Bandslam (2009) is a film about teenagers interested in alternative rock, produced by Christian educationalists Walden Media and starring a clutch of Disney's wholesome young actors. It joins a run of films about independent music and its fans, including the breakout Oscar success Juno (2007), which combines teen heartthrob turned Arrested Development star Jason Bateman with the sad quirky music of Kimya Dawson. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008) follows teens through a night in New York in a quest for a secret gig (an upbeat successor to urban movies from The Warriors to Hangin' With The Homeboys). (500) Days of Summer (2009) is about twentysomethings wondering if love exists and whether musical taste is the be-all and end-all, or if (as Los Campesinos once sang) "it's not what you like, it's what you're like as a person". But this trend also follows such kid-oriented material as Freaky Friday (2003), in which Lindsay Lohan plays guitar in a rock band when not swapping bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis, and even a range of Bratz dolls with attached guitars.
Bandslam centres on Will (Gaelan Connell), a nerdy teenage boy who moves from the horrors of Cincinnati to the paradise of New Jersey (the reason for his leaving does become clearer). His mother is played by Lisa Kudrow: unlike her fellow Friend Jennifer Aniston she has not become a film star but has prospered in smaller films as best friend or sister and now mom. She and her son have an unhealthily close relationship: while he's in the shower she sits on the toilet to talk to him; at one point he encourages her to unzip her top to get the services of a talented drummer with a fondness for older women.
In New Jerseyan suburbia (the Garden State was the subject of another music-heavy film with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman), our hero finds himself in a sort of romantic triangle with two girls. Charlotte is a blonde ex-cheerleader who helps out at playgroup and leads her own dodgy band Glory Dogs - not to be confused with the school's favourite band Ben Wheatly and the Glory Dogs whose singer she once dated. Her strange behaviour is explained towards the end when it emerges that she has made a pact with God (everyone has their secrets here). She is played by Alyson Michalka, who starred in Disney sitcom Phil of the Future, which had a certain following outside its core age group.
The other girl is Sa5m (the 5 is silent - one of the better jokes), brunette and antisocial, played by Disney superstar Vanessa Hudgens, who was Gabriella, the female lead, in High School Musical. While HSM co-star Zac Efron was worshipped by the camera and given many long sequences to show his sensitive side and conflicted personality, Hudgens suffered from a lack of material as his love interest: a mathlete in the first film turned into a lifeguard in the second. She's not much better off here, miscast as Bandslam's troubled girl (think of Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club or Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You for how it should be played) with her natural perkiness and an inability to slouch or mumble or look anything other than well-scrubbed and beautiful.
As with many teen stories, the film uses the device of unsent letters - Will composes regular missives to David Bowie. This appears forced and incongruous, not least because otherwise he doesn't seem to be a particular Bowie fan, but does create expectations for the inevitable Bowie cameo, which is late and brief and poor by the standards of Ricky Gervais's Extras. (In fairness, many things that teenage boys do are forced and incongruous.) Rather than go to the trouble of learning to play an instrument, Will becomes manager of Charlotte's group of no-hopers (one of whom is told off for bearing a resemblance to Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whom he is almost entirely unlike). He rapidly improves the band by recruiting even more freaks and outcasts, from shop class, orchestra, and marching band.
The film was shot in Austin, Texas, known for its excellent live music scene, and some local bands feature in the climactic bandslam (a music competition not a wrestling event). But the film's attitude to music is inconsistent, flipping between the super-cultish and the mainstream. Will and Charlotte bond while arguing whether The Velvet Underground's self-titled third album is better than their debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico. He wants to visit CBGB's in New York, but uses his trip to enthuse about how punk's spirit inspired U2 and The Killers; most cliquey, over-serious indie fans dislike the pompous stadium rockers (aptly parodied in South Park with Bono's quest to produce the biggest bowel movement in history) and the 80s-influenced pop-rock Mormons.
A similar conflict can be seen in 10 Things I Hate About You, slightly cooler but still fairly mainstream, where the heroine speaks of her love for Bikini Kill (confrontational riot grrls who recorded the best-ever double A-side I Like Fucking/I Hate Danger) and the Raincoats (wayward, disorganised mostly-female post-punk act who swung between dreamy proto-world music and fierce denunciations of soldiers visiting prostitutes) but the film features cute power-poppers Letters To Cleo. Both 10 Things and Bandslam feature covers of Cheap Trick's I Want You To Want Me.
But according to Bandslam the greatest music genre of all isn't indie rock, power pop, or even poverty-eliminating Irish stadium pomp. It is reggae, and particularly the 1960s subgenre called ska, which is apparently better because it's not just about getting stoned. This is a curious statement, as Rastafarians like Bob Marley blended a fondness for weed with a passion for social justice that has made him an icon throughout the developing world, while ska was mostly party music that focused on beats not lyrics. But perhaps the anti-drug message is more important. (In the infinitely cooler Ghost World, the nihilistic heroes dismiss reggae and its main audience of dumb stoners with a contemptuous glance.) Hudgens is particularly fond of Everything I Own, a big hit for Jamaican singer Ken Boothe and a reggae-tinged cover by Boy George.
Walden Media may have filmed The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe but isn't the worst company to be making kids' films: aside from their genuine commitment to get kids reading, their adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia was moving and shocking, with indie-queen Zooey Deschanel at her nicest and best as a school teacher. There isn't much religion in Bandslam, and as with the lion-killing in Wardrobe, it's more Flannery O'Connor than nativity play: a teenage girl who promises to be nice if God will spare her terminally ill father, then sees him die. Religion, then, is real but not always benign.
There are some good jokes (feeding toddlers teriyaki-flavour beef jerky, a bit of Violent Femmes business), and there are certainly plot twists, even though the film is badly paced. But if you were to rate the kids' rebelliousness and cool on a scale from the Heathers to the Flanders, they're not even as cool as Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday who manages to be authentically hard to get out of bed in the morning.
Bandslam is made by adults with a pop-culture sensibility but is aimed at kids and the censors who guard them. Movies like Ghost World, Heathers, or Mysterious Skin choose to show teenage life as a random, brutal, nightmarish place where you've got to make your own meaning; Juno approaches adult themes with cutting jokes; and The Breakfast Club and 10 Things I Hate About You represent teenage confusion with some attempt at sincerity. In contrast, Bandslam has improbable plot elements, tried-and-tested cliches, pretty girls, and a few flashes of wit. The result is less anarchic than many shows on Nickelodeon; even Disney's Kim Possible (an animated heroine who fights super-villains with the aid of a naked mole rat) is a more interesting and complex character. But for fans of alternative music, or of movies that make references to Patti Smith and Samuel Beckett (Will's band is called I Can't Go On, I'll Go On which he justifies as being no stupider than Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly!), it's a fascinating collision of commerce and art.
The movie is set in the fictional Martin Van Buren High School. This might be a nod to Glee or Freaks and Geeks, both of which feature a William McKinley High School; to James K Polk Middle School in Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide; or to The Brady Bunch which had both Fillmore and Coolidge Highs.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Young Harvey, Young Jack
You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.
1970s cinema has a canon beloved by film-buffs, movie magazines, and even film writers: Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, but also Jaws and Star Wars. At the same time, films like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, despite their power and audience affection, remain outside the official story of American film history in which self-involved mavericks took over, only to be usurped by special effects and populism. This article considers a number of films which fit within the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tradition but perhaps aren't viewed as often as they should be.
The first thing you notice about Mean Streets is how young Harvey Keitel is. From his 1990s renaissance (The Piano, Bad Lieutenant) he is clearly middle-aged, balancing paunch with muscles, still clinging on not to his youthful beauty but to some of his power. In Mean Streets he is slim, immaculately dressed in suit, bright patterned shirt, and large-knotted tie, with a bouffant hairdo and clean-cut good looks. He is a young man, trying to get started in organised crime, trying to find the balance between religion, loyalty, love, and the necessity to project the appropriate image. His girlfriend is unsuitable, his best friend is a lunatic who owes money to every loan shark in town, and he is trying to be a good Catholic not only in church but on the streets. While he's running the rackets.
Scorsese shoots the film with astonishing facility, layering it with constantly-moving camera, incongruous pop songs on the soundtrack, the first 20 minutes bathed in red light. It's the confidence of a young man who for the first time has the total freedom to say what he wants but more importantly knows almost instinctively how to do it. His cast is brilliant - they look like mobsters and mooks, not actors. The script is funny and savage. De Niro steals scenes with a youthful vitality absent from his later films - in Taxi Driver he was already a veteran, and by the time of Raging Bull he was an old has-been. But at the centre is Keitel, a smooth surface that never lets us beneath the clothes he wears like armour. We can only imagine his troubles and the decision he must make between love and success; yet while we want him to choose Teresa (Amy Robinson) over the mob, we equally want him to stop being so soft with Johnny Boy. It's not just about being made in the mob; it's about entering society and becoming an adult.
James Toback's Fingers, which also stars Keitel, is a lesser-known film, or at least until its recent French remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Keitel is a wannabe pianist again working as an enforcer for the mob. The job description for his position involves beating up debtors and having sex with - or sometimes raping - their wives and girlfriends. It is a film of dubious morals and astonishing energy. Like Mean Streets it is a film about what it takes to be a man, and yet even more than Mean Streets it ignores so much of manhood that it is a caricature, albeit one of great virtuosity.
The critic David Thomson, later a close friend of Toback, wrote "Fingers is the best first film by an American director since Badlands. Even that is inadequate praise, for whereas Terry Malick's debut was an inventive ballad about innocent energy run amuck, Fingers is ingrowing and wounding. It does not belong to any familiar genre: it is more like a psychological allegory or ordeal." Thompson could not bring himself to comment on any of Toback's later films. Certainly, Toback never made anything else nearly as good as Keitel explaining why he loved the song Summertime Summertime by the Jamies.
There's a long tradition of tough guys in movies wanting to go straight: most mafiosi seem to want to become legitimate business people. But there's a limit as to what jobs they can do: in Paul Schrader's smoother Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe's drug dealer wants to become a record producer, and in countless films people want to be rappers. But becoming a concert pianist is a little too esoteric for movie cliches. Insofar as they treat classical music at all, movies tell us that concert pianists are weird, effete, stuck-up and rather unlikable. Thomson finds it all "implausible" and points to the schematic nature of Keitel's character's parents - tough guy father, mother in an asylum. Added to that chiaroscuro is former American footballer Jim Brown as a black pimp, a terrifying figure of darkness. The scene in which he bangs two of his girls' heads together, and the noise of the crack, is one of the most horrible in cinema. Becoming like that is the more realistic choice for Keitel.
It's a film that's all about angels and demons. It's ridiculous, unbelievable; nobody in the audience thinks it's possible for Keitel to become a serious musician, even if his fingers make it through everything intact. When Jacques Audiard remade it, he cut down on the evilness of the criminals, and made Romain Duris's dreams of musical success seem more delusional and pathetic, but he lost the insane sense of Augustinian spiritual conflict: that the true battle was not fought with the hero's fists but with his soul.
Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, both directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson, are not about the glamour of violent crime on the streets. They are films about fraud, deception, hiding, and escape. Central to both is perhaps the greatest Hollywood actor of the last 60 years. Nicholson, unlike Keitel, remained a star from the 70s to the present day. While he does all the usual hack work of any big star, he has found time for some astonishing performances more recently. About Schmidt (2002), the greatest film of the overpraised Alexander Payne, is one of the best tales of growing old in middle-class America, and for it Nicholson seems to resurrect both the trauma and the tenderness of the youthful roles that made his name. But back to the 1970s.
The King of Marvin Gardens starts with one of the great scenes of 70s cinema: Nicholson sitting alone in a darkened room, telling lies to no one. He is a late-night radio DJ, spinning wonderful if implausible tales, but it is hard to believe there is anybody listening to him. The film is a stylised, almost theatrical piece, in which nobody might exist except the four main characters, with Bruce Dern playing out dreams of property development in a run-down Atlantic City that doesn't seem to have anybody to live in his houses. It's a film about capitalism, about success, but one in which success and failure are both strangely illusory - Bruce Dern in another of his great madman roles is certainly the happiest character. Nicholson for once plays quiet and introverted, coolly intelligent rather than impulsively physical, something he has seldom explored since.
Nicholson made his name with a supporting role in Easy Rider, a shallow but impactful story about the counterculture and their war with America. Five Easy Pieces presents a generational conflict which is far more ambiguous and more specific in its social and economic setting. While earlier filmmakers like Douglas Sirk criticised the American middle class for its philistinism, greed, crassness, and meanness of spirit, Nicholson's character grows up in an exemplary artsy, liberal, upper-middle-class family, and chooses to reject all that in favour of dangerous labour on oil-fields and being cruel to women. This is a film about somebody who doesn't want to be a concert pianist.
Long before Mean Streets or Five Easy Pieces, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause alluded to a crisis of masculinity in the American middle-class. Teenager Jim (James Dean) despaired at his hen-pecked father, but it still showed the young man as capable of love and responsibility in his relationship with Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. In the 1950s, there was a cosy suburbia against which a man could define himself, but by the 1970s this uniform social background was gone, and there was nothing to rebel against. Five Easy Pieces is nihilistic, with Nicholson's contempt for women (and for his family) only equalled by his contempt for himself.
And yet the film recognises the attractiveness of Nicholson's character Robert Eroica Dupea to both men and women. The scene in the diner where he tries to change his order - denied toast he cleverly requests a chicken salad sandwich in toasted bread, but tells the waitress to hold the butter, lettuce, mayo, and the chicken - instantly became a classic for lovers of grumpiness, despite its mean-spiritedness and the way that it's instantly undercut: Dupea saying he didn't get his order despite his verbal skills and his girlfriend suggesting she'd have punched the waitress out instead. This is not rebellion that's big or clever or successful; it's self-destructive and pointless. Nobody gets what they want in any of these movies.
It's clear that what all the films have in common is that the world, no matter how lovingly and accurately described in Mean Streets or how stylised as in Marvin Gardens, is not where the action is taking place. Was this generation of directors - Scorsese, Rafelson, Toback, the last who could make spiritual dramas that can stand with Bresson or Bergman or Tarkovsky? There's something Dostoevskian about it, recognising that Dostoevsky could be tremendously funny and sly as well as dark and prophetic; the urban hell of St Petersburg at night mirrors that of New York. As well as being the first great urban novelist, it sometimes seems that Dostoevsky was the last novelist to believe in good and evil, even if he loved evil more than good and saw both fade away impossibly - Raskolnikov fails at being evil just as Leo Myshkin fails at being good. While nobody in any of these films is exactly good or evil, what these filmmakers did was to recreate some of this old whirlwind of moral debate, to affirm that the most important thing in the world is the decision about how you live your life even if that decision cannot bring you happiness.
Moving forwards 20 years, Scorsese's last really great film was Casino, in which Robert De Niro plays Jewish gambler turned casino manager Ace Rothstein. This is a film about how it's impossible to ever be really successful. What is great about the movie is the way it demolishes the characters' seeming success with terrible precision. It is a film full of ironies, both visual and narrative, and its over-the-top style captures the enthusiasms of its characters, but at its heart is something similar to Mean Streets. This is a film that understands and sympathises with its characters' successes, but at the same time that is willing to destroy them clinically, to pick them apart without sentiment. Goodfellas, a slightly earlier film considered better by many people, managed the clear-headed analysis of its young mobster's rise and fall, but it lacked the kindliness of the later film. Goodfellas is about a young upstart who thinks he can get somewhere, and by betraying his friends ultimately escapes, while Casino is a film about middle-aged failure, the end of dreams that cannot be avoided.
1970s cinema has a canon beloved by film-buffs, movie magazines, and even film writers: Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, but also Jaws and Star Wars. At the same time, films like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, despite their power and audience affection, remain outside the official story of American film history in which self-involved mavericks took over, only to be usurped by special effects and populism. This article considers a number of films which fit within the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tradition but perhaps aren't viewed as often as they should be.
The first thing you notice about Mean Streets is how young Harvey Keitel is. From his 1990s renaissance (The Piano, Bad Lieutenant) he is clearly middle-aged, balancing paunch with muscles, still clinging on not to his youthful beauty but to some of his power. In Mean Streets he is slim, immaculately dressed in suit, bright patterned shirt, and large-knotted tie, with a bouffant hairdo and clean-cut good looks. He is a young man, trying to get started in organised crime, trying to find the balance between religion, loyalty, love, and the necessity to project the appropriate image. His girlfriend is unsuitable, his best friend is a lunatic who owes money to every loan shark in town, and he is trying to be a good Catholic not only in church but on the streets. While he's running the rackets.
Scorsese shoots the film with astonishing facility, layering it with constantly-moving camera, incongruous pop songs on the soundtrack, the first 20 minutes bathed in red light. It's the confidence of a young man who for the first time has the total freedom to say what he wants but more importantly knows almost instinctively how to do it. His cast is brilliant - they look like mobsters and mooks, not actors. The script is funny and savage. De Niro steals scenes with a youthful vitality absent from his later films - in Taxi Driver he was already a veteran, and by the time of Raging Bull he was an old has-been. But at the centre is Keitel, a smooth surface that never lets us beneath the clothes he wears like armour. We can only imagine his troubles and the decision he must make between love and success; yet while we want him to choose Teresa (Amy Robinson) over the mob, we equally want him to stop being so soft with Johnny Boy. It's not just about being made in the mob; it's about entering society and becoming an adult.
James Toback's Fingers, which also stars Keitel, is a lesser-known film, or at least until its recent French remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Keitel is a wannabe pianist again working as an enforcer for the mob. The job description for his position involves beating up debtors and having sex with - or sometimes raping - their wives and girlfriends. It is a film of dubious morals and astonishing energy. Like Mean Streets it is a film about what it takes to be a man, and yet even more than Mean Streets it ignores so much of manhood that it is a caricature, albeit one of great virtuosity.
The critic David Thomson, later a close friend of Toback, wrote "Fingers is the best first film by an American director since Badlands. Even that is inadequate praise, for whereas Terry Malick's debut was an inventive ballad about innocent energy run amuck, Fingers is ingrowing and wounding. It does not belong to any familiar genre: it is more like a psychological allegory or ordeal." Thompson could not bring himself to comment on any of Toback's later films. Certainly, Toback never made anything else nearly as good as Keitel explaining why he loved the song Summertime Summertime by the Jamies.
There's a long tradition of tough guys in movies wanting to go straight: most mafiosi seem to want to become legitimate business people. But there's a limit as to what jobs they can do: in Paul Schrader's smoother Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe's drug dealer wants to become a record producer, and in countless films people want to be rappers. But becoming a concert pianist is a little too esoteric for movie cliches. Insofar as they treat classical music at all, movies tell us that concert pianists are weird, effete, stuck-up and rather unlikable. Thomson finds it all "implausible" and points to the schematic nature of Keitel's character's parents - tough guy father, mother in an asylum. Added to that chiaroscuro is former American footballer Jim Brown as a black pimp, a terrifying figure of darkness. The scene in which he bangs two of his girls' heads together, and the noise of the crack, is one of the most horrible in cinema. Becoming like that is the more realistic choice for Keitel.
It's a film that's all about angels and demons. It's ridiculous, unbelievable; nobody in the audience thinks it's possible for Keitel to become a serious musician, even if his fingers make it through everything intact. When Jacques Audiard remade it, he cut down on the evilness of the criminals, and made Romain Duris's dreams of musical success seem more delusional and pathetic, but he lost the insane sense of Augustinian spiritual conflict: that the true battle was not fought with the hero's fists but with his soul.
Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, both directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson, are not about the glamour of violent crime on the streets. They are films about fraud, deception, hiding, and escape. Central to both is perhaps the greatest Hollywood actor of the last 60 years. Nicholson, unlike Keitel, remained a star from the 70s to the present day. While he does all the usual hack work of any big star, he has found time for some astonishing performances more recently. About Schmidt (2002), the greatest film of the overpraised Alexander Payne, is one of the best tales of growing old in middle-class America, and for it Nicholson seems to resurrect both the trauma and the tenderness of the youthful roles that made his name. But back to the 1970s.
The King of Marvin Gardens starts with one of the great scenes of 70s cinema: Nicholson sitting alone in a darkened room, telling lies to no one. He is a late-night radio DJ, spinning wonderful if implausible tales, but it is hard to believe there is anybody listening to him. The film is a stylised, almost theatrical piece, in which nobody might exist except the four main characters, with Bruce Dern playing out dreams of property development in a run-down Atlantic City that doesn't seem to have anybody to live in his houses. It's a film about capitalism, about success, but one in which success and failure are both strangely illusory - Bruce Dern in another of his great madman roles is certainly the happiest character. Nicholson for once plays quiet and introverted, coolly intelligent rather than impulsively physical, something he has seldom explored since.
Nicholson made his name with a supporting role in Easy Rider, a shallow but impactful story about the counterculture and their war with America. Five Easy Pieces presents a generational conflict which is far more ambiguous and more specific in its social and economic setting. While earlier filmmakers like Douglas Sirk criticised the American middle class for its philistinism, greed, crassness, and meanness of spirit, Nicholson's character grows up in an exemplary artsy, liberal, upper-middle-class family, and chooses to reject all that in favour of dangerous labour on oil-fields and being cruel to women. This is a film about somebody who doesn't want to be a concert pianist.
Long before Mean Streets or Five Easy Pieces, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause alluded to a crisis of masculinity in the American middle-class. Teenager Jim (James Dean) despaired at his hen-pecked father, but it still showed the young man as capable of love and responsibility in his relationship with Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. In the 1950s, there was a cosy suburbia against which a man could define himself, but by the 1970s this uniform social background was gone, and there was nothing to rebel against. Five Easy Pieces is nihilistic, with Nicholson's contempt for women (and for his family) only equalled by his contempt for himself.
And yet the film recognises the attractiveness of Nicholson's character Robert Eroica Dupea to both men and women. The scene in the diner where he tries to change his order - denied toast he cleverly requests a chicken salad sandwich in toasted bread, but tells the waitress to hold the butter, lettuce, mayo, and the chicken - instantly became a classic for lovers of grumpiness, despite its mean-spiritedness and the way that it's instantly undercut: Dupea saying he didn't get his order despite his verbal skills and his girlfriend suggesting she'd have punched the waitress out instead. This is not rebellion that's big or clever or successful; it's self-destructive and pointless. Nobody gets what they want in any of these movies.
It's clear that what all the films have in common is that the world, no matter how lovingly and accurately described in Mean Streets or how stylised as in Marvin Gardens, is not where the action is taking place. Was this generation of directors - Scorsese, Rafelson, Toback, the last who could make spiritual dramas that can stand with Bresson or Bergman or Tarkovsky? There's something Dostoevskian about it, recognising that Dostoevsky could be tremendously funny and sly as well as dark and prophetic; the urban hell of St Petersburg at night mirrors that of New York. As well as being the first great urban novelist, it sometimes seems that Dostoevsky was the last novelist to believe in good and evil, even if he loved evil more than good and saw both fade away impossibly - Raskolnikov fails at being evil just as Leo Myshkin fails at being good. While nobody in any of these films is exactly good or evil, what these filmmakers did was to recreate some of this old whirlwind of moral debate, to affirm that the most important thing in the world is the decision about how you live your life even if that decision cannot bring you happiness.
Moving forwards 20 years, Scorsese's last really great film was Casino, in which Robert De Niro plays Jewish gambler turned casino manager Ace Rothstein. This is a film about how it's impossible to ever be really successful. What is great about the movie is the way it demolishes the characters' seeming success with terrible precision. It is a film full of ironies, both visual and narrative, and its over-the-top style captures the enthusiasms of its characters, but at its heart is something similar to Mean Streets. This is a film that understands and sympathises with its characters' successes, but at the same time that is willing to destroy them clinically, to pick them apart without sentiment. Goodfellas, a slightly earlier film considered better by many people, managed the clear-headed analysis of its young mobster's rise and fall, but it lacked the kindliness of the later film. Goodfellas is about a young upstart who thinks he can get somewhere, and by betraying his friends ultimately escapes, while Casino is a film about middle-aged failure, the end of dreams that cannot be avoided.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
We've all seen the future, which is the problem.
A forthcoming event in Manchester, the FutureEverything Conference (May 13-14) seeks to explore the future in all its myriad streams: crowdsourcing, social networking, Twitter, and databases, to answer questions like what will be the next Wikipedia.
There is a constant interest in the future in modern media, with the onrushing progress of internet technology throwing up a series of big new names over the past 15 years in a process of constant fertility: Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google, Slashdot, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Friendster, YouTube, Myspace, etsy, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Latitude... All of these promised or promise to change the way we live, the way we (a more nebulous we) do business, the way we are made to buy things and the way we might be able to sell them. We are told there is more around the corner; while many things like Twitter and Facebook appear of uncertain value at first, there's always a chance they'll prove useful, or like cigarettes their value might have no relation to their popularity.
And yet it's a constant theme of postmodern and recent Marxist thought that there is (for people today) no future and no past: what marks the present age is a total absence of history, of the future. Fredric Jameson has launched a quixotic battle to preserve the dying concept of Utopia - following the failure of Marxism and the dreams of the 60s counterculture, it seems nobody has any idea of a better society; the idea that the future will be different from the present has been almost entirely closed off, and utopian thought is vanishing the same way as the idea of medieval chivalry.
Today, there is little sense of the past, of history. Narrative is reduced to a series of moments, a list such as the one I made earlier. A list contains no idea of logical connection, of historical agency, of progress, of will, of conscious choice or motive, or of dialectic. Modern media is focussed on the momentary and the stream of moments - the Flickr photostream; Twitter; the website status updates that preceded and followed it; geo-tagging and location tracking; shared amateur and professional video clips from falling-down dogs to moments excerpted from classic films; RSS streams, aggregation, and the jumble of Google News.
It is possible to suggest a story in a twitter post or a photograph, but such a story will always be tenuous and insubstantial, lacking necessity. A photograph frozen in time, even if it is clear what happened next from your external knowledge and internal clues, denies the certainty of history. It is always possible to halt time, to make things otherwise. A photograph obliterates history. Even a video clip is only the most shallow and sensational version of history - someone falls off a table, someone shoots JFK in the head - leaving more questions than answers. Only the understanding of historical processes can truly explain where we have come from and where we are going, and that is something for which there seems little appetite - because we focus our attentions on the future, a future (the next Twitter, the next YouTube) that inwardly we know offers nothing but more of the same.
There is a constant interest in the future in modern media, with the onrushing progress of internet technology throwing up a series of big new names over the past 15 years in a process of constant fertility: Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google, Slashdot, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Friendster, YouTube, Myspace, etsy, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Latitude... All of these promised or promise to change the way we live, the way we (a more nebulous we) do business, the way we are made to buy things and the way we might be able to sell them. We are told there is more around the corner; while many things like Twitter and Facebook appear of uncertain value at first, there's always a chance they'll prove useful, or like cigarettes their value might have no relation to their popularity.
And yet it's a constant theme of postmodern and recent Marxist thought that there is (for people today) no future and no past: what marks the present age is a total absence of history, of the future. Fredric Jameson has launched a quixotic battle to preserve the dying concept of Utopia - following the failure of Marxism and the dreams of the 60s counterculture, it seems nobody has any idea of a better society; the idea that the future will be different from the present has been almost entirely closed off, and utopian thought is vanishing the same way as the idea of medieval chivalry.
Today, there is little sense of the past, of history. Narrative is reduced to a series of moments, a list such as the one I made earlier. A list contains no idea of logical connection, of historical agency, of progress, of will, of conscious choice or motive, or of dialectic. Modern media is focussed on the momentary and the stream of moments - the Flickr photostream; Twitter; the website status updates that preceded and followed it; geo-tagging and location tracking; shared amateur and professional video clips from falling-down dogs to moments excerpted from classic films; RSS streams, aggregation, and the jumble of Google News.
It is possible to suggest a story in a twitter post or a photograph, but such a story will always be tenuous and insubstantial, lacking necessity. A photograph frozen in time, even if it is clear what happened next from your external knowledge and internal clues, denies the certainty of history. It is always possible to halt time, to make things otherwise. A photograph obliterates history. Even a video clip is only the most shallow and sensational version of history - someone falls off a table, someone shoots JFK in the head - leaving more questions than answers. Only the understanding of historical processes can truly explain where we have come from and where we are going, and that is something for which there seems little appetite - because we focus our attentions on the future, a future (the next Twitter, the next YouTube) that inwardly we know offers nothing but more of the same.
Monday, March 8, 2010
The dark side of Live Aid
The BBC recently reported that some money from the 1980s charity Live Aid was used by one of the rebel groups, the Marxist Leninist League of Tigray, to buy guns. Live Aid founder Bob Geldof has angrily denied the allegations and is complaining to broadcasting regulator Ofcom, but the claims appear well-researched and the BBC is standing by its report.
In 2005, Prospect Magazine (subscription required) reported that
In 2005, Prospect Magazine (subscription required) reported that
The millions donated to Ethiopia in 1985 thanks to Live Aid were supposed to go towards relieving a natural disaster. In reality, donors became participants in a civil war. Many lives were saved, but even more may have been lost in Live Aid's unwitting support of a Stalinist-style resettlement projectAid resources were used to sustain forced population transfers on a large scale, as President Mengistu moved his enemies around Ethiopia; the article did not use the phrase "ethnic cleansing", but it might easily be applied.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Control
In a new blog post, Adam Curtis discusses the problems with economics and the difficulty of treating the socio-political sphere as if it was a machine. This repeats arguments advanced in his series The Trap and Pandora's Box - that the Thatcherite/laisser-faire (and even Blairite) project of marketizing all aspects of public life (education, the health service, social services, etc) is not truly a freeing, but the construction of an incredibly complex network of measurements, penalties, and rewards, all of which are susceptible to manipulation by the people involved (politicians, managers, staff) who gain rewards or punishments depending on the data fed into the system; inspired by cybernetics, feedback engineering, and systems theory.
One good example is British railways. Before privatisation, almost the entire railway system was run by a single entity, British Rail, which combined passenger and freight operations, rolling stock, track, stations, safety, planning, staffing, and all other aspects of running a railway. The 1993 railways act broke British Rail into over 100 companies: the track is controlled by one company, which contracts out maintenance, and train services are put on by a number of different companies, who lease rolling stock from other companies. A hugely complex bureaucracy is required to adjudicate between all these organisations: train operators are penalised for unpunctual trains, but have found tricks like cancelling trains or adjusting timetables that can be used to manipulate the metrics. Subsidies doubled in real terms from 1994 (just before privatisation) to 2005, with no increase in punctuality or quality of service. Wikipedia has a good summary.
As a result you do not have a free-market system where people are free to innovate and provide new services; you have a huge costly bureaucracy which constrains people into maximising semi-arbitrary metrics rather than competing directly for customers. Of course, with a railway system, it is hard to allow two operators to run rival services and compete against each other, but this reduces the choices to state ownership or unregulated monopoly (with each company building their own lines, as happened in the 19th century). The present system is neither free enterprise nor state control, but the worst of both worlds. The toughest question is why such a system exists: when railway privatisation was planned, some people wanted BR privatised as 1 or 4 companies, but the Adam Smith Institute, a group of right-wing semi-libertarian ideologues pushed for the bizarre system now in place. Their reasoning remains opaque: it cannot be motivated by naive laisser-faire economics, but can only be a product, as Curtis suggests, of strange counter-intuitive ideas lifted mistakenly from cybernetics about how a complex system of data flows (and money flows) can produce a self-regulatory system, little considering the effects on either the cost of the system or the services it provides.
One good example is British railways. Before privatisation, almost the entire railway system was run by a single entity, British Rail, which combined passenger and freight operations, rolling stock, track, stations, safety, planning, staffing, and all other aspects of running a railway. The 1993 railways act broke British Rail into over 100 companies: the track is controlled by one company, which contracts out maintenance, and train services are put on by a number of different companies, who lease rolling stock from other companies. A hugely complex bureaucracy is required to adjudicate between all these organisations: train operators are penalised for unpunctual trains, but have found tricks like cancelling trains or adjusting timetables that can be used to manipulate the metrics. Subsidies doubled in real terms from 1994 (just before privatisation) to 2005, with no increase in punctuality or quality of service. Wikipedia has a good summary.
As a result you do not have a free-market system where people are free to innovate and provide new services; you have a huge costly bureaucracy which constrains people into maximising semi-arbitrary metrics rather than competing directly for customers. Of course, with a railway system, it is hard to allow two operators to run rival services and compete against each other, but this reduces the choices to state ownership or unregulated monopoly (with each company building their own lines, as happened in the 19th century). The present system is neither free enterprise nor state control, but the worst of both worlds. The toughest question is why such a system exists: when railway privatisation was planned, some people wanted BR privatised as 1 or 4 companies, but the Adam Smith Institute, a group of right-wing semi-libertarian ideologues pushed for the bizarre system now in place. Their reasoning remains opaque: it cannot be motivated by naive laisser-faire economics, but can only be a product, as Curtis suggests, of strange counter-intuitive ideas lifted mistakenly from cybernetics about how a complex system of data flows (and money flows) can produce a self-regulatory system, little considering the effects on either the cost of the system or the services it provides.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Who's up in Lady Gaga's crotch?
Popjustice have got hold of the seating plans for this year's Brit Awards, the UK record industry jolly held on February 16 this year. There were platinum tables rated A to E and mere gold tables from F to J. As PopJustice points out, the seating assignments say a lot about the state of the British music and media industries.
There were many top-class A tables for Sony (18, plus 2 Sony/ATV publishers and 2 Sony Ericsson) and Universal/UMTV (17) and fewer for Polydor (6), with 6 Warner Bros/Music/Chapell tables scattered around from A to C, and 7 EMI tables in B. Mastercard/Barclays (chief sponsors) and BPI/Brits (organisers) filled out much of B and C. ITV who broadcast the ceremony had 12 good tables (A and B) - 5 for Brand and Commercial, 2 for ITV Entertainment, and the rest spread across Commissioning, Corporate Comms, Productions, Public Affairs, and ITV2; the BBC had just 2 (one for Radio 1 and the other for Talents and Rights Negotiation) and Sky and Channel 4 one each.
Here are some of the other attendees, divided by class of table (A is right up in front of the stage, B behind, C and D in a semicircle behind that, right up to J and K at the very back):
A: 3 tables for Island; 2 for Atlantic; 2 for Mercury music group, 1 each for CAA (talent agency), Classic FM, Def Jam, iTunes, Live Nation (promoters), Music Week (magazine), Ticketmaster (promoters), XL Recordings (record label), All Around The World (record label), All The Worlds (events company)
B: 3 for AEG (concert promoters)
C: 2 for Myspace; 1 each for HMV, LTB TV, MTV, Pet Shop Boys partnership, Primary Talent International, The Sun, Virgin Media, William Morris, Official Chart Company
D: 2 for ASDA stores, 2 Fremantle (producers of X Factor, X's Got Talent, X Idol, etc); 1 each for BSkyB (Sky television), Freud communications, Guardian Media Group radio
E: Orion Security Print, BMI (music licensing agency), Black and Blonde (music management behind The Soldiers and various pop acts)
F: Heart (radio)
G: Bauer media (Heat, Kerrang, FHM, Kiss radio, and many more)
H: Dragonstorm Records, Olswang (media lawyers), ITV2 press, Just 4 Linen (linen hire service)
J: 2 for Comet Group (electrical retailer)
Many of the lesser tables were also set aside for Brits staff, Mastercard, and miscellaneous suppliers.
There were many top-class A tables for Sony (18, plus 2 Sony/ATV publishers and 2 Sony Ericsson) and Universal/UMTV (17) and fewer for Polydor (6), with 6 Warner Bros/Music/Chapell tables scattered around from A to C, and 7 EMI tables in B. Mastercard/Barclays (chief sponsors) and BPI/Brits (organisers) filled out much of B and C. ITV who broadcast the ceremony had 12 good tables (A and B) - 5 for Brand and Commercial, 2 for ITV Entertainment, and the rest spread across Commissioning, Corporate Comms, Productions, Public Affairs, and ITV2; the BBC had just 2 (one for Radio 1 and the other for Talents and Rights Negotiation) and Sky and Channel 4 one each.
Here are some of the other attendees, divided by class of table (A is right up in front of the stage, B behind, C and D in a semicircle behind that, right up to J and K at the very back):
A: 3 tables for Island; 2 for Atlantic; 2 for Mercury music group, 1 each for CAA (talent agency), Classic FM, Def Jam, iTunes, Live Nation (promoters), Music Week (magazine), Ticketmaster (promoters), XL Recordings (record label), All Around The World (record label), All The Worlds (events company)
B: 3 for AEG (concert promoters)
C: 2 for Myspace; 1 each for HMV, LTB TV, MTV, Pet Shop Boys partnership, Primary Talent International, The Sun, Virgin Media, William Morris, Official Chart Company
D: 2 for ASDA stores, 2 Fremantle (producers of X Factor, X's Got Talent, X Idol, etc); 1 each for BSkyB (Sky television), Freud communications, Guardian Media Group radio
E: Orion Security Print, BMI (music licensing agency), Black and Blonde (music management behind The Soldiers and various pop acts)
F: Heart (radio)
G: Bauer media (Heat, Kerrang, FHM, Kiss radio, and many more)
H: Dragonstorm Records, Olswang (media lawyers), ITV2 press, Just 4 Linen (linen hire service)
J: 2 for Comet Group (electrical retailer)
Many of the lesser tables were also set aside for Brits staff, Mastercard, and miscellaneous suppliers.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Brand new you're retro
The Citroën DS3 is according to Wikipedia a "luxury supermini", a small car being produced by French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën. It is being advertised with the slogan "anti retro" and a variety of advertisements promoting the idea that the car is a dramatic new innovation on a par with The Beatles or punk: the antithesis of the backward look. This assertion of novelty includes a TV ad with footage of John Lennon (who died 29 years before the car was launched) speaking of newness and modernity and destroying all that came before, and an online project in which bands such as Editors take a break from producing 1980s-influenced indie rock to nominate a selection of ground-breaking epochal tracks. Other bands participating include new wave-influence power-pop group Ash, aging stadium dance act Faithless, soundtrack favourites Zero 7, up-and-coming indie band Temper Trap, and traditionalist rockers Stereophonics.
There is nothing new in artistic movements rejecting the past: punk, Lettrism, Dada, Futurism, and many other movements did exactly this thing, whether by declaring a hatred of Pink Floyd or promising "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind" (Futurist manifesto, 1909). But just as the Sex Pistols recycled Rolling Stones riffs and a long tradition of rock 'n' roll rebellion, the DS3 takes its name from one of the most iconic cars in Citroën's history, the DS, launched in 1955 and still coming very high in polls of the most beautiful and well-designed cars of all time. The DS3 costs from GBP 11 700 in the UK, looking brutal and bottom-heavy with bulky squarish front, low sides, big air intakes, and streamlined top. According to Autocar it is intended to compete with another design classic, the BMW-owned Mini: perhaps the DS3's rejection of the past has one particular legend in mind.
There is nothing new in artistic movements rejecting the past: punk, Lettrism, Dada, Futurism, and many other movements did exactly this thing, whether by declaring a hatred of Pink Floyd or promising "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind" (Futurist manifesto, 1909). But just as the Sex Pistols recycled Rolling Stones riffs and a long tradition of rock 'n' roll rebellion, the DS3 takes its name from one of the most iconic cars in Citroën's history, the DS, launched in 1955 and still coming very high in polls of the most beautiful and well-designed cars of all time. The DS3 costs from GBP 11 700 in the UK, looking brutal and bottom-heavy with bulky squarish front, low sides, big air intakes, and streamlined top. According to Autocar it is intended to compete with another design classic, the BMW-owned Mini: perhaps the DS3's rejection of the past has one particular legend in mind.
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