“But history does not teach; rather we ‘teach’ it by making it ‘speak’ to us in various ways, by remembering this and forgetting that.” – Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War, 149.
Archive for September, 2008
#239 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008#238 – Time Keeps On Ticking…
Friday, September 26th, 2008let’s do the time warp.
The 1950s happened after the 1960s…while the 1960s happened after the 1980s.
#237 – Surging Back In Time
Monday, September 15th, 2008vietnamesque images from the iraq war.
Contemporary soldiers now watch Vietnam films such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket not for their moods of a war gone terribly awry, but rather for the strange thrills of moral compromise experienced in the midst of battle. They want to experience the sublimity of quagmire.
But now that many in the military are actually experiencing a war gone awry, other images from Vietnam are turning up. Among them are Maya Alleruzzo’s incredible images from Iraq, such as this one: U.S. Army Sgt. William Brayman, 25, from Warner Robins, Ga., with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment in Beijia village in Arab Jabour, south of Baghdad, on Monday, Feb. 4, 2008.
Alleruzzo’s website contains other startling images from a surge that, because of how dangerous it is and how difficult it is to report on (and how much the US government and military want to control the narrative), has become largely invisible: a ghostly kind of surge whose actual images tell Vietnamesque stories.
Image: Maya Alleruzzo, AP
#236 – Make Me Down a Podcast on Your Floor?
Monday, September 15th, 2008letter to american public radio requesting an american routes podcast.
Dear American Public Radio,
A humble request to pay the copyright fees for American Routes to create complete show podcasts.
Sincerely,
Culture Rover
#235 – The Pervasive Ghost of 9/11
Saturday, September 13th, 2008cultural permutations of terror in film, art, & television.
The ghost of 9/11 and the response of the so-called War on Terror haunt many cultural artifacts of the last seven years. Among them, the anniversary of 9/11 this year made me think of three: the film Tickets, the television series Foyle’s War, and the photographs of the Border Film Project.
Tickets was a quiet little collective movie comprised of three film-vellas by the directors Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach, and Ermanno Olmi. These directors follow three discrete stories on board a train toward Rome. All three tales emphasize difference and conflict, private fantasies and public spaces, meglomania and deep empathy, disconnection and the effort to overcome it. And all the activities feel haunted by an anxiety that something terrible is about to happen…and yet it never does. In fact, the film seeks out alternative visions of a cosmopolitan Europe besides the post-9/11 one.
Tickets
Folye’s War similarly takes place in Europe, this time in England during World War II. Though not a BBC drama, it has all the airs of one: it’s middlebrow to the core. And yet it is also a wonderful show. Seeming at first to be an escapist period piece that draws upon true events from the World War II era, the show resonates more and more with contemporary British anxieties the more one watches it. As we follow a chief police detective (played marvelously by Michael Kitchen) strive to prevent the ends of victory in the war from compromising values of justice and fair rule by law, the shows increasingly seem to take stock of how Britain is fairing in the current War on Terror. How is the country holding up in preserving freedom when it has compromised this freedom in response to terrible tragedies such as the Tube bombings as well as anxieties about a growing immigrant population? Foyle’s War seems to look back to the World War II period in order to take an emotional accounting of the current British war.
Foyle’s War
Finally, in the Border Film Project, Victoria Criado and other artists sent out disposable cameras to “migrants and Minutemen on the U.S.-Mexico border,” who then packed the cameras into envelopes and anonymously mailed them back to the artists. The resulting images are artful and fascinating, furtive glimpses into the shadow life of borders under the blazing sun. Their strangely intertwined tales of liberty and security seem to identify the competing elements of the 9/11 collective imagination.
Border Film Project
#234 – Once Is the Loveliest Number
Saturday, September 13th, 2008love the title, but please explain.
Why is the lovely film Once called Once?
Is it because the film chronicles a relationship that, for once, does not get consummated? Is it because all stories begin “once upon a time”? Is it because the film is about how the stars align sometimes in ways that amaze? Or is it, ultimately, because the more you write and say and think about the word once, the more its strangeness starts to multiply?
#233 – Live and On the Air
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008modou dieng gets his groove on.
“Are You Experience,” Modou Dieng’s assemblage of phonograph records, neckties, paint, and glitter is up to many things, but one of them is evoking the thin groove between what we hear, who we were, and what we might become.
Modou Dieng, “Are You Experience” (2008)
Image: Modou Dieng via the New York Times
#232 – Debating Vices
Friday, September 5th, 2008hey joe, how would palin’s policies affect women like palin?
Project for Joe Biden’s vice-presidential debate planning team: I am curious to know how the policies that Sarah Palin supports would affect a woman in a similar situation to her, minus her income level. In other words, what kind of policy track record for women does Palin have besides being a woman herself? Beyond the identity politics, I wonder what the actual positions stand for.
#231 – The Preacher and the Pitbull
Friday, September 5th, 2008comparing tones of the rnc and dnc.
You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick. – Sarah Palin, RNC Speech
On that path to freedom, Harriet Tubman had one piece of advice. …If you hear the dogs, keep going. – Hillary Clinton, DNC Speech
What was so striking about the Republican and Democratic National Conventions was the difference in their tones: the DNC was full of the rhetoric of uplift and solidarity, while the RNC kept returning to bitterness and divisiveness.
Of course, there were plenty of policy differences. But since both campaigns have turned to the same rhetoric of change and transformation, the contrasts in style became increasingly marked.
Obama and others at the DNC in Denver drew upon the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom “I Have a Dream” to strike a stern but hopeful tone. Even critics noticed the cathartic power of this style of politics.
Meanwhile, the Republicans trotted out every stale tactic in their playbook — accusations of elitism, insinuations of lack of character, grandstanding references to war heroism, and claims of self-righteous outsiderdom that bordered on outright lies. Their speeches (and the audience’s responses) displayed a kind of cruelness. This was the politics of bitterness, but even more than that it was the politics of meanness.
What’s intriguing about this RNC tone is that it brings together those who glory in their privilege (the kind of dismissive teasing by those with power of those less fortunate who would dare to complain) and those who feel a kind of rage and humiliation at their shortfalls (the infamous working class who supposedly cling to their guns and religion). The tone of shrill cruelty performs enormous political work by bonding those together who share common emotions but lack the same material interests.
Nowhere was this tone more on display than in the style and presentation of Sarah Palin. The pitbull in lipstick brought together in one figure a kind of celebrity display of perfected success and hints of awkward, failed dreams.
* * *
The tonal differences between the DNC and RNC seemed, in the end, to revolve around competing visions of individualism.
Democrats struck a tone of uplift to emphasize that individuals need each other in order to thrive as individuals (“we cannot walk alone” Obama announced, paraphrasing King). Republicans repeatedly argued that the individual is under continual threat by forces beyond his or her control and might only bond together in a kind of fearful anger, pent-up rage, or militarized aggression (“This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn’t just need an organizer,” according to Palin).
If political candidates act out collective visions of the American individual in their presentations and personas, then the question of the election at this juncture seems to be: should the American engage in community organizing or bear the marks of being a tortured prisoner of warfare? Is the American individual a figure of fulfillment in community or fear in isolation? Is the American individual to be like the preacher or the pitbull?
#230 – Words and (More Importantly) Guitar
Friday, September 5th, 2008on corin tucker’s riot-grrrl rhythm guitar.
The “Palin Power” signs at the RNC sent me fleeing for some real riot grrrl power I might actually be able to believe in: a day of listening to Sleater-Kinney.
Most critics, in rightly celebrating this band as perhaps the most important rock group of the last fifteen years, have focused on Corin Tucker’s ululating howl, Janet Weiss’s Bonhamian Led-Zep beat, and Carrie Brownstein’s guitar riffs as the key components of Sleater-Kinney. Their songs are essential too, particularly their ability to create sonic spaces for investigating and feeling out all the complexities of the DIY aesthetic and ethic. But, most often, commentators have focused on Tucker’s voice, which her bandmates affectionally (and somewhat sardonically?) called “the Tool.” It was Tucker’s voice that was supposed to be the essence of Sleater-Kinney’s riot grrrl power.
Of course, it was the combination of these three musicians’ talents that made the now inactive Sleater-Kinney such a powerfully expressive band. Yet, listening again to the group, I think the secret weapon of the trio’s sound was actually Tucker’s rhythm guitar, which emerges from the mix like the ocean leaking out from a rusted metal pipe.
Full of grit and minerals, Tucker’s rhythm guitar substituted for the lack of a bass in Sleater-Kinney’s instrumentation. It filled up the background of the group’s sound with a kind of pulsating rumble, a salty undercurrent of murk on which the three voices of the group — Tucker’s voice, Weiss’s drums, and Brownstein’s riffs — could ride.
I hear something in Tucker’s guitar, the least noticed aspect of the group’s sound, that drove the band, that undergirded it, that lifted each musician’s more noticeable voices on its waves. As in the best rock music, Tucker’s rhythm guitar parts harnessed the explosive buzz of electricity, channeling the power grid into six strings and fingertips and a fist clenched around a plastic pick…making you want to dance and cry, march in the streets and slip under the bedcovers, declare I am and we must be, all in one downstroke.
Tucker’s rumbling guitar was the tide on which Sleater-Kinney rocked and rolled.