Archive for the ‘Global Culture’ Category

#341 – With a Love Like That

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

the beatles beyond rock band.

I intentionally avoided American love songs, trying to dispel their belief that all Americans were hedonists. Despite my efforts, romantic songs — whatever their language — were the guards’ favorites.

The Beatles song “She Loves You,” which popped into my head soon after I received my wife’s letter from the Red Cross, was the most popular.

For reasons that baffled me, the guards relished singing it with me. I began by singing its first verse. My three Taliban guards, along with Tahir and Asad, then joined me in the chorus.

“She loves you — yeah, yeah, yeah,” we sang, with Kalashnikovs lying on the floor around us.

David Rohde, “You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers,” New York Times.

Posted in Culture Rover, Global Culture, Music Culture, War Culture | No Comments »

#289 – After Shock & Awe

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

moving beyond & thinking back on “shock and awe.”

…You’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. — Barack Obama, First McCain-Obama Presidential Debate, October 2008

Mark Landler of the New York Times, one talking head in Frontline’s marvelous “instant history” documentary, Inside the Meltdown, describes Hank Paulson and Ben Bernacke’s decision — after much avoidance — to go to Congress for direct capital injections from the federal government to the private banking system as “almost the economic equivalent of ‘shock and awe.’”

It’s an intriguing comparison, one that commentators such as Ariana Huffington pointed out at the time.

It makes me wonder two things:

First, during parts of the “Dubya” years, “shock and awe” seemed so powerful as a technique. It inspired fear and loathing (and analysis) on the left such as Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Aside from “shock and awe”‘s obvious problems (small things such as killing a lot of people and causing plenty more to suffer), what seems more striking now is what a failure “shock and awe” seems to have been, both in its military and financial versions. What initially appeared as such agile legerdemain — the spectacle by which neoconservatism (in the political realm) and neoliberalism (in the economic sphere) was able to dominate, steal, overwhelm, and even win — now seems like such a desperate ploy: the anxious posturing of a vulnerable bully; the last sucker punch from a heavyweight going down for the count.

Second, and more intriguingly, now that its moment is perhaps passing, might begin to think about the broader metaphor of “shock and awe” during the first decade of the twenty-first century? Does it, will it, serve as a useful tool for understanding a wider swathe of cultural production in the face of shifting technological and social foundations? Now that we are moving from the hatchet blow method of power (shock and awe them and bop them — or ourselves — over the head) to the Obama administration’s surgical scalpel, can we ask: what was “shock and awe” all about in a deeper sense?

Was it a kind of collective spell out of which the U.S. and the world is beginning to snap? And snap to what: attention or pieces?

Posted in American Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Global Culture, War Culture | 5 Comments »

#235 – The Pervasive Ghost of 9/11

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

cultural 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

Posted in American Culture, Culture Rover, Film Culture, Global Culture, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Television Culture, Visual Culture | No Comments »

#212 – Echolocation #10 – Viva La Musica Pop

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

the magnetic fields, “world love”

“When the rhythm calls the government falls…”

A wry imitation of the Paul Simon imitation of African “world music,” the Magnetic Fields’ “World Love” sneaks in its serious point: that music can still matter, but only if you don’t take it too seriously. The song breezes past tired, old issues of authenticity and broaches a spirit of global solidarity in the imitative and mimetic. Rather than worrying about authenticity, the song proposes a new sense of fellowship and association wrought out of the fake, the hybrid, the mutated, the mongrel, the mixed up.

“…So if you’re feeling low
, stuck in some bardo / I, even I, know the solution
 / Love, music, wine and revolution…”

Crucially, the mode here is not satire, but rather, as one listener puts it, pastiche. The music, even the words, are a quote of a quote of a quote — slightly off and just right all at once. The references spin around so many times, a kind of gyroscopic sonic and affective revolution launches into motion.

“…This too shall pass, so raise your glass / to change and chance
…”

Freedom wafts by like a melody caught askance, a guitar trill curling up the latticework, around the corner of a building, out a cafe window on the street. Music, wine, and revolution arrive by “chance,” but sometimes, this freedom opens up new spaces — funny, ironic, witty, and profoundly serious and revelatory spaces that are marked by a consciousness of time, of history (“this too shall pass”).

“…and freedom is the only law / shall we dance…”

Music, like humor, pulls us out of regimes of domination or control if we will let it, suggesting that there may be other kinds of sovereignty — other laws — to guide us.

It’s an outrageous, ridiculous claim, but also powerful and sneaky.

Posted in Culture Rover, Echolocations, Global Culture, Music Culture, Political Culture | No Comments »

#201 – Pakistani Lawyer! The Action Flick

Monday, March 10th, 2008

news photograph as film still.

This photograph, on the cover of today’s New York Times, is remarkable for its cinematic evocations.

10pstan-span-600.jpg

(Photo: Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press)

It emphasizes the unreal quality of actual street protest as glimpsed through the lens of mass-mediated representation. This must be a movie set, we say, away from the tear gas special effects and the coils of barbed wire.

The man in the photograph is also set in a liminal space. We might think of it as the border zone of globalization, the no man’s land between tradition and modernity, the boundary between difference and universality. For a middle-class reader in America, the lawyer leaps forward from there to here, from the third world to the first, from one of them to one of us. It is as if he is striving to leap out of the photograph itself, to jump through the portal of the camera lens. And keep his suit unruffled in the process.

Where will he land?

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