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Prescription Puppets

Another year in which we were forced to bid farewell to many things I imagine we hold dear. Are there any historians who can put the fundamental cultural changes we are going through in some sort of perspective? I wonder: did the 1910s hurt the same way?

Passwords, psychoanalysis, the postal service, print journalism, and "privacy" have all been placed on permanent obsolescence notice once more, while the Singularity has entered the mainstream via a CBS sitcom. (Remind me to be long dead when it finally arrives on our shores. I do not want to be around the chosen ones.)

Yet, in today's society or society today, as it were, I hardly ever went to the movies again -- my liturgy in the church of the poison mind, for solace, that is, rook to queen bishop and all that. OK. xin lỗi. But in the few instances when I did, here are some of the films in 2011 that mattered to me:

1. Welt am Draht
2. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
3. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
4. The Descendants
5. The Beaver
6. Joschka und Herr Fischer
7. Drei
8. Eine Insel namens Udo
9. Bridesmaids
10. One Day

Also: Double Hour, Hanna, Contagion, Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Disappointing: Hugo, My Perestroika, the Mill and the Cross, Winter in Wartime.

Still did not bother to see, despite my best efforts and intentions: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Tintin, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Tree of Life, Under Control, Melancholia.

Worst movie of the year: Crazy, Stupid, Love.

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This Aggregation or My Hay Flick Limit for the Year in Movies

2010 was the year I began to say goodbye to the movies, although any year with a new Coen Brothers movie should be celebrated. But why is that? Adult-onset ADD, with symptoms of distractibility in a fidgetative state? Movie theaters with Cimex lectularius infestations are not helpful either.

Perhaps Greenaway was right that cinema died on September 31, 1983. Or Godard or whoever said it first, but maybe the dead cinema doesn't know it's dead yet and keeps on going and I have just about had it with those motherfucking zombies as a motherfucking cultural praxis. (Insert vampire reference here.)

Just as dumb are the discussions about their cultural relevance in the commentariat. I have yet to hear a good take on this and I guarantee I will give 20 dollars (roughly the hourly wage of a graduate-student TA) to anyone who can give me a convincing read on what makes zombies so ubiquitous these days and/or why the public intellectuals are so ill-equipped to address this rather boring phenomenon.

Whatever. I've cut my habit down to 2-3 movies a month. Still, there was a weekend where I wanted to see six movies. Instead, I ended up not going to a single one. Angry Birds is more fun.

No patience? I did not make time to see the 6-hour version of Carlos and I did not feel too conflicted to skip the Shoah re-release at the IFC. For old-time's sake, I caught the screening of Syberberg's 7-plus hours of Hitler: A Film From Germany. Still fascinating, especially in conjunction with Susan Sontag's accurate commentary and the dispute about the Hitler rage videos on YouTube, which Constantin Films decided to challenge the day after the Führergeburtstag this year.

I am also not interested in seeing A Serbian Film. There was a time when I would feel the need to subject myself to such a movie and form a measured opinion of it, but that is no longer necessary. Aargh, pretentious Eastern-European filmmakers, could you please just quit or at least curtail your repulsive impulses? Calling it allegorical is one of the last refuges, you scoundrels.

We don't need you to rub our eyes in it. Booshie that I am, though, I found myself appreciative of A.O. Scott and his pieces, despite his moronic apodicticities such as "these are truisms, obvious enough to anyone who has given these issues more than passing consideration." These appear most reliably whenever the topic is actually way more interesting.

Manohla Dargis' attempt to elevate the status of film coverage at the New York Times is laudable (not you, Holden). I am even more impressed by the absence of Manohla images on the web. But all of this good faith disappeared again when both the film A Film Unfinished and its coverage in the Times were irritating exercises in self-righteous piety.

Now, now. More ranking, less ranting. Here goes, the ten best movies I caught in 2010:

1. True Grit (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)
2. Alle Anderen (dir. Mären Ade)
3. Exit Through the Gift Shop (dir. Banksy)
4. I Am Love (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
5. Inception (dir. Christopher Noland)
6. 127 Hours (dir. Danny Boyle)
7. Salt (dir. Phillip Joyce)
8. The Kids Are Alright (dir. Lisa Cholodenko)
9. The Social Network (dir. David Fincher)
10. The American (dir. Anton Corbijn)

Still on my tada list: Tiny Furniture, Black Swan, Biutiful, Last Train Home, The Tourist, Tamara Drewe, Machete, The Next Three Days, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Monsters, The Runaways.

Again - maybe, maybe not.

Interesting calamity: Enter the Void. Interesting disappointments: Catfish, Green Zone, Greenberg. Uninteresting disappointments: The Secret in Their Eyes, Shutter Island, Hot Tub Time Machine.

Uninteresting calamity and my worst movie of the year: Love and Other Drugs.

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die in der zwischenzeit.

You don't have to be Cassandra in October to get a sense of foreboding these days, these months, and these years of the dying parents.



Five in a row. The one who didn't accept "losing" someone. The one who drowned in her own fluids, alone in the chair on the telephone. The one who left her children to go to Mexico. The one who had moved so far, all the way to Alaska. And the one who recognized the faces (and the voices!), even after dementia had usurped her mind and the cancer had spread to her intestines. You are allowed to let go now and leave us alone.

Because they were the ones for whom rituals hold little comfort, who questioned the powers "that be," who challenged the sanctified rules of behavior -- and the ones who did not live they way you are supposed to. This is what happens because.

How did we say goodbye to you today: a haphazard assembly, with men and women in separate rooms, and rows and rows of strangers innocuously distancing all of us from what remains of you. Then, instructed by the Imam, your only child and your second husband lift your awkward body, shrouded in white, and struggle to guarantee that it will forever face Eastward, just as the jet planes crisscross the clear-blue, cloudless skies above and groundskeeper Anthony's walkie-talkie is squelching. "Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the funeral services," speaks the earnest young white man. "You are welcome to stay, but we will have to move in the machinery."

Your long physical journey from Baghdad has ended in a Brooklyn cemetery, but, if the divine comedy is real, you are now reunited with your sister, rejoicing together in the fact that, for as long as she stands, the Statue of Liberty will be staring at your bum.

“This mortality thing is bad news,” said a sage who did not believe in death.

There are no habits and protocols in place for those who die askance. There is no easy solace for the ones without custom, in temporary homes, struggling in the places between. What hears our pleas, yet "refuses to take the other within oneself, as in the tomb of some narcissism?" So it goes, as they shall besmirch the steadfast wisdom of the loved ones who have muddled to live virtuously elsewhere and otherwise.


Notes:

There are, of course, other ways to think about it: "il faudra lui montrer des granges pleines de moissons, et de fleurs dont les formes et les couleurs gagnent le suffrage des Anges." Also: "Blum und Jugend lacht und Sang erklingt."

For the tomb of narcissism, see:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/remembering_jd/letter_list.htm

For the bad news about mortality, see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/arts/design/20arakawa.html

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a few more optics of adjacency.

For some reason, I'm occasionally asked what my favorite movies are (luckily, for the most part without any stipulations as to what films are to be excluded) and I usually get semi-paralyzed by my apprehension about betraying shallow tastes, lack of historical breadth, limited Eurocentric scope, or my astonishingly vanilla-middlebrow sentiments.

I might briefly consider an inside-autistic joke: name only movies with exclamation points in their title (Airplane! Zucker Brothers, USA 1980) or name named, uh, eponymous, movies (Stella Dallas, King Vidor, USA 1937; Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy, USA 2007). I usually end up with Alien (Ridley Scott, GB 1979) at regular gatherings, or with my default alphabetical range in "glorious black-and-white" (Alphaville, M, Zentropa) for the more academic receptions.

But there are times when it's not just about de gustibus. If you really want to rely on my judgment, it turns out I tend to favor movies made in 1997 or in 2006. Coincidence or neurotic pattern? And what do you recommend when the standard is that movies should be passionate and engaging, not just cerebral or formalist?

Most of the following may just reveal my own obsessions, but these ones could be suitable for discerning, smart, and enlightened viewers willing to give the medium another chance:

Two documentaries that made me revel in the creativity and complexity of the human spirit are Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (Errol Morris, USA 1997) and Deep Water (Louise Osmond, Jerry Rothwell, UK 2006).

Two German masterpieces reflecting about how individual lives are caught up in historical circumstances are the hard-to-find Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (Wolfgang Becker, D 1997) and the far-too-easy-to-find Das Leben der Anderen (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, D 2006).

Two male melodramas that show the intensity of survival through adverse conditions are Brother (Aleksei Balabanov, Russia 1997) and Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, USA 2006).

And The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, USA 1997) comes close to a perfect movie, while the overlooked Stranger than Fiction (Marc Forster, USA 2006) might actually manage that rare achievement to be both meta and passionate at the same time (also, it was filmed in Chicago).

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a brand apart.

Y’all know it’s been a summer of leaks – spilling, seeping, oozing, and containment is a strategy that no longer works. Oh, and let’s not forget the twitching masses. The bits of slam poetry I encountered these days were structured entirely around the mode of “how things used to be different.” Is that really enough?




Well on our way towards the permanent middlebrow, which means that I’m in a quandary whether I should curb my disdain for the Wall Street Journal if Toril Moi is allowed to discuss Don Draper over there.

I’m beginning to think that my obsessive interests in the meedjuh and the weather are intricately related. Both can be understood on much the same terms. On the subject of yoking, two terms that are uglier and not as great as anyone thinks they are: open-source and peer review. But nothing beats German. Its discursive flexibility was again in full force when these two words started circulating: entfluchtbar and Brustquetschung.

And, in a strange sense of decorum, the New York Times online version of the article on the disappearance of the sphinxes among contemporary celebrities leaves out Bill Cunningham’s candid shot of Greta Garbo that was included in the print edition. But not all was gloom, doom, or prospective visits to the oncologist. Life’s little pleasures:

It pleases me a little that at the moment anyone feeling lucky with my key terms gets a massive PDF on the SERP. Still, I will have to work on my brand. [And I can’t believe I said that either!]

It pleases me a lot that I know someone who is a master of the severe word and the correct knowledge as well.

It pleases me to no end that we are still split right down the middle. After the first weekend opening, the debate around Inception raged on the Entertainment Weekly website. EW asked in their poll: “at the end of 'Inception,' Cobb was: …” Back then, 51% of participants chose “Awake” and 49% “Dreaming.” Four weeks later the results are now reversed and currently stand at “Awake 49%” and “Dreaming 51%.” Walk the center line with more evidence that we will all be members of the Bipartisan Party soon.

By reading this post, you deny its existence and imply consent.

Outbound references:

For a sexual/textual politics scholar joining the Street:
http://www.torilmoi.com/latest/blogging-on-mad-men-for-the-wall-street-journal/

For the Entertainment Weekly inception poll:
http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/07/17/‘inception-ending/

For the Times on sphinxes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/fashion/18mystery.html

For consent and deny:
http://supersadtruelovestory.com/

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time again for the longue durée?

As far a culture goes, my current attention span and level of insight roughly correspond to the three-and-a-half minutes of Uffie’s soon-to-be mega-hit A.D.D. S.U.V.

But what if you are among the patient few for whom movies still hold a promise? Here are some suggestions to rekindle (or should that be de-kindle?) your interest:
You delight in classical Hollywood romcom narratives: Bandits (2001) and Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
You can tolerate German New Wave and its heirs: Die Innere Sicherheit (2000), Halbe Treppe (2002), and Gegen die Wand (2004)
You savor highbrow Euro existentialism: Hable con Ella (2002) and Nuovomondo (2005)

And for a mischmasch of these three styles, perhaps this will work: Adaptation (2002)

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blokpost, miame compliant.

Maybe it’s not really true, but I can easily see myself yearning to have seen glimpses of the future back in the day. What would I have made of the current TV commercial for the Motorola Droid at the time? It frightens me now but not, possibly, then.




Our boys, doing the Hurt Locker thing during the “Times Square Terror Scare” (even more fun when you say it with Mayor Quimby's voice). What baffles me is the lack of imagination here. Did we not think that eventually the AfPak theater show would head to Broadway or refuse to accept that Predator drones would be deployed stateside?

In any case: the meedjuh and, again, another metonym. The incomparable mrc points out that this term is used thrice on the FAQ section of the "Hells Angels" website (no longer "Web site" as per AP guidelines). This is the kind of intelligence report we desperately need. When I was staring at a Brainetics infomercial, it occurred to me that I have been unencumbered by a lucid thought for three years now. Let alone thinking, but that's another story.

A while ago, the US Air Force, which guarantees "sovereign options" in cyberspace, launched a publicity campaign that included the question: "But who's thinking about tomorrow's headlines?" Are you? I heard a rumor on the Zwitschermaschine that capitalism will end by the year 2051. After that, it's probably The Road for us. But, not to worry, we'll all suffer from Alzheimer's Disease at that point anyway.

So, praise then the oiled motions. In keeping with the spook-thread narrative enveloping my spirits as usual, I will add some freelance, unvetted, non-actionable SIGINT. Darling North Korea has finally gone global and introduced an English term in its latest propaganda efforts: Computer Numerical Control machines! "CNC, towards the world!" Visual evidence found here because we can make everything using the computer program.

Or just try this on the Tube for now if you're still stuck in the Böhmische Dörfer, Bohemians that we may have liked to have been.

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as if this record matters, so early on, to anyone.

Let it be known henceforth that the following movies would once be declared the best of the 00s decade by none other than one added voice in the cloud:

1. Synecdoche, NY (Charlie Kaufman, USA 2008)
2. Cargo 200 (Груз 200) (Aleksei Balabanov, Russia 2007)
3. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, GB 2006)
4. Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, USA 2007)
5. Talk to Her (Hable con ella) (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain 2002)
6. In This World (Michael Winterbottom, GB 2002)
7. Deep Water (Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell, GB, 2006)
8. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, USA 2007)
9. The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany 2006)
10. Code Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages, Michael Haneke, France 2000)
11. Head-On (Gegen die Wand) (Fatih Akin, Germany 2004)
12. Intolerable Cruelty (Ethan and Joel Coen, USA 2003)
13. Amélie (Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France 2000)
14. Adaptation (Spike Jonze, USA 2002)
15. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, USA 2005)
16. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, USA 2001)
17. Sideways (Alexander Payne, USA 2004)
18. The Three Rooms of Melancholia (Melancholian 3 Huonetta) (Pirjo Honkasalo, Finland 2004)
19. Russian Ark, (Русский ковчег) (Alexandr Sokurov, Russia 2002)
20. Halbe Treppe (Andreas Dresen, Germany 2002)
21. Still Life (三峡好人 Sānxiá hǎorén) (Jia Zhangke, China 2006)
22. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA 2007)
23. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon) (Julian Schnabel, France 2007)
24. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, USA 2005)
25. First on the Moon (Первые на Луне) (Aleksei Fedorchenko, Russia 2005)

Honorable Mentions (because nobody else will): Die Unberührbare (Oskar Roehler, Germany 2000), Zoolander (Ben Stiller, USA 2001), Herr Schmidt und Herr Friedrich (Ulrike Franke, Germany 2001), Igby Goes Down (Burr Steers, USA 2002), Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, USA 2004), Muxmäuschenstill (Marcus Mittermeier, Germany 2004), Fateless (Lajos Koltai, Hungary 2005), Domino (Tony Scott, USA 2005), Idiocracy (Mike Judge, USA 2006), Manda Bala (Jason Kohn, Brazil 2007), Sunshine (Danny Boyle, GB 2007), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA 2008)

(And some of the worst movies I have yet to repress: The Family Stone, Munich, The Break-Up, I Know Who Killed Me, Babel, Redacted, American Gangster, Alexandra, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Righteous Kill, House of Sand and Fog, and –sacrilege, but really, folks– 2046)

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paradigmatic failure to load.

Where to get influenza vaccination.

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neoplastic pleonasms.

The following aspects of your life are now up for grabs: demographics, psychographics, geographics, "lifestyle," and biometrics. An important trending topic will be "information allergy," that is, the willful ignorance of confounding variables. Therefore, I hereby move to reserve the intellectual but non-exclusive copyright for the following critical concepts that should take the place of deconstruction: Decompression, Redecompiling, and Refragmentation.

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beer summit recap.

The beer summit recap, with bad news all around and all roles predefined and unchallenged:

Elitist egghead Henry Louis Gates switches from the urban rebellious irie mon Red Stripe to the WASP-y Sam Adams, a beer for people who'd rather drink imports but can't decide between Stella Artois or Heineken.

Ordinary working-class cop (a cop?!) orders Blue Moon Belgian White (a cop?!). Sure, that'll go over well in the station house. That's like, I'd rather have a Coors, but since you're buying, I'll take the fanciest-sounding beer that's written in chalk on the blackboard menu.

Bold visionary Obama reverses course and changes his order from Bud to Bud Light. Bud Light? Obama? How timid, tepid, middle-of-the-road, Suburban housewife, poll-tested, boring, global conglomerate can you get? Where is the Pabst Blue Ribbon, the Yuengling, the Genesee, the Stroh's?

And Joe Biden joins them with a Buckler. Say it ain't so, Joe. A Buckler? A Buckler?! A non-alcoholic beer that is the laughingstock of the Dutch? (Wikipedia knows about it already and it's all due to the guy from this post.) Joe, you might as well go back to the Veluwe.

And the woman who called 911? At home, trying to defend her honor, but the guys would have prolly bought her round after round of Long Island Ice Tea.

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visualise like it's 75 again.

tagged as "music thats so good you cry" on last.fm. Yes, but really, though: isn't this the future of cinema?

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de bank die met u mee denkt.

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historicizing ang lee.

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image on for chesterfield.

1935 surveillance film from Chesterfield police. From an article in Surveillance & Society Vol 6, No 1 (2009).

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deconstructing the pinkie on the other hand.

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he do the police in different voices.

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yes, they wanted us to be able to.

As an indicator of how remarkable this recent public coronation has been, you can now buy Obama T-shirts in the Midtown tourist stores, right next to the I ♥ New York shot glasses, miniature glass Empire State Buildings and yellow cab keychains. Now even the tourists want to bring home a souvenir of this remarkable event.

Although: I am starting to worry that our projection of goodness onto our next leader (and C-in-C, as we were constantly reminded with 43) is swerving into a Riefenstahlian direction. This adjective, paired with "obama," is already scoring 170 results on the Google. It's not quite yet on par with the descent from an aircraft (Junkers 52 or Lockheed S-3B Viking), but I doff my hat to this kind of impressive media machinery, especially if it touches the folks who aren't smarter than a fifth grader.

How fitting, then, that a recent ESPN commercial celebrates Mondays by railing against your institution's "'fascist attendance policy'." There is no ironicon yet to punctuate the previous sentence.

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overtaken by events.

OBE'd again. Optics are going to be the decisive factor, after all. Fox Business insists: "we own this story." Meantime, the antes are upped with "what the flock" and "the most advanced technology you'll ever pee on" in the consumer information clips. This as statistics show that the average American household has 27 electric devices running at any given time and 42% of teenagers claim they can text while blindfolded.

Speaking of which, how is it possible that the human brain still allows for "blindfolded speed cubing" (round and round the Rubik's cube in about two minutes flat) while stupidity is making a serious comeback? It looks like the pigeons are onto us -- they have become more and more aggressive in their flight patterns around humans.

This week's "now more than ever" platitude-watch winner is the Kia ("Napels zien en dan...") 'Sorrento!'.

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