This entry is brought to you by insomnia

I can't sleep, and by now it's pointless, because the light is golden and I have to get up in, like, an hour anyway, and at least at the moment I am warm & cozy & insomniac, which is better than not being able to sleep because I am cold because I forgot to put my socks on, but I'm too cold to get out of bed to put them on--a predicament that I usually find myself in about once a week.
So I am just going to ramble about anything and everything on my mind. There are three specific things I want to talk about. Well, four, but I'll have to save the fourth for the friends filter. But the topics for today are: deceptively peppy songs, cinema verite (a.k.a. why I hate Frederick Wiseman) and stuff I saw on TV tonight. I realize that these sound like categories from SNL's riff on Celebrity Jeopardy, but so much the better, because if you start out your day by thinking of Sean Connery's incarnation in that skit, you may be better equipped to understand Fox News. "It must be my lucky day, Alex. I'll take The Rapists for $300." "It's Therapists, Sean." So anyway.

1. Deceptively Peppy Songs:

I have been thinking about this since claudelemonde opened my eyes to how fucking depressing Outkast's "Hey Ya" really is. That song delighted me the first thousand times I heard it, because I have nothing but love in my heart for Andre 3000, except now it's mixed with chagrin because he is apparently blase and unenthused politics and voting, but anyway. The dancing girls in the super-Uggs, shaking the polaroids as that catchy progression tinkles right before the refrain. But then I followed claude's link and read the lyrics, and now it makes me verklempt. Basically, for those of you who have not listened to the lyrics and are too lazy to read them, the message of the song goes like this: our generation does not know how to stay together and in love, and if nothing is forever, why the presumption that love is the exception, and the gap cannot be bridged, because meeting the parents and fucking are posited as a mutually exclusive binary. Oh, and ice cold is better than cool, and I don't think he is talking about Zima. Or Dentine Ice. To the degree that I enjoy the Loki-like perverse trickery of a song that trojan-horses its way into your brain under the false pretenses of a peppy ditty, I am appreciating "Hey Ya" even more. In the same way that I appreciate R.E.M.'s cold simulacrum "The One I Love" which fronts as a love song, and Cracker's "Let's Go For a Ride," where the highly energetic repetitive refrain in major sublimates the teetering between the two textbook poles of existentialism-- absurdism and nihilism, which is quietly and visciously articulated, to minor chords. It's kind of a scary song. Of course, this is tame stuff. Americans don't know from really scary songs. When I was in the Soviet Youth choir, we had to sing "The Buchenvaldt Bell" which went, like: "in the copper sound, righeous blood is rebord and grows stronger, and the victims are rising from the ashes." That's a whole other thing, and commemorations of mass murder are one arena where the Soviet baroque aesthetic works, and even sometimes leads to such collaborations as the Shostakovich/Yesenin "Babiy Yar" but now I have gone on a total tangent. so, onto

2. Cinema Verite:

The same fucking quote I have had to read over and over again for my documentary history & theory classes is Robert Flaherty's (of Nanook of the North fame) twisteroo that "sometimes you have to lie in order to tell the truth." That is true, for Freudian hysterics and for documentary filmmakers. Of course, the lie/truth division in his sentence comes from a modernist idea of truth as reified verisimilitude, one that I am partial to in the same self-consciously atavistic way as I am to 1950s cardigans. But still, in the end I pick the cardigans based on their overall aesthetics and potential integration with my wardrobe, not on their retro essence. Or rather, the former trumps the latter. Size and color are important too. It's the aura that I like. Same with modernist idea of truth. It's solid like ice, in a way, and equally primed for gliding. Within its own discourse it is unreacheable, and any pendantic linear attempts to reach it result in the most didactic pomo reflexivity that is boring and gets represented by abused metaphores like an onion or hall of mirrors. Of course, verisimilitude is paradoxically linear by nature: paradoxically, because "linear" implies a distance, which is contrary to the immediacy of verisimilitude; and yet if something is verisimilitude, rather than the thing itself, it already implies representation, a signifier/signified split, even if the two are supposed to be identical, or at least enough so to get a self-dual equation out of it. The linearity comes from the 1:1 ration that gets implied by the necessary equivalencies. All of which, obviously, gave rise to the school of the most typical hegemonic documentary filmmaking where the medium was the truth because of its technological capacities. People, overimpressed with technology, as usual, into taking it too literally. Mirrors, which theoretically could lay claim to greater verisimilitude (albeit inverted one) instead became the realm of the other, or the abject, and in "Through the Looking Glass" we have Lewis Carroll teaching Alice grand alienation from her own reflection, orange in hand. But verisimilitude, with film, first has to find a subject or object to reflect, and the less monadic the idea is, the more overcompensation for the medium of film/interrupted nature of filming, edited together to manipulate time. An article I read for class this year talked about filming as gaze in a very literal sense; the author urged the readers to notice that before they look across the room, or at a different interlocutor, they blink; he compares the process to filming. It's an interesting idea, but has limited use as a non-problematic analogy, the selectivity of vision has to do with rods and cones and saturation and capacity for periphery, but not necessarily linearity, so it only goes so far, because even neophytes film to edit.

Anyway, verite. So, I love Jean Rouch. Jean Rouch is how post Dziga Vertov's kino-pravda verite should be done. He finds ways to circumnavigate the linearity, and to avoid runaway reflexivity where it becomes the subject (a lesson one of my classmates would do well to heed, meow). Chronicle of a Summer features a section at the end where the subjects of the stories profiled in the film are invited to the screening of the footage and discuss representation with the filmmakers. Reflexivity is simultaneously explicit, compartmentalized, and not preemptive. The narration of Jaguar is provided by the subject of the film as he is watching the film, narrating what he is doing in the footage. Rouch does "direct cinema" by maximizing the capacities of the medium, and overcompensating for its shortcomings, and strikes a perfect balance. And then we have Frederick Wiseman, beloved by many, hated by me.

( Here are the reasons I hate Frederick Wiseman: )

3. Stuff I saw on MTV:

I know that logically 1 and 3 go together better, but this is my insomniac rants, so deal with it. Anyway, after unsuccesfully courting sleep for, like, an hour and a half, I finally gave up, and stumbled out into the kitchen, deciding that if I eat something I won't be hung over in the morning, and hopefullyt the ensuing food coma will bring the sweet dreams after all. I made myself a bagel with egg and cheese and plopped down in front of the TV, fully prepared to be seduced by informercials. I am highly impressionable at 5.30 in the morning. Especially when it comes to exercise machines and 80s songs compilations. But videos were on, and since they are never on when I am awake, I was delighted and flipped between MTV and VH1 for the next hour or so.

a)The biggest surprise of the wee hours was the fact that Counting Crows are still around, and not only that, but Adam Duritz has apparently invented the time machine, and is living in the early 90s, wandering through the same pre-apocalyptic bleak landscapes logically enough populated with crows that he is presumably counting, flailing his arms at random angles, and whining through the same progressions, presumably because he wants to go back to the future, but can't. Xtina looks better with black hair, because with blonde hair she just looks like a ho, and really, even though people sometimes say "goth ho" that is incorrect usage, because both are primary categories, first and foremost, and modifiers/adjectives second and last.

b) Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 is like that untalented Faust in the Henry Kuttner short story that I was telling nuncstans about the other day, where a modern-day Faust sells his soul to the devil, wanting to live forever, or 300 years or something like that, and to be able to be a great artist, except he does not become an artist, he becomes a sociopath, blames the devil, saying that he can't make art b/c the devil took away his soul, the devil says that noooo, he just took away his superego, and his creative impotence is due to the fact that, basically, he is a mediocrity, because someone truly talented would not need to make the deal with the devil, they would just make art. So, like, Faust does not believe him and demands that the devil put back what he took, the devil obliges and puts the superego back, and he regains his conscience after decades of sociopathy. All ends in a moment lingering but not so fair. Anyway, I don't know if all the pieces of the narrative are applicable, but Rob Thomas does not seem to age or change, and sings the same goddamn pouty/misogynistic tune over and over again, and he is the Quintessential Mediocrity (and recently, since the arrival of John Mayer, the defending champion of that title), so, you know.

c) Celine Dion is launching a perfume. Which made me think of a not-so-old Russian saying about the French actor Alain Delon and about how he does not drink au de cologne. Russians are fond of rhyming. Russian language lends itself to rhyming. That's why our poetry is better. And all you poor schmucks will never be able to enjoy Tsvetayva or Akhmatova or Pasternak or Mandelshtam the way I can. And sadly, you will never even realize how inferior your poetry is.

And finally, I would like to leave you with my new favorite quote from the New Yorker, from their "a critic at large" column, the "Did Tolkien Steal Wagner's Ring?" edition (it is actually a very well-written, astute, kinda wankery but in a good way essay in the current issue, so y'all should read it):

"When Tolkien stole Wagner's ring, he discarded its most significant property--that it can be forged only by one who has forsworn love. (Presumably, Sauron gave up carnal pleasures when he became an all-seeing eye at the top of a tower, but it's hard to say for certain. Maybe he gets a kick out of the all-seeing bit.) The sexual opacity of Tolkien's saga has often been noted, and the films faithfully replicate it. Desirable people appear onscreen, and one is given to understand that at some point they have had or will have had relations, but their entanglements are incidental to the plot. It is the little ring that brings out the lust in men and in hobbits.* And what, honestly, do people want in it? Are they envious of Sauron's bling-bling life style up on top of Barad-Dur? Tolkien mutes the romance of medieval stories and puts us out in self-abnegating, Anglican-modernist, T.S. Eliot territory. The ring is a never-ending nightmare to which people are drawn for no obvious reason. It generates lust and yet gives no satisfaction."

*Saturday night, J.Mu and myself were watching SNL.
Me: Is it wrong that I think Elijah Wood is kind of hot?
J.Mu: But he is so little.
Me: But he is a hobbit!
J.Mu: He is just so short. How old is he supposed to be anyway? He is just too little.
Me: But he is a hobbit!
J.Mu: Wait...for real?
Me: What?
J.Mu: What?

Thank you and good morning.


p.s. nuncstans, I have unexpectedly located the source of the "remember the night we kissed Drew Barrymore" phenomenon.