You Missed Out, Friend

If you are among the majority of my friends and fam who didn't attend South by Southwest, you missed out on a whole helluva lot, let me tell ya (big props to my brother Tim and Phil Harder for showing up). If you haven't noticed, I love SXSW and I'm more than willing to evangelize on its behalf. Part of being an evangelist (thought not necessarily a good one) is rubbing the good news the faces of the uninformed. So here I present my Top 5 Bands and Top 3 Films of SXSW 2010. Check 'em out--and get your arse down to Austin next March!

Best Bands:
1. Balkan Beat Box.
These lively Israelites put on the most outside-the-box show I saw this year, complete with disco lights and roaming saxaphones. //Balkan Beat Box: Move It//
2. Warpaint. This all-chick band from LA rocked the faces off a late-night crowd. No gimmicks, just great music. //Warpaint: Elephants//
3. Das Racist. Despite being the drunkest act of SXSW, they put on a bumpin' show with deep bass beats and the kinds of tongue-in-cheek rhymes that I've come to expect from the NYC hip-hop underground. //Das Racist: Shorty Said//
4. Trampled by Turtles. TbT is a five-man hillbilly band that lays down some wicked licks featuring fiddle, banjo, and mandolin. I smiled as Texan audience members were shocked to learn that TbT hails from Duluth. //Trampled by Turtles: The Darkness and the Light//
5. Crystal Method/Steve Aoki. I've wanted to see these masters of the dance floor for a long time--even worse since Crystal Method's show was preempted by the Austin fuzz at last year's Moon Tower. And Aoki gets involved in the crowd; he doesn't just stare at his computer like most DJs. //Steve Aoki: WARP//

Top Films:
1. Micmacs.
Remember the deliciousness of the pranks in Amelie? Take that flavor and spread it over an entire movie, minus Amelie's high-fructose sweetness, and you've some idea what to expect from Micmacs. Also expect beautiful photography, ingenious mise-en-scene, delightful performances, and fantastic fun. I like Micmacs so much I'd hate to spoil any of it by writing about it. Just go see it.
2. Harry Brown. Most of the blurbs I saw about Harry Brown touted Michael Caine's excellent performance, but the real reason to watch it is the way that the filmmakers' method comprehends their message. The film asks the viewer questions about violence and justice, due process and vigilanteism, but offers only ambiguous answers. Throughout, the director and DP offer us camera angles that suggest the ambiguity of the content. Is that group of kids downstairs about to become victims of a random attack? Or will the film reveal them to be the instigators of the opening scene's shooting (the most shockingly visceral attack I've ever witnessed as an opening scene)?
3. MacGruber. MacGruber the SNL sketch features Will Forte's anti-MacGyver getting blown up in under thirty seconds--every time. How, I wondered, could that possibly translate to the big screen? MacGruber the movie works because (a) it is really stinking funny, and (b) because Forte & crew broadened the scope of their spoof to include all kidnapped-missile movies, all spec-ops movies, all buddy movies, all ass-kicking movies with a romantic sub-plot, and all Val Kilmer movies. So, all action movies, basically. And did I mention that the writing and acting made me and the 1200+ people who showed up for the premiere laugh hysterically? While MacGruber bears no pretensions of being a smart action film, it proved to be a worthy bit of feel-funny escapism.

Your Butt Says Hi

I get butt-dialed a lot. Call it the curse of the double-A name. I don't really mind; I just wish I could understand the contents of the long voicemails that result. Almost as good, however: Google Voice transcripts of butt-dialed messages. Here's what my friend Wheaton Ian's ass had to say today:

"Hi, Well hey. So, hello hi hello for what. Hello Kurt, call me bye bye. Aloha, Hello all, Bye bye hey. Ohh, hi hey bye."

Smell ya later, buddy.

Consuming the Corpse--with Relish

“Art is dead; Godard can’t change that,” the Situationists proclaimed in 1968. “Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.” Jean-Luc Godard must have anticipated both of these sentiments when crafting Pierrot le Fou (1965). Quoting literary art at every turn, the titular Ferdinand-Pierrot insists that art remains very much alive. With Pierrot, Godard creates a marvelous mashup of genres—a spectacle worthy of applause. Indeed, it seems that Godard was bent on twisting the Situationists theses against them; Godard’s appetite for the whole body of western art proves insatiable.

Pierrot opens with a rather lengthy voice-over exposition on the painter Velasquez. What we mistake for a narrator’s voice turns out to be that of the protagonist, enjoying a bath and a cigarette and reading a passage of a biography to his young daughter. Aside from injecting humor into situation, Godard takes an early opportunity to make a serious point. That is, how can art be dead when part of its essential nature just is to be disseminated, received, and reinterpreted in a new context? In fact, Godard himself has already been enacting this three-fold process in the opening montage. The printed pronouncements of the biography come alive over images that interpret and inform them; Pierrot speaks the word “twilight” and Godard presents us with an image of sunny afternoon tennis game. Several shots later, he presents twilight over water, but now the voice informs us that “space reigns supreme.”

For a corpse, art is doing quite a lot of work here. Or perhaps it might serve us better to say that the sound and images are doing a lot of work to create a work of art. The juxtaposition of quotation with new images, of “twilight” with light, and of twilight with “space” suggests (1) an ongoing dialog with art of the past and (2) a continuing struggle to create something that interprets our experience in space and time. But what is art if not the latter? And how does a work dialogue with its predecessors if it is not one of them itself? One might answer that the critic or essayist partakes in both but does not create art. But the critic’s craft operates in the intellectual domain; the artist’s spans the sensory, emotional, and intellectual. Pierrot le Fou assaults the senses with fireworks, gunfire, and flashing neon, pricks the emotions with a love affair, a journey, and a betrayal, and invites the intellect to apprehend a barrage of images and plot points that can only be understood in context.

The context of Pierrot comprises not just the Situationist state of affairs and the state of cinema itself, but the whole of performance spectacle dating back to at least the 16^th-century Commedia Dell’arte, from which Godard's protagonist receives his nickname. In that comic tradition, the trusting Pierrot pursues the love of Columbine; she betrays him for the affections of the agile Arlequin. In Pierrot le Fou, if fickle Marianne plays Colombine to Ferdinand’s Pierrot and to dancing Fred’s Arlequin, Ferdinand’s fate should come as no surprise. Yet Godard surprises us because he closely associates Pierrot with himself (via quotation), Marianne with the state of French culture (she wears the colors of the flag), and Fred with violence and war (suggesting the collapse of French imperialism). Pierrot's betrayal occurs at the last minute, leaving the audience with sensory exhaustion and a strong emotional charge, but still chewing on the meaning of every quote.

Indeed, the ability to inspire affect and introspection in its absence proves to be one of art’s most powerful qualities. Art lives in Godard’s film, and he clearly wishes to spread it around. That he co-opts his opposition’s terms—especially, spectacle—makes Godard’s artistic food for thought all the sweeter.

Webb 3.0

I saw Derek Webb at Austin's legendary Cactus Cafe tonight. You could call this the third incarnation of Webb--after Caedmon ensemble guy and solo acoustic folkster--and I gotta say, the new show is pretty rad.

I'd only heard a song and a clip or two from the new album, and what I'd heard shocked me. Derek went from folk-acoustic to synth-electronic. I worried that D Webb wouldn't be able to pull off the electronica live, but he, his drummer, and his everything-else guy put on a great concert. (They even had a little bit of a light show that added to the experience.)

In good Webb form, they played the new album in its entirety, including the "controversial" What Matters More. While I like that song's lyrical ballsiness, I thought it a musically a bit weak in context; everything else on "Stockholm Syndrome" is even better. I especially liked "Freddie Please". Most of the show tended toward drum-and-bass with Webb's signature vocals, which worked in spite of the fact that at times it proved a difficult to separate Derek's vocal style from his acoustic self.

He did a solo acoustic set, too, taking requests as is his custom. My only real complaint is that he did the acoustic set in the middle of the show and it sapped the momentum that they had built with the more electronic stuff. Still, it was great. The PA died during the last song, but Derek finished strong, unplugged and unmiked--quite moving, actually. Oh, and the opening act, Marc Scibilia, did a fantastic job, too. All in all, a wonderful evening.

* * *Derek Webb plays Mokah Coffee Bar in Dallas on Sunday, October 25 at 7pm* * *
Support independent music and independent coffee!

P.V.I. Me, ASAP

In the middle of giving a counter-intuitive answer to the Special Composition Question (when do xs compose a y? If and only if they compose an organism), Peter van Inwagen pauses to acknowledge his argument's affront to common sense:

"A good many philosophers...may want to accuse me of a philosophical ploy that Saul Kripke has described in these words: 'The philosopher advocates a view apparently in patent contradiction to common sense...Personally, I think such philosophical claims are almost invariably suspect....The real misconstrual comes when the claimant continues, "All the ordinary man really means is..." and gives a sophisticated analysis compatible with his own philosophy.'"

Inwagen then proceeds to (1) deny that there is any such body of belief as common sense and (2) answer Kripke's philosophy-of-language-informed charge by denying that he is proposing an analysis of language. Up to this point, Inwagen has been saying something analogous to this: "When the ordinary man says the sun has moved behind the elms, what he really means is that the earth has moved in such a way that our position relative to the elms and the sun has changed such that the elms now block the sun." But then he seems to switch gears and claim that the ordinary man really does mean the sun has moved behind the elms and that furthermore, "this sentence is sufficiently empty of metaphysical commitment."

Prima facie, Inwagen's move smells like a blatant contradiction. One philosopher that I know, however, suggests that it's possible that Inwagen is stepping outside the metaphysics room momentarily to address Kripke. Perhaps there's even more to it. Maybe Inwagen is pointing out that statements of this sort constitute "protocol" sentences which, in contrast to "system" sentences, are about primitive, immediate perceptions and not scientific fact. And since such protocol sentences are never really false, what's the problem? In short, PvI gives a linguistic rebuttal to a linguistic objection and continues doing metaphysics as if he's just swatted away a fly. Personally, I take his remark as a kind of F you to philosophy of language on the whole (and, as such, humorously endearing), but decide for yourself [here].

Casting a Dream Net

Question for all of you: What themes or events recur often in your dreams? For about as long as I can remember, I've had dreams about weird things happening with elevators--doors not working properly, the car stopping between floors--usually ending in a cable/brake failure and a terrifying free fall. But lately it seems the dreamland lift engineers have figured out a way to put emergency brakes on those things, however, and I survived the two elevator-free-fall dreams I've had this month. Anyone else have recurring, evolving themes/events that have endured through the years? It's not the one-time weird dreams that are worth pondering; it's the ones that keep coming back that are intriguing.

C.S. Lewis is Alive and Well

In reading a mere twenty pages of Lewis's A Preface to Paradise Lost, I have discovered two rhetorical gems that are, today, as true and relevant as when he wrote them.

The first regards a recent debate in the literary world as to whether Shakespeare ought to be translated into Present Day English just as Beowulf and Chaucer have been. John McWhorter fired the first ghastly salvo, D.H. Lawrence fired eloquently back, and Alan Jacobs called in the air support. Both replies are well worth your time, but it appears that Lewis had seen it all before and planted this delightful time-bomb in his defense of the lost art of solemnity: "The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one. We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not. They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts that no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly proclaimed itself to be poetry. What is the point of having a poet, inspired by the Muse, if he tells stories just as you or I would have told them?"

The second struck me because it explicates in a sentence what Charlie Kaufman demonstrates in his brilliant two-hour mind-scrump, Synecdoche, New York. "The attempt to be oneself," Lewis writes, "often brings out only the more conscious and superficial parts of a man's mind." Indeed, that one line comes close to summing up the thematic and artifactual whole of Kaufman's work; the thread of superficial self- and consciousness-feedback runs through all the films of his that I've seen. And yet I wonder whether Kaufman also understands what Lewis says immediately following: "working to produce a given kind of poem [or in the case of Synecdoche's Adele, a given kind of painting] which will present a given theme as justly, delightfully, and lucidly as possible, he is more likely to bring out all that was really in him, and much of which he himself had no suspicion."

String Theory: Shoe-String Edition

Pardon me while I go all Andy Rooney for a minute here.

What the hell is wrong with shoe companies these days? Every pair of shoes I've owned since like 2002 has had the same problem: the damn laces won't stay tied. Before '02, all I ever had to do was tie a simple bow and my kicks stayed tight all day long. But the last, like, seven pairs of shoes I've bought inevitably untie themselves--sometimes in as little as twenty steps.

Really, Skechers? Seriously, Puma? Et tu, Asolo? Shoe-lace technology has had what, 3000 years of research & development, and you still find a way to screw it up? Did the secret recipe for laces that stay tied get classified after 9/11?

I wouldn't make a big stink out of it except that the obvious solution--double-knotting--is a big pain in the ass. Pain in the ass to tie when a man's running late in the morning, pain in the ass to untie when a guy just wants relief from sweaty sneaks. Even when I double-knot, my stinking laces undo themselves half the time anyway. And the less-obvious solution--velcro--is really expensive (85 bucks for canvas Vans!) or really ugly (you're not helping anyone, Wal-Mart).

I can't remember the last pair of shoes I bought that stayed tied...until now. I picked up a couple pairs of Chuck Taylors last month, and those puppies haven't untied on me once. So the moral of the story is this, apparently: in the age of iPhones and Large Hadron Colliders and the mapping of the human genome, the only shoes that stay tied are ones that were designed 92 years ago. Sometimes, the simplest designs prove the most excellent and enduring.

The Carbon Motors E7

The new standard in law-enforcement awesomeness:












Part KITT, part Airwolf, the E7 has 75+ features that you won't find on a retrofitted Crown Vic, including
-18" wheels
-300hp clean-diesel engine
-6-speed automatic transmission
-50/50 front-rear weight distribution
-75mph rear impact crash capability
-Body-integrated ram bars
-Heads-up display
-Video/audio surveillance of rear passenger area
-Integrated "laptop" computer
-Forward-looking infrared system (FLIR)
-Suicide rear doors for easier perp entry/exit
-Hoseable rear passenger compartment
-Integrated flashers/spots/takedown lights
-Remote start
-Nightvision-compliant interior illumination
-Radiation and biochemical weapon detectors

Dude, I want one!

Dante? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Or, EA Ruins Everything.

I should be writing a paper on Copernicus right now, so I'll try to keep this short. Electronic Arts, the biggest, mediocrest video game publisher in the world, is making a video game out of Dante's Inferno.

You would think it could be done without fundamentally screwing up the story. But you would be wrong if you think EA could do it. Among the horrific violence they are working on Dante's masterpiece: Lucifer he actually rules Hell; furthermore, he is free to roam around the cosmos; and most ridiculously of all, he kidnaps Beatrice's soul as she dies. Dante, "a man who knows no fear", pursues Satan into Hell to rescue his beloved. Need I go on? Oh, and (spoiler alert!) as the game progresses through Hell, it "gets more hellish."

Look, I know a close adaptation would amount to little more than pressing X to snap a twig off a Suicide tree now and then, but come on, this is more than I can take.

Witness the horror for yourself here.

Can a Self-Aware Moriarty Hologram be far Behind?

The one thing I thought that the Star Trek: TNG holodeck stories never adequately accounted for was how people could walk around in there without bumping into the walls. They weren't just walking in place, after all, but running through dark alleys and up stairs and whathaveyou. Well, apparently the Japanese have been puzzling over the problem, too, and have come up with a prototype solution. Behold: the CirculaFloor.

Justin McElroy on 50 Cent's Video Game

"50 Cent: Blood on the Sand blends terrific gameplay with really bad ... well, practically everything else to create a final product that I love -- not like, love. I suspect you'll love it too ... just in that dark, secret way we love the things that are almost certainly making us stupider."

So...the way we love all video games?

Hard to think of any video game I've played that didn't make me stupider--except maybe for Clyde's Adventure.

Homer on Middle Knowledge

The Simpsons conduct an experiment in counterfactual conditionals.

Conclusion: "If you could live in the sauce, don't you think I'd live in the sauce?" Yep, that pretty much captures it. But what if it turns out that the messed up world as we know it is the sauce?




(Full episode here)

Ah, this is the life (is this the life?)

A Little Hopeful Arm-Chair Theology

"Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." I think about this Proverb often as I watch my childhood friends, one by one, drift from the Faith. Is that axiom really true, or is this one of those "generally speaking" proverbs that happens "most of the time." Will my friends really come back; can I count on it? How old is old? How long do we have to wait to see results? What to do in the meantime?

Then again, the author doesn't say anything about turning away in youth and then coming back in old age. No, he just says, "Hey, at least she won't turn from the path when she's old." What about those that lose their way in youth? My gut says there's hope for them, too. But I don't think that gut feeling is founded on that proverb. Rather, I think it's founded on a kind of Platonic notion that a soul really cannot unlearn what he already knows. I'm almost certain that once God gets under one's skin, he's impossible to shake, but I don't know how to argue that theologically. So maybe this isn't arm-chair theology. Maybe it's philosophy. Or wishful thinking.

Can one really unlearn the truth? I mean sure, go to school, learn a completely different epistemology with no room for true religion, but you'll always be trying to prove your old knowledge in terms of the new, I'd like to tell 'em. As if that proves something. Still, I know that friends A, B, C, and D will come back around, someday. Maybe I only feel that way because sometimes I suspect I'm following them down that road, but at a more cautious, reasonable speed. I had this conversation with a buddy on Thanksgiving, and we parted with hope, but never nailed down exactly why we hoped.

A few days later, I came across something Flannery O'Connor once said: "Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not." I think maybe she's saying the same as the author of that proverb, but she says it in a way that puts the question outside of the worrisome dimension of time. I'm pretty sure she's right. I hope she is.

Everything You Need to Know About Texas

(AMK)

Peter Singer on Obama's Phone-a-Friend Shortlist?

Firelance posts an interesting, provocative bit about how Barack Obama, as an Illinois state senator, helped kill a bill that would have required attending physicians to give medical attention to aborted fetuses born alive. In fact Obama voted "present" the first time the bill came up (it failed to pass) and "no" the second time a year later (it failed again). After Congress passed its own Born-Alive Infant Protection Act in 2002, the Illinois senate sent another version of its bill to the Health and Human Services Committee, chaired by Mr. Obama, where it died.

The only senator who took the floor against the 2001 version of the bill, Obama argues, "Viability is the line that has been drawn by the Supreme Court to determine whether or not an abortion can or cannot take place." In other words, doctors only give medical attention to human persons. Conversely, by law, we do not abort viable human persons. It makes no sense to pass a bill that requires doctors to give medical attention to a fetus that has already been determined to be previable. Obama argues that the bill up for discussion represents an attempt to define previable fetuses as viable human persons, which would, essentially, make it an anti-abortion bill.

I think his argument works. But I think he arrives, brilliantly, at the wrong conclusion. 1093 was written as a result of one nurse's effort to make medical attention available to fetuses aborted alive. She noticed that wanted babies born at the same developmental stage as those being aborted were given medical attention. She wanted the aborted children to have the same shot at life as those whose parents wanted them. Read her story here. Read the context of Obama's statement here, and the entire discussion of SB1093 here.

Henry's Story

As part of my training at Houston's, I had to write a short bio on one of my co-workers. Hank/Henry is one of our better servers. He gets a lot of crap because he's Colombian; he gives me a lot of crap because I'm the newbie. But what makes Hank Hank? I rolled silver with Henry a couple nights ago and asked him a few questions. Here's what I learned.

Henry left Colombia after a friendly game of dominoes went south, way south. Nineteen, high on life, Henry had gone all in against the neighborhood jefe, keys to his prize possession—a 1984 baby-blue Honda moped—on the table. Only Henry didn’t know that his buddy Tellez had been paid off by the jefe, who had been pressuring Henry to sell. The fix was in, and Hank knew it as soon as he drew double nines and double sixes back to back. He peered through the rich Cohiba smoke at his friend’s eyes when that double six came up; he saw the weakness. The guy who was supposed to be rounding this game with him had sold him out—probably for a couple of chickens and sack of rice. Hank did the only thing he could—he flung his burning habano into the jefe’s face and fled on the Honda. He never looked back, kept it cranked wide open, through the colonial streets of La Candelaria, around San Felipe de Barajas, past Ciudad Perdida. All the way to Venezuela.

Venezuela would be where Hank made his first million—his first legal million. He sent for his girl Blanca, and she arrived a week later on the bus with the $180,000 pesos—barely a hundred bucks—Hank kept hidden below the cajica carpet. They moved into a hotel and Hank got a job delivering pizzas with the Honda. That lasted a week, enough time for Henry to meet the right kinds of people on the west side of town. Hank got into the oil drilling gig just long enough to learn the ropes and save up enough for a down payment on a drill. Henry had always been more lucky than charming, and he struck a big, untapped field within a month. Mind you, this was long before Venezuela nationalized its oil; Henry savored his first true taste of capitalism. But Henry came home one night to find Blanca in the arms of another man, watching Amores de Mercado. Henry calmly lit his Cohiba, then kicked over one of the many barrels of crude that he happened to keep in his living room. He tossed the cigar into the inky mess and walked away. A hard year’s cash was tucked away in the nooks of that house, and the Honda was parked in the garage, next to a couple more drums. But Henry just didn’t give a damn.

He had to get away. He withdrew all his savings from his Swiss bank account and bought a sloop with a Bermuda rig. Shoved off at El Tablazo, cursed the waves, spat into the wind, let the sails do the rest. He landed at St. Martin, on the French side. He didn’t speak French, at least not at first, but he quickly found a job shaking appletinis for American tourists on one of St. Martin’s thirty-seven gorgeous beaches. Island life proved calm, lazy even. Henry grew restless. One night, a year after he’d landed, Henry locked up the cabana bar, threw the keys up on the roof, and hopped into his sloop. But this time, Hank knew where he was going.

The land of opportunity. The United States of America. Specifically, Florida. He’d heard about Texas, fuerte entre los fuertes, as the Venezuelan oilmen had called it, and he knew that he’d fit right in. But his little sailboat wouldn’t take him that far, so he had to settle for the Keys. Henry didn’t know a soul in the States, but at twenty-one, he knew two English words: appletini and adventure. He had no problem meeting people. He missed his family often, but he became so tight with his peeps in Miami that he couldn’t tear himself away. Spent seven years there, but never gave up on his dream of moving to the America of America, the Republic within the Republic: Texas. He gave all his belongings to a family of Haitian refugees and bought a one-way ticket to Austin.

All the pieces were finally falling into place for old Henry. What’s more Texan than Austin? Just to be sure he was completely immersed in Texas culture, Henry got a job at a joint named after another Texas city, Houston. And dammit, Henry loved it. Loved everything about Austin, couldn’t believe his good fortune. Hank figured there were millions of people out there who would kill to be in his position, but Hank had grown weary of his expat status. The choice to become a US citizen came as no real decision at all to Henry. As far as he could tell, only benefits awaited him, and hey, he didn’t have to renounce his Colombian citizenship, so why the hell not? The process proved difficult, but as of two weeks ago, Hank’s a bona-fide United States Citizen. Took the oath and never looked back.

Now I'm Paying Attention

No more Mavs or Stars playoffs action for now, and our beloved Bulls haven't had a prayer since the whole program was sold for parts...but I like the NBA post season this year. Lakers and Spurs, the past decade's most dominant WC teams--classic match-up. Detroit, yeah, sure. Every story needs a villain.

But Boston? Man, I hate that town's other teams, but I kinda wanna get behind these guys, especially if it means more Gino.

A Word to the DFW Crew

Somebody please go dance your socks off with Z-Trip at Suite. I can't. I have two exams the next day.