River of Play

Wild Things

I know, I know. I need to post the rest of the geese pictures. But did you know that there's a live-action version of Where the Wild Things Are coming?

Check it out!

Th' Wearin' o' th' Green

I have now exhausted any love I might have had for apostrophes.

I've been thinking about two very different green issues recently. First, the relentless green-washing that's going on. As an example of sorts, Chlorox bought Burt's Bees to shore up/establish their environmental...illusion. At a coffeehouse get-together with the two ecocrit Toms in the department and a visiting poet, Maria Melendez, we got to talking about the issue, viewing it with a kind of dark fascination. It's moments like this where I can see some in the environmental movement heaping scorn on what have become pop buzzwords like "green" and "sustainability." But I think it's important to keep fighting for the words that are appropriate. I have serious problems with deep ecology, and I feel pretty damn sure that people who might be interested in making lifestyle changes to ensure the survival of their offspring's offspring will be turned off by an invitation for all the humans to just go ahead and die.

And the other green thing I've been thinking about is The Incredible Hulk. Weren't expecting that segue were you? So there's another Hulk movie coming out this summer, among other comic book movies for you to line up for (and Hollywood's a delightfully greenwashed town, no?). My curiosity stems from trying to sort out the various versions of the Hulk and what they mean. Id v. superego at the heart of the whole thing, to make the issue a bit old fashioned in its Freudianism. The character survives as an adolescent male fantasy about what you'd like to be able to do when you get angry. Puny Banner--and puny parents and puny stupid fucking adults--don't understand the freedom of being apeshit wild. And strong! I want to break shit! Thwock! Fwoom! It's the sort of story that has doomed the graphic storytelling scene in this country to the sort of niche it inhabits. Ah, well.

Maybe the US Greens would get more attention and/or votes is they adopted the Hulk. We might be socialists, but look at my pecs!

Ecology of Friendgroups

The Anniversary Party was one of the first films shot to digital video. It’s in essence a small project, though the cast is amazing. The structure is almost Shakespearean. A group of friends gathers for—wait for it—an anniversary party. Relationships and difficulties get revealed through dialogue. The setting is an expensive house set up in one of the canyons in the area around L. A., and most of the action takes place in these interiors. Halfway through the movie, the people who are still at the party take ecstasy. Not exactly fairy dust, but it will have to do.

In the sense that it’s a movie driven by dialogue, it moves slowly. In the sense that it’s working hard to reveal character and motivation through that dialogue in only slightly stretched time, it moves quickly. A lot happens, but very little is resolved. I always leave movies like these a little stunned, not least because of its rarity in the US film industry.

For Your Review

A couple of quick items to amuse and distress. First, though you probably know this, Sean Penn has made a movie of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. Take a look at the official site and a trailer. You'll find that Oprah is a presence at the official site and that the soundtrack of McCandless's adventure for the film is melancholic but vaguely hopeful. You'll know, if you read the book, that, while Oprah might be appropriate for a kid growing up in the 'burbs, this is a book about a particular kind of stupidity when confronting the natural world. Culture can have a way of constructing Nature such that you can get yourself killed in a hurry. Or, in McCandless's case, starve to death over time. Should I have put up a spoiler alert? Damn.

Another bizarre intersection of nature and culture is this little project. Go ahead and click. I'll wait.

You back? Did you pull up the individual images? So we've got an iconic piece of art composed of individual photos of nature. Is there a big claim being made here? Culture is composed of nature? That we can try to pretend that culture, art, theory exist in hermetic, sealed enclosures that only speak to each other, but we'd be wrong? Or is it simply the work of a biologist art lover with too much time on their hands? I leave it to you to decide.

Ecopoetry Manifesto, the Update

I've got a good five hundred words on ecopo, but I'll hold off with a post of it until the honchos of Octopus have had a go with it. Nevertheless, if you've got ideas, people, send 'em my way. I'd like to spend the whole time taking apart Saussure, but I don't have the space.

Movies!

And how's that for a transition?

If you've got young'uns lying around, stuff 'em with beer and take 'em down to Charlotte's Web. The art of making animals move their non-speaking lips around so they look like they talk has improved since both Mr. Ed and Babe.

I've liked a few films my colleagues don't. For example, A Scanner Darkly. First, I have nothing essential against Woody Harrelson. Bit of a dim bulb, but so are most actors. They can't all go to Yale. And if they did, I'd have to swear off film. Right. So, I liked the source material. It's uneven, but deeply felt. I'm intrigued by the question of the self in a paranoid culture. I mean, if you're not doing anything wrong, why object to being searche at random? And if you're willing to being searched and/or constantly monitored, what does that make you? Or do to you? Or the narrative of you that you keep in your head? And the movie asks the irksome question that keeps needing to be raised since Reagan: if you're government is funding the war on drugs as well as the druglords, then what the hell does the government want? Or is it simply the Cabinet getting richer? Oh, stop me. I'll be getting all class-conscious in a minute.

Now, The Good Shepherd might be pedestrian in its pacing, but it's fucking beautiful. It's not Haskell Wexler behind the viewfinder, but it must be one of his aesthetic children: Even the most banal shots are gorgeously framed. And don't talk to be about grey and gold tones. I'll say this, too: This film is the most accurate spy movie I've ever seen. These are geeks, dorks of the first water. Shall we do research? Yes! Let's! Shall we weigh heavily the importance of words? Yes! Of course! Is the film a meditation on the costs of pulling oneself tightly around oneself? Oh, yes, that too.

The Good Shepherd dances around the question of family, but Little Miss Sunshine heads right into it. You might not have liked this film. Fair enough. It's dark in a fucked up little way I recognize from my own family, so the scenes had a ring of verisimilitude to them. Between D and I, we had a story that resonated with pretty much every episode. I also liked the pulling apart of the American road story. Heading to California for a better life? You betcha. But this time coupled with the easily pushed aside notion that you take yourself everywhere you go. This is another in a series of American existential black comedies that really took off with The Royal Tennenbaums. Blow as much clove smoke over them as you want, but it's intriguing that the American zeitgeist has begun to not get all freaked out with darker images of itself.

Next, reviews of swimming pools that have only been cleaned haphazardly by men who own not one but two iguanas, and who have been both married and divorced to sisters from different hometowns.

Wii!! and other Notes

The weekend is not officially over, true, but we've got to get back to work, though we don't want to. We hit First Friday with Madeline and Adam. D and I found a Nativity set in a gourd. Mary and Joseph are strange little insects. Baby Jesus is a pupa. I'll try to put up a picture later. And we found a birthday gift for D's mom. After hitting the various art hotspots--some hotter than others--we split up. D went to paint herself silly, Madeline and Adam went their way, and I had a date to become a seven foot runemaster. The gaming was thwarted, though, so we were reduced to dragging out M's new toy: the Wii. Yes, it's a stupid name, but the system is a whole shit-ton of fun, people.

Saturday, we went to the church of the brunch over at a first year's new house. We got to drinking mimosas (pomegranate seeds replacing strawberries) and coffee and talking about teaching. And playing the Wii. Can you think of naughty implications for Wii? Knock yourself out. The rest of the day was dedicated--and this always hurts--to finding and buying stuff. But it's not too bad to buy fun stuff for kids. I mean, it's entertaining, especially if you can track down weird little stores in the almost abandoned strip malls of your town. We decorated a bit for the holiday. Always a warm ritual.

Oh, and we watched CSA: Confederate States of America. It's a stunning mock-documentary that explores an alternative history in which the South wins the Civil War. It's presented as a production of the "BBS" the "British Broadcasting System." It's supposed to be broadcast in the current CSA, complete with commercial interruptions. It's dark, it's harsh, it's hilarious, and very, very edgy.

Today: class plans, finishing Convex Mirror, reading for Schooner. And D's going to work on managing the colony of feral cats that have taken up residence in our shed. Plus, some photos from the decorating mayhem.

The Fountain

D and I trundled downtown to see The Fountain. It's from the same director who did Pi. It's visually stunning in places, a great choice for the big screen--especially if you're only paying student/matinee prices. It stars Wolverine Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as humans who. . . recur. . . and here we run into a bit of a puzzle. Is Jackman two characters? Or three? We know that Weisz is married to the director; what kind of man directs his wife in a love scene with an acknowledged "Sexiest Man Alive"? It makes you wonder about other things, eh? About the film I mean.

Were we talking about existentialism the other day? Here, we're concerned with eternal life. Or at least cheating death. There are several repetitions of birth tunnel images, and a very brief bit of chen taiji. So that was nice. The film asks the question: if you can find the Bible's Tree of Life, can you use it to support an astronaut on a near-ftl flight into a dying star? If you find that question a bit peculiar, you would not be the director of this film. I'm suddenly realizing that The Fountain is something like a remake of Altered States. Dude, I'm blowing my own mind.

But the concerns of the film remind me of the story of the death of my dad's best friend. He was a lead in an early-twentieth century, Eastern European opera that revolved around a woman who was close to putting together the final touches on her eternal life serum. Doesn't death define life? my dad's friend sang on opening night at the Metropolitan Opera, and he promptly stopped singing, got a quizzical expression on his face, and fell from the ladder he was on. The conductor stopped the orchestra, called out the man's name a couple times, and then called for the curtain. They cancelled the run of the show. The most intriguing aspect of all of this--and it's all pretty intriguing, eh?--was that I heard this story first on NPR's Performance Today. Yes, a review of my dad's best friend's death on the radio. I'm still more interested in the levels of that story than I am in The Fountain. But none of the peole in my story looked as good as the cast of the film.

Apes! Apes! Apes!

So fourteen years after Moses came down off the mountain, he got shot into space "at near light speeds" and landed with two intrepid crewman on an unfamiliar planet after 2000 years elapsed "Earth time." What were they doing? Why? And who let them smoke cigars in a high-oxygen atmosphere?

Sorry. I digress.

Yes, gentle readers, Planet of the Apes, 1968. It's got humor, barely clothed busty women, bad wigs and a host of confusing messages. First, and this is meta-cinematic, you've got Charlton Heston bemoaning the militarism of humans. Also around Heston, his character defends humans while being more than willing to both fight and shoot guns. He's more a proto-James T. Kirk than Picard, if you will. There's an interesting tension between faith and science, age and progress. Three generations of apes complain about the interests and actions of the other generations.

And then there's the apes. So the big point is that humans fail as a species on the planet and a group that's thought of as naturally inferior takes over. So, Apes. I'm thinking that in 1968 this is meant as a racial commentary. All the humans are white and the apes are variously pigmented. In fact, the apes reproduce the color divide. The pale orangutans are the top, the brown chimpanzees are next (and subject to prejudices from above), and the dark gorillas are--as far as we can tell--stupid and good only for grunt work. If the point is to shake up audiences with a racial inversion, who inverted is this, really? And the race that gets mapped here remains in animal garb. Literally. You can start sketching out any number of ecocritical/post-colonial/African-American studies critique. This is before we start talking about the love interest as entirely passive and silent.

But is the movie any good? I've been intrigued recently with the pacing of films in the pre-MTV era. This one clips along nicely even as it does the character building and establishing shots you expect from films of this vintage. Some fun intertextuality and jokes. And a vision of studly masculinity that has a lot more body fat and a lot less vascular muscularity. It's well worth digging out and watching. I'll expect your report next week. Use MLA.

Ecopoetry Book List, and Weather

Today, I'm handing in my first draft of my reading list. It's waaaaay too long, but it's annotated. We'll see what happens.

As a bonus, though, there's a scotch tasting over The Still--a liquor store store south of town. I'll be tasting scotch. Mmmm. It's a cheap celebration, but it's mine.

Random transition: and I watched The Weatherman last night. Nick Cage plays a sort of Everyman/Willie Loman/existential anti-hero. How does a weatherman making 250k get away with this role? Ah. Because of the perversions of a consumerist society. We get to lay bare his emotional crises without the pressure of economics because worrying about economics would, oh I don't know, point up the fact that we're mostly ALL, as Americans, overextending ourselves financially to compensate for our emotional insufficiencies. Cage ends up steadying his nerves by focus. Foooocus. You know, like with archery. Just focus. That'll make it all work. Right. Focus. I'll check back later and see how that's working out for you.

Neighborly Characters

More on Syriana (and, to some degree, Munich): Mathias's comment to the last post has me nodding my head. I was also thinking that with a longer, more meditative film the violence, or other repercussions, have an inevitability that feels grounded in the characters, characters that have enough depth so that we can feel the inevitability of the consequences of their actions and beliefs. As much as I love a good shoot-em-up (for some reason, I'm thinking of the Die Hard series), it suffices for the characters to be, oh, wacky. That surface stands in for real character--for both protagonists and antagonists--and so the audience accepts any bizarre, coincidental ramping up of tension, violence, etc. But that structure (or lack of it) also allows us to accept the idea that people who inflict pain are simply crazy. They're monsters. Completely other in a scary, evil way. Munich and Syriana, and others of their ilk, demand (I hope, at their best, anyway) that we consider that other people make decisions that make them behave monstrously, but the people remain monsters. They further ask us to consider who qualifies for this title of monster and why. They suggest that we are all capable of horrifying acts, but only some of us choose to perform them. It's good to be reminded of these things.

It's also good to be reminded that we live in communities. Last night, D and I were taking a nighttime constitutional when we walked up on a woman on her front steps looking up for Mars (have you gotten this hoax email about Mars being as large as the full moon in the sky?). We started talking, and she invited us into her home to meet her dog (an old black lab) and her husband (a prof in the education department). We knew several people in common and just sort of hung out there, scratching her dog, for half an hour. A bit odd, but it's nice to meet the neighbors.