THE CHISELER

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL FOR WAYWARD GIRLS

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 11:13:27 -0500

Putting “acceptable” limits on depravity in the name of compromise and “reality” is how fascism eventually triumphs. Or so said Professor Yvonne De Carlo of ‘Miss Yvonne’s Academy for Wayward Hussies’ also known as 'The Frankfurt School’ – a place of higher learning for delinquent, pregnant scholars. “Your new president is merely proof that the depraved nature of power is given license by tolerating all but its excesses” said Professor De Carlo as she powdered her ample cleavage in full view of the astonished, pinafore-clad undergrads gathered for her lecture on the 'Dialectic of Fascism and French Manicures Made Easy-Peasy’.

“You want to know what brought Trump to power? Hint: It wasn’t a sudden, inexplicable, sewage-strewn wave of raw hatred poised to strike down public schools, libraries and national parks at the behest of a braying, stupid mob of "privileged” former factory workers. It wasn’t merely insanity wrought by decades of institutional neglect or unchecked greed – although that was a big part of it. It was *nice* people willing to accept certain 'realities’ to ensure their place at the proverbial table remained a pristine space of individually apportioned, locally sourced food; a place where rhetorical restraint replaced actual political solutions to any given problem.

You chose 'safe’ over actual justice – meaning someone else’s kid will take a police bullet to the chest so that we can all read heavily redacted versions of Mark Twain in the peace and comfort of a colorful ball pit of higher learning like our own Frankfurt School, which I should mention was only made possible by a generous corporate donation from a multi-national purveyor of processed pork by-products with vaguely German origins. At the end of it, you’ll all be awarded a certificate declaring you free from venereal diseases, and the skills necessary to lower live poultry into a vat of ammonia in a subsidiary facility owned by our trustees. At your age, I was performing burlesque numbers on the mean streets of my Canadian homeland at the behest of my stage mother. But I’ll tell you all about that later in the term when we cover 'Hoochie-Coochie Cave Dancing of the Early Ottoman Empire - as Explained by a scantily-clad Miss Yvonne Waving a Jewel-Encrusted Saber’. Consider that your 'trigger warning’. Now let’s proceed:

It was enough that we embraced Caitlyn Jenner and applauded Meryl Streep giving the phone book version of the Gettysburg Address to her wealthy patrons – I could give a better soliloquy while swallowing a sword and balancing a cobra on my head, but I digress … It was enough to sprout a 'dad boner’ over Pussy Riot to declare ourselves – “punk rock”, even as we devised ways to make earth’s human and animal life redundant during brainstorming meetings that took place in an indoor ergonomic playground that served wheat grass martinis on tap. My dear friend Frederick Marcuse who took me under his bosom … or was that the other way around … argued that the technocratic efficiency of advanced, industrial societies had rendered it 'one-dimensional’, and as such, resistant to all critiques of it. Our “aversion to introspection” according to Adorno – another generous benefactor to the Frankfurt School – renders left-opposition to Trump little more than an elite-led, sour grape authoritarianism that is unable to contemplate its own role in a paradigmatic shift towards a more 'unprincipled’ and unpredictable variety of global aggression. If you don’t believe him, just ask a white feminist how writing 'rape culture’ on her boobs in sharpie will 'shame the patriarchy’, and this will give you some idea about why I start every afternoon coughing up a ball of mentholated phlegm into my cornflakes.

Let me tell you what brought us to this precise moment of imminent planetary collapse: It was “nice” people with library cards and rescue pets accepting the kind of compromises that result in bulldozing homes in the occupied territories of Palestine, imprisoning whistle blowers, putting indigenous land everywhere under threat, and even sodomizing a half dead Pan-African leader while he lay dying in a drainpipe.

It’s the 'realists’ who sign off on nearly $40 billion in military 'aid’ to Israel so that it can build more settlements in defiance of International law, and the similarly counterproductive reasoning that blames Russian hackers for the DNC’s corrupt maneuvering to install its preferred Wall Street-friendly candidate in defiance of roughly half the voting population. The same folks who cry foul the loudest when an asshole takes his rightful place on the golden, Imperial throne after they have spent years polishing it for him, and expanding its powers to flush away civil liberties and environmental protections. Now all of a sudden that reclining, ermine-trimmed commode in the Oval Office is a “hot seat”. Back in the day when I was bumping and grinding on the Paramount lot for chump change, Charlton would grab me by the pussy and … well, never mind that now. Let’s just say that my jungle cat put up a fierce resistance that left a permanent scar on his manhood and not a single scratch on my lady mandibles. Not sure where any of this is going, but anyhoo …

It’s the 'nice’ – meaning the technocratically-minded gatekeepers of the 'left’, who perform the linguistic feats necessary to justify, say, the involuntary sacrifice of dozens of dead Bedouin wedding celebrants in Yemen to maintain cordial relations with a despotic petrostate that helps prop up a neighboring Apartheid regime equally ill-disposed towards its benefactor. 'This is why we can’t have nice things like brutalist revolving restaurants atop Manhattan office towers’, they will remind you. Ingrates like you always second-guessing the stuff we do to prevent maniacs from seizing power here at home’. The nice among us, whom we used to call 'Good Germans’, prefer that you don’t bring 'false equivalency’ into reasoned discussion about state-sponsored murder, and focus on the positive … like … um … 'At least under Trump, my sad face selfies will have all the political urgency of Guernica’.

It’s the “nice” that refused to hold Obama’s feet to the fire, giving him carte blanche to capitulate wholly to the more clamorous and opportunistic voices of his inner circle without ever troubling his conscience. The guy was so cool he could grant clemency to Chelsea Manning AND bomb a failed state into further oblivion all in the same week. “Nice” folks would never venture into the treacherous waters of condemning or even criticizing your country’s first black president for reasons entirely to do with the sort of career-minded, self-preservation that says “Bummer about Leonard Peltier, but Michelle Obama sure rawked that Zac Posen dress on the cover of Vogue!”

When someone *reaches across the aisle*, it’s usually to grasp at the last straws of power allotted to them by whichever democratically elected fascist regime happens to control Congress. Or it’s a hands-y director trying to cop a feel on a red-eye flight from LA. Yes, Otto Preminger, I’m talking to YOU!

To make a long-winded lecture only as long as it takes to dry one’s nails after the second coat of Revlon’s 'Dead Roses on a Dusky Tomb’: Trump didn’t win in spite of your 'reasoned’ acceptance of the outgoing president’s expanded powers, but because you were willing to rationalize its unsavory aspects long enough to ensure its unchecked and unbridled form reached its inevitable conclusion".

Professor De Carlo then flounced out of the lecture hall with the scent of Shalimar, and two or three shirtless Cabana boys trailing behind her discarded veils. “I’m off to powder my you know what. Class – and I mean the particular one that conflates legal weed smoking with political resistance - dismissed”!

by Jennifer Matsui

THE SADIST: Teen Terrorizes Teachers

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 11:12:12 -0500

“How does it feel when you’re about to die?” asks a beady-eyed boy. His handgun, perpetually drawn at the hip, is leveled at a schoolteacher who’s bent over, tinkering with the innards of a car engine. This bit of cruelty foreshadows an impending violence—the big blast of silence. In fact, the threat of violence clings to this film with its oh-so-appropriate title, The Sadist (1963). And when the violence does come, it’s swift and blunt, and the threat looms once more. That’s how it feels when you’re watching this sweaty, greasy, and white-hot B movie that unfolds in real-time. Alamo Drafthouse programmer Joseph A. Ziemba describes The Sadist best: “If an episode of The Twilight Zone was directed by Tobe Hooper circa 1974, it might have turned out like this movie.” The film’s premise is simple, elemental even: Three teachers go on a road trip to watch a Dodgers game in L.A. Car troubles beset them, and they pull into a junkyard, finding a giggling serial killer and his girlfriend. The young sadist is dead set on murdering them only after making them squirm under his power.

Playing at drive-ins, and sharing an unfortunate double bill with Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), The Sadist came and went like a Seattle rain. It’s an independent film produced by a man, Arch Hall Sr., who wanted to make his son, Arch Hall Jr., a movie star. Yet Jr. didn’t have a burning desire to be an actor at all. At the time, he had more of an interest in his own rock ‘n’ roll band, The Archers, and his Fender Jazzmaster, which can be seen with Jr. playing it in Eegah (1962) and Wild Guitar (1962). Later, he would become an airline pilot. As for Hall Sr., he stumbled into show business after failed and aborted attempts in real estate, radio, and trucking operations. He financed quick, low-budget trash such as The Choppers (1961) and The Nasty Rabbit (1964), both of which starred Jr. The Sadist, on the other hand, is something altogether different, a nasty thriller amidst Sr.’s dreadful body of work. So it’s not surprising that he didn’t come up with the original idea, that would be the film’s director, James Landis. He brought a script loosely based on teenage serial killer Charlie Starkweather to Sr.’s attention. Sr. gave Landis the green light to direct the script with no real conditions except that Jr. had to star—and boy would he star.

Shot on a shoestring budget, The Sadist is a film, as Joe Dante observes in his Trailers From Hell review, like Casablanca (1942). It has a sweet mix of cast and crew. Along with Landis, there was cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, fresh from Hungary, and who would later lens Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Michael Cimino’s films. Here, Zsigmond makes each shot dynamic. With his Arriflex camera, he shoots from different angles. Shots are set in the trunk of a car, as well as behind windows and fences. Richard Alden, Don Russell, and Helen Hovey comprise the trio of helpless teachers. They give competent performances. Marilyn Manning is Judy, the sadist’s mousy thrill-seeking girlfriend. And then there’s Jr. If he had no desire for acting, it doesn’t show in The Sadist. As Charlie Tibbs, he’s bold and extravagant. He’s convincing as a psychopath. He has the giggling, grinning appearance of Richard Widmark combined with the ultra-cool youth of James Dean.

A decade before, in the 1950s, Hollywood films about teenagers began to appear on the screen, films such as The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Crime in the Streets (1956). In them, juvenile delinquents ran amok in the square world of adults. “You’re tearing me apart!” James Dean shouts as his parents bicker about him in Rebel without a Cause. That could be the mantra for all teens lashing out at authority figures. The Sadist, however, mutates the 1950s juvenile delinquent films. The teen kills the grownups; he tears them apart.

by Tanner Tafelski

TRANS-ASSHOLES

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 11:11:14 -0500

My god, my god I never cease to be amazed and confounded by what a ridiculous world this has become. The depths people will plunge in order to solidify their pitiful victimhood. It grows more flabbergasting and absurd by the day.

I was just getting a handle on what “trans fats” were when they threw “transgender” at me. That took some more doing, considering all the legal repercussions and all the concessions businesses, schools, and prisons had to make to cater to this sudden explosion in the quasi-hemaphrodite population. Then people started bandying around the term “transracial,” and I still don’t know what the fuck that one means. Are they like wiggers or something? It all seems like so much whining foolishness. Worse it results in more controls on the language, those things we are and aren’t allowed to say out of fear of offending some useless delicate simpering snot. Because if you do offend them they’ll sue you into oblivion and make you go on an apology tour, as this is what we do now.

Until yesterday I was able to mostly just laugh off the nonsense and go back to listening to my Mentors records. Then yesterday I encountered the word “trans-abled” for the first time.

Okay, bear with me here if you already know the term (and if you do, and if you have ever used it earnestly in conversation, may God have pity on your soul.)

See, while “transgender” refers to people convinced they were born with the wrong genitalia given how they would prefer to have their genitals manipulated, “trans-abled” refers to people so desperate to be pitied, so desperate to be a victim they become obsessed with being a specific kind of cripple. Some will roll around in wheelchairs even though they’re perfectly capable of walking. Others will truss up their arms and legs like Lon Chaney in The Penalty to pretend to be amputees. Others with 20/20 vision will wear sunglasses and tap around with white canes. They claim, in myriad support group websites, that it’s just like being transgendered, in that they feel like they were born with the wrong body, that the defective bodies they pretend to have are how they were meant to live.

Yeah, they can tell themselves that all they want, but what it boils down to is they’re a bunch of pity whores who want to be treated special.

I thought it was bad enough to be living in a stupid world in which assholes are now allowed to bring their so-called “service animals” (mostly poodles and terriers and other pointless small dogs) into restaurants because some goddamn shrink told them they were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome since mommy didn’t hug them enough when they were six. These “trans-abled” assholes are pushing it much, much further. A few with the courage of their stupid and misguided convictions are apparently taking steps to have themselves surgically altered in order to make their dreams of crippledom a reality. Most, however, seem content to remain cripple poseurs, to play act gimphood when it suits their fancy. But since this is America it’s now turned into a movement demanding they be treated the same way people with actual disabilities are treated. That means they want all those bonuses and perks that come along with being gimpy, like being able to go to the front of the line at Whole Foods, or parking in cripple spots at the mall simply because they enjoy pretending to be handicapped. Some apparently hang out with vets at paraplegic support groups and the like, sharing their own imaginary stories about what their lives would be like as if they really were cripples or blindos or deafies.

There’s even a move on now (again because this is America) to legally declare “trans-ableism” a real honest-to-goodness mental malfunction, which would then allow these fakers to fulfill their dreams of not only having an actual victim label to slab on themselves, they’d also be able to collect disability payments.

Know what I think, as a blindo myself? I’m not personally offended by this on account of my own condition. To my mind there’s absolutely no difference between these poseurs and those geeks who go to comic book conventions dressed like Wonder Woman or Han Solo, or that sexual subbculture whose members dress like big stuffed animals. No, it’s that these fake cripples are demanding the rest of us take them seriously. I’m pissed at all the seemingly endless levels of whininess constantly being unleashed upon the culture. If the laws are passed and the language further constricted to take these fucknuts seriously instead of just, y’know, pushing them down, what happens to the real cripples who have to be lumped together with the fakes?

First day I was teaching a couple years back, I was confronted with a line of students at my desk, each one holding an official piece of paper issued them by the school stating they had “a learning disability” and were therefore to be given separate tests, easier assignments, and more time than the other students to complete those assignments. My response at the time was “Well if you’re so goddamn stupid, why are you here? Why aren’t you in remedial classes or working in a mop factory like a normal retard instead of wasting everyone’s goddamn time with your fucking whining?”

(Of course I didn’t say that aloud, or I would’ve been arrested and convicted on hate crime charges. And don’t get me started again on “hate crimes.”)

Many years before that I was approached by a woman who claimed she was making a documentary film about blindos. “Oh,” she said in a wistful tone that made me want to stab her right there in my office,” it must be so wonderful to be blind! You’re living in a whole new, magical world!”

Realizing now that had the word been invented back then she would undoubtedly have called herself “trans-abled“ I wish I had stabbed her. No jury in the world would have convicted me. Hell, I might’ve even been given a prize for ridding the world of one more asshole.

I’m the first to admit that blindness doesn’t bother me that much. So long as I can work and get around I’m fine. It’s frustrating an annoying at times, but so are headcolds and hangnails. There’s nothing “wonderful” or “magical” about it, that’s for damn sure, but you learn to fucking deal with it or you become an insufferable pain in the ass.

I’m starting to get the impression, from the research I’ve done, that these “trans-abled” morons actually begin with the impulse to be an insufferable pain in the ass, to be an unending constant burden on everyone around them, then set about figuring the best way to do that—a way no one could ever call them on. “Oh, you can’t yell at me! I’m in a wheelchair!”

So here’s what I think we should do. We should gather all the cripple poseurs together and give them exactly what they want. They want to be blindos, we pluck out their eyes. They want to be amputees we roll out the guillotine. They want to be paralyzed, we shoot them in the spine. Then we send them on their way and follow up about six months later to find out exactly how much fun they’re having with this wonderful new lifestyle of theirs. Was it real super fulfilling when they got lost in the West Village and no one would stop to give them directions? And hey, was it real magical when they had to ask their understanding spouses to wipe their asses?

Then we tally up all their responses and shoot them in the head and dump them in the woods.

Whoops, could that be read as some kind of terrorist threat? Oh heaven forfend!

That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? If a real cripple had to do time in stir because a fake cripple was offended by him? Yet I can see it happening. Jesus christ what a pathetic world we’ve created.

by Jim Knipfel

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Mon, 23 Jan 2017 11:10:01 -0500

MAY I CUT IN HERE?

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 11:09:54 -0500

A Dance to the Music of Time is one of the monuments of 20th-century British literature.

As a monument, it is immediate, cleanly chiseled, foursquare and, despite occasional intricate carvings of angels, stark. As a monument, it does not clearly disclose its sculptor – whether, in this case, it be the author, Anthony Powell, or its universal narrator, Nick Jenkins. And as a monument, at least for me, it is also less “to read” than “to have read.”

I wrote earlier here about the first two “Movements” of Dance (each Movement comprises three of Powell’s sequentially published novels). I entered the third Movement hoping that it might pry loose the hinge to the narrator, Nick Jenkins. War, after all, brings misery but most of all change. I was disappointed that nothing of the sort unfolds. The writing is excellent, incisive as always, but the content, especially considering the upheaval of World War II, is peculiarly insular and abstracted. The coincidences on which the the “dance” must necessarily depend seem more forced, less a natural interactive swirl.

Unlike in the first two movements, things do happen. Sort of. Jenkins experiences the deaths of friends and acquaintances, but if they have lasting emotional effect on him, he doesn’t (won’t?) express it. He serves at one or another military backwater that deals with nothing that impacts directly on the progress of the war. We seldom know precisely where he’s stationed (on the home grounds of England and – I think – Northern Ireland) or what his job or rank entails in practical terms, behind a scattershot of unexplained acronyms. (Perhaps this is a holdover from that odd spatial and temporal shyness in 19th-century English novels, which feared that exact placement of its characters would somehow embarrass the real realm. Better to have them live “during 18__ in _____.”)

Hitler and Germany receive one or two tangential mentions, but the enemy remains a nebulous something and the outcome of it all hardly a matter for thought. Jenkins’ personal life goes as unexplored as ever. He is married but seems unconcerned with his wife and child.

Socially inept megalomaniac Kenneth Widmerpool, the bizarre cement of those first movements, takes on a larger presence in his aggressive climb up the military ladder, but, to my mind, occupies a smaller – less pivotal – role here. By contrast, the addition of Pamela Flitton, a vituperative vamp who sleeps with almost anyone of importance (and many of none), introduces Powell’s most interesting and explosive female character. I missed the sense of humor that pervades the first two movements but seems in abeyance here.

The last Movement – which enfolds the final three novels – takes Jenkins into his 60s, a period when many of his contemporaries have died, either in the war or of a combination of mostly natural causes. It also expands on characters introduced during the wartime years, particularly the self-centered, beautiful, fearfully consuming Pamela. For continuing readers, it enduringly examines the slow rise and later rapid dissolution of Widmerpool. Though perhaps impossible within the limited confines of the “real” world, these two oppositely aligned but equally destructive forces marry and wreak havoc at every turn, their alliance within Dance necessary, perhaps inevitable.

A new, interwoven sub-cast includes novelist X. Trapnel, destroyed in part by Pamela; Trapnel’s biographer, the self-protective American Gwinnett; and young cult leader, Murtlock.

Such an outline may sound as though a great deal of action at last takes place, but actually, as in the rest of this 3,000-page opus, little is acted out onstage. The reports we hear, through Jenkins, range from mildly removed through emotionally distant to windblown supposition.

Stylistically and in its orchestration of events, Dance as a whole is close to perfection. Sentences slither and knot through themselves to come out the other end as straight lines of meaning. Present and past intertwine in Jenkins’ mind with remarkable clarity and cohesion. Characters introduced years in the past recur with enticing recollection. That’s not only difficult to do but, yes, monumental to achieve.

I haven’t read critiques of Powell’s work (I never do), but I think he was trying to tie together a definitive package of mid-20th-century England. If so, his success depends on how you define “England” in the social sense. If it’s a narrow slice of upper-middle-, lower-upper-class life, he’d done the job superbly (even if this slice today is mostly burnt toast). But if it’s the country’s society as an evolving whole, then hardly.

Though Jenkins interacts through the years with almost everyone he has ever known (the foundation of the “dance” concept), his waltzing partners, despite disparate backgrounds and modes of progress, can take on a narrow, claustrophobic quality. Where they step off the dance floor and have the temerity to die in the cloakrooms of, say, Japan during the war, they dissipate and cease to be “those who matter.”

Is this deliberate on Powell’s part? It unsettles me that I can’t say, that I can’t pin down the author’s overall intent. What did he have in mind by presenting both the war and Jenkins as enveloped in massive indifference? Which ties in to my biggest problem with the whole production: How are we to view Nick Jenkins?

He is embraced by one and all as a friend or trusted acquaintance, the one to whom you choose to impart the latest news, yet he does little but ask questions and absorb responses. He had two or three early love interests that turned out poorly, then married Isobel (who is allowed perhaps 40 lines of dialog over 12 volumes). He has two, possibly more off-camera children, one a girl (Caroline?) born during WWII, another a son (unnamed) who was interviewed by a university. A published author, he never discusses his books. In the military, by his rise in grade, he shows competence, so something of importance must reside inside him.

Does he stand in for Powell, or is he an objective-commentary mechanism? Is he presented as an uber-character who is peculiarly lacking in affect and empathy, or is he representative of an uncaring or at least undemonstrative social stratum? Is he all of these together? Or is he something else, a dissociated outcaste of the 20th century, at base unaware that he is dissociated or an outcaste?

Despite my general applause for, even amazement at this work, I don’t know who to recommend it to. An exquisite 19th-century verbal tapestry transposed to the 20th century, it should exist largely because it does. Any author who would undertake such a labor should be rewarded with recognition and careful consideration. But it’s not an easy read, not an enjoyable read, I’d guess, for most. It can seem an exercise in verbalism, a sort of literary isometrics. But once you’ve started, if you accept the scope and encompassment of it all, you will want to finish. Monumental, indeed.

by Derek Davis

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THERE ARE FAIRIES IN THE BOTTOM OF OUR ANGER

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 09:32:18 -0500

“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

I’ve been reading a collection called Welsh Folk-Lore, assembled by the Rev. Elias Owen (1887, revisions 1896). I was especially intrigued by an autobiographical entry from the Rev. Dr. Edward Williams, a recollection from his youth in 1757. He and his companions, playing in a field, witnessed a troupe of swarthy, somehow inhuman, dwarf-like dancers, dressed in near-military red, one of whom chased and caught Williams, who managed to wriggle free. All raced home, then returned to the field with their families, but nothing was found of the possibly fairy dancers.

What’s captivating (and somewhat unnerving) about his tale is that it is rife with specific detail, that the man sounds in no way credulous, and that he makes no definite claims, outlandish or otherwise, as to who these figures might be; indeed he seems still mystified by them decades later as he puts down his recollections. Yet, as described, they fit well with other Celtic tales where the observer (almost always at at least one remove from the narrator) identities the entities as most definitely fairies.

What elements most likely influenced what he saw and how he interpreted his vision?

First of all, he was seven years old at the time of the meeting, so his memories had years in which to become clouded or otherwise amended.

At the time of his publication (1813), had he corroborated his memory with his friends and relatives? Not noted in Owen.

Were his family supportive of his and his friends’ descriptions of what happened? Again, not specifically noted, but their response at the time would suggest that they were.

What is clear, from the larger context of Owen’s collection, is that at least into the early 19th century the existence and prevalence of fairies was generally accepted in much of North Wales. (Owen himself is not a believer in the “good folk,” rather a collector of stories that he fears will vanish without publication.)

I don’t doubt that Williams and his friends saw something, that this something was both strange and frightening, leaving an indelible mark on his mind. And that, despite his later attempts to leave the dancers unidentified, in context, they would have been accepted as fairy folk.

(My guess? Misplaced Morris dancers who wished not to be identified – and who could blame them? as Stan and Garnet Rogers might suggest.)

Mackey’s book on popular delusions – which I haven’t read in many years – concentrates on wide-spread societal upheavals of mind, many of them economic bubbles that led to spectacular collapses, or religious manias like the Crusades. What I don’t recall his doing is tying these to the specifics of the cultures involved.

This, Owen’s work and Williams’ tale in particular, do. Though inhuman inhabitants have been accepted in a wide variety of cultures, the specifics of how they appear and how they behave are fairly singular to and consistent across the Celts: small of stature, more ancient and elemental than humans, fair, mirthful and generous (if given to tricks) yet mercurial in temperament, living at a faster time scale, normally invisible to humans, intensely secretive. This view remained mostly unchanged for many centuries, only going out of “fashion” with the Industrial Revolution.

Elsewhere, Renaissance Europe saw the St. Vitus Dance, a form of mass physical hysteria that enveloped whole communities (the Celtic fairies were said to entice humans to join them in their prolonged, manic dancing, so this hysteria is something of a role reversal). The Crusades, as Mackey notes, were another type of mass religious movement (with a far more brutal aspect, if you happened to be Jewish or Moslem).

But were such physical upheavals the same kind of culturally-contained phenomenon as encountering beings who, scientifically speaking, do not exist? I think so: both are society-wide expressions tied to a specific place and people that develop, blossom, become entrenched, then die out as the social assumptions supporting them dissolve.

The 20th and 21st centuries have been far from immune. In the 1950s, multitudes claimed to have seen, spoken to and traveled with space aliens. In that time of social constraint and prosperity, the inhabitants of UFOs were experienced as almost universally benign, set on taking us to a world without nuclear weapons and war, where all cares vaporize. But during the crime-splattered and tumultuous 1970s, these aliens in their comfy circular ships became malign, ramming probes into every human orifice (for some reason taking special sadistic pleasure in the nose).

But despite local differences – pre-human inhabitants vs. physical hysteria vs. extraterrestrial interference – there seems to be a universal link: a general need for humanity to embrace a communal experience that includes both hope and fear, with heavy emphasis on the latter. Today, we shiver over scary clowns, clandestine terrorists and terrestrial aliens behind every tree (though few of them dance in the fields). In other words, we have always not only believed in but actively sought out fake news.

What’s changed, with the spread of near-instantaneous communication, is the speed with which these tides of misapprehension sweep over us.

In the case of the UFOs, a radical change in perception of alien intention took place in America over less than a generation. More recently, the reaction to shifts in government – to altered power structure – involves the same principles but has spread across the globe. In the Arab Spring, disillusionment with the new order – the heralded replacement – took about six months. The initial government was seen as evil, was attacked through social media and was overthrown, a new coalition took power, and within those six months became the new enemy.

In the U.S., we have fingered fake news as one culprit in creating disillusionment. But it’s simply the local exhibition of a now almost universal phenomenon. The global culture has merged many formerly local bugaboos into a constantly simmering pot of apparent malignancy, attributed to the “other,” whoever the other of the moment may be. The process itself is nothing new, it’s just been subjected to a blinding increase in scope and speed.

So let us Americans sit tight. The revolt against the latest revolting development shouldn’t take more than 120 days. Possibly 90. The bubble will burst or, more likely, deflate like a pricked balloon.

But … then what?

by Derek Davis

POP MODERNIST DYSTOPIA

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 09:23:57 -0500

In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich shortly before his death in 1976, Fritz Lang said of Metropolis, “You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that’s a fairy tale – definitely. But I was very interested in machines. Anyway, I didn’t like the picture – thought it was silly and stupid – then, when I saw the astronauts: what else are they but part of a machine? It’s very hard to talk about pictures—should I say now that I like Metropolis because something I have seen in my imagination comes true, when I detested it after it was finished?”

Lang wasn’t alone back in 1927 when the film was first released. Critics applauded the striking visuals and the ambitious technical achievement, but lambasted the trite melodrama and cheap platitudes. In a vicious New York times review, H.G. Wells attacked the picture’s anti-progress, anti-technology message, accused it of ripping off several earlier works (including his own), and called it “quite the silliest film.” It was also attacked as a bunch of simpleminded and heavy-handed pro-communist propaganda, while at the same time and ironically enough it was hailed by the Nazis for portraying the overthrow of the Bourgeoisie.

(As a quick sidenote, Lang’s wife, novelist and Metropolis screenwriter Thea von Harbou, became quite infatuated with the Nazis after they took power, which led to a divorce shortly before Lang fled to the States in 1936.)

The story, admittedly, is pretty trite. In the year 2000, 2026, or 3000 (depending on which cut you see), there is no middle class. The top .001 percent of superwealthy intellectuals live in unimaginable luxury in the towering city of Metropolis, while the teeming masses of impoverished proles work the monstrous machines in the underground factories. Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), son of Metropolis’ ruler, falls for a poor worker named Maria (Brigitte Helm). Meanwhile an engineer with a beef builds a humanoid robot to exact a little revenge, and the workers begin muttering about conditions and revolution. There are another half dozen storylines at play, but we’ll keep it simple here. There are some disasters, some rioting, things go a little crazy there for awhile until everyone learns they can live together happily. Yes, well. But the story hardly matters. Background becomes foreground in a film so packed with unforgettable images.

Produced by the German studio UFA, Metropolis called for 13,000 extras, over 200,000 costumes, and a city’s worth of monumental sets. It took fifteen months to shoot, over which time its initial 800,000 Reichmarks budget ballooned to over five million.

At the Berlin premiere for distributors, Lang’s directors cut ran about 153 minutes. Everyone, particularly Paramount, who’d signed a distribution deal with UFA, felt the film was way too long and the story far too tangled and confusing. That Berlin screening would be the one and only time anyone saw a complete version of Metropolis for the next eighty years. Paramount took the print and cut it down to 92 minutes, excising a number of characters and subplots, as well as the perceived commie propaganda. Then they brought in a new writer to concoct a new story to replace Lang’s original intertitles. UGA took Paramount’s version and cut still another ten minutes out, and other international distributors made other cuts of their own.

During its first theatrical run, Metropolis brought in a pitiful 75,000 Reichmarks. The brass at UFA was not pleased. Neither was Paramont, and the film ostensibly vanished. From that point, the history of Metropolis became as tangled and complicated as the original plot about class struggle, dehumanization, several layers of betrayal, a couple illicit love affairs, and robots. Beginning in the early Seventies, a number of attempts were made to restore Lang’s original complete vision by splicing together scenes from assorted international versions, but the story didn’t come to an end until 2008, when, much to everyone’s surprise, a print of Lang’s original 153-minute version was discovered in an archive in Argentina. The print was cleaned up, remastered, and released by Kino International in 2010. Two scenes from the Argentinian print were unsalvageable, so the 2010 version ran 148 minutes, five minutes shorter than Lang’s director’s cut, but what are you gonna do?

Until his death, Lang would tell the story that Metropolis sprang into his head fully formed upon seeing the towering skyline of Manhattan for the first time. He, his wife, and a German film critic were sailing into New York harbor for the U.S. premiere of Die Nibelungen in 1924, and Lang was mesmerized by all the skyscrapers. Immediately he envisioned a film about a magnificent city of the future. It’s a good anecdote and one he told quite well, but the only problem is by the time they first arrived in New York, von Harbou had already sketched out the story upon which the Metropolis script would be based. There’s no denying, though, that architecture would play a central role in Lang’s visuals. He supplied the film’s staggering architecture and machinery while von Harbou provided the human melodrama and social commentary. Lang was inspired by not only the Manhattan skyline, but a number of radical architectural movements of the time, from Art Deco and Bauhaus to Futurism, elements of which he would mix and match in order to design his own magnificent vertical city. His designs for Metropolis would in turn later go on to inspire not only other filmmakers and production designers, but artists and architects as well. And in the end, it’s the film’s visuals that stick with us far more than the plot: the new Tower of Babel, the robot-like workers marching into and out of the underground factories, and of course that insidious engineer Rotwang’s Maschinenmensch which itself was inspired by avant-garde sculpture of the early 20th century.

In a way that is absolutely key to understanding Metropolis’ unique and singular position within not only cinema, but the culture at large. It remains to this day a lynchpin between highbrow and lowbrow, the most enduring and influential embodiment of what might be called Pop Modernism.

The world’s first feature-length (and then some) science fiction epic took the Modernist art and architecture of its time and transformed them into a vision of a dystopian future that was at once a staggering achievement of cinematic art and imagination as well as a simple message film aimed at a populist audience. Despite the initial critical and audience reaction, and despite having been butchered by distributors, it would go on to inspire artists, architects, filmmakers, writers and musicians across the board. The Los Angeles of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the Gotham of Tim Burton’s Batman both owe a great deal to Lang. Madonna, Lady Gaga and countless other pop acts have grabbed imagery from Metropolis to drop into their music videos. Respected composers, indie acts and electronic industrial outfits have all composed new scores for the film. Osamu Tezuka insists he only saw a single still from Lang’s picture, but that was enough to inspire his own Metropolis manga, which was turned into an award-winning animated film in 2001.

Perhaps the most perfect and telling example of Metropolis’ place in the Pop Modernist spectrum came in 1984, when producer and film composer Giorgio Moroder edited and released his own 80-minute version of Metropolis, which by that point had fallen into the public domain. Moroder replaced all the intertitles with subtitles, ran the film at a slightly faster speed, slapped on a pop soundtrack featuring Top-40 acts of the day like Loverboy, Pat Benetar, and Bonnie Tyler, and worst of all colorized it.

Film purists were outraged, assailing Moroder for mangling and desecrating Lang’s film in such a crass and cynically commercial way. But the critics at the time neglected to consider several things. First, a British distributor had already released a colorized version (quite the unfortunate rage at the time) with subtitles replacing the intertitles. Although the Moroder version clocked in at a zippy 80 minutes, this was simply the result of removing the intertitles and speeding up the film. Fact was, his version was the most complete version of the film available at the time. And most importantly, that pop song soundtrack, as painful and outdated as it sounds today, drew a much younger audience who would normally have no use whatsoever for a silent movie. He transformed a classic example of silent German cinema into a long music video, and the newly-born MTV generation bought it. The film brought in a darn sight more than Metropolis had upon its initial release. Moroder’s version, cynically commercial as it may have been, rescued the film from the museum and gave it a new life, introducing it to a whole new generation who were likewise dazzled by the stunning visuals, and who would then go on to incorporate the imagery into their own art and films and music. So 90 years after making an ambitious art film aimed at a popcorn crowd, Lang continues, if unintentionally, to dance that line between the High and the Low, kinda like Andy Warhol.

Funny thing is, from Moroder to Club Foot Orchestra to Lady Gaga, the more contemporary artists co-opt Lang’s film, the more timely and timeless Metropolis seems, and the more ephemeral and pointless everything else seems in comparison.

The final, sad irony of Metropolis’ long and complex history, blasphemous as it may be, is that for all the understandable ballyhoo surrounding the discovery of Lang’s complete original vision, and of at last having a pristine, remastered edition (minus those five minutes they couldn’t salvage) finally available again, I’d still argue the 92-minute Paramount version was the better picture.

by Jim Knipfel

ACAUSALITY AND EFFECT: A Journey to the End of Linearity

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 09:07:17 -0500

One of Jung’s favourite quotes regarding time was from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in which the White Queen proclaims to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”.

Numerous artists and great thinkers e.g., Jung, Rilke, Philip K. Dick intuited that an illusion of biology, a habit of mind, caused us to perceive the nature of time was exclusively linear…that time, on an exclusive basis, flowed, like a river from the past into the present then towards the future. Instead, they posited, time was more akin to a porous, supra-dimensional, interconnected hive, implacably intertwined with consciousness.

We are embraced by phenomena that exist far beyond our mortal sightline; there are paths of apprehension that lead towards expansive vistas of seeing and knowing that, in turn, stretch into eternal intelligences that blaze within trillions of eternal intelligences.

In our limited perception, these intelligences appear to us, often in dreams, visions, and poetic expression as beauty, terror, even humour…People, throughout the ages, have referred to the phenomenon as communion with the sublime, even encounters with gods and angels.

Time is eternity, gripped by a transitory (but biologically imperative) episode of self-absorption. Yet: One must dare to turn towards the horizon line of acausal knowing, and walk a terrain of impersonal, monstrous beauty, all the while, clasping one’s tattered humanity like a weather-shredded flag.

The dream-fecund human heart, an inveterate time-traveler, knows its way through the honey-hived portals of time. But one must forget all pretense to catch a glimpse of its nature thus become christened with one’s true and timeless name.

by Phil Rockstroh

Blind girls, 1930s

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Blind girls, 1930s

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Unknown photographer. 1930s

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