Monthly Archives: January 2013

Quentin Tarantino, Humanist

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Since we’re doing a Django Unchained roundtable I thought I’d republish this. It first appeared way back when in the Chicago Reader.
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It’s hard to believe the acclaim bestowed on this rip-off artist. Second-hand plots, second-hand characters, second-hand themes, all thrown together without regard to narrative probability, but with plenty of gratuitous violence to bring in the groundlings, and — ta daa! A marketing phenomenon is born.

But enough about Shakespeare. Kill Bill isn’t exactly Henry IV, but at least Quentin Tarantino’s two part epic is shallow and derivative. Even fast food commercials these days want you to believe in the sincere virtues of family, community, and up-to-date urban newness. Not Tarantino, thank God. Kill Bill is relentlessly, gloriously glacial — the ravishing Kung Fu battle in the first part unwinds endlessly without narrative function or even, really, suspense — we all know how this is going to turn out, after all. Its only raison d’etre is the choreography and the beauty of the shots. In “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Ang Lee tried to give martial arts films a soul. Fuck that, Tarantino seems to be saying — his version is all cold surface; blank stare as tribute. Empty? Why, yes. But, as it happens, it’s also more true to the source material, and a more thoughtful take on the depersonalized attraction of violence.

Kill Bill 1, like martial arts movies generally, is a mechanized ballet — even the out-of-sequence narrative feels, at this point in Tarantino’s career, more like a reflex than an innovation. Kill Bill 2, on the other hand, is not so much robotic as paralyzed. Everything is Sergio-Leone-extreme close-up and anticlimax. Bud (Michael Madsen), the ex-killer, working as a bouncer in a girlie bar, is painfully chewed out by his thoroughly despicable boss — we expect him to go ballistic and trash the place, but instead he just mumbles and goes off to clean the plugged toilet. The super-martial-arts-guru played by Gordon Liu dies from eating poisoned fish-heads. Our heroine, the great swordswoman, keeps gearing up for a awesome display of virtuosity and then getting shot — the first time with rock salt, the second, bizarrely, with a truth serum dart that forces her to confess absolutely nothing of consequence. David Denby in the New Yorker speaks for many critics when he claims that “such scenes don’t work,” but surely they’re not supposed to, any more than the Simpsons is intended to be dramatically intense. This isn’t homage — it’s slow-motion parody. Action-movie clichés — revenge, honor, violence — all end up looking not merely dumb, but boring.

Tarantino’s usually viewed as simply a fan of movies. His films are supposed to be giddy hipster pleasures; an excuse to show off, the accusation goes; at his best he merely reproduces the stylistic tics of his heroes. Thus, for Denby, the fact that Gordon Liu comes off as “a prancing little snit” is a mistake; martial-arts masters should be treated with respect, right?

On the contrary, Tarantino’s studied refusal to fulfill genre expectations is the reason to watch him. He doesn’t want to make a Hong Kong action movie, or a blaxploitation flick: he wants to have a conversation about one. And that’s what his movies seem like: long, dramatic arguments with other filmmakers and other films. Probably the most enjoyable part of Jackie Brown, for me, was the treatment of Robert DeNiro, whose portrayal of an utterly inept, hen-pecked wannabe bad-dude deftly upended decades of macho posturing — this guy, Tarantino seems to say, is just another honky who wants to be tough. Similarly, in Pulp Fiction, gangland thugs, so celebrated by Scorcese, Coppola, et. al., are presented as moronic sit-com buffoons.

It’s no accident that Tarantino seems most masterful when skewering the primal histrionics of a method-actor like DeNiro. The pulp movies Tarantino draws on are, as a rule, obsessed with visceral responses — sex, blood, suspense, shock. Tarantino is interested in these things too, but only second-hand, as odd collectables you might find on display in a museum. He doesn’t want to create excitement, but to take it apart and see what makes it tick. The famous torture scene in Reservoir Dogs, set to a feel-good seventies sound-track, was disturbing not because it was so immediate, but because it was distanced: Tarantino seems to be watching you with his head slightly to one-side, clipboard in hand, asking, “Well, now, how did you feel about that?” In Kill Bill 2, Elle (Daryl Hannah) sics a black mambo on Bud, then reads him pertinent facts about the snake as he lies paralyzed. That’s Tarantino all over; you can bet that if he were dying in horrible agony, he’d still want to know how many milliliters of venom had entered his bloodstream.

Every so often, though, Tarantino does attempt to generate the kind of catharsis that he usually makes it his business to mock. The results, needless to say, are not pretty — a vivisectionist may be good at taking the dog apart, but he’s not the person to go to if you want to buy a pet. Of all his movies, Kill Bill seems the one in which Tarantino has most consistently attempted earnestness and, as a result, it’s his weakest effort. The character of The Bride (Uma Thurman) is a case in point. She’s clearly patterned on Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name — an ectomorphic, blond, impassive killer. Fun could certainly be had with this character, and Tarantino indisputably hits some of the right notes; after digging herself out of her own coffin, for instance, The Bride, covered in dirt and looking like death, calmly walks into a diner and asks the startled counter-attendant for a glass of water.

Before being buried alive, however, The Bride totally loses her composure, weeping hysterically. This would be okay if Tarantino had actually cast Eastwood in the role. But Thurman is a woman, and seeing a woman fall apart in an action movie doesn’t tweak convention; it fulfills them. Of course, The Bride pulls herself together and escapes in an utterly preposterous and enjoyable sequence, but what’s the point of her outburst? To increase suspense? To make us identify with her? To make her more believable? Tarantino can be brilliant when he pushes ideas to their limits, or when he undercuts them. But here he’s doing neither; he’s using tired techniques to achieve tired ends. Thurman’s desperate emoting doesn’t comment on Sergio Leone — at best, it merely replicates the supposed “realism” of Bruce Willis’ average-joe action hero in Die Hard.

The misguided desire to turn Thurman’s character into an actual person is underlined by her christening; in the first movie, she’s nameless, in the second, we learn that she’s called “Beatrix.” But it’s her final appellation that really causes trouble. In the film’s last scene, we see a close-up of Thurman’s face and printed over it the information that she is now known as “Mommy.” Motherhood is, in fact, the central theme of Kill Bill. It’s also one of the most loaded and thorny topics in our culture, and by the end of the second part of the movie, its clear that Tarantino, in confronting it, has suffered a catastrophic failure of nerve.

Things start out all right. Many pulp movies center around plots involving brutality committed against or witnessed by children: “Once Upon a Time in the West,” for example, or, more recently, “Batman.” But in Kill Bill 1, Tarantino features not just one act of violence, but several. To open, Bill supposedly kills The Bride’s unborn child. Then, in an animated sequence we see a young girl literally covered in the blood of her murdered parents. This is O-ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) whose horrifying experience inevitably inspires her to become a ruthless assassin and the crime-lord of Tokyo.

And finally there’s the movie’s first extended sequence. The Bride has tracked ex-assassin Vernita Green (Vivica Fox) to the later’s suburban home; the two immediately begin an extended, violent kung-fu battle, complete with kitchen knives, but they are interrupted by the arrival of Green’s four-year old daughter Nikki (Ambrosia Kelley). The Bride, it turns out, doesn’t want to kill the child’s mother in front of her. Green pushes for more, suggesting that, for the sake of the child, the Bride should abandon her revenge. But the Bride is unconvinced, she refuses to let Green off the hook just for “getting knocked up.” In the end, she does murder the mother in front of the daughter, and then apologizes woodenly: “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.” There’s been much speculation on the net about a sequel starring a vengeful Nikki, and rightly so. After all, children in this world aren’t the innocent victims of violence — they’re excuses for it — convenient plot devices. Oren Ishi’s seventeen-year old, psychotic bodyguard Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama) who wears school-girl outfits is emblematic; a kind of living fetish of blood and gore.

Kill Bill 1 suggests that we enjoy watching our children get hurt. In Kill Bill 2, Tarantino merely notes that children have aggressive impulses — a much less daring thesis. Certainly there’s nothing particularly daring about the portrayal of Beatrix’s four-year-old daughter B.B. (Perla Haney-Jardine), who, it turns out, did not die after all. Bill has raised her as a normal, upper-middle-class suburban youth who enjoys playing with toy guns. She also deliberately killed her pet goldfish, but her real function is to humanize her mother. After rediscovering the child, Beatrix kills Bill, ends her crusade of vengeance, and begins a new life as a loving mother –inaugurated by another extended crying jag. B.B. herself, however, barely exists; she’s little more than a stand-in for hundreds of redemptive movie children. Tarantino could have made her a hyperbolically saccharine sit-com clone; he could have made her a spunky bad seed like John Connor in James Cameron’s motherhood-obsessed Terminator 2; he could have made her a ninja-assassin hell-bent on avenging her father’s death. Instead, he gives her an obligatory quirk (she likes watching “Shogun Assassin” before bed) and otherwise treats her with an unbecoming reverence. It’s as if he’s afraid to touch her.

Tarantino isn’t usually considered a cautious director. But in his scenes about motherhood he is pulling his punches, and the strain eviscerates his writing. Thus the scene in which Beatrix discovers, using an over-the-counter test, that she’s pregnant. Moments later an assassin bursts into her hotel room. Hijinks ensue, but finally the assassin accepts that Beatrix is with child. This time the plea of “but the children!” which was so ineffective in the first part of the movie, works like a charm. Looking through the shotgun-hole she’s blasted in the door, the assassin intones “Congratulations,” a punchline predictable and saccharine enough to have come out of a third-rate, by-the-numbers Hollywood action-comedy like Police Academy.

Tarantino’s never going to make even a first-rate action comedy, of course; he’s simply too talented a craftsman to churn out a scattershot masterpiece like Airplane. But if he doesn’t take care, he could create something significantly worse. Kill Bill’s more maudlin moments queasily echo the efforts of Jim Jarmusch, a director who, instead of puncturing genre conventions, inflates them with pretentious philosophizing and waits for the critics to call it art. It would be a shame if Tarantino went further down this road. Truly talented satirists are few and far between, but film-schools are full of myopic white boys eager to tell the rest of us what it means to be human.
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Utilitarian Review 1/19/13

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On HU

Featured Archive Post Anja Flower on gender in Ghost in the Shell.

Me on the pernicious drivel of Jim Carrey’s Yes Man.

Me on Fredric Wertham and the Seduction of AbEx.

Matt Brady on Django vs. Lincoln.

Gail Carson Levine (author of Ella Enchanted) on Joan Abelove’s anthropological novel, Go and Come Back.

Robert Stanley Martin on Jim Shooter and Moonshadow.

Owen Alldritt on Lil B as God.

Watching Django on the southside of Chicago

Richard Cook with 8 reasons that the Hobbit sucks.

Me on Dr. Strange and Steve Ditko erasing himself.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about mamas in country music.

At Splice, I review the Future Sounds of Buenos Aires, and decide the future is exotica.

At Splice Today, I urge everyone to follow me on Twitter!
 
Other Links

David Brothers has been writing an interesting series on Django Unchained.

Amanda Marcotte on why rape is not an accident.

Alyssa Rosenberg on Beyonce’s compulsive self-documentation.

Brian Cremins on the queer joys of Black Cat and tiny Spider-man.
 
This Week’s Reading

I’m rereading Twilight for a piece. And rereading/editing my Wonder Woman book; hopefully I’ll finish up next week and can get it out to readers sometime soon after that.
 

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The Erasure of Steve Ditko

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I think I first read Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s story “The Challenge of Loki” in a black and white reprint edition when I was around 8 or so. It’s originally from Strange Tales #123, August 1964.
 

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It’s not exactly right to say that it hasn’t held up — I wasn’t necessarily all that into it even as a kid, though it does have its virtues. Chief among them is a kind of self-contained inevitability; plotting that opens and closes with a satisfying “click.” In the story, Loki decides to use Dr. Strange to destroy his old enemy, Thor. He convinces Strange to cast a spell to rob Thor of his hammer while Thor is in flight. Without the hammer, Thor starts to fall to his death. Dr. Strange realizes he’s been tricked, and he and Loki battle. Strange is losing, but manages to reverse his spell, winding time backwards and returning the hammer to Thor. His life and hammer restored, Thor sets out in search of Loki, arriving at Dr. Strange’s sanctum just in time to scare Loki off and save Strange. The end.

I guess it sounds convoluted in the telling, but, again, the thing I sort of liked about it, and still sort of like about it, is the neatness of it — the way the story so swiftly and so unapologetically sets itself in motion, and then resets, or erases itself. Loki has an evil plot; it is discovered; everything goes back to normal. It’s transparently unmotivated, and then gratuitously rubbed out — pulp piffle which revels in its own greasepaint-daubed inconsequence. The gaudiness of the lack of pretense is refreshing — though also, admittedly, a little unsettling.

That hint of wrongness, might, perhaps, be tied to some of the characteristic tensions in Ditko’s work. Specifically, Craig Fischer argues in this lovely essay, in which he connects Ditko’s obsession with eloquently gesturing hands to the anxiety and unease which pervades the artist’s oeuvre — and then (obliquely) connects both the hands and the anxieties to repressed themes of abuse.

Certainly, hands are very important in “The Challenge of Loki.” Dr. Strange steals Thor’s hammer from him by generating a giant, blue/black hand.
 

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In part, the hand can be seen as pointing directly to Ditko himself; the elaborate motion lines an excuse to show the squiggle of the pen line — the diegetic hand as artist’s hand drawing the diegetic hand. The comic is showing you its own grinding mechanisms; it’s showing you the man (and the hand) behind the curtain.

What the man behind the curtain is doing, of course, is wreaking havoc. Thor is sadistically thrown to his death by the mystic hand — or, if you’d prefer, by the hand of the artist. There’s no motivation, other than Loki’s almost pure malevolence — which both is a plot device, and can be seen as characterizing pulp plot itself. The narrative almost figures artist as supervillain.

But then, of course, the artist relents.

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It’s interesting that the hand does not return the hammer, but instead fades away. Time is wound backwards (though, again curiously, this is not really visualized). Thor’s hammer is returned to him; the supervillain artist erases his own work. Not only is recompense made, but, apparently, the evil was never done. It effervesces, like a dream — or an instantly forgettable chunk of pulp detritus. There’s almost a wistfulness there — a fantasy that those hands (my hands? whose hands?) had never been or done; that they could just vanish with a wave of (the same?) hand.

I’m sure some folks will say that it’s a stretch to read into this story trauma or guilt or a confused identification/repudiation of an abuser. And I’d actually agree with that. “The Challenge of Loki” isn’t about abuse. It’s not about anything. It’s a stupid little story about Dr. Strange fighting Loki, with Thor thrown in for cross-promotional purposes. It’s well-constructed, and mildly entertaining, and that’s all that can be said for it, really. It’s inconsequential genre product. If there was ever anything more there, it has been scoured out by some violent or gentle hand.

The 3-D Gave Me a Headache and Seven More Complaints about The Hobbit

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1. The movie spends over half an hour introducing the dwarves, yet doesn’t give a single reason to care about any of them. It’s hard to even keep them straight. I remember the king, the fat one, the old one, and the one with the stupid hat. Beyond that, I don’t remember them and don’t care. By any standard of characterization quality, this movie compares poorly with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. At least I knew what to think of Grumpy.

2. Somewhere in this great big world, there is a movie that successfully combines musical numbers, snot gags, and rampant violence. The Hobbit is not that movie. The plot retains the cutesy qualities of a children’s adventure, but with incongruous levels of violence. Though now that I think about it, this is familiar territory for a comics blogger.

3. PG-13 violence is remarkable, and not in a good way. The movie has decapitations, eviscerations, multiple stabbings, and a body count in the hundreds, yet there is very little on-screen blood and the camera never lingers on the gruesome consequences of violence. The Hobbit is too gory to be cartoonish yet too tame to be explicit. It’s the uncanny valley of violent entertainment.

4. The action scenes are not exciting. Several reviewers have noted the video gamey quality of the action, particularly the big battle/chase sequence with the goblins. There is shot after shot of indistinguishable dwarves killing indistinguishable orcs. Noah compared it to a “body count video game,” which sounds about right. While body count video games can’t be defended as good art, they can at least provide a base level of entertainment and a pleasurable empowerment fantasy. But watching The Hobbit is like watching someone else play a video game, which  is never fun.

5. Every scene is about 10 minutes longer than it needs to be. It’s bad enough that such a short book was split into a trilogy. But there’s no conceivable reason why each installment has to exceed 2 hours. Though now I can’t help but wonder what sort of scenes were cut from the theatrical release. And what will be included in the extend cut DVDs? No doubt there are many more thrilling scenes of characters sitting around tables and explaining the plot to each other.

6. The film is tragically lacking in hobbit feet close-ups. Why even make The Hobbit if you’re not going to showcase hobbit feet?

7. To harp on the 3-D again, it adds absolutely nothing to the movie experience. 3-D is just a silly gimick, so if you’re going to use 3-D you might as have some fun with the audience (for a great example, see Friday the 13th part 3, which is all rats and marijuana and eyeballs in the third dimension). The Hobbit doesn’t have any fun with the 3-D, so it feels suspiciously like an excuse for theaters to jack up the ticket price.

7.5. Speaking of ticket price, two tickets cost me $38. Thirty eight fucking dollars.

Django, Southside

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Movie theater, South Side of Chicago: photo by Russell Lee, April 1941, from this site.

 

So there’s been some discussion in comments on various bits of our Django Unchained roundtable about how African-American audiences have reacted to the film.

The obvious answer to this question is, of course, that different black folks have reacted differently to the film, just as different white folks have reacted differently to it. There’s no monolithic black community response any more than there’s a monolithic white community response.

With that said…I did see Django Unchained on the south side of Chicago, with an audience that was basically entirely black (I think I may have glimpsed one other white guy there, but that was pretty much it.) The reaction to the film was, as far as I could tell, pretty enthusiastic; the little old lady sitting next to me kept loudly finishing punch lines and seemed particularly stoked by Stephen’s ignominious end.

When I was leaving the theater, I did overhear an interesting conversation, in which two men were discussing the way that “we undermine ourselves,” (to quote loosely.) I assumed they were referring to the character of Stephen — the black slave who aids his white master and effectively becomes (as Charles Reece points out) the film’s main antagonist. The idea that blacks are at least partially responsible for their own oppression is a well-established discourse in the black community, of course, from Bill Cosby and Barack Obama on down.

Still, it made me a little queasy to hear it deployed in this context, inasmuch as Stephen really is not, as far as I could tell, an accurate representation of anything. Uncle Tom really is a caricature, and looking to Stephen for straightforward lessons on slavery or racial politics really seems like a bad idea.

Anyway…while writing this, I actually started to wonder how white audiences reacted to the film. So, anybody see the film with a primarily white audience? Was there discomfort? Enthusiasm? Or what?

Based Passions

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There are two popular ways of coming at Lil B’s music.

The first is outright dismissal.  A significant portion of the listening public is turned off by the seeming childishness and rough-hewn nature of his material.  They find it infantile or moronic.

The second is ironic approval.  Because of his prolificacy and oddball sensibilities, Lil B has become the exemplar of internet-wave hip-hop.  From this perspective his work seems like art brut, a (presumably) unknowing reflection of the state of music in the twenty-first century.

There have been a few more complicated treatments of Lil B’s music as winking provocateur or network visionary. For my purposes I would like to focus on the spiritual dimension of his music.

I want to articulate the mystical theme that runs through Lil B’s work.  It draws on a mix of his own home-brewed creative ontology, Judeo-Christian mysticism (writ large), and a sort of liberal pan-spirituality. We will see that this unique stance comes from the nature of his ambitious goal and his idiosyncratic context; as so many of us are, he is attempting to work from where he is rather than from any codified religious position.  His eclectic, haphazard approach to religious and ethical life suffers horrible (arguably humiliating) failures at times from its internal tensions.  At times he lapses into uninspired and dull posturing. But the same tensions that lead him to lapse into inanity lend his songs particular ingenious moments.  Who could expect anything else from this sort of religious exploration?

A discussion of the relationship between Lil B and religion could easily become a monograph. Thus, I’ve limited the scope to my favorite of his songs, “I’m God”, and its accompanying music video. I will attempt to keep the analysis of “I’m God” within its internal structure, lending related works and theoretical references primarily in the end-notes.  Finally, I will deal with the beat, the imagery, and the final verse rather than going through the entire text line-by-line (my first attempt to do a thorough reading was terrifyingly long).
 

 
The video opens in what appears to be a religious goods store in Los Angeles. Lil B is wandering around, handling the merchandise as his cameraman shakily shadows him.  This imagery is gorgeous, if a little familiar; even in a commodified world where religious artifacts seem anachronistic, there is a beauty and a subtlety to each of the objects in their individuality, as the video’s numerous closeups attempt to convey.  Further, the structure of the store mirrors the structure of Lil B’s lyrical struggle within the song; from within a modern, heavily commercial environment, here the notoriously superficial environs of LA, he strives to use the tools at his disposal to relate to something simultaneously ahistorical, personal, and spiritual.  His relationship with God and his related attempt to be a deity are quickly expressed in the opening lines of the song.  Over the hushed whispers of an Imogen Heap sample, he tells us that we know he always wanted to be the best.  What rapper doesn’t?

The experience of struggle and overcoming is central to hip-hop, as is the notion that material wealth is connected with one’s spiritual wealth. This often involves a set of simple answers to the question: “How do I know that I’ve been successful, that I’ve approached perfection even as I suffer from this struggle?” One of the primary conflicts in hip-hop is wanting to know you’ve made it, and this helps us understand the emphasis on benjamins, booze, and bitches that many rappers refer to as proof of their symbolic security.  Material wealth often fails to capture exactly what rappers are attempting; thus Jay-Z’s late career shift of concern from dope and hoes to his legacy[i].  At a certain point, the material goods are not enough; they, like the bodies who possess them, are too finite, and elicit a craving for more that often becomes displaced onto conservative concerns with one’s presence in history.  Lil B, despite not having the capital or success of a more marketable rapper, reaches out to this same sense of historical success and, importantly, even further beyond it to spiritual concerns.  Thus, he opens the track with his desire, not simply to be the best, but to be God.  Soon after he affirms his ambition to be divine, he affirms again his finite, named identity: “This is real talk.  It’s Lil B.”  His name is public, contextualized, but his spiritual pursuit is not; he is a historical figure confined to his context and his history but striving for something more, a commodity striving for significance like the religious products that surround him.  This struggle is the core of the song.

The Imogen Heap song sampled by producer Clams Casino is “Just for Now”, another song about the passions involved in struggle.  In that song, the conflict is interpersonal; Heap meditates on the struggle to remain happy, calm, and avoid judgment even as your desires and doubts pull you apart from one another.  There is not space here for a detailed analysis of “Just for Now”, but the song is about the balance of desiring pause and escape even as the immanent pressures of a relationship push you into uncomfortable contact with the Other.  This has a direct analog in Lil B’s complex relationship with his spirituality, with Jesus Christ (iconography of whom appears prominently in the video), and with his own desire to be properly recognized by others while remaining true to his own ambition.
 

 
In the hands of Casino, the Imogen Heap sample becomes an angelic chorus surrounding Lil B’s all-too grounded and personal voice.  The sample becomes ghostly and secondary; abstracted in order to express its affective nature over its lyrical content (though that also remains relevant).  Longing and passion charge Lil B’s delivery with a context and a hungriness that his decontextualized lyrics do not have. This funhouse reflection is one aspect of the implicitly structured ecology of  “I’m God”.  Lil B, frustrated by his inability to consistently and clearly express his desire and ambition, surrounds himself with images and sounds that also obliquely refer to an unnamed object.  This symbolic collage is constructed in hopes that holistically the entire configuration (assemblage) will be able to express what he, in his historically determined selfhood, cannot[ii].

Let’s turn to the final verse.  I will begin with Lil B’s plea: “Throw your hands up, it’s Lil B for Lil Boss/I need all the based energy I can” at about 3:26 in the music video.  For those who are unfamiliar with Lil B’s terminology, being “based” has an ambiguous relationship with drugs, but is primarily characterized by a positive affect and feeling of flow[iii].  A “based freestyle” is a freestyle that flows through someone who is based.  The based individual has a positive, quasi-mystical experience that is connected to another plane of being. Based here takes on the double sense of being (de)based as a centered subject and being based, as in rooted, in an originary point.  Lil B consistently claims that he is the “Based God”, which is simultaneously a statement about one’s intimate relationship to God and one’s shamanic prowess at becoming (and remaining) based.  It’s in this spirit that Lil B asks for our help.  Being based is not an atomistic process; it’s about a relationship to a responsive audience.  If Lil B’s mystical experience is successful, both he and his audience experience being based.  Being based is thus related to the festival experience common to many cultures; experiencing a sense of flow is something that happens to us as a collective, not something that strikes us as individuals.  Lil B as Based God takes on the position of a spiritual conduit.

After this preface, we are transitioned into the first section of the final verse.  This set of lines begins a meditation on the conflict that I have described above.  Lil B raps: “Is this what you really want, you’ve got me in the flesh now/No, I’m not stressed out, I’m God, I’m the best out.”  Lil B here asks if you really want him as a finite, historically determined man or if we really desire him as a spiritual entity, a vector for based energy.  His answer is immediate: he’s not upset about our addressing him as a human being because he knows that he is also God. This brings us to the core of the verse:

Rap transparent, my see-through glasses

Incoherent, and no I’m not starin’

I just see through you

And from your heartbeat you is soft in the middle

I’m real on the outside, solid in the inside

Bitch, it’s the Westside

Lil B takes our reminder of his humanity as a challenge.  His raps are transparent and weightless; by virtue of their musical ecology they are based and therefore transcend the status of determinate words of a given speaker.  They are in touch with a spiritual reality, while we (and presumably fake rappers) remain contextually determined and thus “soft in the middle”.   While he works toward transcendence, we find ourselves still measuring our world by material and social goods.  This lends a particularly interesting bent to his reversal of our attempt to assert his materiality; while as a mortal human he is “real on the outside”, his solidity as a rapper comes from his spiritual struggle on the inside. It’s in this spirit that he evokes the “Westside”; both a real place and a culture, the Westside captures a recognition of the tension that is missing from our mundane account of reality.

The tension and dehumanization of being based is both exhilarating and disorienting.  It is in this spirit that he raps: “I’m so sick/I’m feeling so nauseous”.  This leads into by far the most interesting part of the song.  Lil B raps:

Somebody tell the Earth I’m the best now

Somebody tell the ocean I’m the best now

Somebody tell the trees, I’m here now

Somebody tell the world, I’m based now

See me in outerspace, I’m out of reach today

Celebrate for me, I’m Based for life[iv]

This is a culmination of the various moments of the song.  Lil B asks us to evangelize his basedness and his transcendence while simultaneously echoing his earlier request for our participation.  He is “Based for life” not simply because he has dedicated his life to being based, but also because being based is a recognition and a celebration of the ephemeral and oblique spiritual core of life. In the final images of prayer and an illuminated plastic angel, he asks us to celebrate alongside him.


[i] Though the shift in Jay-Z’s music warrants an extensive discussion, for a simple (and admittedly selective) comparison, consider the early, street-centric “Dead Presidents II” and the late, reputation-flaunting “Kingdom Come”.

[ii] Interesting touchstones for this sort of artistic move can be seen in the symbolist tradition.  For a more robust theoretical reference, consider Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

[iii] Another possible avenue of  investigation that will not be pursued in this essay is the relationship of Lil B and freestyling to the Fluxus movement.

[iv] Interesting precedents for this device include Emerson, Whitman, and Nietzsche.  Each make claims that they channel the voices of history.  This addresses their respective notions of self-hood; each makes a claim to a self that is a fractured element of a larger multiplicity.  See Leaves of Grass, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Emerson’s Essays.

Go and Come Back

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There’s no sex in Joan Abelove’s novel Go and Come Back (DK Ink/DK Publishing, 1998)! But Jen Nessel’s review in The New York Times begins, “Young-ADULT fiction just gets racier and racier.” Although sex is talked about plenty, it’s never acted out, not even a kiss. Two of the three main characters, Joanna and Margarita, are anthropologists from New York City, and of course sex is a topic of study during their year in a Peruvian jungle village. For example, the tribespeople believe, intuitively if not scientifically, that it takes more than one man to make a healthy baby. As one might guess, this has consequences, which are discussed but never played out on the page.

The third main character, Alicia, a young Isabo woman narrates. (The names of the tribe and the characters are fictionalized.) Through her we learn about the tribe but we are also treated to a clear-eyed, unsentimental portrayal of the modern U. S. as represented by the anthropologists.

For full disclosure, author Joan Abelove, who spent two years in the Amazon working toward her doctorate, is my friend. We were critique buddies when she wrote Go and Come Back and her other novel, Saying It Out Loud. Each is a marvel, but this is my favorite. Due to illness, Joan is unlikely to write any more full-length works.

More than any book I’ve read in the intervening years I wish I’d had Go and Come Back when I was an adolescent. It would have undercut my assumptions, undermined my expectations, and opened me to the possibilities of life outside my box. And I would have loved it.

The chief difference between the Isabos and the two “old white ladies” centers on property. Joanna and Margarita start out stingy, and their progress to generosity is one of the arcs of the story. What they regard as saving for a future need, the village considers hoarding. When you have, you share with your neighbors, which establishes an obligation so that when they have they share with you. That’s the Isabo way to save. A funny example comes up with dental floss, which the villagers salivate over for its strength and usefulness in fishing and stringing beads. They’re mystified that the anthropologists are keeping such a treasure for pulling old food out of their mouths.

The difference in beliefs comes to a head when Margarita’s watch disappears, and the subsequent crisis begins the anthropologists’ evolution. When, late in the book, a group of missionaries arrives and the missionaries fail to share their dinner, both Joanna and Margarita are furious.

What I love most are the surprises. An old man boasts that he has seven daughters and only one son. Joanna commiserates and is thought a fool. Seven daughters! – whose husbands will come to work for the good of the village, and only one son who will leave and support another village. Narrator Alicia adopts a “nawa” (outsider) girl baby whose father wanted the child drowned. An Isabo might kill a boy baby in special circumstances but never a girl.

Lies aren’t concealed. A young girl announces to Joanna that her blue dress is yellow and insists despite Joanna’s protestations to the contrary. The girl is practicing lying, an important Isabo skill. When she’s older she may need to tell a relative she has no meat although it’s obvious that she does. How much worse it would be to say, “I have food but I won’t give you any.” The hungry relative goes away unsatisfied but not insulted.

The villagers study the anthropologists as much as they are studied.  For example,  Alicia and her mother learn that Joanna’s mother died when she was six.  They’re surprised that she wasn’t raised by her mother’s brother. Instead, they learn, Joanna’s father never remarried and much of her care fell to her mother’s friends. Alicia’s mother says, “‘What a bad old man. So these women had to take care of him too?'”

And Alicia is baffled when Joanna’s explanations fall short. The book is set in the early 1970s, so computers don’t come up, but Joanna can’t even describe how shower water reaches her high-rise apartment. I had to laugh, because neither can I.

There’s no overall plot shape of rising action, crisis, falling action, and so on, although some incidents do take that form, and the section about Margarita’s illness rivals an O. Henry story for its twist at the end. The narration just covers the year of the anthropologists’ visit as it progresses, and yet the book is hard to put down. We come to care about these characters and we’re eager for the next revelation. Yes, it’s episodic, but not random, not, for example, the way Alice in Wonderland has always seemed to me. Alice goes down the rabbit hole; things get curiouser and curiouser but not vital. Here it all matters. This novel’s Alice, Alicia, is becoming a woman, caring for a baby, and instructing the two grown-up babies, the anthropologists, in how to stop being nawa. How it satisfies when Alicia finally comes to regard them as caibo, family!

Here’s a reader review from “Customer” on Amazon:

 As an anthropologist having done fieldwork in another part of Amazonia, I recognized myself in Alicia’s descriptions of the awkward, annoying, and funny situations, with two young women trying to get a grip on the culture they want to study. I think anthropologists should read this book to become more honest about the way they gather their “data”, initially understanding half of what was said, to say nothing of the context in which it was said. On the other hand, Abelove obviously succeeded in her own fieldwork, understanding and conveying another point of view so well. She writes with care and respect for the two different cultures, with modesty, and with humor. She does NOT standardize the witty characters and does NOT create a native paradise, nor a native hell. I wished more anthropologists would use her human approach in addition to writing academic, “objective” books. It could bring us a wider readership, which in turn could help to create more respect for “the other” in an increasingly hostile and racist world.

As “Customer” says, the village is neither utopian nor awful. There are few judgments here. Only niggardliness is reviled, a quality that’s defined differently in our culture but not admired by us, either. Joanna and Margarita are portrayed with sympathy. Alicia and the visitors find common ground in humor and fellow feeling. One doesn’t have to be an anthropologist to appreciate what’s achieved. My books, mostly fantasies, sometimes inquire into the practices, values, and belief systems of fairies, dragons, elves, ogres, and giants, but are always, inescapably, informed by my life, from which I can’t entirely depart. Joan neatly unwraps her own straitjacket and frees herself and her readers.

In contrast, for example, the movie Avatar, takes an anthropological approach to the alien Na’vi but idealizes them. Although they’re ten feet tall and blue, we recognize them instantly as pop embodiments of peace and harmony lacking in complexity, specificity, and originality. The Isabo villagers, however, come alive as fully developed characters. Alicia’s mother, to pick just one, spoils her children, fears spirits, holds unshakable opinions on every subject, and is determined to dislike the visitors.

Many years ago I read several of Carlos Castaneda’s books, which examine or profess to examine the shamanism of the Yaqui Indians of Mexico. My jaw hung open throughout. I was fascinated but my nose remained pressed to a pane of glass that separated me from the strange goings on. The reader is never allowed in, and maybe the difference is the narrator. If don Juan himself, and not gringo Castaneda, had narrated I might have entered. Alicia opens the door wide. Go and Come Back reminds us that anthropology is the study of people, and nothing is so foreign that it can’t be understood.

The book ends with the departure of the old white ladies. A final scene is a meeting in music, fittingly the Beatles’ “The End,” which the anthropologists play on their tape recorder. Some villagers have learned the lyrics in English, which they don’t understand, but the meaning is explained and discussed. This is Alicia and Joanna:

“What does it say?” I asked. If she talked, she wouldn’t cry.

“It says, ‘In the end, at the end of it all, the love you have, the friendship you have, the love you are left with, is just the same, is only the same, as the love you gave, the love, the friendship you had for others.”

“Of course,” I said. Who didn’t know that? “That is why it is so important not to be stingy,” I said. “Now, in the end, you finally understand.”

“Yes,” she said.

“But your music, your bug music was telling you that all along.”

And I’ll finish with this from the very end. Joanna arranges with the helicopter pilot who’s come to fly them away to take Alicia up in the plane for a few minutes so she can see the village from the air.

 The plane turned, and now I could see the big river, with our little river flowing into it. And I could see all the little streams that fed our little river. Then we were coming down to our river again, right on top of it. The plane stopped and we were back in my old world and it looked the same as when we left it, but now I knew that it also looked different when you looked at it from another view.

A viewpoint bending book all around.