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Category Archives: Blog
Yes Crap
I have an essay up at Culture 11 about Yes Man, the new Jim Carey movie. Here’s a quote:
Indeed, the whole Yes Man concept is charged with a kind of lobotomized libidinousness. Saying “yes” to everything allows Carl to absolve himself of all personal responsibility. By replacing his conscience with an arbitrary shibboleth, Carl escapes from Adam’s curse. He no longer knows good from evil; he now literally knows only what he says. Liberated from moral choice, he is invested with an irresistible prelapsarian glamour. He charms his immediate supervisor, Norm (Rhys Darby) by attending his Harry Potter costume parties; he charms his best friend’s fiancée by agreeing to host her bridal shower; he charms a jumper back from the ledge by leading the onlookers in a rousing singalong. Moroever, Carl’s newfound charisma has a definite erotic edge. Women in bars and in bridal stores swoon and giggle when he flirts, his toothless septuagenarian landlady neighbor comes onto him (and more); Alison falls seamlessly in love with him. Even his ex-wife wants to get back in his bed.
Ciara – The Evolution
I’ll probably be posting only lightly for the next couple of weeks or so, and I assume that’s the case for Tom, Miriam, and Bill as well. I will try to put up some older reviews though, so things won’t entirely grind to a halt. So, without further ado…
****************
This review ran in Bitch a while back.
The Evolution
Ciara
{LaFace Records}
Ciara’s first album, *Goodies*, had some great hooks but was marred by an odd impersonality. On “*The Evolution*, her sophomore effort, she hasn’t so much transcended that failing as embraced it — she’s evolved (as it were) into a robot. On “Like a Boy” (in which the singer imagines what it would be like to be as emotionally inaccessible as her man), the heavily processed vocals and machined beats strip her of gender altogether; on “I’m Just Me,” she declares that she’s “ghetto” over alienated backing tracks that suggest she actually fell to earth from Saturn.
These incongruities, and the attendant guffaws, probably aren’t quite what Ciara intended. Still, she’s clearly enjoying the sci-fi goofiness — why else would she appear on her album decked out in giant silvery pants like some sort of intergalactic aerobics instructor? And the line-up of A-list R&B producers Ciara’s brought along seem equally thrilled at the opportunity to drop some Afro-futurist insanity. On “I Proceed,” the Neptunes lay down rhythms stiff enough to make Devo involunarily herky-jerk ; will.i.am provides glorious Kraftwerk-like blips and bloops for “Get In, Fit In”; and on “Can’t Leave ‘Em Alone” Rodney Jerkins does the best music box impersonation this side of Aphex Twin. These echoes of space-ages past are expertly blended with current top-40 technology; walls of harmony, intricate songwriting, guest raps, and (as indicated above) lyrics right out of your high-school journal. The combination is ridiculous, exhilarating, sublime, and genuinely startling. I’m glad Ciara has finally found herself — and delighted that the self she’s found is, counterintuitively, a cybernetic organism.
Listen To While Reading: *Do Androids Dream of Electric Boogaloo?*
Danger! Prolonged Exposure Will: Cause you to merge with your ipod.
Hunter on Form
Check this out. Having raised questions about Donald Phelps’s use of the term “form,” TCJ message-board pillar Mike Hunter has whipped together a Photoshop image to get his point across. Very snazzy, and fast work.
Here it is, a pictorial representation of “form” as the word features in the Phelps essay. With luck we’ll get the left two-thirds; you can see the whole thing at TCJ (scroll down). UPDATE: Yikes, more like one third. Still quite an effect, though.
Majel Barrett Dies
Since I’m on a Star Trek kick.
I think Barrett was pretty good. I’ve been watching a bunch of the old episodes and thought she was fine in “Amok Time” (Nurse Chapel’s big episode). Also in the first pilot, “The Cage,” as Number One, a very different role. Never saw her in NextGen, but I gather her part there was broad comedy, again different.
In Star Trek Memories William Shatner says something catty about her along the lines of “Majel was basically a proficient actress.” (Quote to be corrected when I have the book with me.)
The AP reports:
NEW YORK (AP) — Majel Barrett Roddenberry, the widow of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, has died. She was 76. Roddenberry, an actress who appeared in numerous “Star Trek” TV shows and movies, died Thursday of leukemia at her home in Bel-Air, Calif., her representative said.
At Roddenberry’s side were family friends and her only son, Eugene Roddenberry Jr. Gene Roddenberry died in 1991.
Her romance with Roddenberry earned her the title “The First Lady of Star Trek.” A fixture in the “Star Trek” franchise, her roles included Nurse Christine Chapel in the original “Star Trek,” Lwaxana Troi in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and the voice of the USS Enterprise computer in almost every spin-off of the 1966 cult series. She recently reprised the voice role in the upcoming “Star Trek” film directed by J.J. Abrams.
Now Mike Hunter Weighs In
Thanks, Mike! What is Donald Phelps saying about Seuss/Sendak? To give me an idea, Mike lines up relevant quotes out of the Phelps piece (scroll down). The picture grows more and more clear. Yet I have a long way to go.
Mike takes issue with Bill Randall over, I think, whether Phelps is laying into Seuss or merely expressing murmured regrets. Apparently, Phelps’s argument is “actually more complex, nuanced, and laden with caveats” than one might expect from Bill’s summary, and the reason lies in the Phelps article’s ambiguous use of the word “form.” Or so I surmise from Mike’s comments. Read the whole thing!
Mike lays into Noah for the thoughts expressed in Noah’s post about the essay. Apparently they’re outrageous, I don’t know.
Bill and Jon Come Through
So I have to know about this guy before I understand Phelps’s lead. Great. But, yeah, thanks for that, Bill.
No, I’m just being a jerk. Discovery is painful: there’s a top-level American literary thinker, he came up with a term people like to use, and I never heard of the guy or the term. What do I do with my time?
You’ll see that Bill also went to the trouble of digging up a relevant Phelps quote (on form, see here for another view), and that Noah is roused to give the quote a smack. Well, ok. To me the quote sounds like a Monty Python routine, but whatever.
Bill, since you’re being gracious, I will impose upon you with another question. You define “imagination’s geography” as:
the bounds of what’s imaginable, with a sense that certain imaginings, depending on where in the mind they’re from, come with different rules of use.
Can you give examples for the above — that is of an imagining, the part of the mind it’s from, the rules of use that apply to the imagining, and the consequences that arise when the rules are ignored and when they’re followed?
That sounds kind of long, I guess. But you know, whatever you want to do.
Now the original post:
Thanks. I posted here about my need for a plain-English translation of Donald Phelps’s Seuss/Sendaka article. Bill Randall and Jon Hastings posted in Comments, and now I have two plain-english summaries to be getting on with. They posted damn solidly too. You can check out the full versions here.
Noah comments that Phelps’s whole argument is a specious “high art/low art distinction.” But I’m not nearly at that level; right now my project is finding my feet.
Here’s a big deal: because of the Comments by Bill, Jon, and others, I now know that Donald Phelps does not consider Dr. Seuss quaint. Reading the essay had not made this point clear to me, which will show you how much I took away from it. The thing is, offhand, “quaint” is one of the words I’d apply to Seuss.
Bill Randall fluidly sums up the Phelps piece as he sees it:
“Form entails a sense of the imagination’s geography and its component laws.” Seuss breaks those laws; Sendak doesn’t.??For Phelps, form is art; specifically, it’s the form embodied in any individual work of art. He calls it “judicious awareness of locality.”…The Marx Brothers’ late works violated the vaudeville form that defined them; Seuss likewise failed for abandoning the integrity of his stories in favor of commodity. Phelps faults him for ditching the terms of the story for an awareness of the audience as consumers.…The quaint/cozy opening sets up the tone of reminisce– this one’s more prosaic than usual– and contrasts modern consumer tastes with gentler, older tastes. (Seuss is more revered by modern taste than Sendak …)
Note that I dropped some big parts of Bill’s post. What I hope is that the quotes here make up a rough version of Phelps’s argument, something that can take me from one end of the piece to the other. Even if it’s wrong, it may get me through.
Bill, another question before I go back to the essay. What is “the imagination’s geography”? It appears to be core to the subject of Phelps’s piece, and I don’t know what it is.
Jon Hastings addresses the aggressive strangeness question. His thinking appears to be similar to Layla’s and he expresses it well:
… edginess” means that the creator is working at or beyond the boundaries of conventions: it’s a challenge to the audience’s expectations. Challenge is aggressive.
Again, note that I’m dropping bits you may want to read. On competitive strangeness, Jon says this:
Edginess is competetive in that, in any dynamic, living genre, the boundaries of the conventions are always moving.
Thanks, Jon. Here’s a follow-up: What’s the competition between? What’s an edgy cartoon competing with?