This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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As a first time reader of Pauline Kael, I was surprised to discover that she’s boring as fuck.
Okay, to be fair, she’s sometimes slightly less boring than that. Going Steady, her third volume from 1968 and the one which I happened to get my hands on, has its share of zingers. I smiled when she noted acidly of Mel Brooks’ script for the producers: “That’s not screenwriting; it’s gagwriting.” I’m always up for seeing Norman Mailer ridiculed, and her pummeling of his Wild 90 as a lazy egoistic exercise in flab was satisfying on that account. And there are several entertaining anecdotes sprinkled throughout. Such as this one:
Once, in Berkeley, after a lecture by LeRoi Jones, as the audience got up to leave, I asked an elderly white couple next to me how they could applaud when Jones said that all whites should be killed. And the little gray-haired woman replied, “But that was just a metaphor. He’s a wonderful speaker.
The fact that Minaj channels Helen Reddy with a straight face on a hip-hop album seems like a good indication that she’s lost her way in spectacular fashion. It’s easy to see this as a desperate and misguided effort to reach a mainstream audience—and it clearly is that. But at the same time, the album’s rudderlessness seems like part and parcel of Minaj’s persona. With a flow that hops from Barbie cuteness to Rasta declamation to a faux British accent to sped-up Tourette’s, Minaj has always been about spastic incoherence, and one of her most acclaimed performances is deliberately and gloriously bipolar. In her verse on Kanye West’s “Monster,” she switches back and forth between a flirtatious little-girl coo and a fierce, ranting growl, using the alternation to create an escalating momentum so massive it makes the other rappers on the track—Jay-Z and Rick Ross—sound positively precious.
Other Links
I mentioned the both of these in comments, but:
Melinda Beasi and Michelle Smith have a lovely discussion of Paradise Kiss here.
This originally appeared over at Splice Today.
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So what’s the best superhero movie of all time? Perhaps you love Dark Knight because Heath Ledger is dead now and Morgan Freeman taught us about the dangers of surveillance technology. Or you may love Spider-Man because it drips with pathos and daddy issues. Or maybe you like Robert Downey, Jr.’s charm in Iron Man, or, if you’re old school, Christopher Reeve’s charm in Superman. Or maybe you’re just cranky enough that when someone asks you “What’s the best superhero movie ever?” you answer with a waggish sneer, “There are no best superhero movies ever!”
It’s that time of year when Americans give thanks that the smallpox virus and small arms fire cleared a continent for Europeans and their livestock. In that healthy spirit of aggressive annexation, I am imposing my provincial holiday on our international contributors and closing shop for a few days. Happy turkey eating, if turkey is what you’re eating, and we’ll be back as usual on Sunday.
Of course, you don’t really need to make a choice for one or the other. The title of the piece may indicate that there are a bunch of reptiles here, but much of the enjoyment of the image — and of Escher’s work in general — is the sense of moving pieces caught in a pleasurably regimented dance. Even if it’s not technically one reptile moving, the individuals are nonetheless interchangeable. You know that the reptile climbing the triangle is going to get to the top of the D & D die and that it’s going to blow smoke out of its nose when it gets there just as its predecessor did. The reptile blowing smoke will climb onto the little cup; the reptile on the cup will crawl back into the abstract pattern. Whether the image is showing a sequence as a comic would or merely implying it, the point is still that time and identity are flattened out across space.
Cool It has more ambitions than merely setting the record straight on global warming, though. One of the talking heads that Cool It drops on the unsuspecting viewer notes with the slightly condescending chuckle of the large-brained that Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a “great piece of propaganda.” No doubt it was. So is this. Cool It uses, in fact, many of the same hagiographic tactics as its more famous predecessor. We see Bjorn biking healthily through Denmark, chatting earnestly with impoverished children in third world nations, and puncturing bloviating politicians with his rapier wit. We get porn-movie close-ups of his book as voiceovers speak sternly of its controversial and brave counter-intuitiveness. The movie even trots out Lomborg’s Alzheimer-afflicted mother for a few scenes—because nothing adds depth to a wonk’s character like a little family tragedy.
This essay first appeared in slightly edited form at Splice Today.
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Art is by most objective standards a useless endeavor. You can’t repair our nation’s crumbling infrastructure with a sonnet; you can’t beat back a terrorist-affiliated insurgency with a performance piece, even if it involves some combination of meat, elephant dung, and/or Lady Gaga. Go ahead and sing “We Are the World” till even starving Ethiopian children with giant bellies cover their ears and pray for death and/or earplugs, but the fact remains that the last best hope of man isn’t Bono finding what he’s looking for or Angelina Jolie adopting it but the loose change in Bill Gates’ underwear drawer. Relevant artists are the white elephants of our times — uselessly bloated, irritatingly stentorian, semi-sentient tschotskes. The only real difference between the two is that you can imagine situations in which someone might actually want to look at a white elephant.
