Yeah, the Police don't age well. But they're an important band for the budding intellectual adolescent. And at least people know to give them up once they graduate, unlike (say) Led Zeppelin.

I never understood all the pretension hating. It's fun and harmless.

When this levee breaks, B, I'll have no place to stay. At least Led Zeppelin had the good sense to rock the fuck out instead of, well, you know.

I don't really pay attention to lyrics, this kind of stuff doesn't annoy me much.

Myself, I'm killing an Arab.

LB, thanks for spoiling my general sense that you're awesome. If it were clever, I think it'd be fun. But it's all "I read a book! I did! Tantric sex!"

You Know, I Used To Be Kind Of Cool Once.

5: sweet!

The correct way to insert fiction into song is demonstrated by "The thing that should not be."

If we had a baiting filter like we have a spam filter, B wouldn't be able to comment here anymore.

However, to treat this topic with the seriousness it deserves, I have to say that pretentious bands are a necessary part of growing up for alienated youth, but the bands themselves are embarrassing when viewed sub specie adultis.

I didn't realize Andy Summers was so old.

Ogged, you know I hate because I loved. It's sort of like that Animotion song, where my fantasy has turned to madness, and all my goodness, has turned to badness. You know?

Seven months older than Mick Jagger!

Led Zeppelin had the good sense to rock the fuck out

With hobbits, yeah. Kewl.

No one knows who they were, or what they were doing.

Damn baiting filter.

I didn't know about the Zeppelin/Hobbit connection until I read about it here a few months ago.

Someone has to be the whipping boy, Ogged, and you got tired of it being you. Quit complaining.

Ogged, how could you not? Robert Plant is responsible for about seven of the most embarassing moments in rock.

That was a VH-1 special, right?

I didn't really pay attention to what they were saying. I don't want to know, either.

The Lord of the Rings references are the coolest thing about Led Zeppelin.

...but they were in grave danger of being trod upon by a dwarf.

I loved the Police as a kid but there were just a few too many Sting-playing-Roxanne-with-a-lutist moments for me to even have any nostalgia for it left.

The only Police album I have any affection left for is the one Sting wouldn't put his name on, playing for that musical genius, Klark Kent.

Come to think of it, I probably didn't get it because I haven't read any of the Tolkein.

Dude, read the Tolkein. It's good stuff.

We're reading it to PK now. You had a deprived childhood.

Let's see if the baiting filter gets this: Missing both Tolkein AND Rand is the best thing that could happen to any adolescence.

Farber doesn't seem to be around right now, so I'll do it:

TOLKIEN. I-E, not E-I.

It is annoying that he mispronounced Nabokov.

Oh yeah, try to outpretentious me, will you?

You misspelled "depraved".

Tolkien isn't for adolescents; he's for precocious prepubescents.

Did I say we're reading it to PK? For the second time?

You had a deprived childhood.

I thought it was lowbrow.

27: Disagree -- everyone should read Rand, but everyone should get over it eventually.

Adolescence? I'd already read the Lord of the Rings about ten times or so by the time I was eight.

30: Thanks, Officer Krupke.

i-e. Jesus. Who knew I had a pet peeve?

31: I can get behind that. I don't know how old PK is, but prepubescent is the right age for Tolkien. There is no right age for Rand, however.

33: I've never read Rand, and I am the better for it.
32: And yet its derivative, Led Zeppelin, you thought was just fine.

re: 28

Recently, in my day job, I had occasion to handle some of the original Tolkien artwork.* Which is cool.

Then I embarrassed myself by misspelling his name o some stuff I was sending to the Tolkien Society people.

It may be many things, ogged, but lowbrow is not one of them. Don't be fooled by the fans or the movies. Speaking of which, Jane Austen is also really good.

28: Forgive my lysdexia.

I read LOTR a couple of times when I was a kid, and then again when I was a teenager. Much different experiences. I think it was better when I was younger, but it still holds up well.

re: 40

Oh yeah, and Jane Austen's original hand-written manuscripts too ...

Never made it through any Austen either. But this is more the fiction hangup than anything about Austen, the parts of which I read (beginning of P&P, I think) were quite good.

She'll be relieved to hear.

I was thinking.

37, 38: That dismissive, ironic cynicism, so prevalent in today's world, is exactly why adolescents should get a big dose of something which promotes Righteous Passion in Doing What You're Good At and ignoring the morons who will try and hold you back. Rand fits the bill. I'm not saying Rand isn't a nutcase, just that there's something useful in her message.

The LotR movies are great, JM, what's your beef?

43: Remember what I said about loyalty? Forget it.

39.-- Okay, I'll admit to being envious. I used to handle original documents for a job, and I'd get cranky with myself for how fannishly excitable I could get over, say, Napoleon's letters. Tolkien's drawings and maps are really pretty awesome, though I've only seen them in reproductions.

47.--They're ok, better than I'd expected them to be. They screwed up some of my favorite scenes, though, and I hate the music. But unless you want me to elaborate, I'll just say that I really was impressed that Fellowship of the Ring was as good as it was, and the other two movies were pretty good too.

Do you work in the Bodle/ian, ttaM?

re: 48

My doctorate funding day job is at the photographic studio in [the very old and prestigious library in Oxford], so I get to see, well, pretty much everything. Just this week, they had in the original of Wind in the Willows which is quite lovely.

Maybe 50 should be redacted?

I felt kind of bad about the movies -- I was very attached to the books as a kid, and was looking forward to the movies. I saw the first one, and it was okay, but not good enough to bother with seeing the other two. It seems as though I should have been able to work up either some interest in the movies or some outrage about what a sham they were, but I really couldn't. The first one at least was very competent.

52: If I should, say the word.

The job I was talking about was in the private historical document collecting world, which is very strange and not a little crooked, imho.

re: 52

It's not like what I do is secret. My name probably appears on the staff website. I just didn't want to discuss the place specifically by name to avoid accidental googling by colleagues.

When the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay

Plus, the Internet archive has mp3 search:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?page=1&query=(subject%3A%22Blues%22)%20AND%20format%3Amp3

For a D&D geek, I had remarkably little attachment to the books, so the movies worked just fine for me. The LOTR books and early-80s X-Men comics have, for me, reached the status of folk tale, in which the precise details of canon no longer matter, and telling an engaging story about the underlying archetypes is the important thing.

Dismissive, ironic cynicism stacks up surprisingly well against Rand.

Only asking because I used to work there. Redact that!

But I would assume the D&D geeks to have precisely that sort of reaction, Hamilton. The gamers have big books of monsters, geographic charts, quantifiable battle scores. Tolkien-nerds from the literature department compare his famous discussion of Grendal's mother to the battle in Shelob's lair, and admire what is not explicitly shown.

The low point of this book is when the author namedrops American Idol Judge Randy Jackson as to Randy's high opinion of sting as a bass player.

I'm beginning to suspect I was never as nerdy as the mainstream told me I was.

Incidentally, ignoring Sting, the music of John Dowland rocks.

46: there's PLENTY out there that'll do that trick, without having to wade through 1,000 pages of pernicious ideology and downright bizarre gender relations, all rendered in strained, colorless prose, and likely to promote in adolescents those qualities that we already don't like about them.

dammit, 65 = me

God, I couldn't stand the Police when my son was 14. There was something on the top 40 with Jungian imagery of a dragon emerging from the deep and it just drove me nuts.

I couldn't stand Madonna, either.

53: this was something like my experience. I was pleasantly surprised at how bad the first one wasn't, and then again for the second one. But just like with the books, I never got around to the third one because at last, I just didn't actually care how it ended.

Later on my son got into Elvis Costello, thank God (should he exist). He thinks Nick Lowe is the greatest pop bass player of all.

and I hate the music.

Really? I thought Shore did a good job.

65: Name three.

Regarding the original post I had exactly the same frustration when I read The Sheltering Sky.

Of course The Sheltering Sky is also not a work that ages well.

33: No-one "should" read Rand. Having read Rand, and read some of the writing inspired by Rand, I feel I can state that with some degree of confidence. It's possible to read Rand and not be permanently damaged, but that's something different.

70.--There's only so much faux-Celtic flute music I can stand.

71. At what I suppose would have been my prime Rand-reading age, I instead read The Prince. (Of course, six months later, I was convinced that the book had led me into sins of pride, but Rand wouldn't have been any better in that regard.)

What do you guys think of the French New Wave? The following films have rocked my world: "Cleo from 5 to 7" (and "Vagabond", which probably won't qualify as New Wave but man was it a fantastic film), "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg". "400 Blows" and "Jules and Jim", did not seize me as strongly. Any hints what I should watch next? I'm thinking that other Demy films are probably at the top of the list. Godard I remember having trouble with but it was a long time ago, I should probably check that shit out again -- what of his is good? What else?

76: It's dangerous to suggest without reading all the comments, but you should totally watch "Weekend". It's really...um...long. No, it's great and crazy and insoucient and left-wing...like the left, but with, you know, style. Panache as well. And while we're talking about really long left-wing movies, you should watch the brutal, depressing movie "Fox and His Friends". By the direction whose name I love to say, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. And "Man of Marble", the Best. Movie. Ever.

77 s/b director. If there's actually a Fassbinder direction, I will go that way in fascination and horror.

Can I just say, apropos of nothing, that there are so many pointlessly evil people in the world that it makes me want to vomit.

Hamilton, fully 75% of YA literature promotes Righteous Passion in Doing What You're Good At. They get pounded over the head with that shit.

Cool, thanks. I added those to my Q. Hey did you see either "Cleo from 5 to 7" and/or "Vagabond" and want to talk about what fantastic movies they are? I've got a bee in my bonnet about Varda since November.

76: Random, but I'll bite: I love the relatively little I've seen, and most of it's been Godard. Band of Outsiders is almost my favorite, but Contempt has special status: I think I stared at the screen, slack-jawed, for a while after the DVD ended, and I dreamed about it later that night. Beautiful, fascinating, and horrifying. I realize that's a little under-ironic for the present forum, but I can't help it.

81 -> 77.

82: "Band of Outsiders" looks fun and has been added. I think "Contempt" would not be my cup of tea, not right now anyway.

71: Dammit, I knew that was coming. Well, I can't. Because I don't pay attention enough to narratives-for-adolescents to be able to come up with a good example. But for pete's sake, this is a theme that mainstream film/tv/lit beats us over the head with: be true to yourself, don't let the man get you down, you'll make it through the rain, individualism is the bomb, etc, etc. Do I really have to name three to make the point?

Oh, right, what B said.

81: I saw Cleo a long time ago in miserable personal circumstances, but I liked it a lot. I don't have any smart thoughts on it, though...it is so much more personal than the other new wave stuff I've seen, and the medical fear really struck a chord. I guess the ordinariness of what happens to her speaks to me a lot--it's ordinary, but the film makes it important. It's not trivial or dead because merely because it's ordinary.

Which perversely makes me think of that Bjork/Von Trier musical which I hated with fierce passion--it makes me so ANGRY how disingenous it is--and yet something about the depictions of work recalls Varda.

I read a really neat short piece of criticism about Vagabond by, weirdly, the guy who wrote that funny book A Year At the Movies, where he notes that Varda doesn't call herself an auteur but calls herself something like a writer-with-film. (I forget the French for it and I'm too lazy to pick up the book. It's actually a book that got partially eaten by a mouse at my old miserable dirty-hippie apartment, too, now that I think about it.)

Just to cheer for my dirty-hippie cohort, too, the bookstore where I volunteer had a really good film series where we showed The Gleaners. We also showed Leningrad Cowboys Go America, actually.

I think "Contempt" would not be my cup of tea, not right now anyway.

I'm not sure why you say so, but be sure to watch it before you die.

Yeah I need to rewatch "Gleaners" now that I have seen "Vagabond" -- I think I would get a lot more out of it.

So I guess what I'm trying to say by babbling a lot is this: What about Cleo was so compelling? And I'm curious too about why Contempt doesn't appeal.

(I was once in an arty movie theater where the whole arty audience including me laughed itself into hysterics at a pretentious vintage trailer for Contempt, but the movie itself is amazing.)

Here, I'll do it for you.

To Kill a Mockingbird.
The Chronicles of Prydian (a five-book series)
Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry
The Outsiders
freaking Harry Potter

that's five.

"two or three things I know about her" and "alphaville" are my favorite goddard fims.

So why, people? Come on, spill. What is it about the New Wave? Is it just cool, or French, or what?

French New Wave? Gah.

Back in Real America, I suspect Ghost Rider is going to be fucking awful. In a month The 300 will be out, and I'm thinking there's going to be some cheesy dialogue that I will be distracted from by the awesomeness of the fighting.

94: In a month The 300 will be out, and I'm thinking there's going to be some cheesy dialogue that I will be distracted from by the awesomeness of the fighting.

You know, I thought the same thing about Alexander.

Gswift, are you trying to turn yourself into a caricature?

On that note, I'm kind of unsophisticated in what I like about movies, I think. I tend to like movies with--sort of--a hero whose experiences contain the meaning of the film. Which isn't Weekend at all, though.

My favorite movies are Man of Marble and Pom Poko (which appeared as "Pomo Poko" on our film series poster). In each, the content of the story is what you're supposed to think about, and the way the film is made is about reinforcing the "meaning" of the story.

I tend to enjoy films less when they're less narrative or when they're about characters who don't speak to my essentially middle class worldview (if I had a sort of self-critical-irony-font-tag, I'd use it there). Like for example, Down By Law was fun to watch, but it wasn't as thought-provoking for me as good ol' Pomo Poko.

80: It's been a while, but my sense is that YA literature is great at saying "don't be afraid to Be", which is important, but less good at saying "don't be afraid to Do".

What about Cleo was so compelling

Well to start with, just that everything about it was so spectacularly good -- the characters, the dialogue, the sets, the shots, the music. It seemed like a phenomenally well-put-together movie. And then with that as a medium, allowing the movie to insinuate itself into my brain, the story just clicked for me. Do you remember the opening shot, at the end of the credits where the fortune-teller says to her husband that Cleo is doomed? That grabbed my attention and held it for the rest of movie. The movie was light, and fun, but the atmosphere of impending death was palpable. (And fun: Cleo singing "Sans Toi" with her composer? Godard and Karena prototyping Pee-Wee's Big Adventure? Fun.)

why Contempt doesn't appeal

I have this memory from earlier times of finding Godard oppressively arty and I think Contempt would reawaken this feeling. Could be wrong of course, and I'm sure I'll watch it sometime; but I'd like to get my New Wave vocabulary built up a little first.

Cushla Mochree!

Gswift, are you trying to turn yourself into a caricature?

One of my new year's resolutions was to dedicate myself to 110 percent manliness in my commenting. Of course, this will make some of you patchouli sniffers uncomfortable.

You know, I thought the same thing about Alexander.

My god that was a painful movie.

101: Patchouli smells icky. I prefer yling-ylang.

(99 should include "the acting" among the list of "Cleo"'s attributes which were top-notch.)

98: A fair distinction. Give me a few minutes to think about this one.

From the random recommendations file: everyone should see Swimming to Cambodia. I was just thinking about this weekend and marveling that, for being one of my favorite films it had been a while since I had seen thought about it. Upon reflection it is still one of my favorite films.

It is neither French nor New Wave, but it is very proto-bloggy.

98: You also don't hear "Don't be afraid to Smoke" nearly often enough.

98 -- in which category would you place The Once and Future King?

Interesting post. I was about thirty when The Police were at their peak. The pretension was always obvious to me, but I'm not bothered by it, if the music appeals. The Moody Blues, or for that matter The Doors, seemed to have been pretentious in the same way. All three are listenable, if not worth thinking, to this day.

99: That was...oh, my goodness, I'm gonna watch me some arty New Wave this weekend...Now I can say tidily that the reason to like a lot of the early New Wave stuff is the sense of joy and release and possibility, the way there's mockery without cruelty. (And Weekend has this quality too.) If you want to talk about "another world is possible", that's what is being filmed. Of course it's flawed, and of course 1968 will smash everything, but even so...

I'm really picky about movies (and about everything, really)...I mean, I'll watch a variety of things, but I won't like them. To walk out of a movie and feel possibility and excitement and glamour, and to have all those things from a kind, intelligent, left-wing perspective--rarer than hen's teeth, you know?

98: Ummm, J.R.R. Tolkien.

"However, to treat this topic with the seriousness it deserves, I have to say that pretentious bands are a necessary part of growing up for alienated youth, but the bands themselves are embarrassing when viewed sub specie adultis."

embarrassment is a very juvenile emotion, though.

"Adolescence? I'd already read the Lord of the Rings about ten times or so by the time I was eight."

+1

98: But how much literature really says "Don't be afraid to do"?

I think that's a really useful statement about YA literature, though.

"Don't be afraid to do" seems like the province more of essays or philosophy or memoir to me.

Although as a flinchy nerdy girl I think a little more "Don't be afraid to do" would have been good for me. I certainly didn't think of it in terms of "Don't be afraid to be"...being I was stuck with and had come to terms with.

For that matter, C.S. Lewis. A substantial amount of Le Guin would qualify, too.

rarer than hen's teeth, you know?

I do. I just watched "Umbrellas" last night, it knocked me for a loop it did. And the DVD includes a portion of Varda's Demy biopic, very nice it is.

essays or philosophy or memoir

Or of course, Self-Help.

115: With Le Guin, I think it comes back to being, though...at least if you're thinking of the Earthsea books. People do as a result of coming to terms with being...mere doing is useless, and it's secondary.

I guess I'd like to hear what a "don't be afraid to do" story would look like, other than Ayn Rand.

I'm going to fall back on saying that most biographies of famous people emphasize not the being, but the doing.

Maybe I could make my fortune by writing left-wing self-help books...

chronicles of prydain and alphaville are so warm and fuzzy.

actually alphaville at least isn't W&F but i feel that way towrads it.

Honestly, I'm not a very sophisticated movie-viewer either; didn't really like watching movies much at all until the oppressive misery of grad school sent me looking for new painkillers. So the thing I liked about the French New Wave movies I mentioned was really their novelty, of the narrative, of the look, and of course also of the setting - I wasn't in France in the 50's and 60's, and it looks like it was a fun time & place to be alive. The thing I like about Godard is the self-reference that instead of feeling pomo and clever, comes off as playful, at least to my eyes. People now sniff about French New Wave like it's arty-in-the-bad-way, but it looks to me like it was the best scenario for any kind of art - a few pretty-smart guys who got to play with their medium at a point when they weren't feeling a lot of pressure.

118: With Le Guin, I think it comes back to being, though...

In some cases. But The Dispossessed and >Left Hand of Darkness are both pretty much about Doing, or what kinds of action Get Things Done.

Le Guin lacks the ur-Nietzschean bravado of Rand, of course, but that's a good thing IMO. I don't think "don't be afraid to Do at the expense of caricatured cardboard second-handers" is all that useful a message.

"Don't be afraid to do": Mein Kampf in Riefensthal's film version.

Jim Morrison's pretentiousness ("Horse Latitudes") was redeemed by his gross buttheadedness. No butthead, no rock.

sigh once again, what frowner says (110)

"Don't be afraid to do" young adult would have to include Pullman's His Dark Materials and (the freaking awesome) Sally Lockheart trilogies.

123: Sniff? At French New Wave? Arty-in-a-bad-way? It's just as well that I'm in flyover country where we're still easily impressed, because that would break my heart.

The best thing is when somebody who's smart (well, really, a bunch of people who are smart...auteur theory/discredited/etc) makes a movie or some music (or when one person writes a book...auteur theory/still strong/despite death of author) and they're able to be smart without slipping over into hyper-competitiveness or ressentiment. That's delight, that's ease, that's grace...I mean, Utopia Now!

Jim Morrison's pretentiousness ("Horse Latitudes") was redeemed by his gross buttheadedness.

John Emerson, sometimes you are a genius.

Also, 300 looks like it's going to be just about the most violently offensive movie to come out since The Passion of the Christ. It won't even be redeemed by its special effects, as, from the trailer clips, it appears that they look like bad stop-animation derived from 1970s D&D monster books.

What are you, dense? Are you retarded are something? We're the goddamned Spartans!

127: Hey, that's exactly right. Those are "don't be afraid to do", and that's part of why they're so different from a lot of YA fiction. Being isn't Lyra's or Will's problem at all, or Sally's. I couldn't believe it when [redacted sad event at the end of the second book] happened!

I have a funny feeling that once you get into "Don't be afraid to do" you have to either be all boy's book/"don't be afraid to hit the home run", or you have to get into ethics/politics in a way that a lot of YA stuff avoids. "Don't be afraid to be" can be rather noncontroversial, even if it's fairly sophisticated as in the Earthsea books.

If you like Phillip Pullman (and as an adult I read much more YA stuff than I did as an actual YA) I would genuinely recommend the White Tyger series by Paul Park. Those are--now that I think about it--a really, really interesting comment on the usual YA concern with being. Plus they are so goddam gripping that I have actually bought the latest one and held off reading it because I know I will Get Nothing Done once I start. Of course, the cover illustrations are terribly out of true, which bugs me every time I see them.

Everyone should listen to "Horse Latitudes" once in their life.

132: As opposed, of course, to Getting Nothing Done while posting.

130: indeed. The Frank Miller graphic novel it's based on is atrocious. He's so frustratingly hit-or-miss. I remember finding out that he was doing a book on Thermopylae and thinking "holy shit, this could be the greatest thing ever." Sad that it's not.

What's really good, though, is Gates of Fire. A much better look at the battle.

the White Tyger series by Paul Park

Hey, thanks! I also read much more YA books now than I did as a YA, but I think part of that has to do with the much, much better stuff that's being produced today. I'm always looking for good titles.

By the way Frowner, did you watch "Viridiana"? Speaking of marvelous, fun, exciting, left-wing movies. If you get the DVD, there is an interview with the actors where they talk about protecting the print from Franco.

Everyone should listen to "Horse Latitudes" once in their life.

Indeed.

It won't even be redeemed by its special effects, as, from the trailer clips, it appears that they look like bad stop-animation derived from 1970s D&D monster books.

Ack, stop. I'm trying to keep hope alive here. The possibility it's going to suck is all too real.

Dude, white power militia110%man swift, that movie looks like it's going to be horrible.

And will nobody tell Khashâyârshâ's side of the story?

People should read Nietzsche instead of Rand. Appeals to the same sort of misguided teenage angst ("I clean my room only in obediance to the slave morality! You will see! I am the Overman!"), but with better writing, and we'll only make fun of you about half as much, and we can cure you of it by making you read Crime and Punishment!.

Nietzsche was a big Dostoevsky fan, you know.

According to Wikipedia, that's the "old persian" equivalent of Xerxes, answering my underlying question, "Why, after all this time, do we still refer to Xerxes with the name given by his Greek enemies?"

that movie looks like it's going to be horrible.

I know. Maybe there will be redemption in awesome stunts and fight choregraphy, but the watching the trailers gave my optimism a beating.

Oh, and while I'm in yawping mode:

The U.S. military is not the Spartan 300. We are not the Spartans in such tales, as we are not the underdogs. Anyone who reviews the movie as if it told about how the U.S. is facing a struggle for its existence will be shot. With arrows that blot out the sun. You can die in the shade.

P.S. The Lord of the Rings wasn't about September 11, either.

"Why, after all this time, do we still refer to Xerxes with the name given by his Greek enemies?"

The Greeks get to name him because they put the smack down.

143: Doesn't mean it isn't a cure.

Doesn't mean it isn't a cure.

True.

Don't encourage the Lur, JM.

OT: "Sweet Land" the new Keilloresque or Wobegonian movie about a mixed marriage between a Norwegian-American and a German immigrant, was made by an Egyptian named Ali Selim. The Egyptians have a fascination with the exotic, I guess.

That movie is going to totally tank. I'm obsessed with the ancient Greeks and I have no interest in seeing it, so I have trouble seeing how anyone other than Victor David Hansen and the director's mom are going to pony up the ten bucks to see it.

"Ghost Rider" looks pretty awesome.

"Ghost Rider" looks pretty awesome.

Unfortunately, my instincts tell me Ghost Rider is going to suck as well. I hope I'm wrong on both counts.

I don't know from Ghost Rider, but his schtick in the trailers looks pretty lame. I'm a fiery skeleton on motorcycle!! It's like they ran out of actual superpowers.

We've discussed The 300 here before. Biggest problem: Spartans not laconic.

Also, the introduction to "Horse Latitudes" makes me wonder why we don't just listen to Arthur Brown's "Fire".

152: Where "awesome" means "awesomely terrible," right?

157 -- Yeah, or to tell the truth it did not really mean much of anything, jus watching a commercial for the movie and remembered I was in the middle of a thread about movies, thought I would post something about it and see what came of it. And success! Cala's 154 made me laugh hard.

In other news, San Francisco Values Vs. San Francisco Values.

The impending suckiness of The 300 pisses me off in the same way the early Batman movies did. Such potential! How could it get fucked up? Thank god Chris Nolan brought redemption to the Batman franchise.

Since things seem to be going pretty utterly off the original topic already (and it's a brutal shame to hear that 300 is looking sucky):

Did anyone see The Colbert Report tonight where the Salon columnist Debra Dickerson argued in earnest that Barack Obama is not black? My mind is still reeling somewhat and I'd like to see if anyone can give actual good reasons why this would be the case.

Dickerson apparently wrote a book called "The End of Blackness" about, well, "the idea that "blackness", as it's come to be understood, is a concept rapidly losing its ability to predict or manipulate the political and social behavior of black Americans." That points towards something.

161: I saw it. She was arguing that he hasn't had the cultural experience of most black Americans, but rather a different experience, equally as interesting and valid (I swear!). I was a bit confused by her point, too, but Obama does have a current polling disadvantage among black voters. I wonder if this sort of narrative is going to catch on.

Oh, also that he's not descended from slaves, but rather from a 20th-Century African immigrant. I've read about discrimination (in NYC, perhaps) by slave-descended blacks against West-Indian-immigrant blacks. Something similar, perhaps.

Ack, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...

163: Yeah, she was really tripping over herself to say how valid his alternate experience was, but of course how it could never be called "black" since his ancestors of 200 years ago weren't west Africans who were taken to US against their will.

I still wanted to ask if she thought that maybe he still experienced the same societal prejudices, or if somehow everyone else knew to give him a break because his dad is an east African who came over in 1959. Or if all the people in the US of African descent who were raised in middle-class and upper-class families cannot be called "black". Blargh, it just seemed like such an incredibly stupid distinction to try and make with such a terribly imprecise term.

164: And vice-versa.

I missed the show, but I think that the argument that "black," in American culture, means "descended from African slaves" isn't a crazy one. No, people who meet a second-generation immigrant from Africa won't know that about him immediately; but first-gen immigrants usually have accents that distinguish them from other African-Americans, as well as different cultural norms, family histories, and so on. It's not nuts to think that those things would not only affect the way you'd interact with mainstream white America, but also how it would interact with you.

I wonder if this sort of narrative is going to catch on.

No. Or at least not long enough to matter. If he doesn't dominate the African-American vote, it won't be because of his lack of blackness; it'll be Bill + massive institutional advantage.

164: Oh, also that he's not descended from slaves, but rather from a 20th-Century African immigrant.

There's huge neurosis around this point between New World (mostly North American and West Indian) black people and African immigrants. I'm not surprised to hear it coming out around Obama.

I think it's rooted to some extent in the identity crisis of the New World peoples, who were raised either to hate their African heritage (and thus resent Africans for being a reminder of it) or more recently to identify with their African heritage (and thus resent Africans for having sold off their ancestors).

And 167 is right.

164: And vice-versa.

Oh, certainly. I should've referred to "tension" not "discrimination."

169: I'd think both of those, plus (1) racism on the part of newer immigrants (new immigrants of all ethnicities being quite capable of despising native American poor folks, African-Americans especially, for being lazy and shiftless--not taking advantage of American opportunity--or simply b/c the association of crime, drugs, sex, etc. and African-Americans is pretty worldwide, thanks to American pop culture), and (2) resentment on the part of established African-Americans, who often, it seems to me, perceive new immigrants as either/both inauthentic and hostile. I guess (2) is kind of what you were saying, DS, but I think (1) is an extra factor.

167: Well yes, my family has hosted a couple people who came over from Kenya to attend school here, and I know a fair number of people who had an African immigrant parent or who were the first generation (Nigerian, typically). It's a hugely different culture, and it definitely affects the way that first generation is treated. But I've been consistently amazed at how seamlessly the second generation become part of mainstream American culture (I figure it's mostly because there are so few other true African-Americans around, so they can't really form a subculture). The main difference seems to be that the first generation is typically better educated (after all, that's how they came to the US), but I don't really see how that makes for a drastic difference from highly educated blacks whose ancestors were slaves.

I guess my main question for her would be "When do you become black?". If someone's great-great-grandparents came over in the 1890s to NYC and were always free, but they've been completely American since, what are they?

It's actually been a bit of problem with college admissions. You want a diverse student body. You want to help out black applicants. You do this by admitting an upper-middle-class black kid whose parents immigrated and while it increases diversity, there's a sense in which it misses the point of affirmative action.

Yeah, and you could break (1) down a bit. Some classism / stereotypical views of American blacks in the mix if they're from privileged families (maybe less of a factor from less privileged backgrounds). Pretty severe culture shock in a lot of cases, especially with guys from societies that are used to arranged marriages (for whom coping with a North American-style dating scene is... problematic). PTSD in some cases if they're refugees (I get the feeling it's pretty common among Sudanese guys here, for instance). All factors.

175 to 172.

And in my experience, 172's (2) is definitely true. I heard it a lot, and can still remember one Kamba guest's withering reply to being called a "brother" by an American black.

admitting an upper-middle-class black kid whose parents immigrated and while it increases diversity, there's a sense in which it misses the point of affirmative action.

I knew a couple of Egyptian kids who got into good UC schools this way. Fuckers.

This was an interesting article:

To encourage still more to come, or at least visit, Ghana plans to offer a special lifetime visa for members of the diaspora and will relax citizenship requirements so that descendants of slaves can receive Ghanaian passports. The government is also starting an advertising campaign to persuade Ghanaians to treat African-Americans more like long-lost relatives than as rich tourists. That is harder than it sounds.

Many African-Americans who visit Africa are unsettled to find that Africans treat them - even refer to them - the same way as white tourists. The term "obruni," or "white foreigner," is applied regardless of skin color.

To African-Americans who come here seeking their roots, the term is a sign of the chasm between Africans and African-Americans. Though they share a legacy, they experience it entirely differently.

"It is a shock for any black person to be called white," said Ms. Mann, who moved here two years ago. "But it is really tough to hear it when you come with your heart to seek your roots in Africa."

The advertising campaign urges Ghanaians to drop "obruni" in favor of "akwaaba anyemi," a slightly awkward phrase fashioned from two tribal languages meaning "welcome, sister or brother." As part of the effort to reconnect with the diaspora, Ghana plans to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. DuBois and others it calls modern-day Josephs, after the biblical figure who rose from slavery to save his people.

There are parallels. Ask the Irish how they feel about Americans of Irish descent calling themselves Irish. Or when those same Irish-Americans tour Ireland and expect to be treated like close relatives (excluding those who are visiting close releatives).

Not an analogy, of course, but I have a twenty-something Irish cousin who immigrated to the US in the last couple of years. We get on well, and one night after a couple of beers, I said something to the effect of "Yeah, I'm 70% Irish and 20% Polish..." Her face became immediately stern. "You are not Irish," she scolded.

[on preview, pwned by md, but at least it's on topic!]

Frank McCourt in 'Tis (the Angela's Ashes author) relates several times how common it was for Americans to note his accent and then tell them where their mother and father were from in Ireland, and him wondering why they cared and why they were romanticizing it so.

Sounds like the native Irish are pretty churlish.

Black, even.

Bigot.

185 to 183, but works for 184, and well, maybe the whole internet too.

A friend of mine put that she was African-American on her college applications because her father is Algerian. Another friend got some sort of Hispanic Achievement Award from the National Merit folks because one of his grandparents was Cuban. They were pretty funny illustrations of the problem of how to define race.

If someone's great-great-grandparents came over in the 1890s to NYC and were always free, but they've been completely American since, what are they?

Well, they've still dealt with Jim Crow, redlining, lynching, and a hundred-plus years of discrimination. All of which not only affect a both family and community culture, but also have made a pretty big difference in terms of cultural capital. Until this generation, maybe the one before, blacks couldn't get into a lot of colleges, and were explicitly exempted from a lot of middle-class entitlements. That stuff makes a big difference.

I don't think it's just the Irish. IME, the Scots find Americans going "back" to Scotland for bagpipes and clan tartans absolutely hilarious.

It's kind of sad, but it's a good illustration of a larger point about how (economic/political) emigrants may often retain a kind of nostalgia for home through the generations, even while history sort of passes them and that moment by.

Come to think of it, this is part of why Teo mocks me as a pretentious white chick: my dad's side of the family has hung on nostalgically to a couple/few generations in Mexico and a couple/few Mexican (or Spanish, for all I know--I find genealogy boring) ancestors, and I've kind of inherited that emotional identification.

188: So, basically, Barack is nearly as old as a colored person can be in the US without being truly black (i.e. hitting adulthood or political awareness before the civil rights movement really got swinging)?

Re: a bunch of earlier comments Weekend is mildy good (it's actually the case that it vacillates between being very good and unwatchable, there's no point at which it's mildly good, but it nets out that way), Hiroshima Mon Amour is dullsville.

I saw the Colbert/Dickerson interview but on close caption which made it somewhat difficult to follow.

Cala's point in 174 is important. Lots of Nigerians at Teo U.

190: Sorry about the mockery, but yeah, I find this stuff pretty silly. I'm also irritated at my uncle, who's suddenly trying to get Irish citizenship after studiously ignoring his Irish heritage for decades. That's kind of a different issue, though.

What's the problem? Lots of things make people care about where they come from.

In my uncle's case, the opportunity to get an EU passport so he can talk pretentiously about fleeing the country because the Republicans are in charge (without actually doing it, of course). I don't know if the 2006 elections made a difference to his plans.

That is, as you say, a different issue.

The kicker is that he still doesn't care about his Irish heritage, to the extent that he asks me for help finding documents and stuff for the citizenship application instead of his Irish relatives who, unlike me, both know where the documents are and live in the same city as him. Drives me crazy.

In my case I come from Boston. I don't come from Ireland. Some of my great-grandparents came from Ireland torward the end of the century before last.

I can see the attraction and Lord knows I grew up on professional Irish folk music. The Pogues and Dropkicks push the right buttons. But at best I'd say I'm Irish-American Bostonian.

Funny, I am American culturally and politically but I don't feel American. I feel like a Northeastern ethnic at the widest scope. At the narrowest, I'm a guy from a neigborhood in Boston that no longer exists as it was when I was young. Living in Northern Virginia the attraction of nostalgia is strong.

Speaking of Tolkien (I know I'm a bit late here, but my house had a huge dinner) I'm desperately trying to figure out how to lure all of you into a huge fight over whether Balrog's have wings. But I can't figure out how to tie it into Modern Love or feminism...

re: 189

Damn straight.

Grow up in Scotland? Have a Scottish accent? You're Scottish.*

If not, you have very little claim to Scottishness. It's nice that people feel a tie to the old country and all, but we mostly couldn't give a shit.

Especially when the Scottishness they care about is some nostalgic bollocks mostly invented by 19th century English people and/or Sir Walter Scott rather than anything to do with modern, urban, industrial Scotland.

I've ranted on about this before, though.

* whether your grandparents were from Auchtermuchty or Lahore ...

It will be interesting to watch the vote split out in the Dem primary. I think that voting is often defensive--who is least likely to screw me--and that populations that have the greatest reason to worry are most likely to vote defensively. For that reason, I assume that Obama will get the significant majority of African-American votes. OTOH, white women don't seem that scared, so I'm not sure HRC dominates that pool in the same way. But that view might be over-influenced by the the women I know: none are interested in HRC. It's easy to imagine that older women and poorer women might feel differently. And I do wonder how the Generation Awesome factor plays out here, as well as how people in the NQW group split out. Where does the Arab/Muslim vote go, for example? Or Hispanics? Hispanic women?

Where does the Arab/Muslim vote go

I thought they all just wrote in Bin Laden.

I assume that Obama will get the significant majority of African-American votes

SCMT: Did you see the polling numbers I linked above? Are you assuming that he overcomes this gap, and if so, how?

The hispanic/latino vote is an interesting point, though. I don't know that Richardson plays well there, but maybe he gets it.

Where does the Arab/Muslim vote go

To the Muslim, dummy.

Richardson is saying he's not going to run a campaign based on his ethnicity, so I don't know how effective he'll be with Hispanics. Especially given his very Anglo-sounding name.

206: Yeah, but he announced bilingually. It's a nod, and I doubt he'll go unnoticed on Telemundo.

Oh, he very well may capture the Hispanic vote; I'm just saying it's not a foregone conclusion. It depends a lot on how he campaigns.

Absolutely. I'm saying the campaign strategy appears to be, "I'm an experienced politician, con mucha experiencia [wink, wink]." But then, I also think he's running for Vice-President.

But will Richardson's chances be affected by his GIANT ORANGE HEAD.

Seriously, he's like the Great Pumpkin.

http://www.nmaging.state.nm.us/Images/Governor_Richardson.jpg

I also think he's running for Vice-President, although he may not know it himself.

His giant orange head is just one of the reasons I can't see him winning the nomination.

Racists! Orange people everywhere are offended, as am I.

You don't have to be an orange-hater to acknowledge that orange-hatred is a factor in our society. Sad but true.

I've heard some orange people don't even consider him truly "orange."

I'll attempt to mollify effects of 215 by pointing out that my confusion about the Colbert Report/Debra Dickerson interview was based largely on the assumption that race is a social construct, that anyone could line up a million people from the darkest to the lightest and need to draw a line somewhere arbitrarily to define "black" and "white" (or "whatever"). And I was surprised to see a black woman on TV arguing that Obama isn't black. Of course, she was using black in the sense of culturally "black," the same way Bill Cosby gets called "not black."

My confusion about how all this gets parsed lives in the distinction between racial blackness (which I deem to be a social construct that operates all the time, cf.) and cultural American blackness, which is included in the broader category of racial blackness (in general; see: people "passing as white"), but it's a smaller subset.

I honestly do wonder how Obama deals with this tension, and I assume it's something he's thinking about.

What effects of 215? I think the reason there hasn't been any response to it is that it's 3AM and everyone's in bed.

Everyone on the East Coast, that is. The people who count.

217: I was trying to explain my joke in 215, but I forgot my login over at Standpipe's blog.

Ah, okay. Hypothetical effects, then, from humorless people.

I just started reading this thread, and I only skimmed it, but I still have no idea what the central theme is. Anyway, French New Wave Films and some not New Wave:

1) Le Samouraï by Melville
2) L'année dernière à Marienbad by Resnais
3) La Peau douce by Truffaut
4) Baisers volés by Truffaut
5) La Mariée était en noir by Truffaut
6) Vivre sa Vie by Godard
7) Le Mépris by Godard
8) Pierrot le fou by Godard
9) Masculin, féminin by Godard
10) Le week-end by Godard

Also:
Le chinois by Godard is a perfect view of 1968 Paris.
Notre musique by Godard is one of his latest.

Caché by Haneke is great.

The Trois Couleurs Trilogy by Kieślowski is one of my all time favorites.

And finally, De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté is one of my recent favorites.

Well clearly you people don't go to sleep at the proper employed-person times. I am genuinely shocked.

A handful of observations:

200: Balrogs don't have wings, as is obvious from a careful reading of the text. "Wings" used in this context is metaphorical and describes the shadows surrounding the balrog. I find this disappointing, but neccessary for the text, 'cause if a balrog had wings, all it would have to do would be soar over the chasm, punch people around a bit, and grab the ring--and there'd only be one volume. Or, alternatively, the balrog would not fall into the chasm and Gandalf down with him and setting up a major plot-point for later.

On Weekend,, the boringness of parts of it is part of what I like. I'm sure there's a fancy film-school explanation for this, but actually I like it because it's not organized on the usual Hollywood logic and so it seems to carry a little freedom with it. It seems less subject to the iron law of markets, doncha know--that's I think what I like about the late fifites/pre-68 sixties stuff, that it's not disciplined by movie-production rules as much.

I haven't seen Viridiana, although I know a Bunuel enthusiast who speaks very highly of it.

YA literature: Jackmormon, have you read any Diana Wynne Jones? She has a lot to say about the EU, the UN and government generally, only she says it with magic and telepathic cats.

Now I really must leave for work in the crepuscular cold.

222: s/b pulling Gandalf down with him.

Not fully awake. It's dark and cold.

221: If you're going to watch all those movies, and I think that you should, it would be a good idea to watch some studio system film noir to familiarize yourself with one of la Nouvelle Vague's major influences. I'm thinking of This Gun for Hire, The Lost Weekend, Gilda and Double Indemnity, to name a few that aren't watched as much as they should be.

Tired and yawning, in the cool morning, it's back to the dreary old drive...

I try to believe that nothing human is alien to me, but this YA fiction as an interest and pastime of adults really tests my ability to believe. I haven't been a YA since YA was playing, and I didn't read this stuff then.

199 As a midwesterner living in Boston I'm not surprised that Mad Dog doesn't feel American. I found the ethnic neighborhoods of New York strange in their insularity, but they were nothing compared to the ones in Boston, like Charlestown and especially Southie. I once annoyed a truckdriver there, and he trailed me up the street yelling "I'm sick a you people coming here and messing up our town!!!11!" It was an interesting experience for a blonde person.

I'm only up to 33, and this is the funniest thread in months. Esp. the link in 7.

226: Sure, that seems true of the East in general; I've heard that at least in the past midwestern Jews didn't seem Jewish to Easterners. "Irish" is the once-plausible name the truck driver has for his identity, and you don't share it despite being as Irish as he is.

It works the other way too. I was raised in mostly new communities, suburbs, in midwestern Canada, emigrated to the US at 12, and have always felt natural as an American. While often alienated, and sometimes tempted to find the sources in a different heritage and background, at the end of the day it doesn't stick. Alternative ethnic identities, and I've got several to choose from, seem less inhabitable and authentic than just accepting myself as an American with some particular roots but mostly defined by the larger society.

Le Samouraï by Melville is sweet.

226: I kind of feel the same way about New York -- I'm more of a New Yorker than I am an American. Nothing against the rest of you guys individually, and nothing at all against those of you who like New York enough to come live here, but walking through Times Square tripping over people who don't know how to get out of the way does make me start muttering darkly about gah-damn Midwesterners.

225: Well, yes, not everyone really wants to read YA fiction. My mother is a children's librarian who used to write reviews for the ALA journal, so we would both read some of the books to discuss, and there were always tons of YA novels around the house.

I have some interest in general YA fiction--like, I'll flip through almost anything--just as a collection of genres, since I've read a lot of it going back to 19th century stuff. I'm interested in trends and themes, and the way dominant cultural values are reflected and/or challenged. Mostly I'm interested in fantasy and science fiction, partly because there's some really good stuff out there, like the Phillip Pullman novels, and partly because I've read so much fantasy and science fiction by now that I like to see what the genres are doing.

Sometimes--and lots of people, from China Mieville onward, would despise this logic--you just want to read something that isn't depressing, but also isn't stupid and also doesn't have bad politics. That's where YA novels come in.

Most of the contemporary classy lit'rary fiction that I like--Julian Barnes, say--gets me down. It's about adulthood as grotesquerie, failure, hypocrisy...(and most of the contemporary classy fiction I don't like is about a middle-aged academic who doesn't get on with his wife and who meets a tragic, beautiful nymphet in one of his classes, et patati et patata...)...and it's very individual rather than social. Its politics are reflected through the failings of the characters. And it's stimulating and good for me and makes me face up to the hollowness and grotesquerie of contemporary bourgeois existance, but sometimes I just want a change, but I don't feel like Henry James or Goethe or Jane Austen.

Hence, YA novels.

I'm more of a New Yorker than I am an American

Oh, sure. I identify more as a North Carolinian than an American.

230: Hey, it's funny--I feel the same way about coastal types snotting off to me about my lovely, progressive city in the Midwest. Especially when they assume that there's no good reason to live here, because of course your soul must be dead if you don't want to live in New York or San Francisco...which is not to knock those fine cities.

Or actually: I'm not native to Minneapolis, but I've lived here since I turned 18--coming up for half my life in a few years--and I am constantly surprised both by what a South Minneapolis Type I am (I was pulled here by a sort of social gravity, I guess) and by how much delight I still take in living here.

I've lived in larger cities, and it was fascinating--cities that really work like Lewis Mumford describes, cities that convey to you a different public experience as well as quite a lot about modernity. It's neat, but it's not for me--except the trains. I could ride the El all day, and have on occasion.

But here...I walk down to the old collective hippie cafe, and I'll see someone I know. I go across town to my favorite coffee shop, and someone from the bookstore will be there. I can ride my bike all over the whole South Side easily--heck, I can bike to St. Paul if I want. I love that there's a great diversity of things but only one or two of each, so you can really know them well. I love that we've got lots of immigrants from Somalia and Laos and now Mexico...I love that in the middle of the mostly-Mexican development on Lake Street there's one Equadorian restaurant. I love that my co-op stocks halal goat.

Minneapolis has the delight of the miniature, of the manageable size.

The big old wood houses! The long, steep hill coming into Minneapolis from St. Paul! The way the light looks on the lilac beside the highway when you're riding the express bus across town in the summer! I count myself truly lucky to live in a city I love so much.

Balrogs so do not have wings.

233: That was very nice.

And I like any city I've ever been to where getting around on foot is an option -- they aren't home, but it's all good. A city doesn't need to be big to be the sort of place I like, just dense.

Part of Minneapolis is fairly dense...(yes, joke all you like, I'm used to it.) It's mostly houses, though, with yards--not so much with the apartment buildings, and the ones we have tend to be four flats. A lot of old wood duplexes, though. I get around very well by bike and on foot most of the year, and with a little frustration by foot and bus in the dead of winter. One of the reasons I live in south Minneapolis in an old neighborhood fairly near the university is that it's definitely a walking/trolley pattern of development.

235: Thank you. Minneapolis moves me to far greater cheer and rhetorical power than normally belong to me. Sing now, o Muse...

Pierrot le fou is a terrible, terrible movie. It's only interest is linguistic: the main character at one point tries to imitate an American accent, so it gives you some idea what an American accent sounds like to foreign ears.

Another Godard movie, Contempt (I don't know the French name), is awesome, though.

Frowner, I find your world-view interestingly alien. I always want to ask you annoyingly probing questions, but I'll content myself with saying that I look forward to your comments.

Unfortunately, Minneapolis is filled with murderous psychopaths, some of whom jabber all the time, and some of whom only say "Unguent". The Coen brothers were pressured into shifting the movie to Fargo and Brainerd, but the truth is the the truth. Minneapolis.

BTW, the Minneapolis Star-TRibune isn't that great a paper, but it's got about as liberal an editorial policy as I've seen in the US. The editorial page features a cartoon Banana Republic which would be "alternative" anywhere else.

239: My blushes, Watson...yeah, I like reading A White Bear for much the same reason.

Some--moderately, metaphorically--probing questions are probably okay. (I suppose I might not have answers, though--I am a giddy creature of unreason most of the time.)

What's the deal with the unguent, Emerson?

One of the psychos has two lines in the movie: One is "unguent" and the other is "She started shriekin".

Ah.

Minneapolis is a prelapsarian paradise. Don't listen to John's lies. He actually lives in New York City, which means he can't bear the thought of anyone anywhere else from being happy.

Back up to 201: I don't think this is unique to any immigrant ethnic group. The pattern seems to be this: grandparents come over with their kids, work hard, do pretty well; their kids do even better, and their grandkids grow up hearing stories about Happy Days in the Country of Origin and seeing that sometimes their grandparents were discriminated against, and romanticize the old country. Meanwhile, the grandparents are saying, you know, there's a reason we left....

232: You know, I'd probably identify more as American than Pennsylvanian, and I wonder if that holds true for more of the middle of the country. This also may be just that western Pennsylvania is sort of dull; it's hard to build a community identity around K-Mart.

Hey now, my experience growing up in Pittsburgh was almost entirely devoid of K-Mart! I have noticed that my friends who grew up in suburban places often have a much more generically "American" sense of identity than the small-towners and city-dwellers.

What I'm going to say is ignorant, because I don't live in one of the places I'm talking about, but I have the sense that there is a broad similarity between medium density areas all over the country that doesn't hold for cities or country -- IOW, that suburban PA and suburban Nebraska are an awful lot like each other in a way that downtown Pittsburgh and downtown Carson City aren't.

247: Small-town barely-suburb area, so yeah. I could see having a strong sense of Pittsburgh identity, and what's not to love, because it's a great city, but I don't think it survives past the Ft. Pitt Bridge.

I consider myself more a rootless cosmopolitan than an American.

I wish I could be a rootless cosmopolitan, but I always feel that it requires a better wardrobe and a suave, witty manner. I'm afraid I have to be a stodgy Midwesterner if there's going to be any plausibility to me.

I've almost always lived in second- and third-rank places (small towns, pre-hip Portland, pre-Microsoft Seattle, Taipei, Minneapolis, a shabby area of Oakland) and big-time people always seemed too dependent on their environment. Some places don't do anything for you, so you have to do it all yourself. (On the other hand, second rank and lower places give you little or no support regardless of how resourceful you are.)

I consider myself more a rootless cosmopolitan

RED ALERT! The Jews have discovered our code words!

I think of w-lfs-n more as a tassel-loafered Eastern elitist.

Godard is a genius, but I don't really like most of his movies very much, whereas I adore Shoot the Piano Player and the Antoine Doinel movies. This is because I am middle-brow.

Snarkout, are you Snarkout because of the Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror/Avocado of Doom? Say yes, even if it's not true. The Snarkout Boys (and Rat) were a major, major fuel for my youthful daydreams about adulthood and its potentials.

He has said before that he is; who are you?

Oops...I am nobody, too, er, I am Frowner. Derived from The Story of the Stone, somewhat inappropriately.

I must have missed it when it was explained before.

I'm on a different computer, as you can see, and I didn't realize it didn't autofill.

You don't need to record that you're on a different computer, you know. You can just call yourself "Frowner" wherever.

Not everybody has your elite computerizing skills, w-lfs-n.

256: It's not why I picked my psued, which was just random silliness, but should I ever end up on a solo blog, I'd probably call it Lizard Music for the same reason. And then never talk about music.

"If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me 'middlebrow' I will take my pen and stab him, dead. Yours, etc., Virginia Woolf."

259: I have this terrible fear--because from time to time I manage to insult people's work/discipline/heartfelt beliefs--that if my IP and my name aren't always consistant the Mighty Blog Managers will think that I'm a trolling sockpuppeting fiend of some kind. I know this is only paranoia, when I actually pause to think about it.

Unless you want emphasize some peculiar fact about your present locale.

Last Year at Marienbad, if I'm remembering it correctly, is a terrible, terrible film.

JM: His Dark Materials is unquestionably rad. I never read the Sally Lockheart books because I suspected they were more genuinely "kiddie" somehow though now I wonder if I based that on skimming a back-of-the-book blurb which, if so, was very short-sighted of me. Please tell me I am wrong.

NickS: Swimming to Cambodia is really amazing. I didn't watch all of it because I kept thinking I'd get back to it and didn't and in part because I found watching him, knowing what had happened, unbelievably depressing. Rah got me to watch what of it I did, however, and it's yet another reason I love him.

233 is probably the nicest thing I've read all week.

263: I don't think you have any need for concern, Mr. Senator.

In the future, we don't say which comment we're responding to. M/tch M/lls lives in exile, leading the resistance from afar.

256 - Yes. See here, f'rinstance.

Virginia Woolf apparently did not like middlebrows.

leading the resistance

At ye olde Mineshafte.

The Story of the Stone

Gods, I am hearting Frowner so hard right now.

I tried reading some Robbe-Grillet last year. Not my thing at all. This could be because I am dull-witted or because I don't speak French, but I'd prefer to believe that it's because I like my experimental fiction a little more rollicking. Kathy Acker provides sex and violence! Robbe-Grillet merely provides anomie.

233: Small cities rock; it is my ambition to find a nice one to grow old in. Unfortunately, the two I've lived in, Syracuse and Burlington, were a bit frosty for this Floridian, but otherwise they were awesome.

My only complaint about not-NY/SF cities is the lack of critical mass of fellow Uranians.

265 gets it exactly right.

266: The Sally Lockheart books aren't really kiddie, but they are less complex and less sophisticated than His Dark Materials. They're fun, though, if you like the whole Victorian-boy's-book-adventure trope thing, and they do wear their politics on their sleeves. Also, they pack a certain amount of emotion.

269: I was just re-reading the first Snarkout Boys book and I really, really liked the city-by-night sequence where they first go to the interesting little neighborhood with the park and the speakers. Although in retrospect I think the parts with the chicken are the best.

I am hearting Frowner so hard right now.

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

I liked Frowner from a Different Computer. It made me think of Brother from Another Planet, and hinted at wacky but thought-provoking misunderstandings to come.

277: I was hoping that someone else would take care of the double entendre.

I am hearting Frowner so hard right now.

That sounds really... violent.

276 - If you've read... Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights, I think it is, it's clear how much of the Snarkout Boys' experience of Chicago draws from Pinkwater's experience of discovering what life in a big city was really like. (The Wild Dada Ducks has this feature too, as well as one of the great final lines of American fiction. It doesn't top The Thin Man's, though.)

278: Well, I'm fairly good at the wacky misunderstandings, and I've been told by others that they found it thought-provoking...or was it just provoking? I'm sure it wasn't provocative, though, alas.

281: I should read Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights again--I don't think I've read it since I was in college. The Wild Dada Ducks! That was the one with the Praetorians and the breakfast cereal, right? I knew nothing of Praetorians up until that point, and they are my frame of reference for all subsequent Praetorians, which makes reading some kinds of history pretty funny.

I am hearting Frowner so hard right now.

That sounds really... violent.

Yeah, it's pretty nasty.

Well, the reason it's so hard is because I've taken out my heart and stored it inside a gem inside an unopenable casket inside an duck swimming in a lake on a remote mountain island guarded by sea monsters and storms (so that I will live forever, of course). People try to rip out my heart all the time, but they just end up rummaging around with the lung, stomach, pancreas, etc, and they get really frustrated.

285: And as you can see, I have only one lung. It's capacious, though.

A very sensible precaution.

Man, heroes always find that sort of thing. You should have given it to Key Rabbit to lock up, or else thrown it into the Hudson and told GE that they would have to pay for the cost of dredging.

How do you get the casket in the duck?

I wouldn't trust the Key Rabbit any farther than I could throw him. And look how foolish he was with the pendant and the feathers! That's just asking Heaven to take you down!

Weirdly, as impolitic as a lot of that book is, it's one of the reasons I did Asian studies--not for the exoticism, legends, etc, but for the depictions of city life. When I read it (I think I was ten or eleven) it really gave me a sense of the complexity and realness of China--a sort of mental snap and China was no longer "exotic" and thinly conceived, but a real place.

289: You do it when you remove the duck's heart in order to hide it. (It would be neatly symmetrical but unwise to hide the duck's heart in me...huh, maybe I already have the heart of a duck, and that's my problem.) My heart is hidden inside the only immortal duck, distinguishable, as am I, by the beautifully embroidered stitches up our sternums. The duck, of course, has feathers as well.

Didn't you ever listen to John Madden, LB?

265: If you aren't even sure you remember a film correctly, then how you can judge it to terribly bad?

While you're at it you should get it insured, too, I mean you might as well, after you've gone to all this trouble.

Frowner, what kind of Asian Studies did you do? I've done things on Taoism.

294: There's a lot of restrictions on life insurance, though--I'm not related to the duck, nor is it my employee, so a lot of places don't really feel that I have an "insurable interest" in the duck's life.

I'm thinking might be easier just to get a back-up heart and a second duck.

295: Well, mostly modern Chinese history, complete with a limping insufficiency in Mandarin. I did work in Shanghai for a year and Beijing for a semester...I didn't pursue it (er, do grad work) both because my Mandarin (and I would have had to learn Cantonese, too!) is so bad and because when I lived in China I started to realize how American I was and how little I could really grasp about the various cultures that make up China. Some people go over there and they really fit in well; I had an amazing time and made some terrific friends (although the expat community was mostly squicky) but my whole approach is really non-Chinese. (Inasmuch as there is any "Chinese" way of things, and I don't mean any value judgement here at all.)

The Taiwan expat community in 1983 was squicky too, with a very peculiar scattering: grad students, failed grad students, junior year abroad, retired military, business promoters, flotsam and jetsam, and fugitives from justice. I never met the high-end people, of course.

This conversation has so moved on, but in response to 201, I wonder how much of that "you are NOT Irish/Scottish/Mexican/whatever" stuff is at least partly based in (sorry about this) a colonialist mentality. I mean, it's quite well-established that the "horrid nabobs" aren't *really* British, you know. And likewise, whether the desire people (Americans, especially, I suspect) have to claim their ancestry isn't either an internalized shame kind of thing about being a nabob, or else, on some level, an anxiety about being "white." Which isn't really such a bad thing, given that the history of the term is that it was pretty much created for the sake of racism.

The expat community was always more money than sense where I was--I worked for a teachers' college and got paid in yuan, and not even too many of those, but a lot of people were making dollars and living really high on the hog, while displaying very little understanding of how most Chinese people were living. And then the creepy guys who were there to meet beautiful Asian flowers, like the fellow came from the UK to find a wife, speaking no Mandarin himself, and married a girl who spoke almost no English. (I mean, there were certainly perfectly nice expats who dated and/or married Chinese people...it's just that they were outnumbered by the creepy ones.) Plus the creepy guys who were there to sleep with any expat woman they could talk into bed--there was the Australian guy who tried to get me drunk and seduce me (Me! He left me till last because I was plain and feminist, which was insulting, but even more insulting was the fact that he thought it would work!) and then called me ugly in front of everyone when he didn't get any.

But Shanghai was beautiful. I've seldom had so much fun, or ridden my bike so far.

It's not an internalized shame or some "white" anxiety complex alone, given that it hits pretty much every immigrant group. (Check out the linked article on African-Americans visiting Ghana.) One of my Indian friends who grew up in Canada notes it among the community there; the middle-class kids start romanticizing India and its customs, their grandparents roll their eyes.

Just a desire for a sense of roots and history that isn't only two or three generations old, mostly, and maybe a desire to be something "unique" and "interesting" and "exotic." I'm not just a mutt of European poor person descent; I'm tied to the daughters of Irish kings, &c.

One guy I met was an ambitious foreign-relations major with State Department plans. His wisdom on the "lovely flower" question was "You know, foreign women are different". He'd had local girlfriends in Russia, Japan, and China as he did his language study, and they were all different.

I doubt that people claim to be Norwegian to escape from the stigma of whiteness. I think there's a a feeling that being American-only is too generic and undistinguished. It's also a way of organizing knicknack purchases, low-intensity social gatherings, etc.

I've definitely known people who emphasized their Irish or Italian backgrounds in part to differentiate themselves from American whiteness and the historical burdens thereof. And I know people, myself included, who aren't really comfortable with describing themselves as "white" (in official terms, though the "come on, own up" aspect is a counter-issue) because of that as well.

So I'm not saying it's the only factor; I'm just saying it's *a* factor. I think the colonialist shit is probably a much bigger deal.

I like to talk about being Swedish (half) so that I can complain about the Danes and the Norweigians. I used to do that as a joke when I moved to Minnesota because it seemed so ridiculous, but then I realized that people took it seriously.

I always think of the doctor in that (actually weird and gripping) Lars von Trier mini-series about the hospital...anyway, the doctor going up on the roof, raising his hands to heaven and yelling "Filthy Danes! Filthy Danes!".

I used to think that I had no Swedish heritage, but as I've known more Swedish-Americans I've realized that the way my mother grew up (absolute parental authority, strong father, not so much on the expressing the emotions thing) was very typical of immigrant Swedish families, and her upbringing certainly shaped her marriage and my childhood. So it's more a heritage of repression and perpetually uneasy submissive/angrily rebellious relations to authority than anything else.

I've definitely known people who emphasized their Irish or Italian backgrounds in part to differentiate themselves from American whiteness and the historical burdens thereof.

Yes, to claim exemptions, to insist that because their ancestors, "bleeding from the soles of their feet" did not own slaves, nor did business with those who did, they should not therefore bear the burden of affirmative action.

Well, from the old-country perspective, the Hyphenated-American is just not OldCountryish in their ways of thinking or of going on. Way more foreign than the natives of actual neighbouring countries. (I allow a possible theoretical exception here for people from Newfoundland. I've never met any but from bits I've seen on television it seems like you could just drop them off in Cork or Waterford and they'd blend right in.)

306: Sometimes, yes. But also out of the typical white guilt stuff, which I'm impatient with but think is pretty understandable, given that the entire point of racist legislation was to create a white overclass. I think it's not unhealthy to want to reject that affiliation.

As I mentioned above, the recent Minnesota movie "Sweet Lands" is about a German/Norwegian-American mixed marriage. It may have been based on a true story, but it didn't ring true to me. Catholic-Lutheran marriages were another story.

My father and my aunt showed lingering signs of old Anglo prejudice against Swedes (= all Scandinavians), but my dad got over it.

What's the big deal about expressing emotions, BTW? Doesn't it usually just make things worse?

309: There's a big, big difference between choosing not to express emotions as a mature person and growing up with the belief that you must never, never talk about anger or resentment or admit that you feel any, of course. Kids have feelings, and if they never see adults express any it's easy to believe that feelings are shameful, or a mistake, or something kids have but adults don't. (Which makes it hard to understand why adults do things, especially if there's a lot of very authoritarian parenting involved)

But that's pretty obvious, and I think you're pulling my leg just a little.

There's plenty of evidence for the old Anglo prejudice against Swedes in Main Street.

SO you've heard that before. maybe?

311: Yes, Swedes are dirty and lazy and make terrible hired help. Everyone knows that.

312: Might could be.

293: Perhaps I should rephrase 265 in slightly different ways in order to jog my memory.

Frowner's on fire on this thread. 296 is particularly nice.

Agree with 255 about Shoot the Piano Player, I had forgotten about it.

Shoot the Piano Player is super!

HTML is hard. Apparently.

315: It is weird, isn't it? It's like I'm possessed today--I feel cheerful and lighthearted and amiable instead of bitter and hateful and assuming-the-worst. I wonder what it would be like to be this way all the time?

I wonder what it would be like to be this way all the time?

That way lies madness.

At a minimum, your handle would no longer be descriptive.

There really is something awful about knowing what it feels like to be cheerful and optimistic and productive as hell and measuring your worth the rest of the time using that as the norm. Or so I've heard.

Frowner, 233 really made me smile. I have a list as long as yours, completely different, but still the same. It's a great town.

Also, it's possible you're cheerful today because it's sunny and less ridiculously cold than it's been in a good long while.

323: Wait, you're here? Is that allowed? I feel like my secret identity is in peril now.

Yeah, when I have a really up day, I usually wonder if I'm getting bipolar disorder and simply experiencing mania.

As a further sign that there is a disruption in the force, when I went downstairs to get a diet soda (yuck, yet addictive), the machine disgorged a bottle with a dollar bill and a tiny stuffed Goldie Gopher (the mascot of the university) inside. Moreover, the bottle opened just like the instructions said so that I could get an actual soda with the enclosed dollar. When it first came out of the machine, I thought that it was a terribly damanged bottle in which the soda had somehow dried up and turned to fluffy mold.

324 = yay.

More, it has a weighted tail and feet so that you can balance it on the edge of a shelf or the top of a computer monitor. I may make it a little outfit, because it's wearing a distinctly uninspired maroon sweatshirt right now.

It's also a way of organizing knicknack purchases

Emerson is the best. Some of the passionate identification with the Old Country in places like Southie comes from still-vivid memories of discrimination in the U.S.

You found the last Goldie Gopher! Run home, Frowner! Run home as fast as you can!

If this thing gets me a tour of the Goldie Gopher factory, where good children are rewarded and bad children are punished in ways that I thought excessive and sadistic when I was little, I'm not taking it.

Yeah, I'm here. I wonder if we know people in common? You're my age, and general social set, and it sounds like you worked at Arise! books...

330: Oh, horrible! There goes my cover. I just hope you're not someone who's been to dinner at my house only to be offended by my drunken critique of everything you hold dear. But then you'd probably have recognized some of my anecdotes by now.

That would certainly be Arise--in fact, I painted both our new embedded-in-the-ground and folding signs. I trust that you've been there since the extremely DIY remodel that we did? If not, you should hurry over and spend, oh, at least two or three hundred dollars on books. We've got some nice new things from Verso in, with more to come.

What crowd do you tend to run with? I know some grad students fairly well, a few arty folks fairly casually, and a broad spectrum of activists, many of whom aren't drunk all the time. Bear in mind that in life I am not sparkling or glamourous, and I tend to bloom unseen.

I um, run with a bunch of doctors, lawyers, and computer geeks on a day-to-day basis. But I still have some old punk and activist connections (not that I was ever an activist) but maybe I just like to *think* that I still run in that milieu. Did you know a Naomi that used to work at Arise? She's a good friend of my wife.

I don't think I know a Naomi, but I've met such a lot of people through Arise that sometimes I know them by face and not by name.

Well, that's good--after the revolution you can induce your doctor friends to run clinics. The activist left is sadly short of doctors.

But now I'm going to go and socialize with various scruffy people, after a short detour through a kind of yuppie bar where I plan to have fancy appetizers of some sort.

Some of the passionate identification with the Old Country in places like Southie comes from still-vivid memories of discrimination in the U.S.

Which the people from the same background who went to the Midwest didn't experience, by-and-large. Hence the different outlook, expectations and manner. When totaling up the excellences of the the big cities, where I have chosen to live too, against their drawbacks and evils, this historical fact has to be weighed against them. Where would you have wanted your ancestors to go?

Enjoy!

It's been great to experience your good mood, Frowner; it's charming and appealing, and I hope it helps you to know it.

Which the people from the same background who went to the Midwest didn't experience, by-and-large.

Is that true? I don't think I've heard it before.

328 and 329 are perhaps the best thing yet on this site.

336: Belatedly: Inside my exterior of flint is a core of marshmallow, you see.

(Notice that there are now two contradictory narratives about, er, interiority: there's the "normal interior except heart-stored-safely-in-a-duck" narrative, and the "body-without-organs-but-with-marshmallow" narrative....And that's a Delueze and Guattari reference! God, I crack myself up!)

[I veered from vegetarianism and had the most heart-wringing calamari ever at the bar...I couldn't eat the ones that were tiny whole squid, and so I had to sit there with a plate of fried, breaded baby creatures and crumbs until the waitress cleared it away]

233 makes Minneapolis sound pretty nice.

340: Whatever you do, DON'T VISIT NOW! It's awfully cold.

But you should come out here for either the May Day Parade (first Sunday in May) or the Barebones Hallowe'en Extravaganza (around Hallowe'en). They bookend the warm times with puppets.

Plus, we have lots of great record stores, and a few really decent used bookstores.

I'm going to go for a record in "fraction of a thread's comments ignored" and say something about Sting.

Last year, when my father was dying quietly of brain cancer and then in the months between his death and interrment at Willamette Military Cemetery, I listened to two of Sting's albums a lot: The Soul Cages and the concert album All This Time. I found the first satisfying for those times when it helped to be reminded that others have felt just as full of leaden gray darkness and yet managed to endure, and the second for the warm, sometimes amused, reflection from a mature vantage point on one's youthful self. If someone wanted to say that this was part of a low-keyed midlife crisis, I wouldn't especially argue - I was 40 when he died, so prime vintage for it. But still, there were times and places when what he had to say and the way he and his band said it spoke exactly to my condition, just as in other times and places it would be Brahms, or Faure, or Rutter, or Tarkovsky, or whoever. I would be that little bit more messed up if I'd shunned Sting's stuff as I've been so often exhorted to do now that I'm grown up, and I feel wary about too vigorously and generally poo-poo-ing stuff I regard as discardable juvenalia that might be just what someone else needs in one of those bad times.

Watching Jules and Jim again tonight and really enjoying it.

I feel wary about too vigorously and generally poo-poo-ing stuff

certainly no call for you to do so -- sounds like it was useful to you. I would not have thought of Sting as a good musician for helping one deal with grief but it has been a long time since I listened to any of his music.