Mirrors of Inch-Deep Water

When the New York Times isn't calling for the destruction of Iran or celebrating the decent helplessness of the Israeli state or embodying most everything compromised, middle-brow, and mediocre, it tries its best to stroke  (usually on weekends when the gas of office-stroking is low) the completely understandable cultural insecurities of its dwindling yet still intensely compromised, middle-brow, and mediocre city readership. So it gives an occasional tip-of-the-hat to local artistes of undue ambition and impotent imagination, those invariably more interested in being part of an elite than in the creative act itself.

Today, we are introduced to the new Poet Laureate of Brooklyn (when was that election?) in a story titled (believe it or not) "A Poet Who Doesn't Do Lofty." (How did GAP admakers miss that one: shots of decadent over-dressed partiers, b&w stills of the American working class [perhaps from Williamsburg], a narrator [with Howling Wolf in the background], "In this age, who wants lofty?")

Supposedly, not Tina Chang. (Yes, that's the poet laureate of Brooklyn. And it tells you about all you need to know about what's happened to early 21st-Century Brooklyn.)

But I was Manhattanese, friendly and proud!

I was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street, or ferry-boat, or public assembly, yet never told them a word,

Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,

Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,

The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,

Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

Closer yet I approach you;

What thought you have of me, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance;

I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?

Who knows but I am enjoying this?

Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

Okay, Walt Whitman. Maybe not fair.

Neither is featuring this on the front page of the New York Times:

About "Roman," Tina Chang's new baby:

My child was once a thought and he had

no name, locked in the stall of my making.

The child was housed inside me for a long time,

held still in water, his limbs floating on a screen,

fingerprints intricate as aerial maps.

On suicide:

Red door open.
They come from the trees hanging,
they come cheering,
they come silent.
Swishing, swishing.

A small cord around my neck
makes a kind of song like a flute.
A flower planted inside my mouth.
Let's say it was a rose.
Let's say it was noon,
time to swallow a pill, let's say valium.

About. . .  I have no idea:

There’s a baby in a basket. There’s a burning
basket lullabye. You know the words.
The words are mixed with the soil when
the soil is lifted with a shovel.

Place the soil on top of the wooden boxes
whose bodies dream oo’s and ah’s,
of fireworks branching out in the sky
on holiday, pots and pans clanging,
children playing by dawn, a dream
nailed down to a box.

How Tina Chang thinks: “We don’t only want to engage Park Slope and Williamsburg and Dumbo and places that might be considered — I want to phrase this carefully — places that might, um, already benefit from these rich communities of literature." (And this is when she's being careful.) "We also want to be able to penetrate neighborhoods such as Bensonhurst and Bed-Stuy." Well, Ms. Chang, you might have a tougher time "penetrating" certain Bed-Stuy neighborhoods or the Soprano Family than you had in the D-Day invasions of Greenpoint or Boerum Hill. Still, you do have the zoning boards on your side. . .

Yet, amidst the portobello-mushroom-and-leek quiche baked by her partner (a Haitian named Castro), her flowing black hair and a remarkable ability to pull off form-fitting black leather pants, reading T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" to Roman in utero, and her Afghani sister-in-law, the sister-in-law's brothers' wives from Columbia and Ecuador, and that Haitian partner, Ms. Chang does have a super-cute baby and very nice feet.

Size Does Matter

“Violence in a cinematic context can be, if handled in a certain way, very seductive" - Kathryn Bigelow

"There is that saying, 'There is no politics in the trenches,' and I think it was important to look at the heroism of these men." - Kathryn Bigelow

“Fear has a bad reputation, but I think that’s ill-deserved. Fear is clarifying. It forces you to put important things first and discount the trivial.” - Kathryn Bigelow

“The Jordanian royal family was very supportive of this production.” - Kathryn Bigelow

"The most important thing in life to me? Size, baby! -- Jenna Jameson

One watches the annual "Oscar ceremony" for the same reason one marries again: the triumph of hope over experience. The presentation of March 7, 2010 offered little in the way of hope, so let's say one watched out of fascination with a culture gone totally depraved. And speaking of  depraved, how about that Kathryn Bigelow?

Of course, the best reason to watch the Academy Awards is for the insight provided into that final outpost of total irrelevance: 21st-century Hollywood. From last night's results, one can clearly see the social process which is taking shape: as the US prepares for wider war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen (and who knows where else), and prepares for eventual Israeli/US airstrikes on Iran, the "elite" layer of US liberalism is accomodating itself quite comfortably to Obama-style aggressive war, justifying its new attitude by claiming the "progressive" adminstration in Washington is conducting a different kind of intervention, for different aims. Different in what way, no American movie can quite explain, as the corpses continue to pile up.

Hence Kathryn Bigelow. What exactly is The Hurt Locker? Its "story" is non-existent, and what does exist between the dribs and drabs stolen from the movie violence pallettes of Peckinpah, DePalma, Anthony Mann, Malick, Walsh, Ford, Kubrick, Coppola etc. is the rankest male bonding swill via (of course) violent, drunken, macho horseplay in the barracks and the trenches. The "Iraqis" (actually Jordanians, but a raghead is a raghead) are portrayed as either faceless, darkly-clad terrorists or cliches worthy of Butterfly McQueen. . . who are also terrorists. So what is the point of this completely unnecessary movie? And why did it win last night?

Regarding the point, one can look to its very nasty ending when Johnny (or in this case Jimmy) Comes Marching Home: Bigelow actually celebrates the idea of a dedicated, fearless military caste, permanently on call. Nothing here to upset the likes of Heinrich Himmler, Roberto D'Aubuisson, Papa Doc Duvalier, Dick Cheney, David Petraeus or Stanley the Manly McChrystal. Why did it win? George Packer of the New Yorker points to it:

Above all, The Hurt Locker is an Iraq movie with a modest agenda and no obvious political views. That, more than anything, is the source of its strength.... Perhaps, with the departure of the Bush administration, the withdrawal of American combat units from Iraqi cities, the attention of the new President shifted to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran...Iraq can start to become a real war, not a symbol of all-consuming evil—the subject of movies that try to be good movies rather than major statements.

Right. So it is a good thing that one of the great crimes of modern history -- the US invasion, destruction, and occupation of Iraq -- is treated "neutrally" with no politics. But of course to treat this

A million Iraqi casualties minimum.
Five million displaced from their own nation.
Complete destruction of Iraq's infrastructure: roads, bridges, telephone systems, oil refineries, gasoline storage tanks, power plants, water-pumping stations and sewage treatment plants, even village water tanks.
Total destruction of what was once among the best education systems in the world, targeting in particular the university system and university professors. (Over 300 professors have been murdered by US sanctioned death-squads.)
Extermination of the oldest culture in the world, beginning with the mass theft of some of the most precious artistic treasures in world history.
The targeting and assassination of archaeologists, writers, painters, calligraphers, and singers. (100 singers have been murdered to date!)
Per the World Health Organization, 70% of Iraqi children have suffered nervous breakdowns.

"neutrally" is as aggressive a political statement as one can make. (Perhaps Bigelow's next project will be her version of Helter Skelter, sort of an updating of Only Angels Have Wings with Charles Manson in the Cary Grant role.)

Aside from being a talented huckster, and a talented. . .  well, let's turn to Mailer and The Deer Park:

Tentatively, she reached out a hand to finger his hair, and at that moment Herman Teppis opened his legs and let Bobby fall to the floor. At the expression of surprise on her face, he began to laugh. "Don't you worry, sweetie," he said, and down he looked at that frightened female mouth, facsimile of all those smiling lips he had seen so ready to serve at the thumb of power, and with a cough, he started to talk. "That's a good girlie, that's a good girlie, that's a good girlie," he said in a mild little voice, "you're an angel darling, and I like you, you're my darling darling, oh that's the ticket," said Teppis.

What otherwise might be the interests of Kathryn Bigelow? The Widowmaker is little but pre-nuke worship of all things martial. There's the by-the-balls calculation and Nieztchean babble of Strange Days. (How stupid can one be about a city, in the face of Angela Bassett's greatness?) The imbecilic Blue Steel somehow mistakes Jamie Lee Curtis for Maria Falconetti. Bigelow finds some memorable images (and the very sexy Jenny Wright) as backdrop for the video version of Tangerine Dream's Near Dark. But it is Point Break  -- her 1991 remake of Buck Angel's Sea Food, Part XIV -- which may be key.

Vampires, surfers, serial killers, cops, drug dealers, Russian spys, and most recently male racist murderers who travel to distant lands for sport. Not a cookie-baker or a mommy in the bunch. Well, hee-haw ~ how butch of you, Kathie. The list reminds me of my old school buddy Ed Bray, who wanted to be liked so much by girls that he became the Mayfair High version of George Constanza (before there was a Seinfeld): he would enlist in whatever he thought would bring him closer to them: ballet class, piano, home economics and fashion courses; Bray even volunteered to be assistant coach on the girls' track team. Didn't work, of course.

So let us congratulate Ms. Bigelow on figuring out how to be close to as many he-men as possible. And let us drink a toast to her no doubt seething sexual life. Now put down the camera.

Let us end with the man who should have directed The Hurt Locker ('though I hear his sex life wasn't so great):

"I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." -- General Smedley Butler