I’m fascinated that you chose five images, which suggest how many thousands more of this exotic sort there were. Did you love it? I think the heist itself is visually almost overpoweringly thrilling, from the shave cream on the alarm system, to the trickle of dust throught the ceiling, and the umbrella there. And they all had ties on, sweating. Catherine Sabouret, that luscious statuesque blonde, died at only 36, and was already a Comedie Francaise actress. And how about the Pierre Grutter and Remi Grutter, faces out of Corsica or something. It seems Dassin has a natural taste and feel for the visually exotic. He also had an incredible cast for ‘Le Loi’: Melina, his lover and then wife, who looks like a goddess, Marcello Mastroianni, Yves Montand and Gina Lollobridgida. That’s late 50s and very episodic, good but not as startling and ‘quickened’ as ‘Rififi’, and they gave it a title for the American release that seems to me just like old Bantam paperbacks at drugstores: ‘Where the Hot Wind Blows’. I guess I mostly know him for ‘Never on Sunday’ before I got into ‘Rififi’, but this may be his most famous film. I think it’s amazing, and that shot of ‘Spaghetti’ tied up in the club is pretty phenomenal, as well as all the incredible street footage.
Yes I did love it — a great movie. Beautifully wrought, with all those great faces as you pointed out previously, duR. An ordinary caper movie would have climaxed with the robbery, and it still would have been terrific because so brilliantly conceived and presented. But then we get the whole battle of the two gangs and that final driving scene through Paris where the le Stephanois is dying but still heroically returning the boy and the loot to the mother. All for naught, making the perfect ending. You know that’s the director Dassin playing the role of Spaghetti — the blacklisted American speaking both Italian and French. I want to watch the heist again — twice somebody accidentally nudges the keys on the piano in that upper room, almost as if the music wants to play but must restrain itself. Half an hour with no dialogue, no music — a ballsy directorial move.
Dassin was indeed one of those big faces himself, he was marvelous as Cesar. That’s MARIE Sabouret as Mado, truly that Gallic severe tall beauty. But literally every single actor, including Ida and Jo’s Wife as well, even the little boy, have personalities. I’m so glad you liked it, though, and yes, you must watch the robbery again, I’ve watched it maybe 10 times now, an unusual practice for me. That piano does indeed have its own personality. Then, there are just incredible images, as when they chloroform the remaining employees in the store, that’s just horrifying. And how about Jean Servais saying ‘Je comprends’ purely crisply and matter-of-factly when Mado spits ‘Jamais!’ after he’s expected she’ll come back to him even after he’s beaten her like that. Even the campy cabaret song is fun, with the shadows on the set, reminded me of some Gilbert Because LPs I get off eBay in 2004, sung by Magali Noel, who is later Gradisca in Fellini Amarcord (incredibly, for this day and time, there is an Italian restaurant on my block called Gradisca, but it’s never looked as good as some others nearby, so I haven’t been.)
Tres macho movie, molto bu9na.
But you know what? It’s not corny when they realize that they are not going to get away with it, because that seen with the ‘ice’ on the kitchen table is marvelous: They have all that wealth for a few minutes–and they’re just the type of pricks who really did enjoy just looking at it and knowing how intricate their work was!
A fine assortment of big long shiny gangster cars on wet Parisian streets, two different strange coffee serving systems, that complicated surgical device for sawing a round hole in the back of the safe, the umbrella of course, the single cloth drawstring bag containing the rocks, the popup clown toy — all manner of magical objects populate this world. The DVD includes an interview with Dassin from when he was in his eighties, looking back with fondness on every aspect of the making-of, every person involved. He said that at Cannes the Americans shunned him for fear of reprisals — all but Gene Kelly, who sought him out and escorted him down the stairs of the Palais in full view of all the photographers.
I woke up thinking about this: Tony beats Mado for being with Grutter while he, Tony, was in the slammer. After this Tony decides that he’s in on the heist, not just the planned B&E of the display window but the robbing the safe. Why? Up until the beating Tony is pathetic: he loses in the opening card game, relying on his old pal Jo to come up with the cash. Presumably beating Mado restores Tony’s sense of potency, and perhaps the robbery also is intended as a proof to Mado that he’s still got what it takes, that he’s as much a badass as Grutter. When Grutter sees the belt welts on Mado’s body, he realizes that these are marks of Tony’s reclaimed ownership of Mado, and so he vows revenge.
Revenge then is a prime motive: the jewels = Mado. But Mado herself? She arranges for the drug dealer to deliver some dope to the guy who was holding the kid hostage, and Tony follows the dealer to the hideaway. So apparently, even though Mado knew the town where the hideout was located, and even though she knew how to find the drug dealer, she didn’t know where the hideout itself was located? Or is it important to the story that Mado not appear at the hideout during the big confrontation, to get her out of the way? Anyhow, other than setting Tony on the trail to the hideout, Mado has no further involvement in the story after Grutter discovers that Tony beat her. It’s as if Tony set her free from the story. Tony didn’t really reclaim her as his femme; in effect his beating her is enough for him to realize something about himself and where his real desire lies. After all, he doesn’t fuck Mado during the beating scene — that’s not what he wants. His desire is to be a tough guy — to be rififi. So Mado’s main function in the story is to be the object of desire for the two gang leaders. But that desire is sequentially displaced, from her to the jewels, from the jewels to being each other, from being each other to killing each other. From killing each other to being killed by each other.
Lots of good ideas in that analysis, although I see it somewhat more simply, at least the Mado part, although Tony/Pierre is excellent, I hadn’t thought it through that way, and now remember that Tony shoots Pierre just for the lonely enjoyment of it. As for Mado herself, part of the difficulty comes in from Sabouret’s very classical acting: Although when Tony is first interrogating her after prison, she says she went with the ‘gigolo’ because ‘I thought I was in love with him’, which is not exactly the brightest strategy, and not terribly credible when you’re already living in a world looser than your own manners and even straight posture (Magali Noel is much less formal, much more at home in the club than gorgeous Sabouret–you’re even a bit surprised to see her actual doing stretching at a rehearsal, as in the photo you posted; it’s almost as though that kind of club wouldn’t have rehearsals.
But since Mado is, in fact, in Grutter’s world, Sabouret’s ‘proper formality’ does make some sense, in that she could retain dignity while still knowing that Remi and others were involved with drugs. She couldn’t be there otherwise. And when she says ‘I heard about the boy, that’s disgusting’, she fills out an interesting character, full of some of the contradictions I most like–you know, this kind of stern logic is not nearly always there in resentful or jealous or whatever kinds of characters, sometimes they won’t make the difference between a seriously horrible occurrence like the boys’ kidnapping, and an ugly one–her beating by Tony. I hadn’t thoght of how many times a wronged character will not transcend his/her own comparatively lesser wrongdedness because s/he would rather hold onto it at any cost, revenge at any cost. Mado knows that the great possibility of the boy’s being murdered is far more important than even her own hateful beating. The more I think about Sabouret, the word that comes to mind of her presence is ‘grandeur’.
You’re right, I am underestimating the importance of Mado in her own right, hollowing her out too much. Tony and Mado both uphold a set of standards, even formal ones in Tony’s case when he reminds Macaroni of “the rule” before executing him. Both he and Mado seek the safety of the boy above all, even if it means loss of the loot. When Tony didn’t call Jo before getting on the Metro to follow the dope dealer to the hideaway, he knew that Jo might well panic and hand over the dough to Grutter. It’s almost as if Tony and Mado are the boy’s parents — the boy’s name is Tonio after all. Jo is panicky, his wife is passively waiting at the window for something to happen, but Mado and Tony DO SOMETHING. They’ve both overcome their impotence in order to act in accord with the “stern logic” (fine phrase) of right being, as you say transcending their wrongedness and egos.
I believe I’ll watch the whole movie again before sending it back to the library.
I was just going to tell Rififi Cinemusique that if she feels like offloading her piss and cum, she could do it with someone HER AGE, such as you, Eloise. She comes here to politely discuss old movies, and then she goes to the Parody Center to unload her sexual frustration on ME. In this way the Parody Center has become her personal toilet, while it was designed as a general toilet for the post-Continental academia. You could HELP Eloise instead of playing dumb.
Dejan, I only recently began to be fully aware of what my own thoughts on this Troll Business are, and that occurred from Dominic’s brilliant paragraph placed in a larger post to which it didn’t seem all the directly related. The beauty of it was that it didn’t matter if he had done any of that kind of trolling himself (he says he hasn’t, and if he has, he doesn’t like something about it, or he wouldn’t have explained it so lucidly.) That and some of the things that k-punk said, to my astonishment, have made me realize that I am definitely on that side, despite other disagreements of major significance, and not on yours (you said ‘I don’t agree with Comaradesse Fisher.). Okay, as I said at CPC yesterday, you need both me and the trolls to play off each other, but now that I see you as a troll too, there’s little for me to do except pointing out that you are saying, at least to me, only one thing: “I, a TROLL”. Now, there are lots of self-righteous defenses of trolling, but I don’t buy it. I’ve been called a troll, but I’ve never been an anonymous one even with crazy temp. names, so that if I was horrible, at least I was standing behind my horribleness. Your little trolls at CPC are ALL ONE TROLL to me, and that’s all I have to say about that. i am not a Qlipoth believer ‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said? What matter who’s speaking?’ In their case, of course there is no matter, because all the Qlipothians are notably undistinguished.
It’s pronounced not as Qlipoth, but as KLJIPOT (Albanian accent).
I was just about to publish a collage which I made of you as the Black Swan stumbling over his own overly LONG SCHLONG, but decided that I still do need your services because the stats report Missuz has been lurking in the waters, which hasn’t happened in ages – unless she’s using another spy server to access the Parody Center. This could indicate that the Cobra is orchestrating a Trolling action of unprecedented proportions, which could include triggering your delusional psychosis around Nick Land, and all kinds of disgusting stuff like that.
Stop pushing my face into the Dominique Fox and Mark Fisher FAECES. They are both cowards, who can’t admit that they’ve been supporting third-rate clownery as if it were a revolutionary religion. I don’t give a flying fuck what they think about Trolling.
“I don’t give a flying fuck what they think about Trolling.”
Until the trolls were losing and having to revert to str8 homophobia (which doesn’t bother me at all), because they weren’t selling as trolls anymore. As one will notice, Mark Fisher’s suppression of Comments Function FAECES was quickly adopted, despite the extreme embarassment of such rolling over as seen by the rest of the ‘world’. Not that the trolls didn’t virally rhizomize immediately elsewhere…lucky you, John.
Was trying to remember some more of those images that had that ‘never-seen-before-or-since’ in ‘Rififi’, and one of the best is the lowering of the safe with Jo underneath. Oh man, you start thinking about quickly-snapped backs.
Also, there was something I think you picked up the first time that I still haven’t quite figured out: When Tony leaves Mado to go get the train, there is some other guy, and then there is a second platform, and some attempt to go unnoticed–I wasn’t sure if someone was being followed or not, but watching it a couple of times, I still couldn’t quite get it. You mentioned this earlier when we were discussing the immediately preceding scene. Also strange was Jo’s wet hair after Grutter (I believe) shoots and kills him, and Tony strokes his head sadly. It’s not that important, but I couldn’t figure out why it was so drenched, it wasn’t raining, I don’t think.
That was a good choice of the little boy holding the gun to the bleeding-to-death Tony that you put. One of the more obvious images, it’s still pretty good. And Louise attitude in the final scene is interesting too, she sees Tony as no hero, but rather just as having expedited something–not that he would have seen it as more than that either, of course.
I’ve watched only the first half again, so I will attend to these details when I watch the second half. In one of the earliest scenes Jo identifies Tony as Tonio’s godfather, so Tony has serious mafioso responsibility. He needs to “man up” from his sad-sack cardplaying loser self in the first scene. So the little family scene where Tony gives Tonio a toy penguin is as important as his encounter with Mado. I love the street scenes as they’re casing the joint — the little details of the florist, the newspaper delivery, the cop on his beat, the concierge, the alleyway. The safe lowering was really odd on first viewing because I expected Macaroni to pick the lock from the front, not to drill in from the back. It’s odd that the crewmembers don’t speak, since if they kept their voices down they’d have made no more noise than the hammers and drills they deployed. It’s an aesthetic isn’t it, a respect for the pure technique. They’ve planned it so well, they’re so skilled at their trades, that it would be crude to spoil the purity of savoir-faire with mere talk.
The little boy with the gun fits with the other 3 images: the finger to the temple, the leaking hole in the ceiling, Macaroni about to be gunned down. I’m a cine-collage artist! An obvious image — you mean that Tonio in effect shot Tony because rescuing Tonio is what got Tony shot? Tonio is also a kind of double for Tony, so it’s a kind of suicide gesture: the young innocent will eventually kill himself by taking up guns.
I see Parodycenter has gone comment-free. Milla might be a naif — we’ll see what develops.
That is a strange coincidence. As an over-the-top accelerationist Jim Carrey is perfectly cast as the Black Swan. He’s often better in serious roles, e.g. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
As a sarcastic European I can’t cope with his code, the ”Looney Tunes” – it just doesn’t jell for me – but he is quite smart, and he was really good in THE CABLE GUY. But here it’s interesting how the contortions of his face, which have been his trademark, and which are related to the animation technique ”stretch and squash”, seem to suggest the embodiment of the swan, in a way that is actually better than Natalie Portman’s performance.
Eloise I don’t know if you read the commenting at the CPC but I was thoroughly shaken by PSYCHO IV, and it related (in a Jungian way) with the themes currently being discussed. You can watch the movie on youtube, but to cut a long story short, it turns out that Norman’s ”Oedipus complex” is actually the drama of attachments, understood not necessarily as libidinal investments, but more deeply, as people’s inability to give up – to let go. Norman is actually the psychologist for his victims – even as he’s being cast as the patient. He helps them to leave life.
The Black Swan movie is almost self-parodying — I told you before that the heavy melodramatic plot elements and CGI made me laugh, distracting me from all the intense bodily affect it was building. In the SNL skit I love the director too as the sophisticated but monotonous European: white swan good, black swan not so much…
“Norman is actually the psychologist for his victims – even as he’s being cast as the patient. He helps them to leave life.”
That sounds ripe for parody too. I can picture the initial free session, where Norman is explaining his praxis to the prospective analysand. But I agree that it fits into the discussion. This glorification of hysteria, this explosion of the self into a chaos of passion-vectors shooting all over the screen, this leaving of human life in order to accelerate into posthuman life — there is a bit of Loony Tunes in that, no?
Here’s the main cast. I hadn’t thought throught that maybe 2/3 of the main characters even have ‘rififi’ names, although some, like Mario and Ida don’t, and Viviane is just ‘Viviane’.
Jean Servais…Tony le Stéphanois
Carl Möhner … Jo le Suedois
Robert Manuel … Mario Ferrati
Janine Darcey … Louise le Suedois
Pierre Grasset … Louis Grutter aka Louis le Tatoué
Robert Hossein … Remi Grutter
Marcel Lupovici … Pierre Grutter
Dominique Maurin … Tonio le Suedois
Magali Noël … Viviane
Marie Sabouret … Mado les Grands Bras
Claude Sylvain … Ida Ferrati
Jules Dassin … Cesar le Milanais (as Perlo Vita)
The most important women were very different. Mado is sensual, yet severe and with a formal style. You wouldn’t have had one of the tough guys say ‘Sit your moneymaker down’ the way they did to Viviane. And, strangely, both Ida and Louise have their own magnetism, even though they’re wives and mothers. Claude Sylvain as Ida is especially effective when she and Mario are murdered by Remi.
Glad you brought back to mind that ‘shooting the dead horse’ that Tony darkly enjoys, unsmiling, when he shoots the already-dead Pierre (he wouldn’t have shot him had he just been on the verge and in great pain.) I thought again of the kitchen table rocks: That really was their jouissance, because their talk about what they were going to do in the future with the money had little muscle to it. It was that moment they wanted, and in a sense, probably found the rest of the unravelling exciting and, to them, logical even: That they’d all die wasn’t that important to them, I don’t think they ever gave that much thought. The puny little money-exchanger was very funny, going on about the plastic clown just to fill the time. ‘Magical objects’ is exactly right, and that is something we can probably assume informed Dassin’s choice of environment in real life. After all, he got Melina Mercouri, who is, in height and figure, much like Sabouret, although much more Mediterranean and less severe, of course. But Melina was not garden-variety, even for Greece.
While PSYCHO was all about cutting, about penetration and castration, this one – and this I found most interesting – has these extended murder scenes which play out more like agonized Greek tragedies, than a horror film. There’s also an interesting twist with the aged Norman recounting his life on a radio show, hosted by a black woman (sic!) and you sense that the black woman is in tune with Norman because she understands how his mother was ruined by the violent patriarchal society, by the prohibition on her desire, which she transferred on Norman. The film in many ways broke the ”iron rules” of its genre, which is even more admirable given that the scriptwriter is Joseph Stefano, who penned the first movie for Hitchcock.
Eloise Riffifi is obviously having his day with this movie discussion, and the post after all is dedicated to it, so I will postpone the Psycho and the Black Swan for another time. I haven’t seen the film, so can’t comment. Unlike Riffifi, I have the grace to let her have her day – a luxury she never affords me.
Those are good rififi-names. The author of the novel has one too: Auguste le Breton. Per Wikipedia, he was a WW1 war baby: his soldier father was a clown, an “auguste,” and he was born in Bretagne, hence the name. So the plastic clown in the film conveys self-referential meaning. He grew up in an orphanage, and he became a small-time hood with the French Mafia. He turned to writing when his daughter was born. In the DVD interview, Dassin said he couldn’t understand Breton’s novel since it was written almost entirely in street slang, so he had to have someone read it to him.
I agree that the high point for the burglars is opening the bag and looking at the jewels. I’d have posted the reveal from this scene as a screen shot but it doesn’t look as iconic in isolation.
“{you mean that Tonio in effect shot Tony because rescuing Tonio is what got Tony shot?”
Either that, or just that it emphasizes the one saintly thing this tough guy finally does all the way (and it’s hard on him to keep driving.) It underscores the martyrdom to see Tonio holding a gun to Tony’s head, even though it was Tony who saved him.
Wow, you know, that Remi was an incredible dissolute, pure brashly-goodlooking snake with the sharp need for the heroin and then ready to cut throats. They also don’t show Ida been slashed as they’re leaving, which is a brilliant dash of nonchalance on Dassin’s and the editors’ part. Only in subsequent viewings did I know that she’d been killed with Mario because Tony says ‘you’ll find two bodies’.
“It’s an aesthetic isn’t it, a respect for the pure technique.”
Absolutely, they are thoroughly adoring every moment, even though Macaroni is probably already having stirrings about his rendezvous later with Viviane. That is so hilarious that the whole plot is blown because Macaroni cannot restrain himself even one night from schtupping Viviane–and THIS bitch is, like, totally inappreciative!
On second thought, I’d say the not speaking is both tough-guy code for ‘their sacred’ (which is crime) and also maybe a theatrical/cinematic coloration to make a sort of ‘sound’ for the whole segment–you can feel the real time just as strongly here as in ‘High Noon’. But the reality of the drills is dealt with, by wrapping one of them at one point, as I recall, as well as the shave cream we mentioned. Yes, I also love the memorization of places on the street in preparation.
“not speaking is both tough-guy code for ‘their sacred’ (which is crime) and also maybe a theatrical/cinematic coloration to make a sort of ‘sound’ for the whole segment–you can feel the real time just as strongly here as in ‘High Noon’.”
I like that a lot. Filling time — with dialogue, action, scenery — speeds it up; emptying time slows it down. Emptying out the sound and background concentrates attention to each specific movement, facial gesture, and object in that heist scene — this is part of the sacred you mention, the imbuing of everything with a kind of ritualized sanctity. But I’m just adding to what you already said so succinctly. I’m trying to think of analogous maneuvers in writing, and your Robbe-Grillet comes to mind. Empty out the dialogue and the action the busy-ness, and attention is drawn to the objects and gestures as if they were re-enactments of some archetypal scene pulled up from the Spiritus Mundi.
And what your new mention of Robbe-Grillet adds is that emptying some of the fields doesn’t mean that emptied energy disappears, but rather that it’s redistributed to the surface, making the surface have more radiance, or maybe even ‘radiation’. I hadn’t quite incorporated this all the way till just now, because the emphasis on surfaces always seemed to necessarily also mean ‘shallow’. But this is a place where ‘shallow’ and ‘surface’ aren’t the same. In fact, it’s a sexualization quite like the always-new-and-lovely phenomenon many of us know as ‘the erection’, when the blood adds new dimensions (in most cases) to the PENIS and even makes the BALLS move. Tee hee. But the word that comes to mind for these enhanced and prominent images–perhaps even more in Dassin than in Robbe-Grillet–is ‘charged’. The hardness of the ‘rocks’ is very attractive, more so than an idyll by the sea (in some cases), although I’m not going to take the jewels to mean a ‘permanent erection’, even if diamonds are Marilyn Monroe’s best friend…
Some of the images in Robbe-Grillet’s films will have this charged quality, as the ‘baroque rooms’ and ‘heavy paintings’, while in the novels they aren’t as fixed, because it’s easy to re-use an element for one tributary of narrative off what had seemed the main river, as in ‘La Maison de Rendezvous’, where the slit in the miniskirt of the Hong Kong girl, or the etinceles of the breaking glass, diplomats, drug sales, or the stairway up from the street, and all the others, can be combined and re-arranged in many ways (and are), whereas the medium of film even forces ‘Marienbad’ to stick to something that is not too self-indulgently unintelligible without enormous monkish scrutiny. And the images in ‘Rififi’ are much stronger than even the serialized ones in ‘Marienbad’, the only well-known Robbe-Grillet film (which one can even easily forget is a Resnais film as well, and no wonder: It definitely bears Robbe-Grillet’s stamp a bit more than Resnais’s, even though ‘Muriel’ has some of this hardness).
But it’s surely this ‘charged object’ that occurs with elminating certain elements so that the sound-world, for example, is silence, and you can watch the heist as a glamorous version of when I’ve watched, mesmerized, plumbers work on the pipes in my bathroom and kitchen at various points over the years.
My dear NBC–did you know that, in the old days, when ROBIN MACKAY had his bleug ‘London Belongs To Me’, we were actually in talks then. Now, that’s a somewhat strangely-launched sentence, so I’ll continue by saying that my above response to John includes materials that ROBIN MACKAY used in a rapturous and passionate speech he gave one Saturday afternoon at a London CAFFayyy on skins and surfaces. Now, later on, when I wouldn’t stick to the ‘glamour of Los Angeles’ and went on to those pesky literal physically-fucking bodies of ILLEGAL DANCES OF NEW YORK CITY, he jumped ship and forced labour of 4 new chapters on us, the painters’ works of which are now being scanned by one of the largest scanners in the world, which is owned by the City of Lausanne. If there is ‘wealthy Swiss write-off’ involved here, we count ourselves as aaaaonly TOO 4chan-ate.
‘She sings each night in some cafe,
in her search to find wealth and fame
They say Michael(a) has gone and changed his name.’
That bit of business delightfully finesses as per my usual, I’m glad you liked the film, and please do perorate, mon cher. All is well now that one never even takes a sneak peak at Urbanatomy.com. I think we should also–although I can’t speak for John, of course–be very interested to know if you think that, while Mark Fisher’s thesis on Trolls is deeply flawed, that it would be petty to conclude that it wasn’t just as good a starting point for something as was ROBIN MACKAY’s early encouragement that I prepare something for Collapse, i.e., just because your ‘kerplunck’ did little more than sketch out a blueprint, it is quite possible that from this we have been able to deduce that the essential quality of The Troll is a kinship with The Lesb’an. Kiss-kiss.
I’m thinking about the relative importance of objects vis-a-vis procedures in achieving this sense of time passing. What captivated in the heist were the detailed, sequential, purposive manipulations of objects. One of the things I really liked about The Wire was this same attention to procedure: the drug buys, the recruitment of dealers, the wiretaps, the entrapments, and so on.
We watched Social Network last night, the movie about the Facebook guy, and I was struck by the complete disregard for the actual work. It’s as if Mark Zuckerberg had an occasional insight, and consequently as if by magic the software is written, spreads across the galaxy, and spawns a $50 billion company. Of course the intent of the filmmaker was to create a milieu of shallow speed that mirrors Facebook itself. But it’s a kind of one-note piece: nonstop rapid-fire dialogue delivered now at a bar, now in a Harvard dorm room, now in an office, now in a VC board room. It never slows down enough to see any sort of geeky obsession with the actual writing of code or making of deals.
Reservoir Dogs is a sort of anti-heist movie in that it completely bypasses the actual prep and performance of the jewelry store robbery, focusing almost exclusively on the conversations among the thieves before and especially after the heist takes place. But Tarantino focuses with geeky obsession on these conversations and the characters who deliver the lines. The dialogue and the characters move slowly and methodically, as if this sequence of conversations is itself a procedural.
“Of course the intent of the filmmaker was to create a milieu of shallow speed that mirrors Facebook itself. But it’s a kind of one-note piece: nonstop rapid-fire dialogue delivered now at a bar, now in a Harvard dorm room, now in an office, now in a VC board room. It never slows down enough to see any sort of geeky obsession with the actual writing of code or making of deals.”
Yes, that sounds lazy cheap expressionism, but it’s also true that the objects involved in writing of facebook code are not interesting or beautiful in themselves, hence the tendency to ‘give in to Facebook’. Jodi has some link to this guy the other day who spends all his time on these geeky boards, and made one called ‘Why Wasn’t I Consulted’. I realized I still was way behind on all this social networking, and just like God, observed my handiwork at such negligence and was ‘well-pleased’. It’s much more the fashion these days to ‘go software’ anyway, not ‘hardware’. I think Dominic has sometimes written stuff about ‘jouissance’ he gets from this sort of thing professionally and personally, but he cancels this out to a degree by writing real poetry and being a good musician, so that’s not even convincing; the rest of the bleugers aren’t interested in the hardward at all, and this is usually limited to when they can’t get their system going, there’s a virus, and they feel as though amputated. Otherwise, it’s mostly along the lines of grimy endless Arpegian rants that ‘matter’, thinking made easy by just bullshitting your way through endless rants and by now not even correcting typos. Real shit.
I just wrote that up because it seems of a different order than physical work of great intricacy such as you see the gangsters up to in ‘Rififi’. If you’re honest with yourself, you see the beauty of the criminals’ exquisite work and are even glad they can enjoy it up to a point while also seeing that a few of them have decent sides to them–and there’s a difference in these: Tony has a decent side to him, but from what we can see, Pierre and Remi are much meaner still. There’s a vague ‘criminal brotherhood’ with Tony, Jo and Mario, there’s nothing but cold blood with the Grutters. So you can see their intricate work just as you see Dassin’s own work one structure distanced: Both the thievery in itself (as if it were a reality), and Dassin’s rendering of it are Works of Art. Given the casualties that occur because of Macaroni’s sexual incontinence, it would have actually been quite preferable had they gotten away with the crime.
I’ll just believe you about ‘Reservoir Dogs’, since I have no intention of ever seeing any more Tarantino. ‘Inglourious Basters’ was one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, just rotten and decomposed. The Facebook movie I’d never see, but off-topic, I may get time to see ‘The Fighter’, with C. Bale and M. Wahlberg, the only feature film to come out in the last year that might be worth an afternoon. Although going to the movies is not something I enjoy at all anymore. I saw the B’way show ‘In the Heights’ a few weeks ago (I imagine it toured Denver in the last year), and it’s about to close here as plans for the movie version go forward, and that was money well-spent, as it was the freshest show I’ve seen on B’way in some 30 years. This was something I had thought impossible, and even gave me a measure of hope against the JUST DESSERTS OF THE REAL. Unmentionable has a contemplative post about the Tragic Magnetism of Using the 2nd Person in Her Great Novels…
“but he cancels this out to a degree by writing real poetry and being a good musician”
That’s not quite right. He himself may well find the software code ‘poetic’, but the real poetry transcends that, and is somewhat like Hardware to the software of his professional writing. For my perception, this a fortunate failure of his anti-Phallucism, as it shows muscle over and against his best possible moral intentions, which would, like everybody else’s, be the quick and easy road to hell (bad hell.)
In Rififi, Dassin shows us the details of the procedures as real work, real craftsmanship. The tools possess a kind of pragmatic elegance and the practitioners have acquired proficiency. But Tony uses trial and error to outwit the alarm, the burglars sweat, they bump into the piano, they physically have to clear the rubble out of the cleverly deployed umbrella, they break the drill bit. Lowering a safe onto a squatting guy’s back is not glamorous. In the Kill Bill movies Tarantino exults over the objects and procedures of martial arts, but it’s more of a fetishistic obsession, with bright lighting and sharp focus and exaggerated dance choreography. And he’s self-consciously, ironically smirky about it too. I don’t care for this sort of treatment.
I read Ads Without Products’ post on second person. On the one hand it seems that he’s spontaneously wanting to write in this mode, but then he argues that it’s a bourgeois conspiracy of writer with reader while at the same time worrying that it’s not what the (bourgeois) agents and editors want. As in Rififi, one would hope that art and craft would serve as final arbiter of how best to proceed.
I recall that one my earliest forays into the theory blogs took me to Long Sunday and a post written by Ads about some Beatles song. I wrote a comment, not intensely thought out but on-topic and friendly. “Your analysis fails,” Ads’ reply began, then he brusquely told me why. Much too late I thought of a good response: “Fucking empiricist.” Ever since then I have seethed with ressentiment toward Ads. I hadn’t yet realized how seriously people take this “cultural studies” business. Probably there are dissertations written every year about “Penny Lane” and so on. Anyhow, with respect to second person, you recall that recently I put up the beginning of the new novel in which action begins in a bar with 2nd person present then, as soon as the characters walk out onto the street, the voice abruptly shifts to 3rd person preterite. I had hoped that those damned lit teachers at the writers’ group would have commented on this move, but they said nothing. Useless losers.
Eloise if you could inform Rififi that the comments have been closed at the CPC for the express purpose of staving off her abusive fan mailing. She can resume employment if she provides at least three funny stints and a review of The Black Swan. Otherwise her contract is on suspension until further notice.
If you do re-open them, I shall do nothing but talk about THE TROLL, nothing else, absolutely and positively nothing–and how I intend to extermine him(them, whatever, it doesn’t matter, you’re all garbage when you’re trolls). And the minute you DO reopen, I intend on being just as determined as I already was, as I was making real advances, concentrating with every word only on the TROLL–which includes you and whatever other gerbils have been doing that shit, whether or not once overestimated (and I certainly had to have been, because there is nothing worthwhile in your stupid TROLL SHOW.) None of your fatuous, hysterical lacnanian reading means anything, it’s just stupid puppetry to amuse yourself, and I am personally not interested in whether you are amused or not. And you even wrote the crudest kind of parody of the Tucson Massacre,with ‘brainsplatter’ talk. That’s something that even I don’t do, and when I wrote one clever piece of parody with a link, you didn’t even pick up on it, so you open up the comments at your own risk. I intend never to write at CPC again with anything other than the express purpose of continuing to force the troll into the pale writing she had begun to use as she began to run out of tricks. (and she and YOU had.) Your very plea to John shows how unbelievably vapid you are. NO WONDER the trolls ended up so desperate they became HOMOPHOBIA-SPOUTING: No longer able to get at me, he/they had to get at somebody, so they chose your own Maidenform.
That’s fine with me, darling, and I know you will be alright. To name just one of your rich options, you can develop a warm friendship with Milla here – talk about GAWN WITH THE WIND all day lon’, and how regrettably, Tara seems to be going through a rough patch at the moment. Lord knows I need a break, for I have held a part-time job as the moderator of Your Sagging Testicles way too long.
As for the Arizona brainsplatter, that was no parody: in a country where you can walk the streets in the daylight and see people wearing guns, nothing else could be expected than occasional outbursts of violent lunacy. Why should Americans expect SYMPATHY for this?
Then shuddup. Nobody wants your ‘sympathy’, only your absence. Milla is just one of your trolls anyway, the style very recognizable. But good I could order you to keep the comments closed, because the Vitale thing was the lamest you ever did. As far as Serbia goes, I am simply never going to be interested in your lame patriotic kitsch, to quote the obviously schizy milla, who was trolling the minute you closed comments–nobody, including ‘lafayette’, gives a shit about your endless Serbian Male-Fat-Tit Lament. So put on a goddam bra already. The Milla is also an obvious Lesb’an troll, but from parts further away, she is a mod someplace most likely, but again, who cares. Only I can explain trolls. I don’t even like Mikhail now that I know she’s a troll.
You need a ‘break’? Sure you do. That’s why you were begging me to come back and look at your tattered girdle that you were too tired to rinse this mawnin’. TROLLS ARE LESB’AN ARMPITS.
“Lowering a safe onto a squatting guy’s back is not glamorous. ”
Not glamorous, and neither were their little mistakes, but at least there was never any silly fussiness, i.e., if they have to use trial and error, they’re still very impressive in all of their movements. If it were literally flawless, we might think we were watching Thomas Jefferson! Tbey never let the little stuff get in their way, and their sweating and the clearing out of the rubble is shown, but when they do have to fix something, they bring the same aura of expertise to it, and don’t ‘freak out’. That’s why the actual heist is beautiful start to finish, when they managed to get the hole in the safe is marvelous especially.
Yes, Ads is totally pretentious a fraud. At least Nick Land can write drug-addled pieces that show a lot of talent, and you know, this ‘2nd person’ bullshit is like everything the Rififi thieves never do–they are criminals, but no one would ever think to tell a single one of them to ‘shit or get off the pot’. In Illegal Dances, I use first, second and third persons and quite freely for the same person. I don’t give a shit about what the rules, written or unwritten, are, or even if (in this book) whether some of it seems unpolished. Btw, I didn’t even notice when you shifted, but the slight confusions that ensue can be part of the ‘play’ such as Robbe-Grillet also likes to cause by re-joining different bits of narrative to show another possibility. In this way, R-G achieves something like what happens in dreams, and it’s very pleasurable once you get used to it (I think R-G always requires a bit of effort to get going, but after that, it’s not that difficult.)
And the most ridiculous thing about this character is that his identity was kept so secret, as if that were maybe Edmund White or Gore Vidal with a ‘secret bleug’. When I finally found out who he was, it was just absurd: He wasn’t even as famous as k-punk or Nina Power! His ‘charisma’ had come from writing occasionally good posts (but which he almost sabotaged by then writing others which cancelled those out–there’s something seriously wrong when you have not only not a ‘foolish consistency’, but rather instead a ‘total inconsistency’ and then demand constant pampering) and also from remaining anonymous, although many of his friends (who then became enemies, some of them, in any case) knew who he was. As ‘persona non grata’ to many bleugers, I knew I could never ask them and expect them to tell me, but I was surprised that with all the polemics he did on k-punk, that the latter didn’t ‘out him’. And then I find that his real is NEVER mentioned anywhere, NEVER. Of course, Arpege went to the bat for him, because she loves that he trashed k-punk. I’m afraid I’ve never found k-punk charismatic, but his Troll Essay I do have to admit is important. He was just saying ‘do your serious work first, at least’, and maybe then, if you must troll, troll (he didn’t say that, I’m just improvising.) I take it any a different direction, but even if trolling is sometimes necessary (as with Mikhail doing it with Harman, could be, you know), mainly it’s just cowardly. I’m much happier at having taken the drubbing I’ve gotten with my identity known than be like these shrinking violets who insulted me while hiding under their mama’s skirts.
”I don’t even like Mikhail now that I know she’s a troll”
Do you realize that even MISSUZ was able to hold down more temp jobs than you did – first as Missuz’s butt girl, then as Jodianne’s pet hick, later as Dominique’s fag hag, Mikhail’s third violin, and now as Eloise’s cinemusique teacher??? None of them not once offered a fixed-term position, so now wonder you’re constantly DRIFTING THROUGH THE GUTTERS.
You’re quite right, and you should certainly feel free to delete any of mine, but Dejan won’t stop doing this. If he wants to do it he should reopen comments, and take his chances, instead of fucking up your bleug. If I were you I’d delete every one of mine and Dejan’s posts that weren’t about Rififi on this thread.
Yes, it’s all easy for me. So you take your chances anywhere, I’ve already told John he can delete me (even if he just deleted my responses to you, it would make yours look idiotic, that would be find. I should note to John that emails are OUT with this character, so if she doesn’t want to reopen comments–and I hope she doesn’t–then just delete as you wish. She doesn’t care either, it’s just that there is a difference now that I won’t listen to anything except the FACT OF TROLL. I WON’T HAVE TROLLS IN MY LIFE!
“worrying that it’s not what the (bourgeois) agents and editors want.”
That’s the part that ALWAYS sticks out like a sore thumb.
Sorry I didn’t notice the change from 2nd to 3rd person, esp. since I do that in my real writing all the time myself. I think that when I read yours I just found it natural to think it was the same person, the way all ‘3 persons’ are in mine, and got stuck on the two pianos–wanted clarity on whether it was a GRAND or not!
I found what it is, and I find ITS A MAD MAD WORLD the best example.
For the ballerina dildo bitch: I will reinstate the comments ON CONDITION that even as you may continue shitting about the Trolls, 1) you have to help mount the Christina Vitale character, who will be this year’s parody target; 2) I want a detailed examination of the Kljipot conversation which instituted Ms. Edge, including a structural analysis of Missuz’s strategic thinking; 3) you will fight Lafayette ON YOUR OWN without identifying me with Lafayette. Should any of the terms listed above be breached, your contract will be terminated for the upcoming three months.
Out of curiosity, has Jodi Dean stopped writing altogether on her own blog and become a consolidator? I don’t stop in at I Cite often, but it seems that all posts are now lifted from other sources. Not that I have a problem, inasmuch as screengrabs are likewise lifted. Also, I was picturing a whimsical Dr. Zamalek post where he imagines GWTW being remade as a heist picture, maybe with Scarlett and Rhett assembling a crew to steal back from the Yankees all the furnishings they stole from Tara.
“but the stability, order and obedience to law and many good things that has gone with the USSR.’
John, I think here we have the makings of a wonderful new Dr. Zamalek post, since nobody wants ‘Gone With the Wind II’ as a movie about nostalgia for Miss Stalin, although…when I was living down on the Plantation, I often longed for the gulag–the exquisite pain and severity, the canned dog food that the humans were allowed to eat, the 15 people per room, all the bounty of bare-light-bulb living that we wuh ou-wah-selves deNIED!!! and so UNFAIRLY! Socialism for White People in Alabama NOW!!!!
Maybe we can work in something about the Haitians welcoming Baby Doc back home, longing for the good old days of the Tonton Macoute. I’m sure we’d need to give up too much ownership to the investors for this production to be worth our while.
Eloisa Ukraine was one of those TART REPUBLICS who decided to disentangle from the Soviet Union because they saw how the wrapping of MARS BARS glistened in happy Western commercials, while milk and honey flowed from the expensive interiors of DYNASTY and DALLS*, and lesb’ans were allowed to be themselves, all of which so REFRESHING compared to the greyness of the Stalinist landscape – kind of like Slovenlia, only Slovenlia always had Austro-Hungarian pedigree, which Ukraine doesn’t have in the least, so Ukraine ended up in a total shithole. All these slave statelets now lament leaving the selfsame Soviet Union they so loathed, but it’s too goddamn late and they will have to accept their career as American prostitutes, which is perhaps just desserts for their stupidity. Ukraine does have some of the world’s most astonishing women, so they often end up marrying overseas, or flashing their tits in some Hugh Heffner production. Which could be a sign of hope for dear Milla, that is, if she’s wise enough to drop the Melanie shtick, and sell her assets with Scarlett’s, erm, talent for forgetfulness.
* speaking of this I just discovered this hilarious Dutch song from the 80s: ”vakantie’s toch niet alles, want je hebt Dynasty en Dallas” (vacation isn’t everything cause you have Dynasty and Dallas) – written for lower middle class hicks who can’t afford even a cheap vacation in Turkey
Dr Sinthome just used the expression ”relata” in the increasingly hilarious debate between the process bottoms and the object tops, of whom the Temptress is the clinical one wile dr. Sinthome retains humanity despite her obnoxious preachiness. Anyhow some process bottom called Illuminati or something wrote a panegiric to Avatar, naming it an instance of deeply ingrained all-American panphysicism; the bottom is apparently a good friend of Kvondique. Meanwhile Christina Vitale is barely able to hide her vicious hatred of the narcissistic cat, whom she desires feverishly. All this extreme soap content is covered by laborious and deadly boring ”cultivated dialogue” so that throughout all the merciless bitching everyone keeps apologizing to the other, and emphasizing how they’re not pulling at each other’s hair, but just having a girlie talk.
But the situation with the USSR was different from Yugoslavia. After the Baltic countries seceded from the Soviet Union, Russia was next: a power move of Russian SFSR President Yeltsin over USSR President Gorbachev. Once Russia left, the USSR couldn’t really survive: that was Yeltsin’s intent. When Russia bailed, Ukraine followed suit and joined them in a rapid neoliberal overhaul. The rest of the republics soon tipped over like dominoes.
That’s just a formal difference, not a real difference. Ukrainians could ve toppled Yeltsin if they wanted to, but they believed he would bring them to Western gold. And now that Russia’s getting their shit together, Ukraine could rejoin Russia instead of whining in the mud.
According to the WordPress stats, 16 January 2011 was the BUSIEST DAY EVER on Ktismatics. The previous high was 29 January 2010, when this post was new. Thank you for your support.
That would make sense. Dejan was spouting all the bullshit, and I was writing a lot, plus his comments had been suppressed: If you look at his stats, they plummeted to half of their normal one day after he suppressed comments. Now he should just delete the whole bleug. Obviously I do have a following, but I didn’t know it, because before Dejan showed the stats, he told me that they had remained the same the 6 months I never wrote over there. I don’t know nor care if that’s true or not. Even ads is trying to tweak me in his posts, but I don’t care to respond. btw, your friend’s story about how he was about to reveal his name but ‘decided against it’ was very like ads’s own way of going about things, although I know it’s not the same ‘person’ behind either troll. Rather, why tell such a story? One should just continue as a troll or not, but how ‘you almost did something’ is like ads’s ‘the speech I never quite gave but should have’, about the tuition hikes. Who gives a shit about what somebody might have done?
I thought you might get a kick out of this statistic, duR. We also have to factor in the Milla effect: the GWTW post got a lot of traffic that day too.
Esp. since ‘milla’ wrote both of the following, wanting to identify herself as a troll. In this form, it was identical to the way ‘the troll’ (whoever it/they were) always wrote at Dejan. It is of no interest to me, but as Dominic pointed out in that paragraph, the troll has ingrown-toenail resources which allow her to enjoy just her non-entity as an online gadfly. I suppose I put up with that troll as long as I did because I have no understanding of that as a form of pleasure, and I suggest that trolls really do not ever have a good lay, although they may have bad ones. It’s such a low sort of behaviour:
1)Ktismatics, You’re right. I am a big fan of GWTW. And I don’t understand how one can make any parody of GWTW? I was quite surprised to read such comments on the movie and the actors and their characters. It’s the first time in my whole life when I read or hear such ideas about the movie.
But then again, maybe I misunderstood the purpose of this very site…
2)by delving further into the ”merits” of this kitschy American piece of patriotic sentimental crap – I was sharing my ideas with ktismatics
John, I forgot to include that ‘milla’, if she ‘brought up stats’, would have informed her usual motley crew that the ‘action’ was over here, for the ‘Trolls vs. Patrick Show’. That’s why I won’t waver with ‘NB’, because on the surface, he sounds better than the other trolls, just angry and sometimes on the verge of hysteria, but mostly serious. His fears are groundless, and people have these stupid ideas of me, as Arpege saying that I’d fuck up Michaela’s job if he didn’t stay anonymous. She also said, after the mid-term election ‘if I were you, I’d move to Canada immediately. What do you have to have, a swastika at your door before it sinks in?’ Stupidest shit I ever heard. As it is, I have notbing but understanding for Michaela’s job insecurity even though she’s unstable, and furthermore, am the ONLY reason she is now doing situps! Now how many others, besides my cock-enlarging troll (who can’t benefit from her pedagogy just for being a fucking TROLL) can say they have helped a goodlooking guy realize he ought to ‘get into proper shape’? After all, he’s an athlete, and although he resents the fucking hell out of me, he does know to do the situps and does have the discipline to do it–his ego and pride require it. But Arpege’s alarmism is therefore understood as it is ubiquitous and shows a desire to believe fairy-tale conspiracy stories (which I thought she was just using rhetorically before. She wasn’t: She believes them just like her crony ‘warszawa’, and also Dejan’s troll ‘Lafayette’.) So many of the bleugers think their bleug habit is going to endanger them, because they use it as a ‘no-holds-barred-speech’ platform. But I’ve got all of Michaela’s info, and I just don’t have any desire to do anything to her, even though she’s been one of THE most repellent trolls! I only had to threaten someone once, and it worked. Once he was cornered at his workplace, I never pushed it any further, as you well know. But there had been no other way, since writing his wife had been ineffective. I can’t think it caused him any harm except that he really had to tone down the Heavy Trolling at Dejan’s (which he definitely did.)
People who otherwise would have been entertained at the parody center probably did come over here for their kicks. Audience is fickle and cruel, but we must love them nonetheless. Do we curry their favor, slake their thirst for decadence and perfidy, keep usage of the 2nd person to a minimum? NEVAH!
Eloise when your self-esteem plummets like that, think of yourself as an aging but still-gracious hostess, something like Cher in BURLESQUE – at least you get a colorful toilet in the middle of the church, where your Puritan readership might get a kick or two while telling others that ”those two creeps are jus’ sick”.
(That’s the expression Miss Edge used at KLJIPOT – ”those two creeps”, referring to me and the sewer ballerina)
A reader of Shaviro’s just seems to have written on The Black Swan as a version of Deleuze’s How to Make a Body Without Organs; I never read the original text, but now I see that Deleuze was heavily into S&M pornography (”pull up my asscheeks and stitch them to my lips” – stuff like that), which might have been shocking to the Amsterdam bourgeoisie of the 1960s, yet now simply sounds like standard ”Beate Uxse” inflatable erodoll mild kink stuff.
Sorry, but that’s not a stupid study to make. If it was just ‘Penny Lane’ maybe, but that’s an important and wide-ranging subject, and is as relevant as any movie, any book. Whether it’s a good study we don’t know, but that there hasn’t been any is more extraordinary. If it was just written on ‘Penny Lane’, maybe (I’ve been there, btw, the song gives you the sense that it’s on the slummy side: It’s not, it’s very pleasant if simple middle-class, much better little row houses then the usual American equivalent, and some apt. houses that look better than a LOT in New York.) Of course, whether something is ‘REAL’ is what matters to you, not it’s THERENESS, which is enough for me. I don’t even care if Harman or Brassier or you are right, whatever has to be dealt with. That stupid farthead, for example, is certainly UNREAL, and she has to be dealt with.
When the Beatles first “burst on the scene,” not only did the girls in my seventh grade each have her fave Beatle — they actually called themselves Paul or John or whatever, signed their names that way, and so on. One of my old classmates lives here in Boulder and when I reminded her of this odd behavior she denied it, said I must have misunderstood. I didn’t misunderstand: she was just embarrassed, even after all these years, even though she’s in the music biz on the recording production end of things. You’d think it would testify to her passion for music, but maybe producers are supposed to be more jaded than that.
The dispute I had with Ads had something to do with whether John’s attitude toward Revolution was more accurately captured by the upbeat version of the song — the one that became a hit single — or the slowed-down doo-wopped version where John says “when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out…in.” I no longer recall the substance of the actual argument, however,
Oh dear, I hadn’t even remembered (or reread the above post) to know you were referring to Ads. I thought just in general, and the writing group people. I read a tedious post at Ads yesterday, and started to link a marvelous article about incredible Chinese puppeteers who have the most ancient Chinese puppet art form and collection, and they don’t give a fucking shit about it in Beijing, so they’re moving all of it to FUCKING NEW YORK! Ads is always so ‘breathless’ and ‘sensitive’ with these things, I pay little serious attention after he said that one of her own analyses was ‘softly definitive’ (it was not definitive, HARD or SOFT!).
That’s fantastic that that was a phenomenon–my cousin and her girlfriends called themselves by the Beatles’s names too, I had never quite forgotten it, but didn’t know it was widespread. She was ‘Paul’ and Annette was ‘Ringo’ and I forgot who was ‘John’ and ‘George’. They were such pains with it too, it was most irritating.
just looked over there, he claims that he is bombarded by email encouraging him to continue his campaign against Laurie Penney, who is far more involved in the student thing in UK than he and Arpege are, but HE needs an angle, since he cannot get TOO involved. Arpege doesn’t bother with any of it, just tells everybody they’re not true to Marx and are only trying to please Zizek; just execrable stuff she’s started doing. There’s an amusing reply from an American girl, which mainly puts the by-now miniscule matter in proportion (unless they’re going to keep on with it, the old story is long ago, since then there’s been Tucson and there’s even been the State of the Union. Americans are not THAT interested, nor should they be.) You know, one thing that has interested me, you’ve probably noticed too, is this high concentration of London bleugers, and no New York bleugers. There’s some Chicago types and scattered Americans (I’m not talking about people like you or, in this case even Arpege, but rather students). It seems strange what a concentration in this leftist bleugosphere is in the UK. There’s kpunk, owen, nina, and ads is the rather bumbling expatriate, who polemicizes kpunk, and then kpunk doesn’t even bother to fight him. Really weird these people. Why attack Arpege? Sure, she’s always said crackers things, but I guess just because she’s not in academia: Ads is. Maybe they think they have to be more careful with others in academia, and god knows, Robin Mackay has never said a THING about anybody or anything outside his tiny insulated environment. I guess some people want a ‘padded-wall’ sensation without being committed to the asylum (not an unsophisticated tactic either, ‘in most cases’, as the labels on drugs read. Everybody wants hospice without the hospital-strength Tylenol stigma.)
I’ve wondered occasionally whether there might not be other bubbles of theory blogging out there somewhere that involved New Yorkers or Californians or whatever, but that circulate within their own insularities. I frankly don’t shop around much for new blogs, nor do I visit very many of the ones that I’ve come to know in the past. I don’t feel at all on the inside with the British bloggers anyway — they all seem to know each other either from face-to-face engagement or from a prior era of blogging solidarity that preceded me.
Ktismatics 
I’m fascinated that you chose five images, which suggest how many thousands more of this exotic sort there were. Did you love it? I think the heist itself is visually almost overpoweringly thrilling, from the shave cream on the alarm system, to the trickle of dust throught the ceiling, and the umbrella there. And they all had ties on, sweating. Catherine Sabouret, that luscious statuesque blonde, died at only 36, and was already a Comedie Francaise actress. And how about the Pierre Grutter and Remi Grutter, faces out of Corsica or something. It seems Dassin has a natural taste and feel for the visually exotic. He also had an incredible cast for ‘Le Loi’: Melina, his lover and then wife, who looks like a goddess, Marcello Mastroianni, Yves Montand and Gina Lollobridgida. That’s late 50s and very episodic, good but not as startling and ‘quickened’ as ‘Rififi’, and they gave it a title for the American release that seems to me just like old Bantam paperbacks at drugstores: ‘Where the Hot Wind Blows’. I guess I mostly know him for ‘Never on Sunday’ before I got into ‘Rififi’, but this may be his most famous film. I think it’s amazing, and that shot of ‘Spaghetti’ tied up in the club is pretty phenomenal, as well as all the incredible street footage.
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Yes I did love it — a great movie. Beautifully wrought, with all those great faces as you pointed out previously, duR. An ordinary caper movie would have climaxed with the robbery, and it still would have been terrific because so brilliantly conceived and presented. But then we get the whole battle of the two gangs and that final driving scene through Paris where the le Stephanois is dying but still heroically returning the boy and the loot to the mother. All for naught, making the perfect ending. You know that’s the director Dassin playing the role of Spaghetti — the blacklisted American speaking both Italian and French. I want to watch the heist again — twice somebody accidentally nudges the keys on the piano in that upper room, almost as if the music wants to play but must restrain itself. Half an hour with no dialogue, no music — a ballsy directorial move.
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Dassin was indeed one of those big faces himself, he was marvelous as Cesar. That’s MARIE Sabouret as Mado, truly that Gallic severe tall beauty. But literally every single actor, including Ida and Jo’s Wife as well, even the little boy, have personalities. I’m so glad you liked it, though, and yes, you must watch the robbery again, I’ve watched it maybe 10 times now, an unusual practice for me. That piano does indeed have its own personality. Then, there are just incredible images, as when they chloroform the remaining employees in the store, that’s just horrifying. And how about Jean Servais saying ‘Je comprends’ purely crisply and matter-of-factly when Mado spits ‘Jamais!’ after he’s expected she’ll come back to him even after he’s beaten her like that. Even the campy cabaret song is fun, with the shadows on the set, reminded me of some Gilbert Because LPs I get off eBay in 2004, sung by Magali Noel, who is later Gradisca in Fellini Amarcord (incredibly, for this day and time, there is an Italian restaurant on my block called Gradisca, but it’s never looked as good as some others nearby, so I haven’t been.)
Tres macho movie, molto bu9na.
But you know what? It’s not corny when they realize that they are not going to get away with it, because that seen with the ‘ice’ on the kitchen table is marvelous: They have all that wealth for a few minutes–and they’re just the type of pricks who really did enjoy just looking at it and knowing how intricate their work was!
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A fine assortment of big long shiny gangster cars on wet Parisian streets, two different strange coffee serving systems, that complicated surgical device for sawing a round hole in the back of the safe, the umbrella of course, the single cloth drawstring bag containing the rocks, the popup clown toy — all manner of magical objects populate this world. The DVD includes an interview with Dassin from when he was in his eighties, looking back with fondness on every aspect of the making-of, every person involved. He said that at Cannes the Americans shunned him for fear of reprisals — all but Gene Kelly, who sought him out and escorted him down the stairs of the Palais in full view of all the photographers.
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I woke up thinking about this: Tony beats Mado for being with Grutter while he, Tony, was in the slammer. After this Tony decides that he’s in on the heist, not just the planned B&E of the display window but the robbing the safe. Why? Up until the beating Tony is pathetic: he loses in the opening card game, relying on his old pal Jo to come up with the cash. Presumably beating Mado restores Tony’s sense of potency, and perhaps the robbery also is intended as a proof to Mado that he’s still got what it takes, that he’s as much a badass as Grutter. When Grutter sees the belt welts on Mado’s body, he realizes that these are marks of Tony’s reclaimed ownership of Mado, and so he vows revenge.
Revenge then is a prime motive: the jewels = Mado. But Mado herself? She arranges for the drug dealer to deliver some dope to the guy who was holding the kid hostage, and Tony follows the dealer to the hideaway. So apparently, even though Mado knew the town where the hideout was located, and even though she knew how to find the drug dealer, she didn’t know where the hideout itself was located? Or is it important to the story that Mado not appear at the hideout during the big confrontation, to get her out of the way? Anyhow, other than setting Tony on the trail to the hideout, Mado has no further involvement in the story after Grutter discovers that Tony beat her. It’s as if Tony set her free from the story. Tony didn’t really reclaim her as his femme; in effect his beating her is enough for him to realize something about himself and where his real desire lies. After all, he doesn’t fuck Mado during the beating scene — that’s not what he wants. His desire is to be a tough guy — to be rififi. So Mado’s main function in the story is to be the object of desire for the two gang leaders. But that desire is sequentially displaced, from her to the jewels, from the jewels to being each other, from being each other to killing each other. From killing each other to being killed by each other.
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Lots of good ideas in that analysis, although I see it somewhat more simply, at least the Mado part, although Tony/Pierre is excellent, I hadn’t thought it through that way, and now remember that Tony shoots Pierre just for the lonely enjoyment of it. As for Mado herself, part of the difficulty comes in from Sabouret’s very classical acting: Although when Tony is first interrogating her after prison, she says she went with the ‘gigolo’ because ‘I thought I was in love with him’, which is not exactly the brightest strategy, and not terribly credible when you’re already living in a world looser than your own manners and even straight posture (Magali Noel is much less formal, much more at home in the club than gorgeous Sabouret–you’re even a bit surprised to see her actual doing stretching at a rehearsal, as in the photo you posted; it’s almost as though that kind of club wouldn’t have rehearsals.
But since Mado is, in fact, in Grutter’s world, Sabouret’s ‘proper formality’ does make some sense, in that she could retain dignity while still knowing that Remi and others were involved with drugs. She couldn’t be there otherwise. And when she says ‘I heard about the boy, that’s disgusting’, she fills out an interesting character, full of some of the contradictions I most like–you know, this kind of stern logic is not nearly always there in resentful or jealous or whatever kinds of characters, sometimes they won’t make the difference between a seriously horrible occurrence like the boys’ kidnapping, and an ugly one–her beating by Tony. I hadn’t thoght of how many times a wronged character will not transcend his/her own comparatively lesser wrongdedness because s/he would rather hold onto it at any cost, revenge at any cost. Mado knows that the great possibility of the boy’s being murdered is far more important than even her own hateful beating. The more I think about Sabouret, the word that comes to mind of her presence is ‘grandeur’.
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You’re right, I am underestimating the importance of Mado in her own right, hollowing her out too much. Tony and Mado both uphold a set of standards, even formal ones in Tony’s case when he reminds Macaroni of “the rule” before executing him. Both he and Mado seek the safety of the boy above all, even if it means loss of the loot. When Tony didn’t call Jo before getting on the Metro to follow the dope dealer to the hideaway, he knew that Jo might well panic and hand over the dough to Grutter. It’s almost as if Tony and Mado are the boy’s parents — the boy’s name is Tonio after all. Jo is panicky, his wife is passively waiting at the window for something to happen, but Mado and Tony DO SOMETHING. They’ve both overcome their impotence in order to act in accord with the “stern logic” (fine phrase) of right being, as you say transcending their wrongedness and egos.
I believe I’ll watch the whole movie again before sending it back to the library.
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I was just going to tell Rififi Cinemusique that if she feels like offloading her piss and cum, she could do it with someone HER AGE, such as you, Eloise. She comes here to politely discuss old movies, and then she goes to the Parody Center to unload her sexual frustration on ME. In this way the Parody Center has become her personal toilet, while it was designed as a general toilet for the post-Continental academia. You could HELP Eloise instead of playing dumb.
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What is your desire, pc: to be Mado, or Tony, or Grutter?
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Fucking cool.
Dejan, I only recently began to be fully aware of what my own thoughts on this Troll Business are, and that occurred from Dominic’s brilliant paragraph placed in a larger post to which it didn’t seem all the directly related. The beauty of it was that it didn’t matter if he had done any of that kind of trolling himself (he says he hasn’t, and if he has, he doesn’t like something about it, or he wouldn’t have explained it so lucidly.) That and some of the things that k-punk said, to my astonishment, have made me realize that I am definitely on that side, despite other disagreements of major significance, and not on yours (you said ‘I don’t agree with Comaradesse Fisher.). Okay, as I said at CPC yesterday, you need both me and the trolls to play off each other, but now that I see you as a troll too, there’s little for me to do except pointing out that you are saying, at least to me, only one thing: “I, a TROLL”. Now, there are lots of self-righteous defenses of trolling, but I don’t buy it. I’ve been called a troll, but I’ve never been an anonymous one even with crazy temp. names, so that if I was horrible, at least I was standing behind my horribleness. Your little trolls at CPC are ALL ONE TROLL to me, and that’s all I have to say about that. i am not a Qlipoth believer ‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said? What matter who’s speaking?’ In their case, of course there is no matter, because all the Qlipothians are notably undistinguished.
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It’s pronounced not as Qlipoth, but as KLJIPOT (Albanian accent).
I was just about to publish a collage which I made of you as the Black Swan stumbling over his own overly LONG SCHLONG, but decided that I still do need your services because the stats report Missuz has been lurking in the waters, which hasn’t happened in ages – unless she’s using another spy server to access the Parody Center. This could indicate that the Cobra is orchestrating a Trolling action of unprecedented proportions, which could include triggering your delusional psychosis around Nick Land, and all kinds of disgusting stuff like that.
Stop pushing my face into the Dominique Fox and Mark Fisher FAECES. They are both cowards, who can’t admit that they’ve been supporting third-rate clownery as if it were a revolutionary religion. I don’t give a flying fuck what they think about Trolling.
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“I don’t give a flying fuck what they think about Trolling.”
Until the trolls were losing and having to revert to str8 homophobia (which doesn’t bother me at all), because they weren’t selling as trolls anymore. As one will notice, Mark Fisher’s suppression of Comments Function FAECES was quickly adopted, despite the extreme embarassment of such rolling over as seen by the rest of the ‘world’. Not that the trolls didn’t virally rhizomize immediately elsewhere…lucky you, John.
Was trying to remember some more of those images that had that ‘never-seen-before-or-since’ in ‘Rififi’, and one of the best is the lowering of the safe with Jo underneath. Oh man, you start thinking about quickly-snapped backs.
Also, there was something I think you picked up the first time that I still haven’t quite figured out: When Tony leaves Mado to go get the train, there is some other guy, and then there is a second platform, and some attempt to go unnoticed–I wasn’t sure if someone was being followed or not, but watching it a couple of times, I still couldn’t quite get it. You mentioned this earlier when we were discussing the immediately preceding scene. Also strange was Jo’s wet hair after Grutter (I believe) shoots and kills him, and Tony strokes his head sadly. It’s not that important, but I couldn’t figure out why it was so drenched, it wasn’t raining, I don’t think.
That was a good choice of the little boy holding the gun to the bleeding-to-death Tony that you put. One of the more obvious images, it’s still pretty good. And Louise attitude in the final scene is interesting too, she sees Tony as no hero, but rather just as having expedited something–not that he would have seen it as more than that either, of course.
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I’ve watched only the first half again, so I will attend to these details when I watch the second half. In one of the earliest scenes Jo identifies Tony as Tonio’s godfather, so Tony has serious mafioso responsibility. He needs to “man up” from his sad-sack cardplaying loser self in the first scene. So the little family scene where Tony gives Tonio a toy penguin is as important as his encounter with Mado. I love the street scenes as they’re casing the joint — the little details of the florist, the newspaper delivery, the cop on his beat, the concierge, the alleyway. The safe lowering was really odd on first viewing because I expected Macaroni to pick the lock from the front, not to drill in from the back. It’s odd that the crewmembers don’t speak, since if they kept their voices down they’d have made no more noise than the hammers and drills they deployed. It’s an aesthetic isn’t it, a respect for the pure technique. They’ve planned it so well, they’re so skilled at their trades, that it would be crude to spoil the purity of savoir-faire with mere talk.
The little boy with the gun fits with the other 3 images: the finger to the temple, the leaking hole in the ceiling, Macaroni about to be gunned down. I’m a cine-collage artist! An obvious image — you mean that Tonio in effect shot Tony because rescuing Tonio is what got Tony shot? Tonio is also a kind of double for Tony, so it’s a kind of suicide gesture: the young innocent will eventually kill himself by taking up guns.
I see Parodycenter has gone comment-free. Milla might be a naif — we’ll see what develops.
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Black Swan here.
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Hey that’s uncanny, you published the link at the same time I was publishing the post!
Anyhow this is unusually hilarious and brilliant for Jim Carrey. He understood the movie better than most critics.
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That is a strange coincidence. As an over-the-top accelerationist Jim Carrey is perfectly cast as the Black Swan. He’s often better in serious roles, e.g. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
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As a sarcastic European I can’t cope with his code, the ”Looney Tunes” – it just doesn’t jell for me – but he is quite smart, and he was really good in THE CABLE GUY. But here it’s interesting how the contortions of his face, which have been his trademark, and which are related to the animation technique ”stretch and squash”, seem to suggest the embodiment of the swan, in a way that is actually better than Natalie Portman’s performance.
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…also he’s neither exactly gay, nor is he exactly a transvestite, rather, he’s some kind of a Deleuzian animal, completely ”from outer space”
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Eloise I don’t know if you read the commenting at the CPC but I was thoroughly shaken by PSYCHO IV, and it related (in a Jungian way) with the themes currently being discussed. You can watch the movie on youtube, but to cut a long story short, it turns out that Norman’s ”Oedipus complex” is actually the drama of attachments, understood not necessarily as libidinal investments, but more deeply, as people’s inability to give up – to let go. Norman is actually the psychologist for his victims – even as he’s being cast as the patient. He helps them to leave life.
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The Black Swan movie is almost self-parodying — I told you before that the heavy melodramatic plot elements and CGI made me laugh, distracting me from all the intense bodily affect it was building. In the SNL skit I love the director too as the sophisticated but monotonous European: white swan good, black swan not so much…
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“Norman is actually the psychologist for his victims – even as he’s being cast as the patient. He helps them to leave life.”
That sounds ripe for parody too. I can picture the initial free session, where Norman is explaining his praxis to the prospective analysand. But I agree that it fits into the discussion. This glorification of hysteria, this explosion of the self into a chaos of passion-vectors shooting all over the screen, this leaving of human life in order to accelerate into posthuman life — there is a bit of Loony Tunes in that, no?
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Here’s the main cast. I hadn’t thought throught that maybe 2/3 of the main characters even have ‘rififi’ names, although some, like Mario and Ida don’t, and Viviane is just ‘Viviane’.
Jean Servais…Tony le Stéphanois
Carl Möhner … Jo le Suedois
Robert Manuel … Mario Ferrati
Janine Darcey … Louise le Suedois
Pierre Grasset … Louis Grutter aka Louis le Tatoué
Robert Hossein … Remi Grutter
Marcel Lupovici … Pierre Grutter
Dominique Maurin … Tonio le Suedois
Magali Noël … Viviane
Marie Sabouret … Mado les Grands Bras
Claude Sylvain … Ida Ferrati
Jules Dassin … Cesar le Milanais (as Perlo Vita)
The most important women were very different. Mado is sensual, yet severe and with a formal style. You wouldn’t have had one of the tough guys say ‘Sit your moneymaker down’ the way they did to Viviane. And, strangely, both Ida and Louise have their own magnetism, even though they’re wives and mothers. Claude Sylvain as Ida is especially effective when she and Mario are murdered by Remi.
Glad you brought back to mind that ‘shooting the dead horse’ that Tony darkly enjoys, unsmiling, when he shoots the already-dead Pierre (he wouldn’t have shot him had he just been on the verge and in great pain.) I thought again of the kitchen table rocks: That really was their jouissance, because their talk about what they were going to do in the future with the money had little muscle to it. It was that moment they wanted, and in a sense, probably found the rest of the unravelling exciting and, to them, logical even: That they’d all die wasn’t that important to them, I don’t think they ever gave that much thought. The puny little money-exchanger was very funny, going on about the plastic clown just to fill the time. ‘Magical objects’ is exactly right, and that is something we can probably assume informed Dassin’s choice of environment in real life. After all, he got Melina Mercouri, who is, in height and figure, much like Sabouret, although much more Mediterranean and less severe, of course. But Melina was not garden-variety, even for Greece.
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While PSYCHO was all about cutting, about penetration and castration, this one – and this I found most interesting – has these extended murder scenes which play out more like agonized Greek tragedies, than a horror film. There’s also an interesting twist with the aged Norman recounting his life on a radio show, hosted by a black woman (sic!) and you sense that the black woman is in tune with Norman because she understands how his mother was ruined by the violent patriarchal society, by the prohibition on her desire, which she transferred on Norman. The film in many ways broke the ”iron rules” of its genre, which is even more admirable given that the scriptwriter is Joseph Stefano, who penned the first movie for Hitchcock.
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Eloise Riffifi is obviously having his day with this movie discussion, and the post after all is dedicated to it, so I will postpone the Psycho and the Black Swan for another time. I haven’t seen the film, so can’t comment. Unlike Riffifi, I have the grace to let her have her day – a luxury she never affords me.
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Those are good rififi-names. The author of the novel has one too: Auguste le Breton. Per Wikipedia, he was a WW1 war baby: his soldier father was a clown, an “auguste,” and he was born in Bretagne, hence the name. So the plastic clown in the film conveys self-referential meaning. He grew up in an orphanage, and he became a small-time hood with the French Mafia. He turned to writing when his daughter was born. In the DVD interview, Dassin said he couldn’t understand Breton’s novel since it was written almost entirely in street slang, so he had to have someone read it to him.
I agree that the high point for the burglars is opening the bag and looking at the jewels. I’d have posted the reveal from this scene as a screen shot but it doesn’t look as iconic in isolation.
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“{you mean that Tonio in effect shot Tony because rescuing Tonio is what got Tony shot?”
Either that, or just that it emphasizes the one saintly thing this tough guy finally does all the way (and it’s hard on him to keep driving.) It underscores the martyrdom to see Tonio holding a gun to Tony’s head, even though it was Tony who saved him.
Wow, you know, that Remi was an incredible dissolute, pure brashly-goodlooking snake with the sharp need for the heroin and then ready to cut throats. They also don’t show Ida been slashed as they’re leaving, which is a brilliant dash of nonchalance on Dassin’s and the editors’ part. Only in subsequent viewings did I know that she’d been killed with Mario because Tony says ‘you’ll find two bodies’.
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“It’s an aesthetic isn’t it, a respect for the pure technique.”
Absolutely, they are thoroughly adoring every moment, even though Macaroni is probably already having stirrings about his rendezvous later with Viviane. That is so hilarious that the whole plot is blown because Macaroni cannot restrain himself even one night from schtupping Viviane–and THIS bitch is, like, totally inappreciative!
On second thought, I’d say the not speaking is both tough-guy code for ‘their sacred’ (which is crime) and also maybe a theatrical/cinematic coloration to make a sort of ‘sound’ for the whole segment–you can feel the real time just as strongly here as in ‘High Noon’. But the reality of the drills is dealt with, by wrapping one of them at one point, as I recall, as well as the shave cream we mentioned. Yes, I also love the memorization of places on the street in preparation.
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“not speaking is both tough-guy code for ‘their sacred’ (which is crime) and also maybe a theatrical/cinematic coloration to make a sort of ‘sound’ for the whole segment–you can feel the real time just as strongly here as in ‘High Noon’.”
I like that a lot. Filling time — with dialogue, action, scenery — speeds it up; emptying time slows it down. Emptying out the sound and background concentrates attention to each specific movement, facial gesture, and object in that heist scene — this is part of the sacred you mention, the imbuing of everything with a kind of ritualized sanctity. But I’m just adding to what you already said so succinctly. I’m trying to think of analogous maneuvers in writing, and your Robbe-Grillet comes to mind. Empty out the dialogue and the action the busy-ness, and attention is drawn to the objects and gestures as if they were re-enactments of some archetypal scene pulled up from the Spiritus Mundi.
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And what your new mention of Robbe-Grillet adds is that emptying some of the fields doesn’t mean that emptied energy disappears, but rather that it’s redistributed to the surface, making the surface have more radiance, or maybe even ‘radiation’. I hadn’t quite incorporated this all the way till just now, because the emphasis on surfaces always seemed to necessarily also mean ‘shallow’. But this is a place where ‘shallow’ and ‘surface’ aren’t the same. In fact, it’s a sexualization quite like the always-new-and-lovely phenomenon many of us know as ‘the erection’, when the blood adds new dimensions (in most cases) to the PENIS and even makes the BALLS move. Tee hee. But the word that comes to mind for these enhanced and prominent images–perhaps even more in Dassin than in Robbe-Grillet–is ‘charged’. The hardness of the ‘rocks’ is very attractive, more so than an idyll by the sea (in some cases), although I’m not going to take the jewels to mean a ‘permanent erection’, even if diamonds are Marilyn Monroe’s best friend…
Some of the images in Robbe-Grillet’s films will have this charged quality, as the ‘baroque rooms’ and ‘heavy paintings’, while in the novels they aren’t as fixed, because it’s easy to re-use an element for one tributary of narrative off what had seemed the main river, as in ‘La Maison de Rendezvous’, where the slit in the miniskirt of the Hong Kong girl, or the etinceles of the breaking glass, diplomats, drug sales, or the stairway up from the street, and all the others, can be combined and re-arranged in many ways (and are), whereas the medium of film even forces ‘Marienbad’ to stick to something that is not too self-indulgently unintelligible without enormous monkish scrutiny. And the images in ‘Rififi’ are much stronger than even the serialized ones in ‘Marienbad’, the only well-known Robbe-Grillet film (which one can even easily forget is a Resnais film as well, and no wonder: It definitely bears Robbe-Grillet’s stamp a bit more than Resnais’s, even though ‘Muriel’ has some of this hardness).
But it’s surely this ‘charged object’ that occurs with elminating certain elements so that the sound-world, for example, is silence, and you can watch the heist as a glamorous version of when I’ve watched, mesmerized, plumbers work on the pipes in my bathroom and kitchen at various points over the years.
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Saw it last night. Loved it.
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My dear NBC–did you know that, in the old days, when ROBIN MACKAY had his bleug ‘London Belongs To Me’, we were actually in talks then. Now, that’s a somewhat strangely-launched sentence, so I’ll continue by saying that my above response to John includes materials that ROBIN MACKAY used in a rapturous and passionate speech he gave one Saturday afternoon at a London CAFFayyy on skins and surfaces. Now, later on, when I wouldn’t stick to the ‘glamour of Los Angeles’ and went on to those pesky literal physically-fucking bodies of ILLEGAL DANCES OF NEW YORK CITY, he jumped ship and forced labour of 4 new chapters on us, the painters’ works of which are now being scanned by one of the largest scanners in the world, which is owned by the City of Lausanne. If there is ‘wealthy Swiss write-off’ involved here, we count ourselves as aaaaonly TOO 4chan-ate.
‘She sings each night in some cafe,
in her search to find wealth and fame
They say Michael(a) has gone and changed his name.’
That bit of business delightfully finesses as per my usual, I’m glad you liked the film, and please do perorate, mon cher. All is well now that one never even takes a sneak peak at Urbanatomy.com. I think we should also–although I can’t speak for John, of course–be very interested to know if you think that, while Mark Fisher’s thesis on Trolls is deeply flawed, that it would be petty to conclude that it wasn’t just as good a starting point for something as was ROBIN MACKAY’s early encouragement that I prepare something for Collapse, i.e., just because your ‘kerplunck’ did little more than sketch out a blueprint, it is quite possible that from this we have been able to deduce that the essential quality of The Troll is a kinship with The Lesb’an. Kiss-kiss.
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I’m thinking about the relative importance of objects vis-a-vis procedures in achieving this sense of time passing. What captivated in the heist were the detailed, sequential, purposive manipulations of objects. One of the things I really liked about The Wire was this same attention to procedure: the drug buys, the recruitment of dealers, the wiretaps, the entrapments, and so on.
We watched Social Network last night, the movie about the Facebook guy, and I was struck by the complete disregard for the actual work. It’s as if Mark Zuckerberg had an occasional insight, and consequently as if by magic the software is written, spreads across the galaxy, and spawns a $50 billion company. Of course the intent of the filmmaker was to create a milieu of shallow speed that mirrors Facebook itself. But it’s a kind of one-note piece: nonstop rapid-fire dialogue delivered now at a bar, now in a Harvard dorm room, now in an office, now in a VC board room. It never slows down enough to see any sort of geeky obsession with the actual writing of code or making of deals.
Reservoir Dogs is a sort of anti-heist movie in that it completely bypasses the actual prep and performance of the jewelry store robbery, focusing almost exclusively on the conversations among the thieves before and especially after the heist takes place. But Tarantino focuses with geeky obsession on these conversations and the characters who deliver the lines. The dialogue and the characters move slowly and methodically, as if this sequence of conversations is itself a procedural.
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“Of course the intent of the filmmaker was to create a milieu of shallow speed that mirrors Facebook itself. But it’s a kind of one-note piece: nonstop rapid-fire dialogue delivered now at a bar, now in a Harvard dorm room, now in an office, now in a VC board room. It never slows down enough to see any sort of geeky obsession with the actual writing of code or making of deals.”
Yes, that sounds lazy cheap expressionism, but it’s also true that the objects involved in writing of facebook code are not interesting or beautiful in themselves, hence the tendency to ‘give in to Facebook’. Jodi has some link to this guy the other day who spends all his time on these geeky boards, and made one called ‘Why Wasn’t I Consulted’. I realized I still was way behind on all this social networking, and just like God, observed my handiwork at such negligence and was ‘well-pleased’. It’s much more the fashion these days to ‘go software’ anyway, not ‘hardware’. I think Dominic has sometimes written stuff about ‘jouissance’ he gets from this sort of thing professionally and personally, but he cancels this out to a degree by writing real poetry and being a good musician, so that’s not even convincing; the rest of the bleugers aren’t interested in the hardward at all, and this is usually limited to when they can’t get their system going, there’s a virus, and they feel as though amputated. Otherwise, it’s mostly along the lines of grimy endless Arpegian rants that ‘matter’, thinking made easy by just bullshitting your way through endless rants and by now not even correcting typos. Real shit.
I just wrote that up because it seems of a different order than physical work of great intricacy such as you see the gangsters up to in ‘Rififi’. If you’re honest with yourself, you see the beauty of the criminals’ exquisite work and are even glad they can enjoy it up to a point while also seeing that a few of them have decent sides to them–and there’s a difference in these: Tony has a decent side to him, but from what we can see, Pierre and Remi are much meaner still. There’s a vague ‘criminal brotherhood’ with Tony, Jo and Mario, there’s nothing but cold blood with the Grutters. So you can see their intricate work just as you see Dassin’s own work one structure distanced: Both the thievery in itself (as if it were a reality), and Dassin’s rendering of it are Works of Art. Given the casualties that occur because of Macaroni’s sexual incontinence, it would have actually been quite preferable had they gotten away with the crime.
I’ll just believe you about ‘Reservoir Dogs’, since I have no intention of ever seeing any more Tarantino. ‘Inglourious Basters’ was one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, just rotten and decomposed. The Facebook movie I’d never see, but off-topic, I may get time to see ‘The Fighter’, with C. Bale and M. Wahlberg, the only feature film to come out in the last year that might be worth an afternoon. Although going to the movies is not something I enjoy at all anymore. I saw the B’way show ‘In the Heights’ a few weeks ago (I imagine it toured Denver in the last year), and it’s about to close here as plans for the movie version go forward, and that was money well-spent, as it was the freshest show I’ve seen on B’way in some 30 years. This was something I had thought impossible, and even gave me a measure of hope against the JUST DESSERTS OF THE REAL. Unmentionable has a contemplative post about the Tragic Magnetism of Using the 2nd Person in Her Great Novels…
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“but he cancels this out to a degree by writing real poetry and being a good musician”
That’s not quite right. He himself may well find the software code ‘poetic’, but the real poetry transcends that, and is somewhat like Hardware to the software of his professional writing. For my perception, this a fortunate failure of his anti-Phallucism, as it shows muscle over and against his best possible moral intentions, which would, like everybody else’s, be the quick and easy road to hell (bad hell.)
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In Rififi, Dassin shows us the details of the procedures as real work, real craftsmanship. The tools possess a kind of pragmatic elegance and the practitioners have acquired proficiency. But Tony uses trial and error to outwit the alarm, the burglars sweat, they bump into the piano, they physically have to clear the rubble out of the cleverly deployed umbrella, they break the drill bit. Lowering a safe onto a squatting guy’s back is not glamorous. In the Kill Bill movies Tarantino exults over the objects and procedures of martial arts, but it’s more of a fetishistic obsession, with bright lighting and sharp focus and exaggerated dance choreography. And he’s self-consciously, ironically smirky about it too. I don’t care for this sort of treatment.
I read Ads Without Products’ post on second person. On the one hand it seems that he’s spontaneously wanting to write in this mode, but then he argues that it’s a bourgeois conspiracy of writer with reader while at the same time worrying that it’s not what the (bourgeois) agents and editors want. As in Rififi, one would hope that art and craft would serve as final arbiter of how best to proceed.
I recall that one my earliest forays into the theory blogs took me to Long Sunday and a post written by Ads about some Beatles song. I wrote a comment, not intensely thought out but on-topic and friendly. “Your analysis fails,” Ads’ reply began, then he brusquely told me why. Much too late I thought of a good response: “Fucking empiricist.” Ever since then I have seethed with ressentiment toward Ads. I hadn’t yet realized how seriously people take this “cultural studies” business. Probably there are dissertations written every year about “Penny Lane” and so on. Anyhow, with respect to second person, you recall that recently I put up the beginning of the new novel in which action begins in a bar with 2nd person present then, as soon as the characters walk out onto the street, the voice abruptly shifts to 3rd person preterite. I had hoped that those damned lit teachers at the writers’ group would have commented on this move, but they said nothing. Useless losers.
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I knew it: see.
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Eloise if you could inform Rififi that the comments have been closed at the CPC for the express purpose of staving off her abusive fan mailing. She can resume employment if she provides at least three funny stints and a review of The Black Swan. Otherwise her contract is on suspension until further notice.
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Keep the comments CLOSED.
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If you do re-open them, I shall do nothing but talk about THE TROLL, nothing else, absolutely and positively nothing–and how I intend to extermine him(them, whatever, it doesn’t matter, you’re all garbage when you’re trolls). And the minute you DO reopen, I intend on being just as determined as I already was, as I was making real advances, concentrating with every word only on the TROLL–which includes you and whatever other gerbils have been doing that shit, whether or not once overestimated (and I certainly had to have been, because there is nothing worthwhile in your stupid TROLL SHOW.) None of your fatuous, hysterical lacnanian reading means anything, it’s just stupid puppetry to amuse yourself, and I am personally not interested in whether you are amused or not. And you even wrote the crudest kind of parody of the Tucson Massacre,with ‘brainsplatter’ talk. That’s something that even I don’t do, and when I wrote one clever piece of parody with a link, you didn’t even pick up on it, so you open up the comments at your own risk. I intend never to write at CPC again with anything other than the express purpose of continuing to force the troll into the pale writing she had begun to use as she began to run out of tricks. (and she and YOU had.) Your very plea to John shows how unbelievably vapid you are. NO WONDER the trolls ended up so desperate they became HOMOPHOBIA-SPOUTING: No longer able to get at me, he/they had to get at somebody, so they chose your own Maidenform.
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That’s fine with me, darling, and I know you will be alright. To name just one of your rich options, you can develop a warm friendship with Milla here – talk about GAWN WITH THE WIND all day lon’, and how regrettably, Tara seems to be going through a rough patch at the moment. Lord knows I need a break, for I have held a part-time job as the moderator of Your Sagging Testicles way too long.
As for the Arizona brainsplatter, that was no parody: in a country where you can walk the streets in the daylight and see people wearing guns, nothing else could be expected than occasional outbursts of violent lunacy. Why should Americans expect SYMPATHY for this?
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Then shuddup. Nobody wants your ‘sympathy’, only your absence. Milla is just one of your trolls anyway, the style very recognizable. But good I could order you to keep the comments closed, because the Vitale thing was the lamest you ever did. As far as Serbia goes, I am simply never going to be interested in your lame patriotic kitsch, to quote the obviously schizy milla, who was trolling the minute you closed comments–nobody, including ‘lafayette’, gives a shit about your endless Serbian Male-Fat-Tit Lament. So put on a goddam bra already. The Milla is also an obvious Lesb’an troll, but from parts further away, she is a mod someplace most likely, but again, who cares. Only I can explain trolls. I don’t even like Mikhail now that I know she’s a troll.
You need a ‘break’? Sure you do. That’s why you were begging me to come back and look at your tattered girdle that you were too tired to rinse this mawnin’. TROLLS ARE LESB’AN ARMPITS.
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“Lowering a safe onto a squatting guy’s back is not glamorous. ”
Not glamorous, and neither were their little mistakes, but at least there was never any silly fussiness, i.e., if they have to use trial and error, they’re still very impressive in all of their movements. If it were literally flawless, we might think we were watching Thomas Jefferson! Tbey never let the little stuff get in their way, and their sweating and the clearing out of the rubble is shown, but when they do have to fix something, they bring the same aura of expertise to it, and don’t ‘freak out’. That’s why the actual heist is beautiful start to finish, when they managed to get the hole in the safe is marvelous especially.
Yes, Ads is totally pretentious a fraud. At least Nick Land can write drug-addled pieces that show a lot of talent, and you know, this ‘2nd person’ bullshit is like everything the Rififi thieves never do–they are criminals, but no one would ever think to tell a single one of them to ‘shit or get off the pot’. In Illegal Dances, I use first, second and third persons and quite freely for the same person. I don’t give a shit about what the rules, written or unwritten, are, or even if (in this book) whether some of it seems unpolished. Btw, I didn’t even notice when you shifted, but the slight confusions that ensue can be part of the ‘play’ such as Robbe-Grillet also likes to cause by re-joining different bits of narrative to show another possibility. In this way, R-G achieves something like what happens in dreams, and it’s very pleasurable once you get used to it (I think R-G always requires a bit of effort to get going, but after that, it’s not that difficult.)
And the most ridiculous thing about this character is that his identity was kept so secret, as if that were maybe Edmund White or Gore Vidal with a ‘secret bleug’. When I finally found out who he was, it was just absurd: He wasn’t even as famous as k-punk or Nina Power! His ‘charisma’ had come from writing occasionally good posts (but which he almost sabotaged by then writing others which cancelled those out–there’s something seriously wrong when you have not only not a ‘foolish consistency’, but rather instead a ‘total inconsistency’ and then demand constant pampering) and also from remaining anonymous, although many of his friends (who then became enemies, some of them, in any case) knew who he was. As ‘persona non grata’ to many bleugers, I knew I could never ask them and expect them to tell me, but I was surprised that with all the polemics he did on k-punk, that the latter didn’t ‘out him’. And then I find that his real is NEVER mentioned anywhere, NEVER. Of course, Arpege went to the bat for him, because she loves that he trashed k-punk. I’m afraid I’ve never found k-punk charismatic, but his Troll Essay I do have to admit is important. He was just saying ‘do your serious work first, at least’, and maybe then, if you must troll, troll (he didn’t say that, I’m just improvising.) I take it any a different direction, but even if trolling is sometimes necessary (as with Mikhail doing it with Harman, could be, you know), mainly it’s just cowardly. I’m much happier at having taken the drubbing I’ve gotten with my identity known than be like these shrinking violets who insulted me while hiding under their mama’s skirts.
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”I don’t even like Mikhail now that I know she’s a troll”
Do you realize that even MISSUZ was able to hold down more temp jobs than you did – first as Missuz’s butt girl, then as Jodianne’s pet hick, later as Dominique’s fag hag, Mikhail’s third violin, and now as Eloise’s cinemusique teacher??? None of them not once offered a fixed-term position, so now wonder you’re constantly DRIFTING THROUGH THE GUTTERS.
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Why carry on this conversation here? That’s what email is for.
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You’re quite right, and you should certainly feel free to delete any of mine, but Dejan won’t stop doing this. If he wants to do it he should reopen comments, and take his chances, instead of fucking up your bleug. If I were you I’d delete every one of mine and Dejan’s posts that weren’t about Rififi on this thread.
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None of that makes any sense. Rewrite it, however worthless, if you want anyone to even read it, much less take it seriously.
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If he wants to do it he should reopen comments, and take his chances, instead of fucking up your bleug
NO WAY. As Diane told Camilla – ”You think it’s easy for you. Well it’s not EASY FOR ME!!!”
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Yes, it’s all easy for me. So you take your chances anywhere, I’ve already told John he can delete me (even if he just deleted my responses to you, it would make yours look idiotic, that would be find. I should note to John that emails are OUT with this character, so if she doesn’t want to reopen comments–and I hope she doesn’t–then just delete as you wish. She doesn’t care either, it’s just that there is a difference now that I won’t listen to anything except the FACT OF TROLL. I WON’T HAVE TROLLS IN MY LIFE!
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“worrying that it’s not what the (bourgeois) agents and editors want.”
That’s the part that ALWAYS sticks out like a sore thumb.
Sorry I didn’t notice the change from 2nd to 3rd person, esp. since I do that in my real writing all the time myself. I think that when I read yours I just found it natural to think it was the same person, the way all ‘3 persons’ are in mine, and got stuck on the two pianos–wanted clarity on whether it was a GRAND or not!
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Eloise what is this ”HEIST” movie type I heard the expression once mentioned in relation to Michael Mann’s HEAT or something
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I found what it is, and I find ITS A MAD MAD WORLD the best example.
For the ballerina dildo bitch: I will reinstate the comments ON CONDITION that even as you may continue shitting about the Trolls, 1) you have to help mount the Christina Vitale character, who will be this year’s parody target; 2) I want a detailed examination of the Kljipot conversation which instituted Ms. Edge, including a structural analysis of Missuz’s strategic thinking; 3) you will fight Lafayette ON YOUR OWN without identifying me with Lafayette. Should any of the terms listed above be breached, your contract will be terminated for the upcoming three months.
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No thank you, just think of me as breaching all terms of your friggin’ ‘contract’ AS OF NOW.
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Out of curiosity, has Jodi Dean stopped writing altogether on her own blog and become a consolidator? I don’t stop in at I Cite often, but it seems that all posts are now lifted from other sources. Not that I have a problem, inasmuch as screengrabs are likewise lifted. Also, I was picturing a whimsical Dr. Zamalek post where he imagines GWTW being remade as a heist picture, maybe with Scarlett and Rhett assembling a crew to steal back from the Yankees all the furnishings they stole from Tara.
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“but the stability, order and obedience to law and many good things that has gone with the USSR.’
John, I think here we have the makings of a wonderful new Dr. Zamalek post, since nobody wants ‘Gone With the Wind II’ as a movie about nostalgia for Miss Stalin, although…when I was living down on the Plantation, I often longed for the gulag–the exquisite pain and severity, the canned dog food that the humans were allowed to eat, the 15 people per room, all the bounty of bare-light-bulb living that we wuh ou-wah-selves deNIED!!! and so UNFAIRLY! Socialism for White People in Alabama NOW!!!!
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Maybe we can work in something about the Haitians welcoming Baby Doc back home, longing for the good old days of the Tonton Macoute. I’m sure we’d need to give up too much ownership to the investors for this production to be worth our while.
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Eloise I think you should marry Milla so she can get a green card.
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Eloisa Ukraine was one of those TART REPUBLICS who decided to disentangle from the Soviet Union because they saw how the wrapping of MARS BARS glistened in happy Western commercials, while milk and honey flowed from the expensive interiors of DYNASTY and DALLS*, and lesb’ans were allowed to be themselves, all of which so REFRESHING compared to the greyness of the Stalinist landscape – kind of like Slovenlia, only Slovenlia always had Austro-Hungarian pedigree, which Ukraine doesn’t have in the least, so Ukraine ended up in a total shithole. All these slave statelets now lament leaving the selfsame Soviet Union they so loathed, but it’s too goddamn late and they will have to accept their career as American prostitutes, which is perhaps just desserts for their stupidity. Ukraine does have some of the world’s most astonishing women, so they often end up marrying overseas, or flashing their tits in some Hugh Heffner production. Which could be a sign of hope for dear Milla, that is, if she’s wise enough to drop the Melanie shtick, and sell her assets with Scarlett’s, erm, talent for forgetfulness.
* speaking of this I just discovered this hilarious Dutch song from the 80s: ”vakantie’s toch niet alles, want je hebt Dynasty en Dallas” (vacation isn’t everything cause you have Dynasty and Dallas) – written for lower middle class hicks who can’t afford even a cheap vacation in Turkey
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Dr Sinthome just used the expression ”relata” in the increasingly hilarious debate between the process bottoms and the object tops, of whom the Temptress is the clinical one wile dr. Sinthome retains humanity despite her obnoxious preachiness. Anyhow some process bottom called Illuminati or something wrote a panegiric to Avatar, naming it an instance of deeply ingrained all-American panphysicism; the bottom is apparently a good friend of Kvondique. Meanwhile Christina Vitale is barely able to hide her vicious hatred of the narcissistic cat, whom she desires feverishly. All this extreme soap content is covered by laborious and deadly boring ”cultivated dialogue” so that throughout all the merciless bitching everyone keeps apologizing to the other, and emphasizing how they’re not pulling at each other’s hair, but just having a girlie talk.
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But the situation with the USSR was different from Yugoslavia. After the Baltic countries seceded from the Soviet Union, Russia was next: a power move of Russian SFSR President Yeltsin over USSR President Gorbachev. Once Russia left, the USSR couldn’t really survive: that was Yeltsin’s intent. When Russia bailed, Ukraine followed suit and joined them in a rapid neoliberal overhaul. The rest of the republics soon tipped over like dominoes.
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That’s just a formal difference, not a real difference. Ukrainians could ve toppled Yeltsin if they wanted to, but they believed he would bring them to Western gold. And now that Russia’s getting their shit together, Ukraine could rejoin Russia instead of whining in the mud.
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I’m back to deleting personal insults.
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According to the WordPress stats, 16 January 2011 was the BUSIEST DAY EVER on Ktismatics. The previous high was 29 January 2010, when this post was new. Thank you for your support.
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That would make sense. Dejan was spouting all the bullshit, and I was writing a lot, plus his comments had been suppressed: If you look at his stats, they plummeted to half of their normal one day after he suppressed comments. Now he should just delete the whole bleug. Obviously I do have a following, but I didn’t know it, because before Dejan showed the stats, he told me that they had remained the same the 6 months I never wrote over there. I don’t know nor care if that’s true or not. Even ads is trying to tweak me in his posts, but I don’t care to respond. btw, your friend’s story about how he was about to reveal his name but ‘decided against it’ was very like ads’s own way of going about things, although I know it’s not the same ‘person’ behind either troll. Rather, why tell such a story? One should just continue as a troll or not, but how ‘you almost did something’ is like ads’s ‘the speech I never quite gave but should have’, about the tuition hikes. Who gives a shit about what somebody might have done?
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I thought you might get a kick out of this statistic, duR. We also have to factor in the Milla effect: the GWTW post got a lot of traffic that day too.
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Esp. since ‘milla’ wrote both of the following, wanting to identify herself as a troll. In this form, it was identical to the way ‘the troll’ (whoever it/they were) always wrote at Dejan. It is of no interest to me, but as Dominic pointed out in that paragraph, the troll has ingrown-toenail resources which allow her to enjoy just her non-entity as an online gadfly. I suppose I put up with that troll as long as I did because I have no understanding of that as a form of pleasure, and I suggest that trolls really do not ever have a good lay, although they may have bad ones. It’s such a low sort of behaviour:
1)Ktismatics, You’re right. I am a big fan of GWTW. And I don’t understand how one can make any parody of GWTW? I was quite surprised to read such comments on the movie and the actors and their characters. It’s the first time in my whole life when I read or hear such ideas about the movie.
But then again, maybe I misunderstood the purpose of this very site…
2)by delving further into the ”merits” of this kitschy American piece of patriotic sentimental crap – I was sharing my ideas with ktismatics
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I don’t know nor care if that’s true or not.
This sounds even worse than that time MURRRRL told the producers, ”I don’t CARE about the goddamn Margaret Thatcher lead! ”
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John, I forgot to include that ‘milla’, if she ‘brought up stats’, would have informed her usual motley crew that the ‘action’ was over here, for the ‘Trolls vs. Patrick Show’. That’s why I won’t waver with ‘NB’, because on the surface, he sounds better than the other trolls, just angry and sometimes on the verge of hysteria, but mostly serious. His fears are groundless, and people have these stupid ideas of me, as Arpege saying that I’d fuck up Michaela’s job if he didn’t stay anonymous. She also said, after the mid-term election ‘if I were you, I’d move to Canada immediately. What do you have to have, a swastika at your door before it sinks in?’ Stupidest shit I ever heard. As it is, I have notbing but understanding for Michaela’s job insecurity even though she’s unstable, and furthermore, am the ONLY reason she is now doing situps! Now how many others, besides my cock-enlarging troll (who can’t benefit from her pedagogy just for being a fucking TROLL) can say they have helped a goodlooking guy realize he ought to ‘get into proper shape’? After all, he’s an athlete, and although he resents the fucking hell out of me, he does know to do the situps and does have the discipline to do it–his ego and pride require it. But Arpege’s alarmism is therefore understood as it is ubiquitous and shows a desire to believe fairy-tale conspiracy stories (which I thought she was just using rhetorically before. She wasn’t: She believes them just like her crony ‘warszawa’, and also Dejan’s troll ‘Lafayette’.) So many of the bleugers think their bleug habit is going to endanger them, because they use it as a ‘no-holds-barred-speech’ platform. But I’ve got all of Michaela’s info, and I just don’t have any desire to do anything to her, even though she’s been one of THE most repellent trolls! I only had to threaten someone once, and it worked. Once he was cornered at his workplace, I never pushed it any further, as you well know. But there had been no other way, since writing his wife had been ineffective. I can’t think it caused him any harm except that he really had to tone down the Heavy Trolling at Dejan’s (which he definitely did.)
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People who otherwise would have been entertained at the parody center probably did come over here for their kicks. Audience is fickle and cruel, but we must love them nonetheless. Do we curry their favor, slake their thirst for decadence and perfidy, keep usage of the 2nd person to a minimum? NEVAH!
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Well maybe a little bit of decadence and perfidy…
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Eloise when your self-esteem plummets like that, think of yourself as an aging but still-gracious hostess, something like Cher in BURLESQUE – at least you get a colorful toilet in the middle of the church, where your Puritan readership might get a kick or two while telling others that ”those two creeps are jus’ sick”.
(That’s the expression Miss Edge used at KLJIPOT – ”those two creeps”, referring to me and the sewer ballerina)
A reader of Shaviro’s just seems to have written on The Black Swan as a version of Deleuze’s How to Make a Body Without Organs; I never read the original text, but now I see that Deleuze was heavily into S&M pornography (”pull up my asscheeks and stitch them to my lips” – stuff like that), which might have been shocking to the Amsterdam bourgeoisie of the 1960s, yet now simply sounds like standard ”Beate Uxse” inflatable erodoll mild kink stuff.
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I must have dozed off during the asscheek-sewing scene.
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knew it: see.
Sorry, but that’s not a stupid study to make. If it was just ‘Penny Lane’ maybe, but that’s an important and wide-ranging subject, and is as relevant as any movie, any book. Whether it’s a good study we don’t know, but that there hasn’t been any is more extraordinary. If it was just written on ‘Penny Lane’, maybe (I’ve been there, btw, the song gives you the sense that it’s on the slummy side: It’s not, it’s very pleasant if simple middle-class, much better little row houses then the usual American equivalent, and some apt. houses that look better than a LOT in New York.) Of course, whether something is ‘REAL’ is what matters to you, not it’s THERENESS, which is enough for me. I don’t even care if Harman or Brassier or you are right, whatever has to be dealt with. That stupid farthead, for example, is certainly UNREAL, and she has to be dealt with.
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When the Beatles first “burst on the scene,” not only did the girls in my seventh grade each have her fave Beatle — they actually called themselves Paul or John or whatever, signed their names that way, and so on. One of my old classmates lives here in Boulder and when I reminded her of this odd behavior she denied it, said I must have misunderstood. I didn’t misunderstand: she was just embarrassed, even after all these years, even though she’s in the music biz on the recording production end of things. You’d think it would testify to her passion for music, but maybe producers are supposed to be more jaded than that.
The dispute I had with Ads had something to do with whether John’s attitude toward Revolution was more accurately captured by the upbeat version of the song — the one that became a hit single — or the slowed-down doo-wopped version where John says “when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out…in.” I no longer recall the substance of the actual argument, however,
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Oh dear, I hadn’t even remembered (or reread the above post) to know you were referring to Ads. I thought just in general, and the writing group people. I read a tedious post at Ads yesterday, and started to link a marvelous article about incredible Chinese puppeteers who have the most ancient Chinese puppet art form and collection, and they don’t give a fucking shit about it in Beijing, so they’re moving all of it to FUCKING NEW YORK! Ads is always so ‘breathless’ and ‘sensitive’ with these things, I pay little serious attention after he said that one of her own analyses was ‘softly definitive’ (it was not definitive, HARD or SOFT!).
That’s fantastic that that was a phenomenon–my cousin and her girlfriends called themselves by the Beatles’s names too, I had never quite forgotten it, but didn’t know it was widespread. She was ‘Paul’ and Annette was ‘Ringo’ and I forgot who was ‘John’ and ‘George’. They were such pains with it too, it was most irritating.
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just looked over there, he claims that he is bombarded by email encouraging him to continue his campaign against Laurie Penney, who is far more involved in the student thing in UK than he and Arpege are, but HE needs an angle, since he cannot get TOO involved. Arpege doesn’t bother with any of it, just tells everybody they’re not true to Marx and are only trying to please Zizek; just execrable stuff she’s started doing. There’s an amusing reply from an American girl, which mainly puts the by-now miniscule matter in proportion (unless they’re going to keep on with it, the old story is long ago, since then there’s been Tucson and there’s even been the State of the Union. Americans are not THAT interested, nor should they be.) You know, one thing that has interested me, you’ve probably noticed too, is this high concentration of London bleugers, and no New York bleugers. There’s some Chicago types and scattered Americans (I’m not talking about people like you or, in this case even Arpege, but rather students). It seems strange what a concentration in this leftist bleugosphere is in the UK. There’s kpunk, owen, nina, and ads is the rather bumbling expatriate, who polemicizes kpunk, and then kpunk doesn’t even bother to fight him. Really weird these people. Why attack Arpege? Sure, she’s always said crackers things, but I guess just because she’s not in academia: Ads is. Maybe they think they have to be more careful with others in academia, and god knows, Robin Mackay has never said a THING about anybody or anything outside his tiny insulated environment. I guess some people want a ‘padded-wall’ sensation without being committed to the asylum (not an unsophisticated tactic either, ‘in most cases’, as the labels on drugs read. Everybody wants hospice without the hospital-strength Tylenol stigma.)
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I’ve wondered occasionally whether there might not be other bubbles of theory blogging out there somewhere that involved New Yorkers or Californians or whatever, but that circulate within their own insularities. I frankly don’t shop around much for new blogs, nor do I visit very many of the ones that I’ve come to know in the past. I don’t feel at all on the inside with the British bloggers anyway — they all seem to know each other either from face-to-face engagement or from a prior era of blogging solidarity that preceded me.
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