~

For other reasons, I happen to know Contra Costa County is a ridiculous place. It didn't need the extra distinction of a mayor renouncing Veteran's Day "in favor of" Occupy Wall Street.

What a tangled up country this is. Could anyone explain to her that most of the people in that anti-establishment rally probably Support The Troops? That there are veterans in that rally, and that they are not protesting the war or the millitary? Probably not. A 60-something mayor of a small Southern California city is still marching against Johnson. Against the fucking army and the fucking office and the whole fucking power thing, man. While Newt Gingrich is still waddling around the world looking for fucking hippies to give haircuts and a goddamed job, already.

Those Occupy protesters who have jobs have very good jobs, probably. Those who don't (especially those who were in the army, and want an office) can't get one. They're in the street because the world between those realities is vanishing.

I joke in my last post about how bloodless and tired any political process looks, when that process produces shambling suits like Gingrich and Romney, and fires them off to fight the ghosts of 1968, again, while more and more people in every town can't find a way to live.

I guess the joke isn't very funny.

The enemy of this country is not its army. The enemy of this country is not its students. The enemy of this country is not even its bankers. Really.

The enemy is the idea that we can live apart any more. That America in 2012 can indulge the same intravarsity score-settling that made our parents' America so transformative.

We do not want to socialize the banks. We do not want to take your guns. We do not want to revoke the New Deal. We do not want to overturn Roe. We do not want to work for China.

And for the love of god, you lunatics, we do not want to build a flying highway between Alberta and Mexico City. What the hell would you do with that? Get there and turn back around? Pee over Kansas and watch the wind blow it to Oklahoma? Jump off? Would you people either take your medication or die, already? 

Where was I.

I want the Republican party to be functional again because I want this country to be functional again. All of it.

I hope our parents will understand that stance, someday.

~

While we are on the subject, let's take a moment to note how sad this year's Republican primaries are, compared to the last batch. 

Now, those were impossible to top. They were so thick with old white macho fantasy that we are still trapped in the comic book world they created. Sarah Palin sprang from their head fully armed, the nightmare fairy for a generation's rage against all things outside the cul-de-sac.

Now what? Now they have a bench of young governors and congressmen, well-oiled fundraising groups and a chance to tag the Alien Usurper with a recession. Now they don't have to campaign from under George W. Bush. Now they can really let fly. Who's coming out of the gates??? 
 

Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii ...

Dear lord.

At least the grabass radio host is having fun.
 

Let's be clear. Herman Cain is what happens when the elephants die and the monkeys run away and the ringmaster is drunk and the acrobats have herpes and the last clown relizes this is his chance. Before the audience leaves, he can do whatever he wants. No hope. No rules. No pants.

Good on him I guess.

For the rest of us, a ripoff.

~

I stand a little corrected. The soundbite pagents between people who don't have to say anything and won't be President have done some good. 

In August of this year, Rick Perry was going to be the perfect canned Republican. Cocky, intimidating, Conservative, a distant cousin to George Clooney.

Then he was forced to speak in public. Again. And again. And again. For some reason, Republican insiders and media elites were not able to take whatever drugs got them through George W. and Sarah P. with a straight face.

Then again, George and Sarah could approach a podium and read a canned answer with flair. They could read a prompter and enunciate. They could read. 
 

Soooo, that's over. Which is good.

Meanwhile, the Cain and Gingrich candidicies drag on painfully until some humans finally touch a ballot and we can all throw out the year's worth of polling data that ran serious numerical analysis on people's responses to "if you had to express a preference of no consequence you could later reverse, who do you like more, Eyebrow or Glasses?".

After all, both Gingrich and Cain can wear a tie and look forward and pronounce a three syllable word without pissing in their shoes. Thus, for two more months, we must pretend they can be President. 

Is there some room in Hell where they write these terms?  

~

Exhibit One.

It's funny I went on about tonal discomfort two days before I used this book in a way no doctor would reccomend. I'm very lax in my Alan Moore knowlege. I've got Watchmen and some Lost Girls and now this. But even with that small sample, I'm ready to call out my favorite strength of his: godlike mastery of tonal discomfort.

It's one thing to write "I felt horribly interested at the same time I felt disgust." That's what Lovecraft, for instance, would say. He'd use four or five synonyms for "disgust" and twelve commas before he finished saying it.

Moore uses the story organically. Moore walks you to that state of mind. Then he makes you live there a while. He builds a story on the spot where you are processing sex and rape and jokes and death and discovery and horror all at the same time. Then he invites you to have tea.

In the end you have to be horrified at yourself, if you're horrified at all. Then you have to condone yourself to keep reading. Which you will.

You're locked in here with you.

Happy Halloween.

~

(Um ... please ignore my previous comments on this subject.)

I will not be seeing Paranormal Activity 3 this Halloween. Not because it's bad or unimportant. I think 2 was very well made. I cheer for the series and enjoy overthinking it. But it has a very basic problem.

You can only do this once.

Paranormal Activity begins full of mysteries. Then it slowly reveals them. Then it ends. Resolving all the mysteries. "Resolving" with a capital "!". Those mysteries are resolved as fuck.

For this reason, all that's left is to flesh out the backstory. Both 2 and 3 are prequels. We know everything. We know who survives, what the spook is, and what it will ultimately do. Heck, from the setting of #3, we know what happens to the house. We know what they keep from the house. This story is so spoiled I could fill out the insurance claims.

The choices they made in the first movie were good. But they were one-movie choices. Now they can manufacture the creepiest setups and the shockiest shocks anywhere, but it's like a haunted house you've already walked through. You can't get back the ignorance, so you can't get back the fear.

Such is life.

~

Horror comedy is beautiful.

Like all great slapstick, it needs movement, reaction, impact, and just the right wet sounds. Like all jokes it needs wit, dedpan and zest. Put these together with the opportunity to make great, gross, imaginative sets and to work the revulsion angle, and you get something that is very fun to look at, very fun to hear, and will stay with you for life.
 

So why can't it get any respect?

It's great that Shaun of the Dead found success. But in our lifetime, what else has broken out of the genre? Scream, I guess. Which was so misunderstood that its legacy is Scary Movie and all the shame that came afterward. People saw that spoof, and thought, man someone needs to do a spoof of this! Lighten the mood a little.

So the problem may be that a good parody is a good thing-it-parodies. To be absurd a story has to take itself seriously. So a horror comedy will have horror. Think of Nick Frost being eaten alive. Or Drew Barrymore 20 feet away from her parents, bleeding out. Or the deer in Evil Dead II. Did you see that in nightmares? I did.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil has several of those scenes. There's rape, there's torture, some of the kills have real pathos. There's POV from inside an oven. 

This is really uncomfortable, but that's the point. It makes laughter more of a release. It heightens contradictions. As Gary Brechter said, "the sickest things can be the funniest things ... when did 'sick' and 'funny' stop hanging out?" And he was talking about real life! These 'sick' movies are fooling around with red corn syrup. Besides, shock humor is not exclusive to the genre. There's a huge audience for revulsion in The Hangover or Kingpin. Some assholes like Tom Green. He gets major studio releases.   

So why to I have to sit in the one dirty theater to see the one weekly showing of Tucker and Dale? I'm hidden away like I'm watching porn. Porn with cats.

Okay, so some of the jokes are insidey. Your viewing experience will be enhanced if you've seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Pumpkinhead and The Hills Have Eyes and Cabin Fever. The after-teaser opening shot may actually be the after-teaser opening shot from The Descent. When it's on DVD I'll check.

But hell. None of that is necessary. Strictly. Unless of course you don't ... want ... to see dismemberment slapstick? Or you don't have a choice ... because it's ... unpleasant to you?

There is a wall between us, hypothetical person. 

A wall of zombies

I can still remember how the rug in my basement felt. The loose thread in the rug I would pick at while I stayed up untill 2AM or 3AM, watching Tremors and The Fly and Friday the 13th Part VI. I was twelve and so were my friends, and we'd go downstairs after my parents went to sleep.

Today I could still find the hotel room on the first floor of the Holiday Inn. Where I'd sit up against the couch, my cousins to either side, my parents and aunts and uncles on the sofa or milling around, getting beer. Family reunion was the perfect time to share taped episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Which was a Wisconsin cult theater show when they were in college, and a cult cable show now that I was 10. I can still recite every gag from Giant Spider Invasion. ("Ya'll want a piece of milk?!?").

I doubt all this desensitized us to real violence, or even screen violence (see below). But it helped fill our world with a context. Gushing blood, absurd costumes, deserted swamps, blondes running in high heels, dudes saying "Hello? Guys?" then getting decapitated to a violin sting ... these things were a style. They could be dark or funny or stupid or plain old loud and entertaining. We understood "camp" before we knew the word.

That.

Tucker and Dale will be loved by us because it picks up what feels like an old conversation, and tells great jokes in its turn. 

To those outside the conversation? To people who can't easily slip into the asummptions that mean here, now, murder is hilarious? I can almost peer over the wall, to see why they think we're weird.   

Confession: When I was 17 I left the theater halfway through There's Something About Mary. I couldn't handle the violence. Really.

There was something very wrong with the tone of that movie. A romantic comedy about a hard-luck guy, who can't seem to get ahead because his dick gets ripped open and fishooks pierce his face and cars run him over. The zany scamp!

I felt misplaced empathy. Some part of my brain thought they were really torturing Ben Stiller. People around me gasped and laughed and I wanted to punch them. If you asked me to step back and explain the joke, I could. But I really didn't get it.

I had to go home. Get Ben Stiller off my mind. Watch something light. Cleanse the palate.
 

There's no accounting for taste.

Except that yours is wrong.

~

Yeah. The new edgy, dark, golden-age-of-cable-drama show on FX. That one. Have you seen it? Has anybody? I hope not.

It is the goofiest, campiest, chicken-slapping shit I have seen in this life or in my secret past life as a 19th century fetus. Don't even ask. The dialouge is from Jerry Springer. The performances are from All My Children. There's a hunchback who kills people with a shovel. Yes, with the DONG sound. Three people died in the episode I watched and all three times I laughed.

My god, the fetuses. You could have a snowball fight with all the fetuses.

I wish I could say more. This show would be improved by a cross-dressing Tim Curry. It would be improved by marijuana. It would be improved by most things.

Be afraid.

~

Yes, I think we will.

(What is that thing? Is it full of zombie hobbits?)

Bernard Harcourt looks like the sort of guy who, if one were to say “He got a BA from Princeton under Sheldon Wolin, then went on to get a JD and PhD from Harvard and now teaches Foucault and is the chair of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science,” you would nod and say, “Of course,” as if his life could not have taken any other course. Think a non-douchy version of Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park. With better hair.

If you want to feel better about yourself, though, 
just google a pic of him with a moustache.

I briefly met Professor Harcourt when I came to visit U of C in the spring of 2010. He kindly let me sit in on a class on critical theory he was teaching at the law school. The class reminded me why I wanted to return to school, I decided to turn down a PhD program elsewhere, and enrolled in U of C’s MA program. And then promptly failed to take any class with Professor Harcourt before I finished. This, I am sure, will be one of those poor life choices that will still result in a facepalm when I am sixty.

Yesterday, Professor Harcourt had a piece up on the New York Times’s Opinionator section of their website discussing the nature of the Occupy Wall Street movement, identifying OWS as a sort of Foucaultian critique in action. Money quote? Money quote:

Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver.*

In this he agrees with Mike Konczal, who wrote a couple weeks ago about the theory underlying the OWS protests, who further draws on David Graeber’s work to identify the small-a anarchist and small-d democratic theory underlying OWS’s method’s. Konczal quotes a review of Graeber’s Direct Action (sorry for the large blockquote, but it’s kinda important):

And what seemed like a tedious attention to meeting process was the result of a commitment to direct democracy and rejection of a politics of representation in favor of a politics of participation. Instead of focusing solely, or even largely, on ends, the global justice movement focused on means, attempting to live out its ideals in the present and sneak moments of liberation on the sly.

While anarchists formed the avant-garde of the global justice movement, they generally did not try to convert other protesters and sympathizers to an explicit belief system. Instead of pushing a party line, they spread practices, advocating the adoption of affinity groups, consensus-based decision-making and spokescouncils. Graeber argues that the Direct Action Network, the most significant organization of the global justice movement, while short-lived, was extraordinarily successful in diffusing a directly democratic model of organizing.

This rings true, at least to me, given reports of OWS’s operating methodology: their concensus-based General Assembly, complete with complex hand signals, their committee structure, and – more than anything – their complete unwillingness to articulate demands at the organizational level.

[Read More]

~

We're stuck with a lot of privileged liars in this country, talking this way but not understanding or living it. And not wanting to.

But the real thing, messy and crazy, exists.

"I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime request of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.

I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man's word should be as good as his bond; that character - not wealth or power or position - is of supreme worth."

Steve Jobs, great American, RIP.