Vampire Weekend (Version)

Songs About Robots

Absent Fathers and Secret Origins

In an interview for the PBS History of Rock n' Roll documentary, Seymour Stein talked about signing the Ramones to Sire Records. He said, "I thought they were the most commercial band in the world. But everyone told me, no, I was wrong."

If the Anxiety of Influence has to do with destroying the connection to the source material, hiding and covering lines of lineage, isn't it the case that all fathers are absent?

RE: The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors

It must be some facile right of passage, or else a kind of ignorance, but the NYTimes has become almost unbearable to read. Like a lover whose party conversation sends you into the bottle, the paper seems plagued by some insufferable piety or moralism that yet the hostesses seem to agree with. Indeed, breaking up with the Times leaves one alone to bear the howling fantods of the Thurn, Taxis, and Tristero internet writing commodities, an exile of baseballtonight, rightwingparalegals, and the perijournalism of the uterine monthlies.

I suppose it was something to aspire to the public record, but the tone of the thing reads like the pillow talk of Don Draper (that Babbit qua Kerouac via Chappaquiddick) and one of the Alcott sisters with Bill Cunningham as a roommate Capote who sees the sock draped over the doorhandle and politely goes back to riding his fucking bike. If that doesn't make sense, as metaphorics rarely do, then let's just call it something like "the genteel tradition and the sacred rage:"

If W-- was sombre he was also indeed almost sublime. He told them nothing, left his absence unexplained, and though they were convinced he had made some extraordinary purchase they were never to learn its nature. He glowered grandly at the tops of the old gables. 'It's the sacred rage,' S-- had had further time to say; and this sacred rage was to become between them, for convenient comprehension, the description of one of his periodical necessities.

Anyway, that's all very personal, and I should name Darghlis' review of 'Inglourious Basterds' as the actual occasion of this post. My inability to perform legalistic paraphrase will undoubtedly be the downfall of my academic ambition(s), but let's say that Darghlis critiques Tarentino for creating a character that is "too seductive." That this character (Landa) is a 'Nazi' is tantamount to 'failure' and 'polluted love.' Having not seen the movie, I'm at liberty to cut and paste a synopsis:

FILM REVIEW: NYTIMES--Manohla Dargis (sp.)

Played by a little-known Austrian actor, Christoph Waltz, Col. Hans Landa is a vision of big-screen National Socialist villainy, from the smart cut of his SS coat to the soft gleam of his leather boots. There might be a fearsome skull [the death’s head, or totenkopf] grinning on his cap, but Colonel Landa has us at hallo. (Tennesseean) Raine (Brad Pitt) leads a pack of Jewish avengers, the inglourious basterds of the misspelled title, (LAWEEKLY--Ella Taylor: 'i don't know if you were aware of it, but you touched on an incredibly sensitive issue for Jews, which is the fantasy of the tough Jew, when in fact there was little Jewish resistance to the Holocaust.' Q.Tarintino: 'Over the years, when I was coming up with the idea of the American Jews taking vengeance, I would mention it to male Jewish friends of mine, and they were, like, "That's the movie i want to see. Fuck that other story, I wanna see this story." Even I got revved up, and I'm not Jewish.") who occupy (but) one part of the sprawling narrative.

The film’s most egregious failure — its giddy, at times gleeful embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain — can largely be explained as a problem of form. Landa simply has no equal in the film, no counterpart who can match him in verbal dexterity and charisma.

Cartoon Nazis are not new to the movies, and neither are fascinating fascists, as evidenced by Ralph Fiennes’s Oscar-nominated turn in “Schindler’s List.” Unlike those in “Schindler’s List,” Mr. Tarantino’s Nazis exist in an insistently fictional cinematic space where heroes and villains converge amid a welter of movie allusions. He’s not making a documentary or trying to be Steven Spielberg: Mr. Tarantino is really only serious about his own films, not history. In that sense “Inglourious Basterds,” which takes its title if not its misspellings from an Italian flick in “The Dirty Dozen” vein, is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love." End Review

(digression re: the film review of 'Defiance' directed by Zwick, whose other films include 'Glory' (see note above re: Massachusetts and Transcendentalism) authored by A.O. Scott--breathless, naif-Kael, ivy-league Robert Ebert--et al.)

"The Bielski boys are rough characters — a history of smuggling and petty criminality is hinted at — who can hold their vodka and know how to shoot, how to steal and how to navigate the dense and trackless forests.

Another malbesh, Isaac (Mark Feuerstein), with round glasses and a nebbishy vest, can barely use a hammer. “What is it you do?” Zus asks. “I suppose you could say I was — I am — an intellectual,” Isaac stammers. Zus cannot hide his amusement, or his contempt: “This is a job?”

I have seen hundreds of films and documentaries that repeat over and over again the criminal cruelty and homicidal mania of the Nazis and other hate groups throughout history who have demonstrated the incomprehensible brutality that the human being can direct at other human beings. How many times do we need to see and hear this theme? Is not this side of human nature already thoroughly and permanently engraved on our memories?

It's worth the price of admission alone to watch his work; look at his face after he coldheartedly murders a Nazi family (whose patriarch has just murdered his own). There is no actor on screen today who can simultaneously hold a moment like this, execute the action and then afterwrds model his face into a kind of existential portal into hell... This is amazingly subtle work from an actor of immense integrity.

If a Hollywood writer made up this story, no one would believe that it could ever happen, and yet it did. I for one did not know the story, and am glad that it has been saved for posterity through this film and the book upon which the film was based."

Thesis: The paranoid fantasy enacted by Darglis in the above (above) review originates in the proximity to the forbidden Thing that Tarintino's film clearly perverts and transgresses, I.e. humanizing the Nazi's. Other films that deal with the subject maintain this distance at all costs. Beneath Spielberg's portrayal of the 'fascinating fascist' in Schindler's List beats a warm human heart, a sadist perverted by disavowed identification with the erotic object (his servant girl). What Darglis' reviews willfully overlooks is how smartly Taratino's film upsets this moral order in favor of utopic violence (I can only think of Blood Meridian here). Tarintino's films have consistently led the viewer past the perverted gaze, which holds the 'villain' as superficial fetish of behavioralist ideology (I know very well that he is a ruthless killer, but at heart he just is an abandoned child), via an obscene economy of humor and sadistic pleasure. The viewer engages in the obscene banter of Tarantino's characters to the degree that any moral identification becomes increasingly complicated, i.e. Vincent Vega's pathetic and inglorious death at the hands of Butch, who has betrayed his boss by throwing a thrown fight in which he actually kills his opponent. Ultimately, what Darglis' review wants is the perversity of sadistic enjoyment (basically all Nazi/Holocaust films) to stay usefully locked away in a dark-box like the Gimp, Tarantino's other brilliant set-piece on the Southern(CA)Redneck-(Neo)-Nazi vortex, and a Fascism that always already speaks in a warm, safe, stock German accent.

On Mathematics and Magicians

In The Simpsons episode Grade School Confidential, a Mathmagician appears at Martin's birthday party.

The Harry Potter series is another popularculture intersection of Mathematics and magic, but like we have learned from South Park, Simpsons already did it.