Sita Sings the Blues

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I'm coming around to the stance that copyright is bullshit and all art properly belongs in the public domain. Claim: Artists are not entitled to receive pay for the reproduction and use of their art.

What do you think of that? I'm not well versed on intellectual property law and its controversies, but a certain free culture movement outlet (QuestionCopyright) lead by Brooklyn-based animator Nina Paley currently has my ear. The above logo, her invention, is intended to change our thinking about the commonplace fact that, if you create a work of art that incorporates copyrighted material, the government will silence you. A copyright is a monopoly on a piece of information, issued and upheld by city hall, with the exclusive intent to remove that information from the sphere of free speech; copyright is censorship.

The consequence we live with is an impoverishing of culture. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an actual published version of Jane Austen's novel reworked to include among the sundry proposals and carriage rides a zombie outbreak, is possible because no one holds a copyright on Pride and Prejudice; it's public domain. However, I have no hope of ever obtaining permission to publish my own like-minded novel, Bridget Jones's Zombie Diary. This chapter heading is all I am permitted to share publicly:

129 lbs. (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 4 (excellent), cigarettes 21 (poor but will give up totally tomorrow), number of zombies killed 13

The invention and indefinite extension of ubiquitous copyrighting as a Fortune 500 business model, starting in the mid-twentieth century and becoming more prohibitive every year, has ensured that virtually all creative works made since the 1920s are presently locked out of public use, not a single such copyright will expire until 2019, and all works published today will remain unavailable into the next century.

Let's bring this close to home. Tideland, Terry Gilliam's latest (most?) neglected masterpiece, has been appallingly mishandled in its DVD release by distributor THINKFilm: Transfer features the incorrect aspect ratio 1.77:1, which a child will tell you is an unacceptable substitute for the glorious theatrical 2.35:1. THINKFucker is in no hurry to amend the situation, and so I remain unable to view and share this crushingly beautiful film. Now, if Tideland were not automatically copy protected by law, but rather by default freely available in the public domain, anyone could come along and print their own DVD version (say, the Beggar's Canyon Edition of Tideland) and legally collect all profits from its sale. Doubtless one such version would be made by persons who actually cared about quality enough to preserve the original 2.35:1 ratio, and that disc I would happily buy and show to you.

Closer to home. We will not in our lifetime see an official release of The Wonder Years. The soundtrack is an albatross; hundreds of classic songs licensed for one-time broadcast use only, plus syndication. Hundreds of copyrights between you and Winnie Cooper.

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Animators are the most creative people on the planet. When not limited to live action photography motion pictures become the freest possible mode of expression, and so attract the most dynamic creative talent. This is why Adult Swim is consistently the best block of programming on television.

Don't be misled by the staid ways of postwar Disney or the rigid forms of conventional anime: It should not be surprising that the two most prominent cultural forces in animation happen to suffer (prosper) from creative anemia. Think instead of South Park, the program that long ago punched through the frontiers of satire, then accelerated. (They're now so far ahead that "edgy", the descriptor itself, sounds as obsolete as the Borscht Belt.) Think also of the generally acknowledged greatest sitcom of all time, The Simpsons. Hell, think of SpongeBob SquarePants, the kids show that could well be the apotheosis of the sight gag, surpassing anything in the Looney Tunes catalogue and even (I feel guilty saying it) Tom and Jerry. Japan is not without its superlative innovators either. The experimental miniseries known as FLCL is a freewheeling marriage of narrative and form as densely constructed as Citizen Kane or Ulysses, telling in its brain-melting fashion a deeply affecting coming-of-age story for which I offer the suggestive but altogether inadequate subtitle, Your Erection and What To Do With It: An Electric Riff on Puberty, Space Pirates and the Home Run.

Roger Ebert's exuberant review of Being John Malkovich opens with the exclamation, "What an endlessly inventive movie this is!" I'd like to turn that exclamation into a kind of seal of commendation — call it The Malky — and stamp it on worthy new films, shows, books-games-what-have-you as my highest honor, to share the delight of something new added to the world.

Sita — if, like me, you are comfortably unfamiliar with Indian* mythology — is a much-interpreted princess of yore whose romantic legend ennobles the tragic lot of the virtuous woman. Her colorful story and, more to the point, the telling of it among contemporary Indian and non-Indian audiences is the subject of Nina Paley's animated boogie woogie breakdown, her tribute to "the greatest break-up story ever told", produced independently by donation and loan (Paley admits to falling rather badly in debt) and made available online in 2008, generously sans copy protection. The film is in violation of certain arcane state and federal copyright laws due to the unlicensed use of vintage Jazz Age recordings and faces censure in the event of public exhibition. In the event of public exhibition the public's mind will be blown by the wreck of a Hindu circus train in Toontown, throbbing psychedelia spilled into one of Gilliam's more violent Python landscapes and Sita wiggling with all the pre-Code vavoom of Betty Boop — 30s surrealism on holiday aboard the Yellow Submarine — triple-narrated by quarrelsome silhouette puppets and a scratch pad proxy for Paley herself.


* dots not feathers

Gigantic

If you ever find yourself saying, "Whoa, that homeless guy over there looks just like Zach Galifianakis," brace yourself. Because it is Zach Galifianakis. And he's trying to kill you.



New York Times Magazine article.

Criss Cross + The Underneath

One must touch base with film noir from time to time, if one loves film at all. As a genre to embody the mythos of motion pictures it is second only to horror. Little holes made by a snub nose .38 in the spider hand of a dame bleed emulsion.

Criss Cross (1949) is a sufficiently nasty from-the-files crime brief badly smudged by an all-thumbs cast, but its semi-classic status is justified by a tautly Hitchcock third act and unexpectedly brutal finale. Burt Lancaster never was good for much in his beefcake heyday but I reserve a certain fondness due to his December portrayal of Doc 'Moonlight' Graham in Field of Dreams. Steven Soderbergh's 1995 remake is a bit of an oddity in the Soderbergh catalogue. Re-titled The Underneath, it might have fulfilled the languishing promise of the original screenplay had Soderbergh known at the time to segregate his arthouse doodling from the professionally tailored thrill. Instead the flick seems to be the mistake that taught him the lesson. The sin of pride. Where should be clockwork fatalism in bowing service to the gods of noir the direction sadly falters, fails to observe the rites, straying into a self-indulgent murk of convoluted chronology and stasis. Film noir is a high calling and unforgiving at that. In a way I'm actually relieved to discover that Steven is only human. (All hail the Coen brothers!)

Alison Elliott plays the femme fatale with a hardened set to her pretty face and a cold desolation in the eyes. Bad bad news, this girl. Not quite sociopathic but close enough for jazz. Those slightly puffy lower lids remind me of Peter Sarsgaard, who seems pleasant enough in interviews as he sips coffee and casually guts a cat. Taking over for Lancaster, the leading sap is portrayed by the preposterously soap opera puss of Peter Gallagher, famous son of Wooly Willy and Mrs Potato Head. His occasional willingness to be mocked and suffer misfortune onscreen helps take the edge off my need to work over that brow with a belt sander.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

I've been admiring lately George Clooney and his quicksilver talent for comedy manner. Having finally toured the Ocean's Eleven trilogy, and now reflecting upon O Brother and this latest heehaw outing, it strikes me that Clooney's rascal mug can sell cornball slick as salvation on Sunday, then lickety-split turn and deliver a devastating roll of the eyes to the next unlucky schmuck who tries to get cute. No matter the game — Gomer Pyle or Mr Cool — he always wins even when he's losing, like limp-wristed Dr Jones in a fistfight against a shirtless Nazi pile of meat, because he's already won you over. The old comparisons to Clark Gable and Cary Grant* are apt, ace in the hole being that Clooney actually possesses subtlety.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is best viewed in trailer form, I'm sad to report. Without the scent of a story, dog will not hunt. Ewan McGregor is miscast once again...the only time he's ever been convincing onscreen is when crawling shuddering out of a toilet. Okay, I also liked him as Grimes the self-loathing coffee grunt. Understand that McGregor cannot be sold on handsome Scottishness because fundamentally he is leering and gross.


* CG, CG, GC?

Gears of War 2

I kinda glossed over the gameplay experience of Resident Evil 5, busy as I was suggesting that one might have success opening a Klavern in Osaka (Just tell the Nips that Negroes flew the Enola Gay), but I'll remedy that right now with an illuminating side-by-side comparison to the gameplay experience of Gears of War 2:

Eh, they're pretty much the same. *punt*

Sugar (2008)

The World Series stands at 3 to 2 New York and we check in hoping to see the Yankees blow it. The Cubs and Wrigley Field have a new owner from Omaha because the Tribune has sold everything down to its last pint of desk drawer bourbon. This week is last call for baseball.

Here's one for the road. A Dominican kid has got an arm. He leaves his family for the farm system riding everyone's high hopes. Progressing from training camp in Arizona to Single A in Iowa nothing goes terribly wrong, but the kid's game begins to falter. He sees the system doing what it's supposed to do: weed out. He lies to his mother on the phone about how things are going. He spends time lost. Slowly he sights his passion anew, where always it had been.

Sugar is the second indie drama from newcomer Ryan Fleck to completely stun me. Fleck seems to have an instinctive understanding for the texture of places and the people to be found there, as he proves by putting an educated white crack addict into an all-black Brooklyn junior high and displacing a monolingual athlete from the DR to the urban southwest to a Christian youth group in the heartland to a Big Apple flophouse and making each of these scenarios feel completely authentic.

Where the Wild Things Are

I know where they are. I can draw you a map.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.

— Homage to the runic (obsolete?) vernacular of Cormac McCarthy

I quote the above out of desperation. This is me reduced to flinging rubber chickens. For almost a year now I've been keeping this blog, coaxing myself to become a better writer. I've learned that flippant is easy. Sincere is hard. So I challenge myself to be sincere when the material calls for it. But I'm not up to this task. Not yet.

McCarthy saps my will to attempt to cobble a respectable sentence e'er again. Dammit, Jim, I'm a scientist not a literaturologist! In the face of such isolate mastery of the English language I am unworthy to so much as fart the alphabet.
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I love this novel. It is as bleak a vision of our condition as possible. An unnamed apocalypse has scorched and fouled the land, the sea, the air. World over. Cows and birds are extinct and the other animals too and nothing will grow again. No hope for long term survival. The story is a one-way journey into the despair of darkness, into a cave: In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with them.

On the journey are a father and son, just a small boy. The story is of their perfect love for each other. The question stirred in me, on first reading, is what to make of their love, of their choice to continue to exist each only for the sake of the other, in a world that has nothing else to offer nor ever will.

McCarthy knows truths about the relation between fathers and sons that I'm not ready to face. About the passing of the torch. A day will come when I won't be able to pick up this book at all.

Mad Max makes the end of the world look like a helluva lotta fun. Boys love the postapocalypse because it's one wild rumpus, full of crossbows and mutants and your own sweet pair of greaves. But I've discovered an important distinction. We already knew that horror movies fall into two classes: the giddy fun-to-be-scared (bring a date) experience and, well, the kind where you just feel sick. The difference between them is hope, which comes from the characters' (and the audience's) empowerment. The Road is the first example of postapocalyptic fiction I've encountered that is no fun, no fun at all. Not when there's nothing left to fight (for). Nothing even left of the world to parse. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Dante wrote of no hell so terrible and true as this.


The Road as an American novel (it won the Pulitzer) participates in the tradition of the doomed survivalist; a tradition so basic to American lit that the short stories To Build a Fire, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Outcasts of Poker Flat are standard high school curriculum. These are grim tales...such fatalism is heritage in our Haunted Land.

[Recommended viewing: Grizzly Man. Film adaptation of The Road releases later this month.]