Month: January 2012

At the New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews two films filled with sex.


Shame

depicts the life of sex-obsessed Brandon, a New Yorker who fills every free moment with fucking. And in

Sleeping Beauty

, student Lucy earns cash by taking a sleeping pill and making her unconscious body available for the use of paying customers.

Though neither film is explicitly about fantasy, each describes a kind of fantasy. That of Sleeping Beauty — from the viewpoint of the client — is of easy control, availability. That of Shame is about extremes of emotion. It’s Apollo and Dionysius, transposed to a world where Apollo is getting in on sex.

Sex, here, isn’t necessarily sex — it’s a McGuffin which could stand for any activity which is coveted, or extreme, or intense. Anything which becomes an object of desire, which is fixated on and fantasized about, becomes twisted in a similar way. One kind of mind layers on organized parades of passive partners; another craves extremes of expressed emotion.

Nothing is so neat, of course. For a start, the taming of emotion has an apepal all of its own. Lane, coincidentally, suggests this of Shame director Steve McQueen. His earlier film Hunger:

was imperilled by the coolness of its own gaze. The wall of a jail cell, smeared with excrement as an act of protest, was filmed with such compositional care that it became, in effect, a work of abstract art, allowing us to forget what it actually was: human waste, applied with human rage, and surely unbearable to the human nose. McQueen could hardly be hipper, yet he remains, to an extent, an old-fashioned aesthete, drawn to extreme behavior in his characters not because of any trials of spirit that they undergo but because he is challenging himself to unleash the wildest material that he, wielding his camera, can then possess and tame.

And if the more you think about it, the convoluted all this gets. Not a breakdown, so much as epicycles upon epicycles, an Apollonian OCD trying to leave its grip on the chaos of human passion.

Momus argues that Berlin doesn’t even have the money for its subcultures to sell out:

Berlin sometimes seems like a museum of youth culture styles we invented in Britain: punk, goth, Spiral Tribe crusty. In Britain there’s a perpetual dialectic between alternative lifestyles and the money system, which means that within a couple of years any given subcultural style will have been turned into a big business club scene, and then, shortly after that, will be the soundtrack and the style of a bank commercial, and, just after that, will be utterly naff, dead and unmentionable. But in Berlin it seems that punk, goth, industrial and rave looks are adopted for life by people who live them as permanent subcultural styles, entirely apart from the money system. Nobody hypes them up, buys them out, and flogs them dead. The styles are “timeless and eternal”, the visual corollary of a life of protest and tolerated companionable deviance. Their adepts resemble post-protestant monks and nuns who’ve taken lifetime vows (“I will own two big dogs and make sculpture out of junk”). It’s touching but also somewhat appalling.

Momus:

Mediterranean cultures—and I’d include that whole tranche of peninsulas from Greece to France—tend to avoid the extremities of subcultural style, and I think it’s because these tend to originate in Protestant and Post-Protestant cultures (the US, UK, Holland, Germany) and be an expression of “protest” values, a permanent “reformation”. French, Portugese, Spanish, Italians, Greeks tend to be much more family-oriented and, as you say, conformist, either Catholic or Greek Orthodox culturally, Classical-Catholic rather than Romantic-Protestant.

during the past 12 months a black person was 29.7 times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person. That figure was 26.6 the previous year.

In 2009, black people were 10.7 times more likely to be stopped than whites under the controversial “exceptional” power

— from the Guardian — which, typically, doesn’t link to it’s sources. As far as I can see it’s from a campaign group backed by the LSE and Soros’ Open Society Justice Initiative

Part of the glory of Norman Rush’s novel

Mating

is that it’s about loving by

doing

:

“Supposing we had met in the eighteen nineties, say, when there was nothing ambiguous about socialism being the answer to everything. It would have been obvious that the collective ownership fo the means of production was all that was needed to make us happy. That would have been a medium for us to embrace in. We would have been perfect militants”

Over the last few months, I’ve repeatedly headed to Tiger Beatdown, hoping to find something new from Sady Doyle. There never was.

I’d worried that she had stopped writing for some reason — job, depression, burnout, any of the usual downers. Gladly, it turns out the opposite is true — she’s found places to pay her for words.

In These Times, Rookie. Sady links these and others on twitter.

My favourite of her recent articles is about women in comedy:

They’re comedians; being pretty and nice is not their job.

What makes comedians transgressive, from Lucille Ball to Ken Jeong, is their willingness to look bad in public. Women have never been encouraged to cultivate this fearlessness. There are exceptions – Ball or Joan Rivers come to mind – but they tend to prove the rule. Lady Loser Comedy opens up the game. Women who have the profane deadpan of McCarthy, or the cool prickliness of Fey or the off-rhythm intensity of Wiig: They’re not excluded any more. They embarrass themselves, they’re completely inappropriate, and that’s fine; it’s comedy.

At the New Yorker, Evan Osnos has an entertaining round-up of how the online wags of China have responded to SOPA. Mostly, it seems, with humor:

At last, the planet is becoming unified: We are ahead of the whole world, and the ‘American imperialists’ are racing to catch up.”

“I’ve come up with a perfect solution: You can come to China to download all your pirated media, and we’ll go to America to discuss politically sensitive subjects.”

The significance of Hitchens passing may have more to do with the fact that he was the last of a dying (no pun intended) breed — the erudite, iconoclast commentator who kept up with current events so you wouldn’t have to. It’s not that iconoclasm or erudition as such has disappeared. Instead, it has become generalized, through blogging, and in the process has been deprived of its exchange value.

[source]

Since 2008, I’ve been repeatedly amused by the contrast between coverage in the Economist and the Financial Times, compared to the mainstream centre-left. The bastions of liberalism see capitalism under threat; the

The social democrats rarely even mention capitalism by name, let alone predict its alteration or demise. They’re too cowed, too nervous — and, I suspect, too insecure in their understanding of economics and finance.

This week Lenin is on the cover of Economist, introducing a feature on state capitalism. By this they mean the rise of state-run companies, including from the developing world, as the new behemoths of the economy. They’re not ashamed to put it into historical terms:

The era of free-market triumphalism has come to a juddering halt, and the crisis that destroyed Lehman Brothers in 2008 is now engulfing much of the rich world. The weakest countries, such as Greece, have already been plunged into chaos….

The crisis of liberal capitalism has been rendered more serious by the rise of a potent alternative: state capitalism, which tries to meld the powers of the state with the powers of capitalism. It depends on government to pick winners and promote economic growth. But it also uses capitalist tools such as listing state-owned companies on the stockmarket and embracing globalisation.

The party line is what you’d expect. To the Economist state-run companies are better than pure socialism, but far inferior to private corporations.

I also can’t help noticing how many of their criticisms of state-run companies could equally apply to Britain’s PFIs:

Studies show that state companies use capital less efficiently than private ones, and grow more slowly. In many countries the coddled state giants are pouring money into fancy towers at a time when entrepreneurs are struggling to raise capital….everywhere state capitalism favours well-connected insiders over innovative outsiders

Five years ago today, Armenian-Turkish editor Hrant Dink was murdered. Today 20,000 people have demonstration in Istanbul to mark his death.

Many are also angry at the outcome of a court case, involving 19 people suspected of being linked to the murder. Three were jailed for incitement to murder.

I’m often sceptical of court cases which become political causes. Some, though, genuinely do rise above the facts of the individual case to be debates about the injustices buried within the political system. Stephen Lawrence, Mumia Abu Jamal.

Hrant Dink fits among them. For a start, his killing was beyond doubt political. The trial just finished revolved around a nationalist group, whose members were

There may have been connections between them and the security services. There were certainly connections between their ideology and that of the rest of Turkish society. They were closer to the mainstream than Dink himself, who had been prosecuted for “insulting the Turkish identity”.

There’s been a fair amount of coverage of Dink today. I’m a little disappointed, though, that the Streisand effect hasn’t really kicked in, at least in the anglophone parts of the internet which I notice. It’s a shame, because the articles I’ve found by Dink are really rather good. Here he is in an article which connects Turkeys relations with the EU to the treatment of minorities within Turkish society:

the EU finds nearly all elements of Turkish society and its institutions divided against itself on the issue. Political left and right, secular and religious, nationalist and liberal, state bureaucracy and military — the situation is the same in that everywhere there are internal conflicts over Europe at least as much as conflicts between the camps.

Since no part of Turkish society is homogeneously “for” or “against” the European Union, the EU process has had a singular effect: dissolving Turkey’s existing polarisations and becoming itself the main inner dynamic of Turkish development.