Spring Breakers Fo-ev-ah, Bisquits

I just saw Spring Breakers this afternoon. Yes, it is a good film, one big, long music video. The most interesting thing about the way it tells its linear narrative in a  on-linear way (the editing frequently and unpredictably returns us to footage we've seen earlier and sometimes unpredictably skips ahead) is that the dialogue is almost all non-deigetic and also on a kind of "press replay" loop.  I'd guess that at least half of the few moments with diegetic dialogue also have loud extra-diegetic music.  The soundtrack is composed in by Skrillex and Cliff Martinez (Drive).  The repeated sound of a shotgun locking was rather excessive, however.  Btw, I have no idea who the actresses in the film are, but I thought all were good playing not that bad, bad, badder, and baddest "girls."  Weird and rather disquieting that the villains are all black people, however.   They all die, while all the white b*****es live.  (OK, one does get shot in the arm and then goes home.)  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Breakers

The film tells a sad (supposed to be sentimental?) story about (bad) grrrl (that is the correct spelling of "grrrl," btw) power and white trash Gangstas.  The trailer makes the film seem salacious.  I didn't think the film was, not that I would have minded if it had been.  (Yes, there is nudity and man, many shots of lots and lots scantily clad people, some of whom are engaging in activities in which today's hard partying college youth may or not not actually engage.  You can always drive to Daytona and find out for yourselves, I guess.  Me, I have no idea.)

Lots of inventive camera work and equally inventive uses of different film stocks and video (or digital simulations of same.).
This is the lead track, which I find hilarious.Keep listening for the vocal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSeNSzJ2-Jw

My second fave track:
http://lights.elliegoulding.com/

To cite one of the lines that gets looped many times, "Spring Break Fo-Ev-Ah, Bisquits."  ("Biscuits" is not the actual word used in the film; that word, the word in the film, rhymes with biscuits, begins with a "b" and sends with an "s.")   This message has been rated B, for Burt.

burt hurts with out posts, outburts, and various and sundry tele-communiques, etc. etc.

I want to add to my blog title

burthurts, with out posts, outburts, and various and sundry tele-communiques, etc. etc.

 However, I cannot apparently change the title of my blog.

Don't ask, Pa-tells

Cyrus Patell, an Associate Dean at NYU, must be the most idiotic administrator who ever lived. He wrote a long response, I'm told, to my reply to his sycophantic blog post defending the authoritarian power structure of NYU. Power gets to be silent and non-responsive as well as to speak. Every now then it has to speak to justify itself to those people it holds in contempt. And then power has to justify or walk back the stupid kind of speech it should never have delivered in the first place. See patell.org for the latest. 

The Administrative Mind: Why Do University Administrators Hate Faculty?

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What a post! The world owes Cyrus R. K. Patell a huge debt for providing his readers such insight into the administrative mind in “Who’s Confused?”  Everyone concerned with higher education ought to read it and post it as widely as possible.  I have linked it here: http://patell.org/2013/03/whos-confused/ And I have reactivated my Facebook account just to post a link to it as well.  Patell’sblog post is a great follow up to the confusing NY Times article on NYU at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/nyregion/nyu-gives-lavish-parting-gifts-to-some-star-officials.html

You might think that the role of the university is to produce informed citizens who will participate in our liberal democracy.  You might think that faculty, the people who do research and actually teach students the intellectual and technical latest developments in their chosen majors, would be at the center of the university.  You might think that the role of university administrators would be to support faculty.  Think again!  An administrator himself, Associate Dean Cyrus R. K. Patell has certainly disabused us of any such naïve notions in his column.   Patell is not at all confusing.  Faculty, he says, are not citizens in a university.  Why?  Because the university is not a democracy.  But not to worry!  For democracy isn’t a good thing either, according to Patell.  Why can’t Obama just dictate?  Forget about that circuit court decision ruling that Obamas recess appointments were unconstitutional. Forget about the Republicans in the 111^th and 112^th U.S Congress being the most obstructionist in the history of the United States.  No, “debate” in Congress is just   a waste of time.  Too bad we aren't living in Abu dabi, I guess.  Well, at least we can take solace in the fact that  the university is an authoritarian, top down structure.  And academic freedom?  How dumb to think faculty should have it!  Cyrus Patell knows it so stupid that it isn’t even worth mentioning.  Why would any administrator write such a candid and revealing a blog post like Patell’s?  Apparently, he just can’t stop himself.  Citing with great approval a passage written by Stanley Fish, reveals with almost blinding clarity the absolute contempt in which university administrators hold faculty.  Here it is:

At the end of my tenure as dean, I spoke to some administrators who had been on the job for a short enough time to be able to still remember what it was like to be a faculty member and what thoughts they had then about the work they did now. One said that she had come to realize how narcissistic academics are: an academic, she mused, is focused entirely on the intellectual stock market and watches its rises and falls with an anxious and self-regarding eye.  As an academic, you’re trying to get ahead; as an administrator, you’re trying “to make things happen for other people”; you’re “not advancing your own profile but advancing the institution, and you’re more service oriented.”

Ah, yes, the days when I was just another narcissistic faculty member, the days before I became an Associate Dean and could “make things happen for other people,” those “other people” who in the administrative mind obviously do not include faculty who work in a system which evaluates them as individual persons, not as members of a collective.  No, “advancing the institution,” means working to help administrators, or in the case of NYU, helping them leave NYU with huge retirement packages, packages so huge that the NY Times even ran a story about it.   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/nyregion/nyu-gives-lavish-parting-gifts-to-some-star-officials.html The NY Times interview Patell spends his blog attacking is a follow up. You might very well think that Patell is a time-server, a lackey, a sycophant, a failed academic who didn’t publish enough to be promoted to full professor, a courtier who, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, makes love to his employment.  You might very well think that.  Patell  should be congratulated for showing us the contempt in which self-servicing university administrators so richly deserve to be held.

By the way, my grandfather went to Harvard, like Patell.  Some years ago, I scanned and posted on FB the letter admitting him and his twin brother that the then Dean of Harvard, no doubt “revered,” wrote to my great-grandmother.   Also, regarding the Puritans Patell mentions: My mother is a direct descendant of Governor Winslow. 

EVEN IF YOU HAVE NO POWER

EVEN IF YOU HAVE NO POWER, YOU ALWAYS HAVE THE POWER OF "NO."

"Argo, F Yourself!"

I  saw Argo yesterday at the Cobblehill Theater in Brooklyn with my friend Hai-Dang Phan.  It’s a well-made, entertaining thriller, but especially interesting to me for the way it displays so clearly the way people in the U.S. understand their history as a deferred wish-fulfillment.  (Btw, Argo, fuck yourself! is a running joke in the film.  Alan Arkin, the producer says it to a reporter asking what the film is about.) The ending of the film is the worst part but also the most interesting. Spoiler alert.  Affleck’s character, who is separated from his wife and a very heavy drinker, if not an alcoholic, comes home and asks his wife if he can “come in.”   She hugs him and says nothing, but she is smiling and all happy, happy.  The first shot of Affleck on the veranda shows a big American flag blowing in the upper left part of the screen.   Male hero equals national hero.  The family is restored.   But not really.  The next shot is of Affleck in bed with his son, who is sleeping in Affleck’s arms, but totally awake, and the camera tracks left to show part of the son’s star wars collection of action figures or figurines. They are pretty small scale.  There are at least three dissolves to close-ups of the collection, each take feeling extraordinarily long, at least to me, until finally we get to a storyboard for the bogus film that we saw Affleck keep back from the archivist earlier (Affleck was supposed to turn over all the other docs and did so, except for this one).  The storyboard, around which text about what happened later, shows the hero on some kind of space motorbike with a little boy holding on to him.  Mirror image of Affleck and his son.  Two points about the film's delivery of U.S. history as yet to be fulfilled fantasy:  first, the family is not really restored.  The wife is hardly there and immediately drops out.  The son is safe and asleep, but Dad is still on duty, his heroism invisible (what he did remains classified). Second, national history is only intelligible indirectly, through the sci-fi movie. History begins returns only through science-fiction fantasy. The Star Wars shots recycle the film as Reagan’s never built anti-ballistic missile defense system, called Star Wars.  The length of the takes at the end grant the wish or family reunion only through deferral which looks forward to Star Wars in a future anterior, since the film has already been released but Reagan has not yet been elected, and back via the stolen storyboard, to the sci-fi film Argo that one of the hostages used to get himself and the other five hostages through the final checkpoint, which was itself a story of he Iranian revolution, and back to the moment when Affleck got the idea for the op while watching Battle for the Planet of the Apes on TV with his son.  The son is father of the man.  Son is watching it at his home, Mom is gone, and Affleck turns the channel in his hotel room so he can watch it too at the same time.  The clips from Battle the Planet of the Apes show the black astronaut with two apes and ends with a close up of an orangantan.  That film is openly an allegory of the race wars of the 60s and recycles racist images of blacks represented as apes. (Think King Kong.)   Affleck notices the make-up and gets the idea to call the guy who did it, who has also done work for the C.I.A.   There are lots of clips of TV news anchors (Peter Jennings, Walter Chronkite, Ted Koppel) reporting on the hostage crisis, but Affleck only gets it, the rescue op, when he tunes into his son’s channel.  And he only pursues it after calling his son and missing him (shot of phone, no one home). So he writes a birthday card to his son and wife and drops in the mail at the airport.  Communication delay, letter never arrives at its destination.  The film begins with a sequence about the US involvement in Iran that derives from Persepolis.  It is narrated by a girl in voice-over as a kind of animated graphic novel (anticipating the Argo storyboards later and also echoing in advance an Iranian servant of the Canadian ambassador who is forced to leave to Iraq near the end of the film).  From start to finish, we get history delivered in pre-production movie form or animated storybook form or in collectible sci-fi film merchandise.  This sequence is refreshingly critical of the U.S.  it sort of drops out as the Argo fantasy recodes it as a story of miniature American and Canadian triumphalism (the rest of the hostages remained in captivity, of course).  So the scale of the story is the scale of the toys in the son’s Star Wars toy collection, and the son’s collection forgets the history of U.S. race war and remembers what is to come rather than what has happened.  The re-collection is already compulsive, looping back and forward a moment when the wish can actually be fulfilled, a moment that never arrives and never will, or does so only as a moment represented as the deferral of said wish.  Every covert op is part of a lo-“op.”  No op is opt(imal).

Til Death Do Us Depart: Cold Feet in Trollope's _Can You Forgive Her?_

Can you be happy as a woman and not marry?  That is the question Trollope poses in Can You Forgive Her?  The answer is no.  Yes, Alice knows John Grey loves.  Yes, she knows he loves her. But nevertheless she cannot marry him.  Why? In part because because she misreads him. But this novel is no Pride and Prejudice. A woman can't marry and be happy either.  This novel is about marriage being death. Here is what the narrator says about Planty Pall, Gencora's husband, after he has decided to refuse the once in a lifetime offer he has sought his entire adulthood trying to obtain, namely the office of he Chancellor of the Exchequer, in order to save his marriage by taking his wife on a tour of Europe for a year:  "All his friends knew, or believed they knew, that he had left town.  His death and burial had been chronicled, and were he now  to reappear, he could reappear only as a ghost. He was being talked of as the departed one;--or rather, such talk on all sides had now come nearly to an end." p. 561  Glencora wants to leave her husband because she cannot give him an heir.  When John Grey finally gets Alice to accept his proposal, she does so in a graveyard.  In my view of the novel, a woman who doesn't marry, like a woman who does, already has one foot in the grave.  The central scene of the novel occurs when Alice go for a walk in the ruins near Matching, her home, and Glencora keeps them out to long.  They come home with cold feet, and Planty blames Alice.  The scene is mentioned again and again in the novel, even near the very end. "Cold" iS used again and again. Planty gives Glencora a "cold kiss." A dead husband is buried in the "cold sod." Funny when you think of it. Trollope's The Warden is missing its second volume. The heroine who gets married in a narrative rush at the end is already a widow at the beginning of Barchester Towers. The story of their seemingly happy marriage is never told. Trollope seems to be even more anti-marriage than Hardy. Who'd have thought?