The MPAA and a lack of perspective

I've been watching some pre-production code films, namely a great Greta Garbo 'biopic' of the Queen of Sweden, Queen Christina, and the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, Babyface. Babyface was a central movie in the move by Will Hays to try and get more teeth into the production code, and the resulting process really took a lot of the nuance and complication out of a medium that was already running short on subltly. Ironcially, the discussion of Nietzschean philosophy that was forced cut from the film by censorship boards is actually itself a common misreading of Nietzsche's work, The Will to Power, completely missing the nuance of a very complicated philosophical tome.

Anyway, it occurred to me just now that this may be a huge part of the reason that reactionary politics is so fond of a manichean worldview of us vs. them, good vs. evil. It's embedded in the films we watch, especially commercial Westerns, War films, and Action/adventure stuff. Obviously, that's not uniformly true, and the recent Dark Night films at least partially explore a more complex psychology. It is true that mainstream films still greatly reflect the tenets of the code that a film's sympathies must never be with an antihero or a criminal. The resulting films were never allowed to explore the undercurrents of criminality or sexuality with any real depth without running afoul of the Hays Office.

I do believe that American sexuality has long been perverted by the pruriant standards of the code, and that the vastly huge pornography industry is a result of a failure to really have an open and honest dialogue through art about sex. That may be stretching things a little, but I also feel that films' cut and dried approach to morality gives people a skewed conception of the complications naturally inherent in human life. It's certainly a part of the problem. Couple that with a Television and internet based culture where attention spans are brief and context is rarely sought or provided, and you get the insanity of modern American politics.

It's really a shame, and the thing is, I believe the Production Code may be at the root of a lot of our trouble seeing and understanding complexity. I don't know that you have all those John Wayne movies if Wilder, Hawks, Lubitsch and the rest had to contend with such a regressive process of censorship. I guess I'm overreaching a little, but I do feel like the artistic history of film was warped in a very unhealthy way by the overt censorship of the Hays office, the precursor to the modern MPAA rating system.

'apropos of nothing'

I really hate excessive or unnecessary narration in films. Or the kind of slapdash narration that Allen uses in Vicki Cristina Barcelona. As an easy way to cobble together a movie it works, but in the end it just superficially masks the fact that the movie is skattershot.

I had my car towed yesterday because I parked on the wrong side of the road during street cleaning hours, and I didn't notice until I was trying to leave for work at 4 am. Of course, the tow yard didn't open until seven at which point I would already be three hours late, and I will have to drop a sawbuck to get it out . I'm currently fuming about all of this.

It took me years of journalling before the process became complicated and a responsibility. It took barely six months for the same thing to happen with blogging.

How is it possible that the Rays and the Cubs are tied with the best records in baseball? That is both exciting and frustrating at the same time.

I really like the set design for Gene Kelly's character's apartment in An American in Paris, but I still have trouble with the excessively melodramaticness of the writing and acting in musicals. I wonder what Brecht/Weil stuff is like live? I'd really like to find out someday.

I don't know if I'll start blogging again. If I can get back this kind of feel without this kind of structure, I might just.

Perfect writing & perfect despair

I've had two unique book reading experiences in the last week or so. Firstly, I've always heard or read about people's experience of reading a book that felt like it was 'written about them' or 'just for them' or whatever, and I've always thought: wow, that sounds cool. I've never had the experience myself until I read Haruki Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing. Actually, it's more along the lines of a novella, but I did. I felt like it was written just for me, as if he had me in his head when he wrote it. Obviously, I know that isn't the case, but still, it just gives you this mild electric shiver the whole time yr reading. It was a marvelously eerie feeling all in all, which has been a continuing theme of 'The summer of Murakami'.
Concurrently, I was reading his most recent novel, After Dark, and I was thinking the whole time, hey, it only seems mediocre in comparison to his other novels. It still had trademark Murakami wierdness, insight, and when the characters get to talking its way offkey and interesting, but it just wasn't all the way there. Like he was coasting through this one. This was how I felt right up until the 2nd to last paragragh in the book, when the themes from all of his books suddenly clicked in my head, and the book transformed into this exciting distillation of wierdness into a coherent metaphysics of the odd. If I hadn't've read so many of his other novels I don't think it would have happened like that, but I have, so it did. I've never had a book completely transform itself in the waning moments like that. It was highly awesome.
I also finished Norwegian Wood just two days ago, and it hit me hard. Suddenly I felt like I had been disattached from the universe and was just floating in some interliminal state whereby I couldn't actually interact or engage with the world around me for the entire day. I was just watching without being a part of anything. It was not the response I would've expected. It's a sad story for sure, but this was something different. I just felt like I was no longer in the game or even a part of the game. I'm failing miserably in my attempt to explain this feeling because it was a strange one, undoubtedly, but oh, well. I'm now into Kafka on the Shore and Pinball, 1973. Absolutely, utterly obsessed with Marukami.

Oh how I love to dance!

Firstly, the word of the day over at dictionary.com is harridan, which means a worn out strumpet, a vixenish woman, or a hag. Apparently harridan is a pretty harsh term, and it really doesn't sound like one at all. It sounds more like someone who shops at Nordstorms, although there might be some overlap there. I bet you could totally get away with calling someone that and have it come off like a complement. 'I can't believe you do all yr shopping at Nordstorms. You are such a harridan!'
Okay, enough of that. I went to see Rilo Kiley last night, and it was fan-frickin'-tastic (it's funny that in my real life self I swear like a sailor, but I'm always reticent to do it on the internet), and apparently at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel, which I have to say is a name that's growing on me, they don't know the meaning of the words measured pour. I ordered a Seven and ginger-ale, and I got this plastic cup full of whiskey with a small splash of ginger-ale on the top. I'm thinking to myself after Thao with The Get Down, Stay Down who had this really excellent kind of indie-rock, hawaiian slack key mix going on that I should get a drink from a different bartender because I really didn't want to get that drunk. So, I go to the bar on the other side of the concert hall, which has been really tastefully redesigned since ten years ago when it was The Strand and was a total pit, to order a drink and it's the same deal. I have no idea how they can stay in business selling drinks like that, but they've won my heart, also the show was phenomenal. Jenny Lewis is just totally bewitching and bitchin' all in the same breath, and the rest of the band's pretty durn good too.
Anyway, at some stage I'll get back into form with The Dancing Fool and talk about the show as a show, but I was just trying to tell the story about how I had this total eureka moment about ten minutes before Rilo Kiley came on about how identity is such a distributed property of the brain that it conflicts within itself and maybe that has a lot to do with the emotional response to things that seem to be outside of the dominant aspects of our identity. I'm pacing around in a corner furiously trying to work this all out to some satisfactory degree, and all I got to was a quickly scribbled note about the overlapping functions of reentrant mapping in the creation of consciousness before Rilo came out, which was actually okay cause I was super-amped up from the adrenaline rush of exciting ideas and got instantly into the music, but I still can't quite get a grasp on what the whole thing means. I don't think I'm smart enough.

Elastic interactive

I had one of those connective moments this morning, when two disparate ideas coalesce. I'll try to elaborate on it and see if there's anything there. It was really just a flash, and I haven't worked through all the implications. I read a study some few years ago in which these researchers took fMRI's (brainscans) of people who considered themselves Republicans or Democrats while they were reading quotes from the opposing sides major candidate. I believe this was '00, so it would've been Bush and Gore. The scans showed that there was major activation in the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. The basic conclusion was that we respond emotionally to the opposing side before even rationally deconstructing what they've said.
I know I have this experience when I read Jeff Jacoby, the token conservative on the Boston Globe's editorial page. When I see he's written something, I have this moment of slight venomous emotion before I've read the piece. I've emotionally started to salivate at the thought of his bullshit. Sometimes he does make good points, other times I'm all ready to write a letter to the editor myself. Of course, that never actually happens, but you get the idea.
That's not the point. A few months back I read this piece somewhere on the internet about music criticism or somesuch, and this guy was writing about how our personality shapes how we approach music. It's like what we identify with as our thing and what we identify as the other is the starting point for how we appreciate music.
It kind of hit me this morning that this is the same type of phenomenon, so that because we've identified some band as hip or as a sell-out or whatever is going to emotionally influence how we rationally break down the aesthetics of the sound. Obviously, postmodernism has long brought into question what rational really means, and neuroscience is showing us that the postmodern idea is really true. There exists no purely rational thought, and the emotional signals won't even necessarily show up in our consciousness as feelings or anything. They might just be electrical signals in the brain that warp the thinking process and keep us from truly apreciating a band or music or a film or whatever.
Now also there are limits to this. It's not that Bush and Gore are objectively both right, and the opposing sides just don't see what's the what. True also in the realms of art, but it's just good to realize that there is more going on underneath the thoughts of 'this shit sucks' or whatever than just a pure opinion. I guess that was all kind of obvious. Identity shapes our likes and dislikes, but the idea that it might also be behind denying or over enthusing I think is relevant. I was trying to get farther into that, but I'm just not feeling it.