Arbouretum / Secret Mountains @ Ottobar 02/13/11

On a night when a pneumatic music industry celebrated itself, to the sole delight of the disengaged pre-adolescent genus, it was with more than just a bit of irony that I found myself as the aggressively self-assured Arbouretum decided to eschew the Grammys and celebrate the release of their new record, "The Gathering," by dominating the stage at the Ottobar.  For here is a band that matters; a band that makes you care.

With a foundation of David Heumann, Corey Allender, and Buck Carey, the group lays the classic power-trio bedrock, constructing heavy dark space jams with strong manic 60s psychedelia undertones.  They depart, however, from those ancestral giants, with the inclusion of Matthew Pierce on keys and percussion, who provides a swirling apocalyptic undercurrent to the proceedings.

Be not deceived by the darkness and the gloom, Arbouretum doesn't forsake you wallowing in misery -- at a precise moment they unveil pulsing positivity, and the virtuosity of lead guitarist David Heumann jettisons the hirsute foursome to moments of genuine catharsis.  It is quite appropriate, then, that "doom/ecstatic" is listed next to genre on their facebook page.

Here is a low-fi clip from the show:

Preceeding Arbouretum, Secret Mountains took the stage with a simple greeting, "Hi. We're a band."  Said with David Byrne-like unironic innocence, the six-member band unfurled exquisitely formed dream-pop that has become a unique feature of Baltimore's music scene.  Chanteuse Kelly Laughlin shows her amazing range in the band's most affecting tune, "Rejoice."

Vive La Meritocracy!

We've all seen them, growing up, in college, around town.  They've been blessed with everything:  personality, physique, and most vital to the equation, rich wealthy parents.  They win all the races, they get all the girls.  The hottest girl of them all, Lady Luck, is always on their side.  Individually, they are the embodiment of Shakespeare's Man of All Hues. And then comes along an unassuming computer nerd, a son of a Jewish dentist, from Dobbs Ferry, New York.  A scrawny kid with kinky hair, he's a bit of an asshole.  He also happens to be a once-in-a-century super-genius.  The nerd invents Facebook.  And for the first time in his life, Hue, or in the case of David Fincher's The Social Network, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, comes in second, a very very distant second.  This is not the way it's supposed to happen.

The Social Network is not -- as so many will have you believe -- about the lawsuits, the partying, the girls, the envy, the backstabbing, the money, all of which are indeed part of the Facebook foundation myth.  No, those are just the MacGuffins, the narrative tools employed by highly-skilled writer Aaron Sorkin to hook his audience.  This is about our wonderful, all-equalizing, supreme meritocracy.  This is about how a computer-geek with slight anti-social tendencies revolutionized interpersonal relationships in the 21st century.  The underdog not only won, he pulverized those standing in his way with such ferocity that their only recourse was to litigate, and as Mark Zuckerberg (played with menacing authority by Jesse Eisenberg) sneers to his attorney, "They aren't suing me for intellectual property theft. They're suing me because for the first time in their lives, things didn't go exactly the way they were supposed to for them."  Even Daddy's millions can't get their pleas to not fall on deaf ears when they go whining to the Harvard President.


It's a credit to Fincher, director of other such explorations of masculinity as Se7en, Fight Club, and Zodiac, for keeping the tension maddeningly taut throughout the film even though almost everyone already knows the story.  There was a massive piece on Zuckberberg in the New Yorker which outlines the entire story, and with greater detail.  We all know how this tale ends, or rather, where it stands today, and yet we're still kept on the edge of our seats.  Frequent Fincher collaborator, Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, along with seasoned English music producer Atticus Ross, ratchet up the immediacy of the action with a score that can only be described as militantly ambient.  The aggression in the music and direction mirror the intellectual and creative aggression onscreen.  Zuckerberg is a wunderkind tour-de-force.  He's not just the smartest kid in the room, he's the smartest guy in any room, even all the elite rooms in Harvard.  


The reviews and commentary surrounding The Social Network focus on how unflattering and unseemly Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is depicted.  This is simply a ruse to stir up controversy.  The portrayal is honest and unrelenting.  People are rarely kind and loving and fair and nurturing, especially when those same people are inventing billion dollar enterprises.  Is he insecure? Sure, but since when is insecurity a character flaw?  If anything, insecurity is pitiable. Did he box out possible early cohorts?  Of course, but since when is an abstract formative idea patentable?  

Come to think of it, with the exception of Zuckerberg's condescension to his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) in the opening scene, and the marginalization of his best friend, and initial financier (Andrew Garfield), when Facebook begins to legitimately explode, there is little that points to Zuckerberg being anything other than the guy who is 100 times smarter and talented than everyone else around him, with an uncanny ability to continually innovate and drive his creative vision to new heights.

Success stories like Mark Zuckerberg, and many others, show that in the face of true genius, the entitled class will cling to their last, and only, vestige of retribution, they'll sue.

The Frostly Pen

once more, for the right

climb up and reach that penned

soon it will be night

---youve a dagger to send

into the heart of

                       my master's mistress

she requires yr phallic kiss

to diffuse her beastly sex

carve her skin into sonnets lest---

be destroyed by that vile hex

I struck a match to help yr way

but it faltered in its blueness

---my mistress has sent me away

I am without home and spoonless

the carving word has

                         betrayed us both

my guilt arose in curdly white froth

at the deed which I fatigued

I took my match with scorning scoff

and came straight to yr mistress' bed

                                 intrigued

When I came to her she sat 

                                   in cower

so I graced her with my 

                                   golden shower

11/05/02

Swan Lake of Fire

There's a moment in Godard's Breathless when Jean Seberg's Patricia asks the famous novelist Parvulesco (played by the seminal Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Pierre Melville), "What is your ambition in life?"  Methodically turning his gaze towards her, Parvulesco triumphantly replies, "To become immortal....and then die!"  Fifty years later, Natalie Portman's ballerina, Nina, in Darren Aronofsky's exhilarating Black Swan must chant this mantra in her head at every pirouette.

Aronofsky's cinematic bitches brew begins with heavy doses of The Red Shoes, All About Eve, and Sunset Blvd., adds a corporeal helping of Kubrick's The Shining, and finishes off with Kafka's The Metamorphosis.  Claustrophobia, paranoia, and general creepiness ensue.  For a film staged within the uber-refined confines of the supposedly quietly classy world of dance, there is not a single moment of peace or general pleasantry.  Even Nina's hyper-pinked bedroom glutted with girlish knickknacks and stuffed animals has a pinch of psychosis to it.

At its heart, Black Swan deals with the obsessive convulsions in the pursuit of perfection.  In her innocence and vulnerability, Nina is the ideal virginal White Swan, but the ballet calls for the same dancer to dance both roles, and the Black Swan is a seductive force, using her sex like a flyswatter -- something the technically perfect but timid Nina is incapable of.  Under increasing pressure, Nina immerses herself so deeply into the dual roles of Swan Lake that she completely and abruptly loses grip on reality.  She suffers grisly hallucinations, simultaneously haunted by an evil twin (paralleling the ballet's plotline) intent on destruction and an ambitious incipient rival, Lilly (Mila Kunis), who is everything Nina isn't:  carefree, reckless, promiscuous, and enjoys exploring feminine nether regions, both her own and Nina's.  As if the pressures of the role of a lifetime weren't enough for poor Nina, she shares a domicile with her bizarrely controlling and envious mother played ominously by Barbara Hershey, in an inspired piece of casting.

With Black Swan, Aronofksy achieves what today's gross-out horror moviemakers would sell their souls to replicate, namely, produce a film whose every move, every scene, every word, is shuddersome.  The camerawork and sound editing will make your palms sweat, the scene-cutting will make you cringe.  The thing is, you'll love it, and you'll want much more.  The transcendentally exhilarating climax will give life to Parvulesco's romantic proclamation.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing which contemporary filmmakers we found most intriguing; whose films, when they come out, would make us raise an eyebrow and take notice?  Darren Aronofsky came up in the conversation as someone -- for me -- who fell into this category.  The sheer fact that all his films were so utterly uncompromising and dark earned him that status.  The complete dread evoked by Requiem For a Dream begins and ends any Aronofsky debate.  Yet, with this recent achievement, let me add, along with uncompromising and dark, Aronofsky has become breathtaking.

You Will Meet a Short Ginger Cynic

“We are slaves to our desires,” is a recurrent theme in the work of Woody Allen, but with his latest effort, an accurate evaluation of this axiom begs adding the scornful, “and to our satisfaction.” Or dissatisfaction.

In the world of “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” just about every character wants something beyond their reach, a something (mysterious woman, literary success, reclaimed youth, illicit affair) they really have no inherent or moral right to have.  They covet wildly.  Besieged by dissatisfaction and ingratitude, they act out with shameless ambition.  The fear of being caught or found out doesn’t even warrant a pause – guilt and shame are nonexistent qualities.  As typical for most Allen characters, they are all hopelessly cultivated, wealthy, attractive, sexually adventurous and utterly insecure.

 

Roy (Josh Brolin) finished medical school only to spurn the doctorly life for the bohemian romanticism of a literary one.  Trouble is he apparently has only one good book in him – and three really bad ones.  The anxiety of his imminent doom is tempered only by the beautiful woman in red (Freida Pinto) he peeps through his window.  Roy’s father-in-law, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), abruptly leaves his devoted wife of 40 years because “she was getting old and I refused to accept that.”  Impulsively marrying a rent-girl initially provides Alfie the robust rejuvenation he coveted, but quickly his life descends into bankruptcy and cuckoldry. 

The women show no better.  Roy’s wife, Sally (well played by Naomi Watts) at first comes off as a supportive and caring daughter and wife.  But those illusions fade when her boss chooses to have an affair with her artist friend instead of her, and her mother is told by a charlatan fortune teller that she shouldn’t give Sally the loan she desperately needs to open her own art gallery.  Avarice is rampant, pride a disease. Everyone's miserable. Not even the doe-eyed innocence of Dia (the mysterious woman in red) belies her faultlessness.  She is given to the same irrational dissatisfaction (and desire) as everyone else.

The problem is, even when they get what they want, they end up even more discontent than before.  Lives fall apart, relationships crumble, bank accounts collapse, frauds risk uncovering.  Woody Allen has always leaned cynical, but with ‘Stranger’ he’s promoted cynicism from bemusing leitmotif to central thematic element. He doesn't even bother much to developing the characters save the minimum exposition necessary to parade their selfishness. 

Most of us don’t know what we want, those of us who do figure it out are usually driven by wrongheaded and ungrateful motivations, and then when – always when, never if in Allen films – we do get what we want, we are punished heavily for it, usually by fate.  In the end, only the most delusional have a chance at approaching happiness.

The Stupid Love Affair with Hyperbole

Dangerously inappropriate analogies have gained a sickening acceptance in this current cultural moment.  Obama proposes a 3% tax increase for the richest Americans and he's likened to Hitler.  A football "star" who in the span of 13 months has had $32 million deposited into his greedy coffers by the Washington Redskins likened his petulant reluctance to play in a 3-4 defense to a disavowal of enslavement.

These disgustingly hyperbolic analogies are disgraceful.  Even more criminal is the audacity of those perpetrating these shameful comparisons.   Stephen Schwarzman,  chairman and co-founder of the Blackstone Group, a private equity and financial advisory firm -- whose net worth is $4.7 billion -- commiserated with his fellow plutocrats that a tax increase would be "like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939."  Albert Haynesworth, said football star, a symbol of our generation's "me-only" attitude, explained his displeasure in playing within the defensive scheme his coaches have implemented with inspired uncouth eloquence:

"I guess in this world we don't have a lot of people with, like, backbones. Just because somebody pay you money don't mean they'll make you do whatever they want or whatever. I mean, does that mean everything is for sale? I mean, I'm not for sale. Yeah, I signed the contract and got paid a lot of money, but ... that don't mean I'm for sale or a slave or whatever."

Now that's class.  Worse still, Mr. Schwarzman, a Jew, and Mr. Haynesworth, an African-American, chose to dishonor the very ancestors (their own) whose endurance through unspeakable horrors made it possible for these two ungrateful villains to occupy the highly enviable positions they are in today.  

The Holocaust and Slavery, without too much debate, represent just about the most despicable mass crimes in all of Human history.  Crimes that are so unimaginably horrific, they defy any comparisons short of mass genocide and human rights abuses on an extreme scale.

Even the Soviet propaganda machine, which filled the pages of Pravda (Truth) and other Iron Curtain publications with endless recriminations of The West's bourgeois depravity never dared to compare Churchill or Eisenhower to Der Führer.  How ridiculous that we find ourselves less sensible than the Main Administration for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the USSR Council of Ministers.

Ostensibly, this regrettably spotlights our stupid infatuation with hyperbole.  If something brings a modicum of pleasure, it's instantly loved, and inversely, a small inconvenience warrants hatred.  It's linguistic laziness, intellectual extremism really -- the rejection of thinking through how to appropriately describe what you feel and/or think about a certain subject, instead settling for the most abominable representation imaginable, simultaneously appealing to the most abhorrent denominator.

Clearly -- and thankfully -- I'm not the only person who has noticed and has been similarly disgusted by this odiously cynical behavior.  As The Daily Show's Jon Stewart smartly chose as a slogan for his upcoming Return to Sanity Rally, "I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler."

Macbeth

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more:  it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

--Macbeth V, v