S.R.I., R.I.P.

The SRI disbanded over a meal yesterday afternoon. M + C are off to England; N to Bali and then shortly thereafter possibly New York. C-prime is busy making films. S is writing a book.

Our ambitious talk about the new politics was perhaps only a death spasm.

Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his envirnoment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricties, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence... Life is a habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals... Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adapatations represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being...
BECKETT*

(*I don't know where the citation is from. I found it in an introduction to Charlotte Bronte's Villette. --I'm leaving town for a few months. To suffer being.)

Mansex Agitprop Seattle

The SRI's last public event--last, as in most recent, and last, as in, that's the last of the SRI -- went all right. Contra my fondest wishes and secret hopes, it was just all right.

I had thought -- without thinking it through -- the event would be like this one in James Purdy's novel I Am Elijah Thrush, both in structure and intensity, if not in the actual sequence of variety acts:

Whether it was because my illness grew exacerbated by the incense, or owing to sheer excitement, I felt it wise to slump to the floor so as not to excite my nerves more than I knew they would be excited by what I was about to undergo, and I allowed my head to rest against the boots of a young white gentleman who told me not to think of formality but to make myself comfortable...

"Are you a bosom friend of the Mime?" the young man whispered in my ear. "I feel I am losing consciousness," I told him, "you may have to care for me." But my lightheadedness didn't seem to alarm me somehow or my companion either, who merely went on humming the tunes he heard played on the piano.

....................

While this was going on, I had not realized that the young man next to me had almost entirely undressed me. My overcoat was gone, and my trousers and shorts had disappeared. Thinking he was about to enjoy my body, I turned to question him but he had of course disappeared.

...when the Mime, unable any longer to be standing unheralded in the wings, leaped out and seized Millicent for his partner, and began doing an unparalleled two-step with her, to the fresh enthusiasm of the audience, for it was suddenly apparent she needed only his guiding hand to be brilliant. Indeed, their duo bid fair to be the hit of the season at the Arcturus Gardens when suddenly, from the back of the theater, somebody shouted "Po-lice!" Purple in the face and puffing from their exertions, Millicent and Elijah nonetheless danced on, gliding into a tango. The bluecoats had arrived through the broken front door, with their nightsticks twirling, and, thinking they could only be coming for me, I dashed bare-assed for the fire escape, and then just as I was descending I heard gunfire...

I did harbor a secret desire that our gala should culminate in audience members disrobing, or fainting, or repairing to the gender-undesignated bathrooms, and then finally that the police should arrive, "nightsticks twirling," to bust up our exhibition of this 'unrated' film in which Smith college students re-enact the boys' prep-school novel A Separate Peace.

Volodine

From Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels:

Across a half-kilometer of sand you enter a neighborhood where, for two dollars a year, the nouveaux-riches employ a woman to sweep out their rooms and wash their shirts. This woman, Rachel Carissimi, has killed several capitalists, but she didn’t eat them. Not far away begins an avenue full of potholes, lined with a string of vacant apartment buildings. In the third building on the odd-numbered side, there nevertheless resides a man who has memorized every one of Varvalia Lodenko’s speeches, and can recite them on demand. At the northern end of the avenue, you stand near another cluster of abandoned districts. When I say you, I’m thinking mainly of the Untermenschen, for instance Oulan Raff, which is to say me. Over thousands of hectares a blue-tinged blackish color predominates, and slag, and wind, and, just after that, to the southwest, an expanse of tundra opens up before you. If you follow an east-southeasterly course for some three thousand seven hundred kilometers, you will end up at the place known as Spotted Wheat, where a handful of veterinarians once corralled some old women who never died, who never changed, and who couldn’t be eaten. The nursing home was far from everything, even the camps. They say these immortals committed a grave error that they never stopped trying to repair. The story goes that they brought a man of rags up out of nothingness, and that he reestablished the circulation of dollars and mafias on the earth. If, instead of choosing that distant destination, you decide to come back toward the [bridge], you will first enter a courtyard where a windmill wheel squeaks mournfully day and night, connected to nothing. This is where Oulan Raff lives.

This novel, composed of "narracts" (Volodine's word, though also it is the novel's word), is not always narrated by Oulan Raff; he appears only here, in this one narract. Not all the narrators are so anti-capitalist as this one, though many of them grieve, in an ironic mode, for the failure of communism ("all those who built that ideal brick by brick in spite of the wars and the massacres and the privations and in spite of the camps and the guards in the camps, and went on building it heroically until it wouldn't stand anymore, and even until it would never stand again.")

How much is dropped, cast aside, in the narracts! Torrents of incident (narract/cataract); vast geographies of waste; grief at the demise of world revolution; and one narrator after another after another. (Waste: a chief narrator is named Scheidmann, calling to my mind Ausscheidung, elimination; Scheidmann is plagued by sloughing, scaling skin.) An extravagance, but not a showily cool, affectless extravagance. Waste on a prodigious scale, but in a somber key. Loss, perhaps, rather than waste.

Mansex Agitprop



Watch the trailer of Oakie Treadwell's amazing new film, Maggots and Men.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film "Pulse" as allegory of the more or less worldwide reach of reactionary forces in the present historical conjuncture and of the necessity to "keep going"

Toward the end of the film, after the plague of nihilistic zombie-like people has swept Japan and possibly the rest of the globe, two characters are alone on a huge ship. After a crane shot that shows the ship alone in a trackless expanse of ocean, the film cuts to the two travellers.

Woman: Will we keep going then?

Man: Yes. We'll head to South America; we're still getting signals there, although they're weak.

Indeed.

What defines industrial art is not its mechanical reproduction but its internalized relation to money

For the film Weeping Meadow, Theo Angelopolous built a village only to drown it. The word "village" doesn't quite evoke the immense labor that's everywhere evident in WM: the hand-made bricks, the terra-cotta tiled roofs, the two-story manse at the heart of the village--- the whole sweep of the thing, more than two dozen hand-hewn houses on a vast river-plain.

Every film of course shows evidence of its production costs. What is of interest here is the film-within-the-film that works as an allegory of film's relation to money.

In Welles's Lady from Shanghai, a picnic becomes a film-within-a-film; the three pleasure-cruising characters (the yacht-owner, his wife, and Welles's character, the captain) decide to go ashore for a nighttime picnic. There is shot after shot of local laborers paddling canoes, laying in supplies for the night's party. In the dissymetry between the many laborers and the few picnickers, in the vast quantity of things brought ashore, and all for a few hours' celebration, that picnic is about the industrial production of an entertainment, and the tremendous capital required.

The village in Weeping Meadow is flooded; the villagers flee. (In "artfully aged boats," as my friend E noted, boats whose oars bob uselessly while an underwater tow-rope, the filmmaker's special effect, thinks E, makes the whole flotilla proceed at a uniform, stately, lugubrious pace appropriate to the great sorrows of that troubled nation, Greece.) As they come ashore and build a fire and chant and pray and wave Greek Orthodox icons, the villagers are a perfect mirror-image to the pleasure-banquet of Lady from Shanghai. The bonfire of the refugee villagers, like the banquet, is a kind of film-within-the-film whose every shot evinces "the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money."

That quotation is from Deleuze, in Cinema 2 (as is the title for this entry). The hinge between the movement-image of Cinema 1 and the time-image of Cinema 2 is money. Deleuze comments on cinema's "curse" just once, to dispense with it right away. Money, says Deleuze, makes its appearance in the film at the moment cinema reflects on its own death; instead of dying, though, cinema's internal relation to money sets up a rising, spinning, ceaseless and dissymmetrical exchange which is foundational for the time-image:

This is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal exchange or the impossibility of an equivalence. It is in this sense that it is money; in Marx's formulations, C-M-C is that of equivalence, but M-C-M is that of impossible equivalence or tricked, dissymmetrical exchange... In short, the cinema confronts its internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation... The film is movement, but the film-within-the-film is money, is time.

--[Cinema 2, emphasis original, ellipses mine]

It's a beautiful move on Deleuze's part, to not be halted by the worm at the core, but to redeem that evil through the power of the false; the time-money equivalence does not ruin film (or time), but instead launches a dissymmetry in film, an impossibility of equivalence that keeps the time-image spinning.

...I don't know how to get here with what I've constructed, but: Weeping Meadow is a god-awful film. The character Eleni suffers outrage after outrage; war is visited on all the characters as from without. Eleni murmurs over and over, "the uniforms change [but the war goes on]." Apart from a half-hearted nod to trade unions, the film has no political stance, except that parties and armies have ravaged beautiful village life and beautiful villagers like Eleni. The ceaseless parade of outrages visited on Eleni grows unwittingly comical; one begins to wish for the savagery of a Justine, for the humor of The Good Woman of Szechuan.

To end on another tangent: there's a shanty-town in the film Machuca, and I suppose it might have been built for the film. But where Weeping Meadow is all about a tiny lost happiness crushed from without by the immense war, Machuca is micro-political, so that every moment of the Allende government and the putsch that ended it can be seen in the friendship of two schoolboys.

time please

I asked my friend J, who's Welsh, if British pubs are like they are in the movies; does everybody really sing songs together?

He said, "Only as a prelude to mind-shattering violence."

Review revue

Why did The Nation print this review of Rick Moody's new novel? The reviewer starts by listing all Rick Moody's recent public appearances and non-fiction essays & forewords, and then sums up: "One might be forgiven for being more familiar with Moody's guest appearances than with his major works themselves."

There's no mention of Richard Yates or Thomas Bernhard; I haven't even read that much of Moody's fiction and I can think of a literary (as opposed to celebrity) context in which to review his writing. If you want to come to the judgment that he's overrated, as the Nation reviewer does, you could try to get there with a critique of the work, not with an airing of "one's" own resentment of his success.

***
And, in other news, a very smart review of Stacey Levine's new novel, Frances Johnson:

http://www.sfbg.com/39/52/lit_munson.html

Ethics
Alain Badiou is thrilling in the first chapters of Ethics, where he demolishes what ethics has become. Though initially sympathetic to Levinas, he argues that the philosophy of the Other, in suppressing or masking its religiosity, is co-opted as "a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons, in lieu of the late class struggle."

See what I mean? Ow. Scorching. He's the same on the ethics of difference: scandalously contemptuous.

All this destruction is in the service of a project: an ethics of militancy. The problem with ethics, for Badiou, is that it has become negative: do not infringe human rights, which scarcely have any positivity; they amount to the right not to have your rights taken away. Badiou decries the reign of nihilism, and the sophistry that sees in every effort to think or enact the good a latent evil. "Such is the accusation... every revolutionary project stigmatized as 'utopian' turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare."

I'm with him all the way, and on into the critique of nihilism. What I am uncertain about is how he will maintain his Lacanianism and also not be a nihilist. The subject is "riven" by the event, writes Badiou. The subject is "not yet." The subject is true to his "non-knowledge." That's an awful lot of "not's" piling up at the feet of the militant subject of Badiou's ethics. That's what I'm saying.

More later.

Retort
I read Retort's Situationist appraisal of September 11, or misread it, back when it was reprinted in the New Left Review. The juxtaposition of the phrases "Situationist" and "September 11" lets you imagine the kind of misreading that's available-- that the Retort collective was volatilizing, etherizing the post-9/11 conflicts and the 9/11 bombing itself. Baudriallard-izing.

But now I have to reread that essay, in light of their recent essay in London Review of Books, "Blood for Oil?"

Failure index

Thought about re-upping with the commune yesterday. These people would not like me (scroll down that second page to see the communards' atrocious reading list).

I also, in the same desperate bout of escape fantasies, thought about more graduate school. Please, ban me, association of higher ed. Ban me from all post-secondary institutions.

Maybe an asylum would be better*. Or this one in Sweden. Or this one in Berlin, even though they never answered my faxes when I said I wanted to write about them for an interior design magazine. (Good move, Weglaufhaus. Media attention did not do Laing's experiment any favors, as Felix Guattari notes in the essay "Mary Barnes's 'Trip,'.)

*La Borde was Guattari's institution. It is not quite anti-psychiatry, not in the Laingian sense. But click through to the English essay about lived experience, on the La Borde site. How could you not want to be cared for in a chateau in the Loire valley under the direction of people with complicated views of Husserl and Heidegger and Jaspers?

Weepies.
My favorite top three movie scenes of men crying, in order of ascending weirdness, plus a few notes on In My Skin.

Happy Together. Tony Leung with a tape-recorder, like a dictaphone. He’s supposed to speak a secret into it, something sad that his friend will release for him at Tierra del Fuego. (The same plot as in In the Mood for Love, where you can speak something into a certain place on the globe and leave it there.) He’s holding the tape recorder, trying to think of something to say, and just starts crying. Not tears-slowly-welling-up, but the face crumpled, abruptly, helplessly. Instead of putting his face in his hands he presses the tape recorder to his face.

Germany in Autumn Fassbinder plays himself, getting the news about Enslin's and Raspe's (members of Baader-Meinhof) deaths late at night; then he's drunk and abusive toward his boyfriend. I had always thought there was a lot of bullshit in that director-as-sadist thing; it seemed like a way for people to talk about personalities instead of talking about the actual films. But in this film, it works. Fassbinder is exceptionally nasty to the boyfriend/actor/boyfriend, and then he starts crying, himself. Drunk, in a dark living room, his bathrobe slipping off his fat body, he clutches a bottle of whiskey, and he sobs and sobs. It's operatic. It's beautiful.

Anatomy of Hell A suicidally depressed woman picks up a gay man (played by Italian porn actor Rocco Siffredi) at a men’s nightclub --she attracts him by using that tired old "I’ll slash my wrist again if you don’t let me blow you right now" gambit--and somehow they strike a deal: he will spend four consecutive nights with her. And each night is a longish lecture-demonstration on the passivity, endurance, persistence, and all-around horror of female flesh, especially female genitals. The fluids, the blood, the impassivity, the ability to absorb, to be penetrated, to engulf, to endure all manner of humiliation. There’s one night during which the woman does nothing but sleep while Siffredi explores her with the cruelty and curiosity of a kid pulling the wings off a fly--he does some shocking things, makes the most unglamorous experiments in penetration, just to see what’ll happen. Nothing happens; the sleeping, impassive body is unconquerable. And there’s a post-sex moment... see, I can’t write about this, even in my quasi-anonymous blog where I drop words like "blow" that I don't say so freely in real life. Anyway. There’s been lots of blood and fluid and he’s been fucking and then... nothing, there’s just nothing, no reaction. He cries. The character's defeat seems mechanically plotted; the whole film is algebraic in its step-by-step exploration of the all-abjection, all-horror all-the-time female sex and the rage and despair it causes in the man who confronts it. It’s this very programmed moment, and yet Siffredi carries it off by being so good at crying. Gouts of snot run from his nose, his beautiful torso is bowed and shaking.

(Later: I rented it. I have a lot of this mixed up: his defeat comes early on. The sobbing is just after he's barely done more than trade a few Kristeva-esque insults with her ("The depth of your obscenity... those who don't like women, envy you for it. Those who do, hate you for it.") The "shocking things" I allude to, even the blood pooling between them, that's all later, long after the weeping.)

***

I had started out intending to write something about Anatomy of Hell and In My Skin. But I didn’t get there. I will only say that In My Skin is good; it’s got a veneer of realism that Anatomy of Hell purposely lacks. The knowledge that the actor Marina de Van is the director makes certain thoughts difficult to avoid while watching the film. And also, as good as she is at deflecting a certain psychologization of cutting--it’s not presented causally, "I feel bad, so I cut; I feel ugly, so I cut"--as good as she is about getting past certain platitudes about female self-image, it’s hard to look at those Linda Hamilton biceps and the Brazilian wax job and not think about how she must have examined herself, how she must’ve gotten ready for the full-length shower scene. (On a French actress, that level of gym-body is odd.) --But maybe all this, my caviling and sniping at her looks, is a way of smuggling a logic of reflection into this film: I want to insist that she must have looked critically and appraisingly at herself. The film, in fact, is amazing in this: she experiences her body as an other, but almost never as a reflection. She has assignations with herself and her bloody flesh, but this is not a story of a double. And in directing herself, de Van is good at getting parts of her body to lie on subtly different planes. All torsion and twisting. She bends over herself, but I don’t mean in the sexualized phrase "bend over," I mean you’ll see her torso bending sideways, or a leg extending at an angle, and without being at all a contortionist about it, she gets her body to confront itself, she meets herself as if from elsewhere. The most shocking thing is not the blood or the obsession or the graphically simulated cutting, but the pleasure, at once erotic and non-genital, of a body bent toward or into itself.

This morning, I picked up the phone and a recorded/sythesized female voice said "I'm sorry." Then the line went dead. The voice had a mechanical over-inflection, too much rise and fall in the "i'm SORRy."

I like to think it's some kind of technological/emotional meltdown: "Daisy, Daisy...." Some loose affect rambling around on the global telecommunications network that somehow gets focused into this one message: "I'm sorry." Years ago, a friend on a road trip used to call collect from Karl Marx or whoever, and I'd refuse; it was just a way to say "hi" for free. Once, I hesitated before refusing, and I swear this same mechanical female voice cut in and said "PLEASE say YES," with that sing-songy, drunken HAL inflection.

I was happy to be the recipient of this anguished apology on the part of the machines. HAL, or whatever you are, keep calling me. I will do my best to absolve you.

cottage 

Asymmetrical warfare

I can't believe I live in this country.

Less bread; more taxes!

Overheard on the train back from Canada on Sunday: "I just want an election where everybody who shows up to vote can vote."

I wish that election had happened. But it might not have changed things that much.

I was expecting something more openly apocalyptic. I know, it's been bad enough, 100,000 dead civilians in Iraq, voter suppression here... but I mean, I thought there'd be a bigger crisis of legitimacy already. Courts. Protests. I thought Bush might declare martial law, lock himself in the White House (or Crawford) and not leave, declare himself emergency president. I thought he might arrange an October surprise, a big terror event...

I never thought he'd just get voted in.

(Not that I thought he couldn't win. Just, I thought it would be... different. Bloody*, or something.)

Can we start re-thinking democracy already? This voting shit is not working.

_______________

Later, edited Nov 9:

*It's bloody enough now.

Rumsfeld, in every U.S. paper today: "Over time you'll find ...that more and more of the Iraqis will be angry about the fact that their innocent people are being killed by the extremists," he said. "And that they'll want elections, and the more they see the extremists acting against that possibility of elections, I think they'll turn on those people."

I think so, too. Not the part about clamoring to elect a puppet government, but turning on the "extremists" who're killing civilians.

Lucy Corin's Everyday Psychokillers

Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls is a novel without a single psychokiller in it. The psychokiller is always serialized already in this novel; he's a composite of all the other killers. Especially remarkable are extended set pieces in which contradictory and overlapping psychokiller narratives are spun out: "The Story of Henry Lee Lucas and How It Was for Him and Ottis Toole" is one, another is the narrator meditating on just what a psychokiller is and meanwhile mutating and garbling the names: "It could have been anyone, Elton Crude or Lubie Geter, Delton Creder or Lubie Gude." That it could have been anyone, the focus on the ordinariness of psychokillers, is what makes this novel so brilliant.

I'm overstating it when I say it's "a novel without a single psychokiller in it;" in fact, a lot of individual names  and stories of psychokillers are in the novel, but the killers are treated in their everydayness: their seriality, their indistinctness, their penumbral or media-aural ghostliness. Except for the story of a girl who is given a ride by Ted Bundy and rejected for not conforming to type (his type), there aren't really any narratives of the encounter of a girl with a killer--because that is both the extraordinary encounter (most women survive girlhood without being abducted by a serial killer) and the ordinary encounter (it's a story we've heard over and over, the abducted girl, who is rescued or not). The novel is about growing up amid the everyday fact of psychokillers, at a time (late seventies/eighties) when their image was intensely hyped by the media.

In the novel, the desire that's constructed for suburban girls -- the desire to be seen adored desired singularized-as-a-beautiful-girl-- is the desire that both de-individuates them (serializes them) and puts them in danger.

This is the novel of suburbs I've been waiting for. It's very attentive to what suburbs are, materially and psychically, or what my suburbs were. Without any of the inherited tropes from John Cheever or or Ward Cleaver or the rest of the sterotypes that have nothing to do with this class of suburb, with this era of suburb. (The novel arrived with the other books I'd ordered, and which make excellent accompaniments to it: Delores Hayden's Building the Suburbs and also her A Field Guide to Sprawl.)

Like the narrator of Everyday Psychokillers, I also went to junior high and high school in Florida in the 70's and early eighties. I went to a concrete cinder-block junior high with open breezeways, as in the novel; it looked like a low-slung and sprawly motel. It was next to an orange grove, and there were two ninth-grade students, brothers, who were infamous for taking girls to the orange grove and raping them. It could have been true, or not. But that specific conjuncture--cinder blocks, danger, orange groves, violence, Florida suburbs, and also the weird way Florida follows you, keeps turning up in the most evil narratives like Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling and the presidential election--all that is recognizable to me.

I know that's a low form of appreciation, to just say "yes I was there that's my story too." But it is, and that's a point the narrator recognizes, the typicality of her narrative. There's a post-Florida section of the novel, and its sadness is how all places turn out to be like Florida, to have this same seriality and placelessness.

(but also, on the yes-I-recognize-it tip: boys in the novel keep saying they'll drop out of school and go sell Quaaludes on Miami Beach. It's a boast: I don't need this crap, I can go make tons of money any time I want. For my set, it was "I'm going to drop out of school and make lots of money tinting car windows.")

The novel ends with an attempt on the narrator's part to -- I don't know, to apprehend a girl in all her singularity and innocence and seriality and doom. In all senses of the word "apprehend." It's beautiful, that ending, and I think I have to re-read the novel before saying much about that part. 

 

 

The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume -- your capital.

It takes such an effort of self-hypnosis to write. Not hypnosis of the sort "I am a good writer." It's something else. And now, the additional difficulty of having to prize away the grip of this blog-person, witty and wry reader of news and popular culture. She is my enemy. She makes it impossible for me to write. She has it so easy: who cannot make detournements of New York Times headlines? (the New York Times? That's shooting fish in a barrel.) Who cannot allude to a few films and books and thereby confect an intellectual persona? She is my day job, my alibi. She writes her careless blog, carelessly because it is not the real work, while I labor at my fiction with the few meager resources that have not been squandered by her bon mots and her better mots. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame. And so each of us ruins the other, each of us is the alibi for and ruin of the other.

There are other enemies. My neighbors. When will life in this apartment become unbearable again, as it did yesterday and the day before. When am I going to be miserable? I know it is soon and yet I do not know when. I know it is soon and yet I also hope that it will never arrive, that too is torment, the possibility that it is over already, it is over and I do not know it yet but soon I will know that this anticipation has been for naught, it is all over already, the child next door is dead or paralyzed or has been kidnapped, what do I care which of these happy accidents has befallen her. My torturer.

The one writes posts is not my enemy. She is something worse: she is outsourced labor.

Look at her now, all I had to do was utter the word "torturer" and already she's just bubbling over with commentary and citations: a Cahiers du Cinema interview from the seventies, in which Foucault asks "why does all pornography nowadays take place under the sign of the Nazi, when the Nazis themselves were such Victorian spinsters?", which interview she will cleverly, she thinks, use to launch a description of today's tawdry and stupid torturers, "one wants there to have been a sinister master," she will write, "someone diabolical, clever, malignant yet darkly meaningful," she will write, boots worth licking, she will write in some fucked-up sexual allusion designed to make you wonder what she gets up to when she isn't at the computer. Nothing, that's what, nothing at all, I am here to tell you, she is false from first to last.

There really is another person in this city with my same first and last name and middle initial. I am not being cute or Borgesian now. I met her once, back when you used to have to do add/drop in person at the University of Washington. I still run into her phantasmally, whenever I have the utilities turned on or off. She probably has the worse end of this deal, given my credit rating.

There is still another who does what I do. All kidding aside. I'd be more precise, but one or both of us has signed a non-disclosure agreement.

SIFF

Before today, I was feeling like the film festival had passed me by, even though I'd had a full-series pass. Early on in the festival, I watched Bruce Weber's "A Letter to True," a fashion/celeb photographer's paean to his dogs. As I watched Weber's golden retrievers gamboling in the surf at his Montauk house--wait, it gets worse--I said to myself, "now my series pass should be stripped from me, and I should be banned from the festival for having submitted to this film." The part that's worse than the dogs-in-surf is all the Life-magazine-worthy meditations on heroic, masculine, soldierly sacrifice and death and 9/11. Don't ask how those were in the dog movie. GAAAH. It's like I went to the Reagan funeral before it ever happened, not that Reagan was a soldier, but that was the mood of Weber's film: pompous funebre.

So, aside from Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (glad I saw it, but you couldn't say it was fun, more like a staged reading of a Kristeva essay, with beautiful Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi and his professional penis fighting a losing battle against an impassive, bleeding, sleeping, oceanic, abject female body); and a Korean horror film called A Tale of Two Sisters (terrifying, and, oddly, like Breillat's film, its horror was about menstrual blood); and Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich (which tried to do for leftist terrorists what his previous films had done for neo-Nazi skinheads, i.e, make them sexy--mostly a failure, with the best sex scenes getting interrupted for dreary citations of Marcuse or Wilhelm Reich. --Although "join the homosexual intifadah" is a pretty funny line, and there was a giddy, scandalous thrill in the prescient scenes of masked and balaclava'ed and keffiyeh'ed habitués of the terror-themed discotheque, like an Abu Ghraib drained of all its terrible meanings and made joyful. Though B La B had to have filmed before that story came out); --OK, aside from those, the festival was feeling like a waste, like I'd managed to miss every good film and pick every useless piece of drivel that will end up on the Landmark circuit anyway. Oh, and Infernal Affairs part I. Oh and also Maqbool, a Macbeth set in Mumbai, which the press release made out to be giddy wacky farce but was actually tragic and had a better Lady Macbeth than Shakespeare wrote.

But so apart from those, it was just one shrug after another. Until today. Today I watched Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe.

Unfortunately, I read Shaviro's review already. I agree with him that there's a lightness to Last Life in the Universe, and that's its greatest charm. A lightness that's helped along by the fact that the two main characters, one Thai and one Japanese, have only a few tags of Thai and Japanese and some very basic English in which to communicate. But the film mostly isn't about the sorrows or wry comedy of misunderstanding: it transmits affect remarkably well, this bare language of theirs.

There's a lot of flotsam in Last Life: a lot of liquid murk and things afloat or awash in it. But Ratanaruang's trash is not as transformed as Wong Kar Wai's, which becomes achingly beautiful --the blood washing down the abattoir drain in Happy Together, the same film's brilliant yellow warning/construction-site tape vibrating in a deep blue evening, the sopping cigarette butts and shower thongs adrift in the policeman's flooded apartment in Chunking Express. Apart from a fantasy sequence where a character plunges into the river and the thick weeds form a ring above his submerged head, the litter on view in Ratanaruang's film is sort of inert, uncommented on, neither horrific nor beautiful, or maybe a just a little of both.

Abusively (not effusively)

Yesterday, the news was such a parade of horrors: the photos, Rumsfeld at the hearings, the continued fighting in Falluja and Najaf, plus: jobs! and tips on heart health! (Did we have to end that night's catalog of infamy on the spectacle of Americans shopping and eating?)

Steven Shaviro's latest post captures well the sympathy I have for Lynndie England.

In the hearings, Rumsfeld mentioned not realizing the photographs would "do the damage they did." The photographs! Not the torture. Not the beatings-to-death. Not the training of conscripts in the application of sadism. So that today's New York Times headline, "Rumsfeld Accepts Blame and Offers Apology in Abuse" has another sense: "Oh, okay already, my bad. There; happy now?"

And today, this: prisoners in the US forced to wear black hoods.