Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

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Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a really cool and innovative movie. Its primary filmic P.O.V. is that of the protagonist, Jean-Do, who is paralyzed from head to toe such that he cannot express himself in any way other than blinking. So, the camera represents his perspective, and we see what he sees — doctors, nurses, physical therapists, friends, wife, children and mistress all peering at his unresponsive face. That’s about 2/3 of the movie; it also includes more usual scenes from his life before his paralysis. It’s a very beautiful movie, “painterly,” maybe, filled with gorgeous, dreamy scenes of cliffs falling into the sea, light and ocean; it makes you realize how impoverished and conventional most cinematography is.

My one little observation about the movie otherwise is that it would be a great film to show as accompaniment for German media theorist Freidrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800-1900. It’s an alphabetized movie all about the acquisition of the alphabet and language as a deeply eroticized process. Quite a lot of it consists simply of shots of Jean-Do’s speech therapist (pictured above) reciting the alphabet over and over again. Jean-Do blinks once for ‘yes’, meaning in this context, “that letter.” Two blinks means no. (And by the way, I realized that that Los Campesinos! song “Sweet Dreams Sweet Cheeks,” with its line “one blink for yes, two blinks for no,” is a reference to this movie/book). Eventually they get a word, a sentence, and so on. He gradually writes his memoir, on which the movie is based.

There’s one interestingly awkward effect of the French/English language difference: we get these scenes where he is trying to spell, say, “death.” So, it’s MORTE, but the subtitles represent this as “D, E, A, T, H,” because the tension in the scene requires us to play hangman and slowly guess what word is he trying to say. It’s disconcerting to hear her say “M”? and have it translated as “D?”

Schnabel admits in a DVD commentary that the movie recalls Fellini’s 8 1/2 in its depiction of the protagonist surrounded by a kind of (unattainable) fantasy harem of women, his various lovers and the therapists. The movie is a rapturous male fantasy about infantile language acquisition, in a position of absolute helplessness, from “the Mother’s Mouth.” Jean-Do can’t move, can’t touch, can only sink deeply into the process of spelling/writing by listening to beautiful women recite the alphabet, staring at their mouths and lips as they wait for his single blink of response. All eroticism has to be projected into this single action and relationship.

Os Mutantes Happy Meal/ Chris Knox Heineken

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I know this sort of thing is old hat by now, but this still sort of blew my mind. I’m watching game 5 of the NBA finals, it cuts to an ad, and I hear a familiar tune over a scene of a bunch of a first graders playing soccer. It’s (not that I remembered the name of the song) “A Minha Menina,” a great Os Mutantes song that I know from their 1999 Luaka Bop compilation Everything is Possible. For those of you who don’t know them, Os Mutantes (the Mutants) were a Brazilian psychedelic rock group from the late 1960s/early 70s who were re-introduced to the non-record-collecting Anglophone world by David Byrne with that compilation album — but are still pretty obscure in the scheme of things.

So I’m watching the cute kids playing soccer, trying to figure out what it is, and then the losing team gets the ultimate consolation prize of… a Happy Meal!! It’s a fricking McDonald’s ad!!!

Again, I should be used to the ineluctable globalist cool-hunting margins-to-center logic of late capitalism, but this still freaked me out a little bit. I guess just because I don’t think of McDonald’s as one of those cool-hunting corporations when it comes to advertising — aren’t their ads usually super-mainstream?

Here’s the ad, courtesy of Stereogum.

addendum: now I’ve learned that the catchy/weird song from that Heineken ad is by New Zealand indie rock legend Chris Knox of Toy Love & the Tall Dwarves. Strange. Here’s the ad:

Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place

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Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place is a really unusual, enchanting novel. “Everyone prefers to stick with the subject of people” but this novel opens up the characterological range to include several dogs, moose, beavers, a pike, tadpoles, and even lichen. As well as old people, children, and a more usual range of human persons. It has a Virginia Woolf quality in its roving free-indirect-discourse that slips easily in and out of multiple consciousnesses and voices. “So many things are alive: lichen, moss, grass. Also people. So many people are alive and that’s what’s strange, not that things like stones aren’t.” Also, a range of written modes and forms including police logs, newspaper reports, a diary, an astrological report; and working within various time frames and registers including the present day, the late nineteenth century, and the geological or evolutionary time of glaciers and rock. The surprising thing is, though, that the novel does not feel contrived or very “experimental;” it’s involving and funny in its depiction of a New England town during a summer with some odd things happening; you could almost imagine it as an Oprah pick. Maybe it was Davis’s half-hearted attempt at selling out and writing a popular book — if so, I hope it worked.

It’s especially good on “the minds of twelve year-old girls,” filled with “human sacrifices, cockeyed sexual adventures both sadistic and masochistic, also kitties with balls of yarn… and disembowelings.”

Wii

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So, we got a Wii. This has been a long time coming. Sarah decided to get one for me/us for Xmas, but of course she could not buy one (Nintendo has not been able to meet demand for them ever since they were introduced in December 2006, unless you prefer the conspiracy-theory approach that would see it as an artificially manipulated scarcity). In order to stymie any attempt on my part to block the gift, Sarah bought a gift card from Best Buy. It annoyed me to no end that Best Buy then sat on our money for what turned out to be 6 months. They also are obviously using the Wii unavailability as a way to trick people into having to make multiple visits to the store, as they are always pretty vague about when exactly the new ones will be coming in.

I went last Sunday at opening time, 11:00 a.m., and got one of the last 8 left. It was a weird scene, at least 2/3 of the people there were there for Wiis, or Wii Fit games, everyone carrying out the same white boxes (they look like some kind of Mac/ipod relative).

I checked on Amazon and used ones are still for sale at over 25% above the list price. I of course was tempted to flip ours immediately for a profit.

We haven’t played it all that much yet. The Sports game it’s packaged with is kind of neat but seems as if you need to buy a second controller to take full advantage of it. We got a game called “Cooking Mama” out of the library (!) on a friend’s recommendation that it might be something Celie and Iris would enjoy. They did, although in 20 minutes it already started to drive us a bit crazy. Its a Japanese game with a demented Iron Chef aesthetic — you follow recipes to create certain dishes, peeling vegetables, stirring the pot, rolling the Mochi balls in cocoa, etc. All in all, I think C&I are on the young side for the Wii, although Celie got really into grating cheese.

It’s very funny to watch someone else using it, they look like a madman, shaking and gesticulating. It is neat the way it keeps you on your feet & moving around. I almost felt like I threw my arm out pitching in the baseball game.

I was heavily into video games in the 1979-1983 era, roughly — Donkey Kong at the little store near my parents’ house in Cambridge which is now an outpost of the Swedish embassy or something bizarre like that — and then have not played much since. As a 12 year-old-boy there was something uniquely addictive, in a no doubt sublimatedly erotic way, about the whole experience of slipping the quarter in with its satisfying thwonk and setting the colorful, buzzing, noisy experience into motion. For a while I’ve figured that the period we’re in now with video games might be something like the pre-Jazz Singer silent era in movies, before everyone fully recognized how substantial and important the medium had become. Part of my problem has been that I’ve a lifetime Mac user, so many of the best games aren’t available.

More reports to come, I’m sure. I want to get Super Mario Galaxy. I’m glad that Mario is still a major player in this universe.

Here’s a Nintendo ad that shows what it looks like.

Addendum: Joshuah Bearman’s article in the July Harper’s, “The Perfect Game: Five Years with the Master of Pac-Man,” is hilarious and fascinating on the topic of video game obsession. A great peek into a bizarre little subculture.

Done with my class/ Heathcliff nightmare

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I’m done with my summer session class. That went really quickly, actually. Just need to finish grading papers and exams this weekend.

One student made a comment to me that made me feel that I’d succeeded in some small way: he reported that he’d had a nightmare about Heathcliff the night before. “He was chasing me and it was so scary… he’s just so relentless.”

1943 Fritz Eichenberg etching of Heathcliff

Fritz Eichenberg, Heathcliff Under the Tree, Cover Image from Wuthering Heights, 1943, wood engraving

Half-dressed man cavorting with a farm animal

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This story is so odd.

Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore “a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here.”

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as “funny” but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

By Wednesday afternoon, as controversy about the website spread, Kozinski was seeking to shift responsibility, at least in part, to his adult son, Yale.

“Yale called and said he’s pretty sure he uploaded a bunch of it,” Kozinski wrote in an e-mail to Abovethelaw.com, a legal news website. “I had no idea, but that sounds right because I sure don’t remember putting some of that stuff there.”

Coming on the heels of the revelation that John McCain uses neither a Mac nor a P.C. because he has no idea how to make those computer machines work, this raises concerns about the computer literacy of our retirement-age population. Could we get some additional funds for basic “how to use the web” workshops in our public libraries? With an advanced class for Kozinski on how to password-protect your pornographic images site?

The judge said he didn’t think any of the material on his site would qualify as obscene.

“Is it prurient? I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I think it’s odd and interesting. It’s part of life.”

Yes, I guess it is, in fact, technically the case that “naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal” are “part of life.” I also think it’s funny that he “sure [doesn’t] remember putting some of that stuff there” and so it must have been his son who did it.

Poor guy. I actually do not give a damn what he has on his webpage.

Wearable Feedbags

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Does away with the hassles of chewing and stopping to breathe while eating.

It’s hot steamy food in your face right now.

Sometimes I don’t feel like moving my arms. So this way, you can just have it on your face, close to your mouth.

We’re always looking for more efficient ways to get food products into our customers’ gaping maws.

So-called Feed Hoses will gush food directly into customers’ open mouths as they drive past the restaurant in their cars.

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less

Painting Crate

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My extremely handy wife Sarah made this totally cool crate to ship two of her big paintings in. I’ve created a category called D.I.Y. but it should really be called My Wife Does it Herself because I rarely do it myself, although sometimes I help a little bit. Like if she has to reach something high up, or if it takes two people to carry it.

Anyway, I am kicking myself that I did not take a photo of this crate. Our awesome friends Melissa and Steve, who moved to Philadelphia a few years ago, all of a sudden wrote Sarah that based on the images on the website, they wanted to buy two of the big paintings in the show (“Full Moon Sushi Night” and “Swamp”). Fantastic! But it turns out that it is no easy matter to ship the paintings. Fed Ex and UPS will not ship original art. Too many liability issues, presumably. Probably too many people insist their water colors were worth $10,000 or whatever. So, you basically have to lie or fudge, and therefore cannot get insurance. Also, you need to make your own custom crate.

So Sarah made it herself. This all happened in the basement over two afternoons when I was in my office at school. I came home and there was this five foot high crate, in two halves, into which each painting was bolted, put together as a sandwich, and screwed together with a power screwdriver. It weighed 85 pounds. We lugged it to UPS and Sarah claimed it was a “fabric wall-hanging,” which is technically true, I guess. It cost $136 to mail. The embarrassing thing was that there was — what were the odds? — a Fabric Arts guild member in line behind us, a friend of an acquaintance, who got all excited and interested at this enormous piece of supposed fabric arts being shipped off to Philadelphia, so Sarah kind of mumbled something vague and made her get-away…

The Mutant Brooklyn Real Estate Bubble

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Loved this New York Magazine article (by Adam Sternbergh) about Brooklyn real estate class warfare. Amazing that a reporter managed to conjure a cover story from the comments section of a local real estate blog, but the crazy thing is, I can almost picture the movie version.

The What is a troll who haunts Brownstoner.com, a Brooklyn real estate blog, as an avenging spectre of the real estate apocalypse to come:

The What’s favorite—and possibly only—subject of interest is the coming Brooklyn Apocalypse. He calls it the Mutant Real Estate Bubble. From the beginning, he has contended vehemently, and repetitiously, and often profanely, that there’s a massive correction coming to the real-estate market that will swallow the borough’s fresh-faced transplants and their artfully renovated brownstones as surely as if a chasm had opened up in the earth. Which, of course, means an end to the whole happy vision of recent Brooklyn: the flowering neighborhoods, the skyrocketing prices, the dissipating crime. To The What, Mr. Brownstoner and his readers are snoozing blissfully, lost in this intoxicating dream. And The What is the alarm clock.

…He’s posted comments such as, “Real Estate is fucking over!!!!! Real Estate is fucking over!!!!! Real Estate is fucking over!!!!! Real Estate is fucking over!!!!!” His posting style is so schizophrenic that one might suspect he is either (a) several very different people posting under the same name or (b) schizophrenic. He sometimes sounds like he’s locked in a basement somewhere, surrounded by newspaper clippings on all four walls. He touches down in comment threads like a rhetorical Tasmanian devil…

I am the ultimate wet-blanket Irrational-Exuberance believer — I was warning about the real estate bubble so early that arguably, I should not get any credit for it because anyone who listened to me would’ve lost about 8 years of huge profits. But I don’t in fact think the NYC housing market is really going to crash; I’m convinced that the global-finance world capitals now play by completely different rules than everywhere else. But (see Sha Na Na post), what do I know.