Kee-rist. Alright, now that that particular pit of hell is, if not actually overcome, abandoned for the day, let's get back to this business.

As I was saying below, I want to address one of the big themes of Momus' critique: the idea of LIT as a "betrayal" of a specific subculture. (I have no idea which subculture this would actually be aside from, I dunno, the people that read Giant Robot, which I didn't think was really a cohesive subculture, but I'm happy to grant that this is probably just my own ignorance and take him at his word.)[1]

The idea of art-as-betrayal is something I'm actually really interested in. I think, though, that the angle I'm concerned with is different from the one most people are coming at it from. See, for me, what's really interesting is art as self-betrayal, in the way that market and critical and peer pressures can get you to betray your own interests or beliefs. I won't deny that there are certainly some interesting examples of art that's a personal betrayal of someone else; it's most obvious in documentaries, where you have to gain the trust of a subject often in order to tear that subject down, but there's also the slightly more common, if less obvious, case of a fiction or non-fiction writer "stealing" the characters or life experiences of people they know and depicting them in an either honest or twisted way--either one is likely to cause offense. But to me, what's really interesting is the way that making art in a larger cultural context--as almost all art is--can shape the choices you make about the creation of the art-object.

But anyway, the point is that I don't think Momus is getting at either of those methods of "betrayal," since Sofia Coppola didn't seem to have any particular relationship with the subculture in question; you can only betray something if you've gained its trust first. No, all the examples of betrayal he gives (Kill Bill, late-period Radiohead) are just appropriation, except it's appropriation by auteurs instead of blindly commercial forces, so it lapses into familiar "sellout!" territory. In which case, of course, I think the matter is easy to address. It's safe to say that by 2003 exported Japanese culture, and its Western appreciation thereof, was hardly trying to hide itself in the same way that subcultures like punk or anti-corporatism or jazz were. When these cultures shout "sell-out," it's still annoying to popists like moi, but it at least has some basis in legitimacy: they genuinely seemed like they didn't want to be co-opted. But the subculture Momus is dealing with has done little but aim for mass-cult awareness for a good while now. If you want to blame something for selling out this particular subset, blame Pokemon, or Sailor Moon, or Hello Kittie. Don't blame an indie film.

But what about the larger point of Lost In Translation being sort of disrespectful to Japanese culture, regardless of its current subcultural status or lack thereof? Keep in mind the points made below that Japan is not exactly a powerless culture in need of protection by cultural-capital-wielding Western critics, and that by any standard Momus is just not making a coherent political objection here. I think that latter point is particularly key. You can certainly accuse Coppola of having flat supporting characters without making this an indictment of her insensitivity; lots of directors have flat supporting characters without this being culturally incorrect.

And it's especially important to keep in mind that the two main characters are undeniably very real.[2] I don't think Momus is denying that both Murray's and Johansson's characters are very realistic, very indicative of what a certain kind of American tourist in Japan is like. So let's grant that, and let's admit that neither of the characters necessarily come off as very good people, and that, very importantly, these defects in their characters are demonstrably caused by their American lives. Coppola clearly goes out of her way to show that both Murray's and Johansson's problems are the result of deteriorating relationships with their spouses, deteriorating relationships that they have no small part in causing--certainly Johansson's feckless distancing would be legitimately frustrating to deal with. Once you grant those two things, and it seems like you'd have to, I think you have to admit that these insensitivities flow not from Coppola's cultural ignorance or audience pandering but from the ignorance and state of mind of the two main characters. I think, rightly or wrongly, that this really is how a lot of Americans view Japan as visitors. The two main characters, both clearly bohemians of one generation or another, seem to have the same distrust of and disorientation caused by Japanese pop culture as American pop culture. They are not strangers in a strange land, but the over-educated in a slightly unfamiliar place, and so they deal with it by joking about it, just like they deal with everything else, and by being slightly creeped out by all the pop culture. We wouldn't think this odd if they were visiting Branson, MO--why is it weird when they're in Japan?

In other words, I think that if you're going to criticize something, it's not the movie, which seems realistic enough to me, but the attitude it's depicting. I don't think Coppola should shoulder the blame for smug hipsters.

This is all circling around a variant of my original point: a movie in which the characters were sensitive to the subtleties of Japanese culture would have been nowhere near as funny, and my allegiance has always been to comedy, not sensitivity. If something is offensive enough that you don't find it funny, then yeah, we can talk, but if you're going to admit, as Momus does, that "I chuckled along with the audience" before going on to explain just what was so wrong about his own laughter, well, I just don't think we have a good shared platform for debate here.

Reading back over the line I originally plucked out of the essay--"I squirmed. Does Murray's charisma have to come at the expense of someone else all the time?"--the verb choice really stands out to me. When I hear that he "squirmed," I can't help but think (and a certain subset of clap clap readers already know where I'm going with this) of the "squirming" of David Foster Wallace, especially in his first-person non-fiction essays. But I think the way Wallace uses it is demonstrative. True, he will often take that squirm and use it as a clue to try and figure out why he squirmed, but he will also try and determine whether or not the squirm is, in fact, legitimate, and will either defend it or admit certain reasons why you could see it as illegitimate. Momus does neither, and I think that's a problem.

Finally, a note about my brief comment bringing Momus' artistic corpus into the discussion: I honestly didn't mean to imply that his use of offensiveness made his viewpoint illegitimate. I simply wanted to point out how weird it was for someone who seems fine with a certain form of cultural insensitivity getting worked up about another. But, I suppose, we all do this. So it goes. But it still strikes me as weird in this particular case. Nothing more than that.

[1] Upon rereading this, I also wonder if he means to actually implicate Japanese-Americans or Japanese immagrants to America in this subculture, but I honestly can't tell. I'm not sure if this would change anything, though.
[2] I would say that some of the supporting characters are very real, too--we all know people who seem pretty stereotypical if we don't know them very well, and I think the photographer character is a prime example of that.
posted by Mike B. at 7:19 PM 0 comments

I found it a little hard to take Momus' criticism of Lost in Translation seriously right about the time I read the following line:

"I squirmed. Does Murray's charisma have to come at the expense of someone else all the time?"

Someone saying this while talking about a comedy--to say nothing of the fact that he's wrong, since even aside from any concrete examples it's clear Murray's character's humor comes from a lot of self-loathing--is clearly putting ideology over art, and seeing as how Momus isn't actually arguing from any defensible political position, just a vague don't-sell-us-out-man grandstanding, it hardly even seems worth considering. This is what comedy is, hon, making fun of other people; it's the responsibility of people in a comedy to fire back. You could make the argument that since the cook doesn't speak English, he can't fire back, but a) that means he's not actually offended, since he doesn't know he's being made fun of (and isn't "Why the straight face?" as much a joke about Murray's character's own ignorance as anything else?), and b) I dunno about Momus, but here in New York, I know for damn sure I get made fun of in Spanish or Korean or Russian at least three times a day, and it doesn't particularly bother me.

This is to say nothing about the whole stupid "betrayal" issue, but more on that later.

Also: this is Japan we're talking about here, not Nigeria or Palestine or something. It's a powerful country, capable of withstanding a Sofia Coppola movie. Do purveyors of anti-American films have to defend their anti-Americanism? And isn't their anti-Americanism a whole lot more virulent than any perceived anti-Japanism in LIT? This matters: when you're talking about issues of exploitation, the power relationship matters. And I think Japan's culture is strong enough (it's clearly the third or fourth most powerful in the world, seems to me) to deal with Bill Murray joking around with old ladies. I promise.

Also also: this is a man who wrote a song called "Coming In a Girl's Mouth" and he's offended by someone making a joke about a toe being sushi?!?! Are you fucking serious?!?!

UPDATE: On the subject of the particular irony of Momus making this argument, I might point out that that the headline of the page for one of his albums is "Prease Enjoy Anarog Baloque!", total Engrish if I ever read it. So clearly he's not saying "no one should ever poke fun at silly Japanese things," he's saying "Sofia Coppola should not poke fun at silly Japanese things," and that's a far weaker argument. More on that soon.

posted by Mike B. at 8:57 AM 0 comments

Monday, February 16, 2004

Guys, this is just sad.

One well-known writer admitted privately — and gleefully — to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.

I mean, hopefully you'd have fans eager enough and articulate enough to defend a book that the author wouldn't have to go onto Amazon and do it themselves, you know? You don't see musicians doing this. Although maybe this is simply an outgrowth of the semi-obsessive logorrhea of writers, where they feel they know their work best and can't help but respond. Well, at any rate, it's still pretty sad.

Not to mention lame! At least get these pissing matches out in the open where we the readers can be entertained by them, too!

posted by Mike B. at 11:47 AM 0 comments

Speaking of Northrop Frye--and when are we not speaking of Northrop Frye, oho--is the Norton Anthology of Criticism worth getting if I can get it cheeeep? Since I don't have access to a college library anymore but I'm still a theory nerd, it might be nice to have access to at least little bits of all those folks. I mean, I still have a pretty good collection of theory books, but there's definitely big gaps, and who knows, maybe I might actually want to quote some Lacan someday when I've lost about 100 IQ points.

Hey, I'm just jokin' Jacques, you're alright. (It would be funny to have Rodney Dangerfield do a whole routine about literary critics, although maybe the fact that I think this simply indicates that I need to go back to bed.) (Or write a book proposal. Ca-ching!)

posted by Mike B. at 11:43 AM 0 comments

Earlier tonight I was listening to Eminem's "Without Me" and folks were talking about how they like Eminem, and the bit comes on when he sings the Batman theme, which I've always been pleased to note he actually gave up a percentage of the publishing for doing, and I thought about it for a second--the idea of sampling a bit of familiar music by singing it instead of playing back a previously-recorded version of it. It's far from original with Eminem, of course, and while it works--especially when he places it in that particular symbolic/referential context, which is one of the things he's best at--it is, in its way, the hip-hop equivalent of an ocarina solo, or having a key change in the last chorus, or any old pop song arrangement technique. (To say nothing of its roots in "quoting" other songs in the midst of jazz solos, but let's not give him too much credit.) To my ears, its content references so overwhelm its technique references that you really only think of the Batman theme when you hear it, not previous vocal samplers. But I think it's not just that it's OK that the technique isn't original with him, I think it's actually better.

And this made me sort of realize something about my musical temperment: what's good to me about someone coming up with a new sound or technique or instrument or idea isn't the new thing itself--this intrigues me, but rarely excites me. What's exciting is the thought that in a while people will figure out how to use it so well that they can combine it with all the old things to make more great songs. In other words, I'm not excited about something simply because it's new, I'm excited about it because it'll one day be good, and I don't stop being interested when it stops being new--indeed, I think I get more interested.

In a way, it makes sense that I would come upon this line of thinking when dealing with hip-hop. After all, that seems like the place where it's most obvious how much development of something new can do for the quality of the thing. As many great things as there were about old-school hip-hop, I think you can't deny that MC'ing today is just far, far superior to MC'ing 20 years ago, to say nothing of production. Hip-hop was great, but what was really great was that it put all these additional things into play that you could use in a song. I think it's rare that an idea really is best soon after its inception; if this is the case, it's either a dud/overused genre/idea, or what follows is simply less good imitations. Now, there are some people whose musical values say that this is the case with almost every new musical idea, that it all becomes either overused or badly imitated. And I'll reconize that this is a legitimate, albeit annoying, stance. For instance, I'm currently listening to This Moment In Black History[1], about whom many people have taken this particular stance. I guess they sound new. Not to me, but to some people. (Or maybe they sound like another iteration of a far-from-tapped idea? Hmm.) And so this is good.

But for me, I think that it takes a long time to milk all the utility from a musical trope, and so what really excites me about the new is seeing where it goes, seeing what people will do with it. And so I'm actually more bored when it's new when it's not.

[1] Who have a song called "The Last Unicorn." What the fuck is it with these heavy bands and all the unicorn imagery lately? I mean, Lightning Bolt, Neon Hunk, Friends Forever...er, well maybe it's just a Load thing.

posted by Mike B. at 2:40 AM 0 comments

Mono video. Enjoi.

Also: commentary.

Also also: that was awesome!

posted by Mike B. at 12:03 AM 0 comments