Here is a tiny little film that barely earned $320,000 in total box-office receipts world-wide and screened only in 11 movie theaters when it was released. It’s one of those films that was tossed straight into the home-video bin.

But my god… what quality, what super writing, directing, and acting are tucked away in this miniscule corner of the movie world! The quality of this adult drama is nothing less than astounding.

First off, let’s praise the world-class acting muscle brought in by James Gandolfini (Doug Riley) of the SOPRANOS fame. That TV-series has seared itself permanently into my brain cells and will live with me as long as I’m around. And the number one reason why I loved that show so much was Gandolfini. The number one reason why I was mesmerized with the RILEYS is again JG. Bless you, sir.

But Melissa Leo as Doug’s depressed wife Lois and Kristen Stewart as a teenage hooker also excel beyond description. Why I haven’t heard the names of these amazing actors before; I have no idea. But I’m sure we’ll hear about them frequently in the future, especially Stewart given the fact that she is still so young and in the early years of her career. May it be a long one. I think she’ll fill in the shoes of Marcia Gay Harden nicely. Stewart is another Natalie Portman or Michelle Williams in the making.

(WARNING: some plot points revealed ahead…)

The story: Doug is a plumbing materials wholesaler in Indianapolis living in a middle-class neighborhood with his wife Lois. Despite the appearances, both are depressed deep down since they’ve lost their 15-year old only daughter in a traffic accident years earlier.

Doug, perhaps also squeezed by a typical middle-age crisis, starts to look around for a diversion, for a way to forget his pain. His wife Lois is house-ridden and clinically depressed 24-7. Thus it does not take long for Doug to get off track during an industry convention down in New Orleans.

Enter Mallory, the Big Easy teenage pole-dancer and prostitute who is just about the same age as Rileys’ deceased daughter. There’s obviously a father-daughter attraction there on Doug’s part while Mallory tries to treat Doug as yet another John off the street. Yet when Doug declares his decision to move in with Mallory while refusing any sex for payment, we are as puzzled as both Mallory and Lois are with Doug’s true intentions.

At times I thought the RILEYS might deteriorate into the overworked formula of MY FAIR LADY (even PRETTY WOMAN): will Doug try to make a lady out of Mallory? Yes and no, but Mallory is no “lady” for sure. She is not even a “woman” yet. She is a foul-mouthed wild beast.

The story takes a sharp turn at this point with Lois’s decision to pack up her suitcase, get into the family Cadillac, and after a few nervous mishaps, hit the road to… New Orleans! Lois has her epiphany and will not leave Doug on his own down in the netherworld of New Orleans.

Act Three of this fascinating story gets layered with all three major characters interacting with each other to redeem themselves and to find salvation in ways that befit them.

The ending is both logical and delicate. Writer Ken Hixon and director Jake Scott (nephew of  the great Tony Scott) really love their characters and they treat them with respect, patience, and dignity even when they are down in the pits, smeared with the ugliness of the world.

The RILEYS leaves us emotionally exhausted but yet also strangely charged up for the possibilities ahead. Hope is beating like a drum in the inner chambers of this film.

R-rated and too hard for the kids. But if you’d like to spend meaningful two hours in front of your TV set curled up with your spouse or significant other, RILEYS is not a bad choice at all. As a matter of fact, until you see it, it should be the only choice.Similar Posts:

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© 2011, Gary Karbon. All rights reserved.

This is a cold movie. No, it’s a FREEZING cold movie! (WARNING: some story spoilers ahead…)

The main character is steel cold. It opens up with a literally cold snowy scene. The warmest human relationship is a one-night stand at an Italian bordello (at least until Act 3).

SIDEBAR: There was another movie with a similar name that I watched years ago: THE UGLY AMERICAN (1963) with Marlon Brando. That was a warm, pulsing affair. Many upset characters. Here, people don’t even get upset. They just shoot one another.

There are so many things we don’t know about the story line…

Who is this guy Jack (George Clooney), a ferocious killing machine? We know zip about his history and background. He is just a muscle holding a weapon, even in his sleep.

Is he a freelancer? We don’t know.

Is he CIA? We don’t know.

He only admits to being an “American.” That’s all we know.

There’s another thing we get to know by Act 2: Jack is not as good as he’s used to be — at least that’s what his “boss” (?) or “handler” (?) is saying over the phone.

The film opens in the wilds of Sweden, with one of those unforgettable “everything is lovely — oops!” scenes… Three people die, one totally innocent… Is Jack losing his touch? And more importantly: why are they (who are “they”?) trying to kill Jack? We know nothing. It’s an enigma wrapped inside a mystery.

Jack takes refuge in a small mountain village in Italy, trying to throw off his Swedish avengers. And for the most of the movie we see him do two things: prepare a weapon that a client orders, and eliminate those who followed him all the way to this peaceful little picturesque village suspended in its medieval slumber.

Oh, and a third thing: Jack meets Clara (Violante Placido), a girl-next-door looker he meets at a whore house (do medieval villages have whore houses? – I doubt it). Then they become lovers – almost, since as I said before, even love is served on ice in this movie.

I’ve never seen George Clooney this paranoid in any of his films. In one memorable picnic scene, I swear to god his face DARKENS with fear as we watch… I have no idea how he did that but chalk it up for a veteran actor’s bag of tricks.

The end is a Classical Greek Tragedy kind of ending. The hero… so close to the sun… so close to salvation and redemption…

Without giving the end away, let me tell you this much: Jack is still emancipated from the cold and bloody bonds of his worldly misdeeds but in an aesthetical and metaphorical way, thanks to the Director Anton Corbijn.

So, why did I love this movie? One word – directing. Corbijn is a true student of Hitchcock. Those open-area wide-angle shots with no soundtrack are truly menacing and reminded me of similar scenes in FRENZY (1972), shall we say.

Second reason, again related to directing, is the way Corbijn approaches the whole idea of “narrative” and “story.” If with a “story” what you understand is a series of moments each following the other seamlessly like the wagons of a train, you are in for an education.

In THE AMERICAN there are many moments, many scenes that you have no idea where they’re leading to. And that’s the delight of this cold thriller.

This is one movie where the director is saying “we are not playing with your rules of what constitutes a story – welcome to my house of broken moments and nothing’s-happening transitions.”

In that sense, THE AMERICAN is a philosophical exercise on what constitutes “The Reality.” Can we tell what’s going on inside a man by just watching what’s going on outside of him? Probably that’s the deeper focus that we shouldn’t miss when watching THE AMERICAN.

Cold but recommended like a plate of chilled fine caviar.Similar Posts:

• Brando, Bunuel, and the Meaning of a “Character”
• Movie Review: Equilibrium
• Movie Review: The Bucket List
• Movie Review: Sex and the City
• Comic Book Movie Cameos I Want to See

© 2011, Gary Karbon. All rights reserved.

Going through my library this weekend, I came across an old copy of Harold Bloom’s classic, The Western Canon.

When it was published, Bloom’s book was (and remains today) controversial among educators and academics for its unshrinking advocacy of intellectual elitism and its defense of Western canonical literature.  That is, the European literature that most people who went to American public high schools encountered at some point, such as Shakespeare.

His work was a fitting find.  I moved to my new apartment some months ago, yet the floor is still strewn with boxes full of books, most of which I still haven’t read.  For Bloom (and indeed, his is but one opinion), the fundamental need for a canon of literature stems from our lack of time: “Who reads must choose, since there is literally not enough time to read everything, even if one does nothing but read.”

There’s a little more to this than just assembly line efficiency.  Even if we did nothing but read, doing any activity always involves a choice, and choices always involve the question “what should we do?”  To spend our time is ethical.

To a twenty-something like myself, it also occurs to me that to spend our time is to grow up, though growing isn’t limited to young people.  Sometimes we spend years dividing our energies before we find focus; more often, we never find focus.

That society is also “grown up” or “adult”, that we should make those ethical choices collectively and decisively, is an underlying reason why Bloom’s book remains controversial.  Beyond the politics of having children read Dead White Males or dismissing the democratization of literary education, there is an assumption that we’re capable of making such decisions; also, an that there is a “we” to speak of.  These are not easy in a postmodern age, where positive absolute assertions about culture and society are to be deconstructed and exposed as frauds.Similar Posts:

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© 2011, Ersin Akinci. All rights reserved.

This blog isn’t wont to dole out dating advice.  Thinking upon my own predicament trying to find romance, however, I realized that there’s something unique and highly peculiar about trying to date a critic.

By “critic”, I don’t just mean “film critic”, “food critic”, or any particular occupation.  I mean someone who is genuinely critical, which shouldn’t be confused with that abused term “critical thinker”.  Intellectuals may be brave, but they aren’t necessarily critics, for instance.

At his core, a critic is essentially a destructive person.  Critics are Shiva.  They have no respect for established traditions, boundaries, all the molehills we’ve spend generations accumulating, nor for our mores and accomplishments, including the critic’s own.  The true critic is ready to abandon his entire life, in principle, were he to know deep down that it wasn’t the truth.

But what people don’t realize is that the critic’s destruction is never absolute, because the critic destroys the world according to certain standards, that is, particular assumptions and rules about how the destruction and the subsequent genesis should emerge.  He maintains these standards because if he didn’t his destruction would be completely unrecognizable, and without recognition, it would be meaningless.

It’s not that people have to recognize those standards: just the opposite, since if the world recognized them then the jig would be up and the world’s destruction wouldn’t be complete.  The trick is that the world has to recognize it’s own destruction and it can only do so through some standards, which is what the critic secretly supplies.  Critics of critics, sometimes not actually critical themselves, point out these standards in critical articles as flaws in the critic’s argument, as unsubstantiated and underlying assumptions that must be exposed.  In reality, the critic has been fully aware of them all along, but he doesn’t voice and defend them the way that a scholar or a journalist would write, “Albeit, the other party has…”, to be followed with, “That notwithstanding, they have…”  If he did, the destruction would be exposed for the incomplete and fixed sham that it is.

Thus, the critic’s first dating dilemma: finding someone who can understand and handle that contradiction that the critic bears constantly.

But it’s not enough for the destruction in itself to be complete, or to have the illusion of being complete.  For just as unrecognized destruction is meaningless, the standards that give it meaning have to be recognized eventually or else they would be meaningless, too.  Yet as we’ve said before, the critic can’t open those standards up to the entire world.  So what to do?  The critic seeks a romantic partner, just one person (or maybe a few) that can recognize the secret standards and keep them secret.  To be a critic in love is to be a villain with a partner in crime.

How is this any different from non-critics, though?  Isn’t this need for recognition basically the same principle that any romance follows?

The difference lies in the nature of that need.  The great majority of people’s social anxiety stems from a deeply seated fear that, beneath it all, they are outsiders and outcasts, and so they seek a fellow pariah to console them.  Their romantic ideal is to “stand apart”, like a city upon a hill.  A critic’s social anxiety on the other hand is completely the inverse, because the critic is always worried about being a perpetual insider, since he’s the only one who really understands what rules the world is being destroyed and recreated by.  By the same token, the critic is subversive, never revolutionary.  Remember that Socrates was murdered by the state for contaminating the minds of the youth, not for leading them in revolt.

Does the critic need another insider to recognize his standards?  Yes, because of how recognition works.  The word “recognition” comes from the Latin “cogito” (to think, to understand, to comprehend) and the prefix “re”, which implies repetition.  Recognition isn’t just sight, it’s the rethinking and recomprehension of something that’s already been thought and comprehended.  Namely, the thing outside of us that we comprehend when we recognize it is within us already.

So when the public recognizes the critic’s destruction, it means that they have a little bit of that destruction as well as its structure, its branches and foliage, within them, though they might be unaware of it.  Recognizing the seeds of that destruction, however, demands someone else who has them as well.  This necessarily means another critic and so another insider precisely because the roots are secret.

Now another difficulty lies in finding a fellow insider.  Finding an outsider is easy enough, first because almost everyone is one and second because outsiders’ outside status by definition must be known to all.  Insiders, however, are much fewer and, clearly, more secret.  We can find outsiders outside the city walls, roaming in the fields.  But how do you pick an insider from within the bustle of the market?

Moreover, one insider can’t just approach another and reveal the other’s insider status.  When they do, their status is jeopardized because it’s under threat of being made non-exclusive.  Thus the second major question with finding love as a critic: how do we approach other critics?

This threat of being revealed adds to the romantic pressure, and the critic who is revealed by another critic either has to unite with them or part ways completely.  Herodotus tells us the story of Gyges, servant to the Lycian king, whose master wasn’t convinced that his court recognized the full beauty of his wife.  The king leads Gyges behind the door of the royal bedchamber one night so that he can see the queen naked, but when the queen notices Gyges she says that he must either submit to execution or kill the king himself, for no two men can have seen the queen naked.  Gyges murders the king, thus becoming king himself, and marries the queen.

Baudelaire once wrote that men seek to be two, but that the man of genius seeks to be one.  The critic seeks to be one alright, but he can’t do it without uniting with another.  His entire enterprise is based on a grand and secret hypocrisy that doesn’t need validation but rather genuine recognition.  The critic lives in a state of sin, perhaps closer than anyone else to it; and so Baudelaire, who recognized that the sweetest love always has a little evil:

Pour châtier ta chair joyeuse,
Pour meurtrir ton sein pardonné,
Et faire à ton flanc étonné
Une blessure large et creuse,

Et, vertigineuse douceur!
À travers ces lèvres nouvelles,
Plus éclatantes et plus belles,
T’infuser mon venin, ma soeur!

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© 2010, Ersin Akinci. All rights reserved.

Naval base at San Diego with solar panels. Photo credit: U.S. Navy

The other day, I read an article in the New York Times regarding the American military’s turn to renewable energy: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/earth/05fossil.html?_r=1&hp

I was wondering whether to think that this is forward-looking or whether it’s the military getting up to speed with reality.  Renewable energy advocates have been pushing for increased solar and wind use since the 70′s, but on the other hand, if the military really did switch en masse to renewable energy it would be the first mass deployment of the technology in our country.  “In our country” of course makes things relative again; Germany’s already getting 16% of their electricity from renewable.

In the sixteenth century, the introduction of (relatively) reliable cast bronze cannons into Europe spurred scholars to think about the physics of free falling projectiles.  Hence, Galileo’s famous experiments with canon balls.  The aim was to allow gunners to more accurately predict where their ordnance would land, and it was a big catalyst in the development of modern science.

In social sciences, as well, I suspect that the military’s wholesale adoption of behaviorist psychology helped advance and cement that strand’s dominance in American therapy.  Note, too, that the IQ test was first devised as a way of filtering French soldiers.  Do these count as being “forward thinking”, however?

It depends on our framework.  Universal objectivity and rationality is a product of the Enlightenment, when people began to use the term “rational” as a way of thinking that contrasted with knowledge based on faith, superstition, tradition–or, at least, the advocates of rationalism constructed their arguments in such a way that portrayed themselves as thinking in a new way that was opposed to the “old ways”, or the “medieval” ways, which they then identified as faith, superstition, tradition, etc.  Humanities scholars have pretty much abandoned the notion of absolute objectivity not just a something feasible but as a principle because they’ve come to see that so-called “universal” rationalism isn’t universal at all, and that what we think of in the West (or as men, or as whites, or as members of the bourgeoisie, or as whatever category, all of which have been challenged) as rational seems supremely insensible to others, and vice versa.  Hence, modern science, which is based on rational thinking, is
seen as being relative, as well.

But how can we say that science is relative when the laws of nature are obviously absolute?  Newtonian gravity works the same way here as it does in Africa.  (Interesting aside, the Soviets actually did try to replace “bourgeois” science with “proletariat” science, but the project was quietly nixed after they realized that it didn’t make any sense.)  There are a number of problems with this view.  First, there are many bodies of knowledge that are completely unscientific and totally “irrational” that have been effective and universal for centuries; Chinese traditional medicine is one example.  Second, what we think of as absolute laws are constantly disproven.  Newtonian gravity, for example, doesn’t actually work here the way it does in Africa, because Newton’s model has been surpassed by Einstein’s, which is currently a more accurate description of how gravity works.

That second point can be teased out a bit more.  Max Weber, the German father of modern sociology, delivered a lecture that’s since been printed and translated entitled “Science as a Vocation”.  He makes the point that we can talk about the meaning of science on the one hand and our reasons for pursuing it on the other, that these are in fact two distinct things, and he says that the meaning of science is for it to be surpassed.  So when we come up with a new scientific model, inherent in that model is the assumption–no, the necessity–that it will be superceded.  This is a terribly important point, because it implies that the progress of science isn’t tied to the revelation of universal laws, but rather that it has more to do with the structure
of its enterprise.  We progress with science because science is defined as being progressive.  And how do we measure that progress? By its utility, that is, by how reliably we can use what we’ve discovered to predict how a phenomenon will occur.  But those are two distinct links, and the first link, that we should define science as progressive, is arbitrary.

In that sense, science is relative even though it gets at absolutes. Think about the humanities from the same perspective.  What is the meaning of learning what happened in Constantinople in 1453? Precisely that: to learn what happened in Constantinople in 1453.  The reasons could be manifold: to point to the decline of Christianity in the East, to indicate the end of the Roman Empire, to celebrate the advance of Islam, to identify when the Renaissance started, etc.  But the meaning of the event is simply the event itself.  The predecessor to modern science, known as “natural philosophy” since all scholarly learning was considered to be “philosophy”, had a similar attitude and didn’t get very far compared to science today, but the comparison is false, because medieval scholars weren’t looking to make progress. That concept was alien to them anyway.

The military has its own science and ethic, but disinterested progress isn’t exclusively at its core.  The meaning of finding a new way to power Humvees and tanks isn’t just to put themselves into a position where later they can find an even better way to power Humvees and tanks.  The meaning is a bit more like the humanities, in that it’s more immediate, but it’s also scientific in the sense that a new energy source is about finding a “better” energy source.  The metric is different, namely dollars and blood, which ultimately is translated by the bureaucracy into just dollars.  That they can find this better way assumes, however, that it already exists, since soldiers aren’t scientists.  Hence the industrial-military complex that Eisenhower warned against where the military begins to influence what Weber calls the reasons for science, and it buys that influence with R&D budgets, scholarships, etc.Similar Posts:

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© 2010, Ersin Akinci. All rights reserved.

US Supreme Court Justice David Souter

Here is a commencement speech that every American (and every culture vulture, for that matter) should read.

In this important speech retired U.S. Justice David Souter defends the U.S. Supreme Court against charges of “activism” and explains why a simple-minded “fair reading of facts” approach to Constitutional law won’t do. He explains (in a manner that even I can understand) why INTERPRETATION of the law is a necessary ingredient of serving the American people since different articles of the Constitution need periodic reviews due to the fact that social values that guide such articles themselves change.

Souter dives into two concrete cases — the Pentagon Papers and Brown vs. the Board of Education decisions. After reading his explanation I now understand why the Justices cannot just read the “law”, look at the “facts”, and decide whether the facts violate the law or not. If that were the case, we would’ve constructed a computer, feed all the law articles into the machine and hit the green START button!  Presto! No need for lawyers or judges or law schools.

To understand what Justice Souter is talking about is important for two different but equally crucial reasons:

(1) Some of the issues we discuss day-in day-out and regard as “artistic freedom” or “freedom of speech” issues are actually serious Constitutional issues at heart. Without arriving at a correct interpretation of such cases we cannot resolve the related artistic or cultural issues either.

(2) These very same issues have bearing on other discussions going on around world. In many other countries the judges are attacked with similar accusations of “activism” by all kinds of governments who would rather end the principle of “separation of powers” and rule their countries as they wish through sheer executive fiat.

Thus for the future of DEMOCRACY at a global scale we again need to understand the non-mechanical nature of Constitutional Law interpretation and the great care, erudition, patience it requires to come up with a true “fair and balanced” resolution of these hot issues.

Stepping back and looking at the the brilliant contributions of scholars like Justice Souter makes me say that this the real treasure of America. The real strength, the Real Light and Promise of this great land is not its monetary treasures or material wonders and possessions but the sharp and compassionate minds of cultural beacons like Justice Souter. I offer my heartfelt thanks to him for his guidance and wisdom.

(Photo courtesy of Harvard Gazette)Similar Posts:

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© 2010 – 2011, Gary Karbon. All rights reserved.

Bruegel, Pieter de Oude, "Landscape with Icarus"

I’m at a seaside resort somewhere in the Aegean. I’ve just visited the Temple of Apollo today. Built 2,700 years ago, the temple was surrounded by stone blocks full of inscriptions in classical Greek, which of course I cannot read. I kicked myself why I haven’t devoted the time in the past to learn this ancient language. How wonderful it would’ve been to read these ancient “hardcover books” chiseled into granite.

While ruminating about my self-inflicted misfortune, my thoughts shifted to the loneliness of learning.

Yes, I felt lonely since I couldn’t share my sense of loss (not knowing Greek) with anyone else. Who cares about classical Greek anymore? Not anyone I know. This is the age of iPod, iPad, and checking your text messages five times a minute, isn’t it?

But I realized that even if we lived tens of thousands of years ago, learning would still be a very lonely enterprise, for 2 reasons.

(1) Learning means leaving where you are, leaving the safe confines of your home, and sailing for someplace you’ve never been before. So by definition, you end up in territory that you know nothing about. You don’t have any friends there. No family. On the contrary, the inhabitants of the new domain usually don’t want you there. But by sheer persistence you shoulder your way in. The act of learning is exhilarating since it feels like taking up wings and being reborn. But the cost is your new loneliness. This is the PULL factor at work.

(2) Learning means you leave behind the people with whom you’ve shared almost everything and become a stranger to them, in tiny steps. This is the PUSH factor of loneliness. You literally end up with having no time for your loved ones since reading, writing, learning takes so much time. Famous authors dedicate their books to their families for  a very good reason — they know they’ve hurt them by leaving them alone for all those hours, days, and years that it took them to write that book.

So is learning an act of heroism in the face of insurmountable obstacles or a futile act of self-aggrandizement? I believe it is both. I’ll return to this topic soon. What I know is, the heroes are as lonely as the fools, thanks to the built-in contradictions of the learning process.Similar Posts:

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© 2010 – 2011, Gary Karbon. All rights reserved.

Poets from around the world—from Vietnam and the Netherlands and Brazil and Canada, quite different from one another, coming from quite distinct literary traditions—were part of the same conversation. They were trying to invent in language, trying to say what life was like for them, to bear witness to it, to find fresh ways of embodying the experiences of thinking and feeling and living among others. That was what I was suddenly hearing in Beijing—that familiar, exhilarating sound, not so much of poetry, but of the power of the project of poetry.  –Robert Haas, “Two Poets” (The Believer, June 2010)

Poets speak with voices that are not just their own, but that also carry the sound of their generation.  Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and the other beat poets of the 1950′s and 60′s remain perhaps the most famous American examples in living memory of this aspect of the “project of poetry”, and though the extreme sexual and narcotic liberation embodied by a poem like Howl can never truthfully be said to represent an entire generation, in their free flowing verses an entire new wave of youth found its expression and definition.

Perhaps something similar is occurring in China today, as Robert Haas demonstrates in his article “Two Poets” in last month’s issue of The Believer.  Haas interviewed Yu Jian and Xi Chuan, two leading lights in China’s so-called New Generation of poets born in the wake of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and he observes that in Beijing right now poets are abuzz with “trying to invent language, trying to say what life was like for them, to bear witness to it, to find fresh ways of embodying the experiences of thinking and feeling and living among others”.  To say “what life [is] like” is almost by definition something social, a project that depends not only on the poet but the streets she walks on and he people that line it.  Moreover, as each poet strives for this goal their voices rise in cacophony that slips in and out of harmony, but with the same rhythms that characterize their group since the instruments themselves all come from the same street vendors, businessmen, and homeless orphans.  Thus emerges the voice of their generation.

All this has makes one wonder, what is the voice of today’s youth, the Generation Me born into the Internet and broadband revolutions?  The answer eludes us, since the traditional sources that we might first look to have all disappeared or dried up.  Typing, texting, and browsing have replaced writing and reading as we knew them and the value placed on genuine literacy and the long attention spans needed to cultivate a voice is at an all time low.  Music has become dominated by corporate-controlled mega-personas while thriving yuppie and booze-fueled indie scenes can hardly be thought of as the heirs to decimated folk and home traditions.  Like Archean bacteria, we thrive isolated in dark caves lit by the phosphorescent glow of our immense flat panels; the streets hum dead with the whir and kick starts of central air conditioning units.

What occurred to me, however, is that the text, the YouTube clip, the Ke$ha beat, and the air conditioner’s hum are precisely the stuff that fill up our lives, and that’s the stuff of our generation’s poetic voice.  If we don’t have each other then we should adopt, modify, and sing with the voices that News Corp. and Hollywood lend us.  It’s a refreshingly prosaic conclusion that feels authentic in our socially awkward times, where we’d rather arrange a date by text than call the person and dare face their real sound.

With that in mind, I began to write poems that have these familiar voices.  Here’s one:

Newscaster

oil is gushing into the gulf at 60,000 barrels per day
according to representatives two relief wells are
on their
way
my husband reports I’ve never looked so good
as when I put this cream in my hair
it’s a relief
and I will take his alleged hand
lead him to the beach where
crews have reported tarballs have washed up
where the gulls still caw
I’ll bathe him and
wash my hair every morning
the oil brings out the oil in the follicles rejuvenating roots
giving a lustrous shine
so our sponsors say
and I will be your sponsor
I will look thousands of barrels good for you any daySimilar Posts:

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© 2010, Ersin Akinci. All rights reserved.

A masterpiece by Martin Scorsese on the level of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas.

The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio in his usual pedal-to-the-metal best) heads for the psychiatric-jail on Shutter Island to investigate the case of a missing patient/criminal, Rachel Solando. Accompanying him is his junior partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo).

The mental hospital, which is actually a maximum-security jail protected by an army of smug and hard-core guards, is led by Dr. John Cawley, the head psychiatrist — acted with great control and restraint by Ben Kingsley.

Daniels has some baggage: he was one of the American servicemen who entered the Dachau extermination camp during the liberation of Germany. The things that he saw and did at Dachau left their indelible marks on him.

Then there’s the memory of his lovely wife Dolores Chanal (played by lovely Michelle Williams of Brokeback Mountain who never disappoints)… Memory of a fire that destroyed a family…

This is a film about the tenuous nature of personal identity and the amazing powers of the mind to create alternative realities, each as real as the other one. Or as Bill Clinton once said: it all depends on what the definition of “is” is.

What starts out as a straight-forward missing-person investigation by two G-suits slowly changes shape and turns into a man’s desperate struggle to maintain his own sanity, while trying to assess the sanity of all those around him. What a screenplay!  Kudos for the writer Laeta Kalogridis who adopted Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name.

Scorsese, who at this point in his career have of course mastered the visual language of motion pictures, opens up the first scene with a statement as bold as the first sequence of the Jaws, and the tension never lets up, partly thanks to the arresting musical score.

Jackie Earl Haley, one of those most-under-acknowledged but great actors like Barry Pepper (61*) and Marcia Gay Harden (Pollock), again treats us to a great psychological feast, bringing to life a demented patient.

While we are talking about supporting roles, I must also mention John Carroll Lynch. If you thought playing the softie honey-of-a-husband in Fargo was the best he could do, think again. See how he breathes menacing life into Deputy Warden McPherson. The man has  a range, clearly.

The resolution of the film does not turn out to be what we secretly hope it’d be. There’s a certain sense of letdown at the concluding last scene, perhaps because the lead role belongs to a good-looking baby-face guy like DiCaprio who always plays the “hero.” So perhaps that’s a casting issue that we have to deal with as audience.

Yet, deep down below, we also know that that’s exactly how it’d turn out in real life. And that explains why the hair on our necks rise when the final shock is delivered without flinching. Scorsese does not pull any punches there.

A dark downer painted in bruising black, lightning blue and thunder gray. Not a movie to watch on a sunny Saturday surrounded by your kids, family, and fresh pop-corn. But if you like psychological thrillers, this is a new American Classic that will stand the test of time like Cape Fear. Recommended.Similar Posts:

• Movie Review — Intermission (2003), a “romantic thriller” that parodies itself
• Movie Review: Innocents With Dirty Hands (1975)
• Movie Review: There Will Be Blood (2007)
• Movie Review: Made of Honor
• Movie Review: Cashback

© 2010, Gary Karbon. All rights reserved.

Boundaries are a must to preserve identity. Individuals need a boundary. And so do nations, football fans, and lovers.

There are 2 ways in which a boundary can be violated: 1) Non-members cross over the boundary and enter the “home domain.” 2) The coordinates of the boundary are changed. Or a mixture of both.

Before American Civil War, slave trade kept bringing in non-members until the boundaries of “citizens” burst open (Case I). Then the South tried to redefine the physical borders (Case II) which led to Civil War.

I read the story of a Lebanese shop keeper in Germany who hanged a huge German flag to celebrate Germany’s Soccer Cup victory and… the flag was burnt and torn down by leftists who thought the man had no “right” to celebrate like a “true German.” The Lebanese shop owner was regarded as a non-member passing for a member. An “Uncle Tom” situation perhaps? Depends on who you ask…

And here is the crisis: this is the age of Globalization. People intermarry. We all travel from one corner of the world to the other, work, and sometimes settle down as well. The group, ethnic, and national boundaries are violated constantly.

The only solution left to remain who we think we are is to live according to an inner identification with an invisible boundary, as summarized by the term “Spirituality.” Yet in this age of Mega Churches, spirituality has also become a membership- and boundary-defining business in a hurry, which brings us back to square one — how are we going to maintain our identity when either the borders are changing constantly or we are shifted back and forth across those boundaries due to globalization?

Psychiatry and law enforcement are the true professions of the future.Similar Posts:

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© 2010, Gary Karbon. All rights reserved.

“Democracy is not a suicide pact.” – Amitai Etzioni

Samuel Huntington's Map of "World Civilizations"

I’m sick and tired of those bleeding-heart liberals who defend the most abominable cultural institutions in the name of their “respect” for the “equality before the law.” That covers the presumed equality of all cultures, all social, ethnic and religious practices.

Their definition of democracy is respecting the “equality” of all social practices “before the law” – no matter what! For them this principle is elevated to the level of an untouchable fetish.

But can you name me ONE country which is not ruled according to laws? Why, even Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and “Democratic Republic of Congo” have “rule of law”, don’t they? So the KIND of law we’re talking about makes all the difference in the world, doesn’t it? Liberals don’t get that very simple point.

My point is this – an abstract respect for the “equality before the law” does not make any sense without looking at the outer framework of values, the “civilization” within which those laws are created, interpreted, and implemented.

That’s why chopping off the hands of a thief or the public-stoning to death of a woman who cheats on her husband are perfectly “legal” in Saudi Arabia but we in the West think they are horrendous acts of barbarism. Are we going to “respect” that just because it’s a Saudi law and pretend that there’s no difference whatsoever between medieval and modern law enforcement? Where do we stand on the historic evolution of human values? 7^th or 21^st century?

The blind liberal trumpeting of such “respect” for the equal treatment of all cultural traditions leads to supreme acts of folly like Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams defending the implementation of the Islamic Shariat law in those parts of England populated by fundamentalist Muslims.

Yes, we need to respect the laws and treat all equal but only if we’re first sharing the same civilization, the same general values about how we should lead our lives. Otherwise we end up CONDONING “honor killings,” polygamy, subjugation of women and children, “female circumcision”, gender inequality, and other inhumane values defended by other ethnic or national cultures.

Such guilt-ridden democracies start to molest their own enlightened values (equality, individual freedoms, etc.) while celebrating the very same collapse as a vindication and triumph of liberalism. A pity, a shame, and an evolutionary crime!Similar Posts:

• Take the Test: Are You Liberal or Conservative?
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• You Want Some GOP, Yeah You Know Me!

© 2010, Gary Karbon. All rights reserved.

Intermission, director John Crowley’s first film, is supposed to be a film about “life is what happens in between” two major events; that is, an intermission. But the ending proves the reverse – that, no matter what happens during the intermission, the RESUMPTION of the pre-intermission process towards the MEANINGFUL CULMINATION of one’s life scenario is what counts. That’s why this successful romantic-thriller (a rarity in itself) ends up becoming its own parody. A good film with the wrong log line.

The setting is Dublin, a city of misfits with heavy accents, egomaniac police detectives and supermarket bosses, spurned lovers, middle-aged cheaters with the gray-itch, small-time crooks, simple hearts yearning for undying love … in short, a city like many others around the world.

This is the story of John (Cillian Murphy) and his girlfriend Deirdre (Kelly Macdonald) who takes up with a middle-aged bank manager who leaves his wife for Deidre’s much younger offerings. Then there’s Lehiff (Colin Farrell), good for nothing bum who is chased and humiliated by the sadist gas-bag cop Jerry (Colm Meaney) whose main mission in life is to become a TV celebrity starring in his own cop reality show.

When John agrees to be part of a heist plot to win back Deirdre, the story engine shifts into high gear. After some obligatory twists and turns the story reaches its nerve-soothing climax that again revolves around our two main characters: John and Deirdre.

Colin Farrell and Colm Meaney are so good as villains one wonders if they are actually acting or not.

The bottom line is this: are you ready to affirm your love upfront and confirm the responsibility of that decision, or will you continue to dance around waiting to be “discovered” as a lover? That’s the main question asked in Intermission, a question that’s answered well, in  nuanced strokes.

There’s one late scene between the two lovers, talking straight from the heart for the first time with zero BS, that almost brought tears to my eyes. That’s the kind of “thriller” this is. It’s a man’s action thriller that crosses the finish line as a chick-flick. That’s a hard balance to toe. Recommended.Similar Posts:

• Claude Chabrol’s Structural Innovations
• Musical Cues in Film Aren’t Necessary
• The American (2010) – A Cold Story Served Well Like Chilled Caviar
• Movie Review: Then She Found Me
• Movie Review: The Dark Knight

© 2010, Gary Karbon. All rights reserved.

Yesterday, I received a postcard from a friend studying in Rome that had the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio’s famous depiction of Narcissus staring at his own reflection in the water.  I remembered studying the painting in art history classes, and of course the original myth from which Caravaggio was inspired, and the more I looked at it the more I began to see something that we don’t usually associate with Narcissus or narcissism: a tragic hero.

Caravaggio's "Narciso"

In the most common version of myth as told by Ovid, Narcissus is an exceptionally handsome young man who spurns all those who fall in love with him, including the jilted nymph Echo, who prays to Venus for revenge.  Her prayer is heard, and while Narcissus hunts in the woods he comes upon a pool, and upon seeing his own reflection in the water for the first time, he falls in love with his own image.  Realizing that he can’t act on his desire, however, he tussles with himself until he expires (in other versions, he commits outright suicide or even wastes away by the water’s edge, ever transfixed by his own beauty).

Now, my friend who sent me the postcard writes this:

I had to buy this postcard because I think all scholars are a bit like Narciso falling into or wasting away at our stacks of books and archives.  I mean that in the best sense of course.

The story of Narcissus is a fitting metaphor for scholarship, and just as Narcissus hunts, so too does the scholar, who tracks sources in old archives and grasps at the trails of hypotheses hinted at from afar.  Like Narcissus’s hunting, scholarship is a solitary job that calls for stealth, cunning, and courage.  You have to be able to tamp down your own “noise”, whether physical or mental, so that you won’t distract yourself or scare off the prey; your senses must be wide awake and able to detect the slightest hint; finally, you must be able to track down a lead no matter where it goes.  And indeed, next to to the hunt itself, scholars relish nothing more than capturing their prey, whether it be a long sought-after manuscript or an argument that we’ve finally nailed.

Yet the pivotal moment for Narcissus comes not when he catches the prey, but rather when he stops by the pool to drink.  There, he sees his self-reflection and falls in self-love, a scene that has generally been interpreted as indicative of Narcissus’s fatal flaw, namely his intense vanity.  However, when the scholar “stops by the pool to drink”–that is, when he’s in those lonely passing moments of respite in the wooded thicket of a library when the pages have stopped rustling and he rubs his temple, or when he walks back to his apartment late at night, empty coffee cup in hand; or less stereotypically, in the supermarket, with a friend, or anywhere where he is susceptible to an epiphany–those are the moments of mental and emotional self-reflection when he sees himself within and falls in love not with his eyes but with his soul.  Those are the methodless times when everything he’s absorbed paves itself together and leads him somewhere he would have never thought of, just as writing brings out thoughts that the same words spoken aloud would never have prompted.  It’s enough to arrest him and propel him into something altogether different for what seems like the rest of his life.  What Narcissus and scholars see in those moments is much more than a dumb mirror image or, for that matter, a book or a scroll.  It is the prize of the humanities “in the best sense”: self-knowledge.

In our postmodern/post-Kanye world, we’ve nearly forsaken self-knowledge (and this is not exclusive to scholars) in favor of pursuing the external empirical, but in the myth the two are inseparable.  Narcissus’s admiring pursuers’ incessant pleas are tiresome, and it’s no surprise that he would go out for a day’s hunt after having to put up with the irritating Echo always haranguing his ear.  Ironically, however, the love that Narcissus shuns is exactly the love he finds within himself for himself.  In a sense, his want for understanding the love within pushes him at the beginning to quest for something without–in his case, venison.  So, too, do we want our meat, those iPods, movies, careers, families, respectability, abuse, and nescio quae of the world, those external things (whether tangible or not) entire lives are dedicated to pursuing.  Often enough, that’s where those lives end.  Narcissus’s paradoxical victory isn’t only that he returns and accepts the love he first rejected, but also that he could only arrive at that love through the misleading pursuit brought about by rejecting it.  The story almost follows the familiar heroic arc, from denial/jilting to quest to victory/self-discovery and acceptance, with the exception that the fight/hunt turns out to be a red herring (albeit, the one that sets us on the path).

I can think of no greater jilter than a scholar, but for all our monkish (and perhaps not so monkish, as in the case of Foucault) shunning, do we end up wiser?  Hardly.  Self-knowledge may be the prize of the humanities, but it’s not actually the end: after all, for Narcissus, it merely unlocks the love that he had fled.  What I’ve referred to here as Narcissus’s self-knowledge can in fact be split into at least two layers.  The first is self-recognition, which is the transfixing reflexive gaze from which we gain intoxicating self-consciousness, or rather consciousness of the self through the image.  Once we recognize the self as an entity, we can move to self-authenticity, where we learn, create, feel, and accept what comprises the self.  The tragedy of Narcissus is that he fails to build on his authenticity to create something outside himself, and perhaps that is his ultimate crime.  Love is more than the sum of two human beings, and if it weren’t then his reflection would probably suffice.  The issue is that the reflection is not a person in the full sense of the word, and really it’s even less than an image.  It’s like the difference between reminiscence and memory that Socrates outlines in the Phaedrus: one is an aid to mere recognition, the other is full knowledge itself.

Fortunately, scholarship diverts from the myth at this juncture, since books are art and art is far more than mimesis, or rather mimesis is more than just copying.  When scholars drink at the pool, we see ourselves in the text but also the text can see itself in us.  A book has its own inner power and will, and its expressions and composition are ever changing.  It’s not entirely accurate, then, to think that scholars simply waste away next to books because it’s possible for us to engage in a relationship with them; however, it’s true that we might never get up and keep walking.  Once we confront whatever it was that we were fleeing and accept it, we might still never come back to Echo and tell her what we think now that we possess the capital to think, or even turn around and head straight back into the forest, perhaps looking forward to the day we might slake our thirst again.  Maybe it wouldn’t be a crime, but it seems like we would have missed the point.

So the question remains, after having taken the time out of our busy schedules to read and write our postcards and after having seen ourselves in them, where do we go?Similar Posts:

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© 2010, Ersin Akinci. All rights reserved.

After having weathered the post-modernist deconstructionist storm of the last fifty years, I think the novel format has found its reconstructionist master in the person of José de Sousa Saramago (pronounced Sa-ra-ma-YU in Portugese), the late Portugese writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 and passed away this month (June 2010).

Saramago writes in long breathless sentences and paragraphs, long freight-train of a narrative that usually runs for pages before breaking for a breather. Compared to commercial titans of the novel format like James Patterson, for example, who writes in easily digestible chunks of description and dialog and chapters as short of two pages, Saramago is an anomaly.

However, whether he outsells Patterson or not (and the answer is decidedly NOT), from a historic perspective I think he has accomplished something revolutionary: he revived the novel form as a pure unadulterated inner monologue. He is a “fundamentalist” and “purist” in that regard.

First, consider the following typical passage from his novel CAVE:
—————-
This was when Cipriano Algor said, Don’t worry, we’ll get there on time, I’m not worried, replied his son-in-law, only just managing to conceal his anxiety, Of course you’re not, but you know what I mean, said Cipriano Algor.
—————-
Normally, we would expect this passage written as:
—————-

This was when Cipriano Algor said:

“Don’t worry, we’ll get there on time.”

“I’m not worried,” replied his son-in-law, only just managing to conceal his anxiety.

“Of course you’re not, but you know what I mean,” said Cipriano Algor.

—————-

So, what happened here? The quotation marks have disappeared, together with the pause and white space which usually signals shifting from one character to another or from dialog to description, etc. The traditional spatial arrangement of the narrative is broken and then slammed together into one seamless string of inner monologue.

I say “inner monologue” because isn’t that really the way we “think” inside our heads? Isn’t it the way we end up vocalizing internally what we read, as a raging river of ideas, images, linguistic components, sounds, etc? There are no quotation marks in that inner monologue but an internal recognition, a mental bookmark that the speaker has changed, or that we are thinking of a description instead of a dialogue, etc. Thus by writing in that format, Saramago is already doing the “internal monologing” for us upfront, just like a mother bird chews the food before depositing it into the mouths of her fledgling chicks.

Let’s remember that quotation marks and the way dialogue is written on its own separate lines in “codex” (book format) have its own history. That is, there was a time way back when writers (or “scribes”) did not write any dialogue in between double quotation marks. I’ve heard of a history professor at University of Illinois who actually studied the evolution of the format but since I haven’t read her work I don’t want to name-drop here. But I still feel comfortable in claiming that Saramago’s stylistic preference harkens back to those early times when dialogue and description were not this separated from each other; when the novel was not this “objectified” a format.

Reading Saramago is not easy for the sheer physical effort it requires to go through his long passages and breathless run-on sentences. But if you persevere, you’ll be rewarded with the strange sensation that you’re actually watching your own inner voice taking a walk over a landscape so deep, so nuanced and so delicate that other “objectified” forms of narration like movies or stage plays can never capture the same with their reliance on what can be depicted only through five senses.

Find a quiet corner and dive deep into a Saramago novel today and see what you’ve been missing while chewing and spitting out one formulaic “best seller” after another for all these years.

© 2010 Gary KarbonSimilar Posts:

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• How Much Do Novelists Make? (Part 3 of 3)
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© 2010, Gary Karbon. All rights reserved.

It’s common enough now to see so many postmodern motifs in the post-WWII European art scene that the two have become inseparable. While the Second World War’s aftermath ushered in a triumphant and strident national narrative for the U.S. that lived on despite the turbulence of the 60′s and 70′s, French and German artists turned inward to confront deep feelings of guilt and shame–not that the Americans were immune to their own need for soul searching. Yet whereas the vibrant modernist abstract expressionism of Pollock, Rothko, and Rauschenberg sought to establish a new inner reality, these developments stateside were mirrored by the bleak existentialism of Giacometti and the low art of Dubuffet immediately after the war. Even today, the dialectic between postmodern and post-war expresses itself brilliantly, cynically, and unfortunately through the snide, self-consciously pseudo-deconstructing work of the YBA’s.

It was with great surprise, then, that I finished watching the positive ending of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a recent Swedish release by director Niels Arden Oplev redolent with one of the greatest postmodern/post-WWII obsessions of all: the quest to forget our own history. In the film, Mikael Blomkvist, a muckraking Swedish journalist framed and convicted for libel, agrees to help Henrik Vanger, a kindly old man and the retired head of the powerful Vanger business conglomerate, to solve the 40-year old disappearance of his great-niece. Meanwhile, Lisbeth Salander, a mentally unbalanced and fiercely talented young hacker-for-hire, joins forces with Blomkvist after hacking his computer and gaining an interest in cracking his case.

What follows is, true to Scandinavian style and the epynonymous book’s original Swedish title (“Män som hatar kvinnor” – “Men Who Hate Women”), a gripping detective story mixed with harrowing moments of extreme sexual violence. As the film explores the backgrounds of each character, rape not only becomes an active agent but also gets bound up with history and the state. Salander fights to escape her sadistic treatment at the hands of her abusive government-assigned case worker, against whom she has no recourse but to rape in turn. Yet we learn that Salander’s own mother was abused by her husband with the implication that Salander had burned her father to death. We further discover that Vanger’s great-niece wasn’t killed, but rather she had run away to escape her father’s and her uncle’s constant sexual abuse. Finally, as Blomkvist’s investigation delves into the Vanger family’s past, Henrik Vanger’s neo-Nazi brothers reveal their sadistic pleasure in murdering Jewish women as a sexual thrill, drawing close parallels with the perverse erotic power dynamic so often found between Nazis and their “Jewess” prisoners. Such a dynamic accordingly reflects and faithfully exposes the tensions between Western Europe’s wartime crimes and its uneasy claim to reform and penance.

The goal of exposing postwar tensions in the European psyche through the deconstruction of history is old hat and ingrained in all upstanding and properly liberal Western Europeans. What is new, however, is how triumphantly “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” adopts and parades the result, which is not the usual bleak emptiness or ambivalent-at-best withdrawal from history, but rather an emphatic rejection of it altogether. Through the investigation, Blomkvist and Salander develop a sexual relationship that the former tries to turn into a romantic one, but Salander, incapable of romantic relations with another man, fights her feelings, escapes to the Cayman Islands, and becomes rich without any emotional repercussions (indeed, the movie ends on this high note). Blomkvist himself clearly turns his back on his romantic history with a colleague from his magazine, forgoing the older woman for the younger yet perhaps equally storied Salander, and finds one of the film’s rare notes of tranquility and self-recognition in her boyish bosom. Naturally, Salander’s rape of her case worker is a vicarious victory over her abused childhood while the death of Henrik Vanger’s evil brother is the epitome of fallen history. Yet even in two of the film’s reunions, between Vanger and his great-niece and Salander and her estranged mother, history is eschewed again: Vanger accepts his relative, who has grown up through womanhood far away in Australia, unconditionally on her own terms and not those of their family’s terrible past, whereas Salander essentially abandons her irreparably broken mother, who could not overcome her victimhood. In each case, history is dispatched with equal vigor.

The net balance is not a deconstructed pile of rubble, but a positive (in the existential and emotional senses) result that offers a legitimate way forward, which prompts the question: has postmodernism come into its own? Contrast The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, another recent film that explores historical reversal through a band of Jewish-American soldiers and their slaughterhouse revenge on their Nazi tormentors. Despite clear similarities, Tarantino’s film is ultimately fantasy and lacks metaphysics: it is a brave, brutal, and immediate vindication of Jews who were robbed of a fair chance at dignity as interpreted through the historical principle of the equality of violence, as opposed to the quiet, stolid dignity common in Holocaust films and literature. Oplev’s film, on the other hand, is about the way forward, closer in tone to the (dare I say it) wisdom of Southern Gothic literature. I could not help but think of Richard Ford’s wonderful line from The Sportswriter: “All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life. Whose history can ever reveal very much?”

Perhaps one insoluble contradiction remains that neither Ford nor Oplev can fully answer, since while directors and authors can cut a scene they cannot cut our lives short: how can we escape history without it?  Europe would do well to consider this question as it moves forward, especially now as Germany’s “commitment to Europe”, whose presence in the guilt-ridden stage play of postwar European culture is critical, has begun to shift under the burden of the Greek fiscal crisis.  The ruling CDU party’s loss in the bellwether state of North Rhine-Westphalia this past May was largely seen as not only a referendum on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s economic policies, which have favored an unpopular EU-sponsored (read: German-bankrolled) bail out of Greece, but also on Germany’s sense of superior obligation and duty to European democratic unity and to amend her historic injustices.  If the tide is shifting and Western European states do begin to feel like they have paid their dues, then they will implicitly acknowledge at least the principle of history.  After Salander walks off into the brilliant Caribbean sunshine, what happens next?  Will Sweden, Germany, and the rest of the world follow suit, will we remain in our broken state–or, perhaps, will we commit to our history knowing full well that it can’t be fixed and that we, like the sons of Adam, will have to bear our fallen state forever?  That may indeed be the true lesson of postmodern history.Similar Posts:

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© 2010, Ersin Akinci. All rights reserved.