October 19, 2007
Ten Canoes
I finally got around to watching Ten Canoes, the 2006 Australian film shot with Aboriginal actors speaking Ganalbingu (with a English voice-over narrating part of it). It is filmed in Arnhem Land, where it depicts pre-contact Aboriginal society. It involves a goose-hunting trip through the swamps during which a younger brother covetous of his elder brother's youngest wife is told an ancient and tragic story about faithfulness and loyalty in a similar situation. Many of the scenes of the film are recreations of 1930s photos by anthropologist Donald Thomson, one of which - ten men poling canoes through a swamp - was the inspiration for film. I'm not too sure where the tale comes from, although director seems to imply, in response to the white-guy-makes-films-about-Aboriginal-culture criticisms in some interviews, that the actors created or retold it.
It is a charming and beautifully shot film and I enjoyed it very much. It seemed reasonable enough as a fictional depiction of a hunter-gatherer/foraging way of life, and the story is dramatic and engaging.
Some scholarly blog posts from earlier in the year when most people watched it are here:
The Material World
Transient Languages and Cultures
Savage Minds
and see the the IMDB and the (pretty lousy, as of 10/19/07) Wikipedia entries.
It is reminiscent of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, another indigenous language film with a similar theme.
It is available on Netflix.
Posted by johnn at 10:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 05, 2007
Street Sense
Our tax preparer (!), a month ago, said Street Sense in the Kentucky Derby. We spent the first of half of the race smugly happy our hundred dollars stayed in the bank account and the second half disappointedly spending our non-existent $450 winnings in our heads.
Posted by johnn at 08:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Panderers or Morons?
At the risk of mystifying science and confirming stereotypes of a contemptuous elite, I have to say that Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and Tom Tancredo are either shameless panderers to the religious right or just three more garden variety morons. Unless, of course, they've got some brilliant, paradigm-breaking theory of biology up their sleeves.
Posted by johnn at 08:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 13, 2007
Don Imus
This column in the L. A. Times this week was probably the best thing I read on the Don Imus "nappy-headed hos" incident. I don't share much of Constance Rice's admiration for him - I think he's an idiot - but she's right about the racist self-parody that is the hip-hop industry these days. This particular combination of "nappy" and "ho" is undeniably racist, out of anyone's mouth and in any context. Separately, however, they should make us think about the circulation of racial signifiers.
I could be off base here, but I know "nappy" almost exclusively through the literary and theatrical production of black women. I remember seeing on stage a warm, thoughtful monologue called "Nappy Edges" some years ago, for example. It is term of calm and grounded self-affirmation in the documentary A Question of Color. For me, at least, it has none of the historical racist effect of "woolly" or other such adjectives. As a white man, however, I often feel a sense that the highly visible and visually provocative performative genre that is contemporary black female hairstyle is off limits to me, as a white man, for comment or even notice. And it's difficult to imagine a context in which I would feel comfortable saying "nappy," outside of quotation marks, to describe anything but an old sweater!
"Ho," of course, is the stock-in-trade of rapper lyrics. Anyone who has seen the wonderful and disturbing history of images of blacks in American popular culture presented in Marlon Riggs' Ethnic Notions can't help but see the gangster rapper as just the latest awful stereotype linked to the deepest fears and anxieties in the American psyche.
It's conceivable that Imus was trying to pay a backhanded complement to an intimidating basketball team through an unfortunate amalgam of black feminist identity play and the images that black hip-hip artists sell to the public as a representation of African-American culture. Out of his mouth, probably not, and I'm not sorry to see him off the air, but analyzed as an intertextual moment in a complex web of racism, identity, and capitalism, Imus' sin is not so simple to understand and judge.
Posted by johnn at 10:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 05, 2007
The Dancer Upstairs
In finally got around to seeing this 2002 film, John Malkovich's directorial debut. As luck would have it, two days later anthropologist Orin Starn came to Pomona College for a talk about the history of the Shining Path and Peru's subsequent attempts to deal (or not, as Starn says) with the aftermath of the bloody 1980s. I guess I admired the acting and the cinematography and so forth along with everybody else, but three issues made this a hard film for me to enjoy.
The first is that Malkovich (and, I guess, Nicholas Shakespeare, the writer on whose novel and screenplay this film was based) has done the typical Hollywood thing and reduced an enormously complex social revolution to a kind of Latin American NYPD Blue episode, with the honest cop and the corrupt Army trying to take over the case and the romance and family drama that spills over into the crime scene, in this case the last safe house of Guzman qua Gonzalo cum "Ezequiel." Blech. I mean, I know reduction has to take place, but this was ridiculous.
Second, maybe Malkovich doesn't speak good enough Spanish to have done it differently, but I hate the somewhat outdated conventional way of depicting speakers of foreign language by having them speak accented English. This makes them sound foreign in their own country and less than fully articulate. Film it in Spanish and subtitle it. For the audience that would watch this film, subtitles would be just fine.
Finally, and most importantly, he labels the setting "Latin America" and thinly disguises Peru's Sendero Luminoso guerilla war, all the while including so many specific details about Lima, the Peruvian Andes, Sendero and Guzman that the attempt at generification was laughable. If you're go that close to historical fiction, just go all the way. In his talk, Starn reminded me of even more specific details of the Sendero war that were faithfully but disguisedly represented in the film.
Posted by johnn at 10:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 23, 2006
Olympic coverage not that jingoistic: The Olympics The Nation missed.
Maybe The Nation is becoming a better magazine, because I finally read something in it I vehemently disagreed with: Dave Zirin's "The Olympics We Missed." (Well, aside from Hitchens a lot and Cockburn occasionally.)
I've been blogging on the Games and the coverage on my personal blog almost every night. (I'm a Winter Olympics freak and watch everything I can.) I agree with some of his points, about stupid, made-up events that practically only Americans excel in and the advertising build-up of mediocre American stars, for example. (He could be better informed about his sport history, though: slalom skiing is not a made-up American event; it premiered in Switzerland in 1922.)
The predictable charge of hyper-nationalism and arrogance is rather off the mark, at least this year. For one thing, NBC has shown practically no medal ceremonies, one common source of jingoistic skew. Secondly, they make almost no mention of the "medals race," the stupid, country-by-country tally that I ignore in the paper ever morning. They do always mention the Americans athletes in any event no matter how far down in the pack, but they have given expansive coverage, both in the events themselves and the schmaltzy back stories, to foreign athletes. (And since so many promising Americans are tanking, they don't have much choice, I suppose.) They even covered events in which Americans rarely figure, cross country skiing, for example. The human interest coverage seems to focus on underdogs, and not too many of these are American! I know that many countries, Canada, for instance, have much more extensive coverage, but I really didn't think NBC was so bad this year.
As for his other main complaint, the tape delay, what the hell? I couldn't take off work to watch in the morning and midday, and a lot of other folks couldn't either. I just tune out results news during the day and enjoy the suspense and drama of the carefully non-spoiling evening coverage. Ok, so Koreans are getting up at 3 a.m. or whatever to watch their athletes live. Only super-rabid nationalism could make people do that.
Posted by johnn at 08:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 29, 2006
An Affair of Love
Although my patience with slow, character-driven French films is diminishing, I liked this 1999 film all right. It wasn't particularly sexy, despite the subject: a six-month "pornographic" affair carried on and then narrated to an unseen interviewer by two characters whose names are never revealed to us or to each other. I was in mild suspense about the particular unorthodox act they carried out. The real subject of the film is error: of memory, of emotion, of communication.
The question I was left with was about personal narrative. The two preface their lovemaking with what is described as easy, natural conversations as they grow to like each other over the months. They also claim that there was an implicit rule not to bring their lives into the conversations. Could one really have such weekly chats about anything without growing difficulty in keeping out the rest of one's life, one's background and history? So much of what I know, believe, think, is linked to my life in such a way that abstracting it in a series of conversations like these would become artificial, stilted, and, ultimately impossible, I think. Obviously thought is social, but there are moments when we perceive it or represent as individual. An intense interpersonal relationship could not be such a setting, it seems to me, without excruciating work.
Posted by johnn at 08:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 05, 2005
Economic rationality
I went online tonight to buy a tickets for the Newport Folk Festival this weekend. The base price for Saturday is $48 advance purchase, $53 at the gate. Fine. Except that if I buy in advance they add a $6.33 online processing fee to my purchase. This means that actually the advance price is more, to me, than a day-of ticket. Also, I assume, the Festival itself gets my extra $5 if I buy from them as opposed to a middleman in the online purchase. Which means they've hired some expensive e-commerce service to do something a fourteen-year-old could set up on their very own website with proceeds going straight to their bank account. In terms of work, by purchasing online -- filling in all the boxes, redoing it if I miss a box or make a mistake, entering my credit card number for automatic processing: I've done most of the work for them, yet I'm being charged extra. Furthermore, if I choose to print the ticket out, somewhat more convenient for me because I don't have to stand in line at will call, but definitely much more convenient and cheaper for them because they don't have to do anything, I get charged even more! I've paid for the paper, the ink, the wear-and-tear on the printer, and the labor to produce and transmit a ticket. Yet they charge me $1.25 more for this option. The most expensive technique for them -- my calling them on the phone, making some person do the work of recording the information and putting through the credit card authorization, producing a ticket, and manually organizing it so they can find it and hand it to me when I show up at the gate -- is the cheapest option for me, whereas the cheapest method for them costs me the most money.
Plus, buying online I get lots of long looks the ubiquitous DunkinDonut Newport logo, which should make that sugar-daddy sponsor happy:
So guess what: I'm going to show up tomorrow without a ticket, and maybe I'll change my mind at the last minute and go do something else instead.
Someone just remind me: How does capitalism work again? And why is math education so poor in this country? Oh...
Posted by johnn at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2005
Star Wars, Damn!
Anthony Lane took apart Star Wars: Episode III in the current (May 23) New Yorker in his ineffable way (I regularly use his hilarious review of Jurassic Park III in writing classes). I was happily not going to see it, as I happily didn't see II, after hating I. I also -- from the 2005 and not 1977 perspective, of course -- hate all the Star Wars movies, except The Empire Strikes Back, which is dark and operatic, at least against the backdrop of the others. Louis Menand's piece in the Feb. 7 New Yorker about how the blockbuster is killing Hollywood (although, as he argues, something has always been killing Hollywood, which keeps on living anyway) perfectly sets up this last one. ("I can't watch anymore," says Lane, quoting Obi-Wan).
But now I learn in the newspaper of record that the wacko right is reading the film as an unfair attack on Bush and the Iraq War and is boycotting it. Sigh. I guess now I have to see it. Maybe I can just buy a ticket and then sneak in to see something else, before the summer film season has us fully by the throat again.
Posted by johnn at 09:53 AM | Comments (3)
April 15, 2005
World Music on the Net
Jon Pareles has an article in today's New York Times on the growth of minor-label and Internet-only distribution of world music now that major labels are losing interest. He reviews albums from around the world and has links to several sites, some of them "Fair Trade" music download sites:
http://www.descarga.com/db/pages/catalog.html
http://smithsonianglobalsound.org/
This last one, an outgrowth of the Smithsonian's music collections, should be especially interesting to anthropologists.
Posted by johnn at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)