May 10, 2008
BOOK REVIEWS FOR MY THESIS
In an attempt to give myself a much needed kick in the pants (how? I don’t know), I decided to engage in the solipsistic exercise of WRITING BLURBS ABOUT MY UNFINISHED THESIS. These reviews suggest that my thesis is trenchant, innovative, groundbreaking, controversial, and “powerfully demonstrates how the linguistic cohabits with the political” – a line stolen from the back of a book that is called “challenging” and “dramatical.” And it suggests that my thesis is, most importantly, finished.
I’ve found that writing these blurbs is a mix between using hyperbole, complicated words, and proving that you are, basically, a crank who hates everything good and did not read the book you are reviewing.
Here goes:
From American Literature:
“Andrew Black’s unconventional reading of THE FEDERALIST PAPERS challenges traditional paradigms of deliberative rhetoric. Black’s effort to uncover an unseen narrative project that combines the discursive with the literary and technical innovations of its day offers a new rubric for those wishing to study the rhetoric of colonial America. In his reconstitution of the Federalist project, Black rehabilitates the founders from readings strictly political or theoretical, and liberates them from pre-defined limits. It is a bold project, undertaken with grace, perspicuity, and humility.”
From Political Theory
“Remarkable that a doctoral thesis both broadens and enlivens discursive debates and allows for a recategorization of familiar terms. What Black does is more remarkable because he does not appear to have set out to do it: a vertical reading where previously only horizontal analyses needed apply. It is shaking the dust off some stodgy old criticism, and reviving a text that should have been brought to life long before. Black’s energy and dedication to this project reminds us that theory doesn’t have to be combined to the abstract, and allows us to rethink the Enlightenment on terms at once organic and uniquely traditional.”
From Philosophy and Rhetoric
“Habermasians everywhere will be up and arms by this infiltration by one of their own. Black recognizes public sphere debates while putting his own unique spin on them – reading the public sphere through its literature rather than the traditional reactionary methodology. In doing so, he has (perhaps unintentionally) inspired a new generation of scholars to reimagine political texts based on orthodoxy rather than hegemony (a move that’s no so much bold as confoundingly original). By resisting linguistic trends and reading a revered text at once within and outside of the terms of its own reverence, Black shows us why the Federalists and their long-ignored papers deserve canonical acclaim and critical focus.”
From Rhetoric Review:
“Black’s new critical take on THE FEDERALIST PAPERS is less a textual analysis than a discursive manifesto and a line drawn in theoretical sands. By arguing across traditions and critical fields, he challenges the Pocockian legacy of theoretical vocabularies and argues for a legacy of civic rhetoric that at once dismisses spheroidal thinking and understands its theoretical legacy and primacy. What makes for an at-times schizophrenic read (it was originally conceived as a Masters thesis) finds Black the critic, reader, and historian making fascinating claims substantiated by his belief in the validity of his project.”
From The New Republic:
“When Black argues that THE FEDERALIST PAPERS must be read by students of literature, he opens up colonial debates to new eyes. An articulate rethinking of age-old deliberation, students of American Literature will benefit from Black’s successful claim for addition to a long-closed anthology, one that paradoxically argues the fictional Publius as the key rhetorician of his time.”
From Law and Literature:
“I didn’t much care for the book (because I didn’t read it), but I did enjoy the author’s picture on the book jacket. Yamahama! What a hunk! Move over Slavov Zizek, you’ve got some competition for ‘Best Looking Cultural Theorist’.”
Posted by Andytown at 08:28 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 08, 2008
INDIANA JONES AND A JOKE OF YOUR CHOICE ABOUT A WHEELCHAIR OR ADULT DIAPERS
All right! All right! For those of you who keep bothering me about my thoughts regarding the upcoming Indiana Jones movie, here it is! Now stop bombarding my email: you made me miss an important message from Zooey Deschanel asking me to run away with her. forever I know you’re all waiting for me to give the time-honored Andytown seal of approval/shame to this project, but in case you can’t tell, I’ve been really busy. Running the most popular blog on the internet is a time-consuming venture, space kids, and recently I’ve been dealing with publishers who all want the rights to any past, present, or future ideas.
Here goes:
The very title INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE suggests finality, and the movie did much to confirm that the Indy movies were a trilogy, nothing more. As such, they did not outlive their welcome, but gave us three superior entertainments thankfully bereft of the tedious mythology of the trilogies of PIRATES, MATRIX, and the STAR WARS prequel. Maybe you were interested in all the post-colonial intrigue of PIRATES, but I just wanted to see Johnny Depp play the guitar solo for "Brown Sugar."
On a side note, the PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN movies should have taken the Indy films, and not the Star Wars films, as their template. (Anyone who thinks that the 2nd and 3rd PIRATES movies are not pretty direct ripoffs of that franchise is in that crucial 4 to 8 year old demographic that George Lucas decided to write for). Instead of getting trapped in a goofy mythology and recurring villains both a) boring and b) kind of boring, why not just have each movie be a series of adventures involving the three “good guys” – Depp, Bloom, Knightley. Not that the result would be one the level of the Indy films, but it would have been a whole lot better than that overblown, headache-inducing storyline that was mainly an excuse for filming Johnny Depp’s Keith Richards imitation.
Making a cogent point as they often do, The AV Club says:
"Expectations are extremely high for a film that reunites the kings of the summer blockbuster, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, with a beloved character. If it sucks, it might be discouraging enough to put audiences off blockbusters forever. It's not like all of Indy's adventures have worked out that well, either. Temple Of Doom continues to fail to improve with the passing of time, and the last time Lucas tried to revive a long-dormant, fervently appreciated film franchise, we all know what happened."
First, I totally disagree that TEMPLE OF DOOM is mediocre. Rather, it's awesome. Indy can't fight the Nazis in every movie, and voo-doo baddies straight out of GUNGA DIN make for some pretty cool adversaries. Of all the three movies, TEMPLE has the most wall-to-wall action and is probably the funniest of the bunch, thanks to an underrated performance by future Speilberg wife Kate Capshaw, who recalls Ava Gardner and Claudette Colbert. Also, it's clearly the darkest of the three, which takes Indy as a "Treasure Hunter" to interesting new places.
But I agree that the fate of the blockbuster is in Indy's rapidly withering hands. Other than the first three STAR WARS, there is not a more revered group of movies than than the Indy films - for us, they gave us the opportunity to watch the brains, brawn, and roguish charisma of a true movie star put in impossible situations where we rooted for him to get out. RAIDERS is Speilberg at his finest: fast, suspenseful, full of a lot of interesting scenery, and possessing all that childlike wonder always associated with him.
And I think America may have a falling out with Speilberg if it fails. If IRON MAN, starring that box-office superstar Robert Downey Jr, can make 100 million bucks in early May, that shows the movie-going public still hasn't satiated their desire to see crap digitally blowing up*. The Blockbuster is safe. Speilberg, on the other hand, has seen diminishing returns recently. No one is clamoring over WAR OF THE WORLDS, and MUNICH was fascinating but flawed. Other than possibly CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, it's been since 1998 and PRIVATE RYAN that Speilberg rocked the popcorn/projector world. And who knows . . . kids who are graduating high school this year were just being born when CRUSADE was hitting theaters. Have they followed these movies as closely as I did when they were coming out?
I hope it is good. I hope it is as good as the first three. But like everyone else, I'm a little skeptical.
* - On this point, the Hater has an interesting point:
Mark Burnett, the show’s producer, said that he thinks the MTV Movie Awards are “the most relevant movie award show in America today.” And who knows more about cultural relevancy than the creator of My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad? Burnett also added:
This show honors the movies that millions of young Americans go to see.”
Unfortunately there’s already an award for that, Mark. It’s called money. Young Americans have already honored those movies with the millions of dollars that they spent to go see them. It’s not as if young people are a reclusive minority whose voice goes largely unheard by the entertainment industry. Who do you think they made Disturbia for? Why else would there be an Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem?
Posted by Andytown at 01:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 06, 2008
DEF LEPPARD HAS A NEW ALBUM
Def Leppard has a new album out. I listened to two tracks. It sounds horrible. This arises in me a number of questions: do they still have the guy with one arm (or something?), are they all still alive, do they desperately need the money?
Apparently, they have been making albums for years. In the years since Guns n' Roses stopped making music, Def Leppard has put out two gold albums and one that went platinum in Canada (which is hilarious). They had a retrospective go gold and an album of glam rock covers. Wicked.
In that transcendentally stupid yet chronically necessary debate, the Lep gives one obvious answer to "Is it better to burn out or fade away?"
It has been twenty-one years since, as an eleven year, I owned the Lep's HYSTERIA and it rocked my world, expanded my horizons, made me like really crappy music. I'd like to listen to HYSTERIA again soon - "Pour Some Sugar On Me" was a pretty rocking song.
Or was it?
Posted by Andytown at 06:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 05, 2008
I LIKE WINE . . . AND CHEESE. SOMETIMES TOGETHER.
Slate has a really interesting article about wine-and-cheese liberals. That the author accuses Obama, and not Hilary, of elitism, seems kind of ridiculous. Obama may be a really rich dude, but Hilary and her husband are loaded.
This type of populist spirit is what got huckleberries like Jimmy Carter elected. The grassroots theory of upbringing is a wonderful fallacy - it assumes that poor people grow up out of the dirt and thus are noble savages in their thinking. Just as Matlock used his home-town ways rather than his big-city lawyerin', these rubes and donikers who grewed up on the farm just have a better idea of life than you big city folks. Populism always finds itself as the rich man championing the working man for some political purpose, and therefore I never trust it. Pandering to the poor is a time-honored tradition because there are always more poor than rich, and the nice thing about an egalitarian system is that, as Atticus said, the vote of the lowest farmer counts just as much as Rockefeller.
I don't think its fair to accuse Hillary of being a rich girl, but it is ironic that a earthiness, the lack of which is a severe strike against her, is the same thing that good her husband elected. I think Obama's polish works against him: he's smoother than the spot on my car where I spilled a whole bottle of turtle wax. Do either of them really care about the poor? Beyond a political platform and a vote-grabbing strategy? Who knows. That platform/strategy will get legislation passed, and often the wrong kind.
But the article is interesting because of Orwell's characteristic leftist attack of the left. In ANIMAL FARM and 1984, he lays into Bourgeois culture with, respectively, broad and sophisticated allegory. But this passage from THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER is pretty effective:
"As with the Christian religion," he writes, "the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." Then he wheels out the heavy rhetorical artillery. The typical socialist, according to Orwell, "is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England."
Its a pretty prescient attack on the LA fundraiser crowd. And it made me think of this recently endorsement of Obama by Tom Hanks:
Hanks, who has always seemed like a pretty great guy, disparages his status as a member of the "radical chic." He makes fun of the celebrity endorsement at the same time as he gives it. This self-effacing move will be effective, no doubt, but it only hints at the problem at the core: the people who support socialistic welfare programs are the ones whose income can suffer its blows. At the end of the day, liberalism is hip, and conservatism isn't, and attacking the hipness is a way of devaluing the altruism.
This may not make any sense but I'm going to publish it anyway.
Posted by Andytown at 06:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 04, 2008
I AM REALLY EXCITED ABOUT . . .
David Mamet's new film REDBELT
Just to play catch-up, Mamet is one the top living playwrights. He wrote GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, one of the best pieces of literature produced in the last 30 years. As a filmmaker, he attracts a niche market, and I am part of that niche. He makes movies about Con Artists (HEIST, THE SPANISH PRISONER, the transcendent HOUSE OF GAMES), Cops (HOMICIDE, SPARTAN) and he makes weird curios like THE WINSLOW BOY and STATE AND MAIN. Nobody does Dialogue like Mamet. A typical Mamet example is:
"That's the thing. You have to do the thing to do the other thing. That's why the thing is ****ing thing!"
"What about the guy from Madrid?"
"What does that have to do with the price of Gold? Huh, will you tell me that?"
REDBELT looks like some pretty typical twisty Mamet turf. Which is gravy for me. And it has the guy from INSIDE MAN and AMERICAN GANGSTER whose name I can't spell, but who is shaping up to be a big star. And the typical Mamet players: Joe Mantegna, Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon, Ricky Jay.
Hope it comes to Memphis soon.
Posted by Andytown at 09:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 03, 2008
5 THOUGHTS
FIVE THOUGHTS
1. The Raconteurs are the new Big Star. HANDS is the best song Alex Chilton never sang, but should have. It’s got all the rising beats, love of pop music, love of women, that the best songs off NO. 1 RECORD have. Their first album, the awesometastic BROKEN BOY SOLDIERS, is at once a relic of the 70s and an iconoclastic mission statement. Their new album, the terrific CONSOLERS OF THE LONELY, continues in the tradition. The Big Star legacy, however, will probably never happen as long as Jack White has another band and the group that I like better is just a glorified side-project / supergroup. But this song rules:
2. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is my favorite actor. The three movies he put out in the tail end of 2007 are uneven, yet imbued by his impeccable, low-key brilliance. CHARLIE WILSONS WAR, while repugnant in its politics, Julia Roberts-ness, and revisionist history, offers Hoffman the opportunity to have a goofy haircut and be smarter than everyone else in the room. He and Tom Hanks are a jovial Mutt and Jeff combo – the former always has a runny nose and speaks under his breath, while the latter seems to be existing in some terminally imaginary press-conference. If nothing else, Hoffman’s performance is the best manufacturer of one-liners in recent memory.
BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOUR DEAD offers Hoffman the lead in something he normally plays second fiddle in; despite a sturdy cast of standouts like Ethan Hawke (who is terrible), Marisa Tomei, and Albert Finney, Hoffman’s lead characterization is the only reason to see this naturalistic rain-cloud of a story. Everyone is either miserable or about to be, and Hoffman at least has the good sense to be deserving of his fate. His early scenes with Hawke remind me of the moment in WAYNES WORLD 2 when Wayne asks that a bit actor can be replaced with a better actor, and Charlton Heston shows up – that Hoffman owns this movie is mainly because Sidney Lumet seems to be working with his periodic attempt at gravitas and tragedy that doesn’t suit his workmanlike style very much, and Hoffman goes for something much more earthy, less respectable, more bulked-up.
THE SAVAGES, the best of the bunch, tag-teams him with equally marvelous Laura Linney. In a game of “who can undermine the others façade of happiness,” Hoffman wins, only because he has least embodied his dying, senile father’s sense of enduring misery. A failed intellect, teacher, lover, son, brother, and care-giver, Hoffman’s Jon nonetheless maintains a certain dignity and arrogance that unravels in each scene only to be rebuilt again. When Hoffman talks about the grim facts of death, it’s a recognition of his own mortality and meaningless, and it both contrasts and makes necessary the false cheery optimism of his sister. Both Hoffman and Linney create characters who are lived-in, probably even moreso than their script deserves, but paradoxically, Hoffman is a joy every second that he’s on screen, even though he’s not.
3. Here’s an interesting article from The New York Review of Books about the Wikipedia ™.
As an occasional half-assed perpetuator of Wikifraud, my take is that the writer seems to waver between the Wiki being too high-brow and too low-brow. But isn’t that an adequate level of “brow” for something that can be edited by anybody who has access to the internet?
4. Chuck Klosterman has a typically interesting and preposterous analysis of the Hannah Montana phenomenon. Though several of my students like her, I knew nothing about her until I read this piece.
What’s the deal with this rumor I keep hearing about Hannah Montana being romantically linked with Morgan Freeman?
5. Here are a few arbitrary, unexplained ratings for things I’ve experienced recently:
A free trip to Graceland with an open bar and lots of Elvis swag: A+
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY: C
SOUTHLAND TALES (the 20 minutes I watched): F
SWEENEY TODD: D
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (again): A
THE MIST, book: A
THE MIST, movie: C-
AMERICAN GANGSTER: D
Van Morrison, KEEP IT SIMPLE: B
Elf Power, IN A CAVE: B
Portishead, THIRD: C+
The Headlights, SOME RACING, SOME STOPPING: A
The last two episodes of LOST: A+
CHRIST THE TIGER, by Thomas Howard: A-
British Sea Power, live, at the Hi-Tone: B+
Prince's cover of CREEP, which is no longer available online: A
Posted by Andytown at 12:49 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack