Fermenting Masses

As a novice bartender, I was taught to sell the more expensive wines and spirits by telling their story, making them “taste better” by giving the customer a sense of grander appropriation. For example, “at dawn the vines are sung to by midgets; the grapes are not barbarically crushed, but verbally coaxed into liberating their juices; the juice is then not just fed with the gentility of gravity flow, but anyone that makes eye contact with it is fired.” I have been selling a number of Niagara's Organized Crime wines in my restaurant for some time now, so I asked myself, “what story should I be telling”?

Waiting in the 7am line on the bus platform, a young teen paced in front of me in broad orbit, a thin layer of skin over an ocean of indignation concerning whatever condemned him to this part of Ontario. Grimsby, one of the countless dust-mites on the back of the docile meadow-roaming beast that is Canada. The town is quaint in that polished way that is almost offensive. People say “hello” in department stores and they don’t even work there. Truckers driving down a main street suddenly snap and begin honking wildly to defibrillate the sleepy flanks of manicured Victorian homes and oubliettes of planned residential areas with winey names.¹ The huge spine of verdant rock looms over everyone like a dormant volcano, keeping the village humble, stationary, afraid to upset the giant.

If you continued tracing a circle from the 725km arc that is the Niagara Escarpment you can draw the perimeter of a giant dent in the earth that was a tropical sea about half a billion years ago. In the center bubbled the state of Michigan, pickling in saltwater for aeons. Today, the ridge is basically an artifact shoreline turned agricultural manna, an ever-giving waterslide of mineral-rich erosion into a bed of geologically-milled aquatic fossils. As I passed Hamilton, the shelf peered on in dismay at what looks like a graveyard of crashed starships in a tormented heap, casualties of some huge celestial battle. The only materials these industrial dragons seemed to produce were black piles of concentrated night terrors and smoke specially designed to remain permanently suspended in the air like middle fingers to the ecosphere.

Arriving in Grimbsy I took the much-needed 9km walk to the Beamsville Bench, where along the way I saw some of the most uncannily proud willow trees bursting like geyser popsicles from the buzzcut grounds of parks. They were like a sudden resurrection of the ancient sea through its crusty new cage. Of course, considering it would once again swallow the cities of Hamilton, Rochester, Detroit and other prodigal stains, the “sea” would probably become more of a viscous grey-brown swamp of industrial waste. There is one good reason in all of Southern Ontario that we are no longer submerged in oceanic brine and it revealed itself at the end of my walk where Niagara wine country began.

It’s hardly the serene experience one would expect. With “bangers” (basically blank artillery shells) detonating with regular frequency to scare away birds, it was as though a war for Ontario’s viticultural hold was going on just over the escarpment. I wondered if the sound distressed the fruit. Foolish yes, but it’s easy to consider winemaking a delicate process that cannot be messed with. The vineyards look like a horticultural old folks home. Corridors of boney old vines drag around their pendulous grape bunches like IV's, hunched onto their trellises, too spindly to stand on their own. The fruiting zones are covered in wire mesh to protect them from birds, primarily the ravenous starling, which eats multiples of its body weight daily. If they puncture just one grape, a cavity of rot spreads throughout the entire bunch. The freshly-emptied-dumpster tang of decomposition is constantly wafting up. Everything in the Niagara region says “be careful.” The wineries' operational buildings are planned-to-be-bland, demonstrating that same stucco-and-grey-brick frigidity of Grimsby's housing crops, just estate-sized.

One exception to this is the Organized Crime winery, which makes no attempt at polish. The first person I encountered their was Christina, the clerk at their tasting room/retail store, which was visually humble in a way that wasn’t even trying to be. Outside was a house-sized building held together with siding. Inside was basically my grandmother's living room. Christina spoke with that kind of aenemic honesty that could only be complimented by the lash of her Eastern European accent.

“Buy it now, or buy it on eBay in 6 months for twice as much.” And she would be right.

To involve me in the next harvest she had put me through to a pleasant, accommodating man who seemed happy to have me on board. Little did I know that this was Andre Lipinski, the winemaker himself, and probably the most prolific in the eastern lobe of the country. Spending his days driving between projects – also the winemaker for Foreign Affair, a consultant for a number of others², and a frequent aid in processing crops for wineries without the appropriate equipment³ – he has acquired the nickname “the travelling winemaker,” an oenological catalyst bouncing around the country. The awards he has won over the years, just in sheer quantity, are staggering and he hired me, an anonymous pair of hands, directly. Niagara viticulture is nothing if not accessible.

One look at a Niagara wine label and you can get a sense of that accessibility, a light-heartedness that betrays none of its cold caution. The labels like to mock the solemnity, exaltation and rigid production laws that have for centuries defined the Old World of winemaking. At first glance Lipinski’s wineries seem equally as playful and quirky, complete with the usual clever wordplay⁴. The story of Organized Crime is told on a sequence of panels, one per bottling: “Sometime in the early-to-mid 1900’s, there were two quarreling Mennonite congregations, who disagreed about the acquisition of a pipe organ, which led to one congregation breaking into the other church, stealing the organ and then tossing it down an embankment.” A silly little nugget of Niagara micro-history or a metaphor for the binds of traditional winemaking mores?

But the New World creates its own norms and restrictions too. Being defiantly fresh and fruity and cheerful is sometimes an inescapable confine of Niagara winemaking. So in 2003, Lipinski made a Riesling Reserve for Legends Estate Winery that tasted so Old World, so noxiously German and so impossibly beyond the Niagara extraction, it was as though someone temporarily grafted a slab of the Rheingau onto the escarpment. With the Foreign Affair Winery, he takes this new-to-old-and-consequently-back-to-new-again approach even further, forming a manifold of insubordination: The Appassimento method of drying the grapes out before fermentation, which tempers a wine with diabolical levels of concentration that has only ever – not “traditionally” or “generally,” literally ever – been executed with the most hallowed of Venetian reds. Lipinsky does it with 2 red and 3 different white (white!) varietals, inciting backlash and whispers of “now he’s just being different for the sake of it” from Niagara’s old guard.

Are they even that, though? Wise veterans or the small, cautious spirits of what’s really still a new guard with an adolescent inferiority complex? And why scoff at ambition in a country that is already on its way to making world class cool climate wine? Not only great whites, but fantastic Pinot Noirs and Cabernet Francs. Of course when one thinks of truly Stanley Kubrick levels of standalone Cabernet Franc, what might come to mind is the mighty Quintarelli Alzero, which was hitherto the only Appassimento-style red attempted besides Amarone. Lipinski, leaping the chasm, decided he could make one too. Commanding an unspeakable $110 for it, it has etched itself into multiple wine lists, including Canoe, the top-rated restaurant in Toronto. And his reputation continues to stab northerly. Lipinski’s portfolios are the talk of all those effortlessly cool post-Bistros of Toronto’s west end, along with many of the upper-brow fine-dineries that have finally conceded to recognize their own backyard on their wine list and figure they should at least make it count.

I wondered if it’s really true that labor-intensive things actually taste better. I wondered if I’d just be fooling myself like all the other sadistic gourmands out there if I actually let the wines make a believer out of me. As I swirled the glass of slave-driven juice I tried not to think of the grapes and their 100-day sentence in a wind dungeon, engines constantly blasting the moisture out of the air, starving them to raisins. They pray for mold to take them, but the conditions are too arrid for any trophic life. I try not to think of that agonizing couple drops of nectar squeezed from every humiliated bauble of fruit. But as the first honeyed currents of Foreign Affair’s Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling and Chardonnay rolled over my tongue, the flavors suspended me in such hanging contemplation that I wondered where a willow tree was when I needed one. Already hauntingly complex, they’ve hardly even aged yet. This is serious wine, a brutally delicious liquid Frankenstein. It becomes apparent that the caution of Niagara winemakers is that same species of fear that paralyzes the possibilities of brilliant audacity in every other field.

For Lipinsky, the labor, the process, is all in service of something bigger. That is the story of his wines: “you’re about to taste something that no one has attempted before.” Is it pretentious or exactly the opposite in a field where bold moves are just not worth the risk? As I think back to Organized Crime, I can’t help but see the threads of a modernist romanticism. It’s new world without the innocence, old world without the narrowness. A rebel that no one asked for, defying an oppressive force that everyone thinks is just a couple playground rules to ensure safety. ORGAN-ized Crime: making music when everyone was enjoying the quiet.

Footnotes:

1. The subdivision “Vineyard Valley” can be entered through the streets Cabernet Drive and Chardonnay Place.

2. Including Turkey Point, which pulls us 100km outside of wine-country-proper and into Ontario’s tobacco belt. where farmers are pulling their crops and replacing them with a more romantic vice.

3. Including wineries that haven’t even been constructed yet; they just have grapes and the skeleton of a building

4. See Daniel Lenko’s well-received release of Chardongay to raise money for AIDS as well as John Howard’s Megalomaniac line (SonOfABitch Pinot Noir, Narcissist [spelled backwards on the bottle] Riesling, MyWay Chardonnay, etc), a self-effacing jab at the archetype of egotistical wine virtuosos.

PILLOW FIGHT ENDS IN CHAOS! COUNTLESS DEAD AS BLOODSOAKED FEATHERS LINE THE PAVEMENT OF DUNDAS SQUARE!

Was anyone else hoping to read that in Sunday's headlines? There must be a certain neurochemical make-up of people that compulsively organize "events" regardless of their value - and a certain make-up of those that root for them to fail (i.e. me). Maybe I'm a Schadenfreude junkie or maybe Toronto's playdates bent on "urban bliss" are starting to siphon my own. Obviously my reticence to accept an expressly anti-cynicism movement spearheaded by two U of T students who really like the colour pink is going to seem a little, y'know, cynical. That's, uh, because I am. I mean c'mon, who wants to witness other people have fun for no good reason, except maybe those pseudo-spiritual happiness chasers the world over who continually champion these events. Well, mainly in the notoriously pop-psych- and community-health-drenched United States, the only country in the world that considers happiness something we'll one day be able to isolate, grow in a petri dish, and sell as an energy drink.

But the US still produces witty, satirical, perverse, and just generally confrontational urban playground happenings whereas Toronto's remain friendly, earnest and...well...cute. And ecstatic, with Newmindspace, the organizers of said pillow-fights-and-other-whimsy, splashing their website with photos of their events that look like a New Years celebration in the biblical heaven. This "fun!" and social aspect of such groups represents a new trend in mob activity that creates a stark contrast with historical "groups" like the Cacophany Society (still, after 23 years, active today) who were expressly anti-social, so much so that they eschewed the very notion of cohesion. Operating as individualistic coagulations of mischief, they sought not to enjoy their city, but to disrupt it and, potentially, dismantle the whole urban system. It seems, unfortunately, that after the presence these urban mischief (anti)-entities have established in North American cities (and popular culture in general e.g. Fight Club's Project Mayhem), there is an assumption that if any activity, regardless of its inanity, is done on a large scale, it's worthwhile, even epiphanical (quoting Jenny Holzer in Newmindspace's "documentary", which I will call a public service announcement: "the most profound things are inexpressible"). And one would think, given the freedom to develop ones own sense of play within the urban sphere, today's softer, cuddlier groups would at least go beyond scavenger hunts, capture the flag and other teacher-sanctioned frollicks of our youth. After all, this is fun you don't need an adult's permission for, as one of the many liberating aspects of urban play is the freedom from any need for licenses or other bureaucratic nods to execute something. So in kind with our generation's loss of a taste for revolution, today's demonstrations not only lack any spirit of progress, but have resolved to declare the opposite: a regress into childhood frivolity.

That's not to say there haven't been any attempts to mobilize an ideology. Kevin Bracken himself has stated that people's attraction to his Newmindspace activities are rooted in an "underlying frustration with consumer culture," articulating the impulses of these groups to enjoy themselves outside of what's being provided by the corporate octopi. However, he should be careful, since things like discourse can "[suck] all the fun right out of it." This coming from Brian Bernbaum of SFWeekly, who is not only a supporter of urban playground events, but a resident of San Francisco - the home of the Cacophany Society. San Francisco, a city with probably the most colourful legacy of provocative, ideologically-driven urban mischief events in recent history. Ranging from the incendiary to the whimsical, they're all tied to rhetoric on culture jamming, reclamations of public space, challenges to the deadening routines of urban life, etc. Something as simple as a large group publicly freezing in place (a very popular activity, executed all over the United States), can deftly contradict a city's obsession with motion.

Of course, it's easy to wax righteous any time something outrageous is going on. One blog calls the events a reclamation of the city from “the endless creep of advertising”. Okay, but what is the urban playground, but an internal fury of advertising. In fact, the vitally spontaneous nature of these events depends on the use of instantaneous communication (namely mobile internet and texting) to parse out the times and locations of events on the fly. Elaborate schemes (found particularly in an American brand of play centered around of messing with the public's heads) can be coordinated through the synchronization of phone clocks, coupled with the broadcast of silent commands, creating events that sometimes even comically challenge the technology itself (see: the Starbucks simultaneous cell phone conversation). Of course, continuing to entertain ideas of being involved in some sort of "reclamation" is incomplete and hypocritical. These groups are still not using their technological assets to their full revolutionary potential. In the Philippines, China and North Korea mobile communication is used to organize protests. Here, it's being used to not wear pants with a lot of people also not wearing pants. And as far as Toronto's "response to consumer culture" is concerned, it remains completely dependent on its psychological delivery system. After all, what else does most urban play appeal to than the basest of human desires? In doing nothing more than finding different mediums to aim at the early mongoloid parts of the brain, Newmindspace et al is otherwise indistinguishable from the advertising industry. They just don't want to make money...not yet.

Unlike our Asian counterparts, having a "reason" for these elaborate, perception-altering spectacles is too heavy. If Bracken wants to continue to appeal to today's delirious masses, he might want to stick to his other soundbyte: "Free fun in an age where entertainment costs you." And since most entertainment-driven mediums are designed for spectatorship purposes only (movies, sports, video games), the real pricetag is a spiritual one. It seems that the hunger to return to the idyllic days of childhood springs from a back-to-basics spirit of re-appropriating "fun" as something actually immersive, before we were swallowed by the static pleasures of the screen (if there was ever such a time for some of us). If only NMS commitment to this concept was steady. Contradictorily, their New York mass-bubble-blowing hosted a kitschy gameboy-themed after-party complete with a cover charge, suggesting not only that not even our city's cheerleaders of puritanical bliss can resist merchandising, but that their ideology has not been sanitized of media-zombie paraphernalia. And also, perhaps, that it's not about "purity" or "innocence," but youth itself, a fetish so pervasive, so easily tickled, that it guarantees NMS attendance in the 25-to-old range. And, just like moms shopping at the same stores as their daughters, this can be seen as yet another defensive reaction to the spreading generation gaps and telescopic pace of style culture. Each generation is having a harder and harder time understanding the previous one so why not close the gap by doing our youngest functioning children are doing (children are, after all, the most faithful to traditions).

The group's PSA kicks off with a quote from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world." Kids...I thought you liked playing nice. You see, using the words of a great thinker who fueled the women's liberation movement and sexual revolution of the 1960's to inflate what is a veritable revolution of innocence is enough irony to sink an oceanliner. However, watching the rest of their video, I couldn't accuse them of not being clever. For example they used chalk, plaster of paris and tempera paint to cover queen street with hearts, which are impermanent enough to not be considered vandalism by the city's bylaws. Stamping love on an unwillingly moody environment and getting away with it: it's kind of funny, in a dialectical way. You can't help, but enjoy people's reactions: "I think Toronto's a better place because people are doing crazy, but really quite nice things." It's provocation without the slightest hint of malice. It's art that's pure of heart.

Perhaps too pure? The social politics of their events are a tough nut. They obviously preach inclusivity - come one, come all, engage in your...no, OUR city! - but since the people they attract, says Bracken are "like us", anyone not young, hip and fanciful might get their square asses stuck while spiralling down the urban playground's slides. Lori Kufner (the other half of NMS) concedes that people who use the city functionally (she calls them "business people"; I call them "most people") are more likely to hear about their events in the media or "from their kids." Really? Or how about as they push through the clots street nymphs as they lumber to adultland? People with driven, recession-fueled professional lives are inevitably going to be ostracized from people who have really nothing better to do in their city. To NMS's credit, the pillow fight seemed to expand their market to another type of bourgeoisie by reaching out to kids, which consequently drew a demographic of bored middle class families.

Further evolution of this movement is going to be rapid, care of, naturally, communication technology. The Urban Prankster Network is a veritable mischief laboratory; and they're already merchandising with a DVD and soon-to-be book available for purchase. People post their happenings, i.e. "No pants day, Sao Paolo, Brazil, be there!." Others float ideas, many of which don't get many takers (i.e. "outdoor library!...anyone?...anyone?...") People are already getting a taste for novelty and want to have their stamp on the next new idea. People are becoming very creatively-driven in a whole new medium of expression. And, fittingly, some cities are even making it all into a a game, a competition with marked progress of "our willingness to interact with the city". Although San Francisco just loves being the first, I wonder if the people at SFZero even thought to ask if the activities they award points to are even progressive.

We remain a country waiting for something meaningful to do. All these pillow fights and "complaints choirs" are just a harmless means of catharsis, practice for when it's time to actually make splash. Of course, when everyone finally gets the "storm parliament hill!" message they'll probably come dressed as Che Guevara armed with squirt guns thinking it's some kind of revolution-themed party. I couldn't imagine it any other way. We're a people that create memories for the sake of memories, forming mobs mainly intended to look exciting in pictures (every urban play network implores their members "take pictures!") - constituents of one big urban scrapbook. The question remains: do we really need an adversarial target for our public displays of affectation to count? Do these activities need a vision of a better world, or are they themselves that vision? Perhaps I'm over-analyzing things (wait... no, fuck that) and maybe it's just not so bad to have someone peel back the canopy of the urban jungle and let the sun shine in.

Baseball: A Review

"People pay to see others believe in themselves...on stage in the midst of rock and roll, many things can happen and anything can happen, whether people come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment," Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth (1983)

"People pay to sit around while watching other people sit around as well as, occasionally, stand around." Stefan Ravalli on Baseball (2009)

Though confined to many "so-not-punk!" rules, many professional sports can generate the same ecstatic wonder as rock and roll. Yet it's difficult to muster the same enthusiasm for a sport that can be played while chewing masseter-contorting amounts of carcinogens (that, to boot, relax the nerves; and if both hands weren't occasionally needed, the other would doubtlessly be holding a beer). As entertainment, suspense is its major stock in trade, which I suppose will inevitably burble out of an environment where nothing is really happening in the first place.

Admittedly, baseball requires no shortage of skill to be excellent, but so does lawn bowling...and darts...and staring competitions. The question is really how awe-inspiring the required physical prowess looks (see: basketball). The dexterity needed to hit a fastball no less the reflexes to rein in some truthful contact is doubtlessly impressive...but also invisible to the viewer. The only compelling dimensions are its flashes of instantaneous scale: speed (pitching) and distance (hitting). Particularly distance. The most famous players usually have the most home runs. That's because the sport would be unwatchable to anyone but die-hard fans without the promise of an "ultimate" achievement of said scale. That's why cricket is worthless to this country. There are no "goal posts" or "fences" demarcating the herculean achievement that stimulates our North American "jackpot" mentality - just smooth gradients of success, incrementally, "boringly" tallied.

Another thing that makes baseball deliciously American is its team's unique system of group individualism. With only fleeting moments of teamwork, building a team is not based on formulating the right dynamic of talents, but just getting as many good players in each position as possible. No one really works together, they just hope that when it's their turn, they don't fuck it up, which unlike virtually every other team sport, leaves only the cold language of numbers to define one's contribution to the whole (averages, jackpots, successful attempts at thievery, more fucking averages).

And it's funny how the pace of the game hasn't changed much, but its players are in increasingly in better shape. How much excitement can a professional athlete get from a sport whose training is more grueling than the game itself? It lends so much more to the concept of baseball as a "pastime" when all one can think of is how foolishly it's been invested; such physical hardship in preparation for a sport that demands almost no real exertion of it. Kind of like getting a phD in English only to work at a library. (Or an honours degree in film only to work at a bar...oh shit).

So a tip of the cap (people don't actually still wear those, do they? Like "fashionably" I mean) to all those in attendance of the home opener today. May the first trickle of statistics quench your thirst for some meaningful dimension of the game. May it fill the riverbed that is otherwise barren of any visual pleasure. May tombs of statistics fill the archives of your hungry mind, flooding out whatever the fuck that Dostoevsky guy was talking about. May you feel comfortable paying to watch your heroes believe in themselves. And don't worry, they're accomplishing no small feat out there on the playing field. After all, what's more stoic than dedicating oneself to something trivial?

Air: A Review

I mean the air you breathe, i.e. the most primary ecological anxiety faced by modern civilization. The sleeziest job I ever had looted this state of fear. I sold air cleaning units to people in their houses (that's right: like vacuum cleaners, but more vague in function). I followed up on direct-marketing leads and, of course, 90% of the people company-poor and itinerarily-wealthy enough to see me were retired. Which was just as well because they were demographically the most vulnerable to my dark preachings. I had a book of scary numbers reporting that apparently what we thought to be a never-ending supply of the elderly is now shriveling in a randomly patterned and exceedingly unnatural selection process directly related to increasing air volatility. As though any breath of a Torontonian O2 cocktail could be the final respiratory jaw-shot. I had thought myself a demagogue, not needing to worry about hard sales, but controlling the vaccine-recipient-esque line-ups for the product like I was Amnesty fucking International. I assumed all they needed was the thought of their bridge partners, ageless hexagenarians performing daily oxidant holocausts, urine the colour of a forest elf's from the deluge of green foods audibly macerating in their digestive tracts at all times, these people suspending time itself getting the switch pulled during mile two of their daily five mile run. Although healthy and vibrant enough to air-box the grim reaper, no regimen can guard against the most inextricably exposed part of the human body. With more surface area than anything organically imaginable, the lungs are susceptible to even the least concentrated air borne counterpunches, a fist of temporality right in the soloplexis.

I didn't work there long and had expected to quit anyway, unable to bear the ethical dilemmas (y'know, exploiting the sick, the scared, the lonely, the stupid, etc.) any longer. But that's not why I quit: in reality the units weren't selling. Everyday I was proudly refused like someone handing out flyers at Dundas Square. I would say "smoke, guilt free!" and they would laugh deviously. How puzzling...

Maybe I was a bad salesman, maybe the units were a rip-off (they were), but today I think their lack of popularity also has something to do with the raunchy allure of bad air. I think people like the idea that every breath is a brooding puff of some big dispersed cigarette. That's right cigarettes: quick-draw smog treats packed with any industrial chemical the heart could desire (and eventually asphyxiate from). There's something incredibly erotic about lighting a girl's cigarette for her. Yes cigarettes themselves are a well-worn accessory of displaced sensuality, but no phase of this sacred social fire dance bears more erogenous connotations than waving that ceremonial torch inches from a woman's lips, a connection welded by a tongue of pure heat.

She'll often leave with at least a thank you, or perhaps even a compliment since she's finally found an excuse to flirt. I once had a girl say "thanks, guy-with-the-amazing-lips." I scratch your mouth you scratch mine. That's really what's going on isn't it? A transfer of satisfaction. Reaching out to give a gal her fix, even though it's killing her, just this once prioritizing desire over cliches of bodily preservation.

I don't smoke, but I understand. Without a coffee I just can't face the waking world. It's not a problem, it's just something to look forward to every single day. There are no addications, only recurring goals. And, just like eating or the failures of those around you, you can ride out and treasure these slow, marginally destructive visceral itches for a lifetime (one statistically "normal" in length to boot). But breakfast, lunch, dinner and sex just aren't enough anymore. I want more set-pieces in my stage of pleasure principles than just the ones rolling down through the ol' mammalian helix inevitably to me. Fuck your genetic gumball machine. That chew lost its flavor years ago. I'll cultivate my own drives, even if they kill me.

What's so sexy about smoking is exactly what's so unsexy about a health nut. Each monoxidal exhalation obscures our allegedly "indubitable" survival instinct. Plumes of human transcendence swivel their hips skyward as we celebrate our freedom from our bodies and the demands they place on our consciousness, trying like real estate developers to buy out the delicate, freefalling meadows of careless psychic reflection. One of the reasons why smoking is so easily tied to contemplation of one's surroundings; when we deliberately opppose self-preservation we spring in automatic retreat from self-directed thought. Thoughts become outside of oneself just as respiration is no longer an internal life process, but an external phantasm.

Whoever said cigarettes imply some sort of infantile Freudian fixation has it backwards. It's the health nuts that live in fear, still clinging to physical growth, heads buried in the bosom of maternal nourishment. Smokers are in a far more advanced state of development for they suckle on the teat of death - now that's an eye for the future. This a difficult argument to make in the face of our culture's traditional representations of smokers i.e. the ones of cinema are often of the "chain" variety, which manage to wordlessly (aside maybe from *cough*) exude a state of arrested development rather than, as I propose, existential progress. Well, the movies have it half right. You see cigarettes facilitate another very human and very crucial ritualistic excuse: really do we essentially regard ourselves lighting a tobacco product or the engines of an escape hatch from the world - from physical involvement, as well as mental. AKA: "Fuck off I'm having a cigarette." On an eternal smoke break, these keepers of the flame live in suspended animation, their progress inverted to an internal rhythm, their meadows always blowing, the breeze a thick nitrate grey. Their earthly involvement is now spiritual.

And thus, because over 20% of people smoke, our air could not possibly improve through public action. The other 79% don't care, and the ones that do are the disenfranchised shrill that the eternally cool scoff at out of erotically wheezing throats. Smokers have checked out of the life-club and most non-smokers wish they could do the same (without slowly dying) or at least tag one of the many hypothetical cocky statements they have tucked away (for any cocky-approved scenario they might encounter) with some kind of resolute plume of toxins, like the ghost of assertions slapping them a high five i.e. "air is old news...get over it" (puff...cough).

The Watchmen vs. The Women

Disclaimer: this review is considerably less focused on The Watchmen than it is on the vividly unspectacular The Women. I suppose, since everyone's talking about The Watchmen, this choice largely has to do with how contrarian-cool I am.

The Watchmen has been called "controversial," but I argue that in comparison to Diane English's romantic comedy The Women, Alan Moore's vision of civilization and its post-human future is a little been-there-done-that. That's right: The Women is a more ambitious movie. How's that for controversial statements? Let me first say that although The Watchmen is limited as a book/movie of ideas, it's a fantastic character piece. In both the graphic novel and its pretty-fucking-satisfying-to-fans film version, it's poetry in limping motion. They're superhumans that are more like all-too-humans, pockmarked with flaws that get complicated, rather than covered, by their costumes. Reluctantly, often abusively, they take up their hero mantles like specters, able to save lives, but not their own beautifully wounded souls. Although it often comes off as deliberate, excessive, and deliberately excessive, it remains ruthlessly truthful, scathingly triumphant and just generally moving. And, inevitably, a patriarchal text, the few weak female roles eclipsed by dudes who hold all the big political and human naturey cards. Despite that, I raced to see it and it's presence in my life turned out to be exactly the inverse of The Women's which, in its pseudo-conceptual prohibition of any male specimen entering it's hallowed estrogenical frames, seemed to be vying for some kind of monolithic chick flick status. It's creative story is also the opposite of The Watchmen's: it's a boring play very loosely adapted into some painfully dull cinema.

Rewind a few months to my viewing of The Women to which I was, well, a little less eager. Let's just say that my girlfriend at the time somehow managed to unhandcuff me from the toilet and pull the stitches out of my eyelids. By the time the chlorophorm lifted I was in the theater flanked by popcorn and twizzlers (I was so mad, she knows I like glosettes), expecting a useless string of stuff happening that shows how kooky it is to be a lady. The movie turned out to be more than that. It wasn't the fact that it's actually based on a stageplay by Clare Boothe Luce written in 1936 that was "modernized" for the screen, which means, of course, incorporating some courageously bad pantomime of Sex and the City. It wasn't the "razor sharp!!" dialogue or "insight into life and love!!" that made me realize that this movie wasn't just an exploit. It was in the fleeting aerial shots, easily played off as transitional grace notes ("we're in a city, which means the story has a lot of momentum, right!"), that elevated the film's ambitions beyond just an exploit to mythology-in-the-making.

Despite its refusal of a visual male presence, the plot still orbits around their off-camera deeds, which pull the narrative around like dramatic dark matter - cheating, not appreciating their witty, soulful female companions and, occasionally, casting spells of true love that the ladies later poeticize to each other. The Women is not a movie. It is a cybernetic ova with galvanized cell(uloid) walls. It is a divining rod designed by Prada as a summer accessory, stabbing madly through the skyless urban lunacy for a vision of what it means to be a lady. Not just a lady, but one whose womanhood is constantly undergoing the Manhattan field test, the most unforgivingly commercialized scenario of the modern world. It was then that I realized that one of my favorite things about Manhattan is that it's one big vagina. Enter the aerial shots: they focus not on the phallic structural hallmarks of the city's masculine industrial legacy, but the presence of central park and its unruly crevacious presence within an architectural metastasis. Like the aftermath of a terrorist attack from Captain Planet. It is here that Manhattan is rendered vaginal, its spiritual interior being the park, the realm of the film's ingenue who runs its committee. It is here we are afforded a glimpse of the city's mythological heartbeat in which the sentinels of its last bastion of natural history are, crucially, the daughters of Eve.

But it's more than that, as the film then poses a contradiction: why are our women, charged as the guardians of our city's organic atrium, obsessed with the plasticity of shopping and vanity? Well, first submit to the fact central park is also artificial, existing by design and not necessity, maintained not by nature-lovers, but bored upper class socialites. Central Park, therefore, serves as a decent metaphor for postmodern femininity - potentially artificial but an essential earthly anchor to the concrete fever dream that is urban life. Two eras now stand side by side: the old male era of anabolic industry and the new female era of design, commerce and information. Information? Why yes, who after all pushes more knowledge than a gossip queen with a blackberry? The modern urban environment has, in general, acquired a predominantly female temperament: within their information orgy they lay out the tenets of desire, relationships, success, family, etc, all negotiated while they shop, eat and groom - habits the city has gone to great lengths to cater to. They are the gatekeepers and they know who you're fucking.

Fortunately the main characters of The Women are situated as, relatively speaking, "progressively" minded: scoffing at facelifts, rejecting the mass-distribution and/or the puerile hollowing of their fashion products. Though they'll still flip their shit over a handbag. Then again, what's nymphhood without a little frivolity? What's a tribe without fetishes? And what better, more primal, way to pay tribute to their tools of epistemelogical dominance than a lavish womb for their little darling blackberry familiars to rest?

So, yes, The Watchmen more directly addresses the "fate of humanity," but it's battleground is phallic, all nukes and cigars and guns and manufacturing moguls roosted on the scalps of high-rises. The Women proposes something far more revolutionary: a yannic future. Sadly, unlike The Watchmen (which for the most part kicked ass), it's just not a very good movie. The drama and humor resort to "rambunctiousness!" to keep the audience from slipping into a catatonic state of boredom, the character's relationships maintain a stultifying amount of simplicity, as does the rest of the film's (potential) subject matters, letting the layers flake off, leaving only cliches of "true love" to stand on. I think the director got scared. That one flash of our feminine fate and English retreated to the doctrines of classical romcoms for comfort. But why fear a future less masculine? Don't tell me you really are afraid of gentlemen becoming a remember-when. Apparently, if we squeeze out the dudes, women would have nothing to talk about anymore.

Post-script:

I think there's a connection between Manhattan the city and the somewhat androgynous (minus the omnipresent penis, I suppose) Dr. Manhattan character in The Watchmen. Maybe Manhattan, as a city, is a hermaphrodite. It's intergenderal, its two organs competing for the alpha role. Which one will prevail?

Synechdoche, New York Review

Disclaimer: contrary to what seems to be common form, this article contains no exigesis about the use of the word “synecdoche” in the film’s title (or my use of the word “exigesis”). Although that’s what everyone wants to talk about (just like, say, Clinton’s bombing of Monica Lewinski's dress rather than his bombing of various prefectly good countries) it’s just an unusual word, the dictionary’s full of them, so y’know…deal with it.

I assume that, if you’re reading this, you’re somewhat into Charlie Kaufman AKA: the Radiohead of film AKA: that one virtuosically unique thing you rest your laurels of taste on. Chances are he’s your favorite screenwriter, but tell me this: who’s your second favorite screenwriter? Ha! Of course, I take my accusations no further since it can only be good that Kaufman has aroused an appreciation for the raw creative energy behind the concept of a film, which for him, somehow glimmers through mechanized steps one-through-god-knows-how-

many of the filmmaking process, never allowing us to forget about the ecstatic guru scribe channeling cinematic gospel before even one laid brick of the mise en scene. This time Kaufman is there, trowel and mortar, for every stage of the giant sensory cathedral that is Synecdoche, New York and after a couple decades of succumbing to the legislative committee of someone else’s camera he, frankly, blows his creative wad like an early pubescent finally penetrating the panty-barrier. But, goodness, what a wad, showering the cavacious grey where often creeps my complacency as a viewer. “Fuck me,” I thought, “this movie’s alive.” Albeit agonizingly so, opened up on the operating table, writhing unanaesthetized. An assault of exposed nerves carefully wired by a master pyrotechnician of the telencephalon. Neurons are lit up on both sides of the screen with Kaufman pulling switches at atomically-timed moments, the weaver of big and terrifying thoughts.

But my statements towards his genius remain proactive: he’s a genius if he tops himself post-this-thing, this total existential finale of a movie. Has Kaufman finally reached a saturation point, everything henceforth seeming dialed back, trifling? He’s a genius if he knows he can top this. He’s cool if he doesn’t care. Of course, neither are likely the case since he’s the most notoriously “where-do-I-go-from-here?”-prone writers of our generation (i.e. his characters suffer from it in like every other one of his fucking movies). Knowing full well the ramifications of this total self-evacuation that is Synechdoche, it’s either a monolithic creative risk or a necessary bowel-cleansing whence he’ll retire from all this hyper-reflexive meta-narrative shit. Sorry, but I root for the latter because, honestly, I get it Charlie…you’re clever.

My first expectation of Synecdoche was that in yet another tortured stupor of writer’s block he once again said: “fuck it, I’ll just do another film about the fluidity of self. Cuz what theme is easier to twist into a labyrinth that’ll make the kids go ‘whoa’ than identity?” But it’s not all tight conceptual braids and narrative parlor tricks. Synecdoche’s unflinchingly all over the place. And like pathagonist Caden Cotard’s own impossibly fertile pool of resources (how much IS a MacArthur grant worth nowadays?), one needs their own constant hail of reinforcements in the general upper cerebral area to keep up with Kaufman’s blistering rate of stakes-raising. I’m talking hyper-Masonic stages of enlightenment here, ruthlessly exploding the [insert maddening philosophical angle here] problems of the narrate/live/repeat loops of artistic life.

This all gets a little hard to follow over the sound of heads audibly bursting in the theatre (note: scientifically indistinguishable from the sound of incredulous laughter). There were also real emotive sounds, which suggest Synecdoche is equally funny and soulful enough to keep it from atomizing into meta-to-the-power-of-infinity-times-a-thousand tedium. Cotard’s loss of self remains genuine and moving even (I should say, especially) as he gets increasingly absorbed into the folds of an ur-world where every outrageous creative suggestion is embraced. But only a Kaufman identity-spiral could leave a character wandering the post-apocalyptic streets of his own mise-en-universe monstrosity receiving life commands via headset by someone playing him-as-director, telling him how to feel, how to dream, the deepest human yearnings piped in like source code (just watch the film).

It’s easy to call this whole to-do surreal, but don’t stop there. Yes some of the film’s un-reality is contorted by only the basest anxious spitfires of his psyche (fear of death, sexuality, homosexuality…). But the subterranean animal parts of the mind are just one ride at the Kaufman carnival. Just as Cotard’s New-York-filled warehouse becomes just a building “prop” in a grander New-York-filled warehouse, the surreal aspects are just the center of a magically real Babushka doll. It’s the Kaufman house of mirrors, telescoping from surrealism to the magical realism and then back again. Loops of reflexivity, hilariously dizzying. The “big” themes, the ones that all of the Daliesque anxieties are really just a foil for, are the province of magical realism: using the “impossible” (rather than just the surrealist “uncanny”) to explore the dimensions of the possible. Everything spins so far off the axis of actual lived life (even cinematic life, which is already plastic enough), that the film once again teeters on the possibility of becoming a game of seeing how virtuosically a virtuoso of narrative can play with form.

One of Kaufman’s many writerly talents is his ability to satirize, well, anything. Getting outside of it, twisting it around until it perforates itself with wounds just like his fleet of masochistic characters. A death in Cotard’s family happens, but does it weigh sincerely on the film’s thrust or is it just fuel for a schadenfreudal laugh (i.e. the “saddest deathbed speech the doctors ever heard”…just watch the film), a scarcely-seismic dramatic murmur meant more to feed his own self-indulgent obsession with the polychromatic spectrum of tragedy (disease, dissolution of families, shattered romance, regret, disappointing loved ones, death in general)? Does it all mean something? Thus bubbles up the thesis of Cotard’s creative drive: is all of this suffering just irrational, impossible to understand? After all, nothing bad seems to happen to him for any tangible reason (starting with his wife leaving him…just cuz), casting him into a creative furnace, fueled by the needlessly unfortunate nebula of life stuff that surrounds him every single day.

Although Cotard’s endless means of exploration are “magical,” his approach is shrewdly verite. The metaphysical, the enigmatic, the phenomenal, things that loosen the jaw in wonder, all must be contained in quotidian life-stagings, MRI-ed through an endlessly prying lens of realism. Each one of his actors get a premise and the discrete mathematics of reality are left to rut in futile hope of revealing their extraterrestrial formulas. Small wonder is Cotard’s fascination with Death of a Salesman. Its moral is classic, eternal, timeless: Americans make bad decisions, deliberately trampling on a “good life”…and no one knows why for fuck sake!

Ultimately, my opinion of Synecdoche remains a dialectical one. I thought it was brilliant and masturbatory, but also brilliantly masturbatory. Was it everything I wanted or nothing really at all, just a wayward stab at some celestial truth? And perhaps that’s why it’s great: it took me dancing on the heads of small, organically-realized approaches to cinema (i.e. The Visitor, which is a great film), dancing in all the chaos between worlds. Skillfully, Synecdoche begins small, almost maddeningly so, only to blow things to meteoric dust, animating a world no thought they needed to know about. They do. The dialectics, AKA: the conceptual collision, of the very big to the very small is a violent Who’s-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf-esque domestic storm. A marriage made only to supernova. Everyday, creatively or not, this battle rages in all of us. And in an age where no level of artistic provocation can really startle, Charlie Kaufman ambushes the viewer with a wholly unexpected angle of cinematic progressiveness: getting away with being cerebral.

Saw V Review

I wrote this because I wanted something to feel like I'm better/smarter than and a misguided horror movie drunk on its own success that I got dragged to was the most convenient choice. I think if I was strapped to a crazy-Saw-machine my message from Jigsaw (or one of his fucking Manson Family of surrogates) would sound something like, "Stefan, you take cheap shots at films that are already obviously bad to make up for your own haunting fears of artistic inferiority..."

Gosh everyone just wants to be an evil genius' dark pupil nowadays. Apparently even the most basic of dirges can inspire the will to orchestrate the elaborate deaths of other shady characters. And they're such quick studies. The precision engineering required (demanding expertise in, I dunno, metallurgy, electronics and advanced physics for these Hi-Fi Morton's-Fork gymnasiums to perform as resolutely as they have...every time...without a single glitch) is no longer just the province of Jigsaw and his decades of mechanical experience, but can be mastered in a matter of days with his, like, Infernal Devices For Dummies crash course. It's D.I.Y. Evil Geniousness! Now anyone can play – even the less cerebral, charismatic and generally interesting characters like Hoffman and that Amanda girl. (Of course who knows how long Hoffman was honing his craft as the Saw franchise's stock-in-trade involves not letting the viewer know when, chronologically, certain sequences are occurring so that later they can, like, blow your mind with revelations that certain things happened before/after others or maybe even...whoa...at the same time!)

But if only such regard was lent to the intricacies of human psychology. Although Jigsaw claims that the most enlightened path to clarity and salvation is being strapped to a large machine that wants to hurt you (his method is now referred to in textbooks as “Shlock Therapy”), then please first consider what percentage of these subjects have actually survived the Jigsaw/Hoffman/Amanda Rehabilitation Center. (Hint: It's even less than the latest film's Rotten Tomatoes rating). And yet Jigsaw seems to think the character's inevitable failures are moral ones. Those ignorant fools, not heeding the geniousy wisdom of their insane, sadistic captor who is submitting them to dehumanizingly morbid dilemmas. Hmmmm maybe his subjects fail to exact Mensa-like logistics skills and oceans of human empathy because they're put in opaque, high pressure situations with no previous warning and no way out. Yes, if you dangle a room full of strangers over impending death with a claustrophic deficit of information and...well...options for survival then, yes, they might act irrationally in the name of self-preservation. What another earth-shaking Saw-series revelation: the dark side of humanity can in fact be unlocked through ruthless physical and mental torment.

This pretense of Jigsaw's dilemmas as “morality experiments” (rather than, say, pressure cookers of animal fear) not only drains the character of his sinister mystique, but reveals him as not-quite-geniousy-enough to realize his own hypocrisy: i.e. things are not experiments if you know already know what's going to happen (“hmmm, yes, it seems that, once again, when human beings have their lives threatened, they will panic and make rash rather than clever and charitable decisions”). After all, these are situations designed to summon the basest instincts in people so that they kill each other. It's like putting two fighting fish in a bowl and calling yourself a marine biologist.

As well-documented as my hate for Wolf Creek and Hostel are, I can now only admire their forthcoming nature. They at least don't pretend like they're about something more than watching people get eviscerated. And although they're movies I want to put in a torture machine that cuts 90% of the footage due to its boring and meaningless nature, I have a different re-edit in mind for Saw. I won't take a single thing out (not even the deluge of unnecessary shot repetitions of something scary or gory or a character being like “whoa!”). I'll just put all of the events in chronological order. I promise you it will put the “sad” back into “sadistic.” It will be my own Douglas Gordon homage. All that veils this film's aesthetic are the “surprise” revelations of a human motive behind its endless pageant of torture sequences (which, by the way, are not improving in stakes, cleverness, intensity, creativity, or even perversity). So relieved are we that the flailing electrical wires of discontinuity have been mended that we don't acknowledge how feebly the “moral” animus of the film's villains are stitched in. Anything to justify the gore I guess.

The thing with Saw is that, for a horror film, it has a very effective basic gore-delivery formula: rather than having the bad guy do all the maiming, why not force the characters to do it to themselves. What's more horrifying than that, really? Well I'll tell you: a half-assed writer. The pointless narrative contortions are more vulgar than any mangling of the body that Jigsaw can conjure. And the continual Shakespearean downfalls (a more suitable illustration probably being “lateral crunchings”) of the protagonists (by the way a Saw protagonist = whoever has not yet been spectactularly killed) persist without the vital components, i.e. actual fucking characters. They're not complex enough to have tragic flaws or really any semblance of a human feature that justifies their failure. But apparently everyone has to die. Gotta get bums in those seats, rusty as the torture-machine-variety have to be, traditionally speaking.

Real elevation of stakes began in Saw four where the complex-mechanism-aestheti

c began to be applied to a greater narrative. In Saw 5 this device is just as counter-productive as ever. Rather than making the story more intricate, it simply magnifies its hollowness, baring its spookily-rust-stained gears. You see normally, if a character wants to do the right thing, what would thwart them is an inherent wrong thing in their methods, motives, desires, etc. Saw's pathos mechanisms are literally such: a series of pulleys and triggers that create a needlessly adversarial causality. The narrative Morality isn't thwarted by its own built-in inadequacies, it's thwarted by a big steel version of the Mousetrap boardgame (or those things that were popular circa late 80's early 90's in Honey I Shrunk The Kids or Goonies that made toast or granted people entry to your front yard). After all, it is all a game...and I'm bored. The Saw series is, narratively, guerilla tactics for the sake of it. And the result is cheap, feeling not as though the victims were soldiers of the thriller genre, but unfortunate children chasing their balls across the street. And it's getting tedious, its over-the-topness as clunky and insultingly deliberate as my closing sentence will be. Sorry, but all the frenetic editing and relentless sensory assaults of spectral audio eeriness amidst one oxidation-rashed post-industrial dungeon after another is not going to save this septology from its own infernal self-mutilation.