Hot Summer by Joachim Hasler
(Icestorm Video, 1968)
review by Chris Fujiwara
This 1968 musical comedy from East Germany has an eerie hollowness. The vapid, perky, not annoying Baltic Sea escapade that occupies the foreground of the film is the perfect oblivion of social and cosmic concerns. You can't even say it's about "sexual politics"—in this respect, though perhaps in this respect only, the film is even more of an escape from history than the slightly earlier U.S. Beach Party films, with which Hot Summer invites comparison. The structuring absence of the Beach Party movies was '50s punk rebelliousness, i.e., rock 'n roll: pre-Army Elvis, etc.—a stage the Communist world simply skipped, going straight to the proto-World Beat musak heard in Hot Summer, which accepts rock-based elements thrown in with an international-pop sound straight from the pre-rock '50s. If Hot Summer acknowledges youth rebellion, it's only to show it as deprived in advance not just of both content and context but also of opposition. Authority figures are glimpsed in the film, threatening a vague retribution that never comes but is meekly submitted to anyway; the generational conflict is even more ersatz than in the Beach Party movies, which suggests that the structuring absence of Hot Summer is not the rebellious son, but the family itself.
The film has trouble getting its narrative unstuck from the teasing rivalry of the infantile battle of the sexes with which it starts; it takes a while to sort out its lineups of virtually indistinguishable, except by gender, well-scrubbed youth (10 boys and 11 girls, two of whom, to add redundancy to redundancy, are twins). This initial failure of individuation, or what seems a willful neglect of it as a generic requirement (the film's refusal to acknowledge a law of genre) indeed suggests what one would be tempted to find anyway in a Communist entertainment, a concern for extolling the collective, but more than this, it suggests a fear of the sexual couple. It' s this fear that the narrative seems to try to grow out of, as it starts to single out Kai (Frank Schoebel) and Brit (Regine Albrecht) as protagonists. But private sexuality, sexuality as expression, is pointedly repressed (first by the girls themselves, in their disapproval of Brit when she returns to the dorm after staying out all night). The superfluous abundance of people, the insistence in Joachim Hasler's mise-en-scène that they all be shown together at once, amount to an attempt to deny and overwhelm the couple by means of superior numbers. The unexpected poignancy of the last third of the film no doubt has to do with our sense that even though both sides are right (both those who affirm the group and those who affirm the individual, and above all, Brit, the sexual outcast in search of an identity), whether they are right or wrong has already, and immutably, been established by the film as beside the point and without issue.
Black Seeds of Vengeance by Nile
(Relapse Records, 2000)
review by James Parker
Impossible books and hard-to-listen-to records turn me on, who can say why—perhaps because in their triumph over me I scent some fundamental process, like my soul going passive before a mystery—and lately I've been indulging in the pre-Enlightenment double whammy of Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings and Nile's Black Seeds Of Vengeance. The Mailer book—as far as I can tell, having never been able to read more than five pages of it in sequence—is an ambitious attempt to write a modern novel about the cosmological spirit-structure of pharaonic Egypt, the soul's voyage beyond death etc. The Nile record is a goofily splenetic black metal album, a work of spaghetti paganism that sounds, in its quieter passages, like the music played in the Temple Of Doom chanced upon by Professor Indiana Jones (crouched behind a boulder, as you remember). The brimstone roar of the gong across the ancient bloodstones, the larynx of the high priest as sooty and bass-conductive as a subway tunnel... magnificent cartoon Egyptology. "Masturbating the War God" is one song title; the title of the song before that is "Libation Unto the Shades who Lurk in the Shadows of the Temple of Anhur." Technically, this is your basic Throat Rock—squalling guitar, vomitous belches of voice, the drummer in a permanent shitfit—alleviated by certain "Eastern" twangs and tints, and sat in a crater of smoky, tomb-like reverb. I have yet to make it to the end of the CD. But while I'm listening to the first four or five songs I will often hold my copy of Ancient Evenings in my hand—I might even open it, read a line or two. Book and album hang before me: vast, obsidian, indigestible, as hostile to intelligence (at least, to mine) as the great and faceless "probes" that the crew of the Enterprise would occasionally see filling their cosmic windscreen.
This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges, ed. by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu
(Harvard University Press, 2000)
review by Matthew Battles
What's most astonishing about these previously uncollected essays, delivered by Borges as the 1967-68 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, is that for all their complexity and allusiveness they are oral performances. While Borges's blindness is a major figure in his writing, the breadth and density of his rhetorical web obscures the fact that he has no notes to read, that he is calling these texts up from the inexhaustible abyss of his memory. If one of Borges' touchstones, Swedenborg, is right to say that mankind is blessed with forgetting, then Borges was a man accursed. "The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol," Borges has written elsewhere, "which the usury of time wore out." This echoes Emerson, one of Borges' favorite Americans, who observed that "all language is fossil poetry." In his decomposition of genres and styles, Borges provokes language to express this immanent word-magic, knitting his own pronouncements together with the primordial force of oral composition. Borges speaks on metaphor, bringing the tangled, sensuous allegories of San Juan de la Cruz into contact and concert with the cold, salty kennings of the Norse Eddas; he discusses translation with freshness and an uncanny sensitivity to the ligatures among the languages; he considers the narrative arc and the transformation of thought into poetry. Willis Barnstone, one of Borges's several translator-amaneunses, has remarked that for Borges everything—the solitude of composition, a friendly conversation on a street corner in Buenos Aires, a cab ride through Chicago snows—was an occasion for charlar, for chat. As editor Calin-Andrei Mihailescu puts it in his graceful afterword to this volume, "Literature," for Borges, "was a mode of experience."
Dr. T and the Womendirected by Robert Altman
(Artisan Entertainment, 2000)
review by Clarke Cooper
What I've overheard most and loudest from people who have—or have not—seen Dr. T and the Women is how terrible it is that it's so awfully misogynist. It is of course, but there's no sense in going off half-cocked like that—ideally (and that's ideally, mind you), a given movie hasn't come to please you and your perverse little notions of philogyny or pacifism or Francophobia. The movie must be its own man and speak its own mind, and your job is to sit there and take it. Then you need to make one decision about the movie itself and whether it has succeeded on its own terms, and then a different one, between you and the movie, about whether or not you agree with it. To conflate the two and a priori reject as Bad any work that offends your beliefs is to insist, pitifully, that art is a popularity contest. There are lots of great movies to be made about how awful women are, just as there are about how awful men are, and whether you're of the good sex or the other kind you have to be woman enough to appreciate it when you catch someone making excellent remarks that you abhor.
That said, Dr. T stinks. Not because it's misogynist, but because its misogyny is base, false and unconsidered. If I were a character I'd never want to wind up subject to the abuse of recent Altman, but even by his standards the women in Dr. T are all hideous puppets deployed solely to make Richard Gere sad. The poor guy tries simply everything, but even adultery fails to protect him from the fact that all women are always totally untrustworthy. The movie, and presumably Altman, has no opinions about misogyny; it has nothing to say about whys or hows, it only mouths syllables and then breaks into a great Har Har Har at its big old comical Self.
A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease by Cintra Wilson
(Viking Press, 2000)
review by Ingrid Schorr
Last week one of my eleventh grade students wrote a story about a powerful philanthropist who was deep down a sleazeball who jerked people around trying to prove that he wasn't just in it for the "fame."
As I read her first draft, the word fame started to bother me. What did she mean, fame? Attention, infamy, self-satisfaction? Why go to the trouble of ducking fame? She couldn't tell me either, and she ended up writing a much better story about an old lady buying socks.
Between grading the rest of that week's stories (bullies, drifters, girls in love, girls with glowing red eyes) I read Cintra Wilson's A Massive Swelling. This acidly funny and terribly intelligent book takes on not just celebrities but the awful sucking sound of wanting fame.
These days, when sniggering passes for wit and online diaries for narrative, you shouldn't take a book like this for granted. Readers who know Wilson from her Salon columns may grow impatient and skim for the funny bits, but stay with it. She nails the easy targets—Michael Jackson, Cher, Bruce Willis—but they don't get away with a giggle. Wilson shoulders the critic's burden and diagnoses her own dependence on the narcotic charm of the stupefying. "Nothing will get your mind off your own shortcomings like seeing some shit-twirling baboon flailing away...like a house afire," she writes. She laments that her three "shipwrecks of rock"—the late G.G. Allen, Mark E. Smith of the Fall, and Ike Turner—fell to fame, not because they sold out (a critic's shabbiest conclusion) but because fame ultimately humiliated them.
The image of swelling, "the huge tumescent aura of Otherness," pervades the book, as massive as any Macy's Thanksgiving parade balloon. While any critic can pop a balloon, Wilson tugs the ropes to bring the icons, and the celebrity that keeps them afloat, down to street level.
Hermenaut also recommends:
The Gift of Stones, by Jim Crace. (Scribner, 1988). In clear, quick, iambic—boned prose, Crace's remarkable novel tells the story of a one—armed poet in neolithic England.—MB
ZOOB Mega-construction set. Primordial LLC, Ages 7 and up. Tinker Toys for the Genomics generation. Be sure to ask for a tub of them the next time you go to Denny's.—MB
Never Give In: A Tribute to Bad Brains, Various Artists (Century Media, 2000). At the end of this album, after fifteen so-so covers by today's angry young men—the punks grabbing the early tunes, the metallurgists heading for the later fusion materials—we have a real gem: Cave In doing "I Luv I Jah" and rendering from it a tribal prog symphony, with guitar-screams. —JP
The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris (Da Capo Press, 1996) This excellent guide to American directors has explained everything I know about why I have all these opinions. —CC
United States MAPBOOK (Interarts Ltd., 1992) The best little atlas ever for staring intently out the window of a plane and figuring out what that is down there; also works in cars. —CC
Rififi, directed by Jules Dassin (1955). This recently rereleased French heist film (originally Du rififi chez les hommes) is like Dog Day Afternoon without cops and without Al Pacino yelling. In between visits to a nightclub, its antiheroes solemnly employ a Jacques Tati arsenal of tools, including an umbrella, without a wink of irony. —I.S.
Patak's Original Coriander and Ginger Tikka Paste. $3.69 for 10 ounces. So rich and aromatic, it'll make even the most hastily cooked dinner taste rich and aromatic. —I.S.
Kokigami: Performance Enhancing Adornments for the Adventurous Man, by Burton Silver and Heather Busch (Ten Speed Press, 2000) Don't go to Bread and Puppet; stay home and use these beautifully lurid paper costumes for the penis. My mate went for the rocket, the squid, and the dog, but we laughed too hard to get beyond raising the curtain.—I.S.
Les Maledictus Sound, Attention (Mucho Gusto) Reissue of a ridiculous French psych/muzak LP from 1968. Strings and horns compete with acid guitar, screams, sobbing, and electronic frissons to see which can be more annoying. As the liner notes (ineptly translated from the French) proudly proclaim, "a true voyage towards an awkward movement."—C.F.
Danses Organiques by Luc Ferrari (ELICA) "Cinema for the ear" (or fluid and breezy sound montages) by the noted electroacoustic composer and erotomaniac. Stimulating.—C.F.
