THE BEST OF 2013: Ten (Plus) Sound Bites

◆ by Kevin Howley

 

On August 21, Pfc. Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. In a press statement Manning said, “If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.” Manning’s sober assessment of his life and times was one of the more moving sound bites of 2013: a year marked by dramatic revelations of NSA spying, a divisive and costly government shutdown, and all manner of gaffes, blunders, and apologies uttered by politicians, pontiffs, and other media personalities.

10. But the difference with Green Eggs and Ham is when Americans tried it, they discovered they did not like green eggs and ham and they did not like ObamaCare either. They did not like ObamaCare in a box, with a fox, in a house, or with a mouse.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz [pictured at the top of this post] channels Dr. Seuss during his “sort of” filibuster of the Affordable Healthcare Act, September 24.

9. Women go to the doctor much more often than men! Maybe they’re smarter or maybe they’re hypochondriacs. They live longer. Who knows?

FOX News “analyst” John Stossel offers his expert opinion on women’s healthcare, October 31.

8. Sure, he could turn over every bit of his weapons to the international community within the next week, without delay. But he isn’t about to.

When asked what Bashar Hafez al-Assad could do to avoid US military strikes, Secretary of State John Kerry stumbles toward a diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis, September 9.

7. Words are important. I understand that, and will choose mine with great care going forward. Behavior like this undermines hard-fought rights that I vigorously support.

Baldwin

Serial offender Alec Baldwin makes amends with GLADD for homophobic remarks the actor hurled at a member of the paparazzi, November 15.

6. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.

President Obama explains “American Exceptionalism” during a nationally televised speech on the prospects of US military intervention in Syria, September 10.

5. I’m no different from anybody else. I don’t have special skills. I’m just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watches what’s happening and goes, ‘This is something that’s not our place to decide, the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.’

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden explaining his decision to leak classified documents detailing the scale and scope of US surveillance programs, June 9.

4. If I knew, I would tell you.

House Speaker John Boehner, when asked when the government shutdown might end, during an appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, October 6.

3. I would never do that. I’m happily married. I’ve got more than enough to eat at home.

Toronto “crack mayor” Rob Ford defending himself. Again. This time for allegations he propositioned a female staffer to perform oral sex, November 14.

2. If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?

Picture 3

Humility becomes Pope Francis in comments regarding the Catholic Church’s
position on homosexuality, July 29.

1. I’m not the most believable guy in the world right now.

Armstrong

Cyclist Lance Armstrong reveals a gift for understatement during his
“worldwide exclusive” interview with Oprah Winfrey, January 20.

Honorable Mention

Now people expect me to come out and twerk with my tongue out all the time. I’ll probably never do that shit again.

Miley Cyrus has second thoughts on her headline groping grabbing performance at the Video Music Awards, September 24.

In Memoriam

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013.

The Ryder ◆ January 2014

FILM: 12 Years a Slave (2013) For Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927)

◆ by Brandon Walsh

 

12 Years a Slave has received near-universal acclaim and in the coming weeks is a good bet to win several Best Picture™ awards. The story of Solomon Northrop, a freeman kidnapped and sold into slavery, is not only the best visual representation of the horror of American slavery, but helps Hollywood look past its own sordid history of racial representation. One ledger in this history is Harry Pollard’s 1927 film adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of Hollywood’s most famous, and troublesome, depictions of slavery.

Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and 12 Years a Slave are close Hollywood adaptations from period works, told with A-list actors, addressing slavery with epic stories of African-Americans enslaved on plantations with abusive owners. But this is where the similarities end. Although they may be cut from the same cloth of history, the two films apply very different stains.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was given a big Hollywood treatment ($1.8 million, one of the highest budgets for a film at the time). Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852, overshadowing Solomon Northrop’s 1853 autobiography, becoming one of the best-selling books of all time. Between 1903 and 1927, at least 10 silent film adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were produced, culminating in the famous 1927 adaptation.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin opens to a scene of a vibrant Georgian plantation scored by “Swanee River,” immediately eliciting nostalgic imagery of the lavish American South. Slave children dance around the hero of the film, Eliza, a mixed-race maid entered into slavery. The film was progressive for its time in casting James B. Lowe, a black man, as Uncle Tom, however all other slave characters are portrayed by white actors in blackface. Eliza’s portrayal by a white actress assumes that 1920s moviegoers could only empathize with slavery when white characters were in bondage. Uncle Tom himself is given less than 10 minutes of screen time, the film paying more attention to large action scenes, laden with stigmatic black characters. While the story itself largely faithful to Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery story, Hollywood’s habit of exploitation is equally present.

From "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

Little Eva and Topsey in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”

12 Years a Slave is an unflinching view of slavery, devoting its screen time to accurately depicting the labor, politics, and violence of slavery, documenting the machinery of society and using Northrop as its spectator. British director Steve McQueen, fresh off his provocative films Hunger and Shame, which deal respectively with political and psychological imprisonment. McQueen continues his sustained, metonymic visual style, which translates well to Northrop’s story. Though making more use of dialogue than his other films, uninterrupted images carry the film’s emotional weight. In one torturous shot, Northrup is left to tiptoe for his life in the mud as he is left halfway-hung on a lynching tree. This shot is a far cry from the “gentle rule typical of the south” mentioned in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and illustrates why 12 Years A Slave is the better film — it stings.

Where Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a harrowing adventure film designed to entertain, it is almost impossible to relax during 12 Years a Slave, a subversion of Hollywood entertainment. The whipping of Uncle Tom and other travesties are merely hinted at in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Northrop’s story is unsentimental. Skin is flayed, children are torn from their mothers, drunkards are patriarchs, and survival is granted by blind chance. Pollard uses slavery as a backdrop for popular Hollywood conventions: love defying the odds, the thrill of the chase, a child’s innocence. Throughout Hollywood’s history, films have too often used social issues as a frame for Hollywood narrative without historical consciousness, making 12 Years a Slave all the more important today.

Hollywood congratulates itself when given the opportunity in the best picture category, to the point that the subject matter can be a stronger consideration of a film’s worth than aesthetic/cultural value of the film. (Look no further than Crash, or even last year’s best picture winner Argo, where the hero who saved the day was Hollywood.) Awards are a way of writing history, and what else is history but a rewriting of history? If McQueen’s film is selected as best picture, it won’t be in the most comfortable company, but its inclusion, as well as the attention to Northrop’s story, is nonetheless overdue. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin showed audiences that social issues can be brought into popular entertainment, 12 Years a Slave shows a modern audience that history can be rewritten the right way, packaged in a piece of unsettling entertainment. It’s a film that wants to remind us, in every image, “Never forget this crime against humanity.”

[Brandon Walsh is an undergraduate senior studying and producing films at Indiana University. Caption for Featured Image: The opening shot to Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (Fox Searchlight).]

The Ryder ◆ January 2014

DANCE: Hot Times On A Hard Floor

by ◆ Paul Sturm

 

As a kid, I had square dance class every other Friday in my grade school gym  It was part of our requisite phys ed regimen. Not ballroom or ballet, modern or tap, mind you; not Lindy Hop swing dances for jitterbugs (which I only saw in movies); not sassy “jazz” dance moves, which hadn’t yet migrated from Broadway to rural vernacular. We were years away from rock bands’ dominion over school dances. Our media piped the likes of Mitch Miller and Lawrence Welk, and the American folk music revival was in full voice — and no one really danced to Burl Ives, The Kingston Trio, or Joan Baez.

So square dancing, and occasional contra dancing, was what we had to know to be socially adept in our ‘50s/‘60s farm-&-coal belt heartland. At church socials and barn dances, in schools and public gatherings, if people danced to music – and people love dancing to music – square dancing was it.  (It’s still the official state dance in 21 states and the official state folk dance in 3 more.) In some communities, they peppered their square and contra dancing with the hard-soled rhythmic stomp of flatfooting and clogging. More visceral than tap, clogging gave every reluctant pre-teen Terpsichorean a much-welcomed invitation to make noise with their feet. Add fruit punch and white cake, and what’s not to love?

What I didn’t then know was that square dancing, contra dancing, clogging — all of these “American” dance forms derive from European dance styles that extend back centuries.  And what I couldn’t then predict was that I’d end up living in a bodacious hub for traditional American dance: our humble burg of Bloomington.

In 1972, IU folklore student, Dillon Bustin, and a cohort of likeminded B-town twenty-somethings began a weekly gathering to revive traditional American old-time music and dance, becoming known as the Bloomington Old-Time Music and Dance Group — an informal army of old-timey enthusiasts who gather weekly to this day.

[For those who want to learn more about this grand Bloomington tradition, John Bealle has written an affectionate history entitled Old Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival, published by IU Press.]

One of the more significant outgrowths of BOTMDG was the formation of Shuffle Creek Dancers, a cadre of five dancers whose skill and dedication to traditional dance moved into a professional caliber and aspiration. Shuffle Creek Dancers became Rhythm In Shoes, which continues as a professional trad-dance ensemble, now located in Dayton, Ohio. Even though the dance company, and many of its members, came and went, a few local souls have kept percussive dance alive in Bloomington — most significantly, Tamara Loewenthal.

Loewenthal was one of the founding members of Shuffle Creek Dancers, back in 1980. Today, she is half of the performing duo Fiddle ‘n’ Feet, with her partner, Jamie Gans, on fiddle. She is an Indiana Arts For Learning Artist as well as an Arts Learning Artist for Ohio and Kentucky). She teaches percussive dance classes, and she is a multi-year Indiana Arts Commission (IAC) Individual Artist Grant recipient. In addition to performing and teaching traditional dance, Loewenthal calls square and contra dances for the Bloomington Old-Time Music and Dance Group and for Bloomington Contra Dance. (She called a great afternoon of square dance at Lotus in the Park during Lotus Festival 2012.)

The weekend of January 23-25 will be chock-full of BOTMDG, On Thursday, the 23rd, Loewenthal is presenting her Seventh Annual Percussive Dance Extravaganza at the Ivy Tech Waldron Center.  This year, with the support of IAC funding, she’s also offering a series of master class workshops on clogging and old time music on Friday and Saturday. (See the lineup of events below). She’ll call a public square dance on Saturday night in the Harmony School gym.

I asked Loewenthal how rehearsals are going for her upcoming Dance Extravaganza. “The process has been going really well. With the IAC grant, we started the rehearsal process earlier, and the body of work has grown;  the concert this year allows the presentation of my accumulated body of work which includes several new pieces. I choreographed everything that we’ll perform.  Even when I began dancing, I was choreographing. I love figuring out the dancers’ directions, how to ‘get there.’ What’s the pathway? How are we going to move in the space? I like seeing shapes, like those old Busby Berkeley movies where the camera pans over the dance scene and you see these great, kaleidoscopic shapes and patterns, and you wonder where everything will go next. I’m inspired by that effect in creating my dances.”

Many know Loewenthal as a solitary dancer/clogger. She and Gans often perform at the Farmer’s Market and elsewhere, and she has danced on stage with several Lotus World Music and Arts Festival performers over the years. But it’s in the ensemble dances she features in her annual concert that Loewenthal’s choreographic talents shine. Whether for duo, trio, quartet, or larger forces, she keeps her dancers moving, and she moves them across the floor with inventive interplay and geometric design.

Loewenthal also maintains variety in her annual Dance Extravaganza concerts by presenting much more than clogging. Each year, the concert incorporates a range of traditional dance styles, and this year’s extravaganza is no exception.

“The largest portion of what we’ll be doing is in the clogging and flatfooting tradition. It’s very conducive to the old time style of music I feature in our concert. We add a little bit of hand clapping, some body percussion, and a little bit of tap on some dances. Clogging is very much about the downbeat and keeping everything steady, while tapping has a lot of syncopation and is often about pushing the beat.

“We’re also doing some French Canadian stepdance, which is different than English clogging. It’s a very ‘up’ style because the French doublé rhythm is more upbeat. You shuffle more with double-toe movements rather than the heel-toe of clogging. So you dance more on your toes, with a lot of precision, and your arms are more at your side.

“But clogging is my favorite style of dance because I feel so clearly how it connects to the music. In terms of dance, for me, I loved the music first, and then I social danced to it through square dance, and when I realized you could make rhythms to this music, that’s when I got excited about dance.  I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

Traditional American dance forms aren’t readily taught anymore, so it requires a special commitment to master the many dance styles in Loewenthal’s repertoire. “In 1981, I began going to dance camps around the country where people could go and learn more about traditional dance styles.  I went to several of those dance camps, and that’s where I learned about and studied all these different dance styles.”

Loewenthal has studied with many great step dancers including Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, Brenda Bufalino, Benoit Bourque, Pierre Chartrand, Mandy Sayer, and John Timm. She’s won awards for her clogging, including a blue ribbon at the Mount Airy (NC) Fiddler’s Convention, and in 1999 she received a prestigious Arts Council of Indianapolis Creative Renewal Fellowship to study with masters in the French Canadian stepdance field.

In many ways, and to many people, Loewenthal is the irrepressible engine for Bloomington’s clogging revival of the last decade. Between classes, concerts, Farmer’s Market performances, school programs and more, she keeps this tradition alive in our town and in the Midwest. I asked her how she stepped into that role.

“By around 2000, Rhythm In Shoes had already moved to Dayton, and several of the dancers had left Bloomington to pursue other career opportunities, and there just wasn’t any percussive dance presence in town anymore. So I began teaching classes in 1998, 1999; and as my students wanted an outlet for more of this kind of dance, I wrote an Indiana Arts Commission grant in 2007 for a concert. It got provisionally funded, so the first Percussive Dance Extravaganza concert was in January, 2008.

“I think there are two reasons why it’s difficult to sustain a performing dance troupe. Learning to dance a rhythm in an accurate way is difficult, and keeping the stamina and fitness to continue practicing this kind of dance performance is difficult. So when I was interested in starting up a group again, I started with lessons because that was an easier way to attract and engage people. As dancers realized that one class a week was enough to only learn one dance over several months, we were able to add more classes and more rehearsals. Everyone lets me know how much they want to do, and I build my percussive dance concerts around how the dancers want to participate. It’s such a joyful, shared art form that people love doing it, and viewing it.”

This growing posse of traditional dance practitioners has allowed Loewenthal to plan more performances, with more frequency. She’s coined these dancers her “Foot Squad” and she and Gans did a couple Fiddle ‘n’ Feet concerts last year where the duo was expanded with Foot Squad dancers.

Led by Loewenthal, the “Foot Squad” company for the Percussive Dance Extravaganza will feature dancers Annie Bartlett Stowers, Suzannah Edgar, Mary Beth Roska, Cliff Emery, Allana Radecki, and Katie Zukof, as well as students from Loewenthal’s percussive dance classes.

Given her love for old time music, Loewenthal gives each Extravaganza concert an added blast of artistic excellence by recruiting all-star old-timey musicians from Indiana and beyond. This year’s Extravaganza Old Time Band includes Jamie Gans and Brad Leftwich on fiddles, Sam Bartlett on banjo and mandolin, Robert Widlowski on bass, and special guest John Schwab on guitar. Additional musicians will include Eric Schedler on piano and accordion, Zach Moon on Irish flute and whistle, and Marielle Abell on vocals. Hudsucker Posse members Paula Chambers and Clara Kallner also will perform.

Following the Thursday concert, and as a big-hearted invitation for Bloomingtonians to “embrace all things old-time,” Loewenthal has organized the first ever Extravaganza Weekend with a series of classes and events all held at Harmony School, 909 E. 2nd Street.  All events have paid admission; contact Loewenthal for pricing and registration info online or at 812-219-1890.

Friday, January 24, features an old-time guitar workshop with John Schwab (7-9pm).

Saturday, January 25, events include:

  • Clogging master class with Tamara Loewenthal (2-4pm)
  • Old-time guitar workshop with John Schwab (2-4pm)
  • Irish fiddle workshop with Jamie Gans (2-3pm)
  • Old-time fiddle workshop with Brad Leftwich (3-4pm)
  • Old-time banjo workshop with Sam Bartlett (3-4pm)
  • Square Dance in the Harmony School gym, 8pm.  (The Extravaganza Old Time Band pulls out all the stops for a square dance called by Extravaganza Weekend artistic director, Tamara Loewenthal.  No experience — and no partner — necessary!  Just bring your most comfortable dancing shoes.)

For newbies and the uninitiated, the Seventh Annual Percussive Dance Extravaganza will offer a memorable evening of exceptional old time music and traditional rhythmic footwork – including English clogging, flatfooting, tap, French Canadian stepdance, and a longsword dance – conceived and choreographed by Tamara Loewenthal, and performed by Loewenthal and her Foot Squad dancers.

According to Loewenthal, “I think anyone who comes to the concert will experience an incredible amount of joy and beauty, not only in the complexity of the dance but also in the wonderful, dynamic interplay of dancers and live musicians.  The exactness of everything commands attention.  It’s very exciting and filled with joy.  The Extravaganza is an expression of the vital old-time dance and music scene in Bloomington, and a celebration of the joy of making beautiful and powerful rhythms with our feet.”

Tamara Loewenthal’s Seventh Annual Percussive Dance Extravaganza is Thursday, January 23 at 7:30pm in the Ivy Tech Waldron Center auditorium, 122 S. Walnut St.  Admission is $15 in advance, $18 day of show; tickets are available at Bloomingfoods or from Loewenthal online or 812-219-1890.  The concert always sells out, so I recommend getting tickets in advance.

The Ryder ◆ January 2014

Books: Victorian Roots, Postmodern Conditions

Patrick Brantlinger’s “States of Emergency: Essays on Culture and Politics” ◆ by Tom Prasch

Perhaps a reader will realize that Patrick Brantlinger’s States of Emergency is something more than just another editorial writer’s book-gathered plunge into assorted aspects of contemporary crisis near the end of his delightful send-up of the Tea Party in current politics (chapter 3), when Brantlinger offers a Mad Hatter variation on contemporary politics that sounds more Lewis Carroll (and rather more Charles Dickens) than any recent Johnny Deppish incarnation of the character: “MAD HATTER,” Brantlinger shouts. “Treacle for one and all! A treacle well in every tittlebat’s back yard! Let’s end our dependence on foreign treacle—!” Tittlebat, you say? Haven’t seen one of those mentioned since last time I read Pickwick Papers.

But the clues have been there from the outset: in the opening chapter’s allusions to Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Matthew Arnold (as well as the more predictable presences of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) to provide context for a defense of the centrality of class conflict to an understanding of present contestations; or when, in a second chapter critiquing neoliberal economics, Brantlinger does not just quote the familiar Thomas Carlyle line about economics as the “dismal science,” as the average editorialist would, but provides a historical context for the line (in Carlyle’s reaction to Thomas Malthus’s essay on population) and then brings in Dickens again.

Brantlinger is, unmistakably, irretrievably, a Victorianist.

To those already familiar with Brantlinger’s name, this comes as no surprise. He has authored, after all, eight substantial studies of Victorian subjects, from Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-67 (1977) to, most recently, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (2011); in addition, he has edited Victorian Studies and chaired IU’s Victorian Studies program and, well, much else. Indeed, his only previous significant meanders away from his home Victorian turf were scarcely meanders at all, but engaging efforts to incorporate theoretical perspectives (accounting for cultural studies in Crusoe’s Footprints [1990]; analyzing the ways in which corporate models of the university, rather than theory-driven revisions of canons, have undermined American education in Who Killed Shakespeare? [2000]), mostly in order to bring those new theories to bear on Victorians.

To those who know Brantlinger only through States of Emergency, this conclusion will become equally evident over the course of the book. After trumping the Tea Party, Brantlinger proceeds to recall John Kenneth Turner’s 1908 visit to Mexico to contextualize his account of the country’s contemporary struggles. He tracks the notion of “waste” back to John Locke and through Adam Smith, Malthus, Carlyle, Marx, and Dickens before turning to a close reading of two turn-of-the-twentieth century figures, Thorstein Veblen and H. G. Wells (and then balancing Wells against contemporary novelist Don DeLillo). He borrows from Carlyle for an epigraph in an essay on the age of “terror” and anchors an account of Australian Aboriginal identity in the country’s colonial Victorian roots. He enriches a discussion of the poverty of today’s veterans with an exploration of the ideas of “surplus population,” from Malthus through early nineteenth-century debates sparked by Marx and “Marcus” forward to Francis Galton and George Bernard Shaw at the century’s end. Whenever Brantlinger needs a contextual hook to illuminate contemporary crises, he reaches first for a Victorian echo of current debates.

Which leads to a simple question: What’s a good Victorianist like Brantlinger doing in a place like this? What might lead him to offer a collection of essays on subjects like the efforts of the World Social Forum (WSF) to redress the inequities of globalization, school shootings, the Iraq War, the lasting legacies of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and (besides their being an almost irresistible easy target) the Tea Party? There are three basic answers to the question.

First, and most simply, Brantlinger is a Victorianist. He is not a Victorian. He lives now, in this world, and can scarce not respond to it. Indeed, alongside his formal academic career, he has a long record of engagement with contemporary social issues, some of which are directly reflected in the essays in States of Emergency, as in the case of the WSF piece, which draws on Brantlinger’s Global Exchange trip to a WSF meeting in Brazil.

Second, as anyone who knows Brantlinger’s earlier books can attest, his has always been a deeply engaged scholarship; his work, even when focused on the Victorians, has resonance for his own times. He searched for the political meanings in Victorian novels in the wake of the upheavals of the 60s in Spirit of Reform, sought the Victorian roots of more contemporary theories of mass culture (and more contemporary forms of mass culture) in Bread and Circuses (1983), and turned to issues of banking and the state in British fiction during the Reagan/Thatcher years in Fictions of State (1996). And anyone who cannot glimpse the contemporary resonance of his magisterial survey of literature’s collusion in the business of race and empire (in the trilogy of Rule of Darkness [1988], Dark Vanishings [2003], and Taming Cannibals) hasn’t much noticed what world we live in today.  States of Emergency thus merely reverses Brantlinger’s usual direction: now finding in the terms of contemporary crises resonance with Victorian debates.

But that final point leads us to the third reason for this collection: if we are truly to understand the multilayered crises of our present condition, the Victorians are where we should begin. After all, if industrial and postindustrial capitalism is at the heart of many of the specific sites where Brantlinger locates contemporary crisis, it’s the Victorians who invented those machines, and the Victorians (across an ideological spectrum from Carlyle to John Stuart Mill to William Morris, with John Ruskin somehow landing on both ends of it) who first theorized about the impact those machines would have on class systems, on the social fabric, on city life, on the forms of culture. And if globalism is Brantlinger’s other central concern, as it shapes first-world/third-world inequalities, the sites of modern war, or the terms of cultural exchange, the shadows of Victorian empire haunt these contemporary formations. Who better, then, than a Victorianist to illuminate the now?

The book offers a dozen essays, divided into two broad sections: “Class Conflicts” and “Postmodern Conditions.” The division is less than firm: Brantlinger’s analysis of class-based conflict informs every one of the essays, and he engages postmodern theory in defending his understanding of class. Still, the terms provide useful organizing principles for the whole, the book’s first half more deeply engaged in the contemporary discourse (or failure of discourse) about class, and its latter half more engaged with postmodernity, above all as one dimension of globalization. Certain deep themes recur throughout the collection, notably: Brantlinger’s critique of neoliberal economics (explicitly derided in the second chapter for its masking of its biases in favor of capitalism through the mystification of mathematics and the sanctification of free trade, but that complicity becomes a leitmotif for the volume); his reflections on the meanings of globalization (which very differently shape, for example, his essays on Mexico’s state of crisis, the Iraq war, and Australian Aborigines’ search for literary voice); his powerfully hopeful search for a road to reform for the crises he himself frames at the outset, following Slavoj Žižek, as apocalyptic (“In an imperfect world, utopianism is a necessity,” Brantlinger insists, in his discussion of the WSF’s agenda); and his constant search for a theoretical ground from which to engage in a critique over such a wide range of topics.

The search for theoretical ground provides an especially rich subtext for this collection; indeed, in some ways, the essays here can be read (if you don’t mind ignoring their actual subjects) as a critical assessment of the range of theories that have been deployed in recent decades to understand society, culture, and literature. Brantlinger’s own theoretical position strikes me as a complexly layered construction, crafted over the full course of his career, with roots in those nineteenth century sages to whom his essays so often revert (most especially, unsurprisingly, Marx), allusions to early twentieth-century thinkers he likely encountered as an undergraduate (Veblen, Emile Durkheim), accretions from the Frankfurt School whose roots were in the interwar era (Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer; the figures so central to Brantlinger’s earlier excursion into ideas of mass culture in Bread and Circuses), later strands of Marxist thought (such as hegemonic readings rooted in Antonio Gramsci, or the ideological state apparatus of Louis Althusser), and then forward to the major poststructuralists (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida; Jacques Lacan is, mercifully, absent), to postmodernist thinkers (Frederick Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), to the major voices who framed the debates of cultural studies (E. P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams; the group of thinkers key to Brantlinger’s earlier Crusoe’s Footprints), to postcolonial theory, and on to contemporary thinkers like Žižek

But this is hardly a haphazard assemblage. Brantlinger critically assesses the values and limits of the varied strands of theory he employs. Of Marx, for example, Brantlinger notes in his opening chapter: “Marx’s prediction that the ultimate outcome of class warfare would be a classless utopia was wrong, but that does not mean he misinterpreted the past.” Brantlinger in the same chapter takes to task postmodernists like Lyotard and Baudrillard for being blind to the continuation of class conflict in the postmodern condition. He later sides with McLuhan against “crash theorists” like Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein: “The crash theorists tend to be dismissive of McLuhan as a techno-optimist, utopian, or even cryptotheologian…. but their own brand of apocalyptic postmodernism begs to be read as a continuation of McLuhanism by other means.” Brantlinger’s theoretical grounding thus, like his literary analysis and his political critique, is rooted in close, careful, critical reading of key texts.

The opening section of the book, “Class Conflicts,” begins, foundationally, with Brantlinger’s defense of the idea of class conflict as a means to understand both historical and contemporary struggles. Addressing politicians’ rejection and postmodernists’ dismissal of the term, Brantlinger asserts: “Despite the obfuscations of the mass media, of neoliberal economists, and of some theorists of the postmodern condition, class struggle continues to shape American culture, a fact that the 2007-8 crash has made glaringly obvious.” The second chapter critiques dominant neoliberal economics, above all for its masking of its own ideological biases: “Economists … present the notions that capitalism is the only system that works and that political and social freedoms depend on free markets. These notions are presented as unassailable axioms.” Brantlinger will proceed to assail them. In chapter three, he has fun with the Tea Party, whose partisans he compares to the Know-Nothings of the 1850s. Chapter four offers a detailed cultural-studies take on the Virginia Tech shootings, charted along four axes: “race, class, gender, and America’s ‘gun culture.’” Ranging from Turner’s 1908 visit to Mexico back to the Mexican-American War of 1848 are forward to the emergence of the Zapatistas in the wake of the NAFTA agreement in 1994, the fifth chapter seeks to explain the long-term economic crisis of the Mexican state; for Brantlinger, NAFTA and the Zapatistas constitute “opposed but causally linked outcomes of economic neoliberalism,” rooted in a century and a half of unequal relations between north and south. The section’s final chapter (coauthored with Richard Higgins) evaluates “waste” as the inevitable byproduct of consumer capitalism (existing in “reversible” polarity to wealth). The authors survey the role of waste in a range of economic thought, from John Locke to Marx, before focusing more closely on Veblen and Wells.

The second section, “Postmodern Conditions,” opens with “Shopping on Red Alert,” a brilliant analysis of the discursive role of “terror” in American politics and culture since 9/11 (and contrasting it to the lackluster response to the Katrina disaster). Brantlinger concludes: “Perhaps what is new about terrorism today, apart from the rhetorical hype that sustains it, is its exhaustion—its angry impotence in light of the desire of the vast majority for peace, stability, prosperity, and freedom.” The section’s second essay sarcastically plays the war in Iraq against America’s history of transcontinental subjugation summarized by the phrase Manifest Destiny: “There are very few places in the world that should not be considered for statehood in the United States, and Iraq is not one of them.” The ninth chapter of the collection (like the eleventh) echoes themes Brantlinger explored in his examination of discourses of extinction (typically of “lower” or more “primitive” races) in Dark Vanishings. Examining the range of representations of Aboriginal Australians in recent literature, he highlights the nostalgic primitivism and commodification of aboriginal tropes, considers the interesting problem of “fake” Aboriginal writings, and concludes by calling into question any sort of authenticity as an anchor to identity: “In both racial and literary terms, the stress on authenticity is misleading,” since “a printed text is, in some sense, already inauthentic.”  Next, Brantlinger turns to Marshall McLuhan and the technological apocalyptic strands of thought (from postmodernists to GRAIN thinkers to crash theorists) he sees as McLuhan’s heirs. In Brantlinger’s penultimate chapter, he poignantly places the impoverished and all-too-unsupported veterans of recent American wars in the context of previous generations’ use of “exterminist” discourses to justify their inattention to “surplus” populations. Brantlinger closes the collection on an optimist note, contextualizing the work of the WSF in challenging dominant global economic structures, and insisting, against those who would dismiss such aims as utopian: “If ever people everywhere needed to think in utopian terms, it is surely now,” facing the wide range of problems (war, famine, ecological disaster, economic breakdown) that constitute our current “emergencies.”

Brantlinger’s collection is not without flaws. Some of its pieces seem comparatively lightweight (as much fun as it is to satirize the Tea Party, it’s sort of like fishing with dynamite); some seem somewhat out of place (exactly what McLuhan is doing in here is never quite clear). As careful as Brantlinger typically is with his sources, he lets a few writers off too easily (perhaps it is only from Kansas that the deep flaws in Thomas Frank’s thought become apparent, but Brantlinger credits his analysis too easily). As wide-ranging as Brantlinger’s theoretical perspectives are, there are still curious gaps (like the absence of Stuart Hall, whose cultural-studies credentials and strikingly parallel attempt to tangle with Thatcherism in the midst of its deprecations in Hard Road to Renewal [1988] should have recommended his inclusion). And Brantlinger really should get to more movies; Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer really belongs in his discussion of Mexican labor issues, and any number of robotic nightmares, from I, Robot to the Terminator series, could illuminate his discussion of “Nanoculture” among McLuhan’s heirs (and both David Cronenberg’s Crash and J. B. Ballard’s source text for that film certainly deserves a place in that chapter as well).

But these are minor quibbles. Overall, Brantlinger’s States of Emergency is a masterful series of excursions into contemporary crises that. The essays both display the deep value the capacity of cultural studies to come terms with contemporary issues and reveal how understanding the Victorian roots of today’s culture can illuminate our present conditions. Deeply researched (with full footnotes and bibliography), carefully thought out, and eloquently argued, they offer a refreshing relief from the babble of mainstream social and political commentary, and a source of hopeful vision against the varied voices of apocalypse.

The Ryder ● December 2013

Film Review: Ender’s Game

◆ by Lucy Morrell

Set in the future following an insect-like alien species’ near destruction and failed colonization of Earth, Ender’s Game is written and directed by Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and is based on the first book in Orson Scott Card’s popular Enderverse science fiction series in which human leaders train gifted children for warfare in order to defend against any further attacks. Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), a brilliant strategist and a child-sized cocktail of empathy and aggression, is humanity’s last hope. At just under two hours, the movie speeds through the events of the book, hitting all the highlights but diminishing each moment’s import in its simplification.

The implications of war, nevertheless, are made all the more intense by the active participation of children. But while the film is able to convey the overarching story and themes, it loses some of the more striking aspects of the book by substituting stock scenes for unique development.

The audience doesn’t actually see how Ender earns the trust and loyalty of his highly competitive peers, but he must because in one scene the children relocate en masse to his cafeteria table from his rival’s. The movie reduces a complex fight for allegiance and power to a petty display of lunchroom dynamics, which could just as easily be in any movie ever set in a high school.

General Graff (Harrison Ford), who oversees Battle School and takes a singular interest in Ender, is unnecessarily injected into scenes. His shouting never changes, but seems to act as a running commentary for the audience to recognize just how special Ender is — instead of allowing us to see for ourselves. In the book, Ender is always special but it often feels he is being singled out for mind games rather than epaulettes. With Harrison Ford constantly pushing him to high command, there is no such ambiguity. The focus shifts from Ender’s development in Battle School to the uninteresting and unchanging world of adults.

Ender is complex, and Asa Butterfield is expressive; he can handle the pressure of a close-up with no explanatory dialogue. The characters surrounding him, though, especially his siblings, are hopelessly two-dimensional. His brother appears only long enough to choke Ender in a fight, barely hinting at the sadistic cruelty he demonstrates in the book, and Valentine, played by a pouty Abigail Breslin, is no more than the overly empathetic female — valuable only in her concern and intuitive understanding. Of course, this is part of the point; Ender is the goldilocks just-right mixture for military command.

If you haven’t read the book, though, you won’t see the compromises, only the cleverness, for regardless of all that it skims through and cuts short, the movie has some awe-inspiring human ingenuity against a backdrop of stunning CGI.

[Image at top of post: Asa Butterfield as Ender Wiggin.]

The Ryder ● December 2013

The Push And The Pull

Two-person exhibition pays homage to IU’s historic printmaking traditions and offers promise for the future ◆ by Adam Rake

When we first met in 2012 at Indiana University’s MFA Printmaking Program we didn’t know our paths had already crossed 50 years before in Iowa City. Keegan’s grandfather, Thomas F. Chouteau, worked under the preeminent printmaker Professor Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa in the early 1960’s. In the 1940s Lasansky’s program launched the “Printmaking Revolution in America” that brought printmaking on par with painting and sculpture as a fine art medium. His students fanned out to universities across America to establish new printmaking programs, including here at Indiana University with Professors Marvin Lowe, and Rudy Pozatti, a student of Wendell Black, one of Lasansky’s first students. Keegan’s Aunt, Suzanne Chouteau, Professor of Art at Xavier University, also worked with Lasansky in the 1980’s. When I told Keegan — who was about to enter his second year of the MFA program — that I was coming to Bloomington from Iowa City after spending the previous 7 years working with the Lasansky family, we both knew we shared passions for a particular era in printmaking.

I first became absorbed in Printmaking in 2000 as an undergraduate at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I gravitated to its tactility, varied processes, and focused emphasis on drawing. Each medium within printmaking bends the artist’s intention to conform to its inherent properties. At its core printmaking is about resistance. The medium literally pushes back against us. We must contend with the copper plate, the woodblock, and the limestone slab. With them, we are involved in a continual process of preservation and decay, choosing what, when, where and how to allow forces — both chemically and directly from our hand — to act on them. Exactly how these forces will manifest in the final print is often unpredictable. Printmaking is my primary artistic medium because it forces me to relinquish my desire for complete aesthetic control and acquiesce to the beauty that only arises from the interaction between both human and natural forces.

Wanagi Tacaku

Keegan Adams’ “Wanagi Tacaku” Artist’s Book With Intaglio

Keegan’s father, Michael Adams, first introduced him to printmaking when he was 17. They etched a small drawing of a green pepper on a zinc plate using nitric acid. Seeing the print pulled changed his life. The combination of drawing, acid, metal, inks, paper, and thousands of pounds of pressure was exciting and seductive. It wasn’t until an introductory class in printmaking in undergrad that he discovered the full extent that printmaking had in his family’s history. Keegan avidly studied the history of modern printmaking, especially the Iowa legacy of innovation. New techniques, new sizes, new complexities of color and printing, and new thinking all came together. He understood that Midwest universities were the pioneers of this movement. Keegan recognized how intimate this print history was to the medium of printmaking as a whole, but even more intimately in terms of his family and own history. Indiana University’s leading role within this print Renaissance made their MFA program a premiere venue for graduate study. Its tradition of innovation was something he wanted to continue, like his relatives at Iowa, and nourish it further into the 21st Century.

In 2004 I packed all my belongings into my compact car and left Philadelphia for Iowa City. My hope was to work with the Lasansky family. A philosophy mentor of mine who grew up in Iowa City had introduced me to Lasansky’s youngest son Tomas’ work. I was enthralled. When I began to study his father’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art I knew these were the artists from whom I needed to learn most. After a year of knocking on his door, Tomas finally took me on as his printer and assistant. The opportunity he provided changed my life by providing me access to generations of artists and art, all with printmaking at the core of its creative essence. After 7 years, and without the prerequisite degrees to teach, I decided it was time to pursue a graduate degree. I chose IU for the same reasons as Keegan.

Keegan and I have the unique experience of being at IU during a period of transition. Ed Bernstein, Director of the program for over 20 years, who took over the position from Rudy Pozatti in 1991, just retired. Tracy Templeton, from Southern Oregon University has just taken the helm. Professor Templeton has already begun laying the groundwork to ensure IU remains a global center for printmaking in the 21st century. It is exciting for us to be able to add our voice to the future of the program. We hope our show pays homage and respect to the traditions that have lead IU’s program to its esteemed place in printmaking’s history. We believe the next century will be as important as the last to the survival of printmaking as an indispensible fine art medium. It will not survive without major research institutions like IU being the laboratories of innovation and stewards of its history.

It may seem that with its many technical concerns and idiosyncratic properties printmaking would be limiting in the pursuit of personal expression. But it is precisely how we push against and manage the resistance of those limitations–how we overcome them– that makes printmaking timeless.

Our current show, Keegan Adams/Adam Rake: Recent Works at The John Waldron Arts Center’s Rosemary P. Miller Gallery opening on December 6th, highlights the common origins and unlikely intersections of history that brought us together in Bloomington. Between our works one can observe what can be described as a distinctly “Midwestern vernacular” born out from that history. Yet, as newly appointed Director of IU Printmaking Tracy Templeton says, “both artists employ personal experience and identity to form compelling, tactile images that indirectly speak to the intimacy of their origins.” The show will include approximately thirty works. We will also display examples of the copper plates we used in the production of the prints, which are objects of importance in their own right.

[Image at top of post: Keegan Adams, Self Portrait, color intaglio.]

The Ryder ● December 2013

Surviving A Plague

by Brandon Walsh

There’s a moment in How To Survive a Plague, David France’s documentary account of the earliest and darkest days of the AIDS epidemic, when ten thousand men and women march on the nation’s capital, carrying the remains of their loved ones lost to the virus. Officers on horses resisting the crowd, protesters on the frontline form against the White House fence, tossing the ashes forward in unison on the front lawn. A man weeps as he repeats, “I love you Mike.”

Heartbreaking moments such as this appear throughout France’s film, comprised of mostly archival footage, news clips, and home movies. In the decade the documentary chronicles, from 1986 to 1996, the epidemic claimed over 8 million lives worldwide, and yet the film voices a story of profound optimism.

How To Survive a Plague follows the history of the New York-based advocacy group “AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power,” more commonly known as Act Up. The organization came into the national spotlight with its inventive and effective media presence, civil disobedience, and its slogan “Silence = Death.”

Realizing that changing culture was not enough to address the lack of government attention towards AIDS funding, Act Up and TAG activists became engaged participants of the FDA’s drug-approval process. As result of this self-education, Act Up’s involvement directly resulted in the emergence of antiretroviral drug treatment, which has saved nearly six million lives since, yet is still unaffordable to many today.

France

David France

France paces his film quickly, highlighting Act Up’s successes and failures, meanwhile foregrounding the humanity of the passionate men and women who led the movement, who recognized the historic importance of their work as well as the likelihood of their own deaths. The film highlights the effects of the deaths, shaking the internal politics of the organization itself as well as addressing the guilt felt by those who survive today.

In many ways the film acts as a convincing endorsement for grassroots efforts and physical presence as a means of producing immediate social change, specifically relevant upon its release in late 2012, surrounding the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements.

As the documentary advocates for organized collaborative efforts, it is of little surprise that the film’s credits recognize 30 archival cinematographers by name, several of which noted as deceased. With such in mind the film memorializes the movement as much as it does the bravery of its leaders.

Though France works foremost as a print journalist covering LGBT-related issues, his directorial debut was awarded several accolades, including best documentary at the 2012 Gotham Independent Film Awards and Boston Society of Film Critics, as well as a nomination for best documentary in the 2012 Academy Awards. David France was nominated for a Director’s Guild Award and Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The film currently has a 100% fresh rating on the film aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.

During one of the film’s protest funerals, Act Up leader Bob Rafsky says to a crowd, “When the living can no longer speak, the dead may speak for them. Mark’s voice is here with us, as is the voice of Perecles, who two millennia ago mourned the Athenian soldiers, who didn’t have to die, and in whose death he was complicit, but who had the nobility to say that their memorial was the whole Earth.” The film is dedicated to David Gould, France’s lover who in 1992 died to AIDS-related pneumonia.

How To Survive a Plague is a story of movement in the face of blockage, optimism in the wake of loss, voiced through the mouthpiece of those who led a social movement that saved millions of lives, but who are not yet finished fighting.

Director David France will be present for Indiana University’s 35mm screening of How To Survive A Plague on Wednesday, November 20 at 7:00pm in the Whittenberger Auditorium located in the Indiana Memorial Union. Following the documentary, Mr. France will discuss the film and accept questions from the audience.

The event is presented as part of the Union Board Film Series, in partnership with Sexploration Week, Indiana University’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Alumni Association, and Positive Link (a program of IU Health). The free, non-ticketed event will be open to the public. For more information visit the Union Board website or Union Board Films on Facebook.

[Brandon Walsh is the director of the Union Board Film Series, an undergraduate senior studying in the Communication & Culture and Telecommunications departments.]

The Ryder ◆ November 2013

Culture And The Power Of Words

An Evening with Author Nicole Mones ◆ by Carol Shapiro

Today I heard a radio announcement for story hour at 3:00 at the Mitchell County Library and was immediately transported back to my own childhood. My mother encouraged me to be an avid reader and I experienced many enthralling story hours at our local Carnegie Public Library. I can still hear Virginia Jones’s animated voice as she spun fascinating tales that kept us all listening intently.

That was my introduction to public libraries and since then libraries have been among my favorite haunts, from the library at Washington University where I majored in English literature, to my present connection with Bloomington’s own top-ten library (5th among 329 ratings in its league) where I served as a member of the Friends of the Library Board.  I am now involved in bringing a storyteller to our city—award-winning novelist Nicole Mones, whose fourth novel, drawn from her extensive experiences in China, is forthcoming.  She will give a free public talk at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on Saturday, November 16, at 7:00 p.m.  Following the lecture will be a ticketed champagne and music reception at the library, which will give readers the opportunity to engage with the author in person.

Book Cover

As its many visitors and long-time residents will agree, the Monroe County Public Library is truly exceptional in its offerings.  In an era in which many libraries have had to cut back or even close, the MCPL continues to grow, receive awards, and stay on the cutting edge of library technology.  By becoming a member of the Friends of the Library I found a way to show my gratitude for all I have received, free of charge, over the years.  Amazingly, this organization is able to contribute close to $100,000 annually to the library budget.  The money, raised through membership dues, book sales, an annual Campaign for Excellence and other activities, is used throughout the library to sponsor and enhance programs, many of which benefit children and teens.  Funds are also used for purchasing patron requests, providing supplies for the VITAL adult literacy program and CATS (Community Access Television Service) and presenting adult programs including movies, professional development for library staff and much more.

Stellar among these programs is the biennial Power of Words (POW). Presented as a gift back to the community POW features a nationally recognized writer whose literary talent and universal themes provide insight into local issues and concerns.  The goals of the program are to provide an opportunity to become involved in a visible community of readers and to experience an author in the context of the many cultural traditions found within Monroe County.

In this age when the local and the global are culturally and economically intertwined, and US-Asian connections are important and intricate, the choice of author was easily made.  As a young liberal arts graduate with an adventurous turn of mind, Nicole Mones transplanted herself to China in the mid-1970s, soon after the end of that country’s Cultural Revolution, to start a textile export business that kept her criss-crossing the Pacific for nearly two decades.  In the course of these travels and business dealings, she became immersed in Chinese art, culture, language and cuisine, the latter to the extent that she became a food writer covering the Chinese restaurant scene for Gourmet magazine and several major American newspapers.  From the riches of these experiences she composed three novels that weave modern western and Chinese aesthetics and values with more traditional perspectives, each focusing on a particular cultural theme while exploring the human side of cross-national connections.

The first of the three books that I read, The Last Chinese Chef, is her most recent and also the only American finalist for the prestigious international Kiriyama Prize in 2008 and a World Gourmand Award winner in the Chinese cookbook category.  It is a novel from which I gleaned a rich knowledge pertaining to traditional Chinese cuisine in spite of the fact that the book has no recipes!  The protagonist, Maggie McEllroy, is given a writing assignment in Beijing that eventually involves sampling and assisting with the preparation of ancient traditional Chinese recipes, described in “The Last Chinese Chef” (a book within a book), which had supposedly been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.  I found myself in awe of the reverent, almost spiritual nature of traditional Chinese food preparation.  An example is a seemingly simple dish made of tofu with crab sauce, which involved using thirty crabs and hours of patient tending.

Her second novel, A Cup of Light offers an education in the history and qualities of ancient Chinese porcelain while weaving in themes of romance and intrigue.  It also addresses issues of authenticity and inherent beauty as well as the dilemma of economic values versus the pricelessness of treasures from the past.  This novel has been chosen for discussion by the local Friends of Art book club, as have other of Ms. Mones’s novels by additional book discussion groups.

Mones’s first novel, Lost in Translation, recognized as a New York Times Notable Book, takes us into the world of archaeology.  What begins for translator Alice Mannegan as a trek into the remote deserts of northwest China quickly turns into a journey of the heart.  As the country itself struggles to reconcile its own past and present, Alice must come to terms with the complicated relationships in her own life.  Lost in Translation won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best work of fiction by an American woman as well as the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Association Annual Book Award.

Visit the event website for video discussions of each of the three novels and a link to the author’s own website.  Mones’s novels have been translated into 18 languages and movie rights have been purchased for The Last Chinese Chef.  Her fourth novel will feature a historical setting in the Chinese jazz age.

To obtain either a free general admission pass or purchase a premium ticket to the author event please visit the library website or drop by the Friends of the Library Bookstore. A premium ticket costs $50 and must be purchased in advance.  It includes reserved seating at the author talk; admission to the gala reception; free reserved downtown parking during POW events on November 16; and merchant discounts during November.  Free general admission passes to the author talk also include merchant discounts.  All proceeds will be used to support Mones’s visit and other programs and materials for the library.

IU Lifelong Learning offers a total event package.  “Chinese Culture and the Works of Nicole Mones” will be taught in three evening classes, November 7, 14 and 16.  The cost for the course is $65 which includes the lectures, priority seating for the author’s talk at the Buskirk-Chumley, a ticket to the champagne reception, and parking for both events.  Guest lecturers with be Sue Tuohy from the IU Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Sara Laughlin, director of the Monroe County Public Library. For more information visit the IU Continuing Education website or call (812) 855-9335.

Other related events include a Books Plus discussion on The Last Chinese Chef led by Sarah Bowman at 2:00 p.m. on November 3 at the library.

Continuing partners for the Power of Words event include Indiana University Lifelong Learning, the IU Fall Themester Advisory Committee, local media, book discussion groups, bookstores and other businesses.  Also involved is the staff from the IU International Center and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.  Sponsors for this event include the Friends of The Library, Monroe County Public Library, the City of Bloomington, Ivy Tech Community College, IU Themester 2013, WFIU and WTIU.

The Ryder ◆ November 2013

FILM: September New Releases

◗ Blue Jasmine reviewed by Lucy Morrell

In Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen departs from his usual humor and instead delivers a portrayal of a socialite whose life collapses with the fall of her scheming Wall Street husband (Alec Baldwin). Having exhausted the last of her money, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) arrives with upper-crust sensibilities and a medley of prescription drugs in San Francisco where she must “slum it” with her adopted sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). The film cuts back and forth between Jasmine’s idealized past and imperfect present, in which both she and Ginger struggle with life and romance.

Cate Blanchett is phenomenal as Jasmine, an atypical Woody Allen protagonist. The comical neuroses that seem to plague most of Allen’s characters are replaced in Jasmine with severe mental illness and denial. Blanchett is convincingly afflicted, her whole being radiating a sense of instability. Blanchett’s performance leaves little room for relief, though, as Jasmine’s perspective becomes an increasingly uncomfortable headspace for the audience to inhabit. Even flashbacks to less psychologically volatile times are painful to watch, with the old, moneyed Jasmine being incapable of interacting with her sister across economic and social barriers.

Blue Jasmine

Cate Blanchett & Woody Allen On The Set Of “Blue Jasmine”

In the few scenes when the perspective shifts away from Jasmine, the audience sees Ginger with various men, including an ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), a hot-blooded fiancé (Bobby Cannavale), and a dodgy lover (Louis C.K.). None of these men live up to Jasmine’s warped standards of class, leading one to believe that only sleazy men and troubled women populate this film’s world. Few of the characters are likable; even Jasmine—so incredibly portrayed by Blanchett—is at best watchable.

The characters simply cannot grow in this film centered around self-destruction and resignation. Allen seems so set on making the audience realize the cyclic nature of relationships and life choices, that real development is curtailed or pointless. The film lacks humor and hope, but in the end it might be worth watching merely to see characters played by fantastic actors stumbling around and making an absolute muck of their lives.

◗ Riddick reviewed by Lucy Morrell

As the third theatrically released movie in the series, Riddick is by far the least nuanced. It exists only to perpetuate, rather than develop, its title character. The premise even seems like a poor amalgamation of the earlier films, with the monsters from Pitch Black and the bounty hunters from Chronicles of Riddick. Now stranded on a hostile planet, Riddick (Vin Diesel), an escaped convict, triggers an emergency beacon to lure bounty hunters to the surface so that he might steal their spacecraft.

Two groups of bounty hunters respond, and it becomes quite clear in the course of a few minutes of inane dialogue, that none of these characters is going to be compelling or dynamic. Santana (Jordi Molla) an incompetent loudmouth leads one, and Johns (Matt Nable), well-equipped and straitlaced, commands the other. While they are disappointingly unoriginal, the true travesty of character comes with Dahl, played by Katee Sackoff. The only female character in the film, she is reduced to her sexuality in the most stereotypical way possible. She can throw some punches and shoot big guns, so of course Dahl has to be a butch lesbian, who doesn’t sleep with men but rather slaughters them. That doesn’t stop any man, though, including Riddick, from aggressively propositioning her. Riddick through his obvious and superior display of virile ability is able to “turn” her, so that in the final scenes Dahl (backlit like a feminine angel) straddles him and promises to fulfill his masculine desires.

From "Riddick"

“Riddick”

The characters, specifically Dahl, and the scenarios within the film seem to exist only to make Riddick into a hyper-masculine ideal. He is well nigh indestructible (e.g. he cauterizes a giant hole in his chest and climbs a rocky cliff) and has a predator intelligence that all of his pursuers lack. He can tame wild beasts, build up immunity to venom, and set his own shattered leg, all of which he can do with no more than a grimace. In previous movies, his abilities were at least tempered with vulnerabilities, like feeling guilt and responsibility for the well-being of another human. In this film, his only connection is to an alien dog.

Riddick is not clever or original even within its own series. It is reduced to the barest of stereotypical frameworks, but at the same time, there is still the occasional thrill that comes with the foreknowledge of destruction at the hands of an indomitable fighter.

American Politics and Blomkamp’s Failed Dystopia: An unfair review of Elysium by Justin Chandler

There’s this point in Elysium, after learning about main character Max DeCosta’s childhood (orphan, raised with Spanish-speaking children, by Spanish-speaking nuns, in a Spanish-speaking community) where adult Max is walking to work in apparently the same neighborhood and you wonder: Why the hell doesn’t this guy speak Spanish? Why not even an accent? He was speaking fluent Spanish like…five minutes ago. What just happened?

From "Elysium"

On Elysium In “Elysium”

If you’re like me, you probably realize the obvious answer: it’s because that’s not Max! That’s Matt Damon, playing the character of Max DeCosta in Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up to District 9. Sadly, neither this explanation nor any other you come up with is likely to overcome the disappointment and boredom you’ll feel if, like me, you sit through the whole thing, barely able to keep from wondering whether Grown Ups 2 has shown that car wash scene yet. Regardless of whether you’ve seen it or not, what follows is a brief summary, followed by a far from exhaustive list of all the dumb stuff Elysium does.

Elysium takes its name from a ring-shaped satellite that, in the future, is populated by the super-rich and orbits around a wasteland called “Earth.” The people on Elysium are greedy, mostly white, have awesome tanning-bed machines that heal them, and throw fancy parties. That’s about it. Oh, and they also hate the poor  people from Earth (all minorities) who fly spaceships into the big open area on the side of Elysium that looks either glass encased or like a vacuum deathtrap, but turns out to be an artificial atmosphere.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the poor people get harassed by robots and work various menial jobs for companies owned by people on Elysium. It’s a lot like America, actually, or the way that a myopic and liberal writer might conceive it. Max DeCosta (technically Matt Damon as Max) happens to be one of those workers. He’s a lifelong thief who, after a stint in jail, has given up his life of crime to work a really crappy factory job for no discernible reason.

That is, until Max gets totally screwed over by his boss and gets radiation poisoning. The only hope for Max comes by way of Spider, a sort of thug boss who agrees to help Max get to Elysium and use the healing bed thingy if Max helps Spider catch somebody really rich.

Long story short, Max goes through with it, a bunch of talking and strangely Call of Duty-inspired fight scenes ensue and, at the end, Max realizes that he’s going to die and that his only option is to sacrifice himself so everyone on Earth will be granted citizen status on Elysium.

It’s a really great thing for somebody to do, no doubt. But by the end of the movie, we’re bound to have more questions than answers, the biggest of which is, if it’s as easy as sending a bunch of spaceships down to Earth to help people, why didn’t the rich people do that way sooner?

Of course they couldn’t, because these rich people aren’t people at all. They aren’t even actors playing rich people! They are one thing only: “bad guys.” No one on Elysium shows the slightest hint of concern for the people on Earth, whereas the people on Earth—even thug bosses like Spider—end up turning out to be considerate (albeit sassy) human beings.

This is a problem, mainly because Blomkamp’s goal for Elysium has nothing to do with being conceptually inventive or action-packed. His real goal is to make us think. But it fails, primarily because it adopts the divisionary close-mindedness it intends  to critique. Rather than treating its enemies like valid and identifiably human humans (the way it treats the poor), it treats them like heartless Scrooges. At no point do we wonder what Max’s boss is like, his hopes and dreams, whether he’s ever lost someone he loved. The same goes for megalomaniacal Secretary of Defense Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster). Thoughts about who they are as people never cross our mind; they are defined and doomed by their affluence.

So what do we do? If—as Blomkamp recently claimed in an interview—greed is hardwired into our DNA, then what? Blomkamp’s explicit answer is “change the human genome.” Easy enough.

Another answer is that the rich could share the wealth. But in no way is Elysium an appeal to those it demonizes. Who, watching Elysium, is going to say, “Hey, that rich jerkwad reminds me of me!” No one will, not because we aren’t jerkwads now and then, but because the jerkwads in Elysium are nothing but.

You can’t show people (whether they are the rich or Republicans or Hipsters) anything if your starting premise is that they are ignorant, crude caricatures of real humanity. Real dialogue requires dialogue, not demonizing. Blumkamp did it in District 9, when he took a bumbling, self-centered jerkwad and put him through the ringer. By the end of the movie, Wikus is us. We’ve come to identify with him through his torturous ordeal. He’s still the same person, thinking only of himself, but he’s a jerkwad who recognizes it. Wikus’s nearly final statement, as he sacrifices himself not for all of humanity but for an alien father and son, is a sincere recognition of this inner division: “Go now, before I change my mind.” But it is the complexity of Wikus that makes it possible for us to identify and in some ways change with him.

But this isn’t Blomkamp’s plan for Elysium. The answer it offers? Human sacrifice. Matt—er, Max—sacrifices himself for the greater good. But this is equally false, not because heroes don’t exist, but because the situations that we face  are more complex than a movie like Elysium can possibly imagine. Max’s death allows a computer code to be overwritten, allowing all of humanity to be granted citizenship in Elysium. But here, in the real world, there is no computer code that can be overwritten. There is no quick fix. It takes more than one person to save us. The real answer lies in dealing with each other, with our selfishness and selflessness.

So why can’t someone on Elysium feel for someone on Earth? Or vice versa? There is no reason. The paradox of living is that we do so for ourselves and for others, and the beautiful thing about art is that when we are least selfless, it can change us, can make us feel linked with other people. One of the times when this can happen is when our art captures the complexity of the human experience. But Elysium fails to change us, to even make us think, because it embraces a separatist mindset, because it depicts the real battle as one between “us” and “them,” rather than what it actually is: a single body, confused, and fighting itself over what is wrong and how to make it right.

The Ryder ◆ September 2013

MUSIC: Béla Fleck

The 13-time Grammy Award winner is coming to the IU Auditorium ◆ by Hannah Waltz

[Béla Fleck and the IU Jacobs School of Music Orchestra led by Giancarlo Guerrero will perform at the IU Auditorium on October 30.]

This October Bloomington will host one the most accomplished and versatile banjo players of our time, Béla Fleck. Renowned for adapting the banjo to virtually any musical genre, including bluegrass, rock, jazz, world beat, classical, and more, it’s no surprise that Fleck has been awarded fifteen Grammys since 1998. In fact, his thirty Grammy nomination nods in a variety of categories make him the first musician to have been nominated in so many musical categories in Grammy history.

But the gamut of his career extends beyond the Grammys. Fleck has collaborated with a wide range of musicians, often collaborating in bands, as he did with the New Grass Revival and his own band the Fleckstones. Although Fleck has performed alongside headliners like Dave Matthews and Phish, he’s no back up man. In September 2011 The Nashville Symphony Orchestra commissioned Fleck’s first stand-alone banjo concerto The Impostor, ten years after Fleck’s album Perpetual Motion, which he worked on with friend Edgar Meyer, won two Grammys.

Even with these milestones of musical grandeur under his belt, Fleck shows no sign of slowing down his creative momentum and continues to compose and tour today. Ryder asked Fleck a few questions about his life and the banjo the way he sees it.

Ryder What would you say was the most unique musical setting in which you incorporated the banjo? What other instruments were you playing with? What made it so unique?

Béla Fleck It’s hard to say… I guess at one time the Flecktones were the most unique setting, but followed by Perpetual Motion, with classical soloists, and Throw Down Your Heart, with African Musicians, duos with Chick Corea, playing with Indian and Chinese musicians on Tabula Rassa, and now with Symphony orchestra  and String Quartet – I’d say that I love to find unique settings for the banjo, and I don’t intend to stop looking for them!

Ryder You are the epitome of musical genre versatility—do you feel like you’re entering a new world when you cross genres? Or are they all more related in your mind, more so than some might think?

BF Well, I am certainly the limiting factor in each of these settings. They could do much more complex things if I weren’t playing! I can only play what I am capable of today, and keep trying to expand myself by putting myself in situations where I must learn and I must rise to the occasion. I pretty much play the same in every setting – as much like myself as I can figure out how to do. And so that relates the idioms insofar as how they relate to me, I suppose.

Ryder What would be a genre of music that the banjo lends itself to that is perhaps unexpected to untrained ears?

BF It would sound fine in most music. It can be a great rock instrument, really adding to the groove, if it’s the right beat. And in classical music it brings a timbre that no other instrument has. That is why it works so well in the orchestra, which is a group that supplies as many different distinct sounds as possible in one group.

Ryder You have been performing with the Fleckstones for 25+ years. What is it about the group makes it work so well as a unit.

BF Everyone in the Flecktones is an inventor, a leader and a composer. And we all like to confound expectations as to what is expected from our instruments. So we are like minds, and it isn’t easy to find collaborators who think as similarly as we do, especially considering how different our backgrounds are.

Ryder What part has musical collaboration played in your career? Who are your favorite musicians to play with?

BF Collaboration is one of the most exciting things to me in music. And the people that I get to play with are such phenomenons. Chick Corea, Edgar Meyer, Zakir Hussain, Marcus Roberts, Chris Thile, Victor Wooten, Howard Levy, Future Man, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Dave Mathews, Brooklyn Rider, Nashville, Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras…Holy Cow, I get to play with the best!

Ryder You’re credited with having changed the sound and performance of the banjo—(if you agree) how would you say that you have done that?

BF I don’t know that that is really true. I have played the banjo in lots of settings though, and been able to get the banjo into the public eye pretty often. I am glad that I get to play music that I am proud of, and that it reaches out to enough people that I get to keep doing it!

The Ryder ◆ September 2013

1 3 4 5 6 7 9