Kony's Klub @LRA @Uganda #children #Africa

I watched “Kony 2012”, today, guys. Its not often that something spurs me to write. Something really has to bother me to get the Ancient American treatment.

Let me just start by saying, whoa! Am I the only who thinks that, for a video about the plight of African children at the hands of a ruthless warlord, there is very little about the children and an awful lot about this guy and his kid and their organization and the great things they’ve done? Well, no, I’m not. In the latter half of the day criticism of “Kony 2012” swept the Internet with the same force and determination that the video had as it swept Facebook and Twitter throughout the morning. And I’m glad I’m not the only one.

“Kony 2012” is a puzzling video and accompanying social media campaign put out by Invisible Children, a top-secret military invisibility-technology research corporation and a non-profit that advocates for “stopping Kony.” No, not the island in Brooklyn, you stupid cafone. The leader of East Africa’s most controversial Christian daycare center, the Lord’s Resistance Army. For more than twenty-five years Joseph Kony has been raiding villages throughout East Africa, slaughtering its inhabitants and abducting the children for use as child soldiers and sex slaves.

And at the front lines of the chaos, Invisible Children is pitted in a daring battle against the LRA to keep Uganda’s children safe. Well, the Ugandan army has been doing most of the front line battling. But Invisible Children is playing just as important a role, and to prove it they released a documentary, “Kony 2012,” which went viral yesterday.

Now, I don’t know much about Uganda or the LRA or African politics or non-profit social work, but I’m going to exercise a little common sense and attempt to debunk Invisible Children’s message right off the bat. “Stop Kony"--judging from the fact that the guy isn't exactly coming forward to face the music and that the video celebrates Obama's deployment of 100 troops to Uganda, this means “kill or capture Kony.” So, Invisible Children is interventionist. They are advocating for military intervention in Uganda to kill or capture Kony. Huh? The guy has a child army. Do we really want to fight a child army? Aren’t we trying to save these children? Isn’t any diplomatic effort, any concession such as amnesty, aid, or territory, however drawn-out and indecisive, preferable to military confrontation of a child army? If a military solution was desirable or even possible, wouldn’t the Ugandan military have ended this twenty years ago? Why are Ugandans being characterized as ineffectual yellow-bellied nitwits who have neglected to stop this?

As the youtube video ended, I had more questions about what I had just seen than I did about the situation in Uganda. I thought this was about African child soldiers? Why is the whole movie just shots of college kids marching around and crying and putting up posters? Where are the Ugandans? Why is this little five-year-old white kid a central figure in a documentary about Ugandan victims of war? Why is this documentary about Ugandan children utterly focused on white people and their accomplishments? Why are the white people in the film cast as saviors of these African children? 

The filmmakers lose almost all credibility with me as white Americans play a central role in this story about Ugandans(many have charged that the film's message constitutes nothing less than a reiteration of the white man's burden). Why should I trust these filmmakers? How do I know that Kony is the bad guy? Because his opponents have access to high-budget Western filmmakers? Because his opponents control the government and therefore have a semblance of legitimacy? Buzz on the Internet has it that the Ugandan establishment is no prize itself, that its military regularly rapes and pillages. And why do these aforementioned posters show Kony alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden? I mean, surely the circumstances and social forces that led to Kony’s rise are completely different from those of Hitler and Osama bin Laden, two very different people themselves?

Why is the conversation about Kony being dumbed down to a Hitler comparison? My elementary research (a quick glance at Kony’s Wikipedia page) indicates that this is an ethnic dispute, a remnant of colonialism that many other African countries still suffer with, the result of arbitrary borders and ethnic favoritism established by European powers. So, like Islamic fundamentalism or European fascism, the Kony sensation has its own unique set of circumstances with historical roots which can’t easily be undone, the product of massive intercultural fomentation, right? So why the curt Hitler/Osama comparison?

I’m sure that if Kony had a sizeable publicity budget he could and would hire some hipsters to make a documentary about him in which he looks like a glorious freedom-fighter, where he’s portrayed among the ranks  of Toussaint Louverture or Pancho Villa or Robin Hood, a courageous leader of a band of freedom-fighters whose draconian overlords have driven them to inhabit the forests as outlaws.

Which isn’t to say that he is like any of those people. Kony seems like an awful individual and I’d give him a titty-twister or two right now if I came face to face with him. That’s not my point. It’s just that once you get into the realm of sentimental manipulative fluffy puff pieces like “Kony 2012,” you’re doing a disservice to intelligence and honesty everywhere.

My point is that it’s never as simple as a Hitler comparison suggests (except with Hitler). I’m going to get Oliver Stone-y here - the whole movie feels like some CIA propaganda piece, with soaring globalist-activist messages and simply drawn caricatures of evil-doers (children= good, man who want to hurt children=bad). The whole thing dumbs down the situation and appeals to emotions; like the assassin mind-control movie in The Parallax View, it's little more than a series of shots of people crying, cheering, fighting, smiling, playing, all to upbeat music. It is utterly devoid of substance. So, I’m very suspicious of anything that portrays a seemingly complicated issue in such black-and-white (no pun) terms. Especially on the heels of the discovery of two billion barrels of oil in Uganda and at a time when China and the United States are jockeying for influence in the region.

But maybe I’m giving these filmmakers too much credit; maybe this isn't some CIA front designed to drum up popular support for a foray into Africa and neatly cast America as the savior of Ugandan children rather than the oil-grubbing empire it is. (Though I wouldn't put it past our C.I.A. psyops friends to engineer such a plot to manipulate the masses. The movie urges people to demand their government to take action, conveniently positioning Obama, if he acts on this opportunity to secure American interests in Africa, as responsive to both public opinion and humanitarian causes. "A crazy evil warlord who kills children and is just like Hitler, you say?  We need troops on the ground NOW!" Who wouldn't support that? Even the most anti-war hippie in Vermont couldn't disagree with that. It's almost a cliche of manipulation--the whole Kony situation is posed as a false choice--no one can reasonably disagree with the assertion that a child-murdering Hitler-incarnate should be "stopped.")

It could just be that the filmmakers are incredibly smug self-righteous people who wanted to make a documentary about the plight of Ugandan children but couldn’t seem to keep the camera lens off of themselves and their children and their many accomplishments. Or maybe it's just that simplifying 300 years of African politics into a 30-minute documentary about one man is a fool’s errand, it can’t be done with any semblance of caution or discrimination.

My research and analysis is admittedly brief and elementary. But if anything that’s a reflection of the superficiality of this campaign. I disliked the video so much that I couldn’t even bring myself to watch it again to try to more thoroughly understand its message. But one thing I am sure of is that the film did not leave me thinking “we have to stop Kony.” It left me thinking, “who would give these guys money to fly around the world producing this glossy rubbish?”

I’m sure the Ugandans and their neighboring nations have been trying to stop Kony for the twenty-something years he’s been on the lam. I am also sure that some social media campaign is not the solution the Ugandan people have been waiting for. Or maybe it is. Who knows? Until the Ugandan people and Kony open up Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, we may never know what they want or what the solution is.

The Good, The Bad and The Natural: A Bullet in the Heart of American Culture

A paper written for the Skidmore American Studies dept.'s Nature and American Culture class that I'd like to share with you. Yes, you. You, the one with the face. I'm talking to you. 

            Since the time the United States first began its westward expansion, the popular American mind has been infatuated with the west. The “West” in our culture has long been synonymous with the wild and the untamable, as catalyzed and evidenced by depictions of it throughout the years. Nineteenth-century artists captured the wildness of the American west in paintings like those we studied earlier in the semester, such as Tait’s “The Prairie Hunter, One Rubbed Out!”, and Durand’s “Progress.” These paintings helped to imbue the west with a mythical status as a place of adventure and wilderness. Americans’ fascination with the west and the wildness it embodies has been present in American popular culture ever since, and as the early twentieth-century brought new media into the cultural sphere, new portrayals of the west emerged. Among the most notable of these portrayals is the Western. The Western genre of film surfaced during the silent film era and continued to bring the mythos of the wild west into the homes and minds of Americans throughout the 1940’s and 50’s. Films such as The Searchers (1956) perpetuated the myth of a wild, savage, and lawless west where civilized society cannot thrive. The Westerns of this era generally depicted morally righteous Euro-American lawmen battling Indians and bandits in an attempt to establish order in the west.

            In the early 1960’s a new type of Western emerged. Italian filmmakers began making what came to be called “Spaghetti Westerns.” These low-budget films were most frequently filmed in Spain’s Andalusia region because of its resemblance to the American West, and featured mostly Spanish and Italian actors. Films of this genre were initially referred to as “Spaghetti Westerns” in a derogatory manner meant to denote the inexpensive production cost and lack of depth of story telling. One film stands out, however, as not only an excellent achievement in filmmaking, but as a very significant depiction of the American West. Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) marks a departure from the traditional Western, and presents a very concise idea of the west as a foremost wild place. Perhaps Leone’s achievement in depicting the west can be attributed to his status as a foreigner. His objective view of American culture’s ideas about its “Old West” seem to grant him a very keen lens with which to recreate its mythos.

            Up until Leone’s Man With No Name trilogy of which the aforementioned film is a part, Westerns generally presented very clear-cut morally guided depictions of the west. It was portrayed as a place devoid of order wherein the hero must defeat the bad guys. In many of these traditional Westerns, portrayals of the land were secondary to the execution of the melodramatic plotline. High Noon (1952), for example, while an incredible film, does not necessarily depict the west, but rather one man’s struggle to find his moral center; the west in this film is nothing more than a backdrop for an albeit incredibly nuanced and well executed lesson in courage and morality. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, on the other hand, presents the west in a very sublime and amoral fashion, which touches directly upon American culture’s core understanding of the west as an above-all, fundamentally wild place.

            The Good, The Bad and The Ugly goes further than any other film in depicting the wildness of the west. Leone’s west in this film is a barren wasteland, a lawless land that is lorded over by vagabonds and criminals. This has essentially been the setting of most Westerns, however, and what truly makes The Good, The Bad and The Ugly stand out is its fundamentally amoral point of view. Leone’s west is a land that is utterly devoid of order and morality. It is defined only by three primeval forces: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, as personified by Blondie, Angel Eyes, and Tuco respectively[1]. These characters are all wandering gunfighters whose lives revolve around the acquisition of money. The different values attributed to these characters might suggest that there exists a clear moral dynamic which warrants sympathy for a character and creates a morally driven plot, but this is not the case. Rather, these three forces as embodied by their respective characters are not clearly defined; they are all in opposition to one another and at the same time cannot exist without one another. Blondie is good when compared to the cold-blooded Angel Eyes, Angel Eyes is bad when compared to the childlike innocence of Tuco, and Tuco’s self-indulgent animosity is ugly when compared to the occasional morality displayed by Blondie; they are all, nevertheless, criminals, thieves, and killers. The lack of moral definition, and the tension and overlap between these three forces, creates a focus on the land they inhabit as being fundamentally chaotic.

            That Blondie is not inherently good, Angel Eyes is not inherently bad, and Tuco is not inherently ugly, and that any one of them can at any time embody any of these traits, reinforces the idea that they exist in an inherently wild place that is devoid of order. This barebones emphasis on the west as a place of chaos strikes at American culture’s core understanding of the west as wild. Leone goes further to demonstrate this notion of the west as wild by placing another culturally weighted subject, the American Civil War, in the context of this chaotic place. Though it is foremost a critique of war as a senseless engagement, Leone’s depiction of the Civil War in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, demonstrates how an attempt to ascribe meaning to and establish order in the west is ultimately futile.

            The Civil War has long been the subject of momentous cultural attention, and contention, though few ever think of its significance as a war that was partially fought in the west. Throughout the film, Leone’s triumvirate of chaos weaves in and out of confrontations with both the Union and Confederate armies. Juxtaposed are the eternally chaotic struggles between the three primeval forces of the land and the efforts of both the Union and the Confederacy to establish order and win the land over. The fact that the paths of the titular characters only intersect with the happenings of the Civil War and are never defined by them reflects the notion that the west, as embodied by the characters, is wild and untamable by armies and ideology. The efforts of the Union and Confederate armies are ultimately futile.

            In one scene toward the end of the film the opposing armies are on either side of a river, and each is trying to capture the bridge that stands between them. There are two attacks each day, as explained by the drunken Union Captain who is experiencing and understanding firsthand the futility of it all, and evidently neither army can beat out the other; they stand in complete stalemate. Along come Blondie and Tuco who completely destroy the bridge with explosives. Following the destruction of the bridge, both armies abandon their positions on the riverbanks, leaving only their dead. The armies are left defeated by nature, by the wildness of the west as personified by the titular characters. The chaotic nature of the land, as embodied by the actions of the main characters, undermines the Union’s and Confederacy’s attempts to conquer and ascribe ideological meaning to a morally obsolete place.

            In the final scene, the three opposing forces gather in the same place at the same time for the first time in the film. Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes, all three forces, are brought together in a circle surrounded by a graveyard full of Civil War dead. The three engage in a Mexican standoff, in one final and brilliant display of the unpredictability and wildness that define them and the land they represent.

In The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Leone strikes deep at the core of the American cultural understanding of the west. The common meaning that unites all portrayals and defines our cultural ideas of the west is that of wildness. What Leone has done in his depiction of the American west is solely present this wildness. The paintings of the mid nineteenth-century reflect this cultural understanding of the west as wild, though they bare strong political and nationalistic overtones. The Westerns of the 1940’s and 50’s present a wild west as well, though their foci are most frequently on melodramatics and Hollywood glamour. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, however, presents our cultural understanding of the west as wild, in its most unadulterated and purest form.

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[1] Who are played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach, respectively.

VISIONS OF FREEDOM IN ZUCCOTTI PARK

An extrapolation of reflections that I put to paper after a visit to Zuccotti Park during the first week of  the Occupy Wall Street protest.

On a warm golden September afternoon I drifted through Lower Manhattan in search of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. It was only a couple days into the occupation and Zuccotti Park had not yet become internationally recognizable as the headquarters of the movement. But that is where I found them, in a previously insignificant and characterless square dotted with marble benches with which I was familiar due to a nearby friend but had never known the name of, a “park” so bland that I’d never considered it anything but the site of a future skyscraper.

 What I originally intended as a 10 minute stop turned into 3 hours. I strolled around the park, back and forth, winding through the crowd, stopping here to listen to a speaker, there to listen to a guitar play, and each time I began to make my way toward Church St. to hop on the NR back to Brooklyn, I looked out onto the street at the edge of the park and stared up at the rapidly rising steel skeletons shooting up from the World Trade Center site.

With this carnival-like bivouac and its inhabitants’ luddite-y message against “a corporate monoculture” behind me, and this grand but dwarfing tribute to the resilience of capitalism in front, I felt emotionally taut, conflicted between these two images, but each time I turned and walked right back into the park, drawn by the feeling that this park, more so than the WTC site, was the center of something. It felt like an epicenter of energy and positivity and freedom, and by comparison the site of the future “freedom tower” felt like a depressing quagmire of impersonal and soulless greed.

It was only while strolling around that park that I began to fully realize what hippies and yippies and beats meant when they spoke of “happenings.” Four years of studying social movements and 1960s counterculture in college could not convey that concept as clearly as did an hour in Zuccotti Park. When I read of happenings in college texts I focused on the setting, imagining hippies frolicking in vast plains of green grass in Golden Gate park. I recognized but could not grasp, until that day, that what constitutes a happening is the truly inexpressible exchange of energy amongst the participants, that the setting is ancillary. Here was a corporate-ordered metal and marble sore crouched between giant steel buildings on the edge of the WTC site that was converted into a playground of vibrant exchange of ideas and emotion.

The juxtaposition of these two images and energies completely deflates the narrative of Ground Zero and the “Freedom Tower” that has been thrust upon the American people. What has happened to our culture when an enormous steel monolith is supposed to be our great symbol of freedom? What does it mean for our nation when our traditional pastoral bulwarks of freedom of expression and entrepreneurship, embodied in this little 1960s-esque egalitarian farming commune transplant, have been eclipsed by faceless unchecked corporatism, embodied in a giant steel cage obscenely named the “Freedom Tower?”

Of course New York City is our greatest symbol of American values. It is a great democratic primordial ooze of culture, beliefs, thought, and commerce, its skyscrapers lasting testaments to American ingenuity and the once-thought limitless upward potential of capitalism. But at some point we went astray. At some point profits became more valued than human dignity, human life and the natural environment and even our national interest.  Or maybe that was always the case, and we humans have changed, spiritually and morally, to recognize and speak out against that evil prioritization.

The Manhattan skyline for me has transformed from a bright and hopeful symbol of a not flawless, but benevolent and accessible prosperity, into a twisted steel bastion of greed, its soon to be centerpiece almost mockingly referred to as the “Freedom Tower” as it continues to rise and tower over the 1.6 million New Yorkers and tens of millions of Americans living in poverty with no hope whatsoever for improvement of their condition, slaves to the banks from birth. And as I finally peeled myself away from the demonstration to return to my computer and my television and my comfortable lifestyle, I looked up one more time and thought, “how did we get here?”

Intro to The Symbolism of Cocktails in American Culture

This is the introduction to my American Studies Senior Seminar paper, an exploration of the symbolic value of cocktails in American culture.

James Bond is undoubtedly the fictional character most heavily associated with cocktails. He is the seminal spy of the twentieth century, his name is synonymous with the profession. References to the secret agent so thoroughly saturate our culture, that the words “shaken, not stirred,” convey sophisticated charm and effrontery of taste as much as they do a drink preference.
Though Bond is known for the vodka Martini in the Hollywood films, in the original James Bond novels, the British spy drank many different cocktails. In How’s Your Drink?: Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well, Eric Felten reminds us that, “James Bond’s first drink on record occurs some 30 pages into Fleming’s debut novel, Casino Royale. He strolls into a bar at a French resort hotel…and he orders…an Americano.”[1] The idea of Bond ordering anything but a vodka martini is a foreign and unsettling one to those only familiar with the spy through the Hollywood films (who are likely the vast majority).

Hollywood, in co-opting the Bond franchise, took a number of steps to make the character more widely appealing to American audiences; crucial to this end was making the character more American. In the books, Bond was a darker character, reflecting the shifty, sinister and morally ambiguous atmosphere of post-war Europe as the two superpowers jockeyed for influence; he was a loner, a faceless, emotionless pawn of the government carrying out its cold unsympathetic will. Hollywood’s rendering of Bond was a projection of American ideals onto a British character. The Bond of Hollywood was completely self-assured, much more aware of his moral superiority; he was technologically savvy, sophisticated, suave, irresistible to women, and destined to outwit the enemies of the free world; he was a hero. In The Search for a Method in American Studies, Cecil F. Tate writes that, “the cultural hero embodies the ideological or valuational preoccupations of the culture in a mythological form which has definite narrative content.”[2] In this sense Bond served as a symbol, the subject of a culturally constructed hero myth, a manifestation of American cultural aspirations and beliefs.

Of the liberties Hollywood producers took in portraying Bond, however, none was as significant as their choice of his drink. Hollywood’s portrayal of the British spy placed the Martini in his hand, perhaps so as not to confound American audiences who might find the names of different drinks confusing. Or, more likely, they chose the vodka Martini because it already had immense symbolic portent in the American consciousness. Americans immediately understood that Bond, because he drank Martinis, was sophisticated. They also recognized that he was somewhat of a rebel because he ordered his Martinis “shaken, not stirred,” which defied the conventional wisdom of the time which held that shaking gin or vodka would “bruise” the liquor. Crucial information about Bond, his patriotic-affiliation, his social status, and his anti-establishment leanings, was conveyed through his beverage choice. The audience recognized the Martini’s bestowed symbolic attributes and Bond confirmed them.

When Casino Royale (2006) introduced Daniel Craig as the new James Bond, it was more than a mere a changing of the guard, more than just another actor recruited to play the character in his twenty-first film; it was a paradigm shift, a substantial reincarnation and reimagining of the character. Casino Royale’s serious and contemplative tones starkly contrasted with the wildly-implausible-gadget-oriented, emotionally devoid, and artistically stagnant films that preceded it.  Daniel Craig’s Bond was dark, self-conscious, brooding, excessively violent, and, arguably, truer to Ian Fleming’s character than his forebears. No longer was there a Moneypenny for Bond to flirt with, M was played by a woman, and Q no longer exists to dispense outlandish gadgets and whimsically complain about Bond’s lack of care for his inventions’ wellbeing. This Bond also displayed affection and even love for his female counterpart, drastically diverging from his forebears’ detached and indifferent policy toward women.

Casino Royale’s break from well-worn tradition was, however, more than anything else, most concisely announced in this Bond’s neglect of his traditional drink of choice. For the first time in fifty years and twenty films, Bond ordered, rather than his trademark “vodka martini, shaken, not stirred,” a cocktail of his own invention, which he dubbed the “Vesper Martini,” after his love interest. The decision to have Bond order something else announced to the audience that, after twenty films, a new Bond had arrived. The introduction of a new, morally ambiguous Bond represented a myth changing to suit the needs of the current culture, and he needed a new cocktail to underscore this change.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bond was rendered temporarily obsolete. Bond’s epic and eternal struggle against evil no longer had any cultural relevance. There was no longer a good-evil dichotomy to which Americans could relate, or in which the American consciousness needed to assert its beliefs and aspirations. Leslie White described the function of the hero myth in culture as a reflection and embodiment of a culture’s aspirations and needs. He wrotes that, “[i]n history, in political and social movements, the Great Man is that anatomical part of a social organism that functions as a directive, regulative or integrative mechanism…The [hero] Is an instrument employed by a nation or a movement in the exercise of its functions.”[3] After the collapse of the Soviet Union, American culture no longer had use for Bond’s polemical cultural crusading.

Four films were released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only one of which was well received, yet the super villain-driven plots continued, despite an increasingly obscure geopolitical atmosphere. Casino Royale, however, represented a reaffirmation and tweaking of an old cultural myth to suit the cultural reality of our time. The film’s dark and morally ambiguous nature seemed to reflect the American consciousness in a post-911 world, in which there no longer existed such starkly contrasting ideological conflict, where the enemies were not clearly cut from an evil mold. Craig’s Bond was self-conscious and conscienceless, rather than cocksure and righteous, reflective of a culture experiencing self-doubt as to its moral superiority, brought about by well-publicized injustices at Abu Ghraib and allegations of torture at Guantanamo Bay. This Bond was completely different from his predecessors in fundamental ways, and reflected changing cultural priorities. But the difference could not be conveyed more succinctly than it was by the new cocktail in his hand. Bond’s cultural purpose had changed, necessitating a change in the fundamental symbol by which American culture recognizes him and understands what he represents.

According to Tate,

Culture is a closely knit, highly complex whole; it is organistic and dynamically interrelated—each change, each development has effects throughout. According to this view every pattern of ideas, vision of reality, or system ethics, every institutional structure of social control—in other words, each embodiment of the belief and ideology that pragmatically charters the total cultural entity—both reflects and affects the total culture. The pragmatic charter which interests us here is myth in its traditional sense: symbolic and narrative. As Americans Studies understands myths, they are inextricably involved with a particular national culture, a whole culture, from which they emerge and whose ‘dominant thought forms’ they body forth with imaginative impact.”(Tate, 24)

Cocktails occupy a symbolic role in American culture by reflecting the aspirations, priorities, and attitudes of the culture that created them and imbued them with symbolic value. Cocktails reappear throughout American history, embodying the ‘dominant thought forms of the time.’” The changing symbolic value of cocktails reflects changing cultural beliefs in American culture at large.

Symbols are outward manifestations of a culture’s beliefs, and consequently, as those beliefs change, the symbol must change to serve that culture’s current reality. Conversely, the cocktail’s change in symbolic value reflects the changing beliefs and attitudes of American culture. The earliest mentions of the cocktail suggest the need of Americans to distinguish themselves from their European counterparts, to forge a uniquely American identity. Eventually, cocktails came to symbolize a more multicultural, transnational American identity, reflecting American culture’s changing definition of itself in a globalized present. Likewise, the Martini’s symbolic rendering of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant social elite was eclipsed by fruity and playful reincarnations, such as the Appletini, reflecting changing American understandings of social class. As the culture changes, so do its symbols, and by examining the ways in which cocktails adapted over the course of the twentieth century in symbolic value, we can chart broader shifts in beliefs, attitudes and priorities of American culture.

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[1] Eric Felten, How’s Your Drink?: Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well, (Chicago: Surrey Books, 2007), 37. 38-39: Ian Fleming knew that in drink, no less than in food, it pays to play to an establishment’s strength. When Bond grabs a roadhouse lunch with Felix Leiter in Diamonds Are Forever, he doesn’t waste time elucidating the comparative virtues of shaking versus stirring; he just orders a beer (a Miller High Life, at that). When in Jamaica, 007 favors Gin and Tonics extra heavy on juice from the island’s fresh limes. When Bond trails Auric Goldfinder to Geneva, he relaxes with a tot of Enzian, “the firewater distilled from gentian,” which is the root of an Alpine wildflower. In the Athens airport, he knocks back Ouzo: in Turkey, it’s Raki. At the Saratoga racetrack, the secret agent blends in with the thoroughbred set by drinking Old-Fashioneds and “Bourbon and Branch” (i.e., whiskey and water).

[2] Cecil F. Tate, The Search for a Method in American Studies, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973), 22.

[3] Cecil F. Tate, The Search for a Method in American Studies, 22.

"Drive" Review

Some films are merely set in cities, the locales serving as nothing more than the backdrop for a story. Drive is not just set in Los Angeles. Instead the city is conveyed as a living, conscious entity, the shots of the cityscape providing the driving force behind the film. Drive does for Los Angeles what Taxi Driver did for New York City. The latter captured the essence of New York City in the 1970s in all its gritty creeping horror, while Drive conveys a colorful 21^st century Los Angeles

Many films set in Los Angeles convey a grey, dirty city filled with crime and misery--think of Chinatown, Falling Down, and Blade Runner, the city in past, present and future. Drive presents a glittery and energetic Los Angeles, its many shots of the city, paired with eighties new-wave type music, focusing on its oft-neglected but here highly compelling skyline. The gloss and polish of this Los Angeles is reminiscent of films set in high-tech European metropolises like the Bourne trilogy or the recent Bond films.

The sometimes dark, though always glossy, underworld of Los Angeles coupled with Gosling’s innocent shy smiles give the film its emotional drive: in one scene “Driver” goes on a family outing into a literal urban oasis, lending the impression that he is a genuinely naïve do-gooder in an evil world before violently smashing that notion in an final act laden with bloodshed.

At this film’s core is emotional scenery and imagery, Gosling’s quiet character deferentially and politely taking a backseat to hyperbolic action and romanticized cityscapes, but it only works on the emotional level. Drive descends into a hopelessly played out trope involving mob dealings gone wrong. The well-meaning and guilt-free protagonist gets involved in something way over his head, and ruthless mobsters come after him, who he must simultaneously hunt down.

It’s the plot of Rumble in the Bronx, True Romance, and countless other mediocre movies that you saw once and quickly forgot about, with broadly drawn caricatures of mobsters who kill subordinates while pounding their fists and saying things like, “I don’t know who this guy is…but I want him DEAD!.” (reminiscent of comedian Pablo Francisco’s “Little Tortilla Boy” bit). While its imagery and tone soar to brilliant heights, its plot descends into B-action movie territory. I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

Alternate Side Harassment

As my partner Erin and I walked along Pierrepont Street today, we broke into discussion about parking spaces in Brooklyn Heights that eventually boiled down to and elucidated a fundamental argument over the appropriate role of government in peoples’ lives, a basic philosophical question that is contained in each action a government takes from the seemingly inconsequential Alternate Side Parking to the most sweeping Federal regulations. As a victim of Alternate Side Parking, the weekly obligation to move your car to the other side of the street to make way for street cleaning, or Alternate Side Harassment as I refer to it, I engage in lengthy philosophically-driven silent protests for about two hours every week as I sit in my car and fume over this simple but extremely inconveniencing law.

This particular discussion began as I voiced a frequent observation of mine that too often people take up what could potentially be two parking spots by centering themselves in a spacious one with half car lengths on either side. What crosses these people’s minds, I wondered aloud, when they decide to park in spots like these? Do they have no consideration whatsoever for the parking needs of others, no utilitarian empathy for the other victims of alternate side harassment?

Surely, I again thought aloud to Erin, this abuse and misuse of space necessitates the allocation of clearly delineated parking spaces which provide the optimal amount of room, within reason, for a car to park, thereby ensuring that the entire block is used to its most efficient parking capacity.

Erin rejected this proposal, arguing that due to the variation in the size of cars, a considerable amount of potential parking space might be lost in the process of establishing uniformly sized parking spots. The only way to ensure the maximum use of parking space on the block, she argued, was to leave it completely unchecked and allow the parkers free reign over the space. The invisible hand of free parking would arrange the cars in the most efficient way possible, she argued, with a concession that the odd abuser who might take a luxurious spot was the price of otherwise maximum efficiency.

And she was right. If one created spaces that could accommodate the largest of vehicles much of the block’s total space would be lost when smaller cars filled those spots. For example, an Escalade GMT 800 is 18 feet long, which is effectively 20 feet when accounting for clearance room when parking, while a Smart car is around 8 feet in length, 10 feet with wiggle room for parking. Designated parking spaces, then, could lead to even more inefficient use of space, as no allotment of spaces could account for the myriad shapes and sizes of the vehicles we drive.

After some self-reflexive consideration of my feelings that parking on the street should be more regulated, it dawned on me that what I was actually considering as a solution, was merely an extension of the problem I primarily face and criticize, that of alternate side parking and the overregulation of public parking in general. When moving your car under the threat of fines becomes a weekly reality, you tend to accept it as an inevitable fact of city living, and rather than ask the difficult questions, rather than supposing that maybe it doesn’t have to be this way, you accept it as irrefutable truth, and the regulatory structure insidiously creeps into your mind and soul.

Before you know it, regulation is all you know, and more and more of it seems necessary and inevitable, if only to undo or improve past regulation. At some unconscious point lost to the alternate side victim at some ungodly hour as he or she crawls drearily to her car past noisy street cleaners, there no longer lingers the question of “why,” a debate about whether or not parking should be regulated or whether the street really needs cleaning every week, but only about “how” it should be regulated, because whether you like it or not, or even know it, you’ve accepted it and been subdued, mentally and spiritually into accepting this official bullying.

And such is the natural tendency of government, to encroach ever so slowly and thoroughly upon citizens’ daily lives to the point that you find yourself filling out tax forms on your death bed and realize that your life in America has just been one giant blizzard of tax obligations and forms and regulations that you’ve trudged through just to avoid incurring the wrath of the hulking fine-waving bureaucracy that dictated your every waking moment on this planet.

But until then you go out to move your car and you inwardly conjecture that  “maybe it should be this way”, or “maybe it should be that way”, but the most important question, “why” or “should this exist at all,” escapes you as you climb defeated into your vehicle to wait out your hour long sentence on alternate side harassment day.

Don't make Brooklyn a 'hipster cluster-fuck'

Published in The Skidmore News, sometime this past blah blah blah

During the Superbowl, the largest most superficial display of consumerism in the U.S., one commercial aired that had the rare quality of genuineness. The "Imported From Detroit" Chrysler commercial displayed brilliant shots of various iconic statues and buildings in Detroit, announcing the phoenix-like return of a city that's "been through hell and back." It was a statement of municipal pride that transcended the normal sports rivalry hoopla and challenged the motor city's detractors as "people who have never even been here, who don't know what we are capable of." Though its tone turns sentimental and corny as a solemn Eminem addresses us in front of a cliché African-American choir, the message of civic solidarity, of the need for a city to determine its own reputation and destiny, is one we should all take to heart.

Last October, an article appeared on Skidmore Unofficial titled "From 87 to the L: Demystifying the Skidmore Migration to Brooklyn." After a protracted, rambling introduction, the author, an alumna, attempts to weigh the pros and cons of moving to Brooklyn after graduation. The author then makes various assumptions, about which I have much to say.

Firstly, the article ignores the fact that many Skidmore students are from Brooklyn, a simple but still resoundingly inane omission. The author writes that, New York "is the city I have wanted to move to since fully grasping the meaning of suburb. And since most of you are likely from Massachusetts or the Tri-State area—with a dash of Midwest for novelty and San Fran for scruff—you will understand that sentiment." The reality is, Brooklyn, Bronx and the other outer boroughs are fairly well represented at Skidmore, and many of these students are from low-income and racially diverse backgrounds. This statement marginalizes an important sector of the student body.

Secondly, the article assumes its audience can afford to "migrate" to one of the most increasingly expensive areas in the U.S. (due in no small part to the influx of post-liberal arts college gentry, who drive up real estate prices, and force out low-income residents).

And finally, the author describes Brooklyn, albeit facetiously, as a "hipstered-out clusterfuck."

I sincerely hope I don't need to tell you that Brooklyn is much more than that. A city of 2.5 million people, a borough which on its own ranks among the top five most populated cities in the U.S., Brooklyn is arguably the most ethnically and culturally diverse county in the nation.

This article epitomizes the misrepresentation of Brooklyn I have observed in the words and behavior of young "migrants." These members of the Williamsburg liberal arts gentry believe they are pioneering and invigorating a thrilling new urban world, naturally grasping the subtleties of multicultural city life. What they don't realize is that they are turning much of Brooklyn into "New Connecticut," a bastion of upper-middle class white culture, replete with Indie bands, trendy bars, and expendable cash. Characterizations of cities by newcomers and outside commentators, such as that of Brooklyn as a "hipstered-out clusterfuck," necessitate a renewal of civic pride, a will to refute these misrepresentations.

A lack of will on the part of inhabitants to determine their city's reputation, has led to commentary and municipal criticism such as this, as well as the use of a term that is in much need of analysis and criticism. Though the author doesn't use this term, her evaluation of Brooklyn smacks of that classist and ignorant label that is far too widely used: "that city is very ‘livable.'"

This term, like most insults, has the opposite effect of its user's intention. It is often meant to convey cosmopolitanism. Its user aims to present him or herself as a citizen of the world. Instead it merely conveys its user's misconception that everyone is among the jet-set like him or herself and can afford to pick the locales in which they reside. It reveals its user's total ignorance for the reality that the working class, low-income peoples of the world, to say nothing of the starved and impoverished, are very much tied to their cities.

Let me demonstrate this word's obnoxiousness by paraphrasing its subtext. Phrase: "That city is very livable." Subtext: "I can find all of the amenities to which my white privileged background entitles me. Also, my expensive bachelor-of-arts degree has made me an expert on urban sociology and I feel entirely comfortable passing judgment on cities the world over."

The most odious implication of the "livable city" designation is that some cities are "unlivable." Phrase: "That city is unlivable." Subtext: "that city is a post-industrial wasteland in which lazy philistines have doomed themselves, by their inherent lack of worth, to toil away their days."

For these reasons, the Chrysler commercial's reclamation of Detroit's reputation is important. I imagined its declaration of civic pride to be aimed at the exact type of municipal marginalizing and disparaging that I refer to. It announces Detroit's indifference toward elitist detractors who would label it "unlivable," who would stigmatize it as a rust-belt "clusterfuck" of impoverishment. The Skidmore alumna refers to "the stigma of moving to Brooklyn as a Skidmore grad". Well, future alumni, if your "migration" is stigmatized by Brooklynites, it wont be because your moving to a "hipstered-out clusterfuck;" it will be because you have no shame in characterizing our city as such.