Afghanistan and The Arts

One of the things I like a lot about the State Department's DipNote blog, which I read for my day job, is that the authors do a pretty good job writing up the arts as they encounter them in diplomatic work. I thought today's post on the 4th Kabul International Documentary and Short Film Festival was particularly poignant. Beverley Mather-Marcus wrote:

The ceremony opened with...a speech by Engineer Latif, one of Afghanistan’s most prominent filmmakers. He detailed the long journey Afghan film has made: literally from nothing to the burgeoning cultural institution it is now. He drew thunderous applause from the crowd when he said that no one could say Afghanistan does not have a real film industry because they are only making documentaries and short films. As he put it, “It may seem small, but it is theirs, and it is a beginning.”

Other favorite moments came when the awards for Best Child Actor and Best Male Actor were given out, both for roles in I Want a Horse, Not a Wife. The little boy who won said “For the whole movie I was asking for a horse, and now I have one!” (The award statue is a rearing horse.)

Given the amazing art outsiders have made about Afghanistan (Tony Kusher's Homebody/Kabul still flattens me every time I read it), I'll be really interested to see if Afghanistan's filmmakers start to be able to make features soon, and if so, what kinds of subjects they decide to make movies about.

Crazy Beautiful

Cleary, I am in full-on indecision mode today, because I can't decide if this profile of Anne Heche in the New York Times Magazine is wonderful or uncomfortably exploitative. The writing vacillates between a neat device, hanging out with Heche while she gets extensions and fitted for a dress for the premiere of Hung, her latest show, and a weird mix of condescension and naivete. Among other things, Alex Witchel judges her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres ("in retrospect, given her experience with her duplicitous father and homophobic mother, it could seem that her attraction to DeGeneres had less to do with acting than acting out"); acts somewhat weird about her looks ("Her extended blond hair became her, and her face had no discernible pores or oil glands. People have killed for less, but the urge never quite struck"); insults Heche for not wanting to believe that dating DeGeneres hurt her career ("That is naïve at best; Hollywood executives are notoriously skittish about homosexuality and its potential to harm their bottom line.") and treats her current (male) partner's making lunch for her son as if it's something miraculous ("and made him macaroni and cheese. Not Kraft. From scratch.") The piece goes into excruciatingly painful detail about the ways Heche's closeted father sexually abused her--he gave her herpes at an extremely young age and died of AIDS in 1983, leaving her unsure for years about what her HIV status was. And it mentions her breakdown, but doesn't deal at all with how Heche went from showing up partially dressed on a stranger's steps asking if she could take a shower before getting picked up by a spaceship, to become the apparently functional person today. There is no reckoning with the details in Heche's notoriously poisonous divorce from her ex-husband.

In other words, the profile seems to treat Heche as a child in a number of troubling ways, condescending to her rather viciously at some points, and treating her as if she's not remotely responsible for her actions at others. Witchel says Heche seemed focused and sane during the time the two women spent together, but she doesn't reckon with the swiftness of the reversals in Heche's life. And perhaps most strangely, though Witchel makes a sweeping judgement about Heche's acting, she doesn't actually discuss any of her roles in detail:

Maybe it’s because there’s an integral part of her — the abused part — that remains vigilant, a shadow of childhood anxiety that still hovers, a tireless antenna seeking approval. She has an uncanny ability to intuit who she needs to be in any situation — her persistent need to please, a phantom limb. As an actress, she uses this to feed her inner chameleon, and it informs her instincts in plumbing a character’s depths, her normally low-key energy erupting, either in lashings of passion or unanticipated fits of whimsy, both of which are just unhinged enough to be riveting.

But there's no discussion of what supports this judgement. The long piece contains just 410 words on any of Heche's specific roles, 223 of which are Heche talking about how she conceived the parts, 139 of which are descriptions of characters, rather than how Heche plays them. Far more space is devoted to Heche getting her hair done, Heche getting her dress on, Heche getting her legs oiled, Heche's son getting nervous when her partner brings out a glass of champagne, etc. In the end, the piece feels like a highly uncritical story about Anne Heche and her public persona, and not at all a probing story about Anne Heche as an actress. The latter could have been a fascinating look at a complicated woman. The former is just creepy.

Silly Boy, Revisited--And Other Things, Too

So, back in May, I wrote about this song, "Silly Boy," that was getting circulated as a Rihanna-Lady Gaga collaboration dissing Chris Brown. Turns out the song is actually the debut track of a singer named Eva Simons, who has released a kind of magnetically strange video for the song, featuring a Delorean, a mirrored dress that echoes some of Lady Gaga's duds, and hair that makes Rihanna's trend-setting locks look positively tame:



Both the song and the video are really growing on me. I like the strobe-light nature of the choreography a lot, and the slightly sci-fi elements of the visuals, particularly the dress made of white tubes that seems to fly off of Simon's body at one point. Though they're totally sonically different, the "Silly Boy" video reminds me a little bit of Janelle Monae's gorgeous and insane short-film video for "Many Moons," which is simultaneously a robot fashion show, a terrific advertisement for adapting Fifties men's fashions for women (I really think I may need to go back and get a pair of saddle shoes), and a mini-narrative about law enforcement and art:



I really think there's something fascinating going on in videos by women artists that grapple with robotics and the nature of humanity, but I haven't quite put my finger on it yet. If I do, I'll let you know.

P.S. For those of you not up on Janelle Monae, what are you waiting for? Her duet with Big Boi on "Call the Law" from OutKast's Idlewild album is haunting.

Alternate Universes

I ended up liking Ghost Town much more than I thought I would, and given how absurdly the amazing the cast as a whole in The Invention of Lying, Ricky Gervais's new comedy, looks to be, I'm pretty excited for that as well. But the movie, which centers around the idea of a world where no one is capable of lying, or even aware of the concept of an untruth, raises an interesting question for me: is it possible for us to get engrossed in an alternate universe that looks exactly like our own? The world in The Invention of Lying really is supposed to function differently from our own, even though it looks the same--no one dresses differently, drives flying cars, lives in surrealist architecture, or has unusual jobs. And so I wonder if the truths people tell constantly will seem like jarring aberrations every time they get too caustic or too funny, because we expect people to behave differently as a result of how they look? Or will we be able to accept the paradigm shift, and accept Gervais's character as an aberration, even though he's the character in the movie most like us?

Girls and Guitars

Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn have always so defined country in my brain that the Times piece on how young women are breaking themselves into record deals with country labels was an important reminder of the real gender balance in the industry. The piece makes the point that the crossover success of stars like Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood has put labels on the lookout for the Next Blonde Thing. But I think it might be interesting to argue that young female country singers have figured out, better perhaps than their male counterparts, ways to make music that has crossover appeal.

Now, I love me some Toby Keith. I have even watched Beer for My Horses with my college roommates. But in both sound and lyrics, his music is solid country. Let's take "God Love Her," for example. Big, crunchy guitar riffs on the chorus. Narrative plot about a preacher's daughter who hooks up with a motorcycle dude, and ends up getting him right with the Lord. Swampy pronunciation of "Daddy." It's a great song, but firmly situated within its genre, just like Keith's best songs, whether it's the class-based drink preferences of "Whiskey Girl," the shots with Willie Nelson in "Beer for My Horses," or the utterly sublime "Should Have Been a Cowboy." And I can understand why if the sound of country isn't something that necessarily appeals to you that the lyrics wouldn't rope you in any further.

Taylor Swift on the other hand, often has music that sounds much more explicitly countryfied than Toby Keith does. The sheer amount of twang in the music for "You Belong With Me" is almost overwhelming. But the lyrics are entirely situated within the teen-movie-evil-cheerleader-v.-hot-girl-hidden-behind-her-glasses genre. There's even this weird little lyrical intervention: "I'm in my room / I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like," which I sort of assume doesn't involve country, since it's meant to be an edgy pronouncement. It's an odd moment, but characteristic of the distance between Swift's musical style and lyrical content. And that's what makes her so successful, I think. It's not that anyone really hates banjo music, or finds fiddle aesthetically distasteful, or anything. It's that songs like "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" are absurd. And within the context of rural America, maybe it's a semi-parodic absurdity, but outside of that, it just seems kind of goofy and unrelatable. Maybe what Taylor Swift and the new generation of girls with guitars are exporting isn't country in its purest and most undiluted form, but that's okay.

Cops and Robbers

Matt has been chronicling and rightly condemning the kind of terrifying assumptions that underly TNT's new police procedural show, Dark Blue, a portrait of rogue cops in Los Angeles. But I was watching USA's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit marathon to take a break from the heavy rotation of Vietnam War movies I have on this weekend in preparation for this piece I'm working on, and was reminded how strange the network's tagline for such programming is. USA bills these events as good entertainment for people "who don't mind a little flexibility with constitutional rights." The line's delivered in a very tongue-in-cheek tone, which is in keeping with the network's sarcastic approach to its advertising. Often it's very funny, particularly when the shows' characters cross over in advertising and talk to each other. But the idea that police violations of suspects' constitutional rights is funny is odd to say the least, in particular because while the detectives in the Law & Order franchise don't always behave beautifully, there are usually consequences when they cross the line from aggressive to violent. The "flexibility" line suggests USA thinks brutality is a selling point for viewers, something to be played up, even chuckled at.

Save Centennial Field!

Though I haven't written much about it here, I am a massive baseball fan, and I spent many happy days during four years of my childhood watching the Vermont Lake Monsters, then a single-A team for the Expos, now a Nationals subsidiary, playing games at Centennial Field in Burlington. So I was devastated to read that the park is in danger of being shuttered. I honestly don't remember if the field was dreadful or not, only that the baseball was, mostly. But it was a great small-town stadium, and the young men who played there were, despite what sound like the indignity of the conditions they played in, total gentlemen, generous to kids and fans. If there's someone out there who wore #34 for the Lake Monsters at some point between 1991 and 1995, I'd happily buy you a beer today to thank you for signing my team hat at least three times during that period. I don't remember your name, but I thought you were great (and maybe a little dreamy, too). And my checkbook is at the ready for anyone who gets together an effort to save Centennial. Small-town baseball is an American cultural treasure. It shouldn't die, anywhere, because stimulus funding doesn't come through, as long as there are people who want to watch the games.