“The whole point of viewing something critically is the shock of recognition that comes from the intersubjectity of two unique sensibilities — the critic’s (or, ideally, every reader’s) and the artist’s. If the reader is merely a supplicant before the art, he’s doing neither himself nor the artist any favors. If he respects the artist and himself, the reader (the critic!) brings his own worldview, his own philosophical orientation to bear on the art and, in the event, perfection and idolatry ought rightly to be looked on with some suspicion. Heretical as this sounds, appreciation could be made even more pungent and challenging when there’s some friction between the reader’s perceptions and the artist’s expression.”

 - Gary Groth, “A Bill of Goods (or ‘Why The Death of Criticism Couldn’t Have Come At a Worse Time’)”

“Lots of first-rate literary criticism has been written by people who are monolingual, or who read lots of novels but almost no poems, or who have no political concerns, or who are philosophically illiterate, or who have little sense of what happened in history. Good criticism is a matter of bouncing some of the books you have read off the rest of the books you have read. The greater number of books you have read, and the more various they are, the likelier it is that the criticism you write will be of interest. But there is no natural order of priority, nor is there any set of methodological precepts, that should guide your decisions about which books to read first. All you can do is follow your nose.”

 - Richard Rorty, “Looking Back at Literary Theory”

I really don’t know what I was expecting from this film, but even had I gone into it expecting the worst, I doubt I could have predicted the level of racist, classist, misogynistic, homophobic, reactionary, overproduced, underwritten garbage that it actually managed to achieve. The film received a bit of controversy when it was first released, mostly centering around the gratuitous violence and profanity, much of it dished out or uttered by the prepubescent vigilante Hit Girl. But if an 11-year old saying the word “cunt” is your biggest problem with this movie, your priorities are likely as backward and your perspective of the world likely as confused as the makers of the film.

In her 1971 review of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Pauline Kael referred to it as “the first American film that is a fascist work of art.” Similar charges of fascistic-ness were leveled against 2008’s The Dark Knight. Yet although both of those works contain elements that seem to celebrate or condone brutal, vengeful bloodshed, they are also relentlessly self-questioning. They do not wrap up neatly, but leave their insides spilling out for us to mull over… frustrated, perhaps unsatisfied, but provoked. In the end, they serve as mile-a-minute ethical obstacle courses, challenging our definitions of right and wrong, demonstrating the overwhelming moral complexity of our world, raising hairy questions that remain unanswered and which may in fact be unanswerable.

Kick-Ass, alternately, questions nothing. It is firmly in the camp of films that Kael spent her whole career railing against (in sharp opposition to the violent yet smart films she loved) - the blunt, brutish, medieval, manipulative films that don’t merely call attention to contemporary fears and longings for security, but actually elevate and rationalize those fears and longings, justifying them with arrogant, unthinking righteousness. It is among the clearest examples in recent memory of a wholly unashamed right-wing spectacle - a stultifyingly simplistic fairy tale whose sole moral is “there are bad people in the world who must be exterminated” - a message made even more insidious and disturbing by the film’s cartoonish veneer and snide, knowing self-awareness.

The clearest sign that Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn’s juvenile stupidity and stunted emotional maturity is equivalent to that of his characters is the sense one gets that he revels in what he perceives as a wanton violating of taboos. This is of course a large part of the film’s appeal. But to think that anyone other than a teenager actually believes that the Tarantino-esque levels of cusswords and carnage contained herein constitute some sort of rebellious, pride-worthy threat to mainstream American values is almost too depressing to fathom. Vaughn and the family advocacy dimwits that protest him are both guilty of the exact same shortsightedness, unable to recognize that the film’s values are not in any way contrary to the values that underpin America’s institutional fabric.

“I said, ‘What are you looking at?!’” yells the thug in the midst of carjacking what looks like a very expensive automobile. The would-be superhero pauses for a second, scared, tinges of embarrassment flaring up in his mind as he thinks about the ridiculous costume he has on. Then he mans up, takes a deep breath and straightens his back. “Two cheapshit losers screwing with a car somebody probably worked their ass off to pay for.” It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Take a look at the above still. Yes… that is an interpretation of the cover of Ayn Rand’s libertarian capitalist apologetic novel of ideas Atlas Shrugged, hanging in protagonist Dave ‘Kick-Ass’ Lizewski’s bedroom, presumably drawn by Dave ‘Kick-Ass’ Lizewski himself. This shouldn’t be at all surprising. In a message board thread about Rand I recently read, one poster provided a timeline of the psychological development of the stereotypical Libertarian:

“Adolescent awkwardness –> social marginalization –> adoption of antisocial subcultural identity –> superficial misreading of Nietzsche –> delusions of persecution for unrecognized genius –> Ayn Rand –> projection of resentment of jocks to resentment of poor people –> libertarianism”

Perhaps not surprisingly, replace ‘genius’ with ‘gallantry,’ ‘Nietzsche’ and ‘Ayn Rand’ with ‘Superman’ (appropriately, himself a superficial misreading of Nietzsche, and originally a villain) and ‘Batman,’ and ‘libertarianism’ with ‘vigilantism,’ and you’ve got a pretty good portrait of Lizewski’s psychological development as well. He is almost too perfect a caricature of that arc. The film opens with Lizewski bleating about his boring-ness and “invisibility to girls.” It is from this pathetic, primordial longing for recognition that all his superhero impulses stem. The film on numerous occasions attempts to quite literally beat Lizewski out of his delusional and misguided ambitions. But rather than acting as a confrontation with reality, shedding light on the would-be vigilante’s dysfunctional, self-aggrandizing psychology as he forges ahead despite all concerns for his own or anyone else’s safety, the film genuinely rewards him for his dysfunction.

On first glance, Lizewski’s stated motivations may seem in direct opposition to those lauded by Rand. On closer examination though, this isn’t entirely so. The invention of Kick-Ass isn’t so much about altruism as it is about the will to power (and getting laid). Rand’s own philosophy, Objectivism, is so named because of her belief that morality is not relative, but rather an objective and universal truth to be discovered by mankind through reason and logic. Such a belief in moral objectivity must always be at the heart of the vigilante’s philosophy - they could not function otherwise.

The link is stronger than you might think. In Rand’s journals can be found the sketches of what was intended to be her first novel, The Little Street. Its hero, Danny Renahan, was to possess “the true, innate psychology of a Superman.” And who was this Superman to be modeled after? None other than the infamous child murderer William Edward Hickman, perpetrator of “the most horrible crime of the 1920s,” who she described as being “born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness — [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.” Renahan was to be “a Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy.” Rand’s fundamental mistake is in believing that the two can be separated, that psychopathy and solipsism are not one in the same. It’s a mistake echoed by both her followers and anyone who glorifies the figure of the vigilante.

One only look at Steve Ditko, the Spiderman co-creator and Randroid whose characters Mr. A and The Question were strict adherents of Objectivism. Just like Rand, Ditko awkwardly wrapped his overwritten philosophical dialogs in flat, unconvincing pulp stories. This makes for some rather humorous reading, as every single confrontation Mr. A has with a criminal is accompanied by dry, lengthy diatribes in enormous blocks of text, so that reading the comics becomes more like being lectured by your parents (if your parents also happened to be philosophy professors). Kick-Ass doesn’t quite lecture you - his vocabulary is far too small for that - but his overbearing voiceover overlays nearly every scene, needlessly describing the very things you are watching at that exact moment, laying out his every thought and feeling, no matter how self-evident.

I would like to believe that this is all a joke; that that poster is supposed to hint at the fact that Lizewski is a prick; that the crack about the car is supposed to be head-shakingly naive. I’m sure to some extant it is. The plausibility and likeability of Lizewski’s character hinges on his naivety, after all. Maybe the bureaucratic and contestuous nature of Hollywood filmmaking managed to squeeze all the subversiveness out of this film and transform a clearly parodic work into one unsure of how seriously to take itself. But if its makers really believe that the end result actually functions as effective satire, they’re sorely mistaken.

If he is being sincere, Matthew Vaughn shares a number of key traits with the seer of selfishness herself. Both idolize the worst, most barbaric impulses of human beings, transmuting them into virtues. And both craft flat fantasy narratives to couch their virtues in, deliberately concealing their ugly consequences by aestheticizing or else rationalizing and downplaying them. Both also falsely imagine themselves to be going against the grain of a stupid, spineless society. Rand failed to see that greedy self-interest was already at the heart of the modern American spirit. Vaughn fails to see that moral certainty and the urge to enact justice is its essential counterpart.

Almost as idiotic as thinking that Kick-Ass‘ conservatism is somehow ‘edgy’ is the notion that Hit Girl, with her mix of pretty pink girlishness and vicious, unflinching brutality, is in any way an empowering female figure. Her character is ultimately just as flat and one-dimensional as the nauseating cardboard cutout of a love interest who exists only to emphasize awkwardness and longing and to function as a prize. The idea of stuffing a handful of laughably stereotypical masculinity inside of a laughably stereotypical feminine shell is the sort of faux-feminism that could only be confused with the real thing by overgrown adolescent boys like Luc Besson (whose Leon: The Professional serves as a notable pre-cursor to Vaughn’s kiddy killing machine fetishism, yet still manages to outshine him in terms of character development).

Yet, at the same time, Hit Girl, and Nic Cage as the father training her to kill (himself a self-made superhero named Big Daddy), are the definite highlight… possibly the sole highlight. Though the essential juxtaposition of cute with gruesome is a played out one, the extreme to which it’s carried out in this film approaches dizzying levels, its absurdity only heightened by the excellent acting of Cage and Chloe Moretz. The first time we witness her in action, casually wiping out a room full of “junkie assholes” with a double-ended katana-bladed staff, the sheer brutality of it all is farcical bordering on chilling. The fact that it doesn’t tip into that second camp, and never once does, is where the film as a whole falls short.

This moment is just one of many in the film in which I imagined it taking a different path. At numerous points like this one, a careful shift in tone to the disconcertingly real or the ludicrously parodic and dissociated would have been brilliance. That is to say, the basic premise of the film had enormous potential. But such a feat would have required a far more intelligent and audacious writer/director than Vaughn. In her review for the NY Times, Manohla Dargis lamented that although the relationship between Hit Girl and her dad contained a tinge of creepy incestuousness “as kinky and potentially resonant as that between Lolita and Humbert Humbert, […] you’d need a better director to pry it out.” Such what-ifs are painful to think about. Yet identifying those sites of squandered possibility are the only way of drawing any useful, interesting, or inspiring insight from the film whatsoever, and so I’ll continue with them.

Mark Millar, the author of the comic book on which the film was based, says that he was inspired to begin writing comics after meeting Alan Moore as a teen. Having not read Millar’s original, I can’t say whether Moore’s brilliance never rubbed off on him in the first place, or if it was merely lost somewhere along the path to the big screen, but it’s certainly nowhere to be found here. Kick-Ass seems written not by a comics fan, but by someone with a simplistic, half-century old conception of what comics and superhero stories are like. Vaughn and his collaborators ignore decades worth of work by people like Moore to legitimize comics as an art form by introducing ethical complexity to the medium. Lizewski’s hero persona, and the world he inhabits, have all the depth of a golden age story, as thin as the paper it’s printed on.

Moore’s own Watchmen, and his character Rorschach, provides a pitch-perfect counterpoint against which to examine Kick-Ass. As Tim O’Neill writes, “Rorschach is a parody of a type - a particular brand of urban vigilante that became an object of undeniable, grotesque fascination during the 1970s. […] Moore bends over backwards to frame Rorschach as a demented goon, a far right paranoiac stuck to an juvenile code of ethics, the inflexibility of which promises not merely danger but complete ruin. […] Rorschach can’t be anything but a stone killer, a sociopathic serial murderer whose only saving grace is that his chosen victims are not attractive blonde joggers or lonely hitchhikers, but presumed criminals.”

Rorschach is in fact based on the aforementioned Mr. A and his successor, the less ideologically heavy The Question. But in Moore’s characterization, he more acutely resembles Travis Bickle. His insanity is not made to appear rational as Rand and Ditko would have it, but revealed for what it is. Kick-Ass, on the other hand, is not a parody of a type, he IS that type.

“Kovacs pretending to be Rorschach.” This is Kick-Ass. He is not yet the cold blooded murderer that Big Daddy is. But not for not trying; not for the sake of empathy; not because he is “soft on scum.” Only because he’s weak, unskilled, clumsy. Lezewski/Kick-Ass’s ‘origin story’ and modus operandi even mirrors that of Kovacs/Rorschach. It is the murder of Kitty Genovese, raped and stabbed to death while dozens of bystanders did nothing to stop it, that causes Walter Kovacs to don a mask. Kick-Ass utters similar reasoning early on, as he’s stared at and filmed with camera phones while combating a group of lowlifes. “The three assholes, laying into one guy while everybody else watches? And you wanna know what’s wrong with me?” The difference between Moore and Vaughn, of course, is that the latter attempts to justify and exult that logic, the former reveals it to be sociopathic.

That same scene is also a curious one, in that Kick-Ass’ coming to the rescue of that “one guy” is completely arbitrary, with no context ever given for his attack, and none ever desired. Why are we to differentiate between Kick-Ass’ brand of extrajudicial retribution and the variety being dished out by “three assholes” on someone he only assumes is just some poor sap? This ignorance points to the most dangerous and reactionary component of the film’s logic, the glue that holds it together, which is the same thing that is dangerous and reactionary about all right-wing spectacle, both on the screen and off: a sort of myopic vision which focuses intently on details and symptoms but which is completely blind to their relationship to the bigger picture. In the exact same way that conservatives view all social plight as merely a problem of individuals, the vigilantes here seem blissfully unaware of the whole of social, economic, and political infrastructure which produces their victims. Nearly all of the movie’s goons are in some way players in the illegal drug trade, and in many cases it is this association alone that is enough to label them “bad guys.” Ironically, the film’s callow simplicity also makes its reasoning all too easy to dismantle. Though I suppose a kid wanting to “fix” the world and then proceeding to campaign for an end to the drug war for an hour and a half wouldn’t make a very entertaining flick.

But Vaughn and the rest of his team can’t possibly be blind to those concerns, and their attempts to tip-toe around unavoidable issues of race and class make this abundantly clear. The group of mainly African American thugs Hit Girl first slays, for instance, is given one or two white guys, insurance commercial-style, so as to pre-empt charges of racism. It’s a patently dishonest trick. In this context, when it is obvious that the film’s makers are painfully, prudently aware of the issues at play, such a conscious, totalizing dehumanization of the film’s many “baddies” is reprehensible.

Were it honest with itself, and were it actually interested in real provocation (and not merely the inane, toddler-like deviancy and imaginary taboo breaking it wallows in), the film wouldn’t attempt to bury those issues, but rather tease them out, where they could be examined. Humanizing its thugs, even just to a minor extent, allowing us to see their pain and the terror on their faces (without being reduced to a slapstick gag), would be profoundly unsettling. It would also disrupt the illusion the film works hard to enforce, which is why it’s not permitted.

“I try to give back to violence that what it truly is: pain, injury to another,” writes Michael Haneke. What if Kick-Ass were to take a few cues from Funny Games? It already dips into sly, fourth-wall breaking territory on occasion. Why not extend that into full blown, audience-baiting sadisticness? There is a moment toward the end of the film in which Hit Girl for the very first time shows pain, vulnerability and fear. But why is this moment glossed over? I would prefer that it were stressed - her sheer mortal terror and realization of imminent death approaching the same levels of empathy Haneke so skillfully pushes his actors to exude. And then what? Why bother saving her? “There’s this unspoken rule that you can’t harm animals,” Haneke reminds us, “What do I do? I kill the dog first thing. The same with the boy.” Kick-Ass would like to pretend that it is breaking rules and violating sacred cows, but in the end, it has the signs of impotent Hollywood risk-management written all over it.

This sort of direction would not, of course, sustain the entire film. Nor should it. The element of absurdity is essential, and that gritty realism would be pointless without a fantasy to rub up against. Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer provides a perfect template for that kind of a contrast, even containing the same child brainwashing and comic nerd turned superhero-styled psycho killer motifs as Kick-Ass.

The discomfort one experiences while watching Ichi stems not so much from the mind-boggling level of violence and gore on screen, which though nauseatingly excessive, comes off as mostly humorous. Rather it is the psychosexual tensions bubbling underneath that is truly disturbing. Ichi very deftly situates its bloodbaths in the context of larger issues of masculine anxiety. In contrast, though Kick-Ass is unabashed in its portrayal of rabid teenage male sex drive and insecurity about sexual orientation, it isn’t smart enough to relate this to anything larger than itself.

Miike also plays with Mulvey-esque, audience-as-voyeur critiques, though via entirely different means than Haneke, relating them back to the sado-masochistic elements that drive the film’s plot. As one reviewer writes, “[the sadistic voyeur Ichi’s] arousal at the sight of any aggression offers an uncomfortable reflection of Miike’s own audience. The film dramatizes how easily violent acts are learned, imitated, and misdirected, engendering endless cycles of vengeance where real satisfaction becomes impossible and disappointment inevitable.” Considering that sort of intelligent, thematic complexity, Kick-Ass is on another planet entirely.

From what little I’ve seen, the art from Millar’s original comic seems to approach something closer to Miike’s approach - blood quite literally dripping from every surface, at once both comic and unsettling. Big Daddy wearing an actual Batman costume is excellent in that it hints at his loose grip on reality and essentially, at his patheticness. But why do we never see him looking anything like he does below - some unholy cross between medieval executioner and slasher film serial killer, chainsaw and all?

Obviously asking for a Peckinpah or Moore or Haneke or Miike film is a bit unfair - desiring something that Kick-Ass, at heart, is not. But it wouldn’t take such drastic changes to make the film “work.” Even just a number of minor changes, mostly shifts in mood or tone, could have saved it completely. A little more gore here, a bit more of an exaggerated smirk there, a little bit of dirt and grime, a few less reassuring explanations in the voiceover, and a color palette that wasn’t so god damn day-glo clean all the time.

The carjacking retort would be better were it made more ridiculous, more out of touch; the saving of the random beatdown victim better if its arbitrariness were played up; the repeated failure of Kick-Ass, and his repeated perseverance, better if it emphasized his detachment from reality more and more with each successive time. The music, already emotionally manipulative, could have been brought closer to breaking point, made more obvious. Hit Girl’s “brainwashing” by her father, briefly touched upon in one scene but otherwise ignored completely, could have been highlighted, adding a troubling, even sad undertone to her character. Most importantly, though, the absurd cartoonishness of Hitgirl and Big Daddy would shine infinitely brighter were it contrasted more with a grim sense of reality and less with the mawkish corniness that characterizes Lizewski’s cookie cutter high school movie existence.

Herein lies the main problem. Despite some rather gruesome gore-porn style violence and exceptionally dark gallows humor, everything in the film mostly hovers around the same high note of implausibility and self-aware, thrice-baked referential clichedness. Ultimately, what Kick-Ass lacks… the one thing that it hints at again and again but fails to ever really grasp onto… is friction: a friction between the surreal, oversimple optimism of Hitgirl and Big Daddy (an optimism shared by Lizewski only in delusions of grandeur) and the terrifying, incomprehensible messiness of the actual world which they all inhabit. We only get tiny flashes of that friction in moments that disappear from the screen as quickly as they came. Some may argue that these flashes are enough to warrant interpreting the film as satire or parody. Indeed, Vaughn himself may even feel this way. But when examined in context, they are not enough. In the end, they are buried and suffocated by a flood of unironic, violent spectacle that represents, at face value, precisely what those brief moments serve to subvert. Not fantastic enough, but not real enough either. Not enough discomfort, and so comfortable, safe, unoffensive.

I’ve long been interested in time-based alternative currencies, and the idea is playing a substantial role in the film I’ve been working on for the past year. Time/Bank is a project by artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle (of the art network and journal e-flux) that attempts to establish a time bank for the art community. Aranda and Vidokle clearly know their stuff - they trace the time banking concept not just to Ithaca, but to Owen and Warren, and link to a number of contemporary time banking projects and resources. Using their website, artists are able to exchange hours of labor with other participants. For instance: you could spend two hours editing a video for someone in your city, and later use those two ‘hour-dollar’ credits to pay someone in Hamburg to translate your press release into German. The project was started last October, and the site gives no indication of whether or not it’s still operating (things like this have a tendency to die out quickly), but I’ve just submitted my application to join the network, so I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

For some reason I’ve never considered before that the art community may be especially suited for experiments in time-based labor exchange. For a few reasons… 1) the stakes are relatively low, 2) artists are typically known for not having a ton of money, 3) barter and unpaid labor exchange (internships, casual volunteering of skills among friends, etc.) are already common.

As part of their project, Aranda and Vidokle also asked a number of artists to design time-based currencies. A few of the designs are clever and aesthetically pleasing, most are ugly and ill thought out. A few have accompanying text explanations, most are left to speak for themselves. A few of those explanations are intelligent and creative, most are typical, overinflated artist statement blabber. These ones are my favorites:

“Film running on a camera that is pointed at an empty set. There are no actors, but the images are the promise of an exchange. No events yet, but my time for yours, for the images to become loaded with meaning.”

“When celebrating a time contract two parties need each find their own string. Any kind of string will do. […] The two parties join the strings in a lark’s head know, or two, or three, or four… One knot equals half an hour, a second knot equals an hour… and so on and so forth […] A note is born of each contract […] In theory a note (knot) can always be traced to its origins”

“This continuous roll of time-money is worth 24 hours. Divided into 48 half-hour segments, the roll was made on a printing calculator by typing the numbers 1 to 30 and then repeating the process 47 times. The user can tear the roll into whatever increments are needed. Artist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s ‘industrial paintings,’ which were kept on rolls and sold by the meter, provided the point of departure for the project.”

Vidokle himself and the net.art duo behind 0o0o0o0.org both had the clever idea of extending the concept beyond the visual/tactile, the former using a loaf of bread that takes one hour to bake, and the latter using silent mp3s of varying lengths. Contrary to the above examples, neither is at all practical, but they both have a poetic way of rethinking our perception of time.

“Most of the feckless, listless quality of today’s art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.”

“Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.”

“The common quality or defect which unites apparently divergent artists like Antonioni, Truffaut, Richardson is fear, a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film. Coupled with their storage vault of self-awareness and knowledge of film history, this fear produces an incessant wakefulness.”

“Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators […] seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite- tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.“

“[Kurosawa’s Ikiru] sums up much of what a termite art aims at - buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.”

- Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art and Termite Art” (1962)

“[F]ilms are just loose scaffoldings, jungle gym swings that allow you to go off in a dozen different directions in your head. Contraptions to think with, murky, messy things. Fascinating sometimes, even often, but rarely perfect. Who needs perfection? – that is the question. […] think about that moment in film theory, late ‘60s to early ‘80s maybe, when all we craved were films with cracks, ruptures and transgressions, films of contradiction, films that tear themselves apart to reveal ideological monsters, whether this film be directed by Jesús Franco or John Ford … those were the days.”

“Imperfect cinema, bad cinema, cannot be corralled down to one kind, one type, one genre of cinema. Today’s whole emphasis on B cinema, exploitation cinema, paracinema, on underground or outlaw cinema, on porno and gorno and all the rest of it, has only one radical point as far as I am concerned: it’s the beachhead, the wedge, that is meant to free you, cure you the viewer, of your in-bred cultural attachment to normative values (the professional film, the well-made film, and so on), and ultimately to the ideal of perfection. That’s why, speaking personally, I ran to Edgar Ulmer, to Tod Browning, to Samuel Fuller, and to so many others of that uncategorisable ilk: to be cured, cured of society, cured of taste, which is a prison – taste, cultivation, whether it is of A cinema or B cinema or Z cinema, is the thing that has to be destroyed in you, exorcised back to hell. It’s hard work, it takes a lifetime, I can assure you: I’m not there yet. It’s not dark yet, but I’m getting there.

“And today this therapy, this exorcism cure, is terribly hard. For today we are living in a Masterpiece culture, a veritable Global Masterpiece Theatre. It’s part of the Criterion Effect that has swamped the DVD market, and hence film culture at large.”

“These days, what I think of as the prison-house of taste has clamped down on most of us – paradoxically so, in the ostensibly wide-open days of the Internet. We are furiously streamed, niched towards what we already know we want to watch: the directors, the genres, the carefully labeled cult-films. And so there are literally thousands of films on those DVD shelves that you or I will never watch.”

 - Adrian Martin, “The World Ten Times Over: Ongoing Adventures in Pulp Poetry” (2010)

As a filmmaker who often works in the science-fiction and fantasy genres and who often incorporates radical themes into my work, the topic of the intersection between speculative fiction and politics is something I spend a hell of a lot of time thinking about. Recently I encountered two authors’ takes on the subject: Michael Morcock’s 1977 essay “Starship Stormtroopers,” and an article recounting a Q&A session with China Miéville at the San Diego Public Library.

Both authors speak of genre conventions that they find politically repulsive. Miéville attacks the trope of “the Chosen One,” a cliche he finds to be “fascist” and which he has attempted to avoid or else subvert in his own writing.

Moorcock, on the other hand, has a bone to pick with a far less obvious and far more insidious convention. He refutes the common interpretation of writers such as Robert A. Heinlein as “radical” or “libertarian,” pointing out that their “rugged individualism” is in fact a childish and simplistic rebelliousness which almost always goes hand in hand with conservative paternalism.

“The bandit hero — the underdog rebel — so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves — what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their ‘charm’. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby.”

“Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in paternalism — albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism — and many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein’s paternalism is at heart the same as Wayne’s. […] To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Coburn [sic] shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office (but not necessarily himself) in True Grit.

“An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world. A ‘rebel’, certainly, he or she does not assume ‘rebellious charm’ in order to placate authority (which is what the rebel heroes of all these genre stories do). There always comes the depressing point where Robin Hood doffs a respectful cap to King Richard, having clobbered the rival king.”

Morcock’s distinction between the childish rebel and the responsible anarchist is spot on. Not only is it something well worth keeping in mind for anyone hoping to write liberatory fiction, but it has far reaching resonance “in the real world” as well. For one, it offers insight into the differing roles “individualism” takes in rightist and leftist thought. Perhaps more importantly though, it should serve as a reminder for many of those on the left of that old adage, “with great freedom comes great responsibility.” I’m thinking specifically of some young punks who too often confuse “fuck you, mom and dad!” rebelliousness with “anarchy.”

The definition of an anarchist Morcock provides (”rejecting authority but accepting self-discipline and community responsibility”) is worthwhile in that it represents a mature political ideal - that is, one which can be enacted not only by the individual espousing it, but by everyone, and still result in a functioning society. Any political ideal which can’t meet that criteria isn’t really an ideal at all… it’s an infantile impulse.

(Thanks to Magpie of Birds Before the Storm for tipping me off to the Miéville article)

bolo’bolo is a utopian novel written in 1983 by the anonymous Swiss author and activist p.m. (a name taken from the most common initials in the Swiss phonebook). One amazon reviewer describes the book as having “No tedious sermons on recycling, condom use, or literacy. Instead, the Magus of Zurich talks about a possible world of duels, sprouting micro-religions, bizarre local cuisines, the transformation of bland existing buildings into bohemian funhouses, dramatic suicides, wild barter economics, and Tarkovskyesque railway systems.”

Central to the brief novel is an invented auxillary language. By simply inventing new terms, p.m. is able to group together concepts in simple, succinct ways. “Pili,” for instance, means “communication, education, language, media,” whereas “vudo” means “city, county, trading area, bioregion.” Each word has a corresponding abstract glyph, and the language has an interesting and elegant grammar system.

p.m. himself speaks of his motivation for creating a new language:

“The original idea for creating this weird secret language came up because the European left-wing terminology was no longer viable. Nowadays when people talk about communism, that’s gulag, no one wants to hear about it. Or if people talk about socialism, then they are speaking of Schröder’s politics - retirement cuts - and no one wants that, either. And all of the other standard left-wing expressions such as ’solidarity,’ ‘community,’ they’re all contaminated and no longer useful. But the things that they stand for are actually quite good. I don’t want to suffer because of terminology for which I am not to blame; instead, I’d rather create my own. It would probably take longer to explain that the communism that I am talking about is not the one that I saw. It is easier to simply say I am for bolo’bolo, and then everyone starts to think of the things all over again, to re-think them. […] I want to emphasize that there is not one single idea in this book that is new. Everything in it is something that I found.”

The official flag of Bikini Atol, whose inhabitants were re-located by the United States government in order to conduct a series of over 20 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, the most significant being 1954’s Castle Bravo - the world’s first ever test of a practical hydrogen bomb. Though the re-location was intended to be temporary, the effect of Castle Bravo was far greater than expected, causing widespread radioactive contamination and leaving the islands uninhabitable to this day.

From a site that also contains the (equally striking and saddening) Bikinian anthem:

“The 23 white stars in the field of blue in the upper left hand corner of the flag represent the islands of Bikini Atoll.

“The three black stars in the upper right of the flag represent the three islands that were vaporized by the March 1, 1954, 15 megaton hydrogen bomb blast, code named Bravo.

“The two black stars in the lower right hand corner represent where the Bikinians live now, Kili Island, 425 miles to the south of Bikini Atoll, and Ejit Island of Majuro Atoll. These two stars are symbolically far away from Bikini’s stars on the flag as the islands are in real life (both in distance and quality of life).

“The Marshallese words running across the bottom of the flag, ‘MEN OTEMJEJ REJ ILO BEIN ANIJ’ [Translation: ‘Everything is in the hands of God.’], represent the words spoken in 1946 by the Bikinian leader, Juda, to U.S. Commodore Ben Wyatt when the American went to Bikini to ask the islanders–on a Sunday after church–to give up their islands for the ‘good of all mankind’ so that the U.S. could test nuclear weapons.

“The close resemblance of the Bikinian’s flag to the flag of the United States is to remind the people and the government of America that a great debt is still owed by them to the people of Bikini.”

Forget about Ashton Kutcher. Forget about Shaq. Forget about the fake but excellent Gary Busey, Steve Buscemi (RIP), and Jenny Holzer. Hell, forget about Iran*. I’m convinced that Twitter was invented for one purpose and one purpose alone… and that was to make Preschool Gems possible.

The site takes submissions of quotes from young children and posts about half a dozen or so “gems” a day. It’s sort of like the reverse of Shit My Dad Says, only a hundred thousand times better.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I love kids and love working with kids. Two years ago I even made a video project where I collaborated with my three young cousins. One of the best things about being around people with ages in the single digits is listening to all the in-one-way-ignorant-but-in-another-way-totally-brilliant stuff that comes out of their mouths. As an artist (or even just as a human being) it can be incredibly inspiring, providing glimpses into an endless myriad of absurd and ostensibly “wrong,” yet very refreshing ways of looking at the world - lenses and vantage points that though once coming naturally, have been squeezed out of us by years of growing up.

Preschool Gems collects the very best examples of this kind of naive brilliance and puts it in a steady stream that can be consumed daily. And for that I am very very thankful.

Some recent favorites:
- “People are hamburgers in America!”
- “You know what? Computers are super smart, but I can beat ‘em.”
- “I would like for you to say wow when I say that you can never be in love with me again.”
- “He has the hapiness of truth and I have the sadness.”
- “I love everything in the world, even fake stuff.”

(That last one I just cannot get over. It kind of sums up my entire worldview.)

*Not that the idea of a bunch of tech-savvy kids challenging a regime isn’t an inspiring idea, but as Rami George Khouri writes in his NYT editorial, “We must face the fact that all the new media and hundreds of thousands of young bloggers from Morocco to Iran have not triggered a single significant or lasting change in Arab or Iranian political culture. Not a single one. Zero. […] [We must] grasp more accurately the fact that young people use the digital media mainly for entertainment and vicarious, escapist self-expression.”

A Conversation with Jon Rafman
Two-Pack-a-Day Smoking Baby Totally Cooler Than You
AVGN - Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties
WWE Wrestler Confused by Own Mustache
cat in a bath “The Torture Room”
TO AMP UP for my day, I ghost ride the whip!
DEATH METAL PARROT
Battlestar Gallactica - Idumea
Why did you kill me Mommy?
Teen Werewolves
FACECAST - Wifebeater
BANGS Take U To Da Movies : [Official Video][HQ]
Fat Man Has A Rash Under His Tit From The Skin Rubbing Together in HD
I Lost My Virginity To A Dog
Hessian Hobbies
Starlings in sp
Shrimp Running On A Treadmill With The Benny Hill Theme
famous guitar player
Birthing Simulator PROMPT
Homeboy of the Month : MC Wagner
Jell-O Enrichment for Squirrel Monkeys at the Bronx Zoo
Walrus sucks own dick
Strange Cat Door Surprise
Foxes Jumping on my Trampoline
Brendan Fowler
BARR: Public Access Media Interview
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D
Creepy Lip Sync Contestant Totally WTF! (Phillipines)
Alka-Seltzer added to spherical water drop in microgravity
Eyewitness News - Hamster’s Mug Shot???
“Non-Documentary Scarf”
Zuckerberg’s Facebook Apology
7 Year Old Raps Justin Bieber - Eenie Meenie (Cover)
7 Year Old Raps B.o.B - Incredible Cover
Self High Five Machine by Deniz Ozuyger: Preview for chashama Installation
Reading and Time: A dialectic between academic expectation and academic frustration
Hippies Crying because of Dead Tree
Lonesome Road cover
GREATIST TREE HOUSE EVER

Also, it’s not worth it to start an entirely separate category/series/whatever for podcasts and the like, but I’ve been listening to a lot of really great interviews that I wanted to share. Hopefully posting audio in these Roundups will become more of a regular thing.

AUDIO:
Fireside Chat with Steve Reich
Bad at Sports: Episode 108: Marc Fischer
Bad at Sports: Episode 251: Mark Dion

Project SCUM
Two Cunts in a Kitchen
Christian angelic hierarchy
Rocky Lockridge
Nurse log
Open-air museum
Historical reenactment
Living history
Renaissance fair
Cosplay
Society for Creative Anachronism
Live action role-playing game
Murder mystery game
Mafia (party game)
Mind’s Eye Theatre
Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Space art
James McIntyre (poet)
Security theater
Philosophy of mathematics
Civil death
Social death
Michael Fagan incident
Richard C. Weaver
Fairy chess piece
Alexamenos graffito
James Joseph Dresnok
Kardashev scale
Doomsday argument
Nudity in combat
The Black Book
List of famous trees
Planned shrinkage
Redlining
Benign neglect
Principles of Intelligent Urbanism
Cliff Young (athlete)
Sylvestre Matuschka
Saddam Hussein’s novels
Percussive maintenance
Hapax legomenon
Bloody Island (Mississippi River)
Flag of Bikini Atoll
Brian Douglas Wells
Dymaxion Chronofile
Radio jamming in Korea
Political religion
State capitalism
Erdős number
Erdős-Bacon number
Morphy Number
Shusaku number
Small world experiment
Supertaster
Selective eating disorder
Just-so story
Monogamy
Value of monogamy
Psychology of sexual monogamy
Cicisbeo
Attachment theory
Anti-fan
Fabula and sujet
Lost Cosmonauts
Emotional labor
The Hamster Dance
Alcohol belts of Europe
Little magazine movement
Sayre’s Law
Biological issues in Jurassic Park
Origin of birds
Cathexis
Waldorf education
The Experience Economy