Project for Joe Biden’s vice-presidential debate planning team: I am curious to know how the policies that Sarah Palin supports would affect a woman in a similar situation to her, minus her income level. In other words, what kind of policy track record for women does Palin have besides being a woman herself? Beyond the identity politics, I wonder what the actual positions stand for.
You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick. - Sarah Palin, RNC Speech
On that path to freedom, Harriet Tubman had one piece of advice. …If you hear the dogs, keep going. - Hillary Clinton, DNC Speech
What was so striking about the Republican and Democratic National Conventions was the difference in their tones: the DNC was full of the rhetoric of uplift and solidarity, while the RNC kept returning to bitterness and divisiveness.
Of course, there were plenty of policy differences. But since both campaigns have turned to the same rhetoric of change and transformation, the contrasts in style became increasingly marked.
Obama and others at the DNC in Denver drew upon the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom “I Have a Dream” to strike a stern but hopeful tone. Even critics noticed the cathartic power of this style of politics.
Meanwhile, the Republicans trotted out every stale tactic in their playbook — accusations of elitism, insinuations of lack of character, grandstanding references to war heroism, and claims of self-righteous outsiderdom that bordered on outright lies. Their speeches (and the audience’s responses) displayed a kind of cruelness. This was the politics of bitterness, but even more than that it was the politics of meanness.
What’s intriguing about this RNC tone is that it brings together those who glory in their privilege (the kind of dismissive teasing by those with power of those less fortunate who would dare to complain) and those who feel a kind of rage and humiliation at their shortfalls (the infamous working class who supposedly cling to their guns and religion). The tone of shrill cruelty performs enormous political work by bonding those together who share common emotions but lack the same material interests.
Nowhere was this tone more on display than in the style and presentation of Sarah Palin. The pitbull in lipstick brought together in one figure a kind of celebrity display of perfected success and hints of awkward, failed dreams.
* * *
The tonal differences between the DNC and RNC seemed, in the end, to revolve around competing visions of individualism.
Democrats struck a tone of uplift to emphasize that individuals need each other in order to thrive as individuals (”we cannot walk alone” Obama announced, paraphrasing King). Republicans repeatedly argued that the individual is under continual threat by forces beyond his or her control and might only bond together in a kind of fearful anger, pent-up rage, or militarized aggression (”This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn’t just need an organizer,” according to Palin).
If political candidates act out collective visions of the American individual in their presentations and personas, then the question of the election at this juncture seems to be: should the American engage in community organizing or bear the marks of being a tortured prisoner of warfare? Is the American individual a figure of fulfillment in community or fear in isolation? Is the American individual to be like the preacher or the pitbull?
The “Palin Power” signs at the RNC sent me fleeing for some real riot grrrl power I might actually be able to believe in: a day of listening to Sleater-Kinney.
Most critics, in rightly celebrating this band as perhaps the most important rock group of the last fifteen years, have focused on Corin Tucker’s ululating howl, Janet Weiss’s Bonhamian Led-Zep beat, and Carrie Brownstein’s guitar riffs as the key components of Sleater-Kinney. Their songs are essential too, particularly their ability to create sonic spaces for investigating and feeling out all the complexities of the DIY aesthetic and ethic. But, most often, commentators have focused on Tucker’s voice, which her bandmates affectionally (and somewhat sardonically?) called “the Tool.” It was Tucker’s voice that was supposed to be the essence of Sleater-Kinney’s riot grrrl power.
Of course, it was the combination of these three musicians’ talents that made the now inactive Sleater-Kinney such a powerfully expressive band. Yet, listening again to the group, I think the secret weapon of the trio’s sound was actually Tucker’s rhythm guitar, which emerges from the mix like the ocean leaking out from a rusted metal pipe.
Full of grit and minerals, Tucker’s rhythm guitar substituted for the lack of a bass in Sleater-Kinney’s instrumentation. It filled up the background of the group’s sound with a kind of pulsating rumble, a salty undercurrent of murk on which the three voices of the group — Tucker’s voice, Weiss’s drums, and Brownstein’s riffs — could ride.
I hear something in Tucker’s guitar, the least noticed aspect of the group’s sound, that drove the band, that undergirded it, that lifted each musician’s more noticeable voices on its waves. As in the best rock music, Tucker’s rhythm guitar parts harnessed the explosive buzz of electricity, channeling the power grid into six strings and fingertips and a fist clenched around a plastic pick…making you want to dance and cry, march in the streets and slip under the bedcovers, declare I am and we must be, all in one downstroke.
Tucker’s rumbling guitar was the tide on which Sleater-Kinney rocked and rolled.
What does it mean for an actor to play out larger collective stories in his roles?
Since 9/11, George Clooney has come to play America’s fixer, taking on the nation’s sins, and trying, through the catharsis of his roles, to bring about some breakthrough in our collective emotional and intellectual understanding of all that has gone wrong.
No scene expresses Clooney’s allegorical place in the American psyche better than the extended last scene of Michael Clayton. In the film, Clooney literally plays a fixer for a high-stakes New York law firm. At film’s end, after settling not only his law firm’s messes, but also the injustices committed by a corrupt agribusiness firm, Clayton gets in a cab and pays the driver fifty dollars simply to drive.
The camera stays on Clayton’s face for minutes in the quiet interior of the taxi. Without speaking, Clooney takes us through a series of slow-motion expression changes: deadpan gazes of shock, the verge of tears, almost a sigh of relief, and, finally, the barest hint of a smile. It is a startling and almost overwhelming bit of acting.
I am not quite sure why, but when placed in the string of roles Clooney has recently played, from Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou? to Fred Friendly in Good Night and Good Luck to Bob Barnes in Syriana, the final scene of Michael Clayton compresses the many emotional moods of the last decade — responses felt to 9/11, Enron, Katrina, Iraq, the presidential elections, the recent Democratic National Convention — into a few minutes on camera.
In these films, Clooney has played a kind of lost American searching for his country, taking on the weight of its shortcomings, expressing its best ideals (sometimes with a freighted seriousness and sometimes through a goofy foolishness), and trying (and often failing) to make things right.
Perhaps this cross-film character that Clooney has traced across the screen will one day help to tell the story of what happened to the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Like Don Draper struggling to put together his daughter’s backyard playhouse, you spend all Saturday assembling a suburban symbol, which fakes looking sturdy but is in fact incredibly cheap and flimsy. Flipping through the novel of an instruction manual, which seems as complex and baffling as a set of war game diagrams or some NFL coach’s offensive playbook, you put pieces together in seemingly random assemblages. Finally, sweating in the August heat, you arrive at the final page, which shows you, in head-on tank-like grandiosity, the monster you have created: an armada of flaming hamburgers.
On Not Hearing Ornette Coleman in Grant Park
The saxophone curls around the grid. Plastic, bending, melodic, blown by a breeze from Lake Michigan, pleading for sense, and for sensations, for sadnesses. It enters my skull and pulls me out toward the American skies. The grass curls into blades, reedy shudders of wind at the edge of the sidewalk. Cracks in the pavement. Manmade beaches where the water strikes rocks. The stillness far from the agora. It doesn’t matter if you hear me or not: sounds make ideas touch past their echoes.
Reviews:
William Safire’s disappointing column about Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech at the Denver Democratic National Convention (“The Audacity of Hype,” New York Times, 31 August 2008) put partisan politics about rhetorical analysis.
In the essay, Safire wanted to have it both ways: he wanted to stand above the scene to provide an objective analysis of Obama’s speech and he wanted to slam Obama no matter what he did. He wanted to play the role of Greek chorus, but wound up sounding more like a Republican hack.
Safire’s confusion of the two roles bespeaks a kind of rage at Obama’s ability to shift and adjust to the needs of the occasion. Obama’s gift is that he seems able to play to multiple audiences in multiple registers. He can be a nobleman and an everyman, a populist and a centrist, a stern father figure and compassionate believer in the role of government to help people. He can stand at the center of a political spectacle while seeming able to reach through it to connect to the listener. Obama’s abilities frightened Safire’s old Republican soul.
The columnist’s critique of the candidate was so surprisingly clueless and tone deaf, so desperate to downplay the successes of the speech. In fact, when he wasn’t desperately turned to stale Republican distortions of Democratic positions, Safire grudgingly granted point after point to Obama.
Unable to mount a convincing case that the speech was a failure on rhetorical grounds, Safire clumsily dressed up an old Jim Crowism in the robes of the ancient Greeks to end his essay. Claiming that Obama’s historic appearance was hubristic seemed nothing more than a fancy way of accusing the first African-American presidential candidate of being “uppity.”
This was the worst kind of rhetorical trick: insinuation instead of plain writing. How depressing for such a thoughtful commentator on language to put his foot in his mouth from start to finish.
Americans have a word for such a shrill and unperceptive essay: garbage.
Sonny Rollins @ Pritzker Pavillion, Millennium Park, 08/28/2008
Sonny Rollins has always played fairly conventional forms of post-bop, but through his inventive improvisations, he has continually connected those conventions to a larger soundscape, especially the soundscape of the cosmopolitan city, where saxophone lines bristle with song quotations and noise quotations, gestures and nods and glances and invocations of a deep, polymathematical culture of ideas and feelings and sensations.
It’s a rich, rich world to get to inhabit when you listen to Sonny Rollins. Even if you don’t pick up on al the references and clues, you feel in the presence not just of a brilliant jazz conversationalist, but also of an observant, worldly, playful, genius artist and thinker.
Sonny Rollins on Williamsburg Bridge, Circa 1960
So it was the perfect setting to hear Rollins perform in Millennium Park, with the towers of downtown Chicago looming all around. Rollins, stooped over as he walked on stage, became the saxophone colossus as soon as he put lips to horn, roaring and soaring, laughing and dancing around songs.
Perhaps the best part of the show was when an ambulance or fire truck siren wailed in the distance during a quiet bass solo. Rollins, outlining the melodic framework of the song for his bassist, imitated the siren, bringing the city into the song and the song into the city.
As with Barack Obama’s speech from Denver later in the evening, it was jazz at its best: not just a representation of the modern city, but in fact both representation and the thing itself, soundtrack and soundscape mingling and merging into the democratic dream and the inhabited being of life in the American civitas.
David Byrne’s project, Playing the Building, available for viewing, playing, and listening at New York’s renovated Battery Maritime Terminal, explores a number of questions, among them:
David Byrne, Playing the Building, Battery Maritime Building, New York City, Summer 2008
Most of all, to me, the project does something odd. It starts out complex, an art piece that seems to pose as many lines of inquiry and questioning as the bundles of pneumatic tubes, wires, and coils tumbling out of the old pump organ at the center of the exhibition. You could write a dissertation about each one.
But then, the more I think about Byrne’s piece, the more simple it is. All that the project seems to really want to do is to ask “wouldn’t it be cool to be able to play a building?”
As Byrne puts it in a Pitchfork TV interview (see below), the point of the project is the pleasure of touching parts of the building one would never imagine being able to affect…and, to boot, touching them through sound.
The play’s the thing.
Image: Creative Time
All big Internet successes — e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft — have a more or less addictive component — they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep. - Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia,” New York Review of Books 55, 4 (20 March 2008)
The mediated life seems to consist of waiting for something big about to happen. On cable news, you hear it in the tone of a voice such as Wolf Blizter’s. Everything he says amounts to “and now, the think you’ve been waiting for,” but then the now never arrives. You feel it when you keep asking your computer to get mail from your email account. You feel it every time you log in, reload, reset, reboot.
Has anyone written about this strange emotional quality of media such as cable news or the Internet? It seems essential to a certain kind of paralysis that one feels in our contemporary world. Information overload. Always on the edge, edgy, and then edged out. You’re standing at the precipice of a crossroads, to quote Little Carmine from The Sopranos. But you never arrive.
The link leads nowhere but to the same perpetual cusp.