On the Road Again

Dear reader,

I’m headed back to Chicago and hope to be up and blogging again in the not too distant future. Please forgive the hiatus, and thank you, as always, for reading.

CGI:Can’t Get Interested

I recently watched David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986). Raccoon’s useful list of films, and a discussion in particular of The Fly as a species of romantic comedy got me interested. Raccoon says:

I’ll tip my hat to the 1950’s one final time (albeit indirectly) by including David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of 1958’s The Fly—the original is a silly bit of hokum, but it turns to something elegiac and moving in Cronenberg’s hands, one of the best meditations on illness that the cinema has ever produced.

And the film is great, at once a send-up of the romantic-comedy genre and an earnest articulation of bio-technological anxiety. In short it takes the gag of an out of control body that appears farting or secreting in comedies like Meet the Parents, Something about Mary, or anything with Ben Stiller, apparently, to its conclusion in the more or less absolute dissidentification of the body–a material collapse of the human shell. The Fly takes literally the notion that a significant other is a creep. Albeit, as is usually the case, a creep with a certain pathos.

In Cronenberg’s film, Brundlefly’s pathos would be completely compromised by CGI. It’s hard to imagine the film being made with puppets today. And that’s a real loss, because in the same way that the telepods in The Fly have a hard time reproducing flesh, so too the technology of computer generated images fails to capture the visceral immediacy that a puppet or human actor conveys.

Geroge Romero does a pretty good job of marrying the technologies (puppets and CGI) in Land of the Dead, but he could get away with just puppets, if he wanted to. I don’t think the romance with CGI will end for directors. But for this viewer anyway, the immateriality of CGI fails to capture the coarse granularity of a past generation of films. And that is a loss of life.

I Renounce American Football

Instead, I officially out myself for OM. This makes good on a chat with a friend who sadly passed away last Christmas about left-wing soccer teams and the importance of embracing one. He’d said that Marseille was a perfectly respectable option, himself being a Celtic fan.

I suppose I should mention that I don’t view supporting the Fire as a conflict of interest. Everybody supports the Fire.

The Wonderful Andy Irvine

The Ballad of Tom Joad

Mother Jones

one more parade

They Might Be Giants have a new album. Here they are covering a Phil Ochs song.

A List Poem

“Somebody Blew Up America” made New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey itch. So he decided he’d make Amiri Baraka step down as Poet Laureate. Except, he couldn’t find a legal way to do it. And so he canceled the Poet Laureateship, thus making Baraka the last Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

I like this poem, despite finding the anti-semitic lines toward the end problematic and at best, a poor decision for inclusion in an otherwise fine poem.

Bedtime with Bukowski

Zombie’s G(al)ore

Here is the classic Lucio Fulci zombie shark scene, from the movie zombie II. The scene is a bit like a choreographed dance. Speculation about how Fulci produced a fairly docile tiger shark is rampant in discussions of the film. The scene is also noteworthy in that it amends zombie lore by suggesting that zombie’s will attack animals, something, to my memory, that we never see in Romero’s films.

And speaking of Romero, he’s recently wrapped up Diary of the Dead, and will be working on a zombie comedy?! Shaun of the Dead like?

Meta

I feel like I’ve become modestly alienated from my own blog lately. I very much enjoy reading anaj, jetsam, and whetted amongst others, but I’ve found that the purpose of “cabbage” has been drifting.

If you were to go back through my posts you’d see that initially they were for the most part concerned with American literary naturalism. I thought that the blog would be a good space to keep some notes and thoughts about things I’d read. This isn’t a bad practice, but as I’m spending more time organizing my notes and writing my dissertation proper, I find I’m spending less time typing blog entries.

So I’ve veered into politics and music. Cabbage: politics and music, or Act II. With these posts I’ve tended to write less and less, and that’s not so good either.

So what to do for act III? Well, I leave it up to you all, what have you liked or disliked? What would make cabbage a more pleasurable part of your day? One improvement would be frequently putting a new post up. I’ve had very limited success with this in the past.

I’ve now had this blog up for a couple months and want to thank you, whoever you are, for reading.