Obama HQ Behind the Scenes

from Cleveland

From the town that brought us Dennis Kucinich, Great Lakes Brewing Company, and the Indians: American Splendor. Harvey Pekar‘s fantastic underground comic is commemorated in this week’s filmclub pic, American Splendor.

What is splendid in American Splendor is the film’s commitment to the confusion of multiple frames: Cleveland, comic, movie, character, realism, nerd-life, disgruntlement, and marriage. Pekar might object to the romanticism, but one recalls Roethke‘s existential question. Which I is I?

The answer, it turns out, is a flawed but compelling character whose claim to comic genius, played straight, captures the pulp fabric of the Cleveland quotidian. It ain’t yuppie. Warm like a worn flannel, that’s the stuff. But put that flannel on jazz and you get closer. Paint the sky slate, and you’re closer yet. Shuffle your feet. Diner. File Clerk. Retirement. Friends.

The realistic virtue of Dreiser‘s Jennie Gerhardt is extolled. Revenge of the Nerds is panned. Pekar lives between the heron and the wren. It’s in this rust-belt rummage through comic pages that the story of a working Joe like Harvey cracks a grin-like grimace, the faint goddamn! of finding himself in frames.

Raccoon’s write-up is here.

Sepulnation

In addition to the kick-ass song, what I love about this clip is the way that Sepultura pulls an un-John Kerry and goes to help the dude being hassled by security. They’re scheduled to have a new album in 2008. In the meantime, I hope to review a Sepultura album ever Monday starting next week (march 3rd) with Morbid Visions (1986). For die-hards I have to apologize: I don’t have the Bestial Devastation (1985) split EP with fellow Brazilians Overdose. Alas! The Roadrunner reissue of Morbid Visions includes the tracks from the Devastation EP anyway, so not a huge loss.

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

I managed to find a copy of the legendary Situationist film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? at Quimby’s. What a treat! It appears they were practicing detournement long before Adbusters. If you’d like to see the film please let me know!

Here’s a bit of it:

wish fulfillment

Dazed and Confused is a film that manages to perform the way high school should have been. The liberal nerd punches his aggressor and despite losing the fight, averts years of wishing he had gotten his lick in. His brainy compatriot overcomes shyness to begin a relationship with a cute freshman. The token dealer never manages to come to any harm, and the quarterback refuses to sign a bullshit pledge that he’ll abstain from drugs and alcohol. The hazed young men get girlfriends and get even with some of the overzealous upperclassmen who had hazed them. Nobody in fact comes to serious harm. Nobody. And this shimmering world hangs for the ensemble like a puff of late-adolescent freedom.

Someone speculates that maybe the 80s will be cool? We know better.

Raccoon’s write-up is here.

soooo excited!!!!

boys suck at logic, nonsexism.

Found this at feministing.

don’t enlist

Unless it’s with Code Pink!

suicide blondes

Tragedy is an entropic genre: it precedes from order to chaos, and is concerned most frequently with the demise of families. Sometimes this is the result of a particular flaw. In The Virgin Suicides that flaw is the parents’  desire to protect their daughters from the 1970s by keeping them like flowers in the attic.  Locked away from the nascent decline of auto manufacturing in Michigan, and from their lives, including the boys across the street, the film directs our attention to the futility of protectionist policies for the domestic manufacture of women.

Enter Michael Moore. Well, actually, as close as we get to Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) and Me, is Mr. Lisbon, whose hothouse hobbies include model planes and obtuse fathering. He boors the neighborhood narrators and slips gradually toward ghost during his daughters’ confinement. In a film with a number of painful scenes, Mr. Lisbon’s inability to connect, or even speak with Father Moody (Scott Glenn) suggests the fathomless quality of his own confinement.

The younger males are more engaged. They note that the women know everything about them, while they appear to only know what my compatriot Raccoon calls mystique.  Like the hidden hand of the market the film could suggest that seemingly disastrous situations will naturally correct themselves. The boys will see a return to equilibrium, a bit of order. Maybe they marry. That would be the comedy re-mix. Instead the film yields a tragic tale of social and industrial decline. The automotive industry outlives the girls, but their death-rattles are conjoined.

Let me be clear: the 70s were socially dangerous because the economy was in danger. I began by calling the film a tragedy, in fact it is stagflation.

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