The Rookie Files

Racism, Sexism and Lonely Planet India

2011-09-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

Pick up any travel guide about any destination and you'll almost certainly find a reference to 'the juxtaposition of old and new'. These references usually mean there are some old buildings but there is also a McDonald's, or people are religious but there is also a McDonald's, or there are lots of beggars, but there are also lots of branches of McDonald's. As cliches go, it's not necessarily more offensive than most workaday journalistic banalities. But when applied to India – and it is, all the time – the tradition/modernity patter works in a very specific way. I use Lonely Planet India as my example because it was the guide that at least 90% of tourists had when I was there, but the Rough Guide (and probably others) are just as guilty. My particular experience of using the Lonely Planet was first one of general irritation, but after a while I traced my irritation back to this seemingly innocuous cliché about the clash of the new and the old, development and sustainability, progress and tradition.

Why is sustainability 'traditional'? I began to wonder about these odd synonymic chains. For 'new' read 'Western', 'secular', 'big corporations', 'the rich'. For 'old' read 'Eastern', 'Hindu', 'sustainable local economies', 'the poor'. Now, there is really no necessary alignment between Hinduism and localism, or between secularism and capital. Nevertheless, in order for India to make sense within travel guide logic, the East must necessarily stand for one thing, the West another. In this narrative, the forces of tradition can mean anything from sustainable agriculture to high infant mortality, while the forces of development can mean anything from improved medical care to corporate land-grabs. The result is a world-view in which India's poverty is a casualty of its difficult path to modernization, and all the shiny wealthy stuff is a glistening image of the future (which is coming soon for everyone, of course). Lonely Planet jokes that the 'dhoti-clad man you pass in the bazaar may be delivering instructions to his mergers and acquisitions office in London'. The relentless emphasis on such apparent incongruities belies the fact that they aren't incongruities at all. Religion and capitalism exist, together, now. Recognizing this is the first step to recognizing that there is a future in which the mergers and acquisitions office doesn't figure. That perhaps the shiny wealthy stuff isn't a beacon leading India out of poverty, or even a neutral emblem of the inexorable march of time, but a sign of what has gone wrong.

The progress-tradition smokescreen allows Lonely Planet to get away with a lot, including stark misogyny. Its advice for women travellers includes the following helpful gem:

“Broadly speaking, India is a conservative society, and the skimpy clothing and culturally inappropriate behaviour of a minority of foreign women appears to have had somewhat of a ripple effect on the perception of foreign women in general … Baggy clothing that masks the contours of your body is the way to go.” (1171-1172)

We can only guess at the terrible acts committed by this evil minority of foreign women and their Western bodily contours. The Rough Guide to India is, thankfully, more specific about what constitutes 'culturally inappropriate behaviour':

“It's always best to dress modestly – a salwar kameez is perfect, as is any baggy clothing – and refrain from smoking and drinking in public, which only reinforces prejudices that Western women are “loose” and “easy”. (78)

So culturally inappropriate behaviour is not murder or rape, but smoking and drinking in public. Don't do that, girls. Not sure if men are allowed to smoke and drink. It doesn't say. They are allowed to rape, I think.

Guys get some advice from the Rough Guide too:

“Men should always wear a shirt in public, and avoid shorts (a sign of low caste) away from beach areas.” (75)

Just, wow.

I am sure Lonely Planet and Rough Guide would point out that this advice is written from a pragmatic rather than a principled point of view, designed to make life easier for the traveller. Both guides devote space elsewhere to explaining the complex and continuing history of gender and caste based oppression in India. But the traveller is mainly looking to have an easy time, right?

Well, it is not that simple. It's likely that a (loose Western) women travelling in India during the hot season might wonder why she's still sweating beneath that (culturally authentic) shawl when she has plenty of (slutty, skimpy) vests in her backpack. It's possible she might get angry at the fact cross-cultural patriarchy has made her so uncomfortable. It's possible she might connect this discomfort with the fact there are more stray dogs out on the street than women, despite her travel guide's seeming inability to make this link. She might even notice that, no matter what she wears, men still stare at her, yell at her, grope her, take photos of her without asking, ignore her and give her boyfriend the bill. She might even feel a sense of solidarity with the Indian women who have to put up with this shit and much, much worse all the time. She might look around her and notice that all the backpacker dudes aren't all that much better, and are often a lot worse, especially the total stranger who shouted that she should use her boobs to help him hitchhike. She might think fuck this, I'm putting on my fucking vest and it's not to help you fucking hitckhike. And the guy? Maybe he likes his shorts, or maybe he doesn't feel comfortable making wardrobe decisions on the basis of caste prejudice, which a few pages ago was being discussed as a terrible but thankfully fading custom.

There is an ever-so-subtle difference between promoting cultural sensitivity and chauvinism. It's not so hard to spot the distinction, if you try. Cultural sensitivity might mean both sexes covering heads and removing shoes when entering a mosque. It might mean not wearing a bikini to dinner. It might mean refraining from passionately kissing someone in public. Generally, cultural sensitivity just means approaching each unique social situation with intelligence, kindness and respect. People from other countries aren't actually aliens.

This doesn't mean women should feel bad about adapting their clothing or behaviour if doing so makes life easier while in India. If you feel OK about covering up, and if it genuinely stops all the unwanted attention, do it. But the Lonely Planet should stop perpetuating stereotypes about 'loose Western women' founded on the erroneous belief these stereotypes are rooted in 'Indian culture'. At best, this is ignorance; at worst, it's both racist and sexist, advancing a colonialist myth about inherently lustful Indian men that (a) fails to acknowledge the complexity and cultural specificity of the situation and (b) completely ignores all the Indian men who are perfectly respectful of women.

Hard and fast rules telling female tourists to disguise the contours of their bodies and behave meekly and obediently are nothing but an attempt to rebrand patriarchy as an ancient tradition that outsiders must respect. At the root of all this 'practical advice' is the same idea that India is engaged in a struggle between the old and the new, and that the traveller is there to witness this struggle and to grab some wisdom from 'the old' before it disappears altogether. But the oppression of women and the poor is not a precious part of India's cultural heritage, nor is it something India will grow out of as it travels slowly but surely along the path to enlightenment.

I'm not sure what I expected of my travel guide. The Lonely Planet has an absurd monopoly in Asia. Practically every tourist you see in India is clutching a copy. I'm not cynical about tourism. I think travel guides can and should do better.

The film Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh (adapted from Helena Norberg-Hodge's book) demonstrates that this problem isn't limited to travel guides. Norberg-Hodge's premise is that the rapid scale of development in Ladakh allows us to vividly discern the problems caused by capitalism. It's a fascinating idea, marred by the fact that the film never mentions globalization or capitalism. The problem in Ladakh are framed as the invasion of the Eastern past by the Western future and as a result, some of the film's most forceful arguments are swallowed by the redundant truism that “we can't go back”. If you care about social justice, you apparently have three pieces of advice: yearn for a time machine, wear a fucking shawl and if that doesn't work, shake your fists at the stars.

Arundhati Roy Vs. Lonely Planet India

2011-08-23T07:49:00.000-07:00

On the 2002 Gujarat massacre

Lonely Planet says:

“Congress was mainly in control of Gujarat after Independence, till 1991 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power. In 2002, communal violence erupted after a Muslim mob was blamed for an arson attack on a train at Godhra that killed 59 Hindu activists. Hindu gangs then set upon Muslims in revenge. This violence coincided with the beginning of the election campaign, and BJP Chief Minister Narendra Modi followed a policy of fiercely Hindu rhetoric, which may have encouraged division in the state, but brought him a landslide victory. Since the 2002 riots, however, the state has been peaceful, and continues to enjoy its reputation as one of India's most prosperous states. In late 2008 this progressive state secured the large and lucrative Tata Motors' Nano car project.” (p. 727)

Arundhati Roy says:

“That the BJP has struck roots in states like Karnataka and Gujarat, both frontrunners in the globalization project, once again illustrates the organic relationship between ‘Union’ and ‘Progress’. Or, if you like, between Fascism and the Free Market.

In January 2009 that relationship was sealed with a kiss at a public function. The CEOs of two of India’s biggest corporations, Ratan Tata (of the Tata Group) and Mukesh Ambani (of Reliance Industries), while accepting the Gujarat Garima—Pride of Gujarat—award, celebrated the development policies of Narendra Modi, architect of the Gujarat genocide, and warmly endorsed him as a future candidate for prime minister.” (p. xxii)

On the IT industry and 'success'

Lonely Planet says:

“Despite the collective pros and cons, there is no doubt that IT will go down in history as one of India's great success stories.” (p.67)

Arundhati Roy says (in the voice of George Bush):

“In return for Bill Gates' millions the Innian government buys hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computer technology from him. He's so rich I'm afraid he might burst. I always wear an apron when I'm around him.” (p.112)

On agriculture and 'basic Malthusian truths'

Lonely Planet says:

“Between 11% and 27% of India's agricultural output is lost due to soil degradation from over-farming, rising soil-salinity, loss of tree cover and poor irrigation. The human cost is heart-rending, and lurking behind all these problems is a basic Malthusian truth: there are too many people for India to support at its current level of development.” (p.102)

Arundhati Roy says:

“The regime of Free Market economic policies, administered by people who are blissfully ignorant of the fate of civilizations that grew too dependent on artificial irrigation, has led to a worrying shift in cropping patterns. Sustainable food crops, suitable to local soil conditions and micro-climates, have been replaced by water-guzzling, hybrid and genetically modified 'cash' crops which, apart from being wholly dependent on the market, are also heavily dependent on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, canal irrigation and the indiscriminate mining of ground water. As abused farmland, saturated with chemicals, gradually becomes exhausted and infertile, agricultural input costs rise, ensnaring small farmers in a debt trap. Over the last few years, more than 180,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide. While state granaries are bursting with food, that eventually rots, starvation and malnutrition approaching the same levels as in sub-Saharan Africa stalk the land." (xvi)

All Arundhati Roy quotations are from the essay collection Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (Penguin, 2009). All Lonely Planet quotations are from the 13th edition of the India guide (2009). I just spent five weeks in northern India with both books.

poem about people who follow Charlie Sheen on Twitter

2011-03-21T04:30:00.000-07:00

Clutching yr smartphone to your

beleaguered crotch:

"Winning", you gurgle.

You gaze up at the closed door of the sky

and scratch in vain

at what life once promised

Imaginary constituencies, invisible power

2010-11-11T07:52:00.000-08:00

The constituency formed by students is always in flux, but we persist in discussing 'the students' as if they are a static mass. When I finished my BA in 2006, my classmates and I were quick to throw off the 'student' label - it always carried a stigma in Manchester, where the physical frontier between town and gown has always been blurred. Now people who already have degrees take a quasi-ironic pleasure in slagging off the bloody students - a bit like when the Year 8s at comp take the piss out of the Year 7s, or when teenagers act more adult around younger children. It's a way of asserting your separation from the crowd, your malleable identity, your resistance to collective labels, your self-interest. At yesterday's demo against education cuts, workers and pensioners and sixth-formers and unemployed graduates and part-time students marched against the withdrawal of state support for education. It's ludicrous to claim this is an expression of self-interest, as Polly Toynbee did a few days before the protest, her position now backed by the unceasing, tedious groan of online commentary. If you are a student now, chances are you won't be directly affected by the policy changes. My PhD funding for the next three years is guaranteed (I hope). Self-interest would be to sit back and wait for graduation day. Sartre, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (crude analysis of complex text i haven't read in full alert), distinguishes between serial collectivity, in which people are passively unified by social structures, and the group-in-fusion, in which people actively unite towards a mutually acknowledged purpose. If the students are a series, can a group campaigning for their rights break up that identity? I think so.

Why criticize students for being posh and middle-class? The social homogeneity of higher education is only going to get worse under the new proposals. I've heard people express support for higher fees on the grounds of their own disillusionment with university - huge class sizes, apathetic teaching, no contact time. These problems exist, but they were created by what Nina Power calls the 'the increasingly utilitarian approach to human life that sees degrees as nothing but "investments" by individuals'. It's perverse that an intensification of this approach is now being hailed as a solution to the problems it caused. I've heard people call for non-violent protest. First: smashing up a building is a lesser form of violence than self-starvation. Second: it's vital to see the Millbank occupation as an important part of something much bigger. Some bloggers are discussing the occupation as the only worthwhile part of the demo: it's a shame to discount the peaceful protests of 50,000 people, just as it's a shame to "condemn" (such sanctimonious language) the less peaceful protests of a sizeable minority as "petty vandalism" (I should stop reading Facebook comments).

Political demonstrations are a form of performance, which isn't to say they are falsified or trivial, but that they are a way of staging problems that are not easily articulated. Demonstrations turn private misery - no jobs, benefit cuts, young people who can't afford to learn to think critically - into the sorts of images and noises that can be transmitted and shared. They turn the violence of law, which is shadowy and invisible and easy to hide, into the kind of violence that can be communicated. They force the police, some of them nice enough people, into the role of The State, making them perform government violence instead of working to naturalize it, keep it invisible. This might not seem fair. But remember who's directing this performance. Protestors don't set the stage. They just storm it.

These machines kill fascists

2010-11-09T04:53:00.000-08:00

White boys with guitars: take stock. In fact, everybody take stock for a moment because John Harris is not happy. Upset with the government and yearning for some righteous protest tunes, Harris recently dug out his Jam records and had a darn good time thinking about what Paul Weller might do to the coalition government and their flabby, smirking, DICKHEAD faces given half the chance. Harris had a sandwich, and then he had a think. “The Jam are really old!” he suddenly realised. He rifled frantically through his record collection, but could only find a record by Mumford and Sons. “I have terrible taste in music!” shouted Harris. “Therefore I must write an article about how contemporary pop music is failing to respond to the political crises of our time!”

According to John Harris, the last pop band to articulate a sense of impassioned anger about social inequality was the Arctic Monkeys. It’s difficult to argue with him there. I certainly plan to chant “I BET YOU LOOK GOOD ON THE DANCEFLOOR, CLEGG!” at the NUS protest on Wednesday and I sure don’t expect to be alone. Since that apex of searing, politicised rock, there have only been a few right-on blips in a sea of apathetic sludge, claims Harris. He concedes that John Legend and the Roots attempted something like a sonic sit-in with ‘Wake Up’, but complains the album is an “exercise in sepia-tinted radical chic”. Nostalgia is an odd charge from a man who wonders aloud whether “when the Berlin wall fell and the gospel of no alternative took hold … the culture was inevitably changed for keeps”.

Harris is stuck between a rock and a hard place: he quite rightly doesn’t want 21st century popstars to ape Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, but neither can he understand that you don’t need to “pick up a guitar and howl” to make music expressing opposition to a right-wing political culture based on the greed of elites. Plenty of people are still making seditious music with guitars, but there are other ways to express dissent sonically.

I can't claim to hold the key to a music library that reflects the specific crisis we're facing in the UK right now, but surely even in this Cyber Age Beyond Time we can't expect a rousing anti-Osborne album on the day of the comprehensive spending review. Still, there’s enough evidence that the musicians of postmodernity are doing a lot more than lying around worrying about their ability to critique the system from within (as if it was ever possible to stand outside capitalism, even in the 1970s).

I saw Joanna Newsom perform ‘What We Have Known’ at Matt and Phred’s in Manchester in 2004, just as Bush was clambering his way to a second term in the US. She told the audience it was a political song, and her chilling words about the amnesia of war – “and all the baby boys we’ve borne/with eyes averted from the storm/sent off to die in perfect form/we know not now what we have known” – remain the best response to claims that Newsom’s lyrics are whimsical nonsense. Even more recently there's El-P snarling "Me fighting in your war is still, by a large margin, the least likely thing that will ever fucking happen. Ever." in the explosive ‘Dear Sirs’. They aren't all Americans: there's The Bug, Robert Wyatt’s Comicopera, M.I.A (whether or not you're sold on ‘Born Free’). Berlin-based electronic musician Barbara Morgenstern’s track, ‘Driving My Car’, exploits pop’s poetic licence to express several things at once. Its haunting lyrics are a meditation on climate change, or a determination to continue singing about driving with carefree abandon, or both. Harris probably hasn’t listened to Erykah’s Badu New Amerykah Part One: 4^th World War. Badu’s lyrics on ‘Soldier’ – “to my folks on the picket line/don’t stop till you change their mind” – form part of a devastating portrait of black American life during the Bush era, not that I would ever use that phrase to recommend the album because, obviously, it exceeds that sort of dry assessment.

Sleater-Kinney were the best at a lot of things, and their ‘Combat Rock’ is one of my favourite protest songs with guitars. It appears on their astonishing post 9/11 album One Beat. The title track of that album crystallizes what Harris doesn't get: that music can be political even when it isn't. Corin Tucker hollers: "I'm a bullet in a sound wave/A sonic push for energy/Exploding like the sun/A flash of clean light hope ... If I'm to run the future/You've got to let the old world go/Could you invent a world for me/I need to hear a symphony..." Then there's Janelle Monae, angry but still excited, and not at all pining for the past.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Now I mean that, my dear.

2010-10-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Kim,

In honour of your birthday, which you are spending in India, I dedicate a blog post of good things. It's not much, but it is better than my first idea involving a Forever Friends e-card and some Facebooking.

In missing you,

Sophie

#1 Bruce Davidson's Subway Series

#2 The Paris Review interviews Dorothy Parker

INTERVIEWER

Do you think economic security an advantage to the writer?

PARKER

Yes. Being in a garret doesn’t do you any good unless you’re some sort of a Keats. The people who lived and wrote well in the twenties were comfortable and easy living. They were able to find stories and novels, and good ones, in conflicts that came out of two million dollars a year, not a garret. As for me, I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money. I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it. At the moment, however, I like to think of Maurice Baring’s remark: “If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom he gives it.” I realize that’s not much help when the wolf comes scratching at the door, but it’s a comfort.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think about the artist being supported by the state?

PARKER

Naturally, when penniless, I think it’s superb. I think that the art of the country so immeasurably adds to its prestige that if you want the country to have writers and artists—persons who live precariously in our country—the state must help. I do not think that any kind of artist thrives under charity, by which I mean one person or organization giving him money. Here and there, this and that—that’s no good. The difference between the state giving and the individual patron is that one is charity and the other isn’t. Charity is murder and you know it. But I do think that if the government supports its artists, they need have no feeling of gratitude—the meanest and most sniveling attribute in the world—or baskets being brought to them, or apple polishing. Working for the state—for Christ’s sake, are you grateful to your employers? Let the state see what its artists are trying to do—like France with the Académie Française. The artists are a part of their country and their country should recognize this, so both it and the artists can take pride in their efforts. Now I mean that, my dear.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4933/the-art-of-fiction-no-13-dorothy-parker

#3 Joan Armatrading sings Love & Affection

#4 Julia Louis-Dreyfus in The New Adventures of Old Christine

And finally

balloon hoax

2010-05-20T09:10:00.000-07:00

“My rivals are all wringing their hands about immigration. They seem to think (wrongly) that it lost us the election. But I have done more immigration casework than all my rivals put together. On the one hand, I know about the continuing inefficiencies and delays in the system that breed abuse. But I also know that we need to face up to the real reasons behind (black and white) working-class unhappiness about immigration. We have to talk about housing, the rise of agency (and casualised) labour and the incremental undermining of the welfare state, which have left working people feeling so insecure.”

Diane Abbott on CiF: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/20/diane-abbott-labour-leadership

“Certainly, the view that the cause of most of the country's ills are down to immigration is very widespread (this depressing survey suggests that 61% of the UK population think that all immigration should be halted immediately). But it's Miliband's concession to this narrative that's dispiriting: as if this view of immigration spontaneously arose out of people's experience, rather than as a consequence of a framing of experience which has been very deliberately constructed with the assistance of a popular media. Most of the alleged "concerns about immigration" could easily be reframed as anxieties about global capitalism or poor (and inadequately targeted) public services. Indeed, the "immigration" question assumes such importance because it allows global capital to remain obscured.”

From k-punk: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/

Alfred Hitchcock, get off my chest already

2010-03-13T17:00:00.001-08:00

In her lecture to coincide with the BFI’s screening of Marnie, Laura Mulvey urges the audience not to giggle at Hitchcock’s use of rear-projection. The special effect, in which actors’ performances are viewed against pre-filmed backgrounds, was mocked by critics when the Tippi Hedren-Sean Connery psychodrama was first released. Mulvey argues that this reaction underestimates Hitchcock, failing to recognise his self-conscious use of an archaic technique to expose the vulnerability of the cinematic illusion. The metatext reflects the artifice of the Hitchcock Blonde - and gender itself, a radical reading of Hitchcock might add.

Does such a radical reading overestimate Hitchcock? I am not sure there is a difference between overestimation and active reading: if you think it’s possible to overestimate a filmmaker, you must consider yourself an entirely passive viewer. Mulvey, it turns out, overestimates the chunk of her audience who chuckle at every sign Marnie wasn’t made last week, as if the past is nothing but a cute, stupid kid and the present tense a patronising uncle.

So a film has at least as many possible interpretations as it has viewers, sure, but Marnie’s genius is to draw two conflicting interpretations from the teeming mass of audience and consistently sustain both. The film lays the groundwork for a conservative reading: the manipulative seduction of the kleptomaniac fraudster Marnie Edgar by the print tycoon and amateur-psychoanalyst Mark Rutland confirms the patriarchal myth that Man must demystify wild and unstable Woman in order to subdue and possess her. But Marnie plants too many subversive traps for this interpretation to dominate. Rutland does not seduce Marnie with charm, good looks and money; he discovers her stealing and blackmails her into marrying him. Marnie mocks his attempts to play psychoanalyst – “You Freud, me Jane?” – and she is right to do so, as Rutland does not wait patiently until Marnie is ‘well’ enough to want to have sex with him; he rapes her.

The rape scene is astounding. Mark and Marnie are on their honeymoon. Marnie has so far refused to sleep with Mark and insisted on separate bedrooms. One night they are arguing, and he follows her into her room and pulls her nightgown off. Cue the obligatory leg-shot, and a close-up of Marnie’s humiliated face (she is forced to stand naked, the audience is forced to imagine her naked torso). He says sorry, they kiss, and the camera adopts Mark’s perspective as Marnie’s stunned, blank face is seen sinking into a pillow. The next morning she tries and fails to drown herself.

For good reasons, the classic feminist line is to insist on the unambiguous nature of rape: it either is, or it isn’t, and terms like ‘date rape’ only trivialize the crime. The Marnie rape, even without the spousal clause, would never hold up in court. But the film conveys definitively that the sex is non-consensual. Furthermore, it situates the rape within a broader culture of inequality, deftly manipulating the viewer’s feelings of identification and guilt (Hitchcock = Haneke’s more fun older brother?). The chuckle-happy BFI audience snickered along with sneery Sean Connery as it watched him assert his conjugal rights by shooting caustic one-liners at Marnie. It is difficult now to separate that scene from the palpable hush that swept through the cinema as the audience watched Rutland’s verbal aggression turn physical. That sound of laughter abruptly muted is the distillation of all Marnie’s contradictions. The film makes the radical claim that heterosexual norms are underpinned by a culture of violence against women, but the norms it is critiquing are also those of Hollywood, and the film’s mode of critique is manipulative and ambiguous, maintaining as it does the option of reading Marnie as a patriarchal fantasy, Mark Rutland as a romantic hero.

During the post-lecture Q&A Mulvey was asked about the social context of Hitchcock’s work and specifically the significance of women’s entry into the workplace. “That’s just a backdrop,” Mulvey shot back like a bullet, maintaining that the isolated psychodrama was what interested Hitchcock and is what should interest us. But Laura!

The culmination of Rutland’s psychological detective work is the discovery that Marnie’s problems – her addiction to theft, her distaste for sex – originate in a forgotten episode from her childhood, when she kills an aggressive client of her prostitute mother in self-defence. It is significant that the audience discovers this fact at the same time as Marnie. Our sympathies are with Marnie and her mother, not Rutland, who learns the facts of the case at an earlier stage. For all his books on psychological deviance and the frigid female mind, Rutland just has to make a few calls to learn the ‘truth’ about Marnie’s condition. In the end, it is money and status and connections that allow Rutland to figure Marnie out. And, crucially, it is not an ahistorical oedipal psycho-crisis that lies at the root of Marnie’s problems, but her single mother’s lack of money and status. Marnie’s theft makes sense as a doomed strategy of economic independence: the apparent Marnie plays secretary while the real Marnie makes a parodic bid to opt out of the system that crushed her mother. And similarly, the apparent film plays out a conventional romantic narrative, while the 'real film' attempts to subvert these conventions from within, perhaps content that the result will be unsettling, inconsistent and eerie.

I left the cinema utterly convinced by Mulvey’s arguments for Marnie’s consistent self-parody but frustrated by her reluctance to observe that this self-parody amounts to a simultaneous annihilation and preservation of hetero-normative gender politics, mainstream cinematic conventions and the entire ethos of the capitalist patriarchy (yeah!). I have a relaxed and easy approach to the risk of overestimating Hitchcock, because I am not willing to underestimate the thrill my rad-feminist reading of Marnie gave me in the dark cinema. And even if Hitch and I disagree about politics, we both reserve the utmost respect for the act of sitting in the cinema and being thrilled - of this I am almost sure.

this is an untapped goldmine...

2010-01-10T03:43:00.000-08:00

Alternative titles for Raymond Carver's Beginners:

(1) Raymond Carver: Unlished (2) It's Delishous: The unedited stories of Raymond Carver

"life doesn't last, art doesn't last, it doesn't matter"

2010-01-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

Contingent // Eva Hesse

Two reasons I am excited to be reading the new Lorrie Moore book

2009-10-08T15:35:00.000-07:00

'Walking home, I passed a squirrel that had been hit by a car. Its soft scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth, as if in a dialogue balloon, and the wind gently blew the fur of its tail, as if it were still alive.'

'The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. I had never heard a melody quite like it.'

[[[[[ Also the Sleater-Kinney reference on page 27, I was not expecting - Moore is not a popcult namedropper and not hip I didn't think but when do I dislike a Sleater-Kinney reference. As often as I dislike questions with no question mark and blogs coded into incoherence.

The word randomness is used once, and oddly innocuous. I wonder if it is such a mis- and over-used cliche in the US, and I suppose not. I can't understand it outside teenage context. ]]]]]]

wait a million years

2009-09-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

I hate when a song is in my head for a whole holiday and not on my iPod

Brad Pitt's chin = irrelevant

2009-08-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

Bradshaw is wrong, Inglourious Basterds is the best Tarantino. Or maybe the Tarantino for people who don't care much for him past the initial nervethrills. The bad reviews seem pissed it's not empty pastiche. They also don't give QT credit for knowing what he is doing, complaining about the narrative loose-ends as if they are an accident. IB's meta-flourishes are not cool and flat, they have a point. One murder scene is I think a brilliantly conflicted use of/apology for cinematic misogyny so subtle as to be potentially nothing more than me projecting feminism onto everything because I'm too bored of sexism to acknowledge its existence any more. But reception theory is ok I think.

I guess it is some sort of betrayal to his fans, but I feel like QT is a little closer to my side. My side being the good side. Plus he is friends with Margaret Cho:

Ursula Meier has the right idea

2009-08-10T00:25:00.000-07:00

After being asked about naturalism/surrealism in 'Home': 'if you put a camera right next to a highway, it's surreal.'

9% abstraction, 5% figuration, 86% misc

2009-08-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

Twice on Saturday I had cause to rant about the way art exhibitions cling to the abstraction/figuration binary as if they decided in a mass meeting it's the only way to get the peepl thinking about how painting works. It was all over the National Gallery and also Per Kirkeby, which I liked but also knew what James meant when he said PK seems like someone who reads 200 books before starting every painting and hasn't laughed since 1968. Clearly I don't object on the grounds of my superior artistic sensibility; it's the opposite maybe - I object as somebody who doesn't necessarily know enough to resist the insidious whispers of the "accompanying materials" at exhibitions, but resents that creeping sense that one has finished looking at a painting when one has pronounced "13% abstraction, 87% figuration" and nodded sagely. just gimme the date, title, whatevs, shutup.

from a conversation overheard in line for the toilet after watching Zabriskie Point

2009-08-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

"i thought it was gash. maybe back then it was all like "ooh anti-capitalism" but it's all a bit obvious now isn't it."

reason number 37896 why I hate queuing every time I use a public toilet

how to write a master's dissertation

2009-06-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

#1 Ashtanga yoga to Glenn Branca's Lesson No. 1

#2 Typing goes faster with Matmos's Rag for William S. Burroughs

#3 Just listening to music now actually

today's achievement: i just figured out how to do the hash symbol on Macbook.

how to make your kids gay

2009-04-27T12:49:00.001-07:00

Why does America think essentialism is the way to equal rights? Surely saying "I can't help it I was born this way" is tantamount to admitting there is something wrong with being gay, that it's something we would change if we could?

Eve Sedgwick made this point years ago. Maybe if the media wrote her the obituaries she is due instead of creaming all over the Prejean-Hilton homophobia n misogyny-fest nobody would still be trotting out the essentialist/constructivist "debate" in a misguided attempt to defend everyone's right to love whoever they want. Even if they weren't born that way, and decided to do it when they were 11 after watching Fame.

musings on the death penalty via vampires

2009-04-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

I’m intrigued by Let The Right One In, and think most of the reviews have it totally wrong. Its Metacritic page keeps throwing up words like ‘hopeful’ and the general critical gist is that this is a film about love that happens to feature vampires. Seriously? Let The Right One In's conceit is that the vampire’s trajectory mirrors that of bullied children. Someone gets bitten/bullied and becomes a vampire/violent fuck-up. The only way to escape this depressing fate is to embrace total victimhood and kill yourself in a blaze of fire.

An hour or so after watching the closing scenes, the conspiracist side of me thinks this movie had the chance to do something interesting with the conflation of victim and aggressor, and seemed to be going this way by giving Eli the Vampire Teen a fascinatingly ambiguous dad figure who seems to both control and be controlled by her. But does the film ultimately wholly embrace the eye for an eye philosophy, give the bullies their comeuppance and throw Oskar in with the bloodsucking monsters because it’s the only place he can go after his screwed up childhood? Not if you apply the ‘it was all a dream’ theory to the ending, but I don’t know if films are allowed to loophole themselves out of right-wing philosophies that way any more. Also, is there a subtly homophobic/family values thing going on with that whole Dad/Dad’s mysterious drinking buddy/single mum backdrop?

Maybe not, but I’m still pretty sure this isn’t ‘ultimately a film about friendship’, which is the note on which most of the self-congratulatory THINK YOU KNOW VAMPIRE FILMS? TRY THIS ARTY ONE! reviews end. It may not be endorsing violence begets violence with bloodthirsty fatalism, but it's definitely aware of the temptation. Not a love story, definitely obsessed with the death penalty, possibly pro, maybe undecided. Like me.

cups of tea are a clock

2009-04-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

It takes a roomful of Raincoats fans to convince me that minority-geared events are not always a PC opportunity to circumscribe the ghetto while emptying its wallet. The BFI Lesbian and Gay Film Festival dedicated a whole night to my favourite band: An advance screening of Gina Birch’s still-in-progress documentary about the Raincoats, a panel discussion about their legacy with some VIPs (including Anat Ben David) and (OMG) a live performance. And a cinema full of people who don’t give a palpable shit that Beth Ditto can’t make it to chair the panel. Or maybe that’s just me. I am a ball of messy joy.

The panel discussion should have been filmed and displayed as a perfect microcosm of all that is right and all that is wrong with feminism.

Right = Gina Birch and Ana da Silva. Gina discusses the reasons they were not hugely keen to ‘take the rap’ for feminism in a 1970s culture that was dumb about gender politics in a way that’s all too recognizable. She quips: ‘the media wanted to get all the girl bands together for a picture’. She’s inspiring on why they ultimately did ‘own up’ to being feminists, without letting anyone reduce them or their music to their politics or gender. Ana says she makes music with individuals, not women. The complexity of their music translates to their ideas – maybe paradoxically. I love their acknowledgement that gender is difficult to talk about, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. I love them.

Wrong = writer and academic Lucy O’Brien, who makes some dumb comments about how punk would have been “less colourful” without women. I am floored in the worst possible way by O’Brien, who happily chats about the more experimental rhythmic sensibility of women and how boys just stick to boring 4/4 beats in a way that suggests she has never listened to ANY music made by boys (it’s kinda good sometimes) nor read any gender theory at all. I’m inversely inspired by how much I disagree with her.

I am dying to see the finished film, if only for more of the big red squinty face of Pere Ubu’s David Thomas drawling eloquently about why the Raincoats are a roots band.

File 1 July 2008 available now!

2008-07-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

File 1 of The Rookie Files is available for free RIGHT NOW. Featuring interviews with artist Christa Donner, comedians Josie Long and Michael Thornton and music writer Miss AMP. Email therookiefiles@googlemail.com for details.