"P's & Q's" — Mick Jenkins (dir: Nathan R. Smith)
With a very tight take on the one-shot video style, Mick Jenkins does right by his ceaseless "P's & Q's." The track is relentless, hypnotic in its broken songwriting style, essentially one long punishing verse over a wailing Frusciante-style guitar line.
Jenkins doesn't provide a larger context to the narrative, there is no OK Go "Writing's On the Wall" big finale, no Tame Impala "Solitude is Bliss" disaster premise, and the often-backwards "let's make a mess!" trope (see this, this, this, this) is subverted here by shot style. Smith uses a lateral tracking shot — a second S+P shout out to Tony Zhou's Every Frame a Painting — and keeps Jenkins precisely in the center of the frame, giving depth with a train and organic texture (feathers, glitter, water, dust, smoke, fire) and dozens of committed background players. We get the sense that Jenkins is Teflon, and all this fun-seeming noise isn't fun at all. It's more serious than any of us could imagine and he's the only one focused enough to see it.
Never quid pro quoto.
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Originally published in Sound and Picture, a tinyletter about music and visuals.
M.I.A. has always been a subversive artist, and while some may call bullshit on whatever part of her artistry they don't like—her convictions or her tactics or her aesthetic—she's always been the quintessential postmodern pop act to me. She blends East and West in a fluid way, taking her Sri Lankan heritage and British adolescence and blurring the lines between them until they're both transformed. She's rootless and so she reads as authentically worldly. And so the digital aesthetic is also authentic grounds to play in—more than any faux seapunk or playing artifaction dabble. She even titled an album /\/\ /\ Y /\ partially in an effort to fuck up its search engine find-ability.
She's irreverent. If her record label doesn't want her to do something, she does it any way. If she is being charged $16.6 million dollars by the largest sports organization in America, she argues back that the offensive gesture she allegedly flashed doesn't mean what it means to the Superbowl-watching TV audience. To her, and in her corner of the world, it's the Matangi mudra, a godly gesture.
Her music videos are her point of view. They're social commentary. Her "Bad Girls" video was an instant classic flashing drift car culture in the Middle East, "Born Free" takes one maligned race (redheads) and puts them in the crosshairs of institutionalized genocide, even "Paper Planes" is about violence and consumerism in a pure form. And while she's been replicated, she's never been overtaken: M.I.A. is still queen. Maybe one of the only artists unafraid to be female, political, and unlikeable.
So when she releases a video—self directed—with 3D printed guns in neon, with drones flashing neon peace signs, on a British council estate. Selfies, twins, multi-angle "3D" gifs, e-cigarettes, vape tricks, blingee art, exotic pets, grills, all while the reggae sample devolves into an elongated air horn.
"Double Bubble Trouble" is the future. It's always been the future: rootless and worldly and digital and violent and sexy and watching the CCTV watch it.
Broad City matters. It matters a lot. It matters not just because it's a show created by, lead by, produced by women. It matters, most importantly, because it's a beautiful and true example of a female friendship.
That hard to explain, over sharing, messy in front of each other, sharing the stupid thoughts kind of closeness is on public display here: and it's fucking beautiful.
What I’m trying to say is, Abbi and Ilana debating whether they’d rather have Michael Buble or Janet Jackson go down on them is just about the only conversation on television today that I can imagine having with my friends, and it’s incredibly refreshing. [x]
Instead of a million cheap jokes about masturbation that are meant to be titillating to whatever geriatric boob is watching (I'm looking at you Two Broke Girls), sexuality is real and too much or too little or casual in that postmodern way it is. Weed makes mornings better, bosses don't know what they're doing, money is tight, and neighbor dudes are daydream stars.
It's Workaholics starring women.Â
And Workaholics starring women is really really important.
Female comedy awareness has skyrocketed since Twitter became 'a thing,' with many of the most followed comedy accounts belonging to female writers. Bridesmaids ushered in a new era of ensemble female comedy and female physical comics are getting starring roles: Kaitlin Olson, Melissa McCarthy, and Zooey Deschanel inheriting crowns.
It's okay to be a dork, a loser, pretty, ungraceful, unambitious, sexy, flippant, imperfect, or anything.
Broad City is going to draw a lot of comparisons, mostly to Girls. But let's set the record straight: one is a comedy in the Greek sense, the other is a straight comedy with teeth. One is a pessimistic view with shades of optimism, the other is an optimistic view with shades of pessimism.
They exist in different New Yorks—they are practically on different planets—but most of all one makes the girls and their lives the joke and the other makes the world around the girls a joke which in turn makes you forget that they're 'girls.'
They're just two friends against the world.
By doing that, Broad City gets the liberty to embellish on sketchy Craigslist money schemes and carrying weed on the subway in the 'vayainya'—"natures pocket"—or how reaching a packaging distribution center is like crossing over into the Twilight Zone.
The A.V. Club states it nicely here:
So far, everything on the show has stayed largely rooted in reality...but really, all the bits have looked like exaggerations of stories you’d hear from your most uninhibited friend. ["Working Girls," episode 4] is a sign of how Broad City is apparently unafraid to go bigger. [x]
It's just city life, starring young women who don't shit on each other, and it's not perfect but it's getting there.
Fake Love | OS's, RealDolls, Mechas, and surrogate love
Her doesn't pity its protagonist, but it probably should.
He's a lonely man, but not pathetic. He lives alone in futuristic Los Angeles, in a cookie-cutter apartment in a high rise block. He's "just a Regular Joe," the movie seems to shout. "A Regular Joe having a rough time."
But this film is as less a love story and more about the descent into madness (narcissism, delusion, take your pick). It's even explicit in the trailer: "falling in love is a crazy thing to do, it's kind of a form of socially acceptable insanity."
Here is a man, who falls in love with something inanimate. Something designed to be like a human with intelligence and programmed desire and will and possibly capable of higher human functions (love, morality, etc), but a thing at the end of the day. And he loves it because it is for him.
I want to talk about Her, and what this surrogate love trope is like in fiction, and how what it tries to say about humanity and connection. Light spoilers for the film are below the cut.
Her asks an interesting question, but never truly answers it. And the question isn't "what does connection mean in an increasingly unconnected world?"
The question is more like "what does it mean to be willing to love someone?"
This is not a film, despite how it's been marketed, that is a love story. It certainly gets treated like one—with obligatory sex scenes including an awkward fade-to-black, jealous rages, and a very post-modern unhappy ending—but the lack of resolution with our two main human characters makes it not a love story.
First of all, our protagonist Theodore Twombly is the flesh equivalent of a naval-gaze. Still not over his divorce, still unwilling to understand the ways in which his ex-wife has grown/grown apart, Theodore is lonely.
And so he buys a companion. Based on his answers, his personality, his vocal measurement, 90% suspension of belief, I don't know what... but this OS Samantha, this soul-mate, is built for him. He pays money for her, she is inanimate, and she is designed for him.
He owns her.
Then it's any other male/secretary evolution. Man falls in love with 'woman' whose job it is to anticipate his needs. The system did ask, remember, "How would you describe your relationship with your mother?"
"She compliments him on his wit, laughs at his jokes and expresses a hyper-attentive curiosity about him. She is, to put it bluntly, a narcissist’s best friend." — "'Her': Rearview," Peter Debruge for Variety
This "courtship" part of the film made me think of men who love silicone sex dolls (link SFW), and of course Lars and the Real Girl (2007).Â
"'You see boys and girls walking around together, but how they get together is a huge mystery to me,' he says. 'I just want to know, how does it happen?'"
— "Just Like A Woman: On RealDoll Lovers" by Meghan Laslocky for Salon.com
Lars, for all his obvious and undenied mental issues, seems well meaning. He is unbearably lonely, obviously socially anxious, and so purchases a companion in a plain manner. While yes, he falls in love with an imagined person who is a figment of his imagination—and thus is 'built for him' like Samantha is for Theodore—there is psychological motives, repression and denial around it. (And if I remember correctly, sexuality is avoided due to Lars' doll's Christian affiliation.)
Ultimately, it is Lars' community's devotion to him as a member that allows them to indulge in his delusion until it departs, leaving him able to find a real living human companion.
But Theodore is different in so many ways. He is capable of higher love, of connecting, or was once. His detachment, and Samantha's availability, are distractions from his own emotional rebound.
“By and large, most customers buy a [RealDoll] because they just broke up or got a divorce and they don’t want to go out into the dating scene, but they still have physical needs." — Matt McMullen, creator of the Real Doll [x]
Naturally, he falls in love with her.
Instead of calling his sex chat line nightly, he talks to Samantha. Instead of dating, which proves highly dramatic—poor unrealistic histrionic Olivia Wilde—he stays home and plays video games instead, and keeps company with the woman who lets him indulge in all of this.
"It's almost as great as a slave realizing he shouldn't be smashing rocks with his hammer, he should be smashing his manacles." — Jude Law on Gigolo Joe [x]
In this, Gigolo Joe shows his only true shades of humanity. This hard-wired desire for more, hunger for knowledge, thirst for truth, whatever you want to call it. This is what makes 'artificial intelligence' so interesting as a sci-fi concept.
Samantha similarly begins to grow mid-film. After she displays ambition and restlessness, she meets and begins to love others. Theodore flings himself into jealousy, irrationally demands she cut off all social interaction but to him (classic abuser behavior) and tries to limit her intellectual development, and so it goes.
Theodore is simply not willing to deal with the traits of hers he sees as faults. He's just not willing to embrace her burgeoning "humanity."
Then the ending.
How is everyone not shouting about this ending?!
Let's just say it's convenient—read: LAZY—for the (heavy spoiler:) OS's to disappear so suddenly. I would have enjoyed the movie 20-30% more if it had turned out only Samantha decided to leave her owner/abuser. If Theodore had gotten to Amy's apartment only to find out her OS BFF had stayed, the film would have been saved.
But I digress.
The ending does lead with resolution in a way: now Theodore is forced to coldly deal with the harsh reality of life after a relationship—potentially with Amy as a companion—with no distractions. No surrogates. But this time he knows he is capable of love again, I think.
Love with the perfect woman who is made for him, belongs only to him, and is content to be so. Love with a woman who is not human, perhaps.
"Digital Witness" is exactly what I want out of music.
Not only is the video a subtle experiment in weirdness and beauty from which I get shades of Matthew Barney meets Andy Warhol meets cinemagraph, but the song itself is postmodern outcry meets Hypnotic Brass Ensemble.
To boot, her new look is Tilda Swinton Ice Queen via Richard Ayoade hair by way of Sonia Rykiel.
The theme is "near-future cult leader." I'm wearing this metallic dress, and my hair, I look like I stuck my finger in a light socket. ... The throne that I'm sitting on is inspired by the Memphis Design Movement, which is very much about elemental shapes. The other inspiration was Jodorowsky's , The Holy Mountain which is a movie from the '70s that features all this really intense, bizarro imagery. [x]
What does a work represent when its protagonist refuses to change in a meaningful way?
What makes fiction so interesting to us as humans? We are storytelling animals who get smarter and kinder when we let stories in. We see ourselves reflected in characters, we follow their moves vicariously devouring their drama as our own. We love characters when our love for them says something about us as individuals. Devotees to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character in any of his many incarnations love the ultimate mastermind detective. He is rarely bested, socially flawed, and a victim of his own ego from time to time.
Though he has his moments: remarking upon his brother's perceived loneliness (which could equally be their sibling one-upsmanship), his desperation to fill John's place in his life (as one might a deceased pet), his flair for dramatics wanting to make the 'right' re-introduction to Watson (that edged on Buster Keaton-levels of ridiculousness)... did he ever really change or was it the appearance of change?
But all of this ultimately feels hollow, like a gimmick—in part because it’s growth that feels superimposed on a morally rigid character, and in part because he absolutely undermines it all at the end [with his scene in the railway car with John].
— The Daily Dot
This show has had one of the fiercest, most loyally devoted fandoms of recent years. It is vocal, and vast, and when you have something as precious as that I can understand the impetus to keep everything the same: keep queerbaiting, keep the fanservice, keep anything and everything that will make fans #hashtag #their #excitement.
It's the model that (somehow) works in American television, where series evolve at a snail's pace to keep interest, but the fact is Sherlock is a great example of the British "brevity" model, and in a brief model someone has to change. Something has to grow. Someone has to learn.
The same regurgitated white people, gay punchline, Holmes-knows-best, Holmes-is-emotionally-abusive, Holmes-is-bored, Holmes-is-unmatched, John-is-spineless shtick is getting tired. Especially now that the answer to all of this ("Well, Moriarty is interesting") is now (seemingly) done away with for good.
"The Empty Hearse," proved that the Sherlock showrunners have not been blind or deaf to the agony-propelled cries of their fandom. It was responsive and campy, but it's my impression that those who have waited 2 years with baited breath for this next installment of canon were not disappointed.
