Serious Business

Iterations of a Dislocated Cowboy: Reviews of Rick Perry Presidential Campaign Ads

2011-12-21T18:20:00.000-08:00

Rick Perry’s Presidential Campaign has been characterized by controversies and public “slip-ups.” The personage of the candidate himself, broad shouldered worn copy version of former President George W. Bush’s cowboy posturing, yet prone to strangely flamboyant and uncoordinated movements lends itself to the cliche’d clown caricature leaders must manifest since Hitler mimicked Chaplin. But it could be said that the trajectory of the 20th into the 21st century has been marked by an increasing and ultimately self destructive tendency toward laughter.

The following ads demonstrate the political personage’s sometimes confident yet dislocated relationship to his own image.

“Proven Leadership”

Obama’s America rendered in post apocalyptic overcast and displayed by abandoned streets, the iconic “hope” poster is torn and bears down on the dirty streets similar to how shots of iconography populate the unpopulated by human streets of dictatorships

A distinct tonal shift is initiated when Rick Perry is invoked as the savior of this fallen grey America under Obama’s leadership. Saturated colors and motion in Michael Bay surfaces. Americana with aesthetic steroid muscles.

Perry says America is “Earth’s last hope,” coupled with a satellite image of a globe, the shot is a standard one but is given a fresh angle here, typically the shot from space diminishes the size of the Earth but the reverse happens in this case. Reminding one of the anecdote from “The Devil’s Candy” in which Director Brian De Palma’s reluctance to include a shot of an airplane taking off during the making of Bonfire of the Vanities, challenging a second unit director to make this cliche’d shot utilized for pure narrative information have a visual heft.

Helicopter camera angles swoops past a cross topped church in a sun-drenched Americana valley, the angle of the Christian cross con-vexed enough by a camera lens just before leaving the frame’s lower edge seems likely to pierce through the frame and puncture the viewer.

Last shot a slow motion walking military salute gesture from the candidate, a punctuating endnote like a gun blast.

“Romney’s Remedy”

Centering around the abstracted and vaguely understood menace of “Obamacare,” Perry levels an insidious critique of fellow Republican rival Mitt Romney’s past support of similar measures. Formalistically, the “right wing” words and personage of Mitt Romney are shown to dissipate and change shape into the devilish and hated “left wing” President. A tense and frantic montage, punctuated by lightning flashes which literally reveal Romney’s mirror image briefly be that of Obama, situates Perry’s rival as bearing a false cloak and the evil of transference itself.

“Leno Ad”

This is ad is oddly named by Perry’s campaign in reference to the comedian, whose consistent employment has largely been ascribed to his inoffensiveness, who is not shown nor referenced in the advertisement. Following the template of the direct address, separate from the dynamic montages which characterize Perry’s other ads, the candidate tries to explain his most embarrassing and public misstep, forgetting the third Government department he confidently stated that he would abolish as President.

Perry tries to humanize this foible as indicative of his authenticity above his rivals. However, the nature of this memory lapse, given the scale of the argument the candidate was intending to make coupled with the defiance in his voice prior to the dead air “oops” would suggest that this event isn’t comparable to other slip-ups characteristic of anyone who manages to survive the unreality of life-in-public, rather the boldness of claims registers more inward scrutiny than their consequences.

The candidate references his mistake also as a joke at his own expense. While amusement toward his or herself is obviously a preferable quality for a candidate or a person if compared to humorlessness, wouldn’t it be more preferable to invoke the vacuousness, fictionalizing nature of how the media treats the campaign itself? Wouldn’t this be the opportunity to remind voters about the nature of the narrative “gotcha” moments tendency to distract from what’s supposedly of value? The joke at his own expense seems like what those in public are often told to do in like situations. Self effacement is an automatism too natural for those built for public life, reaffirming the fears that to bear that harsh light, ultimately nothing must truly matter.

“Momentum”

The titular “Momentum” is less a call to action for the viewer to help ignite as a much as a quality that the ad argues to be already attributable to Governor Perry. Moreover, the ad makes its case operating under the assumption that the viewer does not perceive the candidate as possessing the quality of “momentum.”

Newspaper headlines are inserted to tout Perry’s success in the Republican Primary and to possibly correct the overriding media perception that he has been gaffe prone (“Strongest Performance,” “Solid and Convincing”...). But these headline blurbs are abstract enough to be interpreted as being statements in praise of Governor Perry’s handshake alone, which is isolated in holy slow motion, and executed in a manner comparable to the quoting of positive lines removed from the full context typical of television spots for a major Hollywood motion picture. Some reused Americana shots from the “Proven Leadership” mixed in with new ones throughout.

The highlight arrives with excerpts from Perry’s largely criticized debate performances, here visually recontextualized from the overriding perceptions that have surfaced in the reporting by being projected off of TV screens. While Governor Perry talks about the eventual debate he will have against President Obama, shots of the President looking sad and sullen are interspersed with the Republican’s critical words against the mythologized menace of “Obamacare”, visualizing an almost too ideal future for partisan Republicans. A similar juxtaposition later in the ad uses footage of Iran’s capture of the American spy plane but is clumsily executed as shots of the plane unpopulated by jingoistic shots of a turbaned mob are blandly lifeless.

Rather than minimizing the perceived weakness of the candidate, here an ambitious yet not wholly convincing attempt is made to revise it into his greatest positive.

The BEST films of 2011

2011-12-16T23:01:00.000-08:00

Hey gang, even though I still have some screeners to watch of "Take Me Home Tonight", "New Year's Eve", and "The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu" here's how the 2011 year-in-film pans out, ranked most best to least best.

1. Cars 2

John Lasseter’s moving spy-movie parody sequel boldly switches genres from its predecessor, (the apocalyptic film from 2006 in which sentient automobiles waged a war against humanity) deftly orchestrating this exceptional and moving tale of American exceptionalism.

2. The Artist

In the theater when the credits rolled, I applauded along with many elderly ladies, an experience of movie-going magic not had by myself since the release of Slumdog Millionaire during its award season run-up in 2005.

3. Green Lantern

Ground zero for fans of color coded myth-making. Despite large scale special effects, star Ryan Reynolds manifests the films greatest movie magic with the kind of charismatic soulfullness only a real Canadian could provide.

4. Red State

As a subscriber to Kevin Smith’s "Smodcast" podcast, a vocal member of the Askew universe online forums, and an attendee of View Askew conventions across the country, I feel uniquely qualified to evaluate the significance of what this film means to the director’s career as a person whose success vicariously ignites the desire within myself to get out of bed and bravely regard my own ugly dumb white guy face in the mirror everyday.

5. Larry Crowne

Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, individually and as united through inspired casting, speak to challenges specific to 2011 and beyond. A rough hewn poem for America’s wounded economy.

6. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, individually and as a duo united on-screen through inspired casting, speak to the challenges specific to 2011 and beyond. The infamous movie goer who yelled out "Too Soon!" during the trailer for Paul Greengrass’s United 93 now has the 9/11 film he or she has been waiting for.

7. Water for Elephants

As soon as this adaptation of the best selling novel opened with an old man leading us to a long flashback of what he wistfully remembered about the majesty and wonder of the travelling circus, I knew I would be compelled and engaged intently throughout.

8. I Don't Know How She Does It

In a cinematic device which mimics the structure of a novelistic aside and television’s "Saved By the Bell" series, Sarah Jessica Parker’s titular "she" freezes the on-screen action and directly addresses the camera, reiterating the difficulties for ladies everywhere in balancing work and family. As Ms. Parker’s powerful and aloof boss in the big city, Kelsey Grammer’s freeze-framed brow (surgically resisting a full furrow) remains the most indelible image in movies.

9. The Zookeeper

"He saw an animal that liked to growl

Big furry paws and he liked to howl

Great big furry back and furry hair
"Ah, think I'll call it a bear".

-Bob Dylan "Man Gave Names to All the Animals"

10. Atlas Shrugged Part 1

Although managing to only achieve .05% of what the brilliant philosopher Ayn Rand achieved with her landmark novel, what remains is a stark "outsider art" vision shared by an insular and abnormally un-introspective cult .

Honorable Mentions: Jack & Jill, Anonymous, and Just Go With It.

Decision 2012: The Man of Ideas and a Displacement of Images

2011-12-05T22:44:00.000-08:00

The first campaign ad produced by former Speaker Gingrich since his unexpected and likely temporary (given the illusory demands of the accelerated culture) rise to frontrunner status, "Rebuilding the America We Love" appears to reinforce the impression that his Presidential campaign is not guided by a sincere intention of achieving the highest office, but rather of enhancing the visibility that comes with the intention and posture of race running.

To be honest, my favorite Presidential campaigns tend to be the ones designed not to succeed. Furthermore, if I was to reach my own personal goal of managing a prospective Presidential candidates campaign, my approach would be distinctive, ambitious but with no actual intention toward winning the race. As we are always in the process of becoming in our own lives as individuals, there is value in the performative politics echo-ing possibility in its pure form on the spectacle stage.

Newt's ad consists of perfunctory recreations of President Reagen's 1984 "Morning in America" ad juxtaposed with Newt in a library, seemingly disconnected from the technically warm and glowing yet lifeless images that accompany his narration. My favorite of these is the shot of the male and female co-workers of different races happily entering a corporate office elevator unimaginatively un-displaced from Newt's narrated line "...and respecting each other."

Ultimately the problem is that Newt seems truly disconnected from the visual language of the beautiful America slow-motion poetry and appears to be under no pretense (though ultimately cynical in this awareness) that he is a charismatic Reagen-esque figure to guide a new Republican revolution. He is lazily drawing on the past rather than suggesting a visual language specific to his own campaign and personage. Though this falls in line with Saturday Night Live's punchline of Newt "not really wanting" to actually win the Presidency, which itself is more likely motivated by the only heavyset cast member Bobby Moynihan being the least creative performer on the show next to Jay Pharoah, Newt reaffirms this with such un-dynamic efforts.

But what sort of visual language would suit the Newt Gingrich campaign? Though the former speaker converted to Catholicism in recent years, the florid image based religion's iconographic and sensual tradition does not suit his political personage, as it did Reagen and George W. Bush, which Newt feabily attempts here in an uncommitted manner. The "Man of Ideas" belongs in the word based visual rhetoric of the Protestant tradition and this need not be evaded but rather should be embraced and hyperbolized. So this does not mean that there is no visual rhetoric open to him.

What's often forgotten is that every word is an image of a word. There are visuals that suit the rhetorical life of word based things, possibilities suggesting the living and breathing energy of ideas. I see the former Speaker excitedly writing across the chalk board at the front of a large college lecture hall and the class is filled with the American people. The music is perpetually urgent, yet hopeful. The only true visionary candidate in the 2012 Republican Primary has a command over the class of America and the chalk sketched phrases and shapes, articulating in shorthand his "Contract with the 21st Century," begin to reveal a world inside the lines that form the words, and soon after the world inside every word is revealed.

Decision 2012

2011-08-13T18:26:00.000-07:00

Republican Presidential Primaries are my favorite time, as anyone who knows me knows. Thoughts on the candidates below based on my viewing of the last debate on Youtube.

Santorum - Scared and uncertain. An endlessly defensive squint in the form of political personhood. A light-sensitive soul determined to be in the light but unwilling to ask himself why.

Bachmann - Unmitigated and unsettling certainty. Primitivism and a return to ages of dirt. Hers is not a vision of sky and horizon but of hands held in a small room, gazes shared downward. Existence itself denied to human bodies not linked at that moment.

Pawlenty - Punchy and sardonic. The calculated move from the card-board charisma-less lightweight has miraculously influenced growth of a more organic sort. The trail has deepened him but soulfulness is relative.

Romney - Testament to performative professionalism and the charm of the sitcom dad. Political theater in historic Americana museum terms.

Paul - Conceptually-based campus politics sharing the same seat with stand-up comedy truths, leadership in conflict with our collective delusions. His commitment, secular though sharing the same social function as religion.

Gingrich - The only candidate who leaned on their podium in a contemptuous posture. In his voice, one can hear the Speaker talking himself out of his own interest, comic strip word bubble sentences which increase in transparency, completing in total invisibility by the point of punctuation. But known only to him, these words simultaneously rise in volume. The career highlight was the theatrical pounding of the gavel. The real guitarist still plays air guitar, the former Speaker still mimes the gavel pound motion in solitary rooms. He can never not sound like a man who longs to be alone.

Huntsman - The dreamer of the day though not uncynical enough to know the collisions ahead. A not-fully formed pound of clay. Do we surrender to the self-perpetuated perceptions we can’t shake, climb up the hill knowing the peak may be unreachable or let gravity guide a smooth roll?

Cain - The meter and momentum of his speech has a diagonally downward trajectory. A legacy of racially determined punishment learned to be received as comedy, parallel to the titular joke of “Godfather’s Pizza.” There are generations of ghosts who silently walk with him, translucent figures who look to others for laughter as it is no longer within their capacity.

Und Friede auf Erden

2010-10-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

Here are the excerpts I've posted from a long form project I've been developing. It's the continuation of Our Summer in Oklahoma 1990 and Von Erichs: Of Birth and Blood.

Dear Dr. Bennett

2009-10-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

I still love your radio show Dr. Bennett. My ex-wife and her boyfriend were nice enough to send me a video tape of my son's pee-wee football game (since the lawyers all agreed I can't attend in person). And so I watched the tape of my son's football game with the nyquil I bought beforehand and I fell into the bottom of a deep and upturned water well in the sky, far above and at the height of airplanes. I found myself watching the game forgetting the particulars and simply observing the line of scrimmage as it formed and reformed at the beginning and ending of each play of the long game. The pure form of it and the repetitive/alternating stillness and entanglements of that line. So I woke up this morning and the sun was already out and the tape ran out but somewhere the game's still going.

Also Dr. Bennett, When I brought the nyquil to the checkout counter, the pregnant teenager behind the counter asked if I'd been crying, I said "no" of course but later on and throughout the night I talked to myself in my empty motel room while pretending I was confessing everything to her. I had a dream later in the night in which I followed the pregnant teenager and her boyfriend in the mall, closely and unseen, as a body-less spirit. She was chiding her boyfriend for having "killed her brother" in a manner that wasn't too casual yet not exactly marked by trauma. The peculiar incongruity of her tone of voice was un-captured by my memory but I hope it comes back to me. You know those type of terrifying bright yet freezing winter days? In which it's as though the sun itself is emitting the cold? I think that her peculiar tone of voice will somehow come back to me on a day like that, if ever.

Hitler: The Rise of Evil (Christian Duguay 2003)

2009-04-24T21:50:00.000-07:00

Convex angles of a wide lens oscillate the foreground against background, a constant of its reality as the motion of Michael Bay's alternate universes unceasingly breathe off of (the only briefly applied) Deep Zooms of Vertigo and Jaws. Duguay's near consistent intra-frame tertiary executes the visceral immediacy of violence but the exaggerated spaces mainly execute history as psychology and Hitler arrives psychologically fully formed after the opening credit sequence summary of childhood.The rounded edges make literal mental interiors and the TV movie's institutional limitations and its historical and political obligations confine the direction to the didactic end. Similarly, The Godfather and Cabaret are short-handed as reference points, a deliberate distancing from the anchors of historical authenticity.

A brief gag on the violence of kitsch in the Nazi propaganda innovations: A future (and eventually regretful) right-wing sympathizer of the Fuhrer spotting him in the primitive beer hall speechifying days, noting that Hitler "is a cartoon" but begins his pull into the whirlpool. And of course there's the important discovery of the mustache, "The Chaplin", which I once had myself and regret feeling obligated to shave because of the day-today dangers therein. I wore the mustache to feel more closely aligned with icons of clownishness, failure, i.e. a spiritual self beyond my own time. Granted, a gesture I might have not pursued had history had been altered such that Hitler had not already ruined it for everyone.

The question arises if the Nazi conclusions would have been reached without Hitler, but something outside the frame, the transgressive death work is always waiting and desired. By giving a concrete articulation of and extending the language of the transgressive, the Nazi image-makers made it easier for the the transgressive world/self to fall more easily inward. It's not 1/100th as resonate or brilliant as the reverse Wagner of "Hitler: A Film from Germany" (Syberberg 1978), but that's the best film ever made.

The Private Life of Sherlock Homes (Billy Wilder 1970)

2009-03-15T23:02:00.000-07:00

There is no Loch Ness monster but a replica was built and actually put in the lake and it may or may not be bewildering to the stupid animals when they see it motionless (but not decaying) on the lake floor.

Billy Wilder's movie isn't about that particular monster though. It does lead to a climactic reveal of a fake monster (mechanical wonder and failure) and the other characters react to the world famous Detective Holmes with a slower animal's bewilderment. The perspective is both sympathetic and cynical on the overlap of intelligence and sickness and the mournful end of a better age of men. Holmes is of an advanced mental acumen, so the terror conveyed is in being so close to a force that's always a level above and the gags unfold with the comedy of constant delay.

The Bad Kids of Black Heaven: Where's The Orchestra? Part Two

2009-01-03T20:54:00.000-08:00

Beginning with a split second of the very end of the previous scene: The Senator and his wife, Hadassah sleeping soundly as an earthquake violently rattles their Florida hotel room.

A news report on the freeway shooting of German tourists with stereotypically scary sketches of young black gang members.

Images from a movie from the 1970s with zombified versions of Nazi soldiers emerging from the waves of a Florida beach, to the horrified reactions elderly beach goers. (Also apparently filmed on a day much too cold for beach going.)

Abruptly Cut To Title Card accompanied by silence:

"Studies show that people who are somewhat depressed predicted the future better than those who are happy and well adjusted."

This is still Florida but somewhere away from The Senator.

Here is The Actress, on a movie set. In her early twenties but preternaturally hardened and aged, wearing the body-marked fatigue of mass awareness, the waking terror of fame, and the sublimated soullessness of having maintained a commitment to her goal. But what do any of us know about being that one and a million?

A crew makes painstaking and minute adjustments to the cinema lighting of a 1970s newsroom. A period piece, a bio-pic of the life of deceased Sarasota affiliate newscaster Christine Chubbock, who famously shot herself live on the air one Sunday morning in 1974. Footage of the incident was destroyed, has been sought after for years from collectors of rare video, and the entire basis for this feature film pivots around an exacting recreation of the event.

The 21st century Actress is playing the late Christine Chubbock and is getting made up to look like a newscaster from the era. The personal style and fashion sense exhibited in the ongoing spectacle of The Actress’ day-to-day has been commented on, by both celebrity journalists and academic celebrity theorists, as an updated version of the Dionysian fashions of the1970s, mixed with the timelessness of leather jacket archetypes amidst a haze of smoke. It was once said that fashions become out of fashion before returning later but in the accelerated age it has been found that nothing ever truly goes away, it’s all simultaneously present and waiting to be drawn from but this itself isn’t a facet of the time, it’s a consequence of the obliteration of all taste. Remaining only are the funhouse mirror reflections of the idea of a fashion specific to the current period.

What adds to The Actress’ allure in much of the public’s imagination isn’t solely due to the Dionysian look expressed in her fashion sense, seen primarily through the hurried and inebriated exits in and out of clubs and restraints captured in shaky hand held paparazzo cameras, but mostly the leather jacket archetype’s malleability into other appearances. Sometimes The Actress will have short hair, blonde hair, and more oddly thick glasses and shabby sweater (specifically utilized when The Actress is pontificating in interviews on the philosophical underpinnings of dramatizing the late suicidal newscaster’s final days); always the look in the shadow of another look, the fantasy of an absent self.

The look and its shadow define The Actress’ entrance into prior to the days of her own self-directed spectacle of drug and alcohol addiction rumors and minor arrests. The child of an Older Actress, a now aging former cover girl and star of comedic fluff who manifests a severe and medicated neuroses partly related to the lack of prestige associated with her reputation as an artist but primarily a consequence of the unreality being that one in a million. The Actress was introduced to the world as both a child and peer of her mother. While the daughter lived directly under the harsh light of the narcissistic fantasy of multitudes, her mother manifested a separate fantasy for aging women in the celebrity news narrative of being her daughter’s peer.

It is believed by The Director that casting this actress to portray Christine Chubbock will add poignance to the impending suicide death that frames the narrative, given that The Actress’ reputation for glamorously self-destructive behavior has made her a constant in office death pools for the last couple of years. References are made to famous beauties of the past that have also dies young and there is a shared excitement of potentially witnessing a similar scenario in real present-tense time. There is a faint glittery shine around many see around The Actress’ outline, a Black Heaven which in technical terms is the by-product of premature necrophilia.

So right now, the newsroom set is being prepared and The Actress is in her trailer with friends and assistants. She is practicing the voice, an affected version of Christine Chubbock's own voice, which she studies from videotape. The voice is an exaggerated low moan, Ms. Chubbock was depressed in her final days, reportedly over her fears of always being single and remaining alone. The Actress' impersonation progressively takes on the garish quality of broad characture but not that of a skilled performer, it's a crude gesture encouraged by the group of friends and assistants around her, everything she does with the intent of being the funny is met with agreeable laughter from the lower hierarchy of her circle. She laughs along with their laughter, encouraged she goes even further.

The laughter in repetitive echoes carries over to the next scene.

The Senator, early morning on the highway, examining the wreckage of the car in which the German tourists were gunned down. A psychic investigation, assisting police and other Floridian authorities. Their bodies removed, all that remains is a rental car with such an absurd amount of bullet holes, such that the exterior of the vehicle resembles some sort of modern art design. The Senator runs his hand slowly across pieces of the car's interior, torn material with jagged edges. His fingers touch the sharp edges lightly, eyes closed, he resists the urge to visually recreate the horror of the shooting in his mind and observes the gravity.

The laughter made by The Actress and her people in a small comfortable room continues to echo at this awful scene. The Senator seems to be the only one hearing it. The police and other Floridian authorities confusedly observe The Senator as he wanders away from the vehicle as though in a trance. Staring at the sky again (but this time, not in order to hear Hadassah) and looking past the wide plain next to the stretch of highway, The Senator is hearing the laughter and looking toward its source in the unknown distance. Laughter always overlaps with cruelty but their are two kinds of cruelty: One is a timeless element of earth and humanity, without it love wouldn't exist and vice versa. But then there's this other kind...

The Cross vs. The Circle: In Defense of Lifetime Television's "Cyber Seduction"

2008-12-18T20:31:00.000-08:00

For those who excel and find comfort in the current cultural climate of snark, eager to be the first find humor in every subject, the immediate reaction is disbelief that this movie exists. "Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life," A made-for-television film with the issue of internet porn addiction as the impetus of its central narrative invites interest of an ironic nature. However, what gets overlooked is how the seeming ridiculousness of the lesson-oriented drama provides a valuably reductive framework for an extraordinarily well executed and morally grounded drama, comparable to the transcendent graces of Robert Bresson's cinema. It's also worth remembering that a snapshot of laughter is also a picture of cruelty.

The surprise of director Tom Mcloughlin (responsible for "Friday the 13th: Part 6", the singular and atmospheric height of that famed slasher series) and his modest and powerful film is that it is not issue-specific toward the seemingly ridiculous subject of "internet porn" as much as a formally and thematically disciplined drama about addiction in its universal terms. The teen age protagonist is a perfectly cast (wide eyed and awkward overbite) picture of vulnerability and innocence. The montages of the teenage protagonist's long nights at the computer are precise evocations of the automatic circle of the whirlpool trajectory toward the drain. The brief second of bright blue that fills the screen in the addiction montages is mirrored in the baptismal high school swim meet pool chlorine that saves him. Yes, he finds religion, or "gets radical" as he says he needs to do upon realizing how his embarrassing addiction has crippled his girlfriend, family, and life.

While the baptismal conclusion opens "Cyber Seduction"up to the criticism of exchanging one extreme for another or of bit being shallow religious propaganda, its worth noting that Eastern religions espouse the endless masturbatory Circle ( indirectly adopted as the form of our secular times as Philip Reiff has observed) and Christianity has the Cross, a rising line of confluence and intersection. The subversive criticism inherent in the lingering question of Mcloughlin's film is that the circular nature of addiction leaves its victims with no other choice but seek the Cross of confluence. Additionally, in the film's relationship to larger aesthetic trends, the reductive framework of the issue-oriented moral lesson film such as this one, and other Lifetime pictures, is one that would behoove other filmmakers to follow. It would benefit all of us for filmmakers to aspire to make Lifetime pictures as opposed to the fake independent success of the well marketed nihilism in disguise, revealed in the therapeutic platitudes of films like "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Juno."

Persistance of the Goodness Vision

2008-12-11T21:26:00.001-08:00

"You go on vacation with your family, you know... you hang out you relax. But here...these brothers are on the prowl!"

Recorded in 1991 in front of an audience of predominantly black tourists in Aruba, "Sinbad: Bringing the Funk" is a masterful comic performance. A singularity of place, time, and intended audience (black people vacationing in the Caribbean) but its effects are transitory and a larger testament to specificity-in-performance.

I highly value the Goodness Vision and comedians with reductively clean parameters like Brian Regan and Bill Cosby (Sinbad's overriding influence) but what's often overlooked about Cosby is the undercurrent of anger that should mar the reverence that is held by comics for his tales of childhood and parenting. I understand why today's best comics like Louis C.K. and Chris Rock compare Cosby to a Jazz musician, but the mastery of formalism can't salvage his abusive Black Catholicism in my mind, though Cosby ultimately does achieve the Goodness Vision (though more often than not more successfully in his brilliant 1980s sitcom than in his stand-up recordings).

Pain is intractable from humor, we all know this, but the requisite negative line that runs through Sinbad's story telling manages to hit home with his audience of single black male and female tourists, the force of recognition can be felt in the reaction to his bit about couples who try and ditch each other immediately upon exiting the airplane.

I particularly liked the segment where he mocked a collective procrastinating tendency (implicating his own in a gesture of humility) toward packing a suitcase much too late in the evening before the next morning's flight in its developed exploration of a banal subject. Here and in a later bit in which Sinbad portrays an ugly guy he knows in Atlanta, who is lucky to be outnumbered by many single successful black women, the comic uses a hard-to-place ambiguous "nerd" voice. A brilliants shorthand to invoke obliviousness though without cruelty.

The comic's performance closes with a serious biblical reference which precedes in a celebratory loving ritual chant-a-long led by special guest Doug E. Fresh, and a reminder to the audience that while it's okay to have fun as singles on vacation, these experiences pale next to the value they will someday possess to "the life of a child." Friedrich Nietzsche would appreciate this compartmentalizing of sin and morality as he valued this capacity in the Greeks. Also worth noting is the fact that very few comics could or would pull this off a moment of closing transcendence at the completion of sustained gaiety in this current period defined by a constant desperation search for transgressive openings . Even a supposedly non-blue Christian comic like Brad Stein seems like a con working a fraudulent gimmick with his pleas to his promise-keeper fans to oppose "activist judges," seeming to come from out of nowhere and not at the peak of a crescendo or to mitigate excessive levity.

All in all, compared to most everyone else, Sinbad possesses a nuanced understanding of sin's necessity curbed by morality as much as he does comedic business and its proximity to serious business.

Florida: Where's The Orchestra? Part One

2008-12-11T20:25:00.000-08:00

Just above a whisper..."Hadassah...Hadassah.......Hadassah"A small figure on the shoreline. It's comedian Gilbert Gottfried, portraying a politician (The Senator) in a three-piece-suit slightly too large for his small frame.

The Senator approaches the shore of the Gulf Coast holding his cell phone, he tells his staff that he's seeking a better signal but he really wants to speak to his wife alone as he evades them while walking into the waves, ruining his pants and increasing their professionals' disconcert.

The Senator examines the sky and shoreline, where they meet as one wall. Her voice tiny in his ear but filling up that sky. The terrifying infinity of space and possibility. Haddasah's faith nullifies the terror of possibility, Those endless possibilities of the secular age. He always says her name the same way, as if struck, haunted, and especially when the sky clears.

Returning from the water, surrounded by the assemblage of his staff, revolving around him, speaking and moving at a different frame rate. The Senator's smile is resilient but slightly pained by sunlight, but it looks that way under clouds too... as we'll discover.

The heat makes illusionary tremors out of the horizon lines in the distance but there have been actual earthquakes in Florida lately. Maybe this explains the jittery nature of The Senator's staff, natural phenomena uncommon to the territory named after Easter has expanded naked possibility fraught with the fearful imagination of a collective.

Also happening lately, the shooting murders of German tourists by black suspects on Floridian highways, everything is feeding into everything else in these strange times. The Senator is heading the one man exploratory committee following these unnatural events due to his peculiar sensitivity in these type of matters; it seems that every one of his colleagues has a story about his capacity for surprising clairvoyances. Small things mostly, he once located the missing house keys of his Senatorial colleague from South Carolina, but remarkable nonetheless to any and all observers bound by the normal sensory limitations.

Later on at a press conference, strobing flashbulbs and reporters questions shouted with urgency. The Senator's voice, seemingly designed for maximum annoyance is self-consciously restrained here as in all of the his public appearances, a performative austerity, but one always wonders what he this voice sounds like in full panicky fright mode and unbound at night like a Jewish Werewolf. This is the true undercurrent of The Senator's unpopularity with many of his colleagues and the media: a formal unflappability of manner. Sure, there is the overly nuanced balancing act of his lengthy explanations (The Senator is a master of this "jazz neutrality"), his stereotypically politician transgressions and triangulations from and refusal of acknowledgement of what's plain-as-day-true to everyone else, that is the content which justifies the fists pounded on tables in frustration but the voice...the voice completes this perfect impetus for vexed hair-pulling.

The balancing act, the neutrality and triangulations, these are the byproducts of the Visions, the burden carried and worn by the seer. An elaborate path toward the right thing is being followed and its unexplainable by The Senator because it's beyond words, even beyond vision because the Visions are not literal visions. People overlook this imperfect nature of the prophet, who wears this burden with a shuffling hunched sloppiness, visions are not answers but attacks that lead its victims with not even directions but on a path seeking directions.

The press conference over, The Senator smiles, recording devices shut off violently and pencils stab sentence ending periods onto note pads in frustration. He's said nothing but he's made revelations seem as though forthcoming in the immediate; his gifts are not salesmanesque but he manages this illusion of nearness and farness impossibly through the prolonged static of outwardly flat and neutral execution.

At nighttime, The Senator climbs into a hotel bed with his already sleeping wife. Incidentally, he always sleeps in his suit when not on holiday out of a long gestating superstition. She resembles sea-turtle passivity in these unguarded moments and he drapes an arm across her body, an awkwardly placed hug intended to keep her slumber undisturbed. The Senator recounts his day in an anemic whine with therapy session honesty into her ear. Hadassah jolts unconsciously, moans monosyllables and The Senator nods a serenely felt understanding before reaching his own restful surrender.

He. She. Asleep. And his ongoing psychic investigation will have to resume the next morning as they both maintain their stillness as the next massive earthquake begins. The slow rising falling of their bodies in breaths, comforting to watch from above with God's eye, though inexplicable as the entire room vibrates with violent rattles.