2

Champagne-related deaths are more common than lightning-related deaths. I grew up with a knowledge of lightning safety disproportionate to my actual experience with lightning. I cannot think of a single lesson in champagne (or even sparkling cider) safety.

What disturbs me about the ratio between lightning and champagne deaths—when people are struck by lightning, it’s uncommon, and unfortunate, but it’s not without reason. They were out in a lightning storm, for whatever reason, after all. They lost some kind of confrontation with nature, just as people lose to bears, and avalanches, and cholera. Their actions and the consequences of those actions are commensurate.

The sickening irony of a champagne-related death is that, barring the occupational hazards of bartending a party on New Year’s Eve, and barring the Jazz Age extravagance that demands a steady supply of champagne cocktails, eliminating these outliers, it’s safe to assume that the death, or serious injury, the incident necessarily accompanies a “special occasion.” For every (or almost every) champagne-related death, there is some reason to celebrate, some felicitous event, some mitzvah ruined by a bizarre accident that no one could possibly have foreseen.

I can imagine the scene, the silence pierced only by cries, the shuffling of feet, stilted attempts to help as minds struggle to comprehend the previous few seconds—the cork flew, foam spewed from the plump glass bottle and the cheers were cut short, or turned to cries of alarm, as a window shatters, or a wall fixture falls, or a man, in what seemed like the very same instant. The lost time, cognitive delay, reminds one partygoer later of a time he walked into a screen door, another of when she was T-boned crossing an intersection. The mind continues an event, fills in the gap, as it has grown accustomed, without incident, for a split second before it can make sense of what’s just happened. He had felt himself clear the doorjamb before he found his face pressed against the screen door. She had turned onto that sidestreet fully before she heard the sound and felt the concussion. Now, in this kitchen, or living room, she struggles at first to order the events sequentially in her head, to determine a causal relationship between the things she’s sensed—the cork, the cheers, the crash, the cries. One man thinks it’s a joke, that the person on the ground is pretending, and he laughs out loud. Another woman, already on edge from the popping of the cork, which she didn’t expect, is utterly lost in the commotion. The wife of the struck man is on the ground next to him immediately, prying his hands away from his face and calling out for someone to find help.

The cause of death is left out of the obituary, not mentioned at the service. “He died the way he lived, with good friends.” The absurdity of his death might cause laughter among those far enough removed by tangent or generation, but for those who were close, it is simply baffling. There is no champagne-safety course that can replace his life. Had the bottle been opened differently, pointed in another direction or under a towel, this would never have happened. But it did happen. It will happen again. All the towels couldn’t keep it from happening again.

Champagne-related deaths are more common than lightning-related deaths. Cheers.

Ecstatic SUnshine - Way

What if an album isn't an album? What if it falls into absurdity while no one is listening? Does it make a series of obnoxious sounds? I'm probably coming off like some Bacharach-rocking philistine, but I really really like songs. Failing that, riffs. Failing that, music. The album Way by Ecstatic Sunshine fills somewhere between zero and three of those categories. It consists of half an hour of largely interchangeable guitar loops. You know: the kind of stuff where what they did doesn't matter so much as the fact that they did it (and did it first). Unfortunately for Ecstatic Sunshine, no one cares about Who, Why, and When. What happened to What? Right, right. Minimalism. Deconstruction. Post. Meta. Liberal arts. The centerless, horizonless sphere where significance used to reside. Delay pedals and marijuana. I’m over over it. FUCKING MOVE ME. And who knows, right? Maybe these guys are some sort of sophisticated sex-robots. Maybe the title of this album demonstrates a calm, Lao Tzu-like vision of the universe that I cannot grasp. Or maybe it’s more like this: Q: Isn’t this album infuriating? A: Way. Or whatever. My infuriation is completely my own, because this band has absolved themselves of all responsibility. They’re just out there floating like so many beer cans in a stream. In fact, the idea of a twisted version of organic beauty seems pretty appropriate here. To justify this kind of music, you would have to argue for a beauty that comes before what we can write. Something that falls quite naturally out of calmly repeated sound. Like what you find in a waterfall, say. Or in the polyrhythms of walking feet. Occasionally, Ecstatic Sunshine actually produce this effect, which is a fucking feat. At least as often, we’re confronted with what may as well be a battalion of distant car alarms. The idea of a man-made natural beauty also crops up on Way’s cover art. The more I glare at this picture, the more I like it and believe it’s a key to the album. It’s a natural scene, complete with trees and waterfall, turned upside-down and decorated with plastic eyeballs. Accidental beauty, but ironic, self-denigrating. Clearly composed, caricaturing human creativity (see the guitar lines that burble through the three long songs) but sounding, intentionally-unintentionally, like bird-song. The second track is called “Herrons” Fine: this album is pretty like birds are fucking annoying, and it’s annoying like birds are sort of cute at five in the frigid morning. Maybe even musical like falling down is humorous. With sufficiently odd albums, I like to play a game. I imagine what the ideal fan does while blasting the record. There are always a few funny answers to this question, but on Way, the answer is this: anything at all. Christ, something. I can’t imagine listening to this without doing something else. It would be a disservice to myself and to the music. This album is referential without a referent, wide without depth, and cheap while sounding expensive, like every debased imitation of nature. And yet. Fuck! I was really getting some good self-righteousness going. At the end of the third and final track, as if in spite of their intentions, Ecstatic Sunshine lay down a very good series of guitar tracks. Coming after a bunch of loopy synth and guitar, it almost feels kind of like an imitation of what could once have been “Baba O'Reilly.” It is simple and direct and it is rock and roll. Should I view the whole album as prelude to this thirty-second success? No. That wouldn’t be fair to the band. So let's remember that these guys are capable of something else, and that they choose to bob in the murky po-mo tide. Why?

The Ear the Eye the Arm - Paths

Remember when music had regional traits? You know—Chicago Blues, East Coast Swing, Seattle Grunge? Yeah, me neither. No one reading internet music criticism does. But you can imagine, yes? It’s kind of cute. Exciting, for the sort of person who loves over-precise analysis of pop-culture artifacts. Which I totally am not. In any case, I’ve got some good news for you. There is now a recognizable regional trend underway. We’ll call it Los Angeles Complain.

LA Complain has a lot of exciting peccadilloes, but my favorite is that it’s imitation-proof. It can’t be consumed like Brits absorbed the blues or hat-wearing dorks embraced swing. The secret is... no one wants in on this one. We are talking about a completed and unified aesthetic of whining.

Now this band. The Ear the Eye and the Arm, they’re called. They love complaing. That’s the impression, in any case, their album Paths gives. But I think we can dig a little deeper into the world of LA Comp. Because, really, only their lead singer bitches. Their guitarist, Darin Green, is some kind of finger-mutant on brain drugs. But fuck, man. That singing. It’s like halfway between Hot Hot Heat and Linkin Park, only less self-aware. It’s like the lightest little hint of lounge singer, which indicates a secret desire to be English, which indicates a not-so-secret desire to die, which indicates being from Los Angeles.

                I burned most other examples of LA Comp out of my memory with clean air, sunlight, and exercise. But I think we can safely include every pop-emo hit you’ll ever hear (produced, if not born, in LA) and some embarrassing but decent stuff up to and including Beck. The last genuine contributions LA made to music are called hair metal and Tupac. The difference between those two and The Ear the Eye and the Arm is that those self-obsessed bastards distilled LA’s LAness down to its absurd oil-slick soul. Shit, Steely Dan did that too. But if this is what LA is composed of now, I guess we can give up on another GNR or NWA. Or maybe it’s just the dudes who move down there, as opposed to the ones who relocate to Austin, Portland, New York? Hard to tell, harder to worry about.

                All this is bumming me out, though, because the guitar-work on this album is alternately heavy and weird and I dig the crap out of it. This Darin Green doesn’t nail every opportunity (far from it—when he plays rhythm there’s way to much opportunity to listen to the singing) but when he plays lead, either intricately or head-bangingly, it’s well worth a listen. And to his credit, Green even manages to murdalize on the mid-tempo songs. To be clear, mid-tempo songs blow. If you’re going to rage, scorch earth. And if you’re going to emote, balladeer away, bro. But this gently insistent, carefully arr....I can’t even make myself write about this stuff. What in the world is the point of these songs? But here I am, kind of digging the lower-key moments on this album. Actually, the mid-speed tunes are far and away the most successful. I am thinking in particular of "Paths", "Playing the Martyr" and "Dialect of an Angry Man", which do not suck. Especially guitar-wise, of course. But the complaining also works at that speed. At the end of Dialect, the lead singer even screams. Lets it rip. Crazy, I know. But they put echo on it like they’re embarrassed of it and then the moment is over.

                These guys aren’t even from LA—they’re new recruits. But they’ve absorbed the sound (and, one assumes, the sky-poison) of their adopted abyss. I have this irrational, over-generous desire to score this album as a resume for the guitarist. And based on the first 20 seconds of the first song, it’d be an 8.6. Killer riff, followed by some edge-of-fun weirdness, followed by chiming mellow chords. But then in come the drums and the singer and it’s the grand entrance of shame-faced, oblivious Los Angeles.

                The drumming by JD Knotts is solid, but I’m told he’s just filling in, so let’s hope they can find a replacement with a persuasive singing voice. Calling Don Henley.

Reflections on a Sitar Concert in the South of France

This weekend I made an unexpected appearance at a lecture and performance of the Northern Indian music. The event took place at an old Bergerie -once a house for sheep, translated into a rustically modern home with heating and light and windows- not very far from where I live. Candles and a few small lights illuminated the main room whose floor was covered by large pillows. At one end sat the kitchen. At the other end there lay a series of Indian drums, a lute and a sitar, all on top of a bright red and blue Persian carpet. The room was filled with maybe thirty middle-aged men and women from nearby villages. We were the youngest in the room by twenty years or more, but the crowd was strikingly familiar to me; despite their being French, all of the people could have easily been parents of friends of mine from California. The sitar player sat down and began to explain, in French, some of the differences between Western music and Eastern music. I drew my head as close as possible and stretched my thoughts as far out as I could; something about Western music emphasizing harmony and Eastern music melody; the absence of a tonic and dominant in Indian music; wood and ivory. Suddenly I was reminded of E.E. Cummings,

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because thy are too near

As I am admiring her demonstration of the Indian drums I feel a tickle in my throat and the inescapable need to cough, which is augmented by the awkwardly forced austerity created by Westerners listening to Eastern music. I start to cough. The room is silent except for the beating of the drums and my head is at the point of erupting. I jump up and hobble through the crowd to the kitchen, covering my mouth with watering eyes. I cannot remove the tickle sensation, and someone has taken my seat so I must stay in the kitchen watching the crowd and the musician at once. She picks up the sitar and explains some of the materials and the sounds and without warning begins to play.

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

What did she say about harmony and melody? She plays one low note over and over and over all the while interrupting it by a higher note, the same note, but bent, bent every time at different lengths of time and on different lengths of the instrument. Are they even in the same octave? She mentioned the octaves, something about their not being as constrictive; maybe it was that there were not any octaves at all. What is the French word for constrictive? Her playing is the only thing to focus on to keep me from coughing.

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

By this time the thirty or so people in the room and the fire have melded into one massive and slow moving, breathing creature whose voice is the crackling cataract of notes struck and bent in rapidly altering melodies. One on top of the other; one next to the other. It is almost like John Coltrane’s sound, the sheets of sound descending upon and alongside each other, a line of individual notes that together suggest a augmented seventh or diminished fifth, followed by a series of subtle tangents and perpendiculars to the original theme

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

hard and fast. Back and forth. In my dreams there are shapes that resemble you. It grows and grows and grows but never explodes. There is no tonic, no dominant. At this point she her hand is twittering like a hummingbird, her thumb wildly clanging out the lower notes and her fingers plucking and flicking the rest, in some swelling order that grabs the sonata form by its collar and stares into its eyes with a sweating brow and fluctuating pupils and presses one pair of lips against another, unwilling and afraid and aroused

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all the roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

There were samosas and fresh chai tea after the concert. I was sitting or maybe standing and I had a plate in one hand and a glass in the other. It was warm and I was naked, just like it is and I am after I read Cummings. Defenseless, tired. How heavy was the pen with which he wrote? How bright was the light that illuminated his sheets? Are there any emotions that we share? All of the people around me quietly eating and drinking too-that was nice, their eyes say, thank you, to her with her long hair and deep green Indian robes. You’re welcome.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I went to Barcelona two days after I saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

I was in traffic, thick traffic which was getting thicker and slower as the clock began to move quicker and quicker and for nearly an hour I was worried that I would miss Tim completely at the airport. We'd never made any confirmations and I feared that he would get on a train and come back up to France alone if I never found him. By the time I got to airport I was twenty-five minutes late and I made a loop around the terminals and then parked ran inside, scanning all the arrival times. I knew the flight number and I had looked up the American terminal online but there I was another twenty-five minutes into waiting, running, searching, sweating with no ideas, no information and no Tim. I wandered outside and hurriedly paced up and down the terminal, fighting off the urge to smoke-everyone was smoking on the sidewalk outside the terminal- when I saw a list of airline names under the Terminal A sign and realized that I was in the wrong place. I was walking at a clip down towards Terminal B and I chanced to look to my left and saw the background to the opening shot of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a hundred foot Miro mural spanning the gap between terminals.

It is October and the weather is hot and damp and even at 9 if you start walking you start sweating. Tim is waiting patiently and I finally find him in front of Terminal A only a minute or so after I find Miro. I don't know what the off-season is in Europe, but it seems like there is not any such thing in Barcelona. The airport was full and busy. The streets were packed and the only places that were not were in or near the Casco Viejo. Tim had never been to Barcelona and I wanted to show him the Cathedral and Parc Guell and some of the streets and galleries around the Picasso Museum. At every turn I was looking for someone, expecting someone, surprised when I didn't see them. At first I thought it was Chris or David, who had been with me the very first time I went to Barcelona, six years ago, and then I thought that it was Jess whose presence in Barcelona and absence from Barcelona had defined my spring vacation that same year, or Josh and Ariel who had been with me on that vacation while she was gone. Then I thought maybe it was Joanna and Uraci who I had seen two years later and who had saved my whole ten day trip with tortilla and wine and books and a kitchen when I didn't want to see anyone or do anything except avoid whatever it was that I felt obligated to do while I was there. Then, just as we were leaving the Casco Viejo I realized that I was looking for Vicky and Cristina and Maria Elena and Juan Antonio.



I don't know what I mean exactly by "looking for." I just know that I was turning corners whose narrow, sun-filled streets were naked without one of the characters from the film to clothe them; they were my own canvas without the colors those characters had put there by drinking and eating, photographing and loving. I was expecting Barcelona to be only what I had seen recently on film rather than everything it had been in breadth and width and depth for more than half a decade. The leviathan, lethargic crowds augmented the irony I was feeling. By the time we arrived at Parc Guell I felt as though Tim and I were the only ones there among what must have been no less than two-thousand foreigners.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not as funny as it seemed while I was watching it. For some reason it had more of the character of a comedy without as much of the actual comedy. It's nowhere near as funny as some other Woody Allen films and yet when jokes are made (whether in words, "Of course I looked in your bags!" or quick, characteristic Woody Allen cuts, "There is no way I am going to Oviedo" to a small plane in a storm) they are light and lively, they are comical consequences of passion. The sparing comedy compliments the more serious romance: both reveal the difficulty of confronting the limits of will power. What power do we have to keep our hearts to ourselves, to keep other hearts to ourselves, to let go of them?

Barcelona is a lively city. It is a city that maintains its light, colorful and warm character amidst an endless barrage of tourism. It is a Catalan city in Spain. While it is part Spanish it's identity is not tied up in the web of violence and force of eloquence and raw power of history that characterizes the Basques. In short, where the Basques are Dramatic (and, at times, tragic) the Catalan are comedic. And Barcelona is their center. Their comedy is attractive, opening, welcoming. The uniqueness of the city-its history, architecture, "culture"- somehow outlives the torrent of shit that is perpetually thrown at it by way of guide books and tourism and artwork-I'm thinking of films-"about" it. For so many it is a place that is "visited," not lived in. Look in the faces of the thousands of people you see in a day walking around the city, shopping, eating, drinking; you can see through their eyes right into their heart. And you see nothing.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona assumes both of these views: traveling is revealing of desire and Barcelona is a place that people visit (even Juan Antonio, the Spanish man Vicky and Cristina meet, is from Asturias, not Catalonia). But the film takes on a somewhat archaic perspective of traveling. It is more The Sun Also Rises than On the Road. All of the characters attempt to turn themselves into something else, something that is possible in that one place. Their growth constitutes the action of the film. The characters who are unaffected by the city (Doug and Mark) are out of touch with romance and out of touch with themselves; they have no idea what their spouses want and they are obsessed with categorizing: a marriage is a certain kind of relationship, a man needs this, a woman need that, romance begins with this contrived and nebulous moment and augments itself by these similarly contrived and nebulous stages. If you ran into Doug or Mark walking, shopping, eating, drinking in Barcelona what would you see in their eyes?

I did not sleep last night nor the night before and I blame Barcelona. I blame Barcelona for having disrobed before me six years ago and then having left the door closed but unlocked ever since. This is what I take to be the meaning of the title: it's not Vicky and Cristina in Barcelona, it's Vicky and Cristina and Barcelona. Barcelona is a woman or a man who, like Picasso or Gaudi, presents life before you and then lets you choose. I did not sleep last night nor the night before because I have not yet chosen and I had forgotten that I had to make a choice until yesterday morning when I saw Miro.

The Shaky Hands - Lunglight

It’s raining today. No sun. Shaking angly tree branches. Impenetrable sky rising up out of the ground. Hourless glide from late morning to dusk. I’ve been in bed all afternoon, admitting how sick I’ve gotten over the last week. Nothing beats autumn. It always makes me think of Portland.

Portland used to be my girl. Well. Portland used to be the girl I wanted to be my girl. An indie rock princess, a Bob Dylan song, extravagant hair in the wind, tentative smile and the night coming. Rain jackets and the illimitable future. But that girl isn’t all that great. Amend that: she is all that great, but more trouble by far than she’s worth. Also, she’s not a fantasy—just, I was shocked to discover, a human being. It also turns out that Portland isn’t quite what I imagined.

Apparently I got a little turned around in all those clouds and distorted guitar chords. Thought I had her but it wasn’t her at all. So Portland of me to take the ideal for the reality. Portland is not that scarf-wearing girl. Portland is the young man who loves her, who seeks and entices her. He is the lonesome hopeful loser. That failure of a skyline, that God-sent river. So much to build on, but what are you building, Portland? You self-deprecating aesthete. You appreciator. This band, The Shaky Hands, whose members may come from anywhere at all, calls Portland home. Fair enough—they couldn’t fit their city better. Not quite artists, but lovers of art. Smart, creative even, but no geniuses. A little innocent, somehow—they like good bands but can’t quite get those wings flapping. The Velvet Underground on “Wake the Breathing Light” (ps is “Oh No” the poor man’s “Oh, Sweet Nothing” on purpose, or just by accident?), The Stones here and there, sure, and also a little Strokes (“You’re the Light”). Toss in some Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. There’s even a Radiohead minute (“Air Better Come”’s percussive beginning and mumbly middle). But...what are The Shaky Hands about? Having fun. Making pretty and occasionally odd things. Not much else, outside of some alienated lyrics. All that said, they’re a genuinely fun listen. You want adventure and weirdos? You want the vice and the trees and the night and the day? Portland is your town. But despite our claims of being THE FUTURE, Portland is a town of human beings. Decent ones, not great ones. A democratic town, a mountain and ocean and valley town. This music makes me want to get up out of this bed and shimmy down through the rain to the nearest windowless bar. Then on to the campaign rally. (See “Loosen Up”, but really almost the entire album, if you’re in the right mood). But it won’t change my life or anyone else’s. Won’t even change Rock and Roll.

Shit, though, I can’t keep bludgeoning this album. It’s just good. A little dark and murky. A lot happy. Some great lines (more bad ones though—that’s the way with these flannel-wearing decent persons. Hit and miss and hit and miss and miss and miss): “Feeble hearts live long, you know. / But I’m feelin’ strong!” or something like that. Cool, right? But lost in a fog of “I’ve had it good, I’ve had it bad”s. Straight PDX. We like the real shit, but we’re too busy living high-quality lives to dwell on it. Last real successful band we produced was...Everclear?

Well, this band is ten times as good as Everclear, and I even like that first hit about the big black boots. The Shaky Hands are my hometown through and through, depressed and gleeful and adult, sensible in the fucked-up way and vice versa. You will like this album for a while.

Deerhunter - Microcastle

Dear 1992,

Wow. It’s really been a long time. I bet you’re kind of surprised I’m writing to you at all—I didn’t really know you when you were around, but then, I was pretty busy. I had that gig taping explosives to toy tigers and that other one where I kept buying six soft tacos, no cheese, at taco bell. That was before they had fire sauce. It was just hot sauce then. Remember? In any case, I heard a lot about you after you took off.

1992, I liked what I heard. We really liked the same things—all those neon colors. We both loved it when hip-hop songs had scratchy sampled horns and you couldn’t stop playing those songs where long-haired young white men would just...sort of....smash on the same 3 Goddamn chords. Smash, smash, smash, they would go. Blllllaaaaannnnngggg CONfUsioN LONELYFUCK etc. Man, some of those were sweet. But you have to admit that almost all of them blew.  And their bands would be called like Hogan’s Hobos or Iguanodon or whatever. You remember those guys? They were always from the northwest or some doucher college. Remember the other kind of song those dudes loved? The kind where they’d pick one catchy undistorted guitar riff and then the singer would do weird shit over it? You didn’t like those as much, but later on they became more beloved. El Scorcho. Every other Pavement song. Right? I bet you wish you’d been more into that when it was big.

I’m writing to talk to you about this new band. They’re called Deerhunter. I think you would like them. A lot. Which is weird because, you know, they don’t know you. If they were playing music when you were around, I bet it was Greensleeves on recorder. And yet they’re making me think of you. Not really making me miss you, just making me think of you. That’s the problem. I mean, I still get down with some of those bands you liked so much. See, bands can do that. They can exist in the kind of universe that letters to 1992 exist in. The kind of universe where the only thing that matters is pulling it off. But usually they exist in the same universe that online music reviews exist. The one where just being basic competence is a tall order. That’s the universe Deerhunter lives in, and that’s the universe I’m forced to live in when I listen to their album Microcastle , which pretty much just alternates between BBBllllaaaannng BBBlllannngggg BBBBBBBLLLLLLlllaaaaaaannnNNNNGG and faux-intellectual El Scorcho. It’s like listening to My Morning Jacket, only just as pointless. Actually, is this a My Morning Jacket Album? Hold on.

No, it’s not. That’s too bad. At least they’d have some kind of a gimmick going for them. Kind of a Chris Gaines thing. Let’s wrap this up by saying all the songs are basically uninteresting and of two types: distorty and not. Twenty listens in, I can’t even tell you which tracks suck the least. Forget this album and this band.

Casablanca (2)

Casablanca is difficult to categorize because of its romance. Rather, I should say that it is difficult to categorize because of its coupling of romance and war. Today it may seem unsurprising that a work of art would combine love and war, it may even be so unsurprising that it would be considered predictable. But, in the tradition of romantic literature there is a markedly different coupling: love and death. This coupling is epitomized in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. “What is the relationship between love and death?” is certainly the most important and most telling question to ask after seeing Tristan and Isolde. The question holds such a great deal of importance because it reveals the driving tension in nearly all romances from Shakespeare to Hemmingway. Casablanca, on the other hand, does not present that coupling: it rather couples love with life. Like Tristan and Isolde it demonstrates the struggle between duty and passion, but Casablanca does not take death as its ultimatum, it rather presents life, two lives in fact, stay and live like this or leave and live like that. But neither decision looks appealing. Thus, it is more like Anna Karenina than Pride and Prejudice.
Taking the model of Shakespeare or Austen, Casablanca does not appear to be a comedy; there is no marriage at the end. But before going further something must be said about these comparisons. Casablanca is more like Shakespeare in structure and also in theme; the comparison is relatively clear. Austen, on the other hand, is very different in both structure and theme and the difference is revealing. Austen is frequently misread as being “romantic.” Any romance in Pride and Prejudice is a redefinition of the word. There is no fatality to Elizabeth’s decision of whom she marries or whether she marries at all. The fate of Elizabeth’s relationship with Mr. Darcy will at no point fundamentally change her life; it will only make her more or less happy. Her concern with happiness is far less than her concern for the good. Thus, she will never allow for the very kind of tension on which romance is based. Elizabeth’s character is thoroughly established early on and –while she matures over the course of the book- her final decision does not dictate who she is, it rather qualifies how she will be. The situation is quite different with Rick and Ilsa. The tension of their relationship reaches its climax at the moment when they must decide whether or not to spend their lives together. Rick’s character, by contrast, will not be fully defined until he decides whether or not to leave with Ilsa:

Ilsa
You're saying this only to make me go.

Rick
I'm saying it because it's true. Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor. You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll never regret it.

Ilsa
No.

Rick
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Ilsa
But what about us?

Rick
We'll always have Paris. We didn't have, we'd lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.

Ilsa
And I said I would never leave you.

Rick
And you never will. But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going you can't follow. What I've got to do you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now...
Here's looking at you kid.

Apparently they writers were writing the script literally during the filming of the movie, and, since it was filmed in order, they were deeply unsure about where to go in the final scene. This detail might help to explain why these lines sound so fresh even sixty-six years later; they are delivered as though the actors almost don’t understand what they are saying, as if they were surprised by their own emotions. Whether the details about the film are true or not is interesting historically. Regardless of the film’s history, the writers and actors seem to have come to a perfect understanding. Whatever Rick is thinking there is no way for him to be prepared to let her go; he might even change his mind once he gets to the airport. Such speculations lead to a single question: Who is Rick? To be blunt, he is magnanimity itself. Cool, calm and reserved, he speaks effortlessly yet thoroughly. He stands alone without any affectation. In short, he is the modern gentleman. It is his image that should be conjured up when the word “manliness” is spoken. Ilsa stands opposite him as the modern woman. They are not simply nor merely symbolic, but their symbolism reveals their natures: Rick is outwardly confident though inwardly unsure, Ilsa is outwardly emotional but inwardly maintains her dignity and does not act on a whim. Ilsa, unlike Rick, has a kind of unbridled passion, infinitely attractive but not divine, a mortal unmoved mover. She embodies what Lorca was advocating when he said “La poesia no quiere adeptos, quiere amantes.”

Casablanca (1)

I speak with the greatest sincerity and utmost gravitas when I say that I may be the most unqualified person to write a film review. I am certainly the least qualified of all my friends. I am excitable enough to blindly believe my first impressions and over-confident enough to declare them with every pretense of alacrity. I have been through high school and college and I find myself to be well - though not perfectly -“educated.” Nonetheless, in the realm of cinema I am generally worthless. Such a phenomenon is no surprise even today: I have been a terrible critic of film my whole life. As a child I spent a great deal of my summers curled up in front of the television watching and re-watching Tombstone or the Indiana Jones movies. Don’t get me wrong, these are not at all bad movies, but I was fully unaware of any characteristics by which someone else might call them praiseworthy. I watched them and many others with the most unobservant eye, but the most open heart. I watched in order to spend time being Doc Holiday or Indiana Jones. I engulfed my whole self into the characters and the action, so that I could participate in their lives alongside them. This was why I watched movies and is still why I watch them today. It is not how I read books or observe art. It is not how I listen to music. But I cannot escape my being completely overpowered by movies, time and again. But, since I entertain the image of myself as a thinking man, I cannot fully surrender my interpretations, wholly suspend my judgments when I think about movies. This is why I am so thoroughly unqualified to review movies. It also happens to be why I nonetheless feel so drawn to review them.
Thus, I approach this task with a vast and deep division inside me. I am so enamored by Casablanca that I cannot help but write about it, but I am so self-conscious about saying anything worthwhile that I can hardly know where to begin. (Before beginning I would also like to add that, being 22 years old and having never been married, the brief digression on marriage is entirely a matter of speculation and a subject of which I claim no sagacity. Any truth that I have hit upon is a blessing, however it is a happy coincidence. Nonetheless, it is a subject that I treat with the greatest sincerity and about which I have ruminated for many years.)
Casablanca, which is second behind Citizen Kane in the AFI’s “100 Greatest American Films” and immediately before The Godfather, is arguably the greatest "Hollywood" film of all time, a film that can be enjoyed academically as well as it can be entertaining. Citizen Kane is a great film, but it seems to me to be too much a film for films, too much a testament to its own legend, perhaps too vast to be limited to the genre of “film.” The Godfather (by this I mean 1 and 2, while the AFI indicates just 1; Godfather 2, the only sequel to appear on the list is at number 32) is also great but too epic, too long and deals with too many different themes to be considered a pure "Hollywood" film. Casablanca, on the other hand, is relatively short (about one hour and forty-five minutes) and its varied themes are neatly tied to the two principal themes of love and war. Few films are allowed to have such a fluid storyline, and navigate the difficult waters between eclecticism and making a point. The readability of the script (it is based on a play called Everybody Goes to Rick's) is also a testament to the permanence of its success. That it is in the realm of the greatest films of all time places it on par with other great works of art and literature, and the very tradition of great works. Why discuss whether or not Casablanca is the greatest film of all time? Does such a question seem even answerable at all, much less important? Maybe not, but I raise in an attempt to illustrate what kind of a movie Casablanca is. What kind of a movie it is seems to me to be a very deep question, one that may seem obvious but is in fact not very easy to answer.

1

To be a "conservative," one concerns himself with what simply is; he believes in unchanging principles as the basis for political action. The most enduring of those principles, in conservative thought, is self-interest.

Self-interest is the core philosophical precept of the conservative: freedom exists in opposition to tyranny (or regulation); bigger government means less freedom, higher taxes mean less freedom. But what makes a conservative a conservative is not that he loves individual freedom and sees things which stand in the way of that freedom as bad; the conservative sees tyranny and regulation (read: taxes and government) as essentially non-functional. Conservatives don't think socialism is bad; they think it doesn't work.

This is an important distinction, because it relies on the essentially conservative notion of an unchanging human nature. To say that socialism is bad is to present it as an (unjust) alternative to the life that we know and love, though an alternative nonetheless. Conservatives don't see socialism as a system which functions and produces injustice. Conservatives see socialism as non-functional since it contradicts human nature, which they understand to be universally self-interested in the same way and to the same degree.

"It is human nature," says the conservative, "to want freedom in all things. Humans yearn for freedom, universally." Modern conservatives believe that want for freedom is an unchanging fact of public life everywhere in the world. Those who support a "forward policy of freedom" see liberalism (by which I mean a love of freedom for freedom's sake) as a universal fact of human nature, held to an equal degree among all men in every culture.

In the same way, Smith's "invisible hand" guides the market economy of all things traded, universally. The "invisible hand," like the want for freedom, is a claim conservatives make about "human nature."

This term, "human nature," refers to universal precepts of existence: human nature has no time, no place, no gender, no race. Shakespeare and Hobbes and Smith are central to conservative thought because they "explore the human condition," a condition which existed before those authors wrote, and which remains unchanged today. It's not simply that conservatives make claims about what human nature is, but, more fundamentally, that there is a human nature which is common to all men and does not change.

Exploring seriously what is fact and what is custom, what is and what becomes, what can be changed and what can't is how one becomes politically nuanced. At the core of every political decision, and all decisions are political, is the question of necessity.

Villeseque des Corbiers (the patio)

Of all the pictures that I've taken so far this one is seems to be the best. Behind that patio there are rolling hills and then the Mediterranean.

Euro-flavor

Lakers-Celtics or: Rondo-Fisher

How do we understand/predict the Finals?  The Celtics' 2-0 winning record against the Lakers?  Trumped by the acquisition of Pau?  The fluidity of the triangle offense?  The rigidity of the Celtics defense?  How about just Paul Pierce vs. Kobe?  I think that it will come down to positions, and one position in particular: the point guard.  This is not specific to this series (I would apply it to every series this playoffs).

As a two guard in High School I have a pretty serious bias towards my own position.  How can you deny Monta Ellis, Kobe, Pierce or MJ?  Nonetheless, I wonder whether the two guard position does not lend itself to...itself.  Mj is infinitely more memorable than the Bulls; Kobe has been living this playoffs above the stratosphere, not on the court; Monta Ellis does not play basketball; I don't know what he does, but it's something more like music.  Every time I see Monta Ellis play I am reminded of the first time I ever saw the ocean.  The forward and power-forward positions are nebulous.  It might be the most uninteresting position in professional basketball (e.g. Tim Duncan).  All power-forwards are at their best (and most fun to watch) when they are superimposing center-skills on their game (e.g. Amare Stoudamire, KG) or mixing their game with some of the two guard stuff (e.g. Lamar Odom).  Centers are essential, but not (generally) directive.  Shaq's success, I believe, has been the ability to indirectly (with his overall presence) and directly (with his passing and footwork) direct the defense.  I think that he actually did this against the Spurs this postseason.  Their problem was, in short, everything else.  But, I digress.  The point of this is that the game is inextricably tied to the point guard.  Which leads me to Rajon Rondo and Derek Fisher.

Rondo: Rondo is a defensive locker-downer.  He can shut down guys who are bigger and stronger because of his long arms and he is fit enough to be so active defensively that point guards just get worn down playing against him.  He has been very effective at simply frustrating (though only rarely completely shutting down) Mike Bibby, A.C. Law, Delonte West, Booby Gibson, Chauncy Billups and Rodney Stucky.  The crucial difference between all of these point guards and Derek Fisher?  Derek Fisher does not need to score for his team to win.  The triangle offense runs through Kobe, Pau and Odom, leaving Fisher and Rachmonovic (who are scary-effective from behind the arc) to float around and set random, unpredictable pick and rolls and try to shake their man (or force someone else to shake theirs) to open up a three-point attempt.  Derek Fisher likes scoring and certainly can be the last-nail-in-the-coffin when the Lakers put a team to rest, but his role in the set offense is not scoring, and he's to experienced to get frustrated by by a bad shooting night (and hell, when you have Kobe Bryant, everyone else needs to just play their game for you to do well).

Fisher:  Fisher has in a way the same problem: Iverson, Williams and Parker are all big time (often leading) scorers on their teams.  Fisher's job has been to contain them while he is on the court and hope that Farmar can frustrate them enough for them not to rack up 30 points.  Rondo is unselfish to a fault, but he also has a few stellar offensive players to dish to.  Pierce and KG are so versatile that they will find ways to score wherever they catch the pass.  Rondo's game is not as aggressive as Williams' and thereby less predictable.  He also plays much better at home (an advantage the Celtics have, which the Lakers have not yet had the disadvantage of in the playoffs).  Rondo can get frustrated but he has also hit some very important shots (e.g. a pair of threes at the end of the first half of game 5 against the Cavs and a field goal in the waning minutes of the final game in the conference finals) and can be settled down by KG and Pierce and Allen.  Rondo also has perhaps the craziest and un-analyzable lines ever.  He will get less than ten points, more than ten assists and upwards of ten rebounds and five steals on any given night.  That is truly remarkable and speaks to the fact that his game is modest but pervasive.

In short, it is unconventional how conventional these point guards are.  It is important (for what reason I don't know) that these are the starting point guards in the finals instead of Bilups, Parker, West, Williams, Iverson and Bibby.  Both of these guys have assets that ultimately can not be articulated (and will therefore never be superstars) but are utterly essential to a successful team.  

What does all this mean?  I believe that looking to these two guys will help to gauge the success or failure of each team.  It is silly, although very tempting, to predict the outcome of the series.  The most interesting thing about predictions is why they are being made in the first place which isn't really that interesting until the games have been played.  My guess is that the Lakers will win because I think that their offense might (over seven games) be too much for the Celtics to match.  But that guess is nothing more than a guess and the most important thing is that (after the games are over) the key to unlocking them will be Rajon Rondo and Derek Fisher.  

The Most Exciting Off-Season in Recent NBA History

There was a great deal of talk this year after the All-Star break about this being one of the most exciting NBA seasons in recent history.  The final ten games saw three teams engaged in a brutal battle not only for the eighth seed in the playoffs but also for fifty wins.  The Warriors (who won nine more games than they did the previous year when they just barely grasped the final playoff spot on none other than the final game of the season against the team that they knocked out in the first round) played more consistently this year and, by most measures, better.  Baron Davis, Stack Jack and Harrington turned out to be much less exciting when it mattered.  Yet, of the Warriors, Mavericks and Nuggets (given the massacre of the Nuggets in round one against the Lakers and the systematic dismantling of the Mavericks by Chris Paul) the Warriors as a team and as a franchise may have ironically ended up with the most dignity.  Did that just happen?  The Warriors and dignity... in the same sentence.  Seriously, that's been the most intriguing part of the end of the regular season.  All of the emphasis put on the seeding of the playoffs (Suns in Sixth! Spurs in Third! Hornets in Second!?!) fizzled out with the Spurs manhandling the Suns (thereby negating their Shaq trade, dissolving their championship sanguinity and effectively turning their franchise from a twelfth year PhD scholar who "just has too many ideas" to fit into one dissertation to a Freshman girl who is three drinks deep in October.

The Lakers-Jazz series was probably the best one if only because both teams have very strong offense.  Strong offense is the most terrifying characteristic in professional basketball if only for the fact that it is generally not as consistent as good defense (this is why the Warriors are more frightening to play than the Cavs) but can beat good defense senseless.  Most championship teams (e.g. Spurs, Pistons and even Kobe and Shaq Lakers) live and die by their defense.  But strong offense comes out of nowhere and forces "well-rounded" teams to go all in.  The Lakers were probably the only team that could have swept the Nuggets because they have an offense that can flat out out-score them, not because they can lock down on defense (which they did against the Jazz and did for the first two games against the Spurs).  It is the strength of their offense that has been most surprising (and is actually what people mean when they say that the Lakers have the ambiance of a championship team).    In any event, the Lakers themselves have been the most exciting part of the playoffs and will on that account probably have the least exciting off-season.  Every other team (including the Spurs, if they don't win a championship again this year) should have a very busy summer.  This should be true for two reasons.

Firstly: (The Western Conference)  Nothing turned out how it should have, or: Everything turned out in the only way it could have.

The Lakers, Spurs, Pistons and Celtics are flat-out the four best (strongest, most complete) teams in the NBA this year.  The rise of the West as a crazy, unpredictable conference was just wrong; the (I'm inventing this term right now, so it might not work) record-inflation in the Western Conference meant that expectations were far too high.  The truth behind the records in the West was too simple to be taken seriously: the Eastern Conference just got brutalized by the West (which was thrown off by the Celtics' and the Pistons' crazy good records against the Western Conference) and thereby the real character of the Western teams was hidden (not too well, for anyone who watched the Rockets and Nuggets or the Lakers and Spurs) behind their win columns.  In short, these teams should be here right now, and everyone else needs to figure out why they are not here right now.  The thing that distinguishes this year from any other is that most of the teams that made the playoffs in the West feel as though they ought to be here right now, and they must ask themselves questions that are much deeper than they expected to; it is not a matter of simply acquiring more scorers or role-players, but rather it is a matter of self-discovery: who are the Jazz? how do the Hornets want to play? should the Nuggets continue to refuse to play defense (like the Suns of two years ago) or just focus on playing the sickest offense ever created (imagine the Warriors with on steroids).  These questions will make this summer very busy for the Western Conference teams.

Secondly: (The Eastern Conference) The easiest/hardest question ever:

The Chicago Bulls have the 1st pick?!?!?!?!?!?!?