Soon to Come

From Immigrants to Entrepreneurs, Assimilation through Localization/"Crack Rock and Sammichez": a feature-length documentary chronicling the incredible entrepreneurial endeavors of small communities of Deli/Bodega owners in the Belmont area of the Bronx, NY.

The Courageous Crap Heap: a groundbreaking, topical re-imagining of the "Brave Little Toaster" cinematic universe that takes place in a brand-diverse, rough-and-tumble garbage dump. Meet Christiano the calloused Trash Compacter, Mohammed the angry apple-core and Maquisha the abandoned aerosol can as they quest for re-acceptance/recognition by the humans who threw them away.

Artistic Nudes.

"Me & Paul" -- a film by Casey McGarry

This is a documentary by filmmaker Casey McGarry that I had the pleasure of being involved with.

Here's the trailer:



Production website with synopsis:
http://foreveryman.squarespace.com/

Trip to the F.T. (sound)

First song by Salvatore Brown and Conor Doherty

Other songs very obviously not by Salvatore Brown and Conor Doherty

Article: "3D-Bagged"

Are the Integrity and Attention-Span of the Movie-Going Public in Grave Danger?

(Paralyzed By Sensory Stimulation, We May Not Be Able To Resist Being Brutally 3-D-Bagged)

by Salvatore Brown

     3D movies as we know them have been around for a surprisingly long time. The supposed “Golden Age” of 3D cinematography actually happened in the 1950s in the United States. But to be completely accurate, the 3D technique had existed long before. At its base, 3D film is an advanced form of “stereoscopy,” or “science and technology dealing with two-dimensional drawings or photographs that when viewed by both eyes appear to exist in three dimensions in space,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Stereoscopy” is achieved by presenting a slightly different version of the same 2D image to each of someone’s eyes. The technique was invented in 1840 by the bespectacled English inventor Sir Charles Wheatstone. Early stereoscopes consisted simply of side-by-side images seen through a rudimentary viewfinder. These were handheld or housed in mysterious-looking mahogany boxes at fairs and old-time tech-shows. Those with access to these early recreational prototypes marveled at the strange illusion, but the rapid increases in technology during the period meant that there was a lot of marveling to do. 3D postcards were not the best of the bunch.

     Stereoscopy at least in popular culture was predominantly dormant for the better half of a whole century, relegated to optical-illusion gags and toys for children-- comic books began to capitalize on the technique in the early half of the 20^th century as a way to bolster their sales. Then in 1929 a Harvard man invented Polaroid filters, meant to reduce glare from car headlights by polarizing light through the windshield. Polaroids only truly caught on when it was realized that they made stereoscopic projection possible: two images could be projected onto one screen through different polarizing filters, and when this bifurcated projection was viewed with glasses housing the same two different kinds of lenses, movies became 3-dimensional. At the 1939 World’s Fair the first commercial stereoscopic film short using polaroids was screened to much acclaim. What followed was the afore-mentioned “golden age” of 3D cinema during which slick-haired and poodle-skirted movie fans flocked to theatres to don those iconic cardboard glasses with one red lens and one blue. 3D movies in the 50s typically relied on what stereoscopic recreation always had: novelty and technological allure. 3D would usually accompany movies made for entertainment, not art: cartoons, slapstick comedy, formulaic adventure and violence were typical candidates for a 3D release. Disney of course jumped on the 3D wagon, as did the Three Stooges and a hoard of big picture production houses. One Columbia producer expressed his confidence in the success of slap-stick 3D based on the potential for projectile pies to appear to be thrown at the audience.

     But the appeal of 3D faded in film, tumbling back into the world of novelty toys and rare amusements. Does there seem to be a pattern emerging? If you don’t see it, then James Cameron wants to give you a hug. Seriously. This brings me to my point: 3D technology is, and always will be, a gag-- accoutrement-- frills. Unlike other film techniques, 3D offers no value to the proverbial film-cake other than that of the icing.

     I’ve seen four 3D movies in the past year, and they've all suffered from the same problem: too great a focus on the success of novelty visuals, and not enough focus on movie quality. “Final Destination 3D” paid homage perfectly to the 50’s-era Columbia producer’s faith in 3D slapstick (Only instead of pies leaping out at the audience, it was blood, guts, and explosions). I also recently saw “Alice in Wonderland 3D,” which tried unsuccessfully to mask an incredibly weak and confused bastardization of Lewis Carroll in bright colors and vast, Dali-esque 3D landscapes. "Clash of the Titans" with Sam Worthington need not even be mentioned. James Cameron’s “Avatar” was certainly the best of the four, but nevertheless a formulaic rerun of “Dances with Wolves” melded with Cameron's "Aliens" script and then painted over with some incredibly stunning visuals. “Avatar” was one of the most arrestingly gorgeous films I have ever seen. This is exactly what scares me. If we are finally so stunned by the manipulation of a simple, illusory marvel like stereoscopy, then we may be stuck with the gag for good, and the more than 100-year pattern of historical justice may come to an end. Fear the Cameron.

Film: First Video-- "Trip to the F.T." (no sound)

This is the first footage I completed/edited. The quality is awful because I had to compress the file. I've gotten smarter since, I hope.

Trip to the F.T.

Article: The Avatar Blues

"Looks so Good it Hurts": ‘Avatar’ and American Escapism

by Salvatore Brown

     ‘Na’vi’ is the spoken language of the Pandorans, the resident humanoid life forms of the moon Pandora. The language has a complete structural system of grammar, syntax, and phonetics. In 2009, it had a vocabulary of about a thousand words, and this number continues to grow, despite the fact that Na’vi is NOT REAL. It’s a constructed language director James Cameron paid a USC professor some exorbitant sum to create for his 2009 film ‘Avatar.’ So why and how does the vocabulary continue to grow? Fans are learning to speak it and actually adding to its lexicon; and this is but one indicator of a much larger, much stranger Avatar obsession.

     The inventor of ‘Na’vi’ is Paul Frommer, a linguist at the University of Southern California’s business school. Frommer has conducted research in disparate languages throughout the linguistic spectrum, from Hebrew to Mandarin Chinese. Before his work on Avatar, he penned a linguistic textbook which oddly included an exercise in ‘Klingon,’ the fictional language constructed for Star Trek’s infamous alien villains by linguist Marc Okrand. James Cameron knew the book; he also claimed in an interview during Avatar’s pre-production that the new language he was making for his film’s alien race would “out-klingon klingon.”

Paul Frommer was intimately involved in the filming process, teaching actors rudimentary usage of the language to fulfill the needs of Cameron’s script, and even putting Na’vi audio exercises on iPods for the likes of Sigourney Weaver and Sam Worthington. On set, Cameron kept the linguist close at hand to tweak actors’ pronunciation between shots and provide extra lines and suggestions. Frommer taught the actors enough of the fabricated language to speak their dialogue, but he remained the only one who could actually speak it. Interviewed in production, he said: "At this point, I'm pretty much the only one who knows the grammar,… Maybe that'll change as time goes on. ... Who knows?" It did change.

     The website ‘Language Log’ is a popular linguistics blog from the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. A mere day after ‘Avatar’s’ theatrical release, fans of the film bombarded the site with questions about ‘Na’vi.’ Flattered and surely flustered, Paul Frommer appeared in a ‘guest post,’ satiating fans for the time being with an exhaustive lesson on his language creation’s “Word Classes and Morphology,” and “Phonetics and Phonology,” which included detailed sections on Na’vi’s “20 consonants, 7 vowels, 4 diphthongs, and 2 syllabic “pseudovowels,” rr and ll.” One industrious commenter on the site stated his earnest hopes for further language instruction. And he did so in Na’vi, using Frommer’s mini-lesson to proudly proclaim: "Ngaru ätxäle … oel set futa Hal'liwutta tsayeyktanru ngal peng futa lì'fyati Na'viyä nume nereeiu a ngeyä wotxa lì'utìtäftxurenu sì aylì'uyä sänumeti perängey ayoel. Ayoel nereu a tsa'u ke tsayängun lu txo ayoel pänutìng futa rawketi sayi nìwotx ulte Eywafa ke txayey. Kawkrr!!;-) Eywa ngahu.," or,

"I now ask you to tell the Hollywood [Hal'liwutta] bosses that those of us who want to learn the Na'vi language are waiting (impatiently) for your full grammar and lexicon. We promise to raise a lot of hell if what we want is not forthcoming, and 'by Eywa' we won’t stop. Ever!! ;-)" (‘Eywa’ being the equivalent of ‘Gaia,’ God, or Earth-Mother)

     The author of the post, known as ‘Prrton’ on the site, has since started an online petition to back his demand for a full, official explanation of grammar and a Na’vi dictionary-- the petition is now nearing 4,000 signatures. And die-hard Na’vi language fans like Prrton now have a home on the internet-- ‘learnnavi.org.’ Here, fans help each other learn Na’vi, chat in Na’vi, and daily spread the good word about the glories of Pandora and its fledgling linguistic tradition. The site has over 150,000 posts, from more than 4,000 contributors.

     Depending on who you are, and regardless of whether or not you saw the movie, all of this may very well sound a little bit frightening at first. And it probably should. But it’s not like there haven’t been similar cases in the past. We’ve all heard of Trekkies’ obsessive exploits. Did you know there’s an opera coming out in Klingon? This country is notorious for its fanboys, and its terminal affliction of escapism manifested in the ever-advancing army of better iPods, videogames, and internet role-playing games. All of this seems to meet a terrible apex in ‘Avatar’ fandom, despite the fact (not the opinion) that any randomly-selected single episode of Star Trek is probably better scripted than the entire 2 and a half hours of ‘Avatar.’

     Above all, Avatar fandom is troubling. It’s troubling not because the centerpiece of the craze is a hackneyed storyline, but because the centerpiece is a mesmerizing visual escape. The fact (alright, opinion) that the film was poorly written only makes the obsession, and its aftermath, all the more disturbing. Welcome to the world of the ‘Avatar blues.’ The phrase is a pun CNN Entertainment used to headline its article on the sensations many fans of the film have described felling after removing their 3D glasses and leaving showings of ‘Avatar’ for the ‘harsh’ realities of actual life. We’ve all felt that slight lagging feeling upon leaving the dark, comfortable confines of a movie theater to go squinting in the sunlight of reality, but ‘Avatar blues’ appears to have taken this feeling to a whole new level.

     “Audiences experience 'Avatar' Blues,” “Avatar Fans Suicidal because Planet Pandora is Not Real,” “Post-Avatar Depression Hits Fans,” “Avatar Depression On The Rise, Fans Seek Help,” are only a few of the many news headlines calling attention to the ludicrous and startling idea that ‘Avatar’ is causing bouts of depression in some segments of the American audience. There is a thread on the official ‘Avatar Forums,’ “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible,” which is supposed to provide some sense of solace and community to lonely Pandorans-at-heart whose realities have apparently been blemished forever by the beauty of the fictional planet Pandora. A proud and penitent member of this cult of disenchantment, ‘Eltu,’ describes her particular brand of ‘Avatar blues’ on the forum: “When I woke up this morning after watching ‘Avatar’ for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.” Another, even more helpless and truly saddening case is described by ‘Naviblue,’ who said: “Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’” Something, it seems, has gone horribly awry.

     Were there ever any suicidal Trekkies? Thinking only in terms of probability, there probably were a few suicidal Star Trek fans throughout the decades. But it’s been only a few months since ‘Avatar’ came out to wreck havoc on the psyches of a lonely subset of the population. And at least Trek fans sometimes met in real-time, at conventions and the like. Avatar fans, as of now, have only the internet. So what happened? Why and how has Avatar ‘ruined’ people’s conception of reality? Perhaps James Cameron is the evil puppet-master, covertly stealing nerd-souls and ferrying them across the River Styx into a Pandoran Elysian Fields. Or maybe the sorry saps peppering the ‘Avatar Forums’ with suicide notes for attention need to wake up and leave their basements. Or still yet, maybe all this nonsense is a harbinger, here to warn us of a tragic development in escapist ease and omnipresence. One can only speculate. At least one contributor to the ‘Avatar Forums’ depression thread, ‘Neytirifanboy,’ seems to be getting a handle on things, and all it required was some good old-fashioned practical thinking: “I just remind myself that Pandora is very dangerous. Probably five minutes after admiring the beauty of the place there is a good chance I would be:

1) Ripped to pieces by a pack of viperwolves

2) Trampled by a Hammerhead Titanothere

3) Devoured by a Thanator

4) Pecked to death by a group of Ikran

5) Snatched away by a Toruk

6) Pinned to a tree by a Na'vi arrow

7) Stung, bitten or eaten by some other Pandora plant or animal

Then even if I survived that I'd probably be crushed to death by a RDA Bulldozer or hit by a stray RDA bullet. The real world may be mundane, but at least I know how to survive here.” Bravo, Neytirifanboy, and welcome home, son. Mark one down for the real world… sort of.

Fiction: The Lion Hunting Mamadous

"The Lion-Hunting Mamadous"


Omar dresses conservatively these days-- collared shirt, khaki pants and one of three ties which he alternates. His American friends say he’s trying to look white. He tells them he just wants to make money.

“I want to get rich and buy a mansion-- that’s why I’m working” he would tell them.

“You don’t need to dress like a faggot to get rich, and fuck,... there're faster ways to make money,” they'd say.

But Omar would neither quit his job nor loosen his tie. He was the only son of a lion hunter, the father who had died while Omar was still young. His mother had told Omar stories about his father, about unfaltering work ethic and noble pursuits and lone wanderings on the sublime sea of the savanna and how proud her husband would be of him now. She said her husband had been a lion hunter by profession and had been the bravest man in their village. There were no pictures, but Omar had been told his father was big and strong (like his son) and that his greatest dream was for his son to move to the United States and become a businessman. Omar wanted this more than anything.

Fifteen years after the death of Omar's father, his mother’s grandparents had miraculously been able to provide the money to send seventeen-year-old Omar and his mother across an ocean to begin life in a big city in the United States. There his mother had to work long hours at a night job in the city-- Omar’s work paid very little. She said it was a sacrifice she was willing to make in order to give her son time and freedom to pursue his dream of becoming a businessman.

During his first year in the United States, upon turning eighteen, Omar was given a very special present from his mother-- a letter from his father addressed only to him. “Be brave Son, grow strong, protect your mother and have many children,” was scribbled on a postcard in broken English.

Omar waits every morning now at the bus stop to become a businessman. He works in the mailroom but the building he works in is big and clean and Omar is confident he will have an office at the top of it someday with a window and a desk on which he can keep his father’s letter in an expensive frame. Here at the bus stop Omar’s work clothes cling awkwardly to his tall and athletic frame; he constantly sweats in them throughout the day but especially while waiting here for the bus at sunrise.

He had learned not to talk too much about his father’s profession around his new friends:

“No one hunts lions anymore—Omar, that’s retarded.” Omar had had to defend himself and his family repeatedly since moving to his new home.

Today Mrs. Mamadou returns home unusually late, at 4:00 AM, from her night job just as Omar is securing his blue tie around his neck. He has an hour and a half to get to the bus stop, but likes to have an early start in order to read the newspaper, improving his English every day before work. Omar looks up from the paper to watch his mother stumble through the door, two large bruises on her face and one on each arm. She cries at the table as he holds her. She is delirious, injured-- she talks about money, men, a car, a corner, her night job. Omar cries himself. In her vulnerable state she tells Omar that she invented the story about his father’s work: she did it to inspire him. It had worked.

“But the letter is real, I swear my son.” The lion hunter story was invented, but the letter is real. She says to him that someone from her night job has hurt her.

“Who?”… “I know him.

Where?”… “I know where it is. Stay here and lock the door. Don’t leave today.”

His father’s words echo in Omar’s head.

“Be brave son, grow strong, protect your mother…”

But she said you hunted lions. You are a lie. How am I to be strong now?

“…protect your mother.”

The door opens and closes, Mrs. Mamadou remains at the table, head in hands, drying tears. The bus arrives in an hour.

At 5:00 AM, grinding his teeth, Omar watches the sun climb up through far away black blocks of buildings. His back is wetter than usual with sweat. His hands are held firmly in fists as warm knuckle blood falls from his fingertips and paints the concrete red here at the bus stop. He tries to think of his father, but must admit that the image, which he had depended upon for so long, is lost. His collar is still tight but the tie has ripped, and at the bus stop eyes shift and widen at Omar’s appearance. Here at the bus stop Omar cries like his mother did. He has done what was necessary to protect her, and she must now find new work. He cries from 5:00 to 5:03. And then in a moment the shifting, widening eyes and fearful murmurs and cars carrying businessmen and the whole throbbing city hushes sheepishly at the thunder of a footprint upon the first step of the bus. The footprint echoes angrily off fears and shame and wrongness and lies, good and bad, and across an ocean it stirs kingly lions from their slumber to raise and shake their heavy golden heads and watch carefully the movement of the grass.





(I fear now that this may just be one more installment in the long line of silly stories written by white people glorifying the imagined lives of underprivileged immigrants and/or members of minorities, of whose real lives such authors probably know very little.)

Article: Polyurethane Problems

 Polyurethane Swimsuits Banned

by Salvatore Brown

     In high school my best friend was a swimmer. I didn’t swim, and I rarely ever went to watch him do it, but apparently he was damn good at it. He was a purist as well, obsessed with the sport and its reliance on individual excellence and self-motivation. But it’s not a hard sport to be a purist about. A swimming team isn’t really a team, but a group of athletes all trying to best each other; the sport has no touchdowns or home runs, only records to be broken. And among the best, the records to be broken are often one’s own. There are no highlight reels, and it is, in my opinion, dreadfully boring to watch—unless numbers on the trophy plaque are being changed. I rarely went to watch my best friend swim because I knew he could always just tell me his achievements afterwards, with little loss on my part.

“I broke my p.r. by two seconds last meet.”

“That’s great, Mike, a real achievement. Keep at it.”

     I had no idea what that meant, no understanding of the grueling hours of pool work it meant he had subjected himself to in the weeks previous. In the swimming world, dispensing with two full seconds from a personal record is no small feat. Swimming was a sport in which my friend could measure his motivation in half-seconds—every extra bead of sweat in practice, though it would disappear into the chlorine, meant another miniature milestone in numbers and decimal points.

     This is why Mike hates polyurethane. Mark Spitz didn’t wear polyurethane, he wore a moustache. But when swimmers started wearing suits coated in the stuff because it sealed out water and was effortlessly aerodynamic, the sport witnessed the advent of a veritable arms-race among swimwear brands. My friend Mike hated Olympic golden-boy Michael Phelps for his 50% polyurethane “Speedo LZR Racer,” which, at the time of the Beijing Olympics, was the fastest damn swimsuit a country could buy for its prize athlete. There are countless, record-shearing benefits to these new-age tech-suits; one glaring one—polyurethane floats. On top of that, Phelps’ Speedo LZR was designed by NASA scientists and was the first suit without a single stitch, bonded completely together by glue. Polyurethane opponents complain that such suits actually trap air near to the body, adding invaluable amounts of buoyancy to the swimmer. But the introduction of the Speedo LZR was 17 months before the 2009 World Aquatics Championships in Rome, and technology moves awfully fast; breathtakingly so when coupled with a bit of capitalism and international publicity. Many of the swimmers in Rome wore suits coated in 100% polyurethane. In the 8 days of competition, no less than 43 all-time world records were broken. That’s 43 World Records.

     But Michael Phelps is no phony. He lost to German Paul Biedermann in the 200 freestyle in Rome, despite the fact that Biedermann had finished four seconds shy of Phelps’ time in the Olympics-- Biedermann’s suit was 100% polyurethane, the best and newest on the market. In light of this, or perhaps in defiance, Phelps went on to vanquish the polyurethane-clad Serbian Milorad Cavic in the 100-meter butterfly wearing a suit of plain fabric. The World Swimming Federation, NIFA, seems to have finally gotten the point. Months of debate over the issue have yielded a ban on polyurethane suits which starts in January 2010. And the slew of technologically-enhanced new world records born out of the polyurethane craze? NIFA declares that they are to be branded shamefully with… an asterisk in all official documents.

On Edith Piaf

Thoughts On Edith Piaf

Edith Piaf sounds a bit like a duck-- but a sexy duck who you want to quietly molest while paddling languidly around in the Seine at sunset. She evokes for me the imagery of casual, yet feather-ruffling, Parisian duck love. There is a very romantic, broken quality to her music, which is somehow accentuated by her atypical, nasally duck pipes. The heady euphony of her voice lilts over the traditionally Parisian background of strings and accordions, and seems to dive--unexpectedly yet nonchalantly--into crescendos at Piaf’s volition. Decrescendos come just as effortlessly-- and seemingly at whatever moment Madame Piaf decides, which always ends up being the perfect one. The whole thing is then wrapped in the feeling of a horny love elegy—romantic, erotic, and just so damn sad.
The songs emit an air of characteristically Parisian, exclusive sophistication; but beneath those calm, odorous waters of panache are the feverishly kicking webbed duckfeet of raw, thickly sexual French grit-- from the streets, putain. In an amazing feat of authentic personal expression, Piaf manages beautifully to tell her indelible rags-to-riches, sexy-duck, I-gave-all-the-GIs-in-WWII-boners-over-the-radio, incredible life story in each of her songs. The songs are elegant and beautiful, but they hint that the road to fame and fanciness was not easy. Sadly, the memory which I associate with Piaf songs is not of trysts with pretty French duck women, which would be appropriate. It is parodical. I like to sing disturbingly stereotypical French songs to French people, like an ignorant tourist-- I sing Piaf tunes to them, or even worse: “Le Marseillaise.” I only know the first few lines of Le Marseillaise, so its choice is even more obnoxious because I either repeat the few lines I know ad nauseam or hum the rest of the melody. I also like to do this in a startling and socially uncomfortable operatic tenor. I do this because I like French people (to generalize again), so I suppose it’s strange that I am compelled to offer such an act in representation of admiration and affinity.

Article: Antichrist

Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" Reviewed

by Salvatore Brown

     “Antichrist” is a movie about a therapist and his wife whose infant son tragically falls to his death as the two parents engage in incredibly graphic, slow-motion, black-and-white, operatically scored sex acts in their shower, up against a wall, and then finally in bed. This is how the thing starts at least, and every scene following is equally strange and similarly rendered in stunning detail and artistry by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle.

     Lars von Trier’s film does do some things very well, as would be expected from the acclaimed adventurous writer/director. The casting and acting are superb. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (simply “He” and “She” in the credits) play the “man who thinks he can fix all his family’s problems on his own” and the “mysterious and distant grief-stricken woman” extremely well. The actors’ performances, combined with gorgeous visuals, clever and unconventional directing, and strong scripted dialogue, give this art-horror flick sufficient power to shift everyone’s mood in the audience firmly to bad, and then inescapably to bad and… weird. The film is a perfect mood piece. But the brilliant performances are restricted by gender-archetypal characterization. Dafoe’s psychotherapist is a man who defies everyone’s advice and believes he can cure his wife’s grief on his own—his mission starts to become more about his “case” than his family. If that’s not typical Hollywood man behavior then I don’t know what is. Gainsbourg is quiet, frail, and sad, with lots of explanation-defying, out-of-masculine-reach issues going on beneath the surface. Also sound familiar?

     Antichrist is perhaps also doomed to suffer as a film because of its loyalty to the world of dreams. As in: it looks and feels perfectly like a dream, and very little of any of it is explained. It revels in the ambiguity of nightmares. To me the vague and generic allusions to witchcraft, astrology, the bible, and gynocide were too unclear to warrant credits in good storytelling; Willem Dafoe’s climactic investigation into his wife’s research on witch-hunting and the occult yielded little more than a few creepy ink drawings of demons in leather-bound books and some demented handwriting indicating his wife’s psychosis. As in so many typical horror films, a cursory “research” scene with dusty books supposedly provided enough supporting background knowledge to bolster the inclusion of some grisly violence. I couldn’t help feeling slightly cheated by this. But on the other hand, admittedly, I was already scared long before Mr. Dafoe gets around to finding out just how nuts his wife really is. In short, the powerful success of the mood element buoyed the film’s weaker points.

     But you're always less critical on the second viewing. Seeing Antichrist for the second time I made a point not to analyze it as a film, but as the convention-slaying art project it seems to want to be. And yes, the damn thing is a beautiful piece of paranoia and anxiety-- an artificial panic attack. But, misogyny? Oh yes, lots. Gore involving genitals? Mmhmm. However I wouldn’t call the movie decidedly misogynist, simply because of how archetypal it is: it is about a man not understanding the female psyche. Granted, the female psyche in question is pure evil, but the film never denies the reality that it is heavily focused on a historical and irrational masculine fear of the feminine-- in fact it reinforces the idea. All of this contributes to the film’s aura of mystique (within the theater and outside of it), which, above all, it achieves unerringly. The film is a beautiful, frightening, subtle-yet-not-at-all, quiet-loud, shocking, nightmare/meditation on a muddled, modern amalgamation of vagina dentata and castration anxiety. Leave the kids at home, especially the boys.

Photo: "The Sean Sessions" 1

Photo: "The Sean Sessions" 2

Photo: New Mexico 2

Schoolwork: Catholic School, Moral Capital

For:
English Theory
Dr. Eva Badowska

“Fordham University, ‘Moral Capital’: A Lofty Seat in the Canon Debate”
Salvatore Brown

John Guillory’s “From Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation” brings a skeptical eye to Fordham University’s mission statement: “Fordham University, the Jesuit University of New York, is committed to the discovery of Wisdom and the transmission of Learning, through research and through undergraduate, graduate and professional education of the highest quality. Guided by its Catholic and Jesuit traditions, Fordham fosters the intellectual, moral and religious development of its students and prepares them for leadership in a global society (http://www.fordham.edu/, #1).”
The religious and theological text tradition, an integral part of Fordham University’s core curriculum and broader historical and social underpinnings, acts effectively as a second “cultural” monolith alongside the philosophical body of traditional text described in Guillory’s “Cultural Capital.” Viewed within Guillory’s model of the school as an institution, the Jesuit university’s congenital inclusion of both theological and philosophical text traditions in its curriculum must result in an even more confused, convoluted, and archaic educational vision than is typical. This addition of theology to the traditional, humanities-driven core curriculum only overstuffs it with dated, ideological stipulations characteristic of the traditionalist “right” in Guillory’s canon debate. Little room is left to incorporate even the most rudimentary of theoretical progressions in the debate from the “multiculturalist” side.
The university’s mission statement already evokes Guillory’s descriptions of the widely-held, misguided beliefs in “cultural capital” about the power of universities to transmit national culture. But it then goes further by suggesting that the school can also impart a kind of “moral” capital as well. And if the university’s transference of national “cultural capital” to its students is a false promise given to patrons and parents, a “most deluded assumption (Guillory, 1472),” then what can one say about a university’s promise of “moral” transference? Guillory has already shown “Culture” to be a word too much abused and exploited in the world of education. What is “Morality” then but a similar, flexible concept used to tempt possible patrons and students with some illusory benefit? Guillory says that schools transmit not a greater national culture to their students, but the individual cultures of schools themselves. Schools effectively have to sell their particular “culture” as an item that will prove to be nationally or socially advantageous. Fordham University holds the bar even higher, attempting to sell “capital” with value not only in the national, social sphere but also in the “spiritual” one. Although this concept may seem to complicate a Guillory view of the school, this additional brand of “capital” can be viewed in much the same way as cultural capital, only with slightly different sources and aims. The promise of “moral capital” works to target the specific group of potential patrons and parents who ascribe to a popular, historical ideology idolizing and elevating classical “Jesuit” education. The specific “culture” this supposedly projects upon Fordham students is most desirable to this select subset of typically privileged Catholic patrons who ascribe to Catholic religious ideology, but the school also targets a much broader group by drawing upon the historical connotations of “Jesuit” institutions as places of higher learning with traditionally rigorous educational standards. By viewing Fordham University’s core curriculum and institutional statements in light of John Guillory’s consideration of cultural capital and the canon debate, the ineffectual, deluded, exclusive and dated nature of the school’s current approach to curricula can be realized.
Fordham lags tragically in the canon debate, offering a core curriculum saturated with humanities and theology. Only recently has the institution begun to incorporate more leftist, obligatory multicultural elements; but these multicultural elements appear almost nowhere in the core curriculum. “Pluralism” and “Globalism” requirements appear tacked onto the university’s heavily traditional regimen of Theology, English, Philosophy, Sciences, Arts, and Mathematics. The two courses exist to address the modern political preoccupation with national and international diversity. Only a few of Fordham’s other required subjects, such as Social Sciences and Fine Arts, contain options that could be viewed as slightly leftist or multicultural, and these are all laughably headlined with the word “Urban” or “Urbanism.” The inclusion of these minor leftist components of the Fordham curriculum not only come late in the debate’s progression, but like most leftist attempts at canon resolution they once again highlight the grand mistake of modern educational theory: “The fact that we now expect the curriculum to reflect as a principle of its organization the very distinctness of cultures, Western or non-Western, canonical or non-canonical, points to a certain insistent error of culturalist politics, its elision of the difference school itself makes in the supposed transmission of culture (Guillory, 1476-7).” The traditionalist presence in Fordham’s core curriculum is obvious. The statement on the first year philosophy requirement reads like an illustrative example of Guillory’s critique, promising to “introduce students to some of the most basic questions regarding human existence and to assist them in becoming more philosophically informed, critical and self-reflective (http://www.fordham.edu/, #2).” Fordham students read from the biggest names in the history of philosophy, from Plato to Descartes to Kant. Guillory describes how such a venerative treatment of philosophy acts in favor of the traditionalist perspective, saying: “defenders of the canon extended the debate to the question of the humanities curriculum as a whole… by resurrecting the philosophical text tradition as the basis for that core curriculum. This text tradition can be invoked… to maintain the fiction of a profound evolution or destiny of Western thought extending from the pre-Socratics to the present (Guillory, 1475).” Even separate from the rightist tradition its core curriculum embodies, Fordham specifically benefits from this philosophy-focused approach as a way to bolster its appearance as a member of the elite Jesuit tradition of education; an appearance with vast appeal for the group it targets, and one that serves to catalyze continued enrollment and funding.
In another attempt to broaden its scope and modernize, Fordham gives a generous amount of aid to disadvantaged minority students from the local Bronx community and the nation, many of whom have never read traditional philosophy texts. The most classical segments of Fordham’s core curriculum become an even less effective educational tool when presented to those students who’ve never encountered traditional humanities material before, according to Guillory: “the formal study of a set list of ‘great’ works is condemned to have something of a remedial status for those students who have not read literary or philosophical works, either historical or contemporary, at the lower levels of the system, and who will not continue to study them after their sophomore year(Guillory, 1480).” And if an upper-middle class prep-school graduate, familiar with classical philosophy, can no longer redeem value from Fordham’s freshman philosophy requirements if he or she ceases their study in the next year, then what does a graduate of a disadvantaged public school in the Bronx stand to gain from them? Regardless of this, and of whether or not the core curriculum is lost on students who have or haven’t encountered similar materials before, all students do leave Fordham University with some “cultural capital” in the form of diplomas, connections, and college name recognition. This shallow form of social value remains, despite the questionable relation of a traditional core curriculum to it and the “devaluation of the humanities curriculum (Guillory, 1478)” Guillory says is on the rise. But other of the University’s claims cannot claim even this faulted support base in reality.
This brings us to the final, most glaring indictment a reading of Guillory’s text can levy against Fordham’s core curriculum: the false promise of some ethereal sense of “moral” capital. The following are headings from Fordham’s statement on its “Jesuit Tradition”:
“At Fordham, students seek to tap the full potential of mind and heart while leading a life beyond self.”
“On both the undergraduate and the graduate level, a Fordham education embraces rigorous scholarship and adherence to ethical values.”
“True to its time-honored Jesuit traditions, Fordham endeavors to make excellence the focus of life, and the world the "home of the heart," of every student.(http://www.fordham.edu/, #3)”
These claims express aims similar to those of other traditional canons offering “cultural capital” but serve a specified ideology based on traditional Christian values. This Christian ideology meshes comfortably with Fordham’s humanities curriculum, using the same structure of relation to cultural texts (or “artifacts”) to define and construct the “social imaginary” which keeps the university’s forms of capital valuable in the public eye. Guillory describes this structural relation as “the necessity of defining … culture largely by reference to the High Cultural artifacts to which access is provided in the schools (Guillory, 1472).” The “High Cultural artifacts” that supposedly translate the “moral capital” of which Fordham’s public statements so often speak is simply the body of theological texts which students are introduced to in Fordham’s core curriculum. Guillory continually stresses the implausibility of the similar transference of cultural competence by schools to students, and the underlying misconception belying this idea: “If ‘Western’ civilization—defined by a collection of cultural artifacts—can imaginarily displace the real cultural continuities that obtain at the national level, such an exemplary expression of the social imaginary is the effect of a crucial ambiguity in the concept of culture itself (Guillory, 1473).” A Guillory view of Fordham’s mission statement begs the question: if an acute understanding of national culture cannot be imparted successfully by the education system, then how can human morality be? When considered in light of the excerpt from “Cultural Capital,” this prospect of Fordham University churning out ranks of saintly, classically-trained, spiritually-elite citizens seems absolutely ludicrous.


Works Cited

Guillory, John. "From Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007. 1472-484. Print.


#1: http://www.fordham.edu/discover_fordham/mission_26603.asp
#2:http://www.fordham.edu/academics/colleges__graduate_s/undergraduate_college/fordham_college_at_r/academics/core_curriculum/index.asp
#3: http://www.fordham.edu/discover_fordham/fordhams_jesuit_trad/

Poetry: Good and Golden

Good, golden advice from my father
Used to come at me and hit me in
The center of my chest. Ancient advice.
Advice that came packaged
With ancestry and honor.
Came at me like pearls
Out of an old brass gramophone
Set in fine oak on which was carved
The stern kind faces of the ghosts of the men of my family.
Beautiful, perfect, heroic advice.
But then it’d get broke
By him or me or both.

Poetry: Miss Number 12

Reading red books, sitting, paced and bottomed, this woman was of no other kind than the first. To the 12th sense and all in between was the scent of her perfume. She held fates in her arms upon the swelling of breasts and beasts. But none other came through. None other than princes and pork rinds fought for hand, bummed iniquities. Aye, the storms were in her heads and thighs and holes and upon the crown of her, fine. Come up here and see for yourself, the musks clawing at the nape of her neck and the fauns writhing in want. Years and years and years and scores of human hagglers rocked in that ancient, empty cradle. And to what end, only she could spend you right if you loosed the shell and let run bleeding smells upon the fallowed lance. She baked me a cake once she did. It cracked, smiling, like an oyster and let loose upon my face the most horrid, heavy, and beautiful of little creatures who all immediately called for rumpus in accordance with the books they had read and the meats they had managed to catch before. They fiddled with my seams, rocked me like spent pennies and made me want to crawl right back in like a dog into the sordid womb of mother sin and hide, and fiddle. Aye, the twelfth of Twelvetember will go down in Herodias’ plan book as my day as a marauding, suburban milkman who got to see it all and play every part. Ah, hell. I just can’t go on like such a silly little weasel, sticking my nose in playses tread before and after, but then why any at all? The whole damn thing is just a never-ending conversation unheard.

Poetry: Purgatory

Like Aegeas cliff-jumping for his son at the wrong black sails,
Or Montagues and Capulets missing each other by terrible inches of time,
Things get fucked up. And weird, and quiet, and cosmic.
The sorry silence of elevator air can mean just about anything.
And it most assuredly means something every time.
If only there was a way to tell What. Every time.
Then maybe one could have a hand in the whole damn thing.

Poetry: Falun Gong Foundation

I read once that somewhere in China
There are prison camps
for people the government doesn’t like,
Where they harvest body parts
And use them in making internationally-exported,
Commercial skin-care products.
In other words, wealthy white women of the world,
The internationally-aware, frantic fundraising
Champions of civil liberty,
Have all this time been unwittingly rubbing small, dead
Chinese people into their pink, pampered flesh
For purposes of moisturisation and beautification.
I find this so goddamn funny, that I can barely control myself.

Photo: New Mexico 1

Poetry: Crustacea

At the bare, brackish bottom of the deepest oceans in the world,
Small, dark things scurry and hurry about their business,
Sometimes stopping for a cordial tip of the hat or without stopping issue a smile
On the run or a dirty little double-take, just because and despite life-mates.
Who knew? How could we? This is thousands of miles beneath McDonald's,
Monetary woes, and masturbation we're talking about after all.