The San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm east of White Water, California
photo via flickr.com/caveman_92223
November 2009
To take my review Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog, a notch deeper. Freudian Death Wish is not a death wish at all. A good rule of thumb with these concepts is to turn the obvious reading on its head. The Death Wish is the desire to control the most uncontrollable event, to become a master of own destiny. Freud’s Death Wish is an attempt to reach for the eternity, to become transcendent, to live forever and ever.
The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) is the latest in line of the characters who can only become good by being bad. This mirroring of good and evil classically played out between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the 1995 hit “Heat”. There Al Pacino is faced with the eternal dilemma – to catch the bad guys he must enter their world, become as bad as the bad itself. Can he stay human in the process?
Fast froward to the Werner Herzog’s take on the subject. The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh descends to the dark side, till he becomes indistinguishable from the criminals, he actually partners with the dealers and killers. He is a gambler, a junkie and by becoming part of a murder he solves the crime. Can he still remain a human? This is an open-ended question but there is hope also involving a symmetry and a reversal. In the beginning of the movie the Bad Lieutenant unselfishly saves the life of a prisoner and sustains a life long injury. The same former prisoner appears in the last frames of the film to save the Bad Lieutenant’s life, again a symbolic reversal. Also in a reversal the killer Big Fate is dreaming of being ” good”, of turning the town around, of a legitimate businessmen as he disposes a corpse.
But there is another character, the Jewish gangster Eugene Gratz (Marco St. John) who seems without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. We know he is a Jew because the writer William Finkelstein (of LA Law fame) makes him say two Yiddish code words – shvantz and punim. And true to the symmetry he must be the very goodness in the evil disguise. In an unscripted moment Werner Herzog shows his swirling soul dance after he is murdered, he is the transcendent. Growing up in the postwar Bavaria, Hertzog knows a thing or two about those hovering souls.
My friend Tom, AKA @bostontweet posted this photo, he tweeted: “I don’t know who “Push Play” is but apparently the girls camping out at the Paradise do”. I am fascinated with the camping fanatics. The notion of camping for anything seems so utterly bizarre. But I find it amusing that you can tell just by looking at this Paradise club camp that “Push Play” must be some boy band, and it surely is.
The new New Orleans police drama by Werner Herzog. This is not even close to Hertzog’s early Amazon masterpieces. Yes there is carefully selected profound music, the trademark unexpected visuals, etc. But the rouge cop story is overused. OK, Nicolas Cage plays a junkie cop with authority.
(After the film I looked online for reviews. I discovered that even in the New York Times a film review is just a regurgitation of a plot with some innocuous, minor, meaningless color around the edges of the thousand words jive.)
I was thinking last night, comparing this film to the Coen brothers personal epic (see my post A Serious Man, the Film by and about Coen Brothers). Despite what I wrote in that post about the Coen brothers rejection of the “textual”, perhaps it meant narrowly the Jewish ethos. They are after all the perfectionists writers. The immaculately written scrips, the exquisite dialog is one the most fascinating aspects of the Coen brothers talent. And this was precisely the strength of Werner Herzog’s early films like “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo” with Klaus Kinski. Werner famously spoke how he wrote the Aguirre script on an eight-hour binge bus ride with his drunken soccer teammates. Alas the “Bad Lieutenant” is a remake of a remake. And remarkably all the memorable moments in the film are improvised “off the script”, like the episode with the iguanas or the dancing soul.
Werner Herzog’s cinematographic vision is legendary. Werner is unmatched by any filmmaker with his sense of an unexpected musical overtone, he is far superior to Coen brothers musically. But what Werner Herzog is missing in the “Bad Lieutenant” is the holistic authorship of the narrative.
I admit I expect more from Werner Herzog but the film is tight. There are some genuinely funny moments. The energy stays high, it never ebbs. As a two-hour entertainment candidate the “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” is excellent!
Hugh quotes one of his old posts:
“I was on the phone to an old friend of mine, a guy in his late forties, who was born and bred in Michigan, and is living there now. He was telling me about his uncle, who, about four decades ago, got his highschool sweetheart pregnant. So instead of going off to college, he found himself with a new wife, a child on the way, and an assembly-line job at General Motors. But even though this situation clipped his wings considerably, he still ended up having a nice life in the end, with a home, a big yard, two cars, a steady paycheck, weekends fishing or hunting deer, and vacations in Hawaii every year or so. “The days where a blue collar guy like my uncle could have a nice life without doing much,” my friend said, “those days are gone. Gone forever. And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking the same is starting to happen to white collar guys more and more, as well. But it’s not quite out in the open yet. Society’s not quite ready to have that conversation.”
Naturally this McLuhanian rear view mirror realization is bubbling up because it already long a fait accompli. The Amercian manufacturing have bee destroyed by the late 70s. What followed were the decades of gimmicks, a transitory respite to the middle white and blue class. The dotcom, the financial services, the housing bubble (the later temporary occupied some of the blue color labor). The globalization is complete and the American white and blue middle class is no longer required. They are spoiled, expensive and generally just a headache. Maybe the globally rich can buy themselves another decade till the inevitable social unrest makes them uncomfortable in their outsorced country. The rich will run as they always do, the masses will crave for a strong leader and eagerly give up their freedom in exchange for bread. Provided the Chinese would not enslave the American masses before the revolt and move all the factories back to America.
Baroness Tapuzina provides the recipe. Here how to make “Mom’s Creamed Spinach” for four: “Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the onion. Saute the onion until lightly browned and add the flour. Cook until the flour is incorporated with the butter and onion, and is a light brown roux. Add the milk or cream and stir until thickened. Add the spinach and cook on medium low heat, stirring until the spinach is defrosted. Add the nutmeg and mix thoroughly in the spinach. Cook until hot.”
Might be the French/Italian influence but that fish looks like frog ready to jump out. Can you see the legs on the left? Hmm, nuts with garlic, I need to try that, I like how it sounds. And what is “red fish”, what fish would that be?
On the subject of Dubai’s debt default, most articles are missing the essential point. The question is not if the Sovereign is credit worthy but if Dubai can populate and lease the millions of square meters of the spare commercial real estate.
Dubai is a religious idea, promoted after the dotcom crash in USA, the belief that construction on easy credit is the catalysis for the broader economy. Dubai took this ethos to the extreme. Free from the American overregulation and environmental concerts, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum followed the Singapore model of the free market dictatorship and the ancient Egyptian model of the slave construction labor. All the land in Dubai belongs to the Sheik and he parceled it out for free with the explicit condition of the rapid development.
Let’s say magically tomorrow Dubai would lease or sell all its vast and unused office and commercial capacity. The country would immediately choke, even without the benefit of a sand storm. The infrastructure is lagging the building construction. Firstly it takes decades to develop an urban project, secondly this is the neglected area because no one has the ownership of the public desert and here the Sheiks inevitably revert to the good old socialist model.
The vast unused capacity would remain empty in the foreseeable future. This creates an urban cancer that is impossible to cure. Just go to the heavily foreclosed areas in America and observe the effect of empty houses of the neighborhoods. Even many American downtowns still have not fully recovered from the flight to the suburbia. But this problem is much more severe in Dubai. Essentially it doesn’t have a habitable climate. For months people never go outside but live in the hermetically sealed, air-conditioned structures. An empty building without a rental income becomes an energy money sink even when the energy is cheap (see my post What’s easier, to build or to destroy?). The question is not how soon Dubai will repay its debt but how soon will it become an international exotic park and a futuristic sand canyon.
Photos of the Dubai Sand Storm on July 21st, 2006 via flickr/jgavinha
The world today:
- Post-democracy, AKA America: Anglo-Saxon experiment in liberal democracy. Today framed by the two book ends of the last decade – 9/11 (blow against freedom) and the financial crisis (undermined the promise of the free markets).
- Post-communism: The Singapore model adapted by China, Russia, Dubai, etc. Free market dictatorships.
- The decaying Europe.
Zizek is concerned that with the American idea failing and no viable alternative, the post communism model might prove appealing and freedom will suffer. Here is the 2nd part of his interview in NY on October 15th: ►click to continue
Monument to Russian Soldiers in Berlin
A right-wing affiliation of the orthodox Jews in America is a persistent paradox. To put it simply if the welfare state and the socialist safety net of the post depression America were to disappear, the Orthodox institutions would crumble in a month and the birthrate will drop far below the national average, except perhaps for a few families with unique talent and experience in stealing. Yet despite the fact that Orthodoxy in American is only possible because of the socialist institutions, there is the ubiquitous libertarian rhetoric.
But this is not even half as paradoxical compared to the fact that while Orthodox Jews like to proclaim allegiance to the Anglo-Saxon ideal of the liberal democracy, their culture and the internal communal structure is a bizarre mixture of feudal lordships, monarchy and communism. Most of the orthodox groups are ideological dictatorships run by family clans where nepotism is the decisive power, the very opposite of the idea of the liberal democracy. And this is far more insidious than the “goim and us” universe. There are rules for us and different rules for everyone else. The game we play at home and a different game we play outside.The totalitarian idea is internalized. I actually met people who are passionately libertarian yet believed in brain washing, propaganda, manipulation of the masses, crowd control. Hardly what the Anglo Saxons founders had in mind. Are you still asking why this American experiment is failing?
photo via flickr/tagl
On the subject of Horizontal Axis in Religious Worship. One of the greatest creative achievements of the Kabbalists following Moshe De Leon was the multidimensional vision of the universe. Even the word sefira implied a sphere, a circle and gematria is of course geometría. Kabbalists poetically imagined the geometric structure where the smallest part contains biggest and hiskollelus or inclusion and interconnection form the kabbalistic cosmos. After the eruption of the vision, it was inevitable that just few centuries later the science would articulate the same idea. Compare the kabbalistic cosmos and the discovery by Galileo Galilei.
Sefirot in Kabbalah, Moshe De Leon 1250 – 1305
The phases of Venus, observed by Galileo in 1610
The catholic apparatchiks couldn’t care less if the earth was a flat rock or a ball. But the spherical cosmos deprived them of the earthly hierarchy, of the top and down, the low and high. This was a management problem. The Pope needs to be on top at all times and that requires the flattened subjects.
Chassidim, especially Chabad, did their best to downplay the complex multidimensional cosmology of Kabbalah and substitute it instead with a pure vertical axis. The geometric metaphor repeatedly evoked in Chabad (and especially during the communist/fascist era) is up and down, high and low. For the same reason that the Catholic apparatchiks preferred a flat earth, Chabad commissars saw the world divided into high, low and not low enough (bittul). “And yet it moves!”- Galileo.
C.R. Cockerell, Temple of Jupiter (Zeus) Olympius, Agrigento, Sicily. Interior order of the cella with 'Telamons'. 1830
There is an interesting paper by Alun M. Salt – The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples. Virtually all classical temples built in the diaspora colony in Sicily ci. 500 – 700 BC, are oriented towards East, as one would expect. While there is a bigger orientation variant for the classical Greek Temples in Greece itself. Alun M. Salt writes:
“One reason for the difference in results might be the context of their construction. Temples in Greece were frequently built upon sites that had been sacred for generations, reaching back into the Bronze Age at places like Thermon, where the later classical temples were built over the remains of Mycenaean era megaron. There was the matter of historical tradition which meant that temples built in the archaic and classical periods might be built not only according to the cosmology of the time of construction, but also within the restraints of prior religious thought. The temples in Sicily were built in cities that, at the time of building, saw themselves as immigrants in a distant land. Therefore there was no historical precedent to shape the construction of the temples. They were much more likely to be purely the products of seventh-, sixth- and fifth-century cosmology. The lack of prior foundations gave the Sicilian Greeks more freedom to express current thought in religious practice through their temples.
The self-identification of Sicilian Greeks as Greeks living overseas may have also made adherence to a Greek ideal more of an imperative to reassure both themselves and visitors from the homeland that their location made them no less Greek. It is interesting to note that Greek sanctuaries in Greece could be out in the hinterland tying territory to the city, while Sicilian temples were all built in urban or suburban sites. An ‘astronomical fingerprint’ may, along with other elements such as the architectural form and religious practice, have been part of a drive to prove the Hellenic character of a settlement. Hence, perhaps, the stronger results in Sicily than Greece. This could be testable by comparison with temple alignments in other locations like the Black Sea colonies or Hellenistic Asia. A lack of a similar adherence to astronomical orientation for temples in these regions would be a surprising result given the emphatic nature of the results in Sicily and Greece.”
Wait, Sicily is directly West of Greece. So a Sicilian Greek temple is looking to Greece, perhaps this was also a consideration, just like all the synagogues are supposed to look towards Jerusalem. Would be interesting to test, if the reverse is true for the Black Sea Greek colonies?
C.R. Cockerell, Temple of Jupiter (Zeus) Olympius, Agrigento, Sicily: Transverse section. 1830
