the French - they "get it"

I stole this highly bloggable video from HRO, but I think it's worth a second analysis driven by an ironism with a different number of repetitions of the word "post" in front of it (this is a de facto admission that my blog is now nothing more than a reblog of HRO, and certainly not the most successful one at that - see HRO Exegesis). Charles writes: 

I haven’t ever really listened to the Presets too indepth, except for this one Lifelike remix of them. But I have heard that they are ‘amazing’ live, and they probs are. N e ways, this music video is pretty meaningful bc it was directed by the same person who made M83’s “Kim and Jessie.” I think I can really identify with this music video because I am a teen from the suburbs who wants to go to the city and ‘get my dance on’ but then also get meaningful at a beach bonfire.
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Okay. But also: I think I can really identify with this music video because I am a "young adult" from a city nostalgic for a suburban experience that I didn't have. I want to go to the Hollywood walk of fame and "get my dance on" as if I were a t(w)een from the suburbs. What's authentic about this video is that is evokes a nostalgic longing for an experience of urban life as something aesthetically supple, something new and forcefully alienating and beautiful. The first shot of a sped-up LA freeway scene (0:30), interspersed with our tween walking to school in his uniform, is infused, if not with the wide-eyed, naive awe of a suburbanite's first view of the big, godless city, then with his first wonderous view of a TV commercial for a global investment bank with calm professionals presiding over the chaotic urban scene outside of their gleaming office tower. Though it's not particularly interesting to point out that this shot is "cliche" (here we go again), the aesthetic power of the shot is due more to an evocation of the form which we might imagine a suburban longing for the dissolution of subjectivity offered by the anonymous metropolis, cars whizzing past, would take. Indeed, we don't ever have to "imagine" what form it would take, because the desire itself is cultivated by, e.g., these advertisements (and more forcefully, Hollywood film - it is not insignificant that this is L.A. and not New York).

   The shot is thus all the more powerful because we've seen it before. The desire being evoked here is not our desire for "that (postmodern) urban experience"; rather, it is a nostalgia for that desire.  This also extends to the way the video treats a notion of "Hollywood culture." As our tween sashays down the Walk of Fame, bowling over Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, there is a gleeful kind of irony which, precisely because it is not "post-" (or rather, because it is "post-post-"), feels naive. Wouldn't it be nice to just genuinely ironically enjoy pop culture, instead of having to try to ironically enjoy it? This need to try (Baudelaire's "heroic" affirmation of the present in all its squalid glory), and the effort to navigate the neverending series of quotation marks it unleashes, is a trope to which the French are especially (uniquely?) well-suited.

The French director of this video, Eva Husson, also directed a video for M83. Though I think the unheimlich humor of the M83 video is slightly tangential in regards to this aesthetic, M83 is perhaps the best example of the contemporary Baudelairean attempt to confront postmodernism. Is it a surprise that M83 is French as well?

These could be shots from the Presets video. On the one hand, blissful, "authentic" suburban tween life; on the other, the promise of the Real of urban anonymity and amorality. And again, with the suburban scene, it is the highway in the background which makes the photograph particularly moving; rather than a pure bucolic/rural - and thus historically "previous" to the urban - ideal, it evokes a knowing naivete and willfully heroizes precisely the ironic/knowing aspect. With the urban scene, this is again a generic shot, and what's important about it is the intentionally pseudo-authentic details (grainy stock, saturated colors). Note the similarity to shots from Heat, Miami Vice, and Roadtrip 2K8:

ITT: I liveblog TOOL ACADEMY

11:30: Just finished "Real Chance at Love", a spinoff of a spinoff of Flavor of Love. Was going to read Foucault but this looks more authentic/has more bearing on "The History of Sexuality."

11:32: These guys think they are competing for title of "Mr. Awesome" - but actually, they are trying to avoid pwnage (PUR OWNAGE) by their girlfriends who sent them to the "tool academy" bc they are gaytards.

ex: "my boyfriend's name is terrence...but, he goes by, Celebrity." pause.

so they think they are being celebrated for their bro-ness, but actually "we're all laughing at them" bc theyre bros.

this guy "Matsuflex," i'm actually 100% sure I met him at the pool at the Luxor in Vegas in June. I am going to find pictures to prove this. he was ordering RBVs. i was drinking free tequila shots out of plastic shot glasses (aka robotussin cups)

11:40: the bros are about to get pwned.

"are u guys ready 2 go inside and parti with the ladies"?

11:41 "where's the girls at?"

11:42: "there's been a slight change of plans." long pause. "there is no party" four censored expletives.

11:43 ok so, now it's a commerical break. i've never done this "liveblogging thing" before but just to pick up on what i was saying earlier: these guys think they are being affirmed in their broness, brodom, brodaciousness, all these other adjectives which have already been completely co-opted by exactly the demographic which i thought i was making fun of when i used them like 6 months ago. the point, supposedly, is that in fact they are...fuck commercial is over.

11:46: bullshit pro-feminist rhetoric. ("you've all been pretty crappy boyfriends.") "gentlemen: you are not, Mr. Awesome." medium pause. "you are all complete tools."

11:47: just realized that "liveblogging" is actually using twitter. i dont know how to tweet though - maybe i need to go to the "tool academy"?

11:48: unintentional lulz: "do you think i'm excited to be in like, a prison academy - bro?!!"

11:51: now they have a group therapy session. therapist is british. prestigious? one guy admits, "i guess there's some stuff i need to work on."

11:54: ok so back to what i was saying. the critique of humanism has been co-opted by humanism to reaffirm it's own openness to critique and thus completely eviscerated. thus it comes to seem "inauthentic" to, e.g., critique advertising for determining our interests and personalities because this has been recuperated for a bourgeois notion of aesthetic purity.  at the moment when the bro starts saying "bro" ironically, "bro" is no longer ironic. next commercial: was "bro" ever ironic?

12:00: this one girl took off her engagement ring because she thinks that it represents something "fake" now. i'm starting to think this might be scripted.

12:01 matsuflex: "black, asian white, i bang all sorts of chicks." is that a reference to that Calvin Harris song? 

12:03 b0red, checking out matsuflex's myspace. 

12:11: "she was trying to emasculate me, and im not gonna allow that, im gonna break some stuff, im gonna pick up this heavy chair and im gonna throw it. and you're gonna like it."

12:12: found a ph0to of matsuflex from my facebook:

12:14: matsuflex breaks out his "matsu-panties" (black HUGO BOSS underwear). is this progressive? i saw a tranny last night when i was running, she was carrying groceries. a small shiver ran down my back, and i finally "got" the tranny thing. how bataille-esque would it be to just, like, change your gender? the little thrill we get from 'acting a little gay' or. commercial is over.

12:19: mastuflex is making out with his girlfriend.

12:20: one of the bros: "i want to prove to america that i'm not a tool and that i can BE, Mr. Awesome." very interesting. this is a post-colonial strategy: use the liberatory ideology promulgated by the oppressor as a cover for domination to in fact resist processes of

 interpellated subjectification. instead of allowing himself to interpellated as "tool," he reclaims the (manifestly illusory) rallying cry of Mr. Awesome. did anyone see "The X Files: I Want to Believe"? or Miami Vice? 

12:25: is it even worth discussing the fact that this is scripted? how could i rise above the level of irony already implicit in this show?

12:26: final scene, where one gets eliminated: they are all wearing thom browne.

12:28: more evidence of colonialism, specifically "identifying with your oppressor": when dmitiri, after getting eliminated, says, "i know i'm not a tool," one of the other guys scoffs, suggesting that he has appropriated the discursive framework of the Tool Academy. does this have potential as a strategy for revealing the inherent "lack" on which discourse is based (Santner)? i.e., is it possible that this guy, by asserting that dmitri's being kicked off the show represents some sort of ontological failure (that he "really is" a tool, and that that really means something - even though just one day ago they had never heard of "The Tool Academy" and it

's linguistic rules), is revealing the inherent constructedness of the tool/non-tool (even, perhaps, bro/non-bro) dichotomy? could we go a step further and say that he is in fact revealing the arbitary nature of linguistic meaning itself (Derrida)?

stay tuned for Tool Academy 2:

I've Been Waiting for This Moment, for all my LIFE

OH LORD

more on this later, but



queenuvdiamonds (5 days ago)
I don't want to sound stupid or weird but when I have this song super loud(in the car. or by myself at home) or really loud on my headphones. i'll close my eyes and fade away. like an out of body orgasm. nevermind. its stupid. awesome freakin' song ...

jscorpio78 (5 days ago)
thats not stupid its a kick ass tune...go with it



Which is more powerful, this or the Phil Collins? Which Miami Vice is more powerful, the original or the movie? Which is more real, TV or film? Is Miami Vice the movie realer because it is based on a TV show? Sorry guys I'm farming right now so a full discussion will have to wait.

Miami Vice as Gesamkunstwerk/Mass Ornament

Baudelaire wrote that director Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral, The Insider) is "looking for that quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity'...he makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever elemental it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory." Modernity, as Baudelaire defines it, is "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent."

For those of us looking for the modern-day Ulysses, such as Pitchfork Music, postmodern (i.e., for our purposes, sufficiently contemporary and socially critical) art has to have some sort of sad irony about it, some supposedly fractured Wasteland-esque evocation of the poverty and inanity of mass culture. Even films such as Tarantino's, I think, essentially imply this type of critique: by trying to create "real"-seeming, vibrant characters whose behavior is an agglomeration of cliches from other films, he suggests that reality is now simply mimed, a simulacrum, andthat we cannot have even moving films but only ironic inanity.

Michael Mann - Baudelaire's "Painter of Modern Life" - is someone that these ostensibly cultured and critical hipsters might look down upon. The plot in Miami Vice is not only cliche, it doesn't know it's cliche; it's not only violent, it expects the violence to be frightening and moving. Yet who's to say that Tarantino actually knows how cliche he's being? The presumption of a position from which one can perform the ironic critique with pure remove is the same bird-lipped modernist elitism that people like Tarantino are trying to get away from.

Does anyone really not find modern life - let's call it "late capitalism" for fun - to be almost sublime? If you're not a Luddite - actually, even if you are - can you deny that there is something intoxicating about mass culture, about huge, technologized cities populated with complacent receptacles of ideology, about millions of people on treadmills across the world, listening to techno on their iPods and dreaming their little dreams?

In Miami Vice, we get an evocation of all that is terrifying and beautiful about late capitalism: shiny white cars lost in the crowd on the freeway; slick, mindless dudes talking on their cell phones; sexed out $lutz in glittery bodysuits writhing at "velvet-rope" clubs, "go-fast" boats zipping along an overdeveloped coastline. Globalization (international drug trade, Chinese-Cuban businesswoman as the post-feminist embodiment of the 'Protestant Work Ethic', the faux-internationalism of Miami) figures large; mass culture is treated simply as it is and evoked straightforwardly. The film lets it speak for itself, and it is unbearably moving. The tendency to dismiss films like these as cheesy is, I think, an indication of the fact that people are uncomfortable with the position it puts them in. Take a look at this trailer:

or this admirable home-made thing:.

I don't want to hear that the Linkin Park/Jay-Z mash-up is "bad." When Jay-Z drops the line "Boeing jets" while the teaser cuts to a drug-running plane, then cuts back to the club scene, then to Colin Ferril pulling a 360 in the Ferrari, then to Colin Ferril and Gong Li making out in a limo - which looks like a sort of sublime, frenetic business transaction - this is the beauty of late capitalism. The suffocating literalness of the trailer - matching Jay-Z's raps with 'related' scenes ("blow you to smithereens" gets played over a car getting blown up) and the beat to intercut shots of Colin Ferril and Jamie Foxx cocking various guns - brings us even closer to the text. As in Wagner's use of leitmotifs in der Ring des Nibelungen, the film aestheticizes itself through a synthesis of the aural and visual (creating a "kinetic" feel) and thus the viewer is forced to experience it more intimately and fully. It's not just a song playing over images from the movie, which happens to enhance the mood of the film, but rather the two fuse and come to work "directly on the emotions" - and yet, of course, it's anything but direct; it's wholly mediated through the trappings of late capitalist-gemeinschaft/gesellschaft. This "mediated authenticity" is the exactly the sublime element of late capitalism; what's so fun about hitting the club with your bros is that when you're dancing to Soulja boy with some hottie, it feels real, yet it also feels rediculous and false (like those fake titties! HIGH FIVE BRO!!!!!!!). This is the pleasure of Krakauer's "mass ornament," the aesthetics of the mechanization of human life, here taken to its logical late-capitalist conclusion with the mechanization of culture as such. Miami Vice "works on us"; it leaves little space for the comfortably ironic transcendental liberal subject. Therein lies its beauty and, indeed, its political possibility

Thus, I think it is reasonable to say that Miami Vice exists in the space of the contemporary gesamkunstwerk.