Robert Switzer

For people my age, it was totally OK to cut yourself slack at the day-job. But to malinger in pursuit of cultural enlightenment was unforgivable. So thirty years ago, we all worked hard and suffered a little to watch Fassbinder, or to read Burroughs.

If you’re missing that righteous hard work, and the visceral shock of something new and a bit threatening, the fuck-you candor of Gummo, a film by Harmony Korine, may be just what you’re looking for.

Made in 1997, this film never played anywhere remotely close to where I live, and I can say with complete assurance it never will. I have to admit that I nearly turned it off, and I had to pause it several times to catch my breath.

Gummo is a nihilistic, non-linear cinema verite romp through Xenia, Ohio, a town that was nearly destroyed by a tornado in the early 1970’s; people fell from the sky and buildings imploded, crushing friends and family. Pets and people were dismembered, blown away, and impaled on television antennae, creating gristly sculptures.

Gummo documents the aftermath, the post-apocalyptic Xenia. And a word of warning … if you’re a cat lover, as I am, you may want to pass on this film, which contains scenes of graphic violence done to animals. According to Korine, prosthetic animals were used for the scenes. It will still make you squirm. It may even make you vomit

What you get out of all this is a direct experience, unlike most modern films, which are re-enactments of various kinds of film experiences you’ve already had.

The way this film was constructed is extremely interesting, too. Although it is set in Xenia, Ohio, it was actually shot in the poorest suburbs of Nashville, Tennesse, near where Korine grew up.

Korine brought in well-known cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, who did Les Amants du Pont-Neuf , The Butcher Boy, and The English Patient, as well as the video for the Johnny Cash version of Trent Reznor’s Hurt.

Gummo is 35mm film combined with a variety of other media. Korine handed out 8mm, 16mm, VHS video, and polaroid cameras to friends and crew members, encouraging them to shoot at will, on and off the set. Korine then mixes documentary shots featuring real non-actors in real situations with vignettes shot with the five professional actors in a bunch of different media to produce a rich and perverse visual experience that is 75% scripted and 25% improvised, according to Korine.

Often, in the spontaneous scenes, violence is palpable, and just below the surface. One scene featured a drunken kitchen party, with an impromptu arm-wrestling tournament, that devolves into frantic chair-wrestling by one of Korine’s shirtless, drunken, found-actors, who had just gotten out of prison. The crew and monitors were hidden when this scene was filmed. Korine was out of the room. At one point, the improvised scene breaks down, and no one knows what to do. This moment is priceless. I’ve experienced moments like this after something shocking or inexplicable takes place at a party, or in a public place.

Some of the locations used were so cramped and pest-ridden that the film crew demanded hazmat suits. Korine and Escoffier, offended by this, wore speedos and flip-flops to the shoot, just to piss off the crew.

Korine himself makes a cameo appearance as a drunken young man who is trying to seduce a gay, encephalitic, black dwarf. The dwarf is a non-actor who Korine knew from high school.

Chloe Sevigny, Korine’s girlfriend at the time, is the only household name in the film. She both performed as an actress, and contributed costume design for the film. Costumes were largely drawn from what the found actors actually owned, combined with thrift-shop finds.

The soundtrack combines various elements of American pop culture, from a field recording of the children’s song ‘My Little Rooster’, to Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’, with whole bunches of black metal, from bands like Absu, Barzum, Bathory, Bethlehem, Brujeria, Eyehategod, and Spazz. The aural, visual, and dramatic all work well together.

There are a lot of weird vaudeville references too, with characters spontaneously breaking into vaudeville-like standup monologues. Tap dancing also makes an appearance.

Gummo has been variously described as a surrealist joke, a visual poem, and a worm’s-eye view of white-trash suffering. As with the films of Lynn Ramsey and Vincent Gallo, I feel like I know, or have met the characters. Parts of this film could easily have been filmed a few miles from where I live.

The film is a visual treat, simultaneously hyperrealistic, and surreal. Korine had so much footage left after the final cut that a companion work, a three screen installation called The Diary of Anne Frank, Part II was created out of the leftovers. I’d love to see it.

Although this film isn’t quite as challenging as Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom, it’s challenging enough, and may not be for you. I thought it was worth it. It’s available from Netflix.

Korine’s newest film, Trash Humpers, released last fall, will be coming to video soon.

Dell Inc.’s recall of 4.1 million laptop computer batteries came as embarrassing news to Sony, which supplied the problem batteries, but proved to be good news for rival Japanese electronics companies Sanyo and Matsushita, pushing the struggling company’s shares higher Wednesday.

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It’s refreshing to find out that at least one aspect of Dell Product Suckage isn’t their fault. Maybe they can make lemonade out of those lemons and give the exploding laptops to the managers who decided to defund and outsource customer service.

A Congressional committee subpoenaed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday at the request of U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays(R).

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“What rational person could oppose using birth control to prevent pregnancy?”

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“The real blockbuster in the Hamdan decision is the court’s holding that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to the conflict with Al Qaeda â�� a holding that makes high-ranking Bush administration officials potentially subject to prosecution under the federal War Crimes Act.”

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Kevin Kelly had a piece in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the ongoing scanning and digitization of books and what it might mean for the future of publishing, scholarship, and reading.

Scanning is a great idea, both for preservation and for creating a hypertext database for scholarship. The publishing types who are erecting obstacles to scanning and the preservation of orphaned titles are clueless twits as far as I’m concerned.

Will book publishing change in the same way that music, film and now television are changing? Definitely, despite or maybe because of the clueless twits. Will books go away? Probably not. Will hyper-text databases of books that allow annotation, cross-referencing, and other ongoing dialogs with readers detract from scholarship? I can’t imagine how.

Would such a database trample on intellectual property rights? No — any rights-owner who demonstrates ownership of anything in the data base could have it removed if they so desired.

If an author fears piracy, I would urge him to fear obscurity or invisibility instead.

I’m more concerned about who will control the hypertext database, how it will be indexed, and how it will be monetized. If Google wants to scan everything in five major libraries, I say go for it. And if they want to create a search technology on top of the data that generates revenue via advertising, that’s OK too. We all know now that a Google search is in part prioritized based on payments made by advertisers. We’d also be aware of this dynamic if we used a Google book-search product.

However, the raw data needs to be a public resource and available for others to use and access outside of Google products and services so academic, non-profit, and open-source groups could construct alternate search technologies without commercial bias, or perhaps with specialized biases designed for special applications. And it goes without saying that multiple copies — perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of independant copies — would have to exist.

Kelly estimated that all of music, all of film, and every book that now exists could be digitized into about 50 petabytes of space. Right now I have 60 gigabytes of storage right here in my pocket on an iPod. Twenty years ago I couldn’t imagine enough disk storage to hold a movie. Maybe twenty years from now, we’ll be walking around with devices that can hold an entire multimedia library.

I don’t know who originally coined the phrase ‘obsolete technology becomes art’ — Brian Eno, maybe. I don’t remember. But this idea is at the center of why books won’t go away. Older technologies shrink and (maybe) decrease in importance, but they don’t go away. For the foreseeable future there will be people who want, and are willing to pay for the tactile experience of books. And the advantages of traditional linear scholarship in some contexts will persist, despite hypertext.

So it’s really too bad that luddite publishing companies and clueless authors effectively killed the scanning project. Google has the money, and was willing to do it. It’s everyone’s loss. But sooner or later, it will happen anyway. So I’m going to join Kevin Kelly and urge everyone to Scan That Book!

On vinyl recently: Promotional EP, ‘Hold On To 18′, Black And Blue; ‘Loose Nut’, Black Flag; ‘Paranoid’, Black Sabbath; ‘Autoamerican’, Blondie.

Playing on the iPod right now: ‘Jack The Ripper’, from Heresie by Univers Zero.

Good product and customer service experiences are so few and far between that I feel compelled to give them public mention when they happen.

A couple of weeks ago, my sound card started giving off a loud, low rumbling buzz in the first two channels. I’ve been using this card, an M-Audio Delta 1010, for the audio side of my work for over 7 years. I’ve recorded and mixed hundreds of hours of stuff with it and it’s been great — clean, quiet, and bulletproof under both Linux and MacOS.

Expecting the worst, I went out to Pricegrabber, found the best deal on a new one, and placed the order. A new 1010 cost me a bit less than half of what the first one cost me in 1999.

After the new 1010 arrived, and I installed it, I went out to the M-Audio website and opened a support ticket, on the off-chance that some kind of discount repair/replace deal might be available for older, out-of-warranty units.

M-Audio got back to me a couple of days later and I was delighted to discover that they would repair my 7 year old piece of gear, and return it to me post-paid for the cost of UPS ground shipping to California.

Getting the repaired 1010 back will cut the budget on another project I’m working on significantly.

Three cheers for M-Audio, a company that deserves your business.

On vinyl recently: A 12″ promotional single by a group called ‘Bete Noir’ — ‘Galileo’ b/w ‘Inquisition’; ‘Don’t Let The Bossman Get You Down’ and ‘Big Fun’ by Elvin Bishop; Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows, ‘Live In Chicago’.

Playing right now: ‘Stackalee’ by Frank Hutchison, from ‘Anthology of American Folk Music’.

Second shift is over. My wife finished her evening assignment on Friday of last week and is now back on her normal schedule, as am I. So I’m bleary and jet-lagged this morning. We got up this morning around 6, after two weeks of staying up late and laying in.

After blowing about a thousand bucks, everyone in the family now has an iPod. Gail bought daughter Jen a 4 gig Nano, and then I bought a new 60 gig model last week and gave the 30 gig Gail got me for my birthday back to her. The iPod itself is a great product, though my enthusiasm doesn’t extend to the iTunes software, or the iTunes Store. More on that later.

Speaking of Jen, right now she’s somewhere in the Mekong Delta taking photos. Her school set up a 3 week tour of Vietnam and Cambodia for art students, and she signed up. I’m jealous — I’ve been to Europe and South America, but I’ve never done this kind of hard-core travel — a slightly risky trip to a truly foreign destination.

As a part of my introduction to blogging and the current state-of-the art, I’ve been checking out the offerings of others, and subscribing if they are feed-enabled. It seems like the focus of most of the feed-enabled blogs I’ve stumbled across is ‘Web 2.0′, whatever that is.

One dude in particular is especially interesting, though I’m not going to mention him by name or track back to him just yet. For now I’ll just call him ‘Clifford Stoll 2.0′.

For anyone who doesn’t remember, in 1996, Clifford Stoll wrote a book called ‘Silicon Snake Oil’ that was thoughtfully critical of the giddy boosterism surrounding the internet boom of the late ’90’s.

Stoll made the point that an enhanced virtual life can’t and won’t fix many of the problems of real life, which is true as far as it goes. And as he said, you can’t snake out a drain by pointing and clicking. What he failed to acknowledge is that if you’ve never snaked a drain before, you can learn how by pointing and clicking.

Stoll 2.0, on the other hand, is concerned that the open, accessible world of internet self-publishing, the many-to-many media paradigm that currently threatens traditional top-down broadcast media, is a grievous threat to what he calls ‘elite culture’.

His position is a variation on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, a parable created by William Forster Lloyd, that demonstrates how unrestricted access to a resource ultimately dooms the resource because of over-exploitation.

The Commons that Stoll 2.0 is talking about is attention. In his view, the ever-increasing volume of stuff out there, especially stuff generated by amateurs or avocational creators, will overwhelm what he calls ‘elite culture’.

And it seems to me that what he’s calling ‘elite culture’ is the stuff generated by the traditional media outlets — big media, he calls it.

I’m in complete agreement with him on the importance of elite culture, though I don’t think that elite culture is always a product of the existing elites.

Amateur or avocational creators are no threat to elite culture and may in fact contribute to and expand the boundaries of it.

Elite culture isn’t the result of discovery and marketing by a large media company but rather the result of extraordinary talent or even genius.

Extraordinary talent and genius are self-evident, even to people on MySpace.

I always liked Austin City Limits, and the formula of putting a band or two in a live context, and then capturing the performance appealed to me.

I hadn’t seen the show for a long time. And I was interested in seeing what the media powers-that-be were currently flogging. So a week or two ago, I set up the TiVo with a season pass for Austin City Limits.

Last night after we finished with ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Big Love’ there was still an hour or so left before bedtime, and there was a recent Austin City Limits on the TiVo ‘Now Playing’ list.

The show had aired in the last couple of weeks and featured two bands, The Killers and Spoon.

I had no idea who either were, though I was more than a little curious about The Killers because I’m a big fan of their namesake, Jerry Lee Lewis.

Spoon were billed as an Austin band, and I had an immediate flash of earnest, very un-Texas looking young men in earth-tones doing wordy songs for sensitive, introverted boys and girls to puzzle over in their well-appointed suburban bedrooms.

As it turns out, I wasn’t far wrong but first, The Killers.

All of a sudden, it’s 1983 again and I’m in a dingy, hot, crowded strip-mall night-club at the height of the new-wave suburban dispersion.

Back then thousands of bands like The Killers were knockin’ it out and makin’ ‘em sweat in towns small, medium, and large all across the USA. And none of those bands were much good, either.

Two seconds into The Killer’s set, I had them pegged, right on the Joy Division/New Order border but blander instrumentally, with a big dash of early U2, and, dare I say it, Freddy Mercury thrown in.

Perfectly OK stuff for rockin’ the secretaries and shoe salesmen down at the strip mall, but despite being one of the latest things being flogged by some big media company or another, totally unremarkable and undeniable proof that the wave of post-punk resurgence is cresting.

Spoon were just what I thought they’d be, a group of earnest, over-funded young men attuned to the coffee shop/bookstore side of town singing wordy songs and playing some of the coolest vintage guitars ever.

While The Killers would probably *be* shoe salesmen if they weren’t making music, more than one of Spoon are going to go to law school eventually.

The Killers definitely had the feel of a band — a group effort — despite the flashy frontman, though the group effort was weak in the songwriting department. But the rhythm section rocked hard.

Spoon, on the other hand, were definitely about the singer/songwriter. The rest of the band were probably some non-threatening buddies — OK musicians with no tunes of their own. The drummer had some of the weirdest body-mechanics I’ve ever seen in a percussionist and the bassist was so introverted that he might have imploded at any moment.

Spoon were probably the better band by a nose, but that isn’t saying much. Neither were anything special. And both were definitely big-media productions. Elite culture? Probably not.

You can find bands this good and even better on MySpace.

But hey, if you smoosh the two together taking the rhythmic drive, sweaty energy and feral sexuality of The Killers, getting rid of the brick-dumb songwriting, and pouring in Spoon’s smarty-pants lyrics while leaving out the goin’ to law school vibe and keeping the cool guitars, bingo! You’ve got it — The Spoon Killers.

Meanwhile, if a real band in the neo post-punk mode interests you, I recommend !!! and especially The Rapture.

Playing right now: 99 Problems, DJ Danger Mouse from The Grey Album.

On Vinyl of late: White Album, The Beatles; Blow By Blow and Wired, Jeff Beck; ‘Dance To The Music of Irving Berlin’, uncredited, on SpinORama Records.

Over the last several months or so I’ve watched numerous anti-abortion advocates discussing unplanned pregnancies, abortion, birth control, and sex education on a variety of television news magazines.

It doesn’t seem to me that the issue is abortion at all. If anti-abortion activists were truly interested in reducing the number of abortions, they’d be strong advocates for sex education and easy access to contraception.

But these people, most of whom are evangelical christians, want to criminalize not only abortion, but sex education and contraception for sexually active minors.

The end result of this, of course, will be more unwanted pregnancies, back-alley abortions, neglected children, suffering, and crime.

It’s the sex. Sex bothers these people, and if they had their way, they’d outlaw any sexual activity that didn’t lead to procreation. I think the sex-without-procreation thing is also at the root of the virulent and ugly campaign against homosexuals by the religious right.

iPod Update

If you’re using an iPod with gtkpod on a Linux machine, don’t plug it back into a machine (Mac or PC) with the iTunes software on it. I did this on Sunday, and the damn iTunes software deleted the iTunes database from my ‘pod, making everything I’d tranferred onto it invisible.

Not a big deal really, I just put it all back on. But if I’d had a lot of customized playlists, etc. set up, I would have been pissed.

When I reloaded the iPod this time, I put on a more astringent mix of music, with quite a bit of European free improv, some Japanese noise and a bit of obscure post-punk — Orange Juice, Chrome, and Josef K.

Playing right now: “Two Horn’d Reasoning: Cloven Fiction”, Evan Parker & Paul Lytton
Playing a couple of minutes ago: “Not Great Men”, Gang of Four; “Lost Someone”, James Brown

On vinyl yesterday: “Burning From The Inside”, Bauhaus; The Bears, self-titled.
On vinyl today: “Rubber Soul” by the Beatles.

Who could possibly believe that beating a 14 year old boy to death in the name of rehabilitation is a good idea? Only in the Banana Republic Of Florida, another state, along with Kansas, that I’ll never visit …

Vinyl LP today and yesterday: triple LP by The Band, ‘The Last Waltz’
Playing right now: ‘Jesus Built My Hot Rod’ by Ministry