One of the first glimpses of The Social Network came in July, when an early trailer appeared on YouTube. It was a music video of sorts, featuring a children’s choir singing Radiohead’s first single, “Creep,” over images of typical Facebook photos and status updates—the latter typed into the blank text box in faux ‘real time,’ as in the recent Google ads. The pictures were the standard utopian scenes of youthful recreation that mark the many related genres of online photos: all-too-perfect snapshots of daytrips, candid clips of backyard BBQs, careless grins showcasing the finest balance of composed spontaneity. We see anonymous smiling faces frozen in scenes resembling an Urban Outfitters fall catalogue, which is what Facebook photos have essentially become.

They pop on-screen and disappear the way you click through a friend’s party. Click, click, click, and entire chains of happy days blossom and fade in split seconds. What takes hours to plan, document, sort, and upload then provides your third-grade best-friend with less than twenty seconds of entertainment on their iPhone, 2000 miles away and twenty years later.

A cursor arrow clicks on “add friend” and “confirm friend,” while recent graduates smile, arms wrapped around each other. Then a moody profile shot appears, with a hand reaching toward the camera lens and covering it. This is the other genre of the social network: the solo pose of self-representation, as tired as a freshman year art project. It signals an interruption to the fun. Suddenly someone types on a friend’s wall, and reveals the burrowed longing nestled in the heart of Facebook users everywhere: where are you?

Instructively, the choir answers through the point-blank confession of Thom Yorke’s stripped down loner: “I want you to notice when I’m not around.” What was grunge pathology becomes a prescient analysis of the emotions fueling the dot-com boom still to come. One asks to know, one wants to show, and billions of dollars follow. Time, distance, and desire converge in new wires that no longer require real-time communication between the curious and lonely, such as a phone-call, but instead function like a mass email to everyone. Connecting everyone is Facebook—a corporation that, as founder Mark Zuckerburg exclaims mid-way through the film The Social Network, takes the entire experience of college and puts it online.

The Radiohead lyrics overlaying these otherwise ubiquitous images are beautiful and eerie. They stamp what is perhaps a central and controversial theme of the film: that Facebook is not a technology of communication and connection, but one that exists to exploit alienation and exclusion. Any brouhaha about the truthfulness of the film’s representation of Zuckerburg is completely beside the point. Alienation and exclusion are the subjects of The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, and what appear again and again in the brilliant performance by Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckerburg as the film chronicles his years before and after Harvard earlier this decade.

The riveting opening scene is an awkwardly dark conversation about social status between Zuckerburg and his date, Erica (Rooney Mara). Zuckerburg wants to join the elite Harvard social clubs where the children of the rich and privileged mingle, party, have sex, and build the affective bonds that will connect their professional and social networks for the rest of their careers. Erica is incredulous and more than a little disturbed by Zuckerburg’s open and cynical ambition. Over the course of the discussion they break up, and Zuckerburg return to his dorm to humiliate her in a blog, and subsequently invent a “hot or not” Harvard website with the help of his only friend, Eduardo Saverin. The site crashes the server.

The desire that Zuckerburg first channeled into a hierarchy of hotness is the same that animates the arrows that click “add friend.” Behind the spectral glow of the screens and photos are the missing bodies that these images and updates represent and display. This desire has many gradations and circulates with different intentions. It flows and morphs far beyond the urge to peek through the binoculars at the neighbors. Facebook isn’t about looking at strangers. Weirdly, it’s about looking at your friends and family, and also the people you only kind of know. It provides intimacy where intimacy is desired.

This desire for intimacy doesn’t necessarily come from lonely people. It doesn’t expose an overflow of information. It reveals the infinite desires that bodies make. It connects a disconnected, insatiable generation. It reveals that we can never be connected enough, despite our protests that we are too visible.

Zuckerburg’s loneliness and isolation inadvertently produced a technology to distribute the infinite waves of desire that flow through all relationships. This is in part because users themselves extended the logic of college friend profiles and began using them to mediate all social relationships. This caused some weirdness a couple years ago, when recent graduates found friend requests from their parents, or from “friends” they made in dance class the summer after eighth grade.

Discussions about the flattening of the past, the meaning of “friendship,” or the impracticalities of contemporary privacy miss the essential point of Facebook’s expansion. The growth of this entire company was propelled almost entirely by the desires of people everywhere to connect to one another. The company’s sole task, as Zuckerbug realizes in the film, was merely to provide channels to define, categorize, and capture that desire. It didn’t need advertising or need to convince anyone to join, aside from a few recalcitrant and independently minded individuals.

No one had to sell anyone else on Facebook, or Myspace, or even Friendster. The purpose of social networks was and remains obvious. People need to connect because they feel disconnected. They’re alienated. They’re distant from the people they love and care about. We live in a culture and in an economy that demands we act in our own self-interests. At best, some of us are able to live with people we love. Many don’t, or can’t.

Facebook—like communication technology in general—reflects a need that goes beyond putting the experience of college online. In the film, Zuckerburg uses Facebook to make friends, even as it alienates him from the one or two he already has. Facebook, then, isn’t so much a technology of connection as it is a revelation about the fractured and mediated nature of contemporary friendship.

It’s not a sign we’re more connected than ever—not quite. It’s a sign our bodies have never been more isolated from the bodies we want to be with. At the same time, the bodies we want have never been so visible. Facebook has more in common with porn than one might think.  Not coincidently, Zuckerburg stumbled onto the idea only after he created a “hot or not” site that crashed the Harvard servers. And that site came only after he was dumped.

In the film, Zuckerburg wants to be inside the Harvard clubs, and he wants to be with the girl he offends in the opening scene. The other half of that desire, however, is the desire for status, since it’s also status that makes the otherwise undesirable desirable. Zuckerburg can’t rely on an athletic body, and he doesn’t have the charisma that is so valuable in a US social culture that more and more resembles US corporate culture, where who you know, how energetic you are, and how positive you seem has as much to do with your success as talent or hard work.

The most important function of the “status update” is that it literally signals a status update. One’s friends have become one’s fans. The psychology of celebrity has been democratized – it’s no accident that the site rose to fame alongside the success of reality television and Youtube. Facebook is the logical extension of MTV’s The Real World. It’s a site where status and desire intersect, and those intersections are also where the film engineers its plot.

Status and desire are inseparable and fickle—and profitable. And so it’s impossible to separate what’s creepy and desperate about Facebook from its utility as an instrument of self-production and self-promotion. As an instrument for self-production, Facebook primarily encourages users to promote themselves and their way of life. Its function is in that sense reproductive of status, of class life, and of the digital architecture that provides actual maps to the bars, apartments, houses, concerts, and restaurants that physically sustain and excite the body. It’s one giant “app” for friendship.

To the extent that friendship accompanies the rituals that nourish and pleasure the body, Facebook is the prosthetic skin that envelopes collective relationships. It’s become the digital skin of friendship that allows us to graze each other from afar, like a touch in the hall.

As such, the site is perhaps the ultimate product of the neo-liberal era of privatization and modern corporate power.  Facebook has privatized social communication, class status, and, at the extreme point of this logic, all the human relationships that use it. It’s done this by monetizing friendship itself. It has turned the last location without corporate branding into a space of corporate intervention. Facebook is the first corporation to capitalize on relationships between people, and not simply the relationship between people and products, or between people and celebrities that sell products.

Embedded too within the company’s 25 billion dollar value is also the free promotion of products, companies, and businesses that people can “like,” and thus promote for free. It’s a site that captures the entire ethereal chain of viral marketing and solidifies it. Facebook has digitized desire. It’s channeled affections into categories. It has discovered how to formalize relationships by setting up a system for their public legitimation: one is “in a relationship” or “engaged to,” or “married to.”

In addition to providing a space for individuals to upload their lives—to digitize their values and desires and turn them into usable information and media for other companies—Facebook has allowed consumers disconnected from the production, promotion, and even consumption of products to push those products for free.

People push for what they “like” as naturally as they push to promote themselves and their friends. This is the privatization of advertising, propelled by human desire, and thus inaugurates the creation of a new kind of consumer-producer. One has become the ad for oneself. In one’s pictures one can create an ad campaign for his or her own lifestyle. One links this lifestyle to products. In some sense, Facebook has become the marketplace for selling our lives to each other. This is how we reproduce ourselves: we make ourselves desirable, and we link our affections to sites that ultimately make money.

Mark Zuckerburg turned his desire to be intimately close to desirable bodies into a technology that allowed everyone to do the same. He made billions turning friendship into a brand. Using that technology, we made profiles that essentially function like brands. Our profiles link to businesses and ads and companies. This is the synergy of US-style capitalist democracy. We are all Mark Zuckerburgs.

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The president and his national security team might want to know a bit more about what you are doing on the internet, just to be safe! As a recent Washington Post story notes:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

While portrayed as a “technical clarification,” the request has touched off a firestorm among civil liberties and privacy advocates. A former Justice Deparment lawyer under Bill Clinton exlained that the change would be “bringing a big category of data — records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information — outside of judicial review.” A lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that their “biggest concern is that an expanded NSL [national security letter] power might be used to obtain Internet search queries and Web histories detailing every Web site visited and every file downloaded.” According to Raw Story, “Internet attorney Marc Zwillinger even speculated that it might give the government access to social networking activity. ‘A Facebook friend request — is that like a phone call or an e-mail?’ he asked. ‘Is that something they would sweep in under an NSL? They certainly aren’t getting that now.’”

This most recent controversy is part of a much larger pattern. An important new report by the American Civil Liberties Union (described in a press release here) provides us with a full briefing on “National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration.” It worries about a “New Normal” where policies begun under Bush and continued (or even expanded) under Obama become standard operating procedure for the executive branch. The ACLU report (PDF) is about 20 pages and is worth reading in full but I’ve summarized it below, breaking it down into the key “positive” and “negative” elements.

Positives

• Some improvements in transparency, for example better rules governing classification, appointing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ombudsman, and releasing the Department of Justice memos that formed the basis for Bush’s policy on torture.
• Disavowal of torture, Geneva Conventions protection to be granted prisoners held by the U.S.
• Have not denied visas to foreign scholars and writers the U.S. government might not care for, as Bush did.

Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, a second Guantánamo.

Negatives

• Transparency: refusal to release photos of detainee abuse as ordered by an appellate court and support for an amendment to FOIA to bolster that refusal; refusal to release numerous documents that would cast further light on the Bush torture regime; releasing fewer documents relating to prisoners held in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan than the Bush administration did for prisoners in Guantánamo; aggressive pursuit of government whistleblowers.
• Accountability: no push for accountability for Bush administration officials who created the torture policy and indeed invocation of the state secrets doctrine to avoid releasing documents (Obama does not want to “look back”), no sympathy (much less support) for those who were tortured and are now seeking justice, most notoriously in the case of Maher Arar.
• Failure to close Guantánamo, but more importantly embrace of “the theory underlying the Guantánamo detention regime: that the Executive Branch can detain militarily—without charge or trial—terrorism suspects captured far from a conventional battlefield.” Bagram in Afghanistan and/or a prison in Illinois might well become (or actually already be, in the case of the former) the new Guantánamo.
• Authorization of targeted killing of suspected terrorists (including American citizens) outside of war zones.
• Embrace of military commission trials (with some modifications) that Obama had previously decried.
• “With limited exceptions, the Obama administration’s positions on national security issues relating to speech and surveillance have mirrored those taken by the Bush administration in its second term.”  Basically Obama has fully supported the assertion of the Bush administration that it’s fine to spy on Americans when the government deems it necessary for national security, and there’s nothing American citizens who are spied on can do about it.
• Expanded use of terrorist “watch lists,” including the addition of thousands of names to the notorious (and highly inaccurate) “No Fly List.” As the ACLU notes, in a passage that reminds one of Kafka’s The Trial, “Individuals on the [No Fly] list are not told why they are on the list and thus have no meaningful opportunity to object or to rebut the government’s allegations.”

The ACLU is at pains to emphasize that the Obama administration made some genuinely positive steps soon after taking office, though they are clearly outnumbered by the negatives. Overall they cast their report as an effort to persuade the administration to right its course and turn away from what Dick Cheney literally called the “dark side.” There are few encouraging signs though in terms of a change of direction, and assuming that continues to be the case the ACLU’s conclusion about the future is bracing:

if the Obama administration does not effect a fundamental break with the Bush administration’s policies on detention, accountability, and other issues, but instead creates a lasting legal architecture in support of those policies, then it will have ratified, rather than rejected, the dangerous notion that America is in a permanent state of emergency and that core liberties must be surrendered forever.

And there’s the rub. It was bad enough when the Bush administration was raging open warfare on the constitution, our international treaty obligations, and the basic rights of Americans, but what does it mean when an ostensibly “liberal” president puts his stamp of approval on that same approach? What future president, of either party, would ever attempt to rein in policies that aggrandize the power of the executive and which were okayed by two presidents who supposedly could not be more different?

Unlike health care, financial reform, or any other aspect of policy that requires a difficult legislative path, Obama had a fair amount of authority to chart his own course when it came to issues of executive authority. He largely has not done so, instead choosing to hew fairly close to the path of his predecessor, albeit with some notable and important exceptions. Back in late 2007 candidate Obama articulated quite different views on many of these questions during a Q & A, and I find myself wishing that fellow was sitting in the Oval Office right now. As Kevin Drum remarked in reference to the request for more info on our internet activity, “You know, if I’d wanted Dick Cheney as president I would have just voted for him.”

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eighth blackbird just performed an incredible concert here at Music10. This concert was devoted to works by the three principal composers that I mentioned in my last post: Joel Hoffman, Stephen Hartke, and Martin Bresnick. The whole concert was good, congratulations to all involved, etc., etc., but the standout works of the night were, undoubtedly, Hartke’s Meanwhile: Incidental Music to an Imaginary Puppet Play and Bresnick’s My 20th Century. The two works, as staged by eighth blackbird,  would seem to warrant the term “music drama” more than anything Wagner ever wrote, if only that term weren’t so fraught.

Every season, eighth blackbird completely memorises a work and choreographs it; Meanwhile is one of these works. Before composing the work, Stephen Hartke looked up clips of different types of Asian puppet theatre on the internet. He said to me after the concert that he basically took on the role of “fake ethnomusicologist” in this piece, and created new instruments that he thought would be appropriate for some kind of puppet theatre. I think Hartke summed up the piece best when he told the audience before the performance that the instrumentalists in this piece narrate some kind of story, but he’s not sure what that story may be. Throughout the performance, the members of eighth blackbird moved around the stage, acting with their instruments and with each other as much as playing. Here are some photos:

Look ma, no music! Lisa played one of Hartke's "fake ethnomusicologist" instruments for a large part of the piece, in addition to her usual instrument, the piano.

Nick rocking out on the cello (apologies for the blurriness)

This was a really intense moment

So was this

Martin Bresnick’s My 20th Century was my favourite work of the night. It sets a poem by a close friend of his, Tom Anderson; you can read the whole poem on Bresnick’s website: http://www.martinbresnick.com/programnotes/mytwentieth.htm . Bresnick doesn’t set the poem to music in the sense that someone sings the text; rather, the music that he composed surrounds the poem, which is recited by the members of eighth blackbird, stanza by stanza, at significant moments throughout the piece.

Before the performance, Bresnick told the audience that the poem was at times funny and at times deeply meaningful. This is how I feel about Bresnick’s piece, as well. The work starts with an energetic, driving ostinato that is catchy enough in its own right, but accrues layers of meaning and beauty as Bresnick transforms it throughout the piece. Also  breathtaking are the moments when the ostinato drops out altogether.

Here is a shot from My 20th Century. Michael and Matthew are reciting lines of the poem to each other while the others play.

It was so inspiring to get to see eighth blackbird play together in the midst of these crazy two weeks of rehearsing with them, eating with them, hanging out with them. They are an incredible group of performers, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to learn with them and to get to know them in such a unique setting.

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Whether it’s because they never thought his “Back Page” “articles” were funny in the first place, or because they gradually began to discern the formulaic and insipid nature of most of his jokes and premises, or because he has cast aspersions on too many members of the fragile Graduate Center community, or because his articles have now reached a new low of self-referential aggrandizement—one thing is clear. According to a recent poll, satire columnist Matt Lau is persona non-grata at the Grad Center these days.

The poll was conducted by a group of students concerned about the diminishing levels of humor and wit in the official satire column of the university. The poll asked students whether they approved of Lau’s column, disapproved of it, or had no opinion. 90 percent of respondents had no opinion, while the other person who participated expressed vituperative disapproval.

Poll spokesperson, Mark Schiebe, who was coincidentally also the one person to disapprove of Lau in the anonymous poll, had this to say, “It would be is easy to tolerate the disreputable imagination of Lau if the offensive scenarios he came up with were at all funny.

“But what, may I ask, is funny about faculty freezing to death during a bikini car wash fundraiser in February or starving students once again eating the free computer paper in the library for their Thanksgiving meal or the History Department’s softball team medaling at the Special Olympics or the University President spooning with another professor for a promotional “Men of the GC” wall calendar or suggesting that the GC would be taken over by Interboro Technical College because it has superior job placement support?

“Generously speaking, perhaps these sordid and outrageous ideas could in themselves have made for useful satire premises, but again and again Lau has resorted to cheap bits, gags, puns, and when all else fails, the photoshop skills of the Advocate’s layout editor. Over and over he has relied for his premises on puns,” said a visibly angry Schiebe, who looked tired from a long day of polling himself again. “The Graduate Center and the Guitar Center, President Kelly and R&B singer R Kelly, Oral Examinations and the Freudian Oral Stage; respected Professor Jerry Watts and the Diogenes of Midtown Jerry Watts. These puns are about as funny as jokes about persons with no arms and legs or babies with spears in their heads. Sure, at first you laugh, but then you feel guilty and dirty, even after you’ve taken a few cold showers.”

When asked whether he had burned out or faded away, in a typical example of his lack of literary discipline, Lau attempted to quote both Peter Tosh and Bon Jovi at the same time in what he thought was a hilarious joke. “I’m a cowboy on a steel horse I ride, and I’m wanted dread or alive. Look I was just trying to make a little money to pay down my tab at O’Reilly’s. And yeah, it is kind of fun to slander good honest people; it makes me feel like a right-wing media commentator. But I can’t stop now, after all the shaming I did of how our boss, Advocate ‘editor at-large’ James Hoff, only paid us with his unused food stamps for writing for the paper, we’ve finally gotten a raise! In addition to our $50 dollars a month, I now get a Papa John’s pizza coupon book that James only made me pay $25 for! I can’t tell you how many half-eaten extra-large meat-lovers there are at Mark Schiebe’s apartment right now. And I’m not even talking about the pizzas!”

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As El Salvador transitions from decades of conser- vative rule to the administration of leftist President Mauricio Funes, the country faces an international showdown triggered by a restrictive free-trade agree- ment between the United States and Central Ameri- ca. Canada’s Pacific Rim Mining Corporation is suing the government for its refusal to allow it to mine gold in El Salvador’s rural north. If Pacific Rim succeeds in securing the $100 million settlement it seeks, a trou- bling precedent would be set. At stake is a question that affects all nations: Can private interests trump national sovereignty under international law?
Pacific Rim initiated arbitration proceedings against El Salvador with the World Bank’s International Cen- ter for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) on April 30, 2009. The corporation argues that El Salva- dor violated investment rules in the US-Dominican Republic Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) which is confusing on its face, seeing as Canada is not a party to the accord. (Pac Rim fun- neled the lawsuit through a US subsidiary.)
Company officials charge that the government has violated their “investor rights” by refusing to approve an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) submit- ted by the company. Without this approval, Pacific Rim cannot obtain a mining permit.
The company insists that its operations pose no threat whatsoever to El Salvador’s ecological stabil- ity and public health, but a wide array of community leaders, activists, and environmental experts disagree. They contend that Pacific Rim’s assessment offers little evidence supporting the company’s “green min- ing” claims, and serves as a smokescreen to obscure the adverse socioeconomic impacts gold mining is likely to produce in the small, densely populated na- tion. These social movements contend that it’s Pacific Rim that should be sued. Says Rodolfo Calles of the anti-mining activist group Mesa Frente a la Minería Metálica: Pacific Rim and other “extractive compa- nies in question have violated national laws, caused environmental damage, provoked economic losses, generated conflicts among communities, corrupted government officials, and offended religious leaders.”
Thus far, El Salvador’s movement against precious- metal mining in El Salvador has succeeded in com- pelling the government to fight Pacific Rim’s strong-
arming. But questions remain concerning Funes’s resolve to stand defiant in the face of international pressure. These concerns have grown in recent weeks following a spate of murder and violence directed at anti-mining activists.
This wave of intimidation began with the murder of Marcelo Rivera, a teacher, community leader, and political activist involved in the anti-mining fight. Ri- vera, who went missing on June 18, was discovered weeks later in a remote section of Cabanas depart- ment. An autopsy revealed that he had been tortured extensively before his windpipe was crushed, and his body dumped in an unused well. Activists continue to challenge Salvadorian authorities, who claim that this was an ordinary crime committed by members of a Salvadoran gang, to investigate what they say was a politically motivated assassination.
Since then, local media have been targets of sab- otage and threats for their coverage of the Pac Rim lawsuit. Information Radio Victoria discovered its transmitter stolen shortly after reporting on the min- ing case, and at least four journalists covering the is- sue have received death threats. Bay Area IndyMedia reports that the journalists were “threatened to be the ‘next on the list’” and would fall victim to those who “‘also spoke in San Isidro,’ making a clear reference to the link between these events and the disappearance and murder of…Marcelo Rivera.’”
Violence has also been directed at the Catholic Church, which has stood as a staunch ally of anti- mining activists throughout the dispute. A colleague of Rivera’s, Father Luis Quintanilla—himself a fre- quent target recently of threats against his life—was stopped by four hooded men on a road in Cabanas and forced from his vehicle. The priest threw himself down a gully to avoid what many believe would have been his murder. Quintanilla later released a copy of the text message he received shortly before the inci- dent. It reads, “Extermination…you motherfuckers better stop stirring people up if you don’t want to end up like Marcelo. We’ve got eyes on you.”
background
Pacific Rim began exploring the country’s potential for gold exploitation nearly seven years ago, chart- ing a vein system that covers considerable portions of El Salvador’s northern reaches. It commenced op-
erations at what it claims was the invitation of the government’s Ministries of the Economy and the Environment, which issued exploration permits in 2002 under the neoliberal administration of Fran- cisco Flores. Since then, the corporation has identi- fied some twenty-five sites for gold extraction across seven national departments, and invested upwards of $80 million.
While global corporations haven’t historically seen El Salvador as promising territory for mining, Pacific Rim significantly extended its base of operations as gold prices exploded on the international market. With the value of gold nearly tripling since 2001, the company assured shareholders that it was discovering “bonanza gold grades” and making “exciting gold dis- coveries” that would expand opportunities for future investment and high returns.
Meanwhile, Salvadorian environmentalists, civil society organizations, and others in the country grew increasingly alarmed about the potentially adverse ef- fects of gold mining. Critics point to the threat of wa- ter and soil contamination from chemical residue in the wake of mining operations (miners use cyanide- laced water to extract gold from subterranean rock, which, experts contend, makes its way back to local reserves tapped for drinking). That all of Pacific Rim’s sites are located along the country’s longest river, the Rio Lempa, has environmentalists especially wor- ried. The river’s basin extends nearly halfway across the country, supplying much of the nation’s drinking water. Moreover, the Lempa runs through Guate- mala and Honduras as well, increasing the likelihood that contaminated water could spread throughout the region.
Pacific Rim denies that these concerns are real. The corporation claims that it would detoxify any water used for mining, leaving local water sources cleaner than they were previously. “You could basically stick a cup in the water and drink it,” Pacific Rim’s Barbara Henderson recently boasted to the Miami Herald. “We’ve met all conditions under the law. So there’s no basis for the government of El Salvador to fail to make a decision [about issuing mining permits].”
Not so, say experts. Robert Moran, an independent, nonpartisan hydrogeologist, undertook a technical review of Pacific Rim’s environmental assessment in 2005, concluding that “it would not be acceptable
to regulatory agencies in most developed countries.” In his final report, Moran notes that “The public EIA review process is clearly lacking in openness and transparency… only one printed copy of the EIA is available…within all of El Salvador. The public must review and submit written comments on this 1,400 page document within a period of ten working days. No photocopies or photos of any part of this docu- ment may be made.” More- over, Moran points out that the EIA completely ignores “many of the environmen- tal impacts encountered at similar gold mining sites,” and voiced concerns about the fact that “the signifi- cant uncertainty of [its] seismic risk calculations” and a number of other is- sues were presented in the document in English only.
Page —GC Advocate—September 009
Local activists Fight back
These concerns were met with popular unrest. La Mesa Nacional Frente a la Minería Metálica in El Salvador (the National Working Group against Mining in El Salva- dor), an umbrella organization for coordinating nationwide action, has led the charge. Beginning with local organizing and small-scale protests, La Mesa and its partner organiza- tions have managed to make min- ing a central issue in Salvadoran politics. Activists scored an early victory when Pacific Rim agreed to freeze its operations at the compa- ny’s Santa Rita mining site in 2006, while negotiating a resolution to its clash with local anti-mining organi- zations. Though the meeting failed to reach a mutually acceptable com- promise, local organizers success- fully used the gathering to attract the attention of the media and the government, and garner broad national and interna- tional support.
Momentum behind the movement increased fur- ther when the Conference of Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church issued a statement of opposition to mining operations in El Salvador. In addition to enumerating the adverse consequences of mining to El Salvador’s people and environment, the bishops castigated Pacific Rim’s economic justification for gold mining operations. “No material advantage,” the bishops warned, “can be compared with the value of human life.”
The combined effect of local resistance and reli- gious backing had a decisive impact on government decision-making. With public opinion polls showing a clear majority in opposition to gold mining, and despite its initial enthusiasm for Pacific Rim’s min- ing proposals, officials from the ruling conservative ARENA party refused to issue the company permits to begin extracting gold from underground deposits. In essence, the government ceased to acknowledge Pacific Rim’s existence. Repeated complaints and ap- plications for permits were filed by the company with government ministries, and promptly ignored.
Since then, La Mesa has continued to push the en- velope. Not trusting that government silence on the permits issue equaled support for their cause, the organization presented a bill for congressional con- sideration in 2006 that would ban all precious met- al mining in El Salvador. While the bill was almost immediately withdrawn from deliberation, it wasn’t forgotten. Shortly after Funes took power, the Frente Fabarundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (a left- wing opposition party, better known as the FMLN) resurrected the proposed legislation and presented it to El Salvador’s National Assembly for a vote. Accord- ing to the Latin American Herald Tribune, the pro- posed law would grant Pacific Rim and other foreign companies six months to discontinue operations be- fore being ordered to leave the country.
Legal action
With its prospects for obtaining permits grinding to a standstill within the government bureaucracy, and opposition forces gaining the advantage locally, Pacific Rim filed a notice of intent in December 2008 to bring El Salvador before an international arbitra- tion tribunal to resolve the dispute. Specifically, the company claimed that El Salvador violated the spirit of nondiscrimination enshrined in Chapter 10 of the DR- CAFTA agreement, by allowing domestic com- panies to pollute while denying the same privilege to Pacific Rim.
The agreement, which El Salvador signed in 2006, allows multinational corporations to sue governments covered by it for cash compensation when their po- tential for profit has been undermined by measures that are tantamount to expropriation. But because Canada isn’t a signatory to DR-CAFTA, Pacific Rim
isn’t technically entitled to Chapter 10 protections as it claims. Nevertheless, the corporation routed the lawsuit through the backdoor of its US-based subsid- iary Pac Rim Cayman LLC, and relied on the services of an American lobbying firm to ensure support from Capitol Hill.
Under DR-CAFTA’s Chapter 10 proceedings, par- ties to a dispute are mandated to respect a 90-day consultation period before filing their claims in court. Pacific Rim’s December filing ensured that their threatened lawsuit would coincide with El Salvador’s national election three months later. According to Burke Stansbury, an activist with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the claim was timed to affect the electoral outcome. They “either us[ed] the threat of a lawsuit as leverage or [as] a strategy to help ARENA win the election,” Stansbury told the Pacific Free Press in February.
If this was true, Pacific Rim miscalculated. Out- going president Antonio Saca remained firm in his rejection of the corporation’s demands, rendering the case a non-issue during the election. Yet Saca’s refusal to give in to corporate pressure—whether politically motivated or based on genuine concern for his country—had the effect of kicking the Pa- cific Rim can down the road for the incoming Funes administration.
On April 30, Pacific Rim filed for arbitration with the ICSID, demanding a $100 million payout for damages. “The company’s claims under CAFTA,” the company announced in a press release, “are based on the government’s breaches of international and Salvadoran law arising out of the government’s im- proper failure to finalize the permitting process as it is required to do and to respect the company’s…legal rights to develop mining activities in El Salvador.”
La Mesa’s Rodolfo Calles sees things differently. “Operating permits are not automatic; that is, the current mining law does not oblige the government to provide [permits] after having allowed exploration. Pacific Rim submitted an Environmental Impact As- sessment that did not meet environmental require- ments, and was not able to demonstrate that its min- ing projects would not pollute the environment…In our view, it is Pacific Rim that should be sued, not the Salvadoran state; It is the company that should com- pensate the country and not vice versa.”
Early indications, however, suggest that Funes will pursue a compromise solution instead of risk- ing a costly settlement. “We’re not in a position to be losing litigation. That money should be allocated to social programs,” El Salvador’s Secretary of Technol- ogy recently noted. Indeed, if the arbitration tribunal rules in Pacific Rim’s favor, El Salvador would be pro- foundly crippled by the $100 million payout. Perhaps more troubling still, the verdict would send a signal to other multinationals in Central America that the law sides with corporate interests over the protection of local populations.
Nevertheless, a negotiated settle- ment offers equally disturbing pos- sibilities. The most likely would be an amendment to existing environ- mental and mining laws, allowing foreign corporations easier access to El Salvador’s natural resource deposits. In all likelihood, the Mesa Nacional/FMLN-sponsored anti-mining legislation would be shelved indefinitely, and oppor- tunities for peaceful resolution of local concerns increasingly fore- closed.
On top of Pacific Rim’s case, on March 16, another international mining firm added to the pressure by threatening an additional DR- CAFTA lawsuit. A joint venture of American companies, Commerce Group Corp. and San Sebastian Gold Mines, Inc. (Commerce/San- seb), filed a notice of intent to claim compensation for additional $100
million for the government’s alleged failure to renew a permit to mine gold and silver at the San Sebastian Goldmine near Santa Rosa de Lima, in the depart- ment of La Unión in El Salvador.
The prospect of mounting lawsuits has led to calls from activists demanding that El Salvador revisit the terms of its international trade agreements. “The de- mand of Pacific Rim against El Salvador recalls the need to review international treaties signed by previ- ous governments, especially CAFTA, and reverse—or at least modify—those aspects that are most harmful and violate our sovereignty.”
Hopeful signs from Washington?
The mining companies’ lawsuits—along with the vi- olent repression of recent protests in Peru—represent the latest example of failure by US trade agreements to bring prosperity and progress to the region. US policymakers, including Barack Obama, seem to ac- knowledge as much: bilateral trade agreements with Panama and Colombia continue to stall, and pressure to amend the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) continues to build.
Yet hopes that the social movement against min- ing in El Salvador would find an ally in Obama have been unrealized. Obama, who voted against the pas- sage of DR-CAFTA as a senator, spoke out passion- ately on the campaign trail against free trade agree- ments (FTAs) that privileged economic gain over the welfare of local populations under threat. And “with regards to provisions in several FTAs that give foreign investors the right to sue governments directly in for- eign tribunals,” Obama promised, “I will ensure that this right is strictly limited and will fully exempt any law or regulation written to protect public safety or promote the public interest.” As president, however, Obama has so far failed to meaningfully act on an issue he himself acknowledges desperately demands attention and change.
The president reportedly will outline a new vision of equitable trade in a major speech at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh at the end of this month. There, Obama will hopefully forge plans for a new approach to trade that would meet his goal of preventing foreign corporations from gaining “an economic advantage by destroying the environment” and amend NAFTA and possibly other FTAs to “make clear that fair laws and regulations written to protect citizens…cannot be overridden at the request of foreign investors.”
In some respects, unfortunately, it’s already too late for Salvadorans affected by Pacific Rim’s activi- ties. The failure of Funes and other likeminded “part- ners” throughout the region, like Obama, to stand up for these communities under threat, sets a regret- table precedent—that concern for corporate profit overrides that for human beings and their environ- ment—a precedent that would invest even Obama’s most eloquent rhetoric with the hollow timbre of false promises.

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Once in a while they are on public radio, even more rarely are they on public television, and none dare dream of becoming a media pariah, a la Ralph Nader. The thought of it is tantalizing, the possibility too slim. As a recent report from the Graduate Center’s Center for the Promotion of the Graduate Center puts it, "many of our professors are almost considered public intellectuals."

The most surprising finding in the report is not that none of them are actually as boring as Noam Chomsky, as smug as Stanley Fish, or as swarthy as Slavoj Zizek, but that so many of them almost are.

Indeed, the report details a plan to bring GC professors tantalizingly close to actual public intellectuals, at least in terms of their physical proximity. "The 2008-09 Public Events series on Power, in addition to attracting many extremely articulate and not-at-all insane people to the microphone during the question-and-answer period, had the happy side effect of creating photo-ops of GC professors alongside famous people, even if Photoshop enhancement was sometimes required."

Although it ended up featuring a mind-numbing number of variations on the theme of Power, the Great Issues Forum started off reasonably enough with "Economic Power," "Political Power," "Cultural Power," and "Power and Science" last fall. But since then, it has begun to generate a kind of "Great Issues Forum Bubble" with events of significantly less value being given the same publicity.

There was "Fashion and Power," which our sources tell us President Kelly required all GC Professors to attend. More recently, there was "420 and Power," which featured a group claiming to be GC students extolling the virtues of solar powered carbon-free drug use, by taking the entire audience at Proshansky Auditorium up to the roof of the Graduate Center to demonstrate the lighting of a "water-pipe" with a magnifying glass.

Against the advice of many, the program is being extended into next year, with a series of new events. "Summer Vacation and Power": a 40-hour slideshow featuring photos from the exciting lives of GC Professors; "Somnambulism and Power": featuring GC security staff discussing the dreams they have while dozing off near the entrance to the library; and "Coffee and Power": featuring a debate on the wisdom of pegging the price of Grad Center coffee to that of a subway ride.

But, proponents argue, thanks to the Great Issues Forum, certain Professors have been given once in a lifetime opportunities. For example, Neil Smith and David Harvey, the Hall and Oates of Marxist Geography, were both given the chance to sit on stage with Naomi Klein, a journalist of half their intelligence, but twice their sex appeal.

Critics argue, however, that some Professors have stumbled when given the opportunity to address audiences larger than their seminars or the readership for their books, roughly 20 people in either case.

Only one GC scholar who is ready for his close-up has shunned the media spotlight, Professor Jerry Watts. When he won the Nobel Prize for Blackness, Professor Watts did the only thing he could to keep it real: he declined the award, even though it would in all likelihood have bumped his books on Ellison and Barak up the sales ranks on Amazon.com, from 2,112,847th and 2,026,641st to probably somewhere in the top 1 million. But Professor Watts is already a public intellectual in another since. As the unofficial Diogenes of Midtown, he can often be seen trading lectures on "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual" for cigarettes in front of the Grad Center. 

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The Shipment. Produced by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street.

A few days before Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment opened at The Kitchen last month, the playwright/director’s Facebook status read, “Young Jean needs to figure out how to get black audiences to The Shipment.” Five days later, she wrote “Young Jean can comp you to The Shipment if you are black,” and gave instructions on how to contact her. A few days after that, she updated, “Young Jean wants to put reserved signs that say ‘Black Person’ in prime locations in the theatre where we put critics and presenters. Too much?”

Before long, enthusiastic reviews appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others, and Lee’s status updates became warnings to friends and fans that the show was quickly selling out, then that it had sold out, then that there was going to be a one-week extension, and finally that the extension had sold out as well. I attended the night before the show closed and it was clear that the buzz had spread. Lincoln Center Artistic Director Andre Bishop sat in the row in front of me; Stephen Sondheim sat in the row in front of Bishop. The rest of the audience was made up largely of the usual Kitchen hipsters (whites and Asians with geeky glasses, skinny jeans, artfully messy hair, and the occasional ironic facial hair), but sprinkled with some older Philharmonic types and even a few of the sought-after African Americans. (Reports from previous performances indicate that the The Shipment enjoyed varied and diverse audiences over the course of its run.)

Why this focus on audience demographics? As with her previous plays, Lee began by asking herself what was the least comfortable idea for a show she could think of. What sounded like a terrible idea? What did she absolutely not want to do? When she has asked herself these questions previously, the results have included Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, an exploration of Asian-American identity politics, and Church, an on-stage Christian church service incorporating song, dance, and sermon while confronting issues of faith and doubt, individuality and community. When Lee asked herself what sounded like a terrible idea this time around, she decided that a play about African-American identity politics, written by a Korean-American woman, was probably a bad idea. So she started writing.

The result is angry, funny, probing, and deeply uncomfortable. This discomfort is very much the heart of The Shipment. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Lee observed that audiences began “laughing more enthusiastically [after] the positive reviews [were] published, and it’s so painful sometimes. I know that’s unfair of me because I wrote it to be funny, and the performers are funny, but I feel there is so much in there that people should not laugh at. Part of me would rather have them sit there in silent uneasiness.” Indeed, on the night I attended, there seemed to be some disagreement in the audience as to which bits were funny, and where it was appropriate to laugh. Mr. Sondheim, for example, laughed more than anyone else in the audience, particularly at any moment that crossed the lines of political correctness to stage stereotypes of blacks and whites alike. Others never recovered from the slap they received early on when a comedian character veered from comedic confrontation to undisguised hurt and anger, to scatology, and back again. Parts of this scene were Def Comedy-like, and received Def Comedy-like laughs, but most of the audience was smart enough to know when the guy on stage was attacking them and meaning it. So they got quiet.

The Shipment opens with two wordless sequences that evoke minstrelsy and hip hop, respectively, and are stylized in such a way to indicate that the show will be about the performance of blackness, the representation of blackness, and the perception of blackness. These high-energy sequences also serve to set the stage for the comedian scene already mentioned.

The second half of the play is made up of two acts that could stand on their own as fully playable short pieces, though they would of course lose the context of the larger show, which provides much of the thematic and political complexity. First comes the story of a young black man who dreams of being a rap star but can’t afford to enter a hip hop festival or contest so gets talked into dealing drugs by his nefarious friend. In prison, he discovers Islam and finds his rapping voice. Once he achieves fame and fortune, he finds them both hollow. That it is so easy to imagine this plot as a Hollywood film is the whole point of the sequence. The characters are played in an intentionally stilted, even wooden style that points to the creakiness of the stereotypes presented.

The final scene finds the all-black cast playing white characters, though this is not immediately evident. Pesceveganism, late twenties crises, parlor games, body-image issues, and cocaine are just a few of the elements that make up this eviscerating lampoon of the anxieties of middle-class, educated whites who are unable or unwilling to see the extent of their own privilege and self-indulgence. Several of the elements of this scene recall things that were said by the comedian as he made fun of white people.

No one moment in, or aspect of, The Shipment can be singled out as exemplary of the entire project. Lee is intent on confronting her audience, and herself, with aspects of themselves and their culture that make them uncomfortable, but she is also interested in exploring how these same tensions are interwoven into the material we consume for entertainment. Finally, she acknowledges that she and her audience also want to be entertained, and that this kind of material runs the risk of encouraging self-satisfaction from those who like to congratulate themselves for their liberalism, their open-mindedness, and their occasional feelings of guilt.

I have two quibbles with this production, though both might be considered frivolous. The first is that the cast, while listed in the program, are in no way linked to the roles that they play. In other words, unless you have access to press photos, there is no way to check your program for the name of an actor who made a particularly strong impression. There are reasons for this: the play is complex, and the actors play multiple characters, creating a logistical obstacle. Also, the show is an “ensemble piece,” with no one actor foregrounded, the kind of show that often just lists the performers alphabetically in order to avoid placing them in any kind of hierarchy. (In this case, they seem to be listed in order of appearance, which might be useful if it were noted.)

My objection to this admittedly minor slight, is that this is very much a performer-driven play. It’s clear that Lee is a major talent as both actor and director, but her success relies on collaboration with a skilled, disciplined, talented, and enthusiastic cast that also had considerable input into the structuring of the play itself. The performances navigate levels of stylization and realism, empathy and alienation, that go a long way towards making the play as complex as it is. For a show written and directed by Young Jean Lee, and produced by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company to make it difficult to identify any one actor reinforces the genius/auteur mythology that dominates so much theatrical analysis. (For the record, I was particularly impressed by Mikeah Ernest Jennings, whose offbeat performance was simultaneously charming and distancing, familiar and strange. In a show largely about stereotypes, Jennings created characters that were recognizable as such, and that still felt like something I had never seen before.)

Another possible objection to the show is that, in pedagogical terms, it is a lecture, not a seminar. Lee and her team maintain absolute control over everything except for the degree to which the audience might laugh or not. The production opened and closed with a dramatic, absolute blackout, a clear signal that it was time to pay attention and listen to what Lee had to say. When a show is designed in no small part to attack the assumptions of the audience, it might be argued that the audience should have some opportunity to defend themselves. A playwright whose work occasionally screams “Fuck you!” might consider giving her fans a chance to scream it right back. Lee’s impressive degree of control over her production is a part of why I enjoyed it, but it also makes the experience of watching the show a rather passive one, despite all the techniques she employs to keep us off balance and alert.

Regardless of these quibbles, which should be read more as queries than complaints, Young Jean Lee has further solidified her place as one of the most notable theatre artists working today. The Shipment is a remarkable piece of work that made me squirm and laugh in equal measure. A first-rate cast and design team, a smart and challenging text, and Lee’s ongoing experiment to challenge herself in uncomfortable ways have clearly paid off. Lee’s next project is an adaptation of King Lear that, as she writes in her blog, she wants “to make a hard-core, old-school, Aristotelian pity-and-fear tragedy that will work on today’s jaded audiences in the way I like to imagine the Greek tragedies worked on the Greeks.” Sounds like a terrible idea; it’ll probably be great. 

The Shipment (closed), written and directed by Young Jean Lee. Performed by Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Douglas Scott Streater, Prentice Onayemi, Okierete Onaodowan, and Amelia Workman. With Foteos Macrides and Joseph John. Sets by David Evans Morris. Costumes by Roxana Ramseur. Lights by Mark Barton. Sound by Matthew Tierney. Choreography by Faye Driscoll. Fight Choreography by Jason McDowell Green. Produced by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street. January 8 -31, 2009.

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Battle in Seattle, directed by Stuart Townsend.

Battle in Seattle has gained more press exposure than the average independent film due to its controversial setting: the riots and demonstrations attended by over 50,000 at the WTO conference in Seattle, Washington in 1999. And then there is the film’s talk show-hopping Hollywood star, Cherlize Theron. The talented actress, who surpassed expectations by playing an overweight killer in Monster (2003), has a lot less star making material to work with in this disappointing directorial debut of her Irish fiancé Stuart Townsend. In truth, Battle in Seattle follows so many narratives, it is difficult to say that Theron is the star, even if her name is its publicized feature. By following the trials and tribulations of four racially diverse young activists, a television reporter, a cop, his pregnant wife, and the mayor of Seattle, the narrative strives to be Altmanesque, but ultimately provides little more than a collage of under-developed stereo-types. In truth, though the film’s production company, Insight is independent, Battle in Seattle does not appear to subscribe to the rules of such categorization. The film takes no risks in casting unknowns (and instead casts many minor players of the major world) and its plot follows the classical Hollywood paradigm complete with an emotional score and a happy ending.

Townsend makes a number of nods to Altman, but his primary inspiration is another political film of a protest turned riot, Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969). Medium Cool follows the story of a television journalist obsessed with capturing the real story of change in Chicago despite being dismissed by his station. Only weeks before the DNC he develops a relationship with a West Virginian mother and her 12-year-old son. The narrative thus comments on the state of media and the interdependent web of the personal and political, while its editing and cinematography further blur documentary and fiction. This attempt at transgressing fiction and non-fiction is Townsend’s most overt reference to Medium Cool; actors are placed within the riots by splicing documentary news footage when an establishing shot is needed. This is seemingly infantile when compared with Wexler’s approach, for rather than researching footage of police brutality at the DNC in 1968, Wexler anticipated the protests and wrote his script to include it. By physically placing his fictional characters within the unrest, Wexler questioned the nature of cinema. Townsend rather questions the nature of originality, or lack there of, while celebrating predictability. While Wexler captures the beat of 1968 in the year itself, Townsend reconstructs what he only witnessed via the web, almost a decade later. Hence, though Townsend is emulating the immediacy and realism of Medium Cool, the montage looks as if he badly cut and pasted videos. Furthermore, the artificial dialogue and the flat characters contrast greatly with the actual footage of the riot. Thus the film’s Hollywood tendencies are enhanced and the realism of Medium Cool or The Battle of Algiers, for instance, is never even approximated.

Though no reference is made to the political circumstances of 2008, the film premieres roughly a month after the RNC where police again used teargas on peaceful protestors. Similarities between the need for action in 1999 and 2008 abound and one might assume that Townsend hopes to inspire current activism with the stories of fictional heroes clad in t-shirts and scruffy jeans. Jay (Martin Henderson), appropriately outfitted with beard and scarf, serves as the predictably white male protagonist, mastermind behind all of the protest organization. His blossoming romance with Lou (Michèle Rodriguez) struggles to keep our attention, and almost wins through the sheer humor of trite sexist dialogue. Rodriguez, who started her career as almost butch in Girlfight (2000), continues to play feisty and tough, though now with a sweet loving feminine touch. She relaxes her fist throwing anarchist tendencies when sobbing in her jail cell, and then holds hands through the bars with Jay as he tells her to “stop crying like a girl.” (How serendipitous that within all the chaos of the 1999 Seattle WTO shut down, our lovers’ would land next to each other in the jailhouse!) Unfortunately, if Jay and Lou do inspire you to activism, it will not be in hopes of romance. The romance plot does not even seem to interest the actors, and adds nothing to their “Let’s go out and get those motherfuckers!” (direct quote) ideology.

The other activist to note is the only African-American one, Django (Outkast’s André 3000). Django, like most black supporting roles, and most are supporting, offers comic relief and optimism for the white characters and audience. Django can be facing the teargas, at the end of a police baton, or with others bleeding in jail, but will always, as a good performer, wear a big smile. Although Jay’s back story is the death of his activist brother who was chained to a tree and then cut down, Django’s past is only referred to when he recounts a bedtime story his grandpa told him about turtles. One must suppose that this sweet story is what inspired Django’s love of turtles and subsequent fierce opposition against the turtle-killing fishing industry. Although Outkast deemed 2002’s live action Scooby-Doo flick worthy of a soundtrack song, the only hint of André 3000’s musicality in Battle in Seattle is an a capella rendition of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

If the actors appear as cardboard cutouts of radicals and anarchists, one should note that Townsend’s search for accuracy did include consultation with David Solnit, a real Direct Action Network organizer who was part of the WTO protests in 1999. Solnit tried to correct the script, and evidently did alter large sections despite the director’s resistance. He explains in Yes Magazine that along with other activists, he succeeded with a pressure campaign, “applying tactics (they) often used in anti-corporate campaigns,” but were consulted “too late to change the film’s basic narrative.” Alas, one may hope that perhaps with more time, Solnit and friends could have corrected not only the stereotypes of activists but also the consistently banal dialogue, and what becomes an obstacle course of characters. Other veteran WTO-protest participants who do not agree with the film’s portrayal of Seattle in 1999 have bonded together on a website, therealbattleinseattle.org, which follows Solnit’s conclusion to settle for the mediocre. Their website statement: “It’s a huge improvement over corporate media lies, but won’t tell the motives or thinking of the people who shutdown the WTO.” Although one can easily agree that the Direct Action Network characters are superficial constructions, the film primarily affronts the activist community with its weak script piped full of lofty meaningless inspirational statements and a badly directed cast that was then later, badly edited.

Although the film inserts footage of the violence committed to protesters by cops, police are in no way demonized. In fact Dale (Woody Harrelson), a low level mob-control cop might be the most fully developed character. Dale’s pregnant wife, Ella (Charlize Theron), is beaten and miscarries when she passes through an unavoidable riot on her way home. Dale’s sadness turns to rage when he is forced to return to work after learning the unfortunate news, and this fuels his violent attack on our peaceful protagonist, Jay. Dale alone chases Jay through Seattle’s side streets and beats him to a pulp at a church before he handcuffs his narrow wrists. But because this climatic confrontation between antagonist (cop=bad guy) and protagonist (Jay=organizer=good-guy) must be resolved, the film allows for major character development in a jail make-up chat where Dale visits Jay and says that he is sorry several times. Jay then tells him that it is okay, “You were just doing your job.” This is a surprising turn around for the audience who has only twenty minutes before watched the two characters clash violently in the street. Theoretically, the miscarriage of Dale’s wife and his apology would allow the audience to sympathize with his character despite his crime. Yet the opacity of Dale’s attack and the apology leave the viewer apathetic. This is part of larger general disinterest, for the audience cannot relate to any of the stereotypes presented in Battle at Seattle, whether it be cop or radical.

Townsend (whose career highlights include a guest role as a pastry chef on Will & Grace) seems to have filmed Battle in Seattle with the narrowly didactic purpose of educating those who might have forgotten the historic clash between activists and police, vandalism and media that took place in 1999. He thus begins and ends the film as a very expensive power-point presentation, with charts dissolving into more charts, arrows pointing to dates, and photos cut into smaller photos. Despite Townsend’s aim to win a place in classrooms, his over-wrought style becomes less educational than clunky and confusing, and though the film aims to be objective in capturing both the activist and the cop perspective, the bookends of data wash the film in a liberal preachy-ness. If you do consider yourself to be politically liberal, Battle in Seattle is another film that will shame you, by painting leftist politics as the simplistic wet dreams of the Hollywood industry. Indeed, in an act of self-respect one is tempted to deny affiliation with the fatigue-jacket backpack crew already described. If this situation befalls you, I recommend returning to earlier times of American activism by rediscovering Medium Cool, a film that is ground-breaking and relevant forty years after its release. The riots of Medium Cool are frightening in their violence, and compelling in their place within a fictional narrative; Battle in Seattle is at its best a watered-down tribute to this film of ‘69 that still exposes the reality of protest and media in the United States.

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There was a time, not so long ago, when seeing every film of any kind of acclaim was for me an absolute necessity. Timeout, The Village Voice and the Film Forum website would be thoroughly and periodically perused to insure that no Akira Kurosawa series or zombie film festival were missed. Lists were drawn up, movies checked off as seen. Films possessed the potential of a revelation, magically adding new insight to the mind or a fresh tone to perception – an unconscious revelation, usually, seeping into the brain along the waves of projected light bathing the theater. This even actually seemed to happen on occasion, as when I exited Richard Linklater’s A Waking Life. An hour and a half of watery rotoscopic animation left me as wobbly on my feet as the dreamy, rambling philosophic narrative left me in my thoughts.

And then it stopped. The gleam, the sheer potential, vanished, and movies began to feel as flat as the screen upon which they were projected. Now I cannot remember the last time I did not check my watch during a film. This I did while recently watching Thirty Days of Night and Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, both of which commanded my attention more than anything I have seen for quite some time. Even so, the watch was checked and pretty early on in each. Perhaps it is the passivity of the movie watching experience, the lack of control over the speed of the narrative and over the images presented; perhaps it is the distance from the screen, from the overpaid actors on it, from the people who made the film and wrote it, from the editors and producers who tinkered with it. Perhaps I’m simply getting old, my capacity for feeling hope or potential diminishing. Whatever the case, I go to the movies now only to escape, and seldom get even that.

Okkervil River

The recent work of two rock bands, however, has lightened this gloom (which for me had extended far beyond the theater) by thoroughly absorbing the very medium that seemed its clearest source. La Strada and Okkervil River both confront the disenchantment of age through cinematic tropes and use them to restore a sense of meaning to their art as much for themselves as the listener. The relatively more human scale of the “indie” band amplifies this identification of audience and performer, as does the introspectiveness of the experience of listening in one’s room as opposed to gawking at a screen. Both bands craft suggestive, livable narratives in their lyrics, La Strada heightening them with cinematic atmosphere and Okkervil River maintaining them with a knowing irony that somehow makes the indulgence of these fictions all the more urgent and possible.

Whatever that fundamental mood-setting quality is that underlies all soundtracks, preparing the listener to feel as well as watch the story, also underlies most of La Strada’s songs. “Mountain Song,” like many of their tracks, opens with a soft overture of strings that directs the attention with a sense of mystery, of a plot to be unfolded, before plunging into a noirish soundscape of accordion and drum grounded on a pop bass riff. It is a moment perhaps best described in terms of the image it never fails to call to my mind: the turned-up coat collar of a stranger stepping out to a street pelted by winter rain. As they often do in La Strada’s music, the choruses and bridges ascend with orchestral sweep and anthemic vocalizing, which bolster the imagery of birds, skies, and ascent from trouble that pervade the lyrics. Their songs return from such heights enriched in tone, the verse melody newly layered with warm strings and multiple vocals. A palpable feeling of narrative progress is thus produced by the very song structure, by the drama of the musical changes as well as by the cinematic atmospherics. Such effects derive in part from the influence on co-songwriter Devon Press of film scorers Ennio Morricone (of spaghetti western fame) and Nino Rota, who in addition to scoring The Godfather films worked much with Federico Fellini – whose own movie La Strada may even supply the band its name. The vocals of lead-singer, co-songwriter, and accordion player James Craft at times highlight the music’s theatricality: on “Shapes In The Sky,” he matches each word of the chorus with each note of the stately melody underlying it, a delivery that evokes the pleasurable artifice of a Broadway musical but without at all sinking into contrivance. La Strada’s seven members – three string players, a drummer, and several multi-instrumentalists on guitars and keys including the lead vocalist – produce a big, big Americana sound flavored with French and Balkan influences, as well as pop and indie echoes of the Beatles, PJ Harvey, REM, Beirut, and Sufjan Stevens. This rock edge and folk earnestness renders the melodrama entirely believable.

La Strada’s strongly Romantic lyrics deal frequently with a struggle for self-definition and purpose in the face of deferred dreams, failed relationships, and general confusion, stories that are personal but told in starkly mythic and sometimes surreal terms. On “Mountain Song,” the obstacles that freeze the spirit in its ascent toward self-determination are cast in symbols spare enough to suggest an infinite variety of internal and external conflict, as when Craft sings, “Some were born in fire others in snow / When they get together look out below.” The opposition is resolved when the speaker looks upward to where “the horses stood ready in the sky / the yellow has grown bright again,” a liberating image of imaginative apocalypse juxtaposed with a natural (if cryptic) one of rejuvenated perception.

As direct and simple as the narrative logic of the songs may be, the spare symbolism and occasional strange turns of phrase deepen the lyrics, making them at once more mysterious and more available to personal interpretation. Near the beginning of live show centerpiece “Starling,” Craft neatly captures a state of dejected alienation, singing, “The sky / doesn’t make / sense anymore. / You’re falling / down down down / Through the sky door.” Such idiosyncratic phrases like “sky door” enrich the lyrics with the surreal, here effectively emphasizing the vertigo that is the subject of the lines. But it is the clarity and strength of Craft’s voice, the powerful choral accompaniments by other band members, and the undeniable uplift of the music as it builds towards rapid flights of strings and guitar that justifies the lyrical turn at song’s end: “starling is flying . . . yeah we’ve fallen down / but we get up again / get up again.” The uplift here is not merely persuasive, but actually felt. While the Brooklyn band, less than a year old, has yet to put out an album, their live shows are frequent and not to be missed, especially at the relatively intimate venues they are playing at this stage in their career (tracks and show schedule available at http://www.myspace.com/lastradanyc).

Austin-based Okkervil River has been around a bit longer than La Strada and released their fifth album in August. The Stage Names is a tour de force of perfect country rock landing somewhere between the Rolling Stones and Wilco, a mournful literary roadhouse of earnest meta-pop. The liner notes come off as a small book or magazine short story, the lyrics laid out in neat paragraphs with accompanying photos that sometimes elucidate the enigmatic and interweaving plots of the songs (we find that the unexplained “Red Lion” mentioned in one song is the Red Lion Hotel pictured a few pages later for instance). The main narrative that emerges concerns a rocker, or someone who aspires or aspired to be one (it’s not always clear which), both living and running aground on rock n’ roll stereotypes. “A Girl In Port” sweetly deconstructs the rock Lothario on tour while perhaps only offering a more seductively sensitive reincarnation: “Let fall your shoes. Let fall your shirt,” lead-singer Will Sheff begins softly, “I’m not the ladykilling sort enough to hurt a girl in port” (enough may be the key word here). Marie – catalogued as just one of many girls in port – reappears a song later as his “bride stripped bare since ’98,” deflating his rock illusions by reminding him of his age, “which is 37, by the way, and not 28.” This bride could very well be the band, which began that year, as well as whatever lovers had been neglected or lost for the sake of it. The album explores the failure to connect to people, music, and audience through a medium suffused with self-destructive clichés, predictable narratives, and unrealizable cinematic dreams. “Our silver-screen affair,” sings Sheff again as Marie, “it weighs less to me than air.” As the album title suggests, the subject here is the stage name, the empty construction of the rock artist, and whether it can be filled with anything resembling an actual human being.

Okkervil River paradoxically affirm their art’s potential through as heartfelt a use of self-conscious irony as I am aware of in rock. The cliché is realized as such only to clarify its value and validate its use at a more believable level of self-awareness. “Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe” begins with the sad impenetrability of real life, Sheff singing, “It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax. No more new territory, so pull away the IMAX.” The speaker in the song is abandoned or past his prime, Sheff again noting the cruel disjuncture from cinematic expectations: “No fade in: film begins on a kid in the big city. And no cut to a costly parade that’s for him only.” But despite the negations the lines do in fact “fade in” and “cut to” as mental images brought forth by the words and emphasized by the way Sheff’s melody breaks the lines at “film” and “to.” From muted guitar plucking, the music swells with guitar and piano as Sheff’s vocals surge to a despairing yell that dignifies the pitiable desire for such saving fictions, uniting singer and audience in the very same struggle for aesthetic uplift.

It may be little better than arbitrary to privilege music over film; it may be just as bald-faced a fiction to identify with a rocker on stage, however small, as it is with a face on the big screen; but in the end it is the individual feeling of belief that matters, and La Strada and Okkervil River preserve that feeling in the face of a great deal of cynicism, both for themselves and for the individual writing.

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