What? Africans have televisions??? Why they'll be making music videos next!

An interesting article on the arrival of MTV to Africa trips up, unfortunately, on the some glib misinformation about African modernity. An otherwise OK article at one point comments:

"In much of the continent, televisions are only slightly more common than ice rinks. Americans own one television set for every one person, according to United Nations surveys. Africans own one for every 16. Pay television, MTV's platform here, is the staple of barrooms here,not the one-or-two room block urban homes where millions of young Africans live."

This is a snide comment that perpetuates cliches. Firstly, I doubt the ice rink comparison is anywhere close. Even if Africans own 1/16th of the TV sets America owns, I am quite sure that that is many millions more TVs than ice rinks. I'd be surprised if there were more than one or two ice rinks in Africa.

Besides, Africa doesn't have winter, so winter sports are obviously lacking in Africa. Whereas Africans do have eyeballs (and television stations). The comparison is absurd and tinged with racial offensiveness a la The Gods Must Be Crazy and Cool Runnings, movies about silly black people who are dumbstruck by cold weather and soda pop.

And what, pray tell, is wrong with watching television socially in a bar (which American sports fans do all the time) or outdoors gathered in front of a small shop (as I've seen in Zanzibar)? Does TV not count if it is a social experience? Isn't the point to make money by selling advertisements? So the more viewers the better. The notion that MTV might have to, god forbid, adapt its approach to the cultural and economic realities of Africa if it wants to succeed, ought to be a no-brainer. Everywhere else in the world it gets called cultural difference. In Africa it gets called backwardness.

[Thanks KCH for sending this my way.]

1/3rd life crisis

Strangers wondering about that guy on the fifteenth floor dancing around his living room idiotically with his dog in his arms ought to know that academics, apparently, hit mid-life crisis a decade earlier than most folks. The pressure to stay hip, and the fleeting ability to pass as one of your students, combine to turn many a junior faculty on to such adolescence-prolonging projects like my current one: (punk) rock in the 1970s and early 1980s, which has led me, via the able curating of Anthony Mark-Happel, to spend the last week or so re-viewing the ouvre of Allan Moyle, or at least that portion of his ouvre available via Netflix.

I watched a lot of these movies back when I could care less about directors, and promptly forgot them, so it was a real blast from the past to realize I had actually seen Empire Records (1995) and Pump up the Volume (1990). Via Mark-Happel's able film archive column in Impose magazine, I was also able to connect with an earlier film, Times Square (1980) that was before my time. Man is this a film, and not just for the fact that it has not one but two female lead characters, neither of whom has 10 things she hates about a boy or is writing a Princess diary about some hunk or any of the other idiotic roles teen queens are reduced to these days.

Moyle may not be a particularily great director (with the possible exception of Times Square, if only for the scene in which the two girls break into a radio studio and force the DJ to broadcast them live singing a fuck-you to one of the girl's father). But they are so different, and possibly better, than the John Hughes films that so dominate contemporary nostalgia for the 1980s teen flick. I mean, those films are important too, but I have to admit that I always found the teen characters in those films to be inexplicable and slightly embarassing, and their rebellion maddeningly inarticulate. I always ended up identifying with the adults in these films who had to put up with such twerps.

Maybe the tables are turned now, but I think Moyle's films are a bit different, in particular, in their more authentic connection to music and better understanding of what music actually means when you are an adolescent. That at least is the best explanation for why I have been listening to Kirstie MacColl on non-stop rotation today, and my puppy is getting a bit scared of my erratic behavior.

Media diet

Went to see Sith and was amazed that George Lucas is such an inept director that he couldn't make me care about the death of Padme (Natalie Portman), a character whose story arc I have followed over three feature-length movies. I couldn't even remember the character's name just now and had to look it up on IMDB.

A name I did fortunately remember is Kirsty Maccoll, who sang with the Pogues on the unforgettable track 'Fairytale of New York.' I spotted her greatest hits CD in a bin at Rebel, Rebel, where I was on an errand to request a certain Rufus Wainwright poster for a friend. (After telling me no, the clerk eyed me suspiciously and added: "Now don't go breaking the window after hours trying to get it!")

So I am now enjoying the most luscious slice of 60s girl-group pop as processed through the hyperactive 1980s imagination of a girl from Croydon. According to the liner notes, Maccoll (who unfortunately died a couple years back), recorded songs with Tracy Ullman. Ullman performed 60s girl-group style pop? There is a God!

[Books in: J. Afary and K.B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Comes with blurbs from both Fredric Jameson and Mark Lilla, an academic odd couple if ever I saw one.

Books being read:: Brett Levinson, Market and Thought. I picked this up on a whim at St. Mark's Bookshop and have been dipping into it with pleasure for a couple weeks now. Smart and accessible overviews of contemporary intellectual developments of the sort British academics typically excel at, which Levinson may be for all I know.]

The pathetic middle

In yesterday's Times, David Brooks opined that the left was "unhinged" for seeking evidence that U.S. interrogators actually had desecrated the Koran, after Newsweek retracted a story about an internal Pentagon investigation that had uncovered such abuse.

"Would it be illegal," Brooks whined, "for more people on the left to actually be happy that a story slurring Americans may turn out to be unproven? Could there be a few more liberals willing to admit that prisoners routinely lie about their treatment?"

This odious statement appears in an Op-Ed that strives to be even-handed by dishing out abuse right and left, hobbling down that inglorious middle of the road where, as Molly Ivins once said, there isn't anything but a yellow line and dead armadillos.

As if reality swooped in to rebut Brooks, today's paper has a story by Tim Golden that opens with a heart-rending account of a man tortured to death by U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan. This story gives the lie to the war apologists who assert that the recent riots against U.S. military aggression have been the manipulations of wicked mullahs who exploit the fact that muslims care more about a desecrated book than about the deaths of fellow humans. My guess is that they care about both. And, while stories like Dilawar's, who by Golden's account was a taxi driver unlucky enough to have been driving past an American base at the wrong time, are probably pretty mundane at this point, they are still the tinder for which the Koran story, true or not, was the spark.

To expect the left to be happy that not every single accusation levelled against the U.S. is true to is to expect the left to be sort of happy about the war and our country's conduct of it, sort of glad that maybe sometimes the U.S. military can kinda do the right thing, like interrogate prisoners without committing war crimes. This, when the official guidelines, as reported in books like Mark Danner's Torture and Truth, read like a "how-to commit war crimes" manual. This, when the war itself, illegal at core, is itself a crime.

This isn't moderation; this is pathetic. The left is not glad that stories like Dilawars are true, and that the Koran story very well might be. The left is glad that such stories are coming out, because they are the best chance we have for breaking the immense wall of denial that Bush's aggressions are a criminal mistake and have backfired on us and on humanity.

And guess what, David Brooks? You can't lie about your treatment when you're dead.

Boys, boys, boys

Finally saw the Larry Clark show at ICP ... the Tulsa series is the most affecting -- particularly a shot of three stark naked youths shooting up, one with an enormous, halfway hard cock lolling on his lap. The cock is almost a fourth figure in the photo, it has such presence. It is the most shocking photo in a series full of guns, beatings, needles and angst, all shot in the 1960s in Tulsa.

Can I Get A Witness, the group show at Longwood Art Gallery which just closed today I think, had some good pieces in it, particularily Tara Mateik's homage to Michael Jackson's PYT (Pretty Young Thing) in which Mateik, dressed as Peter Pan, modestly proposes himself as the object of Jackson's desiring gaze. Or, as Benjamin Genocchio puts in in the Times, "The piece has the feeling of a mock talent show -- a kind of art world "American Idol" in which young artists sing and dance for the attention of critics and curators.

The conflation of being and having evinced in Jackson's notorious identification with Peter Pan that Mateik exposes reveals in turn the same dynamic in Clark's ravenous appetite for teenage boys, which reaches a Sadean apotheosis in a tryptych of what is apparently his mother on her deathbed and two color snapshots of a shaved-head punk showing off his erection. In this image, visual overdetermined by contemporary pornography, the full frontal nudity has no erotic or shock effect, unlike in the Tulsa shot. Instead, in continually daring our contempt, Clark at last earns it.

NYT blurbs the Muster

War and Pieces by Artists

"What are we fighting for?"

That's the question Allison Smith and about 75 other artists are asking anyone who makes a pilgrimage to Governors Island - the site of a former military post in New York Harbor half a mile from the mouth of the East River - on May 14.

The Public Art Fund, the nonprofit organization that presents art around the city, has helped organize a one-day, multiartist performance piece titled "The Muster," after a military term referring to a gathering of troops for inspection, exercise and display, Tom Eccles, director of the Public Art Fund, said.

About six weeks ago, Ms. Smith sent "a call to arms" to about 1,500 artists, asking if they wanted to participate in a contemporary version of a Civil War re-enactment. About 75 responded.

There will be more than 50 campsites with artists' installations and performances. There will even be mock battles. William Bryan Purcell created an all-pink Civil War infantry uniform that includes pink musket and flag as part of his "Pink Brigade." Some artists will address issues relating to the military, both historical and present-day, with uniforms and photo-murals, some of the Iraq war.

"Each artist and the public have been asked to respond to the theme 'What are we fighting for?' " Mr. Eccles said.

The highlight of the day will be "The Declaration of Causes," in which members of the public will be invited to state their ideas on a stage under a large festival tent. The public can also take part in activities like the "right to paint," creating artworks on the inside of a tent. Fifteen knitters with machines will make a giant banner.

The artists plan to arrive on Governors Island the night before and spend the night installing their artworks. On May 14 visitors may take a free ferry to the island from Slip 7 of the Battery Maritime Building, on the F. D. R. Drive at Broad Street, for the event from noon to 5 p.m.

-- Carol Vogel

Mysterious Skin

Back from opening night of Greg Araki's latest, Mysterious Skin, based on the Scott Heim novel.

This film is a hybrid of Araki's punk aesthetic and the more romantic style of a director like Todd Stephens. For the most part this worked for me, although Araki's eye-candy casting, second only to Gus Van Sant's, had a lot to do with that. Jailbait, thy name is Joseph Gordon-Levitt:

Divine casting

Flipping open the NYT this morning, I stopped dead at the front page of the Weekend Arts. Wow! I don't remember Elvis, hot as he was, looking this hot. Then I realized it was my favorite under-exposed British actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, as Elvis in a new CBS bio-drama.

Folks, this is a match made in casting heaven. Meyers has the wounded pretty boy look down cold, and, like the over-exposed Jude Law, is a throwback to an earlier era of male movie stars that were as glamorous as the ladies. Nowadays looks seem to work against a male star, at least the blisteringly pretty looks of someone like Meyers. So while its a bit sad for me to discover that he's finding work these days only on a CBS made-for-TV movie, I will find some way of consoling myself with four hours of Meyers as pouty, white trash young Elvis. Ah ... sacrifices.

Elijah Woods is so manly!!!

Couldn't resist this.

Wangechi Mutu and Chris Ofili

The stars have aligned, and both Wangechi Mutu and Chris Ofili have shows up in New York, allowing art lovers a direct comparison of these two wonderful afro-diasporic artists. Mutu's latest collages, shown at Brent Sikkema Gallery, border on cyberpunk, which does good to an afrofuturist's heart, while Ofili's delicate watercolors, which he has been amassing over a decade in his studio, are being exhibited for the first time at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Now playing

The Soft Pink Truth, Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth"?

Amazing, amazing.

All hail Comedy Central, who are giving Steve Colbert his own show, mocking personality-driven cable "news analysis" shows.

Jazzfest

Sparkle Shorts gets the hi-tech stunt of the week award for phone blogging in from New Orleans Jazzfest -- you can hear a clip of an amazing band of apparently 14 year old musicians. Who says this generation cannot swing?

Gay Republican Family Values

Carrie Fisher wakes up to find a dead, gay republican in her bed? Read on to the end, the story just gets juicier. African dictators, cocaine-fueled jet setting, wacky plans to make Belgrade the new Prague, and of course, a flurry of Hollywood beards, headed by la Fisher.

From "America's Amber Alert Headquarters"

This was still up on the website of abduction alarmists as of Monday afternoon. It gives you a sense of the hysteria behind the manhunt for a thirty-two year old woman.

"Jennifer Milbanks, age 32, reported missing at 11:00 PM by her fiancé, John Mason on Tuesday night. Jennifer is a marathon runner who had several routes she would run for various training goals.

A Bride-To-Be Jennifer’s friends stated that she would have no reason to just walk away. [ha!ha!]

A press conference in Deluth Georgia, Major Don Woodruff stated that this is now a criminal case and volunteers are being asked to go home.

Specialty Search team have begun to check through banks of the Chattahoochee River.

Ms. Wilbanks is described as white female, age 32, stands 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighing 123 pounds brown eyes and hair "shoulder length". She was wearing a gray sweat shirt and blue sweat pants.

Searchers are now canvassing the neighborhoods. Until a crime scene is found, the public should continue to look for her.

Please pray for this family and first responders. Never jog alone."

Free Jennifer Wilbanks!

For having the moral courage to break out of the impending strangehold of wedlock, and the panache to tap into America's unrequited love affair with all things reminiscent of Julia Roberts, former bride Jennifer Wilbanks faces possible criminal charges.

Since when is making a desperate bolt from conformity a crime? Since when is buying a bus ticket evidence of "premeditation"? Premeditated what -- downward mobility?

It is Wilbank's pathetic friends,family, and police force in suburban Atlanta who are to be blamed for mounting a $100,000 search effort for her -- a flagrant waste of resources in pursuit of an adult woman, who, since she was white and pretty, was apparently as infantilized by those who knew her as she is now by the media who have dubbed her the "runaway bride."

Need I remind people that little brown and black and probably white children disappear every day, without a nation-wide media circus? Remember the days of the late-nineteenth century, when moral panics over "white slavery" bizarrely identified the interstate traffic in white women for illicit purposes as the primary social problem in America -- this in the era of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Plessy v. Ferguson? What's that creepy sound? Oooh, the sound of history repeating itself.