When Shopping Becomes Unpatriotic

Yesterday Jdimytai Damour, a maintenance worker from Queens, NY, died when he was trampled to death by an onslaught of eager shoppers at Wal-Mart. Damour was working in the store when it opened early for Black Friday. Customers had been waiting in line all night with hopes of scoring big-ticket sales items, notably a limited number of plasma HDTVs. The crowd tore the doors off the store in their desperation to get inside. Damour was knocked to the ground. His coworkers struggled to get to him and were also pushed down. Later when police closed the store in order to investigate Damour's death, customers refused to leave and attempted to continue shopping.

I have often contemplated what I would do during a crisis if I were to be surrounded by a panicked crowd. On September 11th, 2001, as the second tower of the World Trade Center fell, I thought about the people in the stairwells. At the time I was a licensed Emergency Medical Technician and had to practice mass casualty incidents as part of my training. The instructors often stressed the fact that buildings could usually be evacuated safely as long as no one panicked and started shoving others aside. In the role of an EMT, a late arrival to the scene of destruction, I knew how to calm people and facilitate an orderly exit. But I worried that I wouldn't be as calm if I were one of the people trapped inside. Had anyone trying to flee the second tower, before the plane crashed into it, panicked? Had they shoved people in the stairwell, resulting in them escaping, but trapping many others in the chaos they'd created?

How many lives would I be willing to endanger to protect my own? I frequently ask this question.

I'd be curious to know how many other people contemplate what their actions would be in emergency situations. For six years I was chronically homeless and survival was foremost in my mind. The other street kids and I were confronted with ethical issues that most Americans have not had to face. If you were starving, and so was your friend, but there was only enough food to feed one of you, what would you do? I know from experience that I would volunteer to starve. But starving is different than fleeing a building that is on fire because death can be wrestled from hunger's grip over a period of time. Burning to death is a discrete experience.

I want to be able to say with conviction that I would wait patiently for those in front of me to exit the plane or room or office, in the case of something like a bomb threat. I want to be able to state was as much certitude as I can about starving that I would prioritize the good of the group ahead of my own survival. But there's an intimidating voice in my head that asks whether I'd be fine with waiting while someone who walked slowly wasted the precious seconds between me and death. I feel horrible about the fact that sometimes I think that the voice has a valid point.

Perhaps this entire thought exercise sounds alarmist and misplaced on a blog about art, culture and politics. However, people all over the world have to make these decisions every day of their lives. Most often those faced with these gruesome choices are poor. They have to decide how much food they will give their children and how much they will keep for themselves. They have to worry about fires starting in the slums where they live. They have to choose how or when to fragment their families as the adults look for work, possibly abroad, where they will be living illegally. No one who makes these decisions does so lightly. To sacrifice another person's life for your wellbeing is painful to contemplate for almost anyone in the world. The exception would be Americans who want cheap plasma HDTVs.

Whenever confronted with something that elicits a negative reaction in me, I challenge myself to delve deeper, to ask why. Since yesterday I have been asking why a crowd of consumers would kill a man for a TV. I try to put myself into the scene. I have been standing in line all night. Perhaps I want the TV because I've been laid off this year and I haven't been able to give my kids everything I want to be able to give them. This TV is my chance to show that I love them. It is also a chance to prove to myself that I can still provide for my family.

When the doors open the crowd surges. People who have just pulled into the parking lot are rushing ahead of me. I have put so much stock in this TV redeeming me in my eyes as well as my children's that I can't afford to fail. Adrenaline pumps through my muscles as I tear the door off its hinges. Three people who have been standing in line with me all night help. We fling it aside and push our bodies into the solid mass in front of us. By the time I reach the shelf I had carefully scouted the day before, all of the TV's are gone. I begin sprinting through the store, desperate to find something that will serve the same function of validating my ability to care for my family. When police officers demand that I leave the building empty handed I try to brush them aside. How dare they control me when my life feels so out of control?

Later, watching the news reports about Damour's death at home, I can't shake the memory of something spongy giving under my foot as I shoved towards the electronics section. It could have been a hat, a kid's stuffed animal. Or a human with a name and a family. Do I feel any remorse? Am I so consumed by needing to find an object to validate my humanity that I can't spare a thought for the man that I may have accidentally aided in killing?

Advertisements in the U.S. are focused on explaining how products will make us better people and give us better lives and we’ve bought into their messages. A certain perfume will make a woman more independent, living for herself instead of others. A soft drink will give basketball players the boost they need to become winners.

When the economy began its downturn after September 11th the government told us to be patriotic by shopping. As the economy continued to slide we were given rebates to keep us shopping. Yesterday retailers were so worried about their profit margins that they offered deep discounts to keep us shopping. Even if some of us die as a result, we are supposed to keep shopping.

As we are all aware, the economy continues to deteriorate. Citigroup recently announced 53,000 layoffs. Unemployment rates are going up. Resources are becoming scarce. More of us are having to make decisions about who to feed first, how far to travel for work, and what we will sacrifice for our survival. The answer to these tough questions can no longer be that we will go shopping.

When a crisis is imminent the best way to ensure the survival of the greatest number of people is to seek safer ground calmly, respecting those around you. Americans are not accustomed to conceptualizing our country in this way. But it's time that we do before we trample each other to death. The most patriotic action each of us can take at this time is to contemplate how we will react when decisions about the welfare of our families must be made. There are no clear answers. I've been agonizing over these questions for years and am not entirely sure what I would do. But at least when someone else's life stands between me and what I perceive I need, I'll understand the implications of my actions.

The Real W.

Bush's War, a Frontline documentary, is necessary viewing. Simply put, it is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen.

Through in-depth interviews with all but the biggest players in the exceptionally dangerous game that we now know as the global war on terror, it clearly and compellingly tells a complicated narrative. In essence, it is the opposite of Oliver Stone's W., which makes fiction out of a reality so compelling it needed no treatment. In effect, this is the film I longed for when I wrote my review of W. Some may think it unfair to compare a fiction film with a documentary one, but Bush's War is as literary as anything Stone has ever made. It's characters are compelling; it's conflicts vivid; it's ironies bitter, cruel and heartbreaking. It is a tragedy, really, with the State Department as the Greek chorus.

In Bush's War, far from learning that the President is just a figure head, we learn just how important the office is--and why this has been one of the worst ever. After 9/11, weak leadership allowed a cabal of ideologues to undermine anyone who disagreed with them. And, although it didn't happen all at once, it wasn't long before the neoconservatives took over the White House from the foreign policy realists, including State and the CIA, with disastrous consequences.

The filmmakers made many brilliant decisions that determined how this documentary would unfold, but perhaps the most daring was a choice not to proffer a thesis on the President himself. It is a detailed portrait of his administration, but not of Bush. We do not see him directly; we infer his character. We do not identify with him; we observe him. What we induce is perhaps closer to Stone's vision of Bush than anyone would like to admit, but because the narrative is not processed through his interior consciousness, it is more useful. Watching W., you learn about a man; watching Bush's War, you learn about the world.

Bush's War is required viewing not only for those who wish to understand how we got here, but for those who never want to let it happen again. It will be a long time before the mechanics of government are diagrammed this clearly again.

The Last Beat of My Heart

Siouxsie and the Banshees:



A good song for a gray morning.

Endangered Species Act: Chrysler, Ford, GM

This week the Bush administration pushed through a number of midnight regulations, including an alteration to the Endangered Species Act. The new regulations allow agencies to determine whether their infrastructure projects, such as roads or dams, would significantly affect endangered species. Currently new projects are subject to review by independent scientists, but developers have complained that this oversight wastes time. Not surprisingly, President Bush is once again privileging short sighted capitalistic gains over long term measures to protect our national and global interests.

The Bush administration's alteration does include a provision requiring agencies that miscalculate and do harm species to pay for the damage they have caused. However, no explanation for how the costs would be calculated has been offered. In addition, it is difficult to imagine what an agency will be able to do to revive a species once they have brought about its extinction.

In 2006 the Bush administration announced that polar bears would be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Their habitat has been severely compromised by rising global temperatures. The U.S. government's acknowledgment that climate change threatened a species' survival introduced the possibility that steps would have to be taken to reduce carbon emissions in order to maintain compliance with the law.

Due to deliberate steps taken by the Bush administration as well as congress, no intervention of significance has occurred. The Environmental Protection Agency recently struck down California's attempt to regulate car emission and fuel efficiency standards in what was seen as a gift to the auto industry. Twelve states had adopted California's policies, or planned to, when the federal government denied states their right to protect their air.

Now the three American automakers that received Bush's blessings are about to go extinct. Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors have failed to adjust to the modern demands of the auto industry. They have spent their money lobbying against regulation standards and as a result Japanese cars are far more popular in the U.S. due to their fuel-efficiency. Having identified this disparity as a major stumbling block for the failing industry, last year's Energy Bill earmarked $25 billion in loans to the auto industry specifically aimed at increasing fuel-efficiency. Now there are proposals, mostly from Republicans, to use this money to fund a bailout, rather than accessing funds through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (the $700 billion pot of money meant to prevent an economic meltdown).

While the question of whether or not to provide a bailout for the industry is a complicated one, the question of where bailout money should come from is not. We are staring a grim reality in the face. Capitalism cannot flourish when it is divorced from intelligent deliberation and recognition that with only one habitable planet, our resources are finite. At some point we need to grow up and realize that investing long term is the only way to ensure our country's security. Liquidating what little money we have set aside for updating our energy infrastructure is not the answer. Destroying the habitats and species that the health of the world depends on is not the answer. Preventing states from enacting their own regulations to curb climate change is not the answer. A fundamental shift in our thinking that finally conceptualizes sustainability as capitalism's one prayer for survival is our only hope.

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Today is International Transgender Day of Remembrance.

"The Transgender Day of Remembrance was set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. The event is held in November to honor Rita Hester, whose murder on November 28th, 1998 kicked off the “Remembering Our Dead” web project and a San Francisco candlelight vigil in 1999. Rita Hester’s murder — like most anti-transgender murder cases — has yet to be solved." -http://www.rememberingourdead.org/day/what.html

Between 2004-2008 an average of 2.0 people have been killed each month in violence specifically related to transphobia. This rate has been on the steady increase. Between 1990-2000 the average was 1.44. The years 2000-2003 saw a jump to 1.78. Over 68% of these deaths are taking place in the United States and people of color are disproportionately targeted.

Supporting passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (H.R. 2015), with an inclusion of protections for gender identity is one tangible way to help reverse this trend. Currently transgender individuals have no federally protected right to work or obtain housing. This forces many into the dangerous street economy, which puts them at great risk for contracting diseases and encountering violence. Health insurance plans refuse to provide coverage for transgender individuals. Those who are able to acquire insurance through employment or government programs usually find that transgender related treatment is excluded.

It is time for this country to begin treating transgender individuals as citizens. Today we remember the devastating loss that occurs when human rights are denied.

Statistics courtesy of the Remembering Our Dead Web Project

Cubist Grid

Ken Jacobs' Infinite Cinema

Mark Webber has curated an online gallery of 20 works by Ken Jacobs at tank.tv. It will be available until November 30th, 2008. Here, Jacobs responds to viewers' e-mailed questions in an extended Q&A.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Ken Jacobs' contribution to film as an art form. From early, beat masterpieces such as Little Stabs at Happiness to his more recent output of consciousness expanding digital videos, Jacobs has relentlessly pursued a unique vision of cinema. His tireless explorations have led him to various media--film, video, 3-D shadow play, live performance, film performance, et al.--each one allowing him to wrestle with a different aspect of the twin enigmas that dominate his work: time and space.

In the cinema of Ken Jacobs, there is no space without a temporal dimension and no time without a spatial component. By recognizing that film transforms time into a material (24 frames per second, 40 frames a foot), he can pulverize time the way that Mark Rothko famously sought to pulverize the image. Jacobs has the ability to atomize each moment and then reconstruct it according to his own desires, which sometimes renders the original material unrecognizable. But this is rarely an aggressive gesture; it is more often a loving investigation, as in the elegiac Two Wrenching Departures.

In his Nervous System performances--where two identical strips of film in two different projectors are advanced one frame at a time, creating often contradictory illusions of stillness, motion and depth--one feels that Jacobs explores each recorded moment like a little boy lost in a mansion, going from one room to the next in wide-eyed wonderment. Once, when asked in an interview about "slowing things down" this way, he responded:

Nothing has been actually slowed down, we’re just finding more time in that time. There’s much more time in that time than we ever imagined, in two frames. 16 or 18 or 24 frames per second, that’s infinite time, and infinite motion is taking place, infinite numbers of events are taking place and this begins to explore that. I’ve never exhausted the time bounded by two frames.

While studying with possibly the greatest teacher of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, Jacobs learned the power of what Hofmann called push and pull: the ability of a two-dimensional image to allow for simultaneous, even mutually-exclusive readings of depth. But Jacobs has gone one step further: he has extended the concept of push and pull to the illusion of movement. He has applied the cubist grid to the fourth dimension, creating intersecting temporal planes that well up, overlap, burst forth and then recede just as quickly as they came. If time can be thought of as a river, these are the rapids.

But Jacobs doesn't only use time in the abstract; he also shows us that time is always being buried under more time and that cinema can be used to excavate. With a hawk-eyed leftist's look at American history, he uses found footage and other collage techniques to offer incisive, if often humorous, critiques of capitalism. The first, greatest and longest of these is Star Spangled to Death, a Frankenstein's monster of a movie that incorporates whole other films, intercutting them with a raucous, prankish kind of street theater. Although at times wildly funny--it has a certain nihilistic whimsy--Star Spangled To Death is an existential crisis in a can that you open at your own peril. After seven, vital, love- and hate-filled hours the world seems infinitely more wonderful, more wide-open, and more terrible than you previously thought possible.

In Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, Jacobs revels in his abilities to oscillate between both the material and representational aspects of cinema. In wrenching rhythms reminiscent of Charles Mingus, he shifts from smooth spectacle to stuttering substance. Through almost every conceivable means, he makes us aware of the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and the malleability of the temporal plane. Also as in Mingus, there is a vitality that cannot be contained; it pushes at the edges of the frame, threatening to either break it open or destroy it. In fact, Tom, Tom doesn't really end, it just runs out of the projector, filling the screen with an ecstatic, white light. At the end of this film that lovingly, obsessively undresses every aspect of the illusion-making apparatus, you get the naked light of the projector bulb itself.

It is important to emphasize that Jacobs' movies are, first and foremost, human. They are beautiful, flawed, willing, breathing things that come into and go out of existence with force. But they are also humble--"life-sized" is the word he uses. They don't attempt to overpower the viewer, but to extend an invitation to experience, one person to another. Whether hand-held or mounted on a tri-pod, his camera work is embodied; you feel that there is a man attached to the camera and that, by watching, you too are attached to the camera. To see Window is not just a visual experience, it's a visceral one.

Likewise, by manipulating time in his magical-mechanical (and now, digital) ways, Jacobs takes time out of the realm of "twenty-four frames per second" and into the realm of lived time, allowing us to enter into time as we experience it as opposed to time as we measure it. This is why the "total running time" of a Jacobs film isn't actually a good indication of how long it will last. Seven hours can fly by in an instant while ninety minutes can stretch into infinity. But that is one of the great pleasures of this very demanding body of work.

Christopher Orr's insightful review of Synecdoche, New York can be found here. It's the best one I've read yet. Other film writers might note the fact that Orr actually saw the film all the way through--twice.

Synecdoche, New York

Despite all the bad press, Charlie Kaufman has created something incredible: the rare film that is both widely distributed and seriously heady. Even the title is a ten dollar word; most of the people in front of me in line couldn't pronounce it. Written and directed by Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York has a nervous, jagged quality that from the very start offers a rhythmic variation on the alienation effect. Unlike most movies, it has no back-beat; there aren't even really scenes per se, just shots that, despite the elaborate set design and art direction, somehow feel like they're just barely being held together with duct tape. Some critics have seen these idiosyncrasies as evidence of shoddy construction; I found them original and disarming. The jumpiness of the form describes the content. It would be hard to imagine using the graceful arc of a John Ford film to describe Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a man who is unraveling before our eyes. (Hoffman makes the movie; it would be hard to overstate the brilliance of his performance).

Synecdoche, New York is not with out its problems, the greatest of which is that it introduces a kind of endlessness that then consumes it. The protagonist, inexplicably awarded a MacArthur Grant for directing Death of a Salesman, creates an eternal play that recreates a universe inside a universe, an absolute mimesis that becomes less instead of more realistic. This, of course, accounts for the title; art requires synecdoche in order to communicate at all, otherwise it would merely recreate the world without ever describing it. Cotard falls into this trap and perhaps, in trying to describe it, Kaufman does as well.

Other artists have wrestled with the endlessness problem, most notably Martin Kippenberger, Ken Jacobs and Franz Kafka. Endlessness, by definition, is a difficult thing to contain. Usually, it can only be alluded to and even then it threatens to break a work open. Jacobs' epic Star Spangled to Death begins to dissolve its own bonds by the end, but this makes it more, not less, expansive. As Kaufman's movie swells, however, it only becomes more claustrophobic. In the end, there is literally a revolution happening outside the window, but Cotard never emerges from the cocoon he has built for himself. Neither does the film.

Just as powerful as the film is the whirlwind of negative press it has generated that threatens to obscure it entirely. Rex Reed, writing in The New York Observer has loudly declared Synecdoche, New York the worst movie ever made, but if this is the worst movie Rex Reed has ever been forced to endure then he has led a charmed life indeed. Despite spewing forth such phrases as "I have hated every incomprehensible bucket of pretentious, idiot swill ever written by this cinematic drawbridge troll," and, just in case you didn't catch his drift, this tsunami of bile, "His directorial feature debut reminds me of the spiteful, neurotic brat kicked out of school for failing recess who gets even by throwing himself in front of a speeding school bus," Reed actually, if unintentionally, illuminates some of the finer points of the film.

If you can stomach it, you'll discover at the end of his review that Reed did not in fact watch the entire movie before penning one of the most withering pieces of criticism yet put to paper, a vile notice that does not stop at disemboweling the work itself but goes straight for the jugular of the man who made it. Would it be too much of an understatement to say that this seems irresponsible?

One week later, The New York Observer, perhaps hoping to atone for having published the worst movie review ever written, hit it out of the park again. Andrew Sarris begins his more even-handed review by describing the title as "a curious play on words between Schenectady, N.Y., and synecdoche, a word never spoken aloud in formal or conversational speech." Should I be ashamed to admit that I have found recourse to the word synecdoche in many conversations, several of them about the film itself? And, although I have no real reason not to trust Andrew Sarris, I would venture that he has probably dropped an s-bomb once or twice during the course of his own eloquent speech.

William Eggleston:


“William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008” currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through January 25).