Movie Review: Kaboom!

A Crisp, Sci-Fi sexcapade ushers in the apocalypse.
Kaboom! Directed by Greg Araki Starring: Haley Bennett, Thomas Dekker, James Duval, Chris Zylka, Brennan Mejia — Running time: 1 hour and 26 minutes

Movies are metaphors for dreams. Or, better still, movies can slip between reality and dream effortlessly. The movie dream is a cinematic exhibition of fantasy. I think David Lynch's fantasy mindbenders attest to film's obsession with dream sequences mirroring reality in strange, bombastic ways. Kaboom! is no different. Just less serious.

Araki's Kaboom! testifies to the surrealistic, dream-like aspect of film with a brief nod to Bunūel's Un Chien Andalou. A shot of a razor blade slicing through a human eyeball sends the message that the movie is a movie about film. Or a movie about film's obsession with dream-like fantastic images. Among other things. I'm not sure what to make of Kaboom!.

Characters eat lunch at a café called, "Ontological Void." Am I supposed to infer something here? What is the void? And how can a void be ontological? Am I supposed to applaud Araki for being both clever and blithely cynical? The protagonist, Smith, (Thomas Dekker) a film student at an unnamed California liberal arts college, pines for his hunky roomie Thor (Chris Zylka), spends a huge amount of quality of time analyzing his dreams, pals around with his Lesbian hottie gal pal Stella (Haley Bennett), experiments with lots of sex (with both boys and girls), and in a zany twist becomes caught up in a cultic conspiracy hurtling towards an end-of-the -world finale which will leave most viewers scratching their heads asking, "huh?"

Considering Araki's most recent films, Mysterious Skin, and his teen apocalyptic trilogy, one thing is for sure: Araki presents teenage sexuality (replete with young writhing bodies) as a domain of searching for self-identity in witty, culturally sophisticated tones. Even though everyone in this movie is crisply gorgeous, sans fault, and indulge in lots of sex, the overall sense I get from the movie is witty intelligence rather than visceral explosion. Just like Mysterious Skin's Cheerios sex scene, Araki films sex to avert the viewer's eye from the hormonal to the cerebral. I'm sure the Kaboom! in the title alludes to both orgasm and epiphany. The Kaboom! as in the comic arts Kaboom! Pow! and the kaboom of explosion, all's well that ends well.

I loved the ending. Kaboom! That's it. The movie is fun solely because it's ending is so self-deprecating. Araki's clean shot scenes of ultra modern college cafeterias and blue-lit dorm rooms all enclose an interesting plot replete with voodoo, magic cookies, witches, cult leaders, men in animal masks, lines like, "it's a vagina, not spaghetti," or "that's nuttier than squirrel shit," or, "Of course. And does Mel Gibson hate Jews?" At the end of the movie all is revealed and it's a satisfying nihilistic romp. It's not supposed to mean anything. Like a nihilistic fantasy, it's an ontological void. Am I supposed to love this movie because it takes nothing seriously? Or am I supposed to feel embarrassed because I just don't get it?

The movie is a fantasy stemming from Smith's over-active imagination. The opening shot is a dream sequence. The movie is a fantasy of what any good looking college boy embarking on sexual awakening would want: sex with no strings attached, unbarred adulation, sex with hot hunky, married men, an orgy, and in the end, the promise of a boyfriend. Or so it seems. You want Smith to find romance. The romantic plot is subterfuged*, however, by Araki's knee jerk reaction to take the film beyond genre and rest in the "meta" of metanarrative.

Araki overlays the typical college narrative with American Pie humor: Smith gets caught watching porn, and his gal pal quips, "You don't think I can't hear your porn through these thin walls?" Or, London in a sex scene tells a boy how to eat her out while reminding him of the Kinsey's loose interpretation of sexuality which leads both London, Smith, and the boy Rex having a Britney Spears 1-2-3. Smith calls his mom while she's having sex with her masseuse and she answers, "I'm in a meeting. I can't talk right now."

Add the myth of the absent father, the bitchy mother, the desire to annihilate reality, and the deep adolescent urge to live in a fantasy world, then you have Araki's new film.

Beware: the sex is not as titillating as watching "witch girl" evaporate in writhing pain, or close up shots of mac and cheese, snack vending machine turning out chips, or laugh-out-loud special effects more humorous than an Ed Wood flick - but just as corny as John Waters.

Sure to be a cult classic.
* N.B. I am aware that subterfuge is traditionally used as a noun; however, here, I use it as a verb.

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Literary Criticism: Awful Musing on Philosophy and Literature

I'm not sure how to square philosophy with literature. I don't mean to sound philosophical with this sort of statement. I mean: how do I square literature, as in literature in how it is studied in American academic departments, with philosophy in academia. Not thinking about the zillions of ways to do literary theory and the zillions of way to do philosophy. Rather, I'm caught betwixt and between, one foot placed in a literary world, and the other, placed in a philosophical world.
Novels do not seem on the face of it to be concerned with epistemology or questions of language. Yet, novelists love to pepper stories with philosophic allusions. Philosophers employ literary metaphor to suggest their specific points.

One may applaud me for being so interdisciplinary. Literary studies has for a long while been influenced by philosophic thought. Philosophy likes to think about the possibility of literature, or the conditions that make literary reality possible. Derrida is famous for pushing literature to the fore by asking again and again in numerous books and essays, "what the fuck is literary affect? What does it mean to have a literary effect? And how come literature's "affects" become articulated in philosophical musing?

In graduate study of English, I was immersed in theory. We did not discuss Derrida's questions. Not to say we didn't discuss Derrida. We just were not concerned with Derrida's questions. We were more concerned with deconstructing a text or psychoanalyzing a character.  I learned to think through a novel's structure using clever theories. It was fun. My difficulty, however, was always trying to extract from a piece of literature a philosophic thought. Walker Percy's The Moviegoer: I extract existentialism. William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream: I extract the distinction between appearance and reality. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: radical alterity. John Milton's Paradise Lost: the ontology of evil. And so on.

In philosophy departments, the study of literature is reversed. It's not what can be extracted from a particular literary piece that is important, but questioning literary methodology itself. Philosophy makes philosophy from literary expression. What makes a novel feel? How is a poem a poem? Where is the moral good in literary fiction?

Philosophy sees itself as superior to literature. Literature sees itself as more beautiful than philosophy. No one asks if a philosopher is literary or not. And if they do, philosophers shrug their shoulders. So what if Plato, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche are literary. That's cool, says the philosopher, but Kant is much clearer. So what if Milton's view of prelapsarian innocence is whack. Milton's poetry cannot be approximated. Philosophers get frustrated by literary tropes. Literature buffs become weary of theory. Give me a clear, well thought out argument, says the philosopher. Philosophy is preoccupied with meaning: what we say. Literature is preoccupied with suggesting what is not said.

I had a few fellow graduate students read a philosophy paper I wrote on whether a reclamation of history was possible in Kant's Third Critique. "Relegate your literary allusions to the footnote," one of my colleagues wrote in the margin. I guess he's right. What does Homer have to do with Kant?

Kant, it seems to me, could learn much from Homer. Waywardness. For one. Homelessness. The comfortable homeliness of the categories (the moral law within!) can't tolerate raw homelessness.

Homer could learn a thing or two from Kant. I'm not sure what, though. Odysseus does not seem to be an exemplar of the categorical imperative. Who is an exemplar of the categorical imperative? Even Jesus Christ would have to be asked, "Yo, Jesus! Do you follow the moral law?"

Literature came late to philosophy. Plato expelled the poet from the city-state.

In a way, literature is still expelled from the city-state.

The philosopher asks about the novel, "is the novel dead?" The novelist asks, "Will they buy my book?"

I said earlier that my feet are squarely in both worlds. In English departments, we call philosophy "theory." Although not all theory is philosophy. Some theory is literary criticism. Although some literary criticism is philosophical, I'm not sure if philosophy could every be considered literary criticism. In philosophy departments, we call what we do analytic or continental. But, then, even those distinctions quickly get muddled. Literature is subsumed under aesthetics. But, aesthetics is a non-word in comparative literature. We just assume literature is beautiful. It's left to the philosopher to figure that one out. In literature, philosophy is the search for wisdom. We are not so sure what to do with Kant or Plato. We're happy enough to supply beauty without questioning it.

I will end my musing this way: I've arrived at a question about embarrassment. Why is it embarrassing for a philosopher to resort to fiction? For the novelist, there is no such embarrassment. In fact, if there is something philosophical there he will grin. For the literary critic, it is not embarrassing to avoid philosophy altogether. In fact: in some circles, it is encouraged.

The beauty of philosophy is its ability to care about stuff the novel confronts willy-nilly. Heidegger's Being and Time has no comparison in the literary canon. What I love about fiction is its unabashed embrace of play. There will never by a Vladimir Nabokov in the School of Athens. That is why: I have two books on my shelf: in the brain, I have my philosophers; in the heart: I have my literature; the rest I put up my arms in a certain Je ne sais quoi.
image credit: cindy sherman

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Online Citation Software: RefWorks or no Refworks?

After years of organizing research in a Moleskine notebook, I have finally landed on an online bibliographic manager I can kinda live with . . .  
When writing papers, I have always managed my own citations and created bibliographies with the help of either a stylebook or books.google.com and worldcat.com). The frustration comes in getting the style format correct. Formatting a research paper in MLA or APA style is tedious work. Have you ever found yourself at your desk and not able to access the citation for a book you have already returned to the library? Have you ever wondered whether to use parenthetical citations or footnotes? How does one cite a web site? A movie? A sound recording? A librarian told me once that the easiest way to use a citation style is to not learn how to use it. He meant just refer to the stylebook for the rules. I am sure he would agree a citation manager is even better.
Libraries Often Give Their Patrons Tools to Create Citations and Bibliographies
     At my university, the library makes it incredibly easy for students to use bibliographic management software. RefWorks is not free but if you are a college student it is highly likely your institution subscribes to the service, but you can use Zotero or WorldCat if you don't have RefWorks (but their features are limited).
    When I research on the web or browse books and articles I can simply add references to my RefWorks account. Why didn't I do this before? Before the advent of online citation managers, I had to either carry a notebook with me to the library to record bibliographic data or I would key in the data into a word processing program but then I would be paralyzed by not knowing the proper citation format. Do I add the publisher and publication place? Do I need the ISBN? With RefWorks I have folders for the projects I am working on. I have a folder on Hobbes and folder on Kant; I even have a folder for the presentation I am supposed to give on Stanley Cavell's book Pursuits of Happiness. All my citations are there (whether they be a website or a film or a peer-reviewed article). I feel more organized and I feel like my research is all in one place. I think of RefWorks as my citation library, in the same way, I think of Evernote as my ideas library.
RefWorks Keeps Your Research Organized
    RefWorks keeps my projects organized. If I have already entered a citation in one folder on Kant I can easily put it into another folder I created on Kant and Arendt.
     I do have a gripe about the user design. The graphic interface is rather complicated so you have to have patience and persistence at first. There are several ways to add references to RefWorks. Searching a library catalog or an electronic database, RefWorks allows you to import citations directly from a subscribing school's online catalog or database to your RefWorks account. Look for the export to RefWorks option. I have not found this method to always be efficient. For example, I am a student at a school that shares its library with other consortia members. So if I am not in my home library, but in another library only affiliated with my school, the RefWorks login screen pops up demanding that I enter the group code. I don't know my school's group code. Or if I am at home I have to remember to log in to RefWorks through my school's page. I have to manually type in the information for the reference. The nice thing though is that RefWorks gives me a host of fields: I can enter in as little or as much information on a source as I want. An awesome feature is the attachment option. If I have a file of quotes from a particular source I can append it to the citation as an attachment.
RefWorks Stores Your Research in the Cloud
      The big plus for using RefWorks is the same reason why I use Google Docs or MobileMe or Carbonite. The service is web-based and I can work on a project no matter where I am. Either at home, at work, or at school I can add to my RefWorks account with references. The other big plus for me is that when I am ready to export a bibliography from the sources I intend to use for my paper I can export them into almost any available citation format (MLA, APA, Turabian, etc.). This feature saves me tons of time because some of my professors require different citation formats. It's a pain in the butt to have to re-format a paper. I did this once for my Master's Thesis. Not fun. Where was RefWorks then?
    I can actually create a document in Microsoft Word and install RefWorks plugin Write-N-Cite and practically write my paper and at the end of the day convert it into any citation style I may need. Unfortunately, you have to use Microsoft Word (on a Mac or PC) for this feature to work. I use Google Docs or iWork. What do I do? I have to use RefWork's CiteView option which allows me to manually insert citations I create into my documents without the advantage of instantaneously formatting allowed by Write-N-Cite. The CiteView option is tedious and not user-friendly. RefWorks forces you to insert clunky text chunks where your citation should go then when you are done writing your paper you upload the document to RefWorks and it correctly formats your paper. Personally I rather just do this myself and only use RefWorks for the organizational features which makes me second guess any reason why I would pay a premium to use the service when I can get the same functionality from other online venues. The huge improvement in services like RefWorks, however, which differs from EndNote, is the freedom to work on any platform and in any word processor. EndNote is a great application but I have to be sitting at a computer that has it installed with a compatible word processor. EndNote, in my opinion, is not worth the money. And to my knowledge, it is not cloud-based.
While RefWorks is Not 100% Perfect it Manages Fairly Well
    RefWorks is not intuitive. The graphic user interface is intimidating. There are way too many buttons and options. To do simple tasks like generate a bibliography or toggle between folders can become frustrating ordeals if the wrong button is pressed. I tried to import an existing bibliography I had created in WorldCat and I was not able to accomplish this feat. RefWorks is a powerful tool in assisting students in managing their research and citing sources but I recommend taking an hour introductory class before jumping into it. I took a class at my university and found it to be extremely helpful and I can see already that two things will increase my productivity: the universal access to my work and the ability to create bibliographies in tons of formats. If you are not affiliated with an institution that has a subscription then I suggest go with the free online services. Personally, I like WorldCat's List feature. I will write about it in a future post. It allows you to create folders as well and to create multiple bibliographies in various citation formats. Also, I should add, none of these services, WorldCat, Zotero, RefWorks, EndNote, will do your research for you; the programs will not magically provide an A+ paper but they will certainly (if used efficiently -- with a little bit of a learning curve) aid you in creating a polished, finished product.

What has been your experience with online bibliography and citation managers?

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Aesthetic Thursdays: Paul Chan at the Whitney Museum

1st Light

Paul Chan, 1st Light, 2005. Digital video projection. 14 minutes, edition of 5. Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. Photo: Jean

At the Whitney Museum in New York City, there is currently, as of this post, a video installation made in 2005 by the American artist, Paul Chan.

Upon walking into an open room in the museum's "Singular Visions" collection on the fifth floor, devoted to single pieces of individual artist's art, there on the floor, like a cut into another reality, emanates Chan's video imagery.

Movie Clip: The Worst Christmas Eve Ever (Gremlins)

Gremlins (1984)

This otherwise comic film is lodged with perhaps the most tragic dialogue in Hollywood history ...

Kate: Now I have another reason to hate Christmas.
Billy Peltzer: What are you talking about?
Kate: The worst thing that ever happened to me was on Christmas. Oh, God. It was so horrible. It was Christmas Eve. I was 9 years old. Me and Mom were decorating the tree, waiting for Dad to come home from work. A couple hours went by. Dad wasn't home. So Mom called the office. No answer. Christmas Day came and went, and still nothing. So the police began a search. Four or five days went by. Neither one of us could eat or sleep. Everything was falling apart. It was snowing outside. The house was freezing, so I went to try to light up the fire. That's when I noticed the smell. The firemen came and broke through the chimney top. And me and Mom were expecting them to pull out a dead cat or a bird. And instead, they pulled out my father. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit. He'd been climbing down the chimney... his arms loaded with presents. He was gonna surprise us. He slipped and broke his neck. He died instantly. And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus. 

Gremlins (1984): Directed by Joe Dante. Written by Chris Columbus. Starring Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, and Hoyt Axton

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One World Trade Center Under Construction

One World Trade Center, New York City

View of the World Trade Center site from Washington Street in Lower Manhattan. 52 stories have been constructed so far. The glass façade on One WTC is clearly visible. Notice to the right WTC 7 sits completed as if ready for the party, but no one has arrived yet.

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The 4 Train On Sunday

He told me this morning the four train is beast. Not beast as in animal. But beast as in best. I had taken it on Sunday after a visit to my Shrink. (I capitalize her name to make it proper). So I knew what he was talking about.