Wunderbar ist die Gunst der Hocherhabnen und niemand
Weiß von wannen und was einem geschiehet von ihr.
So bewegt sie die Welt und die hoffende Seele der Menschen,
Selbst kein Weiser versteht, was sie bereitet, denn so
Will es der oberste Gott, der sehr dich liebet, und darum
Ist noch lieber, wie sie, dir der besonnene Tag.
Aber zuweilen liebt auch klares Auge den Schatten
Und versuchet zu Lust, eh' es die Not ist, den Schlaf,
Oder es blickt auch gern ein treuer Mann in die Nacht hin,
Ja, es ziemet sich ihr Kränze zu weihn und Gesang,
Weil den Irrenden sie geheiliget ist und den Toten,
Selber aber besteht, ewig, in freiestem Geist.
Aber sie muß uns auch, daß in der zaudernden Weile,
Daß im Finstern für uns einiges Haltbare sei,
Uns die Vergessenheit und das Heiligtrunkene gönnen,
Gönnen das strömende Wort, das, wie de Liebenden, sei,
Schlummerlos und vollern Pokal und kühneres Leben,
Heilig Gedächtnis auch, wachend zu bleiben bei Nacht.
"And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?"
"Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with the water. When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel.) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot. So Father Kleinsorge got a large piece of grass and drew out the stem so as to make a straw, and gave them all water to drink that way. One of them said, 'I can't see anything.' Father Kleinsorge answered, as cheerfully as he could, 'There's a doctor at the entrance to the park. He's busy now, but he'll come soon and fix your eyes, I hope.'"
— John Hersey, "Hiroshima", from The New Yorker of August 31, 1946.
As many of you are aware, I embarked in late 2007 on what I called, at the time, a "yearlong survey of gay-interest cinema". It lasted quite a bit longer, in the event, until late 2009, by which time I had begun a second "yearlong survey" of cheap, shitty zombie movies. I ended both when they coincided in the same title, which will be reviewed at the end of this series. For now, enjoy, over the next several weeks, a series of capsule reviews of films which are, to varying degrees, gay or gay-centric or gay-related.
Sommersturm
D, 2004
Robert Stadlober, Alicja Bachleda
dir. Marco Kreuzpaintner
Overall rating: OO 2 cock rings out of 5
Fag Hag Hotness Index: 10 out of 10
Fake Sex Rating: 3 out of 10
The scene is a small town on Lake Starnberg, in Upper Bavaria: The dour village hall and the thick-as-mud regional accents substitute for creating a meaningful sense of place. Tobi (Robert Stadlober) is a gangly, weird-looking young man in the end stages of secondary school, and he and his swarthy, conventionally-attractive BFF, Achim (Kostja Ullman), are inseperable. Ten minutes of exposition show a friendship full of gleeful—dare we say gay—athletic competition, banter, hijinks, and ew, what's this? A joint masturbation session! Of course as one lies on the floor of the locker room next to one's best friend, one is meant to dutifully close one's eyes and imagine girls, but director Kreuzpaintner decorates his thematic Warhammer models with a billboard-size calligraphy brush, so the entire wank is filmed from such an angle that we can see Tobi doing a Xerox scan of Achim's naked body while they're rubbing one out.
It soon becomes clear that, for Tobi, the worst part about his BFF is that second F: we're treated to a montage of stock teenage awkwardness, misinterpreted glances, awkward leanings-in for a kiss after a fat joint, and all the rest. Then it's time to go camping at the boat race, where Redneck Bavaria Boat Club must compete for the trophy against a number of other subtle, realistic teams: the stern, humorless east German team ("ve vant to train on ze east side of ze lake"), the all-girls Catholic team (of which there is one shot, consisting of them singing Jesus songs on the guitar), and—the plot thickens!—the "QueerSchläger", aquatic faggots aus Berlin. I don't need a sextant and a coxswain to point me to where this is going, and neither do you.
What follows is useful because it serves as a primer for the stock elements of all of these films: there's Tobi, the nervous, innocent, wide-eyed—the Frodo of nascent gayness, lurching fitfully towards the Mount Doom of self-awarness while his reptillian CGI fag hag crawls along desperately behind him; there's Georg, the personification of over-the-top gay panic, and there's the fruitful, if unintentional, discourse on gay male misogyny. Why do we do this to girls who like us? Why do we feel entitled to use them to hide behind? This movie begs these questions, but it's too stupid to ask or engage with them.
Instead, we get Marquez-esque dream sequences: Georg goes into the camp of the gay team and, his head spinning, sees penises and penentration everywhere he looks; Tobi, whose closet door is the gate of Mordor, brushes through a corn field to see the spurned, clueless girl whose dreams he occupies (Bachleda) radiant and ready-for-it on a beach towel, out of nowhere. He eventually gets with one of the rowers from the QueerSchläger, and they get two sex scenes: one on a dock, at whose climax they both rather look and sound like they're being tazed, and one in a youth hostel at the end, which consists of namless Berlin rowing hunk peeling Tobi's sunburn. Rawr. Meanwhile, straightboy Achim and his nasty girlfriend are in the woods copulating in lush vegetation and golden light, showing us what the boning would have looked like in Paradise Lost.
It's tough to tell what the point of this film is. It's too flat and too judgemental of the gay characters to be sentimental fantasy for old gay fogies: the gay Frodo has no agency, he is but the object (the victim, the film insinuates) of older, more lustful, more experienced gays; but it certainly stops short of condemning them, as long as they keep to themselves and don't—Aha. That's it. Sommersturm is a piece designed to make middle-class Germans nod along in confirmation of their mere tolerance, in the abstract, of same-sex desire: something far away, dangerous, but confined to a couple of neighborhoods in Berlin. When the bus drops Tobi off at home, alone, the last second of the film is the one with the clearest message: You thought you were gay, kid. Phew, glad that's over.
updated with line numbers, which match in both the English (AR George) and German (Stefan Maul) translations
Der, der die Tiefe sah, die Grundfeste des Landes,
der das Verborgene kannte, der, dem alles bewußt —
Gilgamesch, der die Tiefe sah, die Grundfeste des Landes,
der das Verborgene kannte, der, dem alles bewußt —
vertraut sind ihm die Göttersitze allesamt. [ I 5 ]
Allumfassende Weisheit erwarb er in jeglichen Dingen.
Er sah das Geheime und dekte auf das Verhüllte,
er brachte Kunde von der Zeit vor der Flut.
Einen weiten Weg kam er her, um zwar müde doch endlich zur Ruhe gekommen zu sein.
Festgehalten auf einem Steinmonument ist all die Mühsal. [ I 10 ]
Er baute die Mauer von Uruk, der Hürdenumhegten,
die des hochheil'gen Eanna, des reinen Schatzhauses.
Sieh an dessen Mauer, die wie Kupfer glänzt!
Besieh ihre Brustwehr, die niemand nachzubilden weiß!
Nimm doch die Treppe, die dort seit ewigen Zeiten! [ I 15 ]
Komm heran an Eanna, den Wohnsitz der Ischtar,
den kein künftiger König wird nachbilden können, noch sonst ein anderer Mensch!
Steig doch hinauf, auf der Mauer von Uruk wandle umher!
Die Fundamente beschaue, und das Ziegelwerk prüfe: [ I 20 ]
ob ihr Ziegelwerk nicht aus Backstein besteht
und ob die sieben Weisen nicht selbst ihr Grundmauern legten!
...
Alle Könige weit überragend, hochberühmt und von schönster Gestalt:
Der kühne Sproß Uruks, der stößige Stier, [ I 30 ]
geht vorne als erster voran;
auch hinten geht er als Zuversicht seiner Brüder.
Festes Ufer und Schirm seiner Truppen,
wütende Woge, die einreißt die Mauer aus Stein. [ I 35 ]
Stier Lugalbandas, Gilgamesch, volkommen an Kraft,
von der erhabenen Kuh, Wildkuh-Ninsunna, gesäugt!
Hochaufgewachsener Gilgamesch, volkommen und ehrfurchtgebietend,
der die Gebirgsdurchgänge erschloß, [ I 40 ]
der die Brunnen an den Rändern der Berge grub,
der den Ozean, das weite Meer, überquerte bis hin zum Aufgang der Sonne,
der die Ufer der Welt, nach dem Leben stets suchend, erforschte,
der dank seiner Kraft Uta-napitschti, den Fernen, erreichte, [ I 45 ]
der die Kultstätten, welche die Sintflut zerstörte, wiedererrichttete an ihrem Ort,
der die Riten festsetzte für die umnebelten Menschen!
The European Space Agency's Planck Telescope took this picture of the entire sky over the course of a year.
"The Sulphurous Hail
Shot after us in storm, oreblown hath laid
The fiery Surge, that from the Precipice
Of Heav'n receiv'd us falling, and the Thunder,
Wing'd with red Lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep.
Let us not slip th' occasion, whether scorn,
Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe.
Seest thou yon dreary Plain, forlorn and wilde,
The seat of desolation, voyd of light,
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend"
— Paradise Lost I.169 et seq.
"But what about the End of the Universe? We'll miss the big moment." "I've seen it. It's rubbish," said Zaphod, "nothing but a gnab gib." "A what?" "Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let's get zappy." — Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a longTrainofAbuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the Present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.
He has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and Convulsions within.
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rule in these Colonies:
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their Friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic Insurrections among us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.
Nor have we been wanting in Attentions to our British Brethren. We have warned them from Time to Time of Attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here. We have appealed to their native Justice and Magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the Ties of our common Kindred to disavow these Usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our Connections and Correspondence. They too have been deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace, Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of the divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
Dissentispatriotic.net wishes you a happy Fourth of July.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem;
who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed;
happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Joanna Newsom
Admiralspalast, Berlin
Monday 17th May, 2010
Dissent Rating: 10/10 UPDATE: footage of the version of "Peach, Plum, Pear" from last night is here.
It's a shame that Joanna Newsom isn't an olympic athlete on top of being an absolute prophet of a singer, because in the space of the two hours that is the limit of any normal human's on-stage stamina, she can only play a handful of her songs. Luckily, the woman's talent extends to the composition of tight, energetic set lists. Concert dramaturgy.
At the start of the show, only the harp is lit, and as she comes out to the frenetic applause of a thousand Berliners, she simply smiles, waves, sits down, and without breathing a word, launches straight into "'81". The effect is absolutely electric: she is, for all the vastness of her other work, still at her best alone with the harp, and it is impossible not to be pulled in immediately.
The arrangements of the larger pieces: "Good Intentions Paving Company", "In California", are different from the album and perfect for the setting. She has brought a drummer, a guitarist, two violins, and a trombone player (he was quite the highlight of the band). From the selection of songs, some conclusions emerge: first, that Have One On Me is a collection of genuine performance pieces. They are great songs, and a pleasure to hear live. But they do not and cannot compare to her magnum opus, and the fact that she only played one song from Ys, "Monkey and Bear", made the contrast all the more apparent. Ys is an anthology of six epic works, varied and vast in ways that words only do injustice to.
She began the silly encore ritual by announcing a fake last song, but not naming it, and as Ryan Francesconi began to pluck something slow and elegiac on the mandolin, it was not at all clear what the song was going to be. Not, that is, until, slow as a glacier, she began to sing the opening lines of "Peach, Plum, Pear". There is great value, and great satisfaction, in having the courage to maniplulate your own work. The payoff was immense.
And lest there be any doubt that this woman is still capable of moments as fresh, forceful, and chilling as those at the peak of Ys ("And I will recognize / all of the lines in your face / in the face of the daughter of the daughter of my daughter"), watch her come back out after the obligatory sustained applause, again without stopping to frame or excuse, and play "Baby Birch":
Well I wish we could take every path
I could spend a hundred years adoring you
Yes, I wish we could take every path
Because I hated to close the door on you
Only a monster could leave without tears in his eyes.
The National
at Huxleys Neue Welt, Berlin
Dissent Rating: 4/10
Dear Matt Berninger,
You make really good albums. I mean it. Without a lot of variety or originality or even, in many cases, particularly good lyrics ("It's a terrible love and I'm walking with spiders"? An aria from Naxxramas, The Musical?), you manage to make terrific songs out of simple tools. There's a moment in "Apartment Story", for instance, at about 1min 18sec in, where you combine gibberish lyrics and conventional harmony into truly great pop music. The crispness and clarity of the instruments of late-period National, even as the layers build up, is one of the reasons I like your band so much and one of reasons I can forgive the fact that so many of your songs aren't songs, they're underdeveloped first movements of things begging to be much larger. (Where are the remaining 20 minutes of the piece of music that "Fake Empire" begins?)
So when Zalmoxis Michael warned me that you're meant to suck live, I consoled myself with the fact that the show was cheap and the venue was right down the street from me. The New York Times also mentioned in an article that your shows had gotten better since you had gotten into the habit of drinking an entire bottle of wine on stage. That sounds like something I would do, so it gave me hope.
Well, Berninger, your show was not cheap enough (20€) nor close enough (I had to walk all the way down the stairs and around the corner), and you've switched back to water. I can't hold you responsible for your opening band, an unholy amalgam of Battles and Tegan and Sara that would've been laughed off the small stage at Rocketown—not entirely, anyway—and for the fact that they reminded the audience that they were from Brooklyn between every song. I can't hold it against you that the entire audience appeared to be from Brooklyn, too, and that I had to stand next to some half-Screech half-Napoleon midget Américain as he regaled a pair of polite German girls in his high-pitched northeastern honk with the ins and outs of his internship at the United Nations in Geneva. But I can tell you right now that I was not in a charitable mood when you sauntered out, water glass in hand.
You see this big metal tub with wooden handles on the back that I've just rolled in? It's called a wheelbarrow, and I'd like you to see if you can carry a tune in it. Ope, looks like you can't. Alright, we're going to use a crane to lower in this note. It's as big as the broad side of a barn, and I'd like you to hit it. Ope, you whiffed. Matt Berninger, how hard can this be? You only sing five notes on your albums! Surely practice can give what lack of natural-born ability hath taken away?
Alright, let's try something else. How about you just get rid of the totally superfluous horn section? Because Guinness called, and they don't actually do "World's Largest Number of Plaid-Shirt-and-Beard Hipsters On One Stage", so we might as well call off the attempt. They aren't adding anything except, well, melody. And quite frankly, I'd get that man to put down his trombone and start playing pitch pipe, if I were you. If you're going to play "Slow Show", which is a song that well and truly depends on its piano solo, ask your sound man to fiddle with some knobs so we can hear the keyboards. You made your reputation on "All The Wine", and I'll wager you've played it hundreds of times live by now. So you should know not to come in at the wrong time, halfway through a measure, so that the entire song is two beats off-sync until the insistent clapping of the audience finally corrects you. I'm just saying.
If there's a bright spot in all this, it's that you saved "Mr. November" for the encore, by which time you had apparently gone backstage, taken a shot, towelled off, and re-familiarized yourself with the music theory surrounding the concept of "key". And that although I don't have it yet, I can tell by your rough renditions of them that the songs from your new album are going to be terrific. On the album. You know, it's like your live shows, except with a mixer and run through the latest version of Auto-Tune.
I'll continue to wear your t-shirt and listen to your very good albums, Matt Berninger. But I'm taking my next 20€ and going to see Broken Social Scene.
