Tony:
Have you ever heard of a dislocated knuckle that poked through the skin before? Seems like a pretty serious injury for the most important finger on the most important arm of the most important player on the team. I can’t tell if they’re making it a more serious injury to cover for the fact that Orton left a game as a result of a glorified paper cut, or if they’re being cool about what is actually a pretty serious injury. My point is, I think Orton’s current injury situation will turn out to be a microcosm of Denver’s entire season, which is to say, no one will really be sure what’s going on but it will be a total mess. That said, the Bengals went 4-11-1 last year, Carson Palmer is already hurt, and their best player is the NFL’s answer to Kim Jong-il. Denver covers.

Sax:
This trend of hiring young coordinators is really getting out of hand with McDaniels, who lost a promising young quarterback and alienated his star wideout trying to prove what a big man he is. The Broncos’ hire looks especially suspect since everyone else plucked from the Belichick coaching tree has been an utter failure. On the other hand, the Bengals are turning into the Clippers of the NFL. Christ, what a fucking stupid game. I put this one on the slate so we could make fun of Tony’s Broncos, but now I just feel depressed. I just can’t take the Bengals under any circumstances, and they’re giving points here. I’m backing Denver.

Vikings at Cleveland +4

Dick:
The line-maker at Caesar’s must have come off a three-day bender when he made this one. Cleveland is one of the worst teams in football and their only contribution to the game over the last five years has been sending all of their first-round defensive busts to Denver expediting the firing of Mike Shanahan and helping to usher in the comedy show that is Josh McDaniels. There is no way Jamal Lewis gets more than 50 yards against Minnesota’s defense while the Browns, who haven’t played defense since 1986, will give up 150 yards to Adrian Peterson. Even though Favre is old, gray, and incontinent, he’ll be able to light these the Browns up for 250 yards and a touchdown or two.

Tony:
Is it me, or does Favre and the Vikings’ apparent sense of “finally!” make it seem like his arrival has been in the cards for far, far longer than anyone is letting on? Three truths: 1. The Vikings are going to get a lot of amazing plays and senior leadership from Favre. 2. The Vikings are going to get a lot boneheaded mistakes and old-guy poor judgement from Favre. 3. Favre looks fucking RIDICULOUS in a Vikings uniform. It makes me physically uncomfortable. Still, Favre is better for the Vikings than Hurrdurrnilus Jackson and Sage Rosenpenis combined. The Browns … have orange helmets. Vikings cover.

Sax:
Like basically everyone else in America, I can’t wait to see this Favre experiment blow up in Minnesota’s face, but we’re gonna have to wait until he gets banged up a little and the temperatures drop a bit. 4 points is an absurdly low line for Minnesota to be giving to a team as shitty as the Browns.

Chicago at Green Bay -3.5

Dick:
Chicago’s the better team, but the spread flips to Green Bay because no one knows if the Bears receivers can catch Jay Cutlers’ passes. There is no frozen tundra, there is no shitty weather, and the running game favors the Bears anyway, but this game will come down to who has a better game: Aaron Rodgers or Cutler. Cutler’s still considered a wild card because of the way he left Denver. Don’t listen to it. He makes the Bears a 13-win team and while folks in Green Bay might have been pissed that Favre went to the Vikings, the Bears landing Cutler made everyone else in the division realize they are basically fucked unless Cutler explodes on the sidelines every six plays and punches Lovie Smith in the face on national television. Don’t bet on it.

Tony:
How is Green Bay favored in this game? Brian “A Ray Lewis White People Can Be Comfortable With” Urlacher and the rest of the Windyville defense remain formidable. And I don’t know if you heard, but Chicago traded for a new quarterback. How, after finishing 6-10 last year, is Green Bay suddenly projected to walk away with the division? Yes, I know they installed Dom Capers and Capers installed a new 3-4 scheme and CHAMPIONSHIPS ARE WON ON DEFENSE, but I’m not buying it. If I were a gambling man or knew anything about football, I would say take Chicago to cover, but I’m not and I don’t, so, look for Chicago to cover.

Sax:
Who the hell is supposed to be catching all these great passes Jay Cutler is gonna throw? They have a wide receiver named Devin Aromashodu and another named Juaquin Iglesias, and look at Desmond Clark’s fucking eyes. LOOK AT THEM! I guess Chicago could end up being really good this year, they still have that defense, but they haven’t had a good quarterback since I was potty-training, so I’m gonna need Cutler to show me something before I back him on the road against a frisky Green Bay squad. I’ll probably regret this, but I’m taking Green Bay.

Buffalo at New England -11

Dick:
Tom Brady has a new knee and probably a clearer sense of his mortality on the football field after previously suffering nothing more than a hangnail. However, even with the running back situation muddled and the Patriots defense in full transition, this should be a cakewalk because Buffalo doesn’t even have an offensive game plan let alone their dreadlocked, tooth-capped running back, Marshawn Lynch, who is suspended for the first four weeks. Considering that Brady still has maybe the best stable of receivers in the game, the 11 points seems a little light considering that Dick Jauron can’t even decide what position to fuck his wife in.

Tony:
The idea of hating Boston sports fans for their lack of humility, reason, class, logic, insight, and sensibility has been around for years and can largely be considered cliche at this point. That said, every time I hear some Beantown doofus jawing about FACKIN’ TAWM BRADY, BROTHA, I want to fly planes into their buildings. Conventional wisdom says always take the Pats so long as Belichick and Brady are at the wheel, and especially against a team like the Bills of Buffalo High School. But 11 points is an awful lot, especially for week one. And the Bills apparently have some super hero receiver who does situps and eats popcorn with impunity. I’m going with conventional wisdom. Pats.

Sax:
TAWM FACKIN BRADY, BROTHA!!! Tony can eat a bag of dicks. 11 is a lot of points, but Buffalo just fired their Offensive Coordinator, TO is old, the Pats are at home, and Brady and Moss are looking to make a statement. Brady and Moss like to make statements in meaningless regular season games against inferior opponents instead of games like the goddamn Super Bowl. I would be really excited about Joey Galloway and Fred Taylor if it was 1999. Fuck, I have a bad feeling about this season. Still, I’m taking the Pats and giving the points.

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka is the champion of the Humanities. He is the reason
why the Humanities must be preserved, for both the sheer delight in his
deceptively shallow prose and for his demonstration of the ability of
fiction to impart truths and ask questions which may be impossible to
articulate in any straightforward or ‘serious’ manner. The very thing
which is continually under question for any reader of Kafka is the
nagging belief that there is something at work in his writing,
operating behind the scenes, which is never announced nor proclaimed by
Kafka himself. Is it possible that he is just ‘telling us a story’,
giving us some simple prose to waste away a few boring hours, and not
demanding anything of us other than the most basic ability to read? My
belief is that only a moron could arrive at such a conclusion, but if
pressed for definitive proof, I confess that I may indeed stumble and
begin talking out of my anus.

The only reason that I can come up with as to why Kafka is so
mysterious a writer is by way of contrast with another writer whose
name is not uncommonly associated with Kafka’s — Albert Camus (and the
existentialist movement in general). In Camus, be it The Outsider, The Plague, or The Fall,
there is no doubt that he is addressing The Big Themes. He practically
yells out to the reader that he is dealing with questions of the most
utmost importance: The death of God, Man’s response to an Absurd
universe, the grounds of political action in a valueless world, etc,
etc. There can be no mistaking the ‘themes’ of Camus. In contrast,
Kafka, and whatever ‘themes’ he is trying to present, only emerge in
the mind of the reader gradually, sometimes even hesitantly. The
experience of reading his work can make one suspicious of one’s own
schizophrenia — always trying to read between the lines, placing
perhaps undue importance upon certain apparently insignificant events,
seeing continuities and connections between seemingly disparate and
unrelated situations. Another major contrast that can be drawn with
Camus is that it is possible to interpret some of Kafka’s works as
addressing the very same themes that Camus is dealing with, but without
any of Camus’ certitude – the incredulity of belief in the
transcendent, the abstract awareness that there is nothing which lies
beyond the veil of appearance, and the ridiculous pursuit of such
fantasies when the possibility of success has been curtailed at the
very outset. It is indeed possible to understand Kafka through the
filters of such themes, but there is at least the space for lingering
doubt in the mind of the reader that perhaps Kafka, unlike Camus, is
doing none of these things.

Turning to The Trial, we have what is perhaps the only
really ‘complete’ novel that Kafka ever wrote. As some of you may know,
the notorious ‘ending’ of The Castle was the beginning of another
sentence. The fact that that book did not ‘end’ in a conventional
sense, at least for me, does not even register as a negative. I mention
the relative ‘completeness’ of The Trial because it seems that if one were recommend a novel by Kafka to the uninitiated, The Trial
would be the best one to begin with; only after this novel, I think,
would my remarks about the fact of the ‘incomplete’ nature of The Castle be understandable. Now although there are significant overlaps in both the structure and the mood of the two books, The Trial
is perhaps the less abstract of the two. This is partly due to its
‘completeness’, but it is also due to the setting of the narrative
within the political-legal system of the world of the novel. At least
on the surface, the characters inhabit a world of domesticity, habits,
streets and buildings, familiar structures and the reliable
predictability of everyday life. Despite the fact that the novel begins
with the protagonist, Joseph K., being arrested by agents of the Law
and subjected to an unusual interrogation, these activities are still
taking place in a familiar environment. In The Castle, however,
the protagonist (just called ‘K’) is a foreigner to the snowbound
village and cannot rely upon any of his usual devices to help himself.
This becomes true of The Trial once the novel progresses, where
K. is forced to enter into strange and claustrophobic hideaways,
apartments and offices, but these new and unfamiliar locales are only
arrived at as a result of K’s investigations. Once he had been shocked
out of his previous life of complacency and narrow-minded
industriousness by the event of his arrest, the mission to uncover and
reveal the truth of his case and the nature of the accusation that has
been leveled against him requires him to enter into the world beneath
the surface of his previous life.

In the tradition of mystery novels, The Trial is
structured around the discovery or revelation of something and the
resultant process of unraveling the multiple layers that have been
erected around the truth behind the initial revelation. In standard
murder-mystery novels, the discovery of a murder leads the protagonist
to the gradual discovery of the truth of the case through the
successive uncovering and sorting together of the partial clues that
are accumulated along the way. The endings of such novels are almost
invariably centred upon the total, unifying vision of the protagonist
– through their eyes and with the sophistication of their intellect
they are able to link all of the preceding clues into a grand schema
representing the truth of the crime. No loose ends, not a single thread
remains left over. The Trial, however, does not begin with the
discovery of a crime or even with an implicit claim that a crime has
been committed. No, the event that triggers this mystery novel is the
event of the arrest itself. K is unable to determine what he is being arrested for, only that he is
being arrested and presumably accused as well. This reversal of the
standard model of the mystery genre becomes the one unifying theme of
the narrative, for K’s subsequent attempts to learn more about his case
lead him into even deeper and darker regions of his world. K’s
steadfast refusal to accept the accusation leveled against him by the
agents of the Law is the motivating factor behind his quest to discover
the truth.

The other most obvious reversal of the standard formula of the
mystery genre lies in the progress that K. makes through the novel.
Adopting the role of the investigator and the seeker of the truth of
his case, the progression through the different layers and facades of
the legal system does not lead towards any satisfying grand vision;
there are no epiphanies, no moments of great insight, and no sense of
even the possibility of such ‘closure’. The various people that he
encounters in the hidden recesses of this underworld of the Law –
ranging from legal advocates, experienced assistants, knowledgeable
women, portrait artists, and other accused individuals — all seem to
be able to offer K. some small nugget of information, some piece of
purportedly valuable and hard-worn advice, and through the application
of this acquired information, we readers are led into thinking that
this will make a difference for K’s case. But lest you think Kafka is
going to let us have anything of the sort, rest assured that the clues
don’t fit together, the advice does not hold any hope of acquittal, and
the disparate mass of partial observations, slanted perspectives and
inconclusive testimonies do not in any way provide a solid foundation
upon which K. can make any decisions.

One of the interpretations which are offered of this
anti-mystery mystery novel is that Kafka was offering us a glimpse of
the nature of the as-yet dormant totalitarianism that was to sweep
across Europe in the years after his death in 1924. There is a case to
be made for this view, but it rests upon an overly literal analysis of
the novel. Such an interpretation is the most obvious one to draw from
the novel. The first thing that could be pointed to in response to this
interpretation is that there is no evidence to suggest that the path of
K. was disrupted by any specific malevolent agency which was
intentionally thwarting K’s attempts to the learn the truth of his
case. What I mean here is that during the course of the novel the
impression develops that no one knows the truth in its totality. Yes,
there are those who are on the ‘inside’ of the Law who could be said to
know more about the operations of things than K. does, but like K.,
they are only privy to what they themselves experience from their own
narrow, specialized and inevitably partial perspectives.

The first evidence of this comes from the first agents that K.
encounters on the first morning: when pressed to answer questions
regarding K’s case and the nature of the accusation for which he has
been arrested, the invariable response is a confession of ignorance,
dutiful ignorance (‘These gentlemen and I are of minor importance to
your case, indeed we know almost nothing about it…You are under arrest,
that’s true, I don’t know more than that.’). If this ignorance, or more
precisely, if this partial understanding was merely a version of these
agents being lackeys of the State (‘We are on a need-to-know basis’,
etc.), then there may in fact be some substance to the totalitarian
interpretation. However, with each new encounter that K. has further
within the workings of the Law, the partial understanding and
comprehension of the operations of the Law by these other agents and
witnesses becomes the defining feature of all involved. No one is in a
position to provide a grand summary of all that is involved in K’s
case. If it were a vision of the madness of totalitarianism and
unchecked bureaucracy, then this would at least be some sort of
explanation and would hold out hope for an almost Oprah-like sentiment
of ‘closure’ (but some ground could possibly be gained by a comparison
between this novel and the madness documented in The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn). It is probably unnecessary to point out that there are other aspects of The Trial which do not fit so easily within this interpretation.

Another common perception of Kafka’s writings was expressed in Orson Welles’ 1962 screen adaptation of The Trial,
where at the beginning Welles’ voiceover tells us something to effect
that ‘Kafka has given us a vision of a nightmare’ or something like
that (I don’t remember exactly, so don’t shoot me). The idea that Kafka
writes surreal, nightmare visions of a horrifying world is another
general response to his work, and in short stories such as Metamorphosis,
there is an undeniable surrealism. However, like with the political
interpretation of his work, it seems to me that once again Kafka is
being pigeon-holed in a way that leaves many other residual themes
unresolved, in particular, the shared themes of both The Trial and The Castle
– the absence of any finality, the sense of the ominous presence of
inhuman forces lurking behind every corner, the ultimate futility of
human plans and the recurrent search for the perpetually absent
Transcendent. These themes can be dug out of the two novels, and this
links him up with the existentialists, but the lack of explicit
meditation upon these ideas, only the faintest allusion to them,
prevents him from being completely identified with the existentialists.
Also, by thinking of the novel as either a surrealist nightmare or as
an examination of totalitarianism, this can serve to undermine the
reader’s direct involvement in the novel. If Kafka were dealing with
political questions of the kind just outlined, for example, then the
possibility that he is telling us something about all of our situations is foreclosed. Indeed, the notorious French philosopher Jacques Derrida has made use of The Trial
as a model of the operation of authority and the law, and presumably
this implies that in some sense, we are all in K’s position.

So there we have it: Kafka is a poet of political terror,
Kafka is a surrealist who offers us glimpses of nightmares, Kafka
telling us the truth of our relation to law and authority, and Kafka as
an existentialist warning us of the futility of human hopes and
admonishing us for chasing illusions. There is something to all of
these charges, though none can claim to fully own Kafka. When I began
this little survey of one of the works of Herr Franz I claimed that
Kafka was the champion of the Humanities. I reaffirm my claim because
only in the world of the Humanities are such ambiguities not symptoms
of failure or of sloppy work, but of the ever-present duty to
continually re-attend those things that we slide over without ever
pausing to consider. In the case of The Trial, if questions
about the nature of justice, the nature of authority, of living without
the hope of eventual redemption, and the futility of pursuing the
Transcendent at a cost to the present are left lingering in your mind
long after reading Herr Franz, then his work here is done. As any
thinking person knows (or should know), disagreement over any
proposed answers to such questions are the signs of the health of a
culture, not its ‘decline’, and it is in this space that the Humanities
exists and prospers. When this space is sold off piece by piece and
there is no public space left for ambiguities, we are all fucked. Read The Trial and learn to love the lack of ‘closure’.

Nonfiction, as a genre that transcends modes of mass-media
communication, is taking over. It’s a not-quite-but-almost coequal
partner with fiction in popular and unpopular literature; but recently,
you’ve more likely seen the rise of nonfiction in television (and
movies, if you count the Clooneyized adaptation of Sebastian Junger’s
‘A Perfect Storm’). From MTV’s perennial ‘Real World’, to it’s recent
‘The Osbournes’, to the host of flunkifying reality-TV shows that have
been washing up and out on network television the past couple seasons,
writers have simply stopped making stuff up. If it’s not stranger than
fiction, non-fictive truth is at least as good of a story.

The granddad of this whole nonfiction thing is probably Tom Wolfe; but
granddad can be a bit crusty, and hard to relate to sometimes – so it
couldn’t hurt to hang out with the younger, less venerated but
nonetheless important uncle of contemporary creative nonfiction – Tracy
Kidder. I can’t say I know too much more about him than what was on the
inside flap of House and what others have told me in passing; but, to
get the gist of him (yeah, Tracy’s a guy), I don’t think you have to
know too much more than that.

House is the story of a house. When it begins, a young upper-middle
class family in the collegiate Arcadian hamlet of Amherst,
Massachusetts wants to build a house. They hire an architect. They hire
a builder. The builder builds the house. In the end, the family – the
Souweines – moves into the house. The Souweines are happy with their
new house, and the book ends. The real story of House is the simmering
clash of class resentments, latent anger and personality that forms a
trans-mundane three way conflict between the Souweines, their architect
and the builders.

Kidder’s talent lays in dredging the depths of his (real) characters
and bringing up subtle internal and external antagonisms that create
the real drama real people (even boring ones) really live everyday.
Even other prime nonfiction stylists, granddad included, would likely
be much more ham-fisted about it. Kidder’s talent, tragically, is
inextricable from those qualities which can make House (and lots of
nonfiction, it’s a premise thing really) a tedious read. Ultimately,
the reality in Kidder’s reality-literature can’t have the gravity of
reality sculpted for fiction plots. Unless he were to deal with, oh, a
murder, the travails of an international drug kingpin, or some kind of
spy-thriller type story – all the subtle conflict in the world can’t
compete with a made-up scenario in which the characters actually had
something to lose over the course of the narrative. Ultimately, Kidder
does a great job seeing conflict where others might overlook it, and
making those sublimated resentments breath fresh air – but, again,
ultimately, all those sublimated resentments give rise to a series of
arguments between the Souweines and their contractors over who’ll foot
the $900 for a set of stairs.

That, along with the excursions into construction history Kidder takes
and the symbolism he hints at, will be enough to hold some people’s
attention; but not everyone’s.

The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Andrea Dworkin

“I would rather suck dick than have sex with Andrea Dworkin,” says Al Goldstein, the founding father of Screw Magazine. Goldstein might soon be going to jail on charges of harassing a former employee,
so he may get the chance to try at least one of those options. But
readers of Dworkin’s new memoir, Heartbreak, may wonder if Goldstein
isn’t missing the point. More than anything, this book reminds me of
the New Yorker cartoon in which a wife asks her husband: “You haven’t
said anything for ten years. Is anything wrong?”

It’s been fourteen years since Andrea Dworkin published a book, so some
of our younger Ruthless Readers may not even know who she is. Along
with law professor Catharine McKinnon,
Dworkin made waves two decades ago by claiming that pornography
violated women’s civil rights. Not only did dirty pictures encourage
sex discrimination (including rape), they were sex discrimination, and
they deserved to be covered-or covered up-by the same civil-rights laws
that dealt with bias on the job. While McKinnon argued points of law,
Dworkin became the street fighter of the pair, speaking on college
campuses and attracting a small but dedicated band of young groupies.

By the mid-Eighties, Dworkin and McKinnon were the feminists men loved
to hate-but maybe we shouldn’t have bothered. The only success they
ever achieved was getting a single “civil rights” ordinance passed in
Indianapolis (of all places), which a federal court quickly threw out.
Meanwhile, their ideas sparked a catfight that almost destroyed the National Organization for Women,
and by end of the Eighties the anti-censorship faction was firmly in
charge of what was left of NOW. Those setbacks pretty much spelled the
end of anti-porn feminism in America. By eliminating Dworkin’s appeal
as a hate figure, they also brought a quick end to her 15 minutes of
fame.

Unpopular views plus bad writing don’t equal huge sales, and some of
Dworkin’s most important work (including her 1979 classic, Pornography:
Men Possessing Women) is now out of print. Like those early books,
Heartbreak is no literary masterpiece, and it may already be headed for
the remainder bin. But believe it or not, it’s worth reading. Dworkin’s
first sentence promises an intimate memoir: “I have been asked,
politely and not so politely, why I am myself”. She doesn’t quite
answer that intriguing question, but her rambling narrative evokes the
heady days of Sixties and post-Sixties radicalism-a lost world that
most of us wouldn’t want to live in, but one that shaped the world we
live in now.
One of the earliest surprises in Dworkin’s book comes from her days as
a student activist at Bennington College in Vermont. In those days
Bennington was a women’s school, with tough parietal hours to keep
boyfriends at bay:

From 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. the houses in which the students
lived were girls only. One could have sex with another girl, and many
of us did, myself certainly included. But the male lovers had to
disappear: be driven out like beasts into the cold mountain night, hide
behind trees during the hour of the wolf, and reemerge after dawn. The
elimination of parietal hours was a huge issue, in some ways as big as
the war?It was law and order versus personal freedom, and I was on the
side of personal freedom.

Dworkin’s demand for “personal freedom” eventually got
her expelled?and that’s not the only irony of this strange woman’s life
story. If you think man-hating feminists are wrong about everything,
Heartbreak will make you think again. A few of chapters may make your
head spin, in fact. Not many people know that Dworkin shares a godson
with her former idol, the Beat poet and gay liberationist Allen Ginsberg,
or the story behind their split in the early Seventies. To hear Dworkin
tell it, their final encounter went something like this:

On the day of [my godson's] bar mitzvah newspapers
reported in huge headlines that the Supreme Court had ruled child
pornography illegal. I was thrilled. I knew that Allen would not be. I
did think he was a civil libertarian. But in fact, he was a pedophile.
He did not belong to the North American Man-Boy Love Association out of
some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant
it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some
inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to
fuck children and his constant pursuit of underage boys…

Ginsberg told me that he had never met an intelligent person who had
the ideas I did. I told him he didn’t get around enough. He pointed to
the friends of my godson and said they were old enough to fuck. They
were twelve and thirteen. He said that all sex was good, including
forced sex…

Referring back to the Supreme Court’s decision banning child
pornography he said, “The right wants to put me in jail.” I said, “Yes,
they’re very sentimental; I’d kill you.” The next day he’d point at me
in crowded rooms and screech, “She wants to put me in jail.” I’d say,
“No, Allen, you still don’t get it. The right wants to put you in jail.
I want you dead.”

Whose side are you on now? Are you surprised?

Speaking of NAMBLA,
the release of Heartbreak is nicely timed to complement the latest
mind-blowing abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. And it’s easy for
free-speech fans to forget that Dworkin spent her career pushing two
ideas, not one. She claimed that sexual violence against women and
children was incredibly widespread, even routine? and that banning
pornography was the right way to put a stop to it. Do those two
opinions make her crazy-or only half-crazy?

But this is water under the bridge, and Dworkin knows it. As if her
agenda weren’t tattered enough in 1990, the following decade brought us
DVD players, Internet smut, riot-grrl feminism, and President Bill Clinton.
You’d be heartbroken, too. It’s a sign of her complete irrelevance that
she now refuses to use the World Wide Web, or even get an email
address. After all, cyberspace is the ultimate smut bazaar. If you felt
the way Dworkin does about pornography, you wouldn’t touch a modem with
a ten-foot pole.

Still, the author seems less bitter than you might expect. (Maybe all
that lecture-circuit money helped soften the blow. I just hope she got
out of the stock market in time.) She hints that this book is her swan
song:

I think I’ve pretty much done what I can do; I’m empty; there’s not
much left, not inside me. I think that it’s bad to give up, but maybe
it’s not bad to rest, to sit in silence for a while.

But the book’s cool, distant delivery sometimes slips-especially
when Dworkin describes her enemies in the feminist movement, the women
who eventually took her down:

There were so-called feminists who published in Playboy, Hustler, and
Penthouse and penned direct attacks on feminists fighting pornography
and prostitution. There were women labeled feminist who wrote
pornographic scenarios in which the so-called fantasies were the rape
of other feminists, usually named and sometimes drawn but always
recognizable…

That brings us back to Screw magazine. Al Goldstein
isn’t the first man (or woman) to argue that only ugly women become
radical feminists. A look at the jacket of Heartbreak convinces me he’s
wrong. Andrea Dworkin wasn’t born wearing overalls, and she can
probably afford a tube of lipstick. So the image on the book’s back
flap must be the woman Dworkin has chosen to become: the Pillsbury Earth Mother whose photograph makes Goldstein’s dick go instantly limp. (That’s the point, Al. Don’t you get it?)

But close the book, and you’re confronted with a very different
picture. The cover photo shows Dworkin as she was some time in the
early Seventies, at the high noon of Women’s Liberation. She is dark
and smoldering, her hair unkempt and–can I be imagining this?–a touch
of mascara on her lashes. She holds a cigarette to her lips, her eyes
cast down intently on something in front of her. I like to think she’s
writing a devastating press release, or a powerfully argued manifesto
to persuade the world that some male chauvinist pig needs his balls cut
off. Andrea Dworkin was always wrong–but thirty years ago she was wrong
and Ruthless, and she was sexy as all hell.

The Fates of Human Societies

also

A Short History of Everybody for
the Last 13,000 Years

Jared Diamond

We may or may not know who Scott Fuller is…

Diamond first entered the saturated pop-science book market back in 1991 with the publication of his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee.
After making a few million and hurting his neck from wearing assorted
medals, our friend Dr. Diamond set his mind on producing one of the
most ambitious pop-science books in living memory. Arguably more
ambitious than Dawkins’ attempt to compress Darwinism to within 400
pages (The Blind Watchmaker) and packed with more information (true or not) than a million year’s worth of The New York Times,
Diamond unleashed this beast upon the public back in 1998. As the
subtitle states, this book is ‘a short history of everybody for the
last 13,000 years’. Not ambitious in the least, but interesting
nonetheless. Before I begin any kind of analysis of the book’s central
theory, it must be stated in advance that a number of anthropologist
co-workers have expressed their contempt for this book to me on a
number of occasions. Not because of the theory, or even because of the
wide-ranging perspective, but mostly because of the details surrounding
whether Diamond was entirely correct in identifying a species of corn
which may have existed in the Fertile Crescent circa 7000B.C.
As I said to these illustrious scholars, I don’t really give a fuck
whether one species of corn or another, closely related, species of
corn existed in region x at time y. What I am interested
in is whether Diamond’s overall theory holds up/makes any sense. For
some reason, my inclination towards the theory over the nitpicking over
details has since alienated me from these scholars. Oh well.

Ignoring the concerns of anally-retentive anthropologists,
paleo-geologists, paleo-agronomists, and all their related brethren, we
can now move on to a brief examination of Diamond’s book. It is
probably best to think of this whole book as answering one basic (or
not so basic) question:

If there are no essential differences among the
different peoples of the planet, then why did the historical
trajectories of these people diverge so much?

Not uncommon in the enlightened world of the bigot or the
Eurocentric fuckhead, is the claim that the different historical
trajectories of the different ‘races’ of the human species represent
underlying differences between these races. We have heard all of this
stuff before: it was the Europeans who developed technology, science,
etc., whilst the rest of the world waded in their own feces and played
drums to summon up the spirit of the volcano, etc. Assuming that one is
not a racist, the claim that the different paths of cultural
development of the different people in the world indicate that
Europeans are superior to, say, the Australian aborigines is unlikely
to convince. Nevertheless, a cursory reading of history will lend
support to claims that there were/are in fact substantial differences
to be found in the level of cultural, technological, and agricultural
development of the different peoples on the planet. The problem for
Diamond, or rather, the problem which Diamond sets for himself in this
book, is how to explain the differences in historical development
amongst the different groups of humans without assuming some kind of
explicit or implicit racist assumption.

Drawing on his experiences living with various tribes in
Papua New Guinea (the Mecca for anthropologists everywhere, or so it
would seem), Diamond presents us with the following problem: If the
current generation of New Guineans is separated by only 3 or 4
generations to when PNG was almost completely ‘primitive’, and if any
version of the ‘innate differences (racist)’ theory was true, then how
is it that modern New Guineans can master modern technology with no
significant problems? This question basically cuts to the heart of the
theoretical project which Diamond has set-up for himself. The fact that
the modern descendents of ‘primitive’ people can easily accommodate
themselves to modern technology (given the opportunity), despite the
fact that they have no historical link to such technology, provides prima facie
evidence against the validity of any ‘innate differences’ explanation
for why the historical development of different groups of people
diverged so much. As you can pretty much anticipate, the only ground
left for Diamond to provide such an explanation will centre on the
historical, geographical, biological, and ecological contingencies in
which different groups found themselves inhabiting.

What our buddy (and he is our buddy) Diamond argues
for is the thesis that the reason for why different groups developed so
differently over the centuries is due to the environmental (broadly
construed) situations in which they were placed. It is due to the lack
of suitable vegetation in certain areas (like sub-Sahara Africa) that
prevented the people living there from developing agriculture. But it
is necessary to make something clear at this point: it was not as
though the people living in these unsavory areas looked about them to
find suitable plants to domesticate, failed to find any, and then
resorted to a hunter-gatherer existence. No. As Diamond illustrates,
the origin of domestication (with the corresponding growth of
agriculture of both flora and fauna) would be entirely accidental and
unintentional. For those of you who know your Darwin, you would be
aware that Darwin first developed the idea of ‘artificial selection’ in
order to lay the ground for his theory of natural selection. And in
that section, Darwin was explicit in claiming that the domestication of
plants and animals by humans would have been entirely accidental in
origin. By the vagaries of human thought and preferences, certain
species of plants and animals would have been favoured by humans. This
initial favorability would slowly give rise to a selection pressure in
favour of more ‘favourable-to-humans’ organisms and so on. Intentional
selection of organisms by humans would only be a late development upon
the originally unintentional artificial selection. This unintentional
origin is consistent with Diamond’s general thesis against any ‘innate
differences’ theory.

With this caveat in mind, it is clear how Diamond is going to
set out to debunk any ‘innate differences’ theory of historical
development. The fundamental concept underlying Diamond’s argument is
the Gould-style emphasis on contingency. Assuming no significant
differences between the different groups of humans, one can explain the
different developmental trajectories of different groups purely on the
basis of material contingency. This is most obviously the case where
plant and animal domestication is involved, for if there are no viable
candidates co-existing with a given group of humans, then the process
of unintentional artificial selection will be much more difficult to
generate. The importance of focusing on the origin of agriculture for
the overall purpose of the book is due to Diamond’s thesis that the
development of agriculture is a critical point which must be passed in
order for other cultural developments to occur. By planting crops, this
had the effects of decreased mobilization, greater population density,
and eventually, all important specialization.

According to Diamond, the sedentary lifestyle which grew up
around intensive agriculture laid the groundwork for a whole host of
cultural and developmental possibilities which had been hitherto
foreclosed. By regulating social action according to the requirements
of the crops/animals, this not only allowed for the production of
surplus resources, but also initiated a new kind of social system based
upon such surpluses. A surplus of production would allow for the
development of parasitic, non-productive social formations which would
be ultimately dependent upon the production of the specialized
agriculturists, but which would also free up the non-producers to
perform other kinds of activities not directly concerned with
production. Much like how the development of bipedal motion allowed for
early hominoids to use their hands independently of explicit
transportational (I think I made that word up) purposes, the surplus
production of intensive agriculture laid down the material/economic
conditions needed for other purposes. As Diamond describes it, this
surplus production opened up quite significant paths for humans:

“…at high population densities only a portion of the
people came to be farmers, but they were mobilized to devote themselves
to intensive food production, thereby yielding further surpluses to
feed nonproducers. The nonproducers mobilizing them included chiefs,
priests, bureaucrats, and warriors. The biggest political units could
assemble large labor forces to construct irrigation systems and
fishponds that intensified food production even further.” (p. 62).

Or, in other words, the development of agriculture was the first
step in the formation of the modern state. Of course, there were
societies in which agriculture was developed but which did not
contribute significantly to the rise of sophisticated technology (the
above quote is in the context of the Pacific Islands), but the point
still stands. If one is attempting to retrace the steps from the modern
industrialized, highly technological, and highly specialized societies,
the birth of agriculture was absolutely necessary. Diamond makes use of
comparisons to the hunter-gatherer societies of pre-colonized Australia
(anachronism noted) and sub-Sahara Africa to highlight these claims.
Just like in the pre-Pleistocene fantasies of insane environmentalists,
early hunter-gatherer societies were decentralized and largely
egalitarian. Diamond is not claiming that the lack of any centralized
command structure and the lack of any recognizable agriculture was a
mere coincidence; he is claiming a causal link between (at this stage)
the economic structure of a society and the political/social
organization of a society. But this is no Marxist rant–Diamond is
making the empirical claim that without either an internal supply of
surplus production or an external (imported) supply of resources,
people will lack the degree of independence necessary for technological
innovation and other cultural feats. The surplus is the currency which
permits the exploration of areas not exclusively founded in productive
enterprise. And whether it is possible for an intensive,
surplus-producing agriculture to take root (pun intended) will be
entirely contingent upon the available flora and fauna in a given
region.

That is the core of what could be considered the ‘benefits’
of sedentary agricultural societies. The negative side is integral to
the thesis of the book. Diamond argues that the formation of sedentary
societies facilitated the growth of diseases in human populations. By
living so close to animals and other humans, infections were not only
much more likely to occur, but they were also likely to remain in a
population. Dense concentrations of people in one area are the perfect
breeding grounds for a whole range of parasites, bacterial infections,
and viruses. Cutting to the point of this claim, Diamond argues that
the increased exposure to disease in sedentary communities would have
had the effect of building up immunity to such diseases by members of
those communities. The reason for why this is important is obvious if
one has even the faintest knowledge of colonial history (or if you
bothered to read the second word in the book’s title). The resistance
to germs and infection by the people who grew out of the agricultural
revolution had catastrophic consequences for those groups who had not
developed agriculture. So, not only did the production of surpluses
enable those societies to develop other innovations, it also had the
effect of killing off or severely disabling any hunter-gatherer groups
who so happened to cross their path.

Another important development which arose out of the rise of
intensive agriculture was the concept and/or practice of private
property. Since anachronism is the order of the day here, it is
probably better to state that the concept of ownership (hence,
property) was first grounded in this revolution. Due to not only the
sedentary lifestyle, but also the necessity of crops and the management
of surpluses, some kind of system was needed to regulate this hitherto
non-existent phenomenon. Although evidence for cultural transitions
like these are extremely difficult to find, one source of evidence lies
in the development of writing systems. The Sumerian cuneiform writing
system is the oldest known system and it was developed in the area
known as the Fertile Crescent (modern day Iraq–also of note is the
fact that the first known anything written by humans was a beer recipe).
According to the thesis briefly outlined, this would fit in quite
nicely with Diamond’s argument because the ancient Sumerians lived in
what was once a highly fertile and dense agricultural region (the
Middle East, somewhere around modern Saudi Arabia and Turkey). The need
for written documents would arise in accordance with the need to store,
maintain, and distribute those resources (i.e., management of
property). Unlike a Marxist, Diamond does not claim that the
development of writing systems necessarily followed the development of
intensive agriculture (he provides counter-examples), but he does claim
that once writing was invented, it allowed for other cultural
developments not exclusively founded on agriculture.

The resistance to diseases associated with an agricultural
lifestyle, combined with the development of sophisticated technology
(the mastery of steel, for example), and the invention of more
effective weapons (guns, etc) all joined together to allow for these
cultures to more or less decimate other cultures. The story of the
South American invasion by the Spanish is a brilliant demonstration of
this point and is very well presented by Diamond. I knew nothing about
that invasion before reading this book and it is merely one of the
extra bits of information that you get from reading it (and if you know
about that invasion, rest assured that there will be others that you
won’t know – unless you’re a real geek). Relating the story of the
migration of homo sapiens into Northern and then Southern
America acts as a fine textbook example of how to provide evidence for
one’s theory in a clear and convincing manner. But Diamond is not
content to stick with the stories of the Americas–he has a stab at
every single major culture on the planet and the paths of their
interaction with one another.

And this is the style of argument and presentation which
underlies the whole book. By examining specific cultural feats in a
relatively detailed way (detailed for a pop science book, at least),
Diamond then proceeds to argue that certain avenues are opened up which
were previously impossible. Unlike a Hegelian, Diamond certainly does
not ascribe any sense of necessity to cultural development, but does
argue that certain things like agriculture lay down the necessary
conditions for things like sedentary living, although whether further
developments occur after these developments is contingent upon other
factors. There is an overriding sense of contingency to the whole book,
but the contingency identified in cultural developments are far from
being incomprehensible. This is why Diamond deserves to be ranked on
the same level with Stephen Jay Gould, for not only do they share the
same fundamental conception of evolution and cultural development they
also demonstrate their wide range of learning in each book. The most
interesting parallel between Diamond and Gould is that each thinker
understands that there is a political element to certain subjects, and
that insensitivity to those political elements is little more than
irresponsible (no doubt due to each man’s erudition). But just like
Gould, however, this erudition can sometimes be annoying in that a
particular tangent is taken which is not entirely necessary to the
point. Diamond has a love of linguistics and the origin of languages,
which is fair enough, but I cannot help but think that a good deal of
his ruminations on language could have been culled from the final edit.
Nevertheless, these mild divergences or extended meditations on
linguistic history (which is no doubt important) pale in comparison to
the numerous baseball references which clutter up some of Gould’s work.

I am nitpicking here (like those anthropologists mentioned
above), but there is no doubt that this book deserves to be placed
alongside the best that popular science writing has to offer. The
controversies can be left to the academics, but for a wide-ranging
theory on the origin of different human cultures, this book is outstanding.
He has clearly taken another step beyond the otherwise good first book,
and it will be very interesting to see what this man produces next (I
think he has another book out now). Plus, Diamond is a cool dude and
knows a lot more than me!

David Rakoff

[Ed Note: If one more mention of the word 'Sedaris',
even if in a strictly non-David Sedaris centric context, is going to
loosen your bowels, save yourself the trouble and just skip to the Ron Jeremy movie review thing now]

So, I was thinking I was pretty clever when I came up with the idea to rip into David Rakoff’s Fraud
by saying how he’s soooo clearly trying to be David Sedaris, and how
he’s soooo clearly not. I bet I was even feeling more proud of my own
cleverness then the 58 or so other people who posted their reviews on
Amazon.com and came more or less the same conclusion.

David
Rakoff isn’t David Sedaris: the difference is real, but not all that
great. It’s like comparing Jet Li to Jackie Chan (Li probably being the
better martial artist, Chan being, undeniabley quicker and more
entertaining). A la Li, David Rakoff is probably smarter, and though
Sedaris trades on the the borderline unbelivable novelty of his
life-experience, Rakoff has, unless Sedaris is holding back his essay
on having walked in space, led the more worldly life. Sedaris is just
the better writer. Rakoff has as much, if not more novelty to work with
as Sedaris (having lived in Japan, had cancer, blah blah blah), but is
so much less funny and sharp with it. Going any further into the
difference between David and David is besides the point though. Between
Hong Kong and Hollywood, there’s more than enough room for both Li and
Chan, and the world can accomodate both Rakoff and Sedaris, easily.

The fundamental problem with Fraud
isn’t who it isn’t, but what it isn’t; which is well organized. Out of
the ten-or-so essays in it, there are some good ones – but they’re all
at the back, and you probably won’t make it that far. The first couple
essays are mediocre in their pacing and constantly making heavy,
probably impenetrable, references to Audrey Hepburn era classic (i.e.
classically gay) films, that you wonder how you’re going to make it
through the chapter.

How do you do it? You skip. After the
second or third essay in the collection, you’ll be skipping lines like
Fraud were a biology textbook and you have an exam on it in three
hours. That’s how bad you’ll just want it to be done. Things which
rhyme with the author’s last name which would be more fun to do than
read his book: slack off, snack off, yak off, etc.etc.etc.

It has become cliché to hate MTV. It is just so easy to make fun of the damn channel. It is as easy and pointless as making fun of Creed, but we are just going to have to keep doing that too until I can safely turn on the radio and go 5 minutes without hearing their horrible renditions of plain, boring rock. When they aren’t showing one of the seven music videos currently in rotation (at least half of them featuring that dumbass with a band-aid on his cheek; likely rapping/dueting with some hot-at-the-moment female singer), they are repeating some Real World or award show program yet again, or some self-congratulatory retrospective (sure you gave Adam Sandler his start on Remote Control? what have you done lately?!). [Ed Note: What? They should be shot] And now this- another in an apparently never ending line of annoying MTV reality shows.

During the last few years, with the rise of reality television, I was always surprised MTV never tried to take more credit, having spawned the genre with the Real World ten years ago. Maybe it wasn’t a fad they wanted to take credit for. Maybe they didn’t want to bring attention to their current crop of the Real World and Road Rules, as they had stopped becoming somewhat amusing guilty pleasures and became outright obnoxious and annoying. Then again, I can only reason obnoxious and annoying is what they were going for, because from where else would this show have spawned.

MTV exec: “Well, it appears that our viewer-ship has grown over the years as each cast has become less and less likeable. Also, look around at all those other shows beating us in the ratings. Is there one single person out there on one of those shows you don’t want to kill? I propose we go towards the opposite spectrum of likeability. Any suggestions?”

Employee #1, spilling her latte: “What a about a KKK reality show?”

MTV exec: “I’m Jewish you asshole. Don’t slam the door on the way out.

Employee #2: “Real World Post Office? No one likes them.”

MTV exec: “Naw, too many ex-military types to deal with. What else?”

Employee #3: “Um, I remember in college, everybody in the Greek system was pretty fucking annoying.”

MTV exec: “Genius! We can follow a sorority around. It will be a half hour of bitchiness a week! Sure to be a hit. Now let’s all go watch Carson suck some more cock.”

None of this has addressed the show itself yet, and rightfully so- I have tried to repress any ideas of what actually happened. Also, it is just what you would expect? except bitchier. Sorority pledge #1 won’t talk to drunk sorority girl cause she kissed her boyfriend. Which “she” and “her” and “pledge” and “girl” is who? It doesn’t matter! They are all equally annoying.

FOX

What do you get when you cross an irate, old Briton with a room full of young, desperate, competing teeny boppers? Judging by American Idol, Hell’s Kitchen and now, So You Think You Can Dance, Fox’s answer to that question is, “entertainment.” And if “entertainment” is the kind of thing that can leave me with the sincere desire to gouge my eyes out and sever my inner ears in order to ensure that I am not subjected to it more than once, then they are right. Hey, I like Simon Cowell. His ability to reduce effeminate young narcissists to tears by simply opening his mouth and being honest was the one redeeming quality of American Idol that had me tuning in once or twice per season. But given the population’s general aversion to his style, I sure as hell didn’t expect the proliferation of Cowell-clones on every new show created by Fox. If this ominous trend is any indication, we can soon to expect a host of shows incorporating a superfluous crabby British character in an attempt to boost ratings. And if Ryan Seacrest isn’t involved, hell, it might work. Er, on second though, no it won’t.

Here is the scoop on So you Think You Can Dance: the only episode worth watching is the first one. Like American Idol, the show begins with a parade of dilettantes, hacks and mega-untalented loser dorks who have somehow developed the belief that they have talent. Gobs of it. They go on stage showing off their “skills” and hilarity ensues. But once they are weeded out, the show goes from funny to serious, and I have a hard time caring about a competition involving a group of self-important amateurs.

The list of positive qualities this show possesses was much, much shorter than the list of negative qualities, so being the economical columnist that I am — oh fuck it, I’m lazy — I decided to go with the short list. No one thought I could do it, but here we go — positive qualities of So You Think You Can Dance:

• There is no Randy Jackson to say, “You go, Dawg” every single time a contestant manages to wipe his own ass. Instead, he has been replaced with a judge who looks like the British Quentin Tarantino, except he doesn‘t talk everyone to death.
• There is no Paula Abdul to pretend she knows what the hell she is talking about when it comes to talent. Whether she was mothering the contestants, or doing the nasty thing with them, she had no place on American Idol. The token female judge who replaces her is actually a bit harsh, as she should be given the talent pool of morons on stage [Ed Note: Wouldn't it have been much more economical to have said, "There's no Randy Jackson; there's no Paula Abdul?"].
• The main judge (Nigel Lythgoe, the executive producer of American Idol) is mean-spirited, harsh, confrontational, egotistical; in other words, all the virtues I admire in a human being. He is OK but not as funny as Cowell — his jokes can border on the lame (”I’ve seen better spins on a washing machine”) Of course, with these three judges, all white and from England, the panel is about as diverse as a Klan meeting.
• There is no Ryan Seacrest. Need I explain further? He has been replaced by a Latina (Lauren Sanchez) with an unassuming personality. I barely notice her when she comes and goes on screen — always a positive quality.

If American Idol is any indication, So You Think You Can Dance will be another lesson in democracy, namely that the American public is too stupid to discern talent from Clay Aiken, who came perilously close to winning in season 2, and still manages to infect the airwaves as the poster child of androgynous people everywhere. People cannot be trusted with the vote, and his success (not to mention the American presidency) is proof that democracy has failed and should be replaced with a Ruthless oligarchy. Oh, the show? It sucks.

• Directed by Robert Marcarelli

• Written by Stephan Blinn and
  Holiss Barton

• Staring Casper Van Dien as
  Gillen Lane, Michael York as Stone Alexander, Catherine Oxenberg as Cassandra

  Barasche and Michael Ironside as Domenic

A secret code in the bible predicts about the same
thing the bible predicts explicitly in Revelations: an evil ruler, world
domination, etc. Gillen saves the world by converting from self-help guru and
academic to Christian, which somehow, indirectly thwarts the Antichrist.

Fucking Christians fundamentalists. They are usually
good for a laugh and this is not truer of anyone than the people at TBN, the
Trinity Broadcasting Network, which produces some of the funniest programming
this side of the Family Guy. When I saw TBN Film’s The Omega Code on
the shelf, I had to rent it.

Omega has some laugh out loud moments, like when
the Antichrist solves the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict. In one scene he
approaches the bargaining table, saying, “Gentlemen, I have a proposal.” Cut
immediately to the next scene in which the peace is announced, in no great
detail. But the funniest thing about this movie is just how fundamentally bad

it is.

The plot is ridiculously contrived so as to squeeze in
as much of the TBN world view as possible. The protagonist, Gillen , begins as
a pawn of evil. Apparently they couldn’t decide whether to make him a self-help
guru or an academic (both are evil because they look outside of religion for
answers), so they made him both. Tony Robins meets Richard Rorty, I guess.
Also, pre-converted Gilligan and the Antichrist awkwardly endorse evolution
about three times each. Towards the end of the film Gilligan renounces his
foolish adherence to reason by begging, “help me Jesus.” This, in itself, stops
the Antichrist.

Gilligan considers divorcing his wife, leading to five
minutes of lecture from an older friend about the importance of keeping a
marriage together “no matter what [?!]” This, of course, has nothing to do with
the rest of the story.

The story of Revelations is attached to attempts at
international governance. The EU and notions such as a global currency are
suddenly part of the assent of the Antichrist. When said Antichrist is elected
chairman of an international federation of states, basically a global version of
the EU, he declares himself God. Naturally, everybody pulls out, but the guy
suddenly has the world’s most powerful military and a nuclear arsenal at his
personal disposal. How the fuck did that happen?

We are also reminded about the evil of Papists. The
one character who might be cast in a worse light than the Antichrist is a former
priest who serves as the assistant to the Antichrist. Why would a Catholic
priest join up with a guy who clearly fit’s the profile of the Antichrist? You
got me. But at one point the church itself joins up. Protestants are
conspicuously absent from the lineup of dupes that also includes Jews, Muslims
and Buddhists. So we get a nice mix of political and religious propaganda.

Oh, then there’s the code itself. It’s a mathematical
reworking of biblical text that allows us to look into… the past. Yes, it turns
out that if you screw around with the code enough you can make it predict
historical events. It predicts the actions of characters in the movie to some
extent, but these predictions only reiterate parts of Revelations.

The story telling is awful. About a quarter of the
plot is revealed through news reports. The primary actors are professional.
You might even recognize some. The supporting cast was probably culled from a
Christmas Pageant somewhere in Nebraska. The directing and editing are
comically bad.

What I love about the film is that it is effectively
anti-Christian. The movie was made for and by Christian Fundamentalists, who
made it a financial success, and it is one of the dumbest most implausible
movies of the past few years. Only the sort of person who takes the bible as
literal truth could swallow a movie like this and only the sort of person who
can swallow a movie like this can take the bible as literal truth. This
film just screams, “we are idiots!”

If you’re interested in a good movie on this subject I
suggest The Rapture, directed by Michael Tolkin and staring Mimi Rogers.
If you want to play the home version of MST3K, get your mitts on this one ASAP.

DVD

Special Features. My DVD came with a great commercial
for a Christian web site called crosswalk .com. It shows an open stretch of
asphalt bisected by a narrow crosswalk. A green light flashes and a herd of
people crowd through the crosswalk, not one stepping over the lines. The
accidental symbolism is obvious, the people look like unusually obedient cattle being herded to
slaughter. But were the commercial makers really that oblivious?

The “Making of a Feature” mini-documentary is pretty
good as well. See a scholar of biblical prophesy expose himself as a moronic
fraud. Here people say things like “I played his co-star.” Wonder why none of
it was edited out. Laugh.

• Film 1

• Acting 1

• Directing 1

• Story 0

• DVD goodies 6

• Rewatchability 5

• It would take me 9 beers to
  completely enjoy this movie, although I would prefer to come up with some sort
  of drinking game.

• Number of times I paused the
  film to do something else 0

• Score I would give if I were

  rating the film for being unintentionally funny 8.5

Any film that ends with Nashville’s Henry Gibson shoving rapper DMX into a cremation oven can’t be all bad, but Ernest Dickerson’s Never Die Alone makes every possible effort to jump from respectability to tragic incompetence. In all, it’s easily the best film yet from Ronald’s archives, but the competition has been anything but fierce. And while I did take out the trash at one point without bothering to hit the pause button, I won’t say that it was a complete waste of time. Boring, pointless, clichéd, and overlong at only 82 minutes, but not an excuse for mass murder like last week’s New York Minute, or a lifetime’s worth of pain like The Big Bounce. I’ll even admit that DMX held his own, that is if it isn’t important that an actor have more than a single emotional reaction. As was said of another, far superior talent, he runs the gamut from A to B, but he’s a believable drug pusher and womanizer, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who even half-heartedly follows the hip-hop scene.

DMX is King David, a thug extraordinaire, who we first meet as a corpse. Through flashbacks, we learn how he met his end, and how in the fuck he came across David Arquette in the course of his day. The film tries to be complex by jumping around in time, but I wasn’t so much lost as confused as to why the director would make things so unnecessarily complicated. King David is stabbed while trying to return some cash to a kingpin named Moon, and he is found in the gutter by a pathetic cracker named Paul (Arquette). Paul takes King to the hospital, where he dies moments later. Paul is confused, and even more so when he learns that King left him a bag of jewelry, cash, and the keys to his pimp ride. One would think that Paul would be smart enough to realize that it might not be a good idea to drive around in a car that had the vanity plate “KING D,” but it’s acceptable that whitey not have too much upstairs. As Paul drives around the city, he finds some tapes, which contain King’s “Autobiography of a King,” the last will and testament of a muthafucka seeking solace and redemption. The tapes act as a device to push the film back into the past, where we learn more of King’s life story.

King’s story begins in Los Angeles, where he greets us with the words, “Whoever said there wasn’t such a thing as a second chance in life is a stupid motherfucker.” An aphorism worthy of Oscar Wilde, no doubt. King immediately bangs some dippy white chick, which temporarily suspends the “Fatal Oreo Rule,” which states that any black man who has sex with a white woman will die after no more than fifteen minutes of screen time. The rule returns later, however, as Moon is gunned down in a hot tub mere seconds after scoring with blond twins. King is determined to be a major player in the LA drug scene, and he makes his mark by getting the entire cast of a Baywatch-style TV show hooked on heroin. His major conquest is the same tramp he screwed earlier, which signifies an important shift in racial attitudes in cinema. After all, we see white people on drugs! Having loveless sex! Throwing their lives away! But as all of the black characters are either whores, pushers, pimps, or killers, I wouldn’t call on the spirit of Dr. King quite yet.

But wouldn’t you know it? King falls in love with a smart, sassy college woman named Juanita. We know it’s love because they meet in a trashy dive, Al Green is on the soundtrack, and she spills a whiskey on his shirt. But he’s determined, and after one on-screen date and a dinner with her mama, they are in love. Of course this means that within minutes, Juanita will be snorting up a storm, performing mind-blowing oral, and throwing away her budding career in social work. As King says, “I guess there ain’t any bitch alive who don’t enjoy a little coke now and then.” True dat. But when King asks her to move in, she laughs in his face. Oh she’ll fuck him and steal his blow, she cackles, but his $250,000 is just chump change and nothing to retire on. It is a curious turn indeed when a black woman, even one of ambition and intelligence, eventually becomes the gold-digging stereotype. Eventually King decides to leave her as a strung-out junkie, but she pops in from time to time to trade her corn hole for a bag of the good stuff.

In the present, Paul listens to more tapes, unaware that he is being pursued by Moon and his men, concerned as they are that Paul witnessed a crime or something. We also meet Paul’s girlfriend, who is a proud black woman who doesn’t understand why her boyfriend lives in the worst part of town to “suffer for his art.” We know Paul is serious because he has posters of Miles Davis and the Wu-Tang Clan, in addition to, well, a black girlfriend. We never learn shit about Paul (thank Christ), as he exists solely to play King’s endless tapes and move the paper-thin story forward. Paul eventually learns the truth about King from his killer, Mike. You see, Mike was present when King gave his ex-girlfriend (Mike’s mother) a fatal dose of heroin. The bitch had threatened to go to the po-lice unless he gave her money, so the ho had to go. Years later, Mike takes revenge. Yes, it’s as simple (and as predictable) as that.

The film tries to have a social conscience, but is there anyone alive who remains ignorant of heroin’s dangers? After nearly an hour and a half, all we learn is that “crime don’t pay,” “thuggin’ ain’t no life,” and “payback’s a motherfucker.” I know all that shit and I’ve led the most isolated, privileged life in human history. Arquette is an annoying little shit, even with less than ten lines of dialogue. And I must instinctively oppose any film that forces me to spend so much of my time fiddling with the volume control, lest the ear-splitting bass force the downstairs neighbor to pay me a call, Louisville Slugger in hand. At one point I had the volume so low in anticipation of a big shake that I missed the orgasmic cry of some white devil as DMX split her in two. It’s just as well; I wouldn’t want the apartment complex to think that married people were actually having sex. And I’m not sure if it matters, but why must a gangsta’s right-hand man always be bald and wearing a skin-tight black shirt? And do we really need a cut from “Pusher Man” to remind us that this is a cautionary tale, a la Superfly? Oh well, it’s a step up, in terms of McDonald’s experiment. So why do I long for a step back?