The online film streaming service FilmStruck is shutting down by the end of November. In the accounts that I’ve read so far, no explanation for the site’s closure has been offered beyond mention that FilmStruck was a “niche” product with no place in the WarnerMedia-AT&T merger. No one has suggested the site didn’t make any money. Rather, it seems nothing in the entertainment industry has the right to live if it can’t be scaled. This blunt message is why so many of its subscribers took the news of its closing so personally.
IM SO FUCKING SAD ABOUT FILMSTRUCK WHY CAN’T WE HAVE ONE GOOD THING
Many avid movie fans have been critical of the idea of streaming services. Once your subscription ends, the texts vanish. If you want a personal archive of films, they advise, you need to buy disks. “Never trust streaming,” Richard Brody warns us, “Own or lose.” Today movies are either film stock or data. The choices between them are as much moral as aesthetic. More than any other streaming service, FilmStruck approached the model of the repertory theater, with its thematic programming and careful projection of films on their original medium. The site was a curated archive, but an incomplete one. I discovered several directors I’d never seen before. When Seijun Suzuki died recently, FilmStruck was ready with a selection of his best films. I saw Pierre Etaix, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Takeshi Kitano for the first time. I finally got access to Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water and Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner.
However, exploring Lubitsch’s work isn’t much easier on FilmStruck than any other service. Nicholas Ray is currently represented by a single film, The Lusty Men. There are no films from the French silent avant-garde available or much from the French New Wave, not to mention the West German cinema of the 1960’s or African cinema from any period. Recent American independent filmmaking is poorly represented. The same for recent international cinema. FilmStruck would be the perfect vehicle for Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour. And don’t get me started on the shortcomings of its streaming technology.
So FilmStruck wasn’t without its frustrations, but it will certainly be missed, at least in the shory term. The Criterion Collection figures to resurface in another streaming service. TCM is already major media asset, so it may also reappear as soon as the proper programming can be put together around it. What will really be lost is the frame around which FilmStruck put its films, making its catalog seem larger and more interesting than it would have been using a Netflix-style algorithm.
FilmStruck won’t do a final collection of films you must see before it dies, but below are some suggestions for FilmStruck films you should see before the service dies.
Wong Kar-wai, In the Mood for Love: Beautifully shot, this story could only happen in its particular place and time.
Vera Chytilová, Daisies: Insouciant and endlessly inventive, it might be the exact opposite of a film you would imagine coming from behind the Iron Curtain.
Jean Vigo, Zero for Conduct: Sums up the Dadaesque spirit of the French silent cinema and points to the Poetic Realism of 1930's French cinema.
Seijun Suzuki, Branded to Kill: Lurid and psychedelic, a gangster movie like no other, except maybe the next film.
Jean-Pierre Melville, Le samouraï: Made by a Frenchman who understands, and loves, the tropes of American crime movies.
Suggestions from Twitter
Lina Wertmüller, The Seduction of Mimi
Ousmane Sembène, Xala
Yasujiro Ozu, Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family
Satyajit Ray, Three Daughters
Mai Zetterling, Scrubbers
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Moses & Aaron
David Hodgson, an MArch student at the University of Sheffield, has won the AJ Students Award for his design of a performing arts complex. The centerpiece of the complex is The Arcade Theatre, a space for immersive performances--meaning the audience gets involved. The project description explains, "Learning from the work of Walter Benjamin, who described the arcade as a ‘world in miniature’, the project incorporates idiosyncratic details to trigger people’s curiosity. These ‘oscillations’, as Benjamin called them, are deviations from repetitive elements such as a bright yellow arch, an exuberant light fitting and a black brick studio. The result is a rich environment full of the theatre of everyday life."
I see a lot of projects that purport to be inspired by the Arcades Project. Oftentimes these projects evince a superficial resemblance to Benjamin's writings and the historical structures which they examine. Hodgson, on the other hand, has a much deeper understanding of the Arcades Project. His stress on how structure can shape an experience gets to the heart of Benjamin's interest in the Paris Arcades.
One consistent feature of Melania Trump's outwear style is that there's always something missing--human contact, generally. The Zara jacket is missing a pronoun. What doesn't she care about? Another consistent trope of her outwear is resistance--to contact with her husband, sometimes. Not to be too "Free Melania" about it, but we can't assume that she sees her mission to the border in the same way we do. It's possible her outwear has an audience of one. If that's the case, the rest of us are locked out, again.
Ambiguity of the image is fertile ground for reproducibility in the sense Benjamin outlined in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as people try to reclaim meaning from the elites.
It's possible, although I can't confirm it, that Philip Roth passed away at the very moment I was reading the final pages of Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, a novel supposedly based on her affair with Roth. Maybe it was Roth just checking out when the "indigenous American berserk" had intensified to the point at which language was finally defeated. But I like to think of it as a Rothian moment, collapsing fiction and real life into one.
First, a few personal opinions regarding Roth's work. Of the three great white male writers who, for readers like myself, define American experience in the mid-century--Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike--I felt the least affinity with Roth and came to him last after my first pass through the best work of Updike then Bellow. However, of the late works of the three I paid serious attention only to Roth. I returned to his work when the vastly darker Sabbath’s Theater appeared in 1995. I would choose that novel as his best over American Pastoral his greatest because it touches upon the origin of Western literature: the singing the virile rage of Achilles. At that novel Roth perfectly balanced his two themes--sex and death, the great preoccupations of the Freudian era.
My personal narrative of Roth's work has Sabbath's Theater (1995), the story of a its lust-wrecked puppeteer, as the transition from the sex books (Portnoy's Complaint, which all its delight in recklessness) to the death books in the remarkable string of late novels that followed. Roth's keen awareness of last days came out in the interview with the imaginary Roth in the last pages of Aysmmetry. It's also present in the interview the actual Philip Roth gave to the New York Times in late 2017. Roth insisted that the interview was conducted by email, and it reads like a written exchange. Every response is carefully wrought, suggesting Roth missed writing more than he let on. He was frank about his age, writing "in just a matter of months I’ll depart old age to enter deep old age — easing ever deeper daily into the redoubtable Valley of the Shadow. Right now it is astonishing to find myself still here at the end of each day."
Roth meant so much to me as a young writer. Anyway, the big 50s-60s literary (male) personalities --Roth, Capote, Mailer, Bellow, Updike, (to a certain degree) Cheever -- all gone. https://t.co/DRgfYetxf9
One could also add Tom Wolfe to the list of recently deceased American writers who lived in vanished literary culture, one that was dominated by white males, to be sure, but a culture that also had room for Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. There are no more Sontags or Didions, either. These writers grappled with the same themes a whole generation of Americans faced together: war, civil rights, Freud, the Holocaust, and the transition from urban to suburban life. What are the urgent themes of today? Trump, staring at iPhones too much, and a long list of other stupid things.
It's often been remarked that Roth never one a Nobel Prize or fathered a child, which is odd considering how movingly he wrote about fathers. Perhaps he could write so directly about death because he didn't have children himself, so he had no one to protect. The death of the childless writer feels like the death of a father, a literary achievement greater than a Nobel Prize.
"Architect of defunct-Chicago Spire to design riverfront sculpture" reads the headline to Blair Kamin's story about the announcement of a Santiago Calatrava sculpture to be placed between the Chicago River and a new skyscraper. The headline places the story in exactly the right context. In the days before the Great Recession Calatrava designed a 2,000-foot-tall tower to be constructed along Chicago's lake shore. The building, known as the Chicago Spire, was more big than beautiful, but it was undeniably ambitious even though no one had a plausible plan for constructing it.
The red sculpture is a retreat from the Spire in every way possible. The artwork is set in a void on the river instead of commanding the lake front. As an aesthetic object, it's not much. It's all flourish and no presence, like a necklace from Kay Jewelers. Calatrava has given up his pristine white in favor of a red that makes no sense in the context, unless the intent is to make sure the architectural boat tours don't overlook it. Perhaps the sculpture doesn't need to be beautiful, only noticeable. Calatrava likes similes, and one may be at work here: It's as if the Spire had actually been built, then someone set fire to it and a single red ember floated up the river and came to rest.
So far Calatrava can't even bring himself to name the sculpture. In the meantime, the owner of the Spire site is preparing to unveil the design for another building to be erected over the round hole over which the Calatrava's tower was supposed to rise.
One day the docents of the architectural boat tours on the Chicago River will point to the red sculpture and say, "This sculpture was designed by Santiago Calatrava, the architect of the Chicago Spire, which was never built."
Slate's Christina Cauterucci reads Melania Trump's clothes, because that's all the meaning we can get out of her, for she does not speak. She is illegible, the Slovenian Sphinx.
The slightly sinister beauty of inscrutable surfaces.
FLOTUS does not put her arms in her coat sleeves. She's not alone in this; other fashion-conscious women do the same. There's a name for it: shoulder-robing. But like almost everything else about her, in her shoulder-robing Melania Trump is both typical and atypical. Draping a coat over one's shoulders is practical if one wants to make a certain statement. Heavier coats tend to be more stylish, more conspicuously expensive, than light coats or sweaters. When it's too warm for a heavy coat, it's possible to show off an expensive coat by keeping the arms free so they can breathe. Impression made, problem solved.
At her husband's side but not fully present. The thought that never leaves her: don't let the coat fall off.
FLOTUS has responsibilities, however, as the wife of POTUS. All her actions are political, including speech. For her, shoulder-robing is a means of hoarding her language, of saying one thing and nothing more:
When Trump leaves her arms out of her sleeves, she’s telling us she doesn’t have to perform any of the daily manual tasks the rest of us do: She will never reach for anything in a cabinet, stoop to pick anything off the ground, hold open any doors, pour any glasses of water, lift her arms to fix her hair, or fish a credit card out of a purse. If she did, her coat would slip right off.
Melania Trump does not speak, she wears. Sometime she gestures, but as little as possible.
The generic city is a city without names. The great city, on the other hand, is a collections of names. London is not just “London.” It is also Big Ben and Trafalgar Square and the Shard.
Many of Chicago’s names are buildings named for corporations: The Sears Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, the John Hancock Center. Many of these names are being replaced or they are being removed from their original position in the production of meaning. In the middle of the 2008-09 real estate crisis the Sears Tower became the Willis Tower. Soon the Tribune Tower will no longer contain the Chicago Tribune newsroom. Even though no newspapers will be produced there, the building will still be called the Tribune Tower because brand names have become commodities in their own right.
Now the John Hancock Center will lose its name. The John Hancock company, no longer an independent entity, has asked that its name be removed from the tower, years after vacating it. The tower’s identity will revert to its position on the grid and assume the name 875 North Michigan Avenue. You will look at the building but you are prohibited from saying its original name. This may seem odd considering how much effort corporations give to insert their brands into our speech. Yet the prohibition against its proper name is really another example of how corporations try to own language.
The tower’s anonymity may be temporary. The Hearn Company, which owns the office and parking parts of the building—the visual unity of the building as a single property is an illusion—is actively seeking an “important identity” for the tower, as if it were a newly divorced woman. The new identity may come from a local corporation. More likely, it will come from nowhere, like the Willis company.
After the tower receives its new name, no doubt many people will continue to use the old John Hancock name, partly out of habit, partly from reluctance to give up a piece of Chicago history, and partly from resistance to becoming a shill for a brand.
After dinner we drove the short distance from Urban Belly to the United Center for the Arcade Fire concert.
First I should say that my wife and I are not regular concert attendees. We had conceded that form of entertainment to the young. We didn’t want to appear to be middle-aged adults trying to be cool by attending a concert by a band that had performed at Lollapalooza last summer. History works one way in popular music. Vinyl records may be cool to the young, but that doesn't mean that cool extends to people who grew up with vinyl. Past musical styles regularly serve as source material for new music, but audiences are not expected to be so free-ranging in their tastes. More freedom is given to objects than to subjects—a cultural condition of our time.
As it turned out, however, we were far from the oldest people in attendance that night. Some people even brought their children, opening up the horizon of age. Why not teach children how to listen to music? If you don’t, the culture industry will do it for you.
The opening act that night was The Breeders, a band from Dayton, Ohio, my wife’s home town. The band had its creative and popular peak in the 1990’s when they were known for their restless approach to the pop-inflected music of the time. They performed perched on the very edge of the stage, crowded out by the headliner’s equipment. The space was so crowded that when Sarah Nuefeld, Arcade Fire’s violinist, joined them onstage for one song, Kelley Deal had to play her guitar crouched miserably against an amplifier.
The Breeders seemed anxious and overwhelmed by the space. Either self-consciousness at being literally and figuratively on the fringes of rock stardom or simply because she had a cold, Kim Deal, the lead singer, made several awkward attempts to connect to the crowd. “Are you doing okay?” She asked after every song, as if she expected them to wander off at any minute to the vendors selling Arcade Fire tee shirts in the concourses. They played a forty-five minute set before announcing, with evident relief, that this was their last show with Arcade Fire.
Black-clad stage hands moved in sweep away the Breeders' equipment and to construct the spell that would be Arcade Fire's Everything Now live show. As they worked images from the album's controlling metaphor flashed on the screens. The United Center is a hockey and basketball arena, so it offers a lot of pixels for information and promotion. The arena's monitors were busy with phony commercials, currency symbols and other images from an imaginary consumer culture--perhaps North Korea's a few years after the fall of the Kim regime. The question, of course, arose: Where to place Arcade Fire in this image flow? Inside it? Beside it? Trying to escape from it?
A simpler and easier to read metaphor was taking shape on the arena floor. The stage hands were setting up a boxing ring in the center. The stagecraft was a conceit to transport the band members through the crowd to the stage. The band was introduced like boxers (“Weighing in collectively at two thousand one hundred pounds.”) and once on stage, they pulled off their robes. (A few songs into the set, the stage hands discreetly ripped the ropes away, dematerializing the boxing ring metaphor.) The band opened with the title song and thematic centerpiece of their new album. Before settling into the music, I wanted to capture the freshness of the spectacle with a video.
The Breeders had constructed an audience in their own anxious image ("Are you doing okay?"), and so Arcade Fire constructed their audience as a collective that gazed upon itself as much as the band.
The Breeders dressed like the audience in the United Center--blue jeans and ugly sweaters. Unlike rappers, who generally embrace theatricality, alternative rock band members prefer illegible styles, rarely straying far from the stylistic template of the record store clerk. Rock bands don’t have foundational myths any more (“four lads from Liverpool”). Instead, they have genealogies of working relationships. The Breeders started as a side project for Kim Deal, who played for the Pixies. Rock musicians choose anonymity because they may find themselves in another band at any time.
Arcade Fire has had some lineup changes, but they present themselves as a collective. Their sound is de-centered, with no instrument dominating over the others. They avoid solos. For the Everything Now tour the stage was designed so that the musicians were distributed evenly around the stage so that each band member staged their own more or less self-contained performance.
Like any collective, Arcade Fire has a lot of resources, but in the vastness of the arena there was a disconnect between sound and presence. Arcade Fire is known for their diverse instrumentation, but, in the United Center at least, the band’s music came across as an undifferentiated wall of sound. Sounds from individual instruments—a short melodic line here, an exotic instrument there—burbled up from the mix, then disappeared back into it. The band’s presentation strategy meant that Win Butler didn’t function as a normal front man, as the visual and sonic focal points of the band. He can be an expressive singer in the studio, but on stage his vocals were another element in the band’s wall of sound. He played mostly to a quarter of the audience, stepping onto a pair of amplifiers on the southwest side of the stage, rooted in place by the prolixity of the lyrics and the fragility of the stage conception. From where we were sitting his presence had to be tracked by his wide-brimmed hat and orange boots.
In their best songs Arcade Fire have found room in their big sound for intimacy. “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” from Funeral, their first album, evokes a shared experience that’s clearly adolescent while trying to imagine the forms of adult experience. It begins with a lovers’ escape fantasy.
You climb out the chimney, And meet me in the middle, the middle of the town. And since there's no one else around, We let our hair grow long, And forget all we used to know.
Then the song worms its way back to home and an unexpected (for a rock song) place.
But sometimes, we remember our bedrooms, And our parents' bedrooms, And the bedrooms of our friends. Then we think of our parents, Well what ever happened to them?!
By their most recent album, however, the singer, now an isolated"I," restages a return home. What had been an imaginative space in their first album is now filled with commodities. Instead of an escape into (and from) possibility, "Everything Now" is empty repetition.
Every inch of road's got a sign And every boy uses the same line I pledge allegiance to everything now Every song that I've ever heard Is playing at the same time, it's absurd
A few verses later we find out what happened to the parents in “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)."
Every ancient road's got a town Daddy, how come you're never around? I miss you, like everything now Mama, leave the food on the stove Leave your car in the middle of the road This happy family with everything now
This constricted, despairing vision rests within a studio production drawing extensively from disco and new wave--musical forms dedicated to the pleasures of repetition. Those forms are logical choices for the band's big sounds, but they're an uneasy fit with the band's thematic obsessions. Every time they performed a song from their latest album the disco balls would drop from the ceiling, visually reducing the size of the United Center while referencing the dance hall experience of being a single body in a crowd.
Arcade Fire has been roundly criticized for Everything Now album and tour, suggesting that the band embraces the cynicism of the larger culture. It doesn't help that arcadefire.com now redirects to everythingnow.com.
But for me and my wife, the Arcade Fire concert in the United Center was both pleasurable and familiar. In other words, it was rock and roll. We had seen this show many times before: a rock band with a deep emotional connection to its audience daring to venture into new artistic territory only to find themselves in a land of dead signifiers. Win Butler's curled-lip delivery of the lyrics in the "Everything Now" video enacts the semiological dead end not just of the band's music, but rock in general.
For all its promise of escape and rebellion, rock music has long been about regression and return. Arcade Fire has understood this from the beginning. Their debut album was called Funeral and it featured not one but three songs called "Neighborhood." Despite the motor revving of "Born to Run," Bruce Springsteen has never left New Jersey. Tom Petty's whole career was a shuttle between LA and Gainesville, FL. Bob Dylan moved on stylistically a few times in his career, but the transitions weren't always smooth, and for a long time he was just as prickly and remote as Win Butler is now. The only rock star who ever successfully dropped one style for another was David Bowie. He pulled off multiple changes because he was a solo act and therefore more in control of himself as a brand. He also dared to fully embrace even the silliest of his personas, i.e., Ziggy Stardust. But his real secret was that he never wore blue jeans, never anchoring himself even for a moment in rock authenticity.
When the ringside handlers reappeared to escort Arcade Fire from their stage at the end of the show, my wife and I, clad in blue jeans, left the arena before the encore. We had enjoyed every moment of the show and we had had exactly enough. We found our car and drove home.
One night not long ago my wife and I attended an Arcade Fire concert at the United Center in the West Loop neighborhood of Chicago. I will have more on the concert itself in a separate post. Today I want to take a look around the restaurant at which my wife and I met for dinner before the concert.
We chose a restaurant near the United Center in a former warehouse district on Randolph Street in the West Loop. The bars and restaurants along this street are mostly large establishments, many of them located in converted warehouses and factories. Urban Belly, the place at which we agreed to meet for dinner, was the quick service side of a restaurant with the rather inscrutable name of BellyQ, as if there is a species of hunger native to the city.
Urban Belly offers a “tour of the world” consisting of “the radically delicious and the curiously familiar.” The “delicious” part of the equation rests in the Asian dishes on the menu, centered around dumplings and bowls, while “familiar” refers to the borrowing of service concepts of casual fast food chains like Chipotle. To avoid Chipotle’s mass-market cultural appropriation, Urban Belly’s website features a narrative of its chef, Bill Kim.
Kim’s story is a quintessentially American one that dives into the melting pot of cultures and experiences to create an identity that is uniquely his own. He started urbanbelly in 2008 to bring together his wide-ranging passions. Asian + American. Fine-dining techniques + neighborhood comfort. Classic dishes + joyous creativity.
The sudden hastening of language toward the end of the narrative, with text-like plus signs reconciling opposites, hints at a structure of feeling experienced by young urbanites. It is globalist, hybrid, and aspirational, but also anxious to move on to the next experience. The general vibe is cool and a little harassed.
The structure of feeling hinted at on the website is expressed most fully in the dining area of Urban Belly. The quick-service Urban Belly space is differentiated by a transparent partition from the full-service BellyQ, which has conventional booths and four-place tables. The Urban Belly space was dimly-lit, with exposed brick and concrete floors. You sat at long, shared tables fashioned from massive pieces of wood-like material. You sat on heavy wooden blocks of similarly indeterminate manufacture. They weren’t chairs. They weren’t stools. The dining area was arranged like a grade-school cafeteria situated in a gymnasium—exertion and replenishment in the same place. Like a cafeteria, the Urban Belly space is convivial but the clock is ticking. There’s no escape from the schedule.
It was a chilly night, the first truly cold night of the season. We ate pork and cilantro dumplings, ramen and pho using disposable wooden chopsticks. The soups were warming and the dim lights soothing. Still, the experience didn’t feel very intimate, and not just because two men were sitting on the not-quite stools next to us. The open spaces, high ceilings and concrete floors made it seem like customers were being warehoused themselves. Just like a grade school cafeteria will revert back to a gymnasium after lunch, after dinner Urban Belly looks like it’s designed to be an easy-to-clean industrial space. I don't think they actually do this, but the space could have been hosed down every night after closing.
The Wicker Park Urban Belly is actually in a residential neighborhood, but on Randolph Street you don’t disappear into the fabric of a neighborhood. It’s a warehouse district, close to highways and rail lines. The few residences in the area are also carved out of industrial spaces. After dinner in the West Loop you get into your car or an Uber and head someplace else. Despite its urban trappings, the West Loop is a transactional space like any commercial strip in the suburbs.
We walked around the corner in the biting wind to our car to hurry to the United Center for the concert. More on that here.
Filmmaker and art historian Judith Wechsler has made a beautiful film about Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, entitled, appropriately enough, The Passages of Walter Benjamin. The film was completed in 2014, but it's still making the rounds, which is good to know.
It situates the Arcades Project in the political and artistic context of the 1920's and 1930's, when Benjamin was actively working on the project. In this trailer, for example, you can see segments from Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927). The story Wechsler tells will be familiar to Benjamin scholars, but the presentation is evocative and the experts interviewed in the film--Howard Eiland, Susan Buck-Morss, Sigrid Weigel and others--are top-notch.
The Passages of Walter Benjamin isn't in general release, but it pops up here and there, most recently at Duke University. You can get the exhibition schedule and the DVD by contacting Wechsler directly.
One-Way Street [Einbahnstrasse, 1928] was Walter Benjamin's first effort to break out of the narrow confines of the academy and apply the techniques of literary studies to life as it is currently lived. For Benjamin criticism encompasses the ordinary objects of life, the literary texts of the time, films in current release, and the fleeting concerns of the public sphere. Following Benjamin's lead, this blog is concerned with the political content of the aesthetic and representations of the political in the media. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street, "He who cannot take sides should keep silent."
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