Cruising the Caribbean, Part 1

I'm going to take up the subject of the Caribbean again, if only to close it (also because I was picking up steam before I started yacking about Avatar). This time I will speak about my experience as I visited all the local islands. I reasoned that being in the Caribbean wasn’t going to happen to me that often throughout my life, so I might as well see all the islands I could while I was at it. So one day I walk up with one of my fellow students, a guy called Calum, to a ship which tours the islands, and we get a cabin for a week.

On the day I set off, the man comes over with a neatly trimmed beard, Ray-Ban sunglasses and ironed clothes. I for a change am hungover, and the truth is impressed upon me that spending time with Calum is going to be something very different from living with Jack. The Welsh bastard has turned me into something of a slob (not that I was a disciple of Mary Poppins before that, but I didn’t live in the bogs either), while Calum looks like a cross between Clark Kent and the gingerbread man. We are given a cabin the size of a sardine tin which has been thrown under a steamroller, but given the prices we are paying, we can’t complain.

Couple drinks too many on the night before departing, maybe. Whoever drew those moustaches on me, if you're reading this, you can go fuck yourself

‘Please put that light out,’ he tells me on the first night, while I’m trying to read. It turns out that he has sleeping trouble – he can’t doze off if there’s a fly dying in Mexico or something. Grand. At least he should be organised as to the journey.

On the first day, we disembark on an island (I hate to be generic, but if anyone can go through five of those islands in five days and remember their specific names four years later, then they deserve the Legion of Honour as far as I’m concerned). We walk into the village, and it takes twelve seconds before we end up in the market and are assaulted by twenty merchants trying to sell us fruit. There, we negotiate with a ferocity which we never would have expected to possess on the price of a sack of pineapples, spending forty minutes in the act of bartering and shouting for our rights, only to get swindled ten minutes later by an old lady selling us pizzas. As the afternoon deepens, my interests and Calum’s display some divergence, so we part ways. I decide to walk on my own to see the sights out of the village, without really taking care of my direction, and I get lost. I turn back and start walking towards the sea in the hopes of finding the boat, and soon I am scrambling with a herd of goats which surfaced out of nowhere and appears to be going in my general direction. I suddenly understand why goats follow their shepherd (or ‘goatherd,’ or whatever the fuck he’s called) so intently. There is something so unspeakably inspirational about him. He looks like someone who really knows where he’s going, strutting about with that satisfied gait of his. Eventually he turns and sees me amid his goats. An exchange follows as to the whereabouts of the port, one of no great wit, in truth – for all of his military poise, the man is disappointingly dim.

On the second day, as we dock into new land, the sun is glorious. We wake up and look at it through the glass, and Calum looks particularly jolly.

The best way of spending your time in the Caribbean, by a mile and a half. Click on photo to see it fully.

‘What do you say that we take a dive?’ he suggests, and I respond with enthusiasm. Then I start rummaging in my backpack, and it turns out that of all the things I could forget, it was the swimming suit which earned the privilege this time. My friend takes it philosophically.

‘You fucking dickhead!’ he yells. ‘You go on a five-day cruise through all the beaches on the Caribbean and you can’t think to bring a rotten swimming suit? What are you going to do, swim in bollocks?’

So I have to go to the village before I can dive, and there I get assaulted by the men of the local market to sell me fruit, because obviously I can’t live without it. That night, Calum has gone to bed early, while I am on deck, chatting with some English girls who are also taking the cruise. They’re the kind of girls who require about twenty years in prison before they start looking attractive, and seeing how I’ve never been behind bars, this limits my interest considerably. After a few drinks together, I take my stuff and go back to bed.

The next day, Calum is flustered. ‘If you come back in the dead of night from your escapades,’ he informs me, ‘can you at least not do so like you’re banging together a pair of drums in the process.’

‘Calum,’ I inform him softly, ‘to begin with, it was more an encounter of the third kind than an escapade. Secondly, the only thing I did before going to sleep was brushing my teeth. If that equates to bongos, then you want to get some sleeping pills, mate.’ The man does not agree, and a small discussion is had on the right of a human being to sleep without being disturbed.

This is getting too long. I'll post part 2 tomorrow or the day after.

Thinking of Avatar

So the Oscars night ran its course and Bigelow kicked the shit out of Cameron. Fair and worthy I call it, and I’m glad it went that way. I was rather disappointed by Avatar, expecting more pathos and deeper characters. Personally my objection was an excess of raw material – it would have made for a great trilogy, with the first film focusing on the training, the second on the betrayal, and the third on the comeback. As it stands, despite the three-plus hours of running time, the plot and characters are just not sufficiently developed to build a real emotional connection, and you can’t empathise with them the way you did with, say, Luke Skywalker or Neo.

Still, much of the critical reception to this film had me perplexed. Some of the claims that it is ‘unoriginal,’ for example, are in my opinion short-sighted. The bare-bone plot structure was banal in films like Star Wars or The Matrix too (to stick with those examples) – archetypal, even, with tropes like ‘saving the princess’ and assuming the identity as the ‘chosen one.’ It was their technical and imaginative execution which made these movies refreshing despite the unoriginal tale, and it’s obvious that Avatar should be judged on the same grounds. Similarly, I had no gripe with the way the film picked up the culture of Native American Indians for the Navi. After all, Tolkien picked up Celtic mythology for The Lord of the Rings and Herbert did the same with Middle-Eastern imageries for Dune. Revisiting old narrative structures or cultures is not deplorable per se, as long as the execution is engaging and interesting enough. And there’s no doubt that the flatness of Avatar’s writing has been overstated, too – people call it ‘terrible,’ but if this is terrible, what do you call the new Star Wars trilogy, or the Harry Potter films?

Ultimately Avatar is a rather mediocre film in terms of script and characters (the bad guys are particularly boring), no more than that, and I think the most synthetic criticism was brought up by Cynthia Fuchs from Popmatters:

For all its powerful technologies and even Grace’s subtler dimensions, Avatar can’t get out from under its essential cardboardness. It can point to the evil effects of racism, but remains entrenched in the fundamental premise: the tribe both endangered and saved by the cowboy, the marine, the same-old romantic lead. Okay, so he’s also blue, in an appropriative and opportunistic way. He’s still the One



True, all. But while a great deal of the critics have been quick to point out these flaws, very few have been receptive to the more subtle aspects of Avatar as well. Praise for the film has been even more superficial than the criticism, and that’s why I felt the need to add my voice by means of this blog-post. The real value of Cameron’s latest creature is its successful assumption as flag-bearer for a new movement of science-fiction – one which had been timidly announced by Wall-E, and importantly stated by The Matrix. Avatar is more subtle in its discussions of virtuality than the film by the Wachowsky brothers, and I’ve seen very little analysis of this. The question was posed most pertinently by Keith Uhlich from New York Time Out, and no-one, to my knowledge, has cared to answer it:

It’s more than a little disconcerting that the film’s manufactured landscapes—with Jake Sully acting as their destined-to-be-reborn pantheistic savior—have a comparable weight to the most rugged terrain of our own great outdoors. The question lingers as the movie comes to its triumphant body-swapping close: Is this a pro-environment parable or a prophecy of virtual realities yet to come? Cameron’s new world may very well be a verdant Matrix.

Yeah. The naturalistic pantheism is couched in a discussion of virtuality, and this is the juice of the text. The opening of the film is the opening of an eye (meta-statement, but also throw-back to Blade Runner, the most representative film from the ‘old’ generation of sci-fi), and the very first words bring our attention to the nature of a dream. Of course, this has a certain ironic taste – the film is lifting a mirror to the spectators, who are also ‘opening their eyes’ to the dream represented by the story. The dream discussion is touched sparingly, but sustained throughout. Halfway through, Jake Sully tells us that real life has become the dream, and the dream has become real life – a reference to his alternation between his real body and his artificial avatar, and an obvious nod to the evolution of virtuality itself and how we experience it in contemporary culture. It should also be noted that Jake’s ‘real’ body is on a wheelchair, i.e. it requires an artificial support. The image of the wheelchair is placed against that of the artificial avatar – both are ‘wheelchairs’ of a sort, meaning that questions of what makes a body ‘real’ become more subtle and destabilized than they initially appear.

Now much like the two ‘bodies’ comment on each other’s reality, so the film sets up an antinomy between the utilitarian, sterile laboratory of Jake’s team (a tiny room) and the hallucinating outdoor scenarios of the Navi. The principle is the same – both comment on each other, questioning each other’s value, use and nature. The film points out their interdependence, and it’s particularly interesting to see the ‘middle ground’ that it sets up in the other human bases (those of the military bad guys at the excavation point). These are sort of a neutral zone, possessing qualities of the virtual and of the real at the same time. Though they belong to the ‘laboratory’ side in terms of aesthetics, they are absorbed in the narrative and seem to become a part of the same virtuality. It should be noted that the human laboratory doubles up to become the closed motion-capture rooms where the film itself was shot – again, the story borders on the meta-textual, as any discussion of virtuality executed through CGI will inevitably do. The statement ‘real life has become a dream, the dream real life’ applies to Jake as he enters the avatar, but also to Cameron as he projects this amazing world in the cinemas (more on this later).

The lab....

...and the space exposed.

I really need to see this film again – I only saw it once and more than a month ago now. But what struck me is that the film makes it a point of couching all of its own stories and myths in an explicitly virtual canvas. Even the Navi are fundamentally virtual creatures, from the neuron attachments in their ‘tails’ which are basically USB keys to their connection with the biological ‘internet’ of the trees and planet. So it is ironic that the threat posed by the humans is that, by destroying their tree, they are destroying the foundation of their virtuality – the basis of its own opposite ideology, that of loving nature. Now the film’s capacity to question – albeit in an often partial and rudimentary fashion, I’m not contesting that – the meaning of nature, artificiality and reality in contemporary culture (while showing how these concepts depend upon each other) is its greatest merit. The film’s final image, that of the virtual men chasing out the real men, is rather frightening as a prophetic metaphor. Still, I believe there is an underlying circular statement in the film – a certain sense that a cyclical view of history (the recurrence of the Western man versus American Indian trope, for instance) reflects itself in a cyclical relationship between representation and its subject matter (myth of nature coming from a virtual matrix, and vice versa).

I realise that, at best, this is more of a suggestive speculation for now than any kind of textual demonstration. As I said, I’d really have to see this film again (preferably stoned) to pick up on its subtlest nuances. What I thought was especially interesting and subtle was another dimension possessed by the film – Avatar as the most autobiographic of James Cameron’s films, and the figure of Jake Sully as a re-narration of Cameron’s ‘epic’ quest to narrate stuff. Two things pop to mind immediately.



1. The film has received much criticism for its ‘banality,’ and one example of this is the presence of space marines – a rather dated trope. But what people forget is that space marines, in cinema, were popularised by Cameron himself – Aliens practically defined the figure, and it’s unbelievable just how successful and pervasive their imagery has become (check out this cut-scene within the video-game Halo – it’s practically a remake, and this was made in 2001!). Avatar goes to great lengths to make the cliché of the ‘space marine’ a negative one, even getting to the point of re-staging the ending of Aliens but inverting the original ethical and aesthetical register (the monsters have become the good guys, the good guys have become the monsters). The ‘clichéd’ representation of the marines is in reality an incredibly assertive act of revisionism – one which is particularly notable because Cameron is doing it with his own work (much like Jake is ‘betraying’ his own kind). After Avatar, representing a space marine will necessarily mean making a statement, taking a position, endorsing an ideology (with or against Cameron’s film). The figure of the marine will never be ‘neutral’ again. Never. The space marine is dead, and the alien who killed him has assumed his shape.



2. The second obvious source of interest, in terms of Avatar’s relation to Cameron himself, is the paratextual quality of the film (more so than the metatextual qualities, I would say). The film tells a story, but at the same time it is a story – the (hi)story of cinematography itself. For all of its megalomania, Avatar is in fact as distant from vanity as you can imagine. It does not intend to ‘last forever.’ It doesn’t want to be a milestone – if not as a milestone of transience, that is. Its interest is ancestral, primary, archeological even – it goes back to the old function of cinema as emotional catharsis by purely technical means; to a time when going to a rollercoaster and then to the movies to see the miracle of moving images was fundamentally the same thing (much like, say, the novel in its ancestral form used to be similar in nature to the transient entertainment of social gossip). Aaron Sagers, still from Popmatters, puts it in these words:

When color came to cinema in the early 20th century, or when silent film gave way to talkies in the ‘20s, I was a few decades shy of making my entrance. Nor was I alive for the golden era of 3-D films in the ‘50s. I also barely made it in time to catch the beginning of the blockbuster film era in the late ’70s. But I’m clearly here for the beginning of the next movement of film, and it is Avatar. It’s too bad I didn’t get that a little earlier[…] Avatar has surprised me more than any other movie in a while. It reminded me that the size of a movie is far greater than the screen it’s shown on, and it provided a well-deserved slap to not underestimate the audience’s willingness to embrace a new kind of cinema.

What’s really interesting is how self-aware the film is of being itself a greater story than that which it tells. The change that is going on in cinemas has a certain epic nature which the film itself tries to reflect, lifting up a mirror to the bespectacled audience with the opening eye at the beginning. This kind of ambition is not strictly cinematographic and therefore cannot be evaluated according to our usual standards. You cannot use it to say that the film is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Like Star Wars before it, Avatar has a dimension which goes well beyond the superficial quality of the text as a narrative. Its history will be more than its story, and for this reason it is a story that makes history. Since you cannot respond to something like this by ordinary critical standards (for criticism is already part of the film’s history), it is only fair that Avatar should have been defeated on the arena of the Oscars.

My first job ever

At the time of writing, I am about to take a train to go to Rome and sign my new contract. It is basically the job of a tourist guide in Egypt or Greece. My formation starts in about three weeks and it'll take me to Tunisia.

So I was thinking what to write about, and I decided that after so many intellectual posts, I'll take a more lighthearted tone and discuss the suicidal process of looking for employment - by going back to the first job I ever had, back when I was living in the Caribbean (and there's a whole set of entries in this blog on that time of my life, if you're wondering when that happened).

You see, couple of months into my permanence in Eden, I succeed in the ingrate task of finding a job. Thanks to my multiple language skills and of course my pretty eyes, it turns out that I am qualified for the position of tourist guide. A lady with a face like a camel, going by the name of Nadia when she’s not carrying Arabs on her back, will be my boss. Obviously before the job can begin I need to find out about the island myself.

The Queen Victoria, not proportional to Queen Victoria herself I hope.

So there we are for our introductory trip at six in the morning (why do these things always have to be done at six in the morning?), dressed up like scarecrows in a Nintendo videogame. The uniforms for the job consist in white trousers and multi-coloured shirts made with a local material which would be perfect if I were an air-traffic controller, given that being accidentally run over with that beaming flag around your chest is as likely to happen to you as drowning in Iraq. The shirt was easy to find, but the trousers were only available in pigmy-style size. When standing for the first tour, I have my nut-sack pressed up to my diaphragm and I look like an eunuch, the guy next to me is sporting a goatee over the shirt and he looks like something out of gay pride.

The tour starts, and a local girl who is supposed to be an ‘experienced’ guide sits in front of the bus. She begins explaining what it is that we are seeing as we take notes. The experience would be quite pleasant were it not for her insistence on ‘entertaining’ us. When the bus sets off she turns around all jolly and goes, ‘How are youuu??...’ and her words trail off into silence. She repeats the question and when we still refuse to lift our arms and go ‘yaaayyy’ like a bunch of demented retards, she gets quite angry and starts shouting and ranting at us. She seems to want to come back here and beat us, in fact. Considering that the girl has such a body mass that if you send her into space you can fly satellites around her, you’ll understand that she looks pretty dangerous. Fortunately she does settle back when we start reaching our destinations, like a pacified rhinoceros.

Then I find out what the lack of national monuments can do to a culture. The volcanology museum is a hall the size of a small stable the greatest attraction of which is represented by a broken church-bell which survived the first volcanic eruption and a couple of skulls the sight of which alone is enough to make everyone ill. The rum distilleries have some legitimacy as tourist attractions because they give free shots of rum at the end, but the summit of self-serving embarrassment is without the shadow of a doubt the banana museum. What on earth is there ever to see? Getting off the bus is humiliating enough, as you have bananas thrown at you from every side as though you were a monkey, and the interior is made up of panels, hung on walls, which tell you the history of the banana. Then you walk towards the plantation and out, all the while with people offering you bananas (or variations thereof – banana cakes, banana creams, banana paper, banana ketchup and shit yo). The plantation, given the naturalistic setting, is the only bit which looks rather interesting, but we have to interrupt it because it starts raining and because the guide makes a joke about bananas being ‘useless if they can’t stand’ which has Nadia in convulsions.

The banana plantation. In the rain.

It really makes you wonder what’s the point of going on holiday to the Caribbean if you don’t intend to spend your time toasting yourself on the beach. If you plan on seeing buildings and museums, you’re much better off staying in Europe.

The one thing which is really lovely and worth seeing is the botanical garden. Good heavens! I have never seen so many and such beautiful flowers all together in one place. Martinique is surnamed ‘Madinina,’ meaning ‘island of the beautiful flowers,’ and this is entirely legitimate. The only problem is that bringing people around through that garden implies learning the names of all the flowers by heart, and that would be hard enough if they weren’t all in Latin. I guess it’s true that you can’t pick a rose without finding some thorns.

When the tour is over, we are carried back – and the girl tries to entertain us again. ‘I will now teach you fifteen terms in Creole, the local language.’ (An appropriate choice I believe, since Creole is spoken by approximately fifteen people). ‘Bonjou means good-day. Saofé means how are you. Mabien means I’m all right. Chuchu means – ’ Enough, Jesus!! My turn to lead the tourists around will be the next day. I reason that two Creole terms is as much as I can realistically expect any of those nut-heads to learn, even in the implausible case that they may want to hear some more. I note down the first two, then I close my eyes, lean back and let the bus take me to my sweet port.

Hitting a guy with glasses

In the immortal words of TS Eliot: Well, fuck.

I was sitting here pondering whether to write my next entry on Avatar or on the antics of finding a job, when this friend of mine sends me an e-bitchslap to inform me that the Nostalgia Critic has published a Top 11 Villian Songs. (I’m not sure what the fuck a ‘villian’ is, the urban dictionary goes for two definitions and I’m guessing Doug adhered to the Kejardon version), but the reason why this was brought to my attention is that the list features – at number 5 – the song ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’ by Ursula. Given the ubiquitous international popularity of my blog, it’s clear that that guy with glasses was influenced in his work by my list of Top Ten Disney Songs, which features PUS at the top #1 spot, nay even lifted the whole work verbatim! Well, normally I’m happy to let the repercussions of my prestige spread forth without interference, but this occurrence brought back to the surface a question which numerous people have asked me now: why in the name of hell didn’t I include any songs from The Lion King in my Top Ten Disney Songs list? I mean, Scar’s song Be prepared even makes the third place of Doug’s list, and that’s one of the most anonymous in the film. How could they not make it in mine??



(By the way, the German version of this song is the creepiest shit I’ve ever seen in my life, though I’ll admit I almost died laughing when he roared IDIOTEN like a Sturmtruppen commando who finds his men have lost a tank over a poker game).

Back to the LK question, I’d like to answer it now because I think it’s important – not because the Lion King is important per se, I mean, but because it highlights some relevant questions on what criticism is, how it works and why it exists. And it’s somewhat of a challenge to the Nostalgia Critic, I guess, and he deserves this for having shop-lifted my ideas. So here goes, bitch. Shield yourself.

I’ll admit that TLK featured in my options for the songs to put on, not through Hakuna Matata, which possibly ranks first in the list of ‘Most overrated Disney songs of all time’ (I might have broken a heart or two here, but ‘Bare Necessities’ from the Jungle Book did that specific trick before and did it much better). Rather I was rubbing my chin over the Circle of Life song. Take a second to listen to the music and look at the video. It’s impossible not to be seduced by this piece – it’s such a beautiful rendition of the African landscapes and fauna. It’s innovative for its time in the realistic rather than cartoony rendition, and the music is lovely – a wonderfully harmonic interplay between chorus and lead voices, efficiently sustained by an orchestral background which is potent but essential. Excellent in many ways.

So why no spot in the list?



Well, the problem with the song is not the music, but the message. The entire LK film strives to draw a connection between established power and natural law – the highly repressive Old World ideology that says the King has been chosen by God and the monarchy is a divine institution. In this sense, the opening song is the most raw and explicit sequence of the entire movie – after the panoramic views over the African animals, the frame flies into and towards a massive stone phallus. The lion is symbolically standing at the peak of the stone, and all the animals bow to the big flagging dick. This is the message of the phallus, in its most elementary and total iteration – everything bows towards me, I am the master of all things, nature is there to serve me, etc. It goes back to the rhetorical statement in Iron Man, ‘Peace is the man with the biggest stick’ (which folds over to become, ‘Peace is the man with the biggest dick’). And the notion that nature follows and bends to all of this is bullshit. The song only stages a representation of privilege for the sake of privilege – aka, a power fantasy.

In fact, the song is so unapologetic in surrendering to the seductive power of the privileged signifier (which is Lacan’s expression for the phallus), and so in-your-face when presenting the Apollonian symbols of rigidity which support it (the stone, the straight line, the lion, the sunray, the direct zooming frame), that I cannot in all honesty call it a ‘good’ song – not because it’s badly executed, but because it is irresponsible. It is an insult to nature, not a representation of it (much less an accurate one) – because it shows nature as a mere function of our own personal fantasy (flexibly, as a power fantasy, not an exclusively masculine one). Nature is here to serve me, aye!!!! I am the king!!!!! (and fuck off).

Now – this is where things get dangerous for me, because I’m throwing a stone against someone quite a bit more established than I am – but this is the whole reason why a song like ‘Be Prepared,’ much like the Circle of Life, has no place in any top 10 list (or top 11). Doug correctly picked out the Nazi references, but he glosses over the fact that the Nazi demonization, in context, is an extraordinarily hypocritical statement (and this kind of glossing over in turn is hypocritical if you’re calling yourself a critic). Obviously the intent of the producers was that of getting kids to associate Nazi imagery with evil values (‘ooohh, those guys are goose-stepping like Scar’s hyenas, they must be bad!’). But if that was the idea, then why the fuck make a whole film based around asserting that there is a natural order giving legitimacy to the ruling classes, and that any attempt to change the status quo or improve one’s social class will only lead to disaster and ruin? Yes, that’s the instinct that is at the heart of Nazism in the first place – the idea of totalitarianism justified by natural selection. And the representation of which ‘animals’ are the good ones and which the bad is correspondingly – and worryingly – racist. As I wrote in one of my very first posts in this blog, ‘the mightily detestable hyenas are made to look and sound like the marginalia of current times: we have the idiot, the mafia stereotype Frankie guy (presumably Italian, who the fuck knows) and the black woman (who goes like peaches of course with the fact that all the good lions are markedly white, while the only bad one is the darker one; though Scar's traits are more Middle-Eastern than black, plastically). Add the fact that female lions also seem to have a purely supportive and subdued role throughout the whole film’ and the fact that Scar, as well as Arabic, also seems rather effeminate, and bingo! It’s an Aryan wet dream.



And this also begs the question – it’s fine to speak of the circle of life if you’re born the lion, but what do you do if you’re born one of the minorities? What should Madame Bovary do? What should Prometheus, or Iago, or a Franz Kafka do here?

Don’t mistake me – I’m not saying that the film is a Nazi manifesto or that it’s openly Nazi or anything. However, it does cater to the narcissistic kind of ‘I am the chosen one’ instincts which, when couched in the context of social representations and power scenarios (as is manifestly the case with TLK), lead to self-privileging, exclusive-rather-than-inclusive ideologies which are the core of Nazism. It’s hypocritical to condemn Nazism in the song when you’re fomenting its core instincts throughout all the film – and it’s a weakness of Doug’s review of the song that he fails to pick up on this clash.

So my problem with Doug’s inclusion of the song in the list is that he ignores the message in favour of the execution. He justifies the selection by criteria which relate to personal taste – the colour-scheme, the accents of voices, and so on, rather than the congruence and the social meaning of the underlying statement. The actual process of interpretation, which is at the heart of all real criticism, is not there at all. Of course, I understand that the Nostalgia Critic has a slightly different focus than a website like, say, Popmatters. It inscribes itself in the tradition of web-comedians like the Angry Nintendo Nerd, whom he famously cooperated with. But this is not an excuse. Yahtzee Croshaw from Zero Punctuation belongs to the same genre, but his comedy never comes at the expense of a real critical spirit. Some of his readings may be questionable, but he always adds a meditation on what the game is about, and he doesn’t divorce questions of quality from those of the text’s statement – in other words, he acknowledges and exposes the text’s social responsibility, which is exactly what a critic should do. Further, using the tag ‘it’s just comedy’ is a terrible detraction from the power of something like the Nostalgia Critic and from the merits of Doug for discovering and developing it. Criticism outside the established institution of criticism has the potential to be much more effective, precisely because – by being at the borders where different discourses rub flanks – it can speak to so many more people. That’s why it’s important that users of this form of criticism take responsibility for it, like Yahtzee is doing.



The rounds are on you, Doug – not only because I’m too broke to pay for any more beers, but because as long as you’re going to call yourself the Nostalgia Critic, you should take responsibility for your title. Veer more towards Croshaw than towards the AVGN, and give us real interpretation when justifying your statements of merit (you’ve done it at times, so it’s obvious you have the competence). It doesn’t have to come at the expense of the comedy, it just has to be original thinking – showing that a film’s quality depends on more than just the choreography, the colours, the pace and the pyrotechnics. In other words, showing that it depends on more than the obvious. Or, change your name to the Nostalgia Nerd and drop the ‘Critic’ from your title. Either way, be true to what you stand for.

And aaaaaaamen!!!! That’s me preaching from me ivory tower done for the day!! Now go forth and multiply. Onwards ye masses.

I have returned / My warriors come with me now

...faaaaarking hell.

I haven't felt so tired since... well, practically since I was born. My journey to India was unbelievable, but it was also unbelievably challenging. I didn't want to go in with a plan, much less buy a tour or shit like that, so I reached New Delhi with nothing other than my money and a contact. The rest I improvised it all. It engaged me mentally, physically, financially, logistically, theoretically, practically. It was total. It was, I think, the most challenging thing I have ever done in my life. And it's going to stay with me forever.

The image above gives an idea of the trajectory I took. From Delhi to Haridwar, brief stop by Gurgaon, then to Chennai, to Hyderabad, to Mumbai, to Goa, to Jaipur, to Agra, and back to Delhi for the plane home. Most of it was done by train (Sleeper class, it rocked!), the two longest journeys by flight. And if you're wondering, yes, of course the idea of drawing an 'A' over India was intentional. Couldn't leave without leaving my signature. :D

The very least I can do, before I do anything else, is give a GIGANTIC thank you to Ashwini Sinhal and Ratul Chakraborty for their help and assistance in New Delhi and Mumbai respectively. Thanks, guys. You gave me more support than I can tell, and spared me more trouble than I can imagine. Any time you come to Europe, give a call, and if I'm in your vicinity, I'll try and be by your side.

I was originally planning on filling up a couple of posts with the narration of my frog-leaping from one side of the most crowded nation on the planet to the other. But now that I'm back, I feel like I need to clear my head before I start formulating everything that I saw. I did keep a journal, and it's got sixteen entries, but it was not written with a view for publication, and I don't think it would make for good material were I to transcribe it on here. So for now, at least, this entry will be all that the Rant Machine will say about India.

Wondering what to discuss next, there's actually quite a few things to go. Someone dubbed me a "silly tart" and asked me to go back to writing funny posts, and I'm tempted to do a bit of that. Fred asked that I elaborate my thoughts on Avatar, and to be fair I've been wanting to do that for a while. Then there's Twilight, which I recently killed off on the trains in India, and that deserves some discussion (because anything that at least a hundred million people discuss, I need to discuss as well. I *am* a critic, dammit!!). And in the meantime, I have my work as sports journalist to pick up and an engagement with a poetry magazine to produce a few articles on poetic matters. So plenty to do.

I'm going to close this entry here. There was some wise shit that I almost took off on saying, but I really don't want to. I think the Rant Machine is really not the right place for me to get all aphoristic and existential. The wisdom shall remain interior. And may the force be with you, of course.

There is no adventure without improvisation, fellas. Peace out.

Update!

I intended to write this before taking my plane, but my ability for making plans is equal to my skills in neurosurgery, so here goes now.

If you pop by on this place with a certain regularity, you'll have noticed that I've gone quite silent in the last few days. This is not because I've lost interest in the blog, but because I'm travelling! These lines are being written from Chennai, in Southern India, and I've just been through Delhi, Gurgaon and Haridwar (coming up: Hyderabad, Mumbai, Goa and more). I'd been saving up for about a year to take a three-week trek across India and now I'm finally taking care of it. Obviously I don't have much time to go on the internet, much less to write on a blog, but the material will start flowing again as soon as I'm back, on the 20th of February.

Also, before leaving, I found a job! :) And it's in Egypt. But more on that later. Now I've got to go. And thanks to all the people who read and commented my list of Disney songs. That stuff got me an impressive number of reads, and that's part of the reason why I'm sending a flare out to say I'm still alive.

Peace out. xx

TOP TEN DISNEY SONGS #1

1. POOR UNFORTUNATE SOULS
Film: THE LITTLE MERMAID.



LINK TO THE SONG

‘Those poor unfortunate souls,’ exclaims Ursula, the sea-witch, with obvious distaste. Her vignette with Ariel is a self-contained narrative mythos standing amid the multiple archetypal tropes that litter The Little Mermaid like sea-shells on the sand. It is a common re-staging of the Christian ‘pact with the devil’ theme, even though the song is not directly Christian, steering away from that parable especially in the film’s happy ending (another primal archetype).

The music is exquisite, constantly vacillating in its tone between motherly tutorship and understated threat. In fact, this is one of the most varied songs in the Disney canon, so flexible that it remains equally catchy when transposed into new genres, effortlessly shifting from waltz and Operatic cantata to Ariel’s own lyric aria and the final Masonic call to the under-gods (sparsely broken by intermezzos of dialogue).While other Disney songs focus on the destructive qualities of evil, Poor Unfortunate Souls tackles the more subtle question of its seductive power, and the song is drenched with self-irony as Ursula, putting on her elaborate act over the low keys of her hymn, switches personalities to reflect the fears and desires in the gaze of Ariel. Like all great Disney villains, Ursula compounds her malevolence with an irresistible, inveigling personal charm – but the words she speaks have an extraordinary depth.

‘Those poor unfortunate souls’ – here are perhaps the most poignant words ever uttered in a Disney film. The register is that of a speaker who is external to humanity and to ‘the souls’ that compose it – it is as though nature herself were looking at her subjects. From a Christian point of view, these words acknowledge the bitter heritage of original sin – the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, in Hamlet’s words, the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Ursula, like nature, states these lines with mock compassion, drawing a gulf between the transcendental (God or the gods, nature personified, the devil, the supernatural, the force of fortune), which she represents, and the earthly, in those poor unfortunate souls whom she is so strikingly indifferent towards (worms, who are literally crushed and trapped in the ground of Ursula’s lair). The word ‘unfortunate,’ to the extent that fortune is a force beyond our control and a sister concept to representations of divine will or judgment, becomes a bitter metaphor to mean un-transcendental – and, therefore, natural. Thus ‘unfortunate’ and ‘natural’ contaminate each other in their meanings, lending an aura of melancholy and compassion to these four words which remains unmatched in the entire Disney canon.



Turning from the established condition to the suggestive potential, what is Ursula actually selling? What is she offering? In no other Disney film (except perhaps for Aladdin) does the villain represent such a fundamental catalyst for the fulfilment of the hero/ine. If Ariel cannot agree to Ursula’s pact and become human, there is no overriding her father’s authority, no reaching out to Prince Eric, no possibility for common grounds and, ultimately, no fateful happy ending. Though Ursula operates out of self-interest, the pact (or p/act) is not evil in and of itself. What Ursula offers is the possibility for Ariel to assume her full power. Such an assumption is necessary for Ariel to reach her happy ending, because her happy ending is precisely a state of independent agency, one in which her inner will has broken free from the shackles of family (her father), culture (her fish-friends) and even nature, in her condition as a mermaid. Ursula is selling the power to transcend those very natural limits which she represents in her lyric and which lend the song its title, those fateful destinies which surround Ariel as indistinct worms on every side – those poor, unfortunate souls.

Thus the song, in its entirety, becomes a potent metaphor for the human condition, torn between a deterministic condition of suffering and a will to break the rules and go beyond whatever the world around us (re)presents as destiny. The terror of assuming our own power is even greater than that of remaining in a state of suffering – this is why other traditions portray it as ‘selling your soul,’ the most frightening of scenarios, or by punitive parables such as that of King Midas. Our powers are so limitless that they scare us. If you negotiate with the transcendental, if you barter with the supernatural, then by definition you do not know what the price will be. Hence the root of the proverb, ‘Be careful what you wish for, because it may come true.’ As we look into Ursula’s mirror, we see the forces which bind and determine us, we see society, family, culture, morality, even nature, and we see them all for what they are – vaporous, feather-slight, powerless constructions which can be demolished with a brush of the finger. Like the cauldron of the sea-witch, the freedom that we subsequently stare into is terrifying – there are no referents, no points to hold on to, no anchors for identity, only the liberation of our power, which is unbounded. Is it a choice worth making? Will we know the price of what we have gained – and, as importantly, what we have lost – until we have crossed forever the line of our free will?

The double theme in Ursula’s song, the opposition of nature and natural laws against the existential void of our infinite power (the latter symbolised by the inebriatingly powerful figure of Ariel), is not a dialectic – Ursula is not an external agent ‘selling’ something, she is just an aspect of Ariel’s own free will. At the most, a projection of her terror. But Ursula and Ariel are not polarized figures, they are not yin and yan or alpha and omega or light and dark. They coexist in the same awareness, in the same ‘oneness,’ each a condition for the other – the ‘transcendental’ as a projection produced by the earthly (or, those who live on earth), and the ‘earthly’ as a category produced by the individual to describe her surroundings, retrospectively produced after the assumption of her power. The message of this song is lacerating – you are omnipotent. So be careful.