Alexandra

Directed by Alexander Sokurov

We enter Alexandra’s Russian army outpost with the eponymous protagonist, via a series of rides in bulletproofed military vehicles. If this journey across arid wilderness feels like passage into an alternate dimension, the labyrinthine outpost at its end confirms the impression. Clinging to the edge of civilization, the huddled tents where Alexandra (veteran opera star Galina Vishnevskaya) has come to visit her grandson house young men jaded beyond their years.


In many ways, in fact, Alexandra could be a cynic’s militarized revision of Peter Pan. The fantastical Neverland is worn down to a mythic and harsh dust plane. The soldiers – veritable Lost Boys – display the shy awkwardness of teenagers, but are as resigned to their daily tedium as veterans of the Cold War front. To these eternally young men, Alexandra looks like Wendy flying into Neverland: proof there’s another world where things change and people age. She moves soldiers from their resolved silence and makes friends in a bombed-out town nearby.

Surprisingly though, director Alexander Sokurov never locates this town and base in the real world. In Alexandra, Sokurov’s string of historical dramas (culminating in the single-take history lesson-via-museum tour Russian Ark) gives way to a universal tale of squandered youth. This film doesn’t address a specific contemporary conflict so much as the lives snarled in war’s grinding and clanging machinery.

Is it intentional or unfortunate, then, that watching Alexandra feels something like being trapped in its military Neverland? Alexander Burov’s languid cinematography of the sun-bleached outpost reinforces the oppressive stillness, as do the young actors’ stoic dispositions. But like new arrivals at the base on the border with oblivion, we want things to move more quickly.


This review appears in the April 26 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Justin Francavilla: I Said You Fckn Die!

Daniel Cooney Fine Art


Francavilla’s ink drawings portray hyper-real scuffles between middle-aged men in middle-management uniforms. These grotesquely stylized images could be satiric exaggerations of corporate competitiveness, or a broader critique of the dehumanizing effects of contemporary society. Either way, Francavilla renders his break-room fight clubs beautifully, with incredible attention to the texture and shading of skins and suits. Closes 5/3

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm, 511 W 25th St #506, between Tenth and Eleventh Aves 212-255-8158, danielcooneyfineart.com

This review will appear in the April 9 issue of The L Magazine.

Jem Southam: The Rockfalls of Normandy

Robert Mann Gallery





Photographing the English Channel coast over extended periods, Southam plays with the notion that photography captures fleeting moments of truth. Documenting the slow process of erosion and its effects on massive geological structures, his large-scale color photographs emphasize changing textures, patterns and colors, and underline the subjective nature of time. Closes 5/10

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm. 210 Eleventh Ave 10th fl, between 24th and 25th Sts 212-989-7600, robertmann.com

This review will appear in the April 9 issue of The L Magazine.

Miriam Shapiro: Important Works since the 1960s

Flomenhaft

This mini-retrospective moves through Shapiro’s major developments: abstract expressionism in the late 50s, her best-known femmages (feminist + collage) from the 60s and 70s, and recent paintings and mixed-media work. Bold colors and stylized forms abound, and most of her recent work builds on investigations into feminism and art history she began years ago. Closes 4/26

Tue-Sat 10am-5pm. 547 W 27th St #308, between Tenth and Eleventh Aves 212-268-4952, flomenhaftgallery.com

This review will appear in the April 9 issue of The L Magazine.

Anju Dodiya: All Night I Shall Gallop

Bodhi Art

In intricate mixed-media prints, Dodiya develops an idiosyncratic lexicon of materials and symbols. She addresses colonialism and feminism, juxtaposing images of maps, Victorian behavior manuals, and primitive tools, with a recurring “Oriental” woman’s face, Sylvia Plath quotations, and references to abused female bodies, the whole often linked by swooping silk threads. Closes 4/26

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm. 535 W 24th St, 4th fl, between Tenth and Eleventh Aves 212-352-2644, bodhiart.in

This art review will appear in the April 9 issue of The L Magazine

"The Odd Couple" by Gnarls Barkley

Originally slated to hit stores on April 8, the second album from the uncatagorizable duo Gnarls Barkley came out online on March 18 and gradually became available in stores from that date onwards. An accompanying press release claimed the move was a tactic for pre-empting the distractions of late-March, namely college basketball and the beginning of Spring. More likely, though, the early release came in reaction to significant internet leaking. And with some buzz generated from MTV’s banning of the album’s first video (for “Run”) for fears it could cause epileptic seizures, why not strike while the iron is lukewarm? That video, which has yet to cause any seizures, goes from being a mundane retro club dance number into a visual frenzy that should be seen by fans of video art everywhere. It also features Justin Timberlake as a video jockey-within-the-video.

The album itself suffers from acute sophomore blues. Or perhaps its audience does. Gnarls Barkley’s first album, 2006’s St. Elsewhere, came out in that pre-M.I.A. era when blending dissonant musical genres brought on the kind of giddy excitement reserved for taboo-breakers. Two short years later Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo have put together a very similar album that’s just not as satisfying. Some of The Odd Couple’s problems might come from poor song ordering, which is arguably an antiquated skill in the post-album age. Nonetheless, part of St. Elsewhere’s strength was its attention-hijacking five opening songs. Once listeners were through shaking it to the initial onslaught, the album could mellow out without losing their attention.

The Odd Couple, sadly, starts with a couple of downers, and the first fast-paced pop/rock-laced song ‘Going On’ can’t make up the difference. The Odd Couple is also surprisingly short, with its thirteen tracks totaling less than 40 minutes. At that rate of track turnover, some great songs end before listeners even get into them. That’s the problem with ‘Whatever,’ one of the more successful experiments on the album that lasts just over two minutes. Halfway into the experiment, apparently, Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo just said ‘whatever.’ Part of what made St. Elsewhere great was that willingness to experiment, but that spirit of innovation seems to be lost on The Odd Couple.

A similar version of this review appears in the March 26 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read
here.

"Eggo Trippin'" by Snoop Dogg


The name, packaging and song titles of Snoop Dogg’s new album Ego Trippin’ suggest a return to the cross-over king’s West Coast gangsta rap origins. However, the 21-track album’s middle song, “Deez Hollywood Nights” – where Snoop raps about partying with Jessicas Alba, Simpson and Biel – portrays this album’s spirit more accurately. Ego Trippin’ is blockbuster rap with enough genre hybrids to please everybody. Except those fans hoping for another Doggystyle, but what fan would want Snoop to grow backwards? That’s regression man.

Among Ego Trippin’s few gangsta rap songs, the best is the southern-styled “Life of da Party,” featuring Too $hort in the album’s only major cameo. “My Medicine,” meanwhile, couldn’t be much further from the blunted marijuana tribute the title implies: it’s a folk-rock Johnny Cash tribute (seriously). Snoop even indulges eighties nostalgia with “Cool,” which is basically a Prince song. This cannibalizing of disparate styles has ruined many adventurous rap albums (Wyclef anyone?). But Snoop’s buttery delivery and Ego Trippin’s prevailing electro-dance production aesthetic keep detours through reggae, rock, Motown, R&B, and even gangsta rap, from seeming too incongruous.

This review appears in the March 19 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Canadian Front, 2008

March 13-20

The eight films having their New York premieres during MoMA’s annual survey of new Canadian cinema resort alternately to personal drama, political satire, or clever genre manipulation, but propose a consistently cynical outlook.

Two entries explore working-class strife, with characters compensating for socio-economic impotence by exercising agency in the ring. The series’ headlining film – Poor Boy’s Game by director Clement Virgo – stars Danny Glover and Rossif Sutherland (Kiefer’s half brother). The film follows violent outbursts between lower-class black and white communities in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Honoring boxing movie conventions, Virgo’s film is all about men, their bruised egos and quests for affirmation through physical domination. Though more sophisticated than most boxing films, its final image of multiracial camaraderie predictably excludes women.

Le Ring (Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s first feature) follows hardheaded twelve year-old Jessy (Maxime Desjardins-Tremblay) growing up in Montreal’s roughest neighborhood. As his family falls apart, Jessy looks to amateur wrestling as an outlet for his anger, but discovers the matches are rigged. Le Ring ingeniously subverts the boxing trope used in Poor Boy’s Game. When it turns out the rules inside the ring are as unfair and arbitrary as those outside, Jessy looks for more durable solutions than cathartic violence.

The biggest film in Canadian Front, 2008 – except maybe the split screen psychodrama The Tracey Fragments starring Juno’s Ellen Page – Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness is also about a Montrealer coping without hitting. Jean-Marc (Marc Labrèche), the middle-aged peon in a monolithic bureaucracy, daydreams of fame while his family plugs into blackberries and iPods. This archetypal middle-class white man’s anxieties over becoming obsolete produce terrific satire, and some silly set pieces.

This preview appears in the March 12 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Contempt (1963)

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Brigitte Bardot, Fritz Lang


Godard’s masterpiece pays homage to many things. Art films: it’s an expensive New Wave movie about making a studio-funded art movie. Tracking shots: the opening credits show one being filmed, and thereafter most shots track. Frenchness: brilliant reds and blues fill the mise-en-scene – especially in Film Forum’s new print. Brigitte Bardot: her beauty and presence bewitch the director, his cast and the audience.


This review appears in the March 12 issue of The L Magazine.

Sleepwalking

Directed by William Maher
Charlize Theron, Dennis Hopper

First-time director Maher organizes this family melodrama around the most uninteresting of the film’s cardboard characters, all of whom are made from 100% recycled materials. Naïve man-child James looks after his eleven year-old niece, whose down-and-out mom ditches. Even Hopper’s monstrous patriarch is a shadow of his Blue Velvet role. The rural North California settings are elegantly filmed, but the script’s simplistic family psychology is hopelessly clichéd.

This review appears in the March 12 issue of The L Magazine.

Celebrity Gossip Magazines and Eating Disorders

Separating Stars from People

Gossip magazines that seek to “out” celebrity eating disorders claim concern for the star, and allegedly educate their readerships about the disorder. However, this sort of journalism has multiple negative effects undermining its façade of benevolent concern. Celebrity magazines’ goal of sparking awareness of a star’s condition effectively isolates readers from the real experience of disordered eating; it becomes a problem caused by abnormal pressure, namely that of being in the public eye. Furthermore, while articles sometimes offer surprisingly clear indictments of our obsession with thinness, they avoid making the next logical connection. Writers never acknowledge the pathological nature of eating disorders in a late capitalist society simultaneously demanding greater consumption and thinner bodies. Often, in fact, an article refuses to name an eating disorder, resorting instead to euphemisms like “extreme dieting.” The goal, it would seem, is to talk about eating disorders without acknowledging their most widely-held determinants. A reading of these articles informed by the writings of Susan Bordo, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, and poststructuralist Roland Barthes will help flesh out – as it were – the counter-intuitive articles in celebrity beauty magazines devoted to eating disorders.

A comment made during our class discussion of Brumberg’s work – paraphrased here – eventually led me to choose this subject: we don’t find anorexic bodies beautiful. My immediate thought was that this is false. Anorexic bodies are considered beautiful so long as their anorexia is not pronounced. In contemporary North America, the ideal female body type – a mediated fiction to be sure – can only be maintained through disordered eating. We read in magazines like Star and People – arbiters of beauty and appropriate style – that our body ideals are destroying the actors and singers we look to for examples of beauty. Yet alongside these articles we see other celebrities similarly emaciated. Because today’s cultural standard of female beauty in the West is only attainable through disordered eating, the bodies we consider beautiful are most likely also anorexic.

Interestingly, celebrity magazines’ articles on the subject are so surrounded by images of similarly slimmed bodies that an astute reader, reading “against the grain,” can easily infer the connection writers don’t make. Never occupying too large a percentage of a celebrity gossip magazine, eating disorders are made exceptional, and the insights printed in their regard are never explicitly developed. However, the fundamentally indistinguishable emaciated silhouettes of the celebrities marked as “extreme dieters” and those assumed to be healthy betray their correspondence. Images of celebrities with eating disorders are largely identical to those of celebrities in surrounding articles, and the advertising images filling out the glossy pages of the magazines. The message available to readers who look for it is that our cultural ideal of (specifically female) beauty is physically unsustainable. Whether they are “outed” as victims of eating disorders or merely selling a new fragrance, the slenderness of so many stars can only be achieved through unhealthy control of hunger and the body.

This insight is at the root of my decision to address this type of celebrity journalism in this essay. I chose to look at this genre of celebrity article because it comes so close to revealing the inherent contradictions of contemporary consumer culture. As Susan Bordo wrote, pathological behaviors like eating disorders reveal our society’s synchronous yet contradictory urges to always consume more while becoming thinner: "Bulimia embodies the unstable double bind of consumer capitalism, while anorexia and obesity embody an attempted resolution of that double bind" (Bordo 201). Indeed, many articles on celebrity eating disorders reveal this same incongruity between our standards of beauty and our compulsion to consume, but always do so on an individual scale. In an article on Nicole Ritchie’s postpartum weight loss, an inside source for Star tellingly observes: “It’s a constant battle between what she knows is right and what she sees in the mirror.” This biting point is the last sentence in the article. The words “eating disorder” are never used though they clearly apply. This lucid observation that our relationships to food and to our bodies are fundamentally at odds is blunted by its presentation. While adroitly addressing individual cases of disordered eating brought on by physical and emotional stress, celebrity magazines like Star fail to make the connection between individual cases and our culture-wide standards of beauty.

In Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s Fasting Girls, she proposes a useful model for studying the effects of these notions of female beauty. She proposes three different lenses through which anorexia has been interpreted and treated. The first is the biomedical, whereby individuals with eating disorders are evaluated in purely physical terms (Brumberg 27). The second mode of eating disorder analysis she proposes is psychological, which holds that anorexia, bulimia and obesity are physical manifestations of a more deep-seated psychological disturbance in the individual, which must be treated according to various therapeutic models (29-33). The facet of eating disorders Brumberg is most concerned with, however, is its cultural determination. In essence, she suggests that a late capitalist culture predicated on ever-increasing consumption that also demands an ultra-thin body, forces consumers into an irreconcilable bind (35). Thus, to fully understand the factors behind the rising rates of eating disorders, Brumberg insists we must adopt all three perspectives.

Celebrity magazines though, generally limit themselves to the biomedical and psychological determinants of eating disorders. In a recent issue of People, for instance, an article on Marie Osmond in a section titled “Body Watch” sports the headline: “Lost 40 Lbs. in 5 Months!” The article attributes Osmond’s drastic weight loss to the recent death of both her parents and her divorce, and the dangerous eating habits she developed as a child star. The article explains that “Osmond was onstage by age 3–and following extreme diets by age 12.” This narrow focus on the psychological factors causing eating disorders, as is standard practice in literature on the subject, overlooks the fundamental cultural conundrum playing such an important role in the disorders’ spread. Interestingly, a quotation from Osmond provides greater insight than the article’s writers seem capable of: “‘I know the head trip of focusing on the outside,’ she notes, ‘when, really, we have to focus on the inside.’” This statement, typically, is the last sentence of the article. Though Osmond comes close to formulating our society’s unhealthy obsession with body image, the article remains focused on fame as the source of these pressures. Celebrity magazines’ preoccupation with isolating specific celebrities as victims of eating disorders, then, has the effect of overlooking anorexia’s far-reaching contemporary cultural roots.

Our unsustainable standards of beauty, rarely stated explicitly by celebrity gossip magazines, are available to the informed readers of magazines like Star and People. On the back page of a recent issue of Star, Julianne Moore is quoted as saying: “I hate dieting. I hate having to do it to be the ‘right’ size. I’m hungry all the time… All actresses are hungry all the time.” This protest against Hollywood standards of beauty is presented without commentary, but betrays the cultural compulsion forcing Moore – one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood today – to diet. In statements like these celebrity magazines reveal what Brumberg found missing from literature on anorexia: as much as individual psychological and biomedical factors contribute to disordered eating habits, they are also culturally determined. By articulating the oppressive standards of beauty actresses must embody, Moore presents a fleeting protest against the aesthetic ideal she is often believed to exemplify.

For all the revelatory power of Moore’s statement, however, it commits another prevalent shortcoming of celebrity eating disorder literature. This quotation questions the self-denial and bodily micro-management actresses endure, but it confines these problems to the ranks of the rich and famous. Celebrity magazines, though sometimes revelatory in their coverage of celebrity eating disorders, perpetually distance these experiences from those of their readership. In the pages of Star and the like, eating disorders become the exclusive purview of celebrities, engendered by the pressures and difficulties of being in the public eye. This sort of celebrity journalism falls outside the multipronged strategy Brumberg proposes will effectively counter-act increasing rates of eating disorders. One approach, she suggests, is to reduce our preoccupation – in global media and on an interpersonal basis – with a thin body ideal, and body imaging generally (Brumberg 272). Celebrity journalism’s fascination with eating disorders, however, concerns those stars’ struggle to maintain that body ideal. These images of disordered bodies are merely an extension of our obsession with thin bodies.

This kind of article seems to conform to another important change Brumberg proposes, to spread awareness and understanding of eating disorders (273-4). However, this genre of journalism falls short on this account as well. Such articles oversimplify the symptoms and catalysts of disordered eating under the pretense of informing readers. In her book, Brumberg veers away from this idea that eating disorders have a stable and identifiable set of manifest traits. Indeed, she chronicles the very adaptive nature of disordered eating since Medieval Europe. The brand of celebrity literature in question here, however, claims to provide highly visible examples of eating disorders. By projecting what are touted as symptoms onto recognizable bodies, this literature effectively defines eating disorders and neutralizes their threat. “This famous person is anorexic,” it implies, “these pictures prove it.” Part of the suggestion is that eating disorders are an expression of psychological and physical pressures, but are largely the province of stars. Furthermore, rather than a changing set of characteristics that could be found in most celebrities and many readers, these articles narrowly define the experience of eating disorders.

The ideological operation at work here is an example of the signification systems outlined by Roland Barthes in Mythologies. Whereas Brumberg documents a history of anorexia over hundreds of years of European history, celebrity journalism’s treatment of eating disorders naturalizes a very specific iteration of this phenomenon. Coverage published by magazines like Star and People presents eating disorders as a text without history. This kind of article, then, “transforms history into nature” (Barthes 129). By presenting eating disorders as a problem engendered by the psychological and biomedical pressures of fame, these articles naturalize disordered eating as a celebrity problem. This confinement of eating disorders to stars’ experience is deliberate, but celebrity magazines present it as natural. Put another way: “any semiological system is a system of values; now the myth-consumer takes the signification for a system of facts” (131). As a result, eating disorders are dissociated from the contradictory cultural imperatives of greater consumption and thinner bodies to which we are all subjected. These articles effectively distance ‘ordinary’ – that is, non-famous – readers from the problems of eating disorders. Certainly celebrities’ hyper-visible bodies mean they are subject to greater scrutiny, compounding the compulsion to adhere to our extreme standards of beauty. However, celebrity magazines seem to deny that every person living in the modernized West is evaluated according to these very same body ideals. The pressure to control one’s body is naturalized as a celebrity problem, rather than a culture-wide issue.

This form of celebrity journalism performs another of the ideological maneuvers defined by Barthes’ semiotics, what he terms inoculation. By this process, the problems of a given value or system are admitted, and then dismissed as a small drawback in comparison to the far greater benefits offered. Barthes describes the rhetorical device operating as follows: "Take the established value which you want to restore or develop, and first lavishly display its pettiness, the injustices it produces, the vexations to which it gives rise, and plunge it into its natural imperfection; then, at the last moment, save it in spite of, or rather by the very curse of its blemishes" (41, original emphasis). Celebrity magazines’ coverage of eating disorders provides a striking example of inoculation. Stars designated as having eating disorders – however coded that language might be – are presented as a minority within a large community of healthy and beautiful stars. This implies that while a few will fall into excess in their efforts to control their bodies, most will succeed – we’re not sure how – in embodying our ideals of beauty. The benefits of thinness – fame and power, as we are told – are presented as well worth the risk of developing an eating disorder. Through this inoculation, then, celebrity magazines can address stars’ eating disorders, all the while upholding the standards of beauty that are their cause.

Though contradictory, celebrity magazines’ coverage of eating disorders mirrors the fundamental opposition structuring consumer society in its current late capitalist incarnation. Bordo explained that the contemporary increase in eating disorders is a result of two opposed cultural imperatives: “the hunger for unrestrained consumption… existing in unstable tension alongside the requirement that we sober up” (Bordo 201). Celebrity magazines indulge in a similar opposition. On the one hand articles about eating disorders warn readers of the dangers involved in pursuing the ultra-thin body ideal. Meanwhile, the surrounding articles and advertisements espousing beautiful slim bodies reinforce that ideal. We should see these opposite imperatives as a deliberate strategy to foster insecurities to which products can be marketed. After all, it would be difficult to sustain a highly-developed capitalist economy whose consumers were secure. These magazines, as a microcosm of the larger culture, exploit contemporary insecurities regarding body image for advertising revenue. Perhaps the most valuable thing to be taken from celebrity eating disorder articles – aside from the telling statements of fed-up stars – is the seamless continuity between their unhealthy bodies, those of otherwise healthy stars, and advertising imagery. The fundamentally indistinguishable bodies in the pages of these magazines betray that they can only be achieved through disordered eating. Until the kind of pictures in these magazines change – “images that allow for aging and ethnic variability, and images that portray women as having qualities other than just ‘sexiness’” (Brumberg 272) – we can seize upon the inherent contradictions they betray.

Note: This essay was written for Deirdre Boyle's class "Mediating Consumption, Controlling the Body" at the New School in the Spring of 2008.

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 1957. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. 1993. Revised Ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2003.
Brennan, Casey, Ilyssa Panitz, Heidi Parker and Tim Plant. “Nicole’s Extreme Diet.” In Star (February 18 2008), pp. 52-3.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa. 1989. Revised Ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
Clehane, Diane and Charlotte Triggs. “Body Watch: Marie Osmond.” In People (February 18 2008), pp. 143.
Moore, Julianne. “Overheard.” In Star (February 18 2008), pp. 96.