In Which Girls Relate to Billy Madison Too You Know

I Love You, Man
by MOLLY LAMBERT

I Love You, Man
Wr/Dir: John Hamburg
2009

Critics were split on I Love You, Man and so was the crowd I went with. Half thought it was funny (if not memorable) and inoffensive and the other half thought it was bland and misogynistic. I remember a similar argument after Knocked Up where a female friend defended Leslie Mann's character's actions against a guy arguing that Paul Rudd's husband character had done nothing wrong. Bromantic passions run high. 

run, run, run from adult responsibilityWhat's bland is not Paul Rudd's character, who's actually quite well sketched out, but Jason Segel's. Which is strange because Segel's brand of creepy-funny seems like an ideal match for Rudd's muddled adorableness. I was expecting something more along the lines of The Zoo Story or The Cable Guy. 

Instead what happens is that Segel's character seems to shift from scene to scene to suit the needs of the questions posed to Rudd's character. Which could also be funny, but it's just kind of confusing. Lots of ideas are set up and never returned to again. There are some really funny bits in the movie and the chemistry between Segel and Rudd is charged with a first date giddiness, but the film never quite makes the leap from good to great.  

Comedies have focused on male immaturity for more or less all of time. What is so weird about these movies to real life slacker girls like me is the way they all portray women as inherently responsible. I must have slept through that memo. Women are always shown being driven endlessly towards goals of marriage, responsibility, financial security, with the men bucking against it.  

Andy Samberg and Paul Rudd demonstrate two different delicious flavors of handsome Jewish guynessBesides Charlyne Yi, girls in these comedies tend to all get cast in this light. The single friend in I Love You, Man (the charming Sarah Burns, memorably from a FOTC episode) is typed as desperate for a man, any man. Most of her laughs come from this, and she's really funny. But in a movie where a single male character who doesn't have his shit together is portrayed as having a life worthy of emulation, it feels a little bit sexist.  

they live in Silverlake, naturallyRashida Jones is as winning as she can possibly be, but she is meant to be the Ralph Bellamy of this love triangle and has no chance against a Rush covers montage. By the time the movie gets to the couple questioning their decision to get engaged I was pretty sure they ought to break up. Like in Apatow movies, a lot of timely and sensitive real life issues about gender and relationships are touched upon and then buried under jokes.

Segel and Rudd display two brands of feminine masculinityThe only trailer that ran before the movie was for Inglorious Basterds, which was strange. Despite the fact that I finally just saw (and loved) Death Proof, I can't feel myself getting that stoked for a war movie, even a Quentin Tarantino war movie. I'm just not sure I care yet about B.J. Novak and Samm Levine murdering Nazis. Can I give you a maybe? If it were a World War One movie I'd be so down.

even though Mahnola Dargis really hated ILYM, she agrees with all of humankind that Paul Rudd is the fucking cutest ever War movies are the ultimate bromances. They have the same message as most of these comedies; that nothing in the world is better, more fun, or more awesome than the not-gay but gayish close friendships between straight men. Most movies violate Bechdel's rule so flagrantly that it's depressing to talk about.

What we need are more girlmances. I guess Sex and The City is a girlmance. Big Love is definitely a girlmance. Gossip Girl is a gossip girlmance. Little Darlings is a great classic girlmance. I have high hopes for the long-rumored Amy Poehler and Isla Fisher collaboration Groupies if it comes to fruition. 

One thing I Love You, Man got completely right: Sunday night programming on HBO really IS amazing. Or at least it was until ten last night, when Big Love and Eastbound & Down wrapped up their seasons. I was already subjected to one Entourage promo tonight and had to wash my eyeballs out with Axe bodyspray. When does Curb start again?   

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording.

In Which Emily Gould Spends A Rainy Sunday At The Museum

The World Was On Fire

by EMILY GOULD

"Pour Your Body Out"

Pipilotti Rist at MOMA

The summer I was 16 my parents went temporarily insane and let me go to art camp at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Ten years later, aka this past summer, I moved into an apartment a block away from the Pratt campus. The neighborhood has changed a lot in ten years; New York City in general has changed a lot. Also I have changed a lot, although possibly in some ways not enough.

At art camp I smoked pot for the first time, cheated on a boyfriend for the first time, and spent a lot of time waiting for the G train for the first time. I drafted a little template for my whole early adulthood in those two weeks, it now seems!

But one of my strongest memories from art camp is of going to a museum where I saw the video ‘I’m a victim of this song’ by Pipilotti Rist. My friend Bennett was visiting – he remembers things better than I do and he says it was the Whitney or the Guggenheim. All I remember is that we got obsessed and could crack each other up for months afterwards by singing Rist’s version of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ to each other.

Or screaming it to each other, really, I am talking about the part at the end where Rist takes the song a million miles away from Chris Isaak and Helena Christensen rolling around getting weird bits of black sand all stuck to their pouty bottom lips territory and just shrieks every line: “NO I DON’T WANT TO FALL IN LOVE! WITH YOU!”

‘Victim’ is more than just hilarious Swiss whimsy, though, I eventually realized. Unlike Isaak, Rist telegraphs actual meaning with every line. The deliberateness of her pronunciation means you have to actually think about the lyrics. “It is strange what desire will make foolish people do,” you find yourself musing.

This song is also notoriously easy to get stuck in your head, as the video’s title suggests. Song stickiness is something Rist, who used to be in a band called Les Reines Prochaines, thinks about a lot. Here, in one of her first videos, from 1986:

Rist jumps around with her breasts exposed and sings the first line of ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ over and over again, cranked up to double-speed. Whenever I watch it I’m reminded of how one little piece of a song will sometimes reverberate through your head just like that over and over while you do some kind of repetitive activity like swimming or biking, and you’ll barely even realize that you’re thinking of the song until finally you do and then you laugh at how literal your subconscious is being, like for example if you are spending a lot of your time missing someone and the song-bit is “Hey, what’s the matter man? We’re gonna come around twelve with some Puerto Rican girls who are just dyin’ to meet you!”

So yeah, Rist is not a girl who misses much.

"Times are tough and wild. Let’s hence look after the commonplace, the ordinary life. I’ll prepare something for you to eat; you watch TV, do yoga, smoke a joint." - Pipi Rist

The other brilliant thing about her videos -- besides their deft appropriation and repurposing and wild enweirdening of pop songs -- is how visually arresting they are, and how they manage to be visually arresting without recourse to being grotesque, which distinguishes them from just about everything else you are likely to find yourself unable to look away from.

I was reminded of this the other day when I went to see the video installation that Rist has built in a multi-story atrium in the new(ish) MOMA building in New York. But first I watched this video of Rist talking about how this “kind of useless big room will be made to enlighten the body.”

“Huge rooms always mean to honor the spirit in a way, like a church, like it’s the house of God,” she continues - she’s wearing dorky thick-framed black glasses and a puffy bright yellow and orange jacket, as if she’s playing ‘wacky German-accented artist’ in an SNL sketch or something - “And this is one of my biggest fights, to reconcile thinking and body.”

Also Rist says on a placard outside the atrium that she wants visitors to absorb “spiritual vitamins” from the piece, which is called ‘Pour Your Body Out.’

Keeping all this in mind, I set out on a dark cold rainy Sunday afternoon, walking past the Pratt sculpture garden to the G train, which came fairly promptly. I transferred to the E but got off too early, at 53rd and Lex, so I walked – it was really pouring – through the luxury shopping and sad office district that surrounds the MOMA.

Am I imagining this, or do lavish shop windows just look especially pathetic and false to everyone right now, as if the sad hollowness of material culture has been revealed once and for all? Possibly I’m imagining this. Probably there’s still someone somewhere who’s still in thrall to the idea of buying a new wardrobe for ‘resort’ season.

Anyway I walked into the MOMA, paid my $20, stuffed my dripping raincoat in my bag, walked into ‘Pour Your Body Out,’ took off my boots (no shoes allowed on the carpeted area) and lay down in the exact center of the room, which is this carpeted ring surrounded by a raised carpeted donut. Immediately I was swarmed on all sides by wide-eyed, joy-filled children, who unworriedly ran around me and over and into my legs as if I was just another pink pillow or lump of carpet.

One eight year old girl’s mom was trying to get her out of the carpeted circle:

“We have to go back to the hotel.”
“Fifteen more minutes!”
“Maybe FIVE more minutes.”
“Fifteen more minutes!”
“Can you explain to me exactly what you find so fascinating about this place?”

She couldn’t. I can’t either, really.

It’s just three huge walls of projected oversaturated color, mostly landscapes and closeup views of grass and puddles and soft bodies which a camera zooms up and around and over, as if your tiny body is being astrally projected into these fantastical surroundings. Sometimes all three walls seem to display the same image and at other times they’re different.

One sequence captures the feeling you get sometimes in botanical gardens of wanting to grab the flowers and rub them all over your body and stick them up your nose and stuff. In another sequence, someone wades through a puddle full of shiny crushed aluminum cans and other bits of shimmering dross. In another, a warm pink body is rendered abstract by the camera’s swoops and dives.

At one point, as a green strawberry floated in viscous pink liquid across the screen, I surprised myself by having the clichéd though that it would be fun to come here on mushrooms, but then I imagined cranking up the intensity of the sound and color and the plush softness of the pillow-nest and the warm surrounding bodies just a tiny bit and realized, yikes no thank you.

Plus imagine if you were on mushrooms and you decided, as I did after half an hour or so of Pouring My Body Out, to poke around in the gallery right behind the atrium and you ended up stepping from the sepulchral warm pink to this small black grotto where Nan Goldin’s slideshow ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ plays for forty five minutes of every hour? You would be so. fucked.

Though I had seen most of these pictures individually or in books had never seen the whole ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ before and in some ways it’s like Rist’s videos’ perfect dark counterpoint, because while it’s also riveting it is emphatically grotesque.

from Nan Goldin's The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency

Goldin’s photos and the funny/sad music that accompanies them – ‘Don’t Make Me Over’ plays over a pastiche of drag queens and tarted-up East Village party girls, that kind of thing – do seem artlessly grotesque – it would be unforgivable if they seemed to strive for grotesquerie. They’re just shiny disgusting completely unignorable portraits of a particular world, which is gone.

There is a whole dead New York world that lives forever in this dark room, trapped and pressed flat in here, living in colors as rich and saturated as the ones on the walls in the atrium. This artwork doesn’t contain any spiritual vitamins. But both rooms are what I came to see.

Emily Gould is a writer living in New York, a sometime yoga instructor and editor of Emily Magazine. This is her first appearance on This Recording.

In Which We Ask Ourselves Where It Will End

Suspenseful Cliffhangers

by MOLLY LAMBERT

STEAMPUNK! Is anything dorkier? Does a New York times style section story on a subculture mean it's officially dead? Does the world really need more Victorian modded objects? Does the world really need more objects period? Do you really want to live in a nautical chamber located twenty thousand leagues under the sea? Is it weird that I still kind of do want to live underwater?

A Technically Adept Stoner's Steampunk Bong Creation

Is it possible that Stoner Culture is even nerdier than Steampunk? Is combining the two, (as in the contraption above, called the Original Model 420 Pneumatiform Infumationizer) some sort of ungodly meeting of geekular netherworlds? Will they join forces or form gangs and fight to the death like The Warriors? If they rumble at Burning Man will the battlefield be littered with broken bong stems and bashed-in brass goggles?

Edwardian Star Wars Robot R2 S2 (the S stands for Steam)

Is the future now past? Does Malcolm Gladwell read This Recording for story ideas or is it a case of concurrent innovations? Whom can we blame for the emergence of Steampunk? Jules Verne? H.G. Wells? William Gibson for The Difference Engine? Christopher Nolan for The Prestige? Scarlett Johanssen for using The Prestige to demonstrate she can't pull off a British accent at all? Is ScarJo using Ghostbusters for evil?

"My god David Bowie Tesla, what an enormous lightbulb!"

Is Scarlett Johanssen Hollywood's Sasha Grey? Is Sasha Grey the sex industry's Scarlett? Will Woody Allen abandon his gross crush on S.J. when he learns about S.G.? Or has he already abandoned her for the even younger more shiksa-y pastures of Evan Rachel Wood? Will I ever stop being creeped out by old perverts?

Back To The Future III is a Weird Western. So is Wild Wild West. They both happen to suck. However, Westworld rules.

How many other sci-fi nerd trends can we cross-breed with steampunk? Where will it end? With the Star Wars steampunk lightsaber? The Back To The Future style steampunk time machine? The Dan Clowes drawn cover for this week's tech-themed issue of The New Yorker evoking low-culture touchstones like comic books, personal automatons, and robots playing poker? Is the internet collapsing in on itself like a black hole?

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs = Steampunk Jurassic Park?

Were the Disney Imagineers way ahead of the curve when they redid Tomorrowland in a pseudo-steampunk manner some years ago? Or were they just paying tribute to designer Harper Goff who art-directed the 1954 Disney film version of early sci-fi classic 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (and later did the amazingly cool sets for Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory)?

the Old Jules Verne Submarine Ride, still in action at Disneyworld

Was closing the Disneyland Jules Verne themed submarine ride and replacing it with a much tamer and lamer Finding Nemo one a tragedy or merely a travesty? Is the Disneyland Resort in Japan way cooler than the American ones for having a Mysterious Island dark ride? Or is it because of Disney Sea, the entirely aquatic theme park featuring a fake Cape Cod, a volcano called Mount Prometheus, and King Triton's Kingdom from The Little Mermaid?

Is Brad Bird's The Iron Giant The Steampunk Iron Man?

What is the ultimate Steampunk vacation or fieldtrip? The Museum Of Victorian Science? A Dinosaur Safari at the Crystal Palace Park in London? The exquisitely ridiculous House On The Rock? The Winchester Mystery House? The Belvedere Castle in Central Park? The British Natural History Museum? Perhaps a journey to Treasure Planet? A time machine back to The Great Exhibition of 1851 to check out the Tempest Prognosticator?

London's Crystal Palace Housing The Great Exposition Of 1851

Was H.G. Wells really such a strong believer in eugenics that The Time Machine is an allegory for it? Is it plausible to assume that Jules Verne was a homosexual pederast? Must all of my heroes turn out to be pedophiles, creeps, and scientific racists? Bringing it all back home, did you know that Woody Allen loosely based Sleeper on the H.G. Wells story The Sleeper Awakes?

Weird Musical Automatons at The House On The Rock

What questions still remain to be asked? Is This Recording more of an Edisonade or a Robinsonade? Is there such a thing as a scientific romantic comedy? Will a World Government ever prove sustainable? Will there ever be a real War Of The Worlds? Will we able to teleport objects (say, candy bars) through computer screens anytime soon? And will they be edible or evil?

Molly Rose Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording.

SONGS FOR SOME FUTURES LONG SINCE PASSED

"I Wish I Was a Teenage Dirtbag" - Norwegian Recycling (mp3)

"Be Like A Dosed Black-Eyed Gary" - Norwegian Recycling (mp3)

"Lose Your Fantasy" - Norwegian Recycling (mp3)

"How Six Songs Collide" - Norwegian Recycling (mp3)

norwegian recycling

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Robots Are Coming To Replace You

Eugenics And Anthropometry

Circus Theater Of Magic Castles

This Recording is 20,000 Blogs Under The Net