In Which We Attempt A Vision Quest Of The First Order

Ma Vision Quest

by DICK CHENEY

Time is nonce. Others perish, I go on; I do not truly know if I am as immortal as George H.W. Bush once told me I might be. The legends of my Wyoming castle are numerous - once a black bear knelt to me as if I was God or World Wide Wes.

In the green valley that marks the western end of my ranch is the passage to the wilderness. The Asjeval warriors who once sheltered there are long gone to history, but some descendants remain. It was their tradition to watch Nick at Night until wiser minds gave way to TV Land. In return for the sacred mewings of Fran Drescher, they told me of the journey their young men take to find new paths.

The Nanny: perhaps the most important sitcom ever about slavery

Since retirement has suited me well enough, I never thought to consider the deprivation, the true escape from the civilized world offered by their tradition. Yesterday I was super bored though, and tired of Donald Rumsfeld's constant jokes about how Archie Manning is a closeted homosexual. I pretended to be polishing up a new horse saddle, filled a fanny pack with Juicy Juice, Kudos bars and baby wipes, and headed back to the valley.

Since the pleasures of the internet (Commentary, The Awl, City Journal and the rare times The Weekly Standard isn't publishing long articles about ACORN) only last so long, here are some tips and tricks for your own quasi-emotional trek to find what in the spirit world is significant in the real.

- it is well to select a spirit animal yourself, lest one be provided for you

- a grouping of ferrets is called a "business"

- do not just eat *any* berry, or as it is termed by the Asjeval of the plains, "burry"

the only possible song to play over this meaningful moment comes of course from the brilliant mind of Chili from TLC
- songbirds do not care for Bon Iver

- masturbation during a vision quest is at best gauche and at worst likely to put you at serious risk of frostpenis

- it's all fun and games until you come across the rare anti-semitic spotted mountain cat

- Gaston was probably not so bad, didn't he just want to save that bookish woman from a psychotic monster?

- I'm not sure what kind of moral superiority owls think they possess, but the constant jabs at Karl Rove's weight are somewhat mean-spirited

- when considering a spirit animal to serve as your bond-beast, underestimate the rabbit at your own peril: when it becomes too annoying it may be consumed as a delicious treat

- the only useful hallucination that cocaine causes is that your rapid speech is entertaining to weasels and prairie dogs, and even then

- the finest orgasm imaginable is obtained only while dangling from a precipice

- face paint tastes like green tea mixed with ashes

the pelt of the red fox is best repurposed as a sassy shawl

- be sure to check your boots for scorpions and G. Gordon Liddy

- scorn is the only response when a juvenile fox abjectly refuses to write blog posts as commanded

- put a pebble in your mouth to slake thirst or look cool

- sleep is for the weak

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer residing for the most part in the spirit world, the rest of the time you may contact his wife Lynne for his exact whereabouts. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Morning" - Beck (mp3)

"Heart Is A Drum" - Beck (mp3)

The new album from Beck is entitled Morning Phase, and it will be released on February 25th.

In Which We Tire Of Disney's Frozen At A Rapid Pace

I hope antoine de saint exupery's daughter's daughter by a prostitute is getting royalties for this

Icy Hot

by DICK CHENEY

Frozen
dir. Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee
102 minutes

The racism is back and better than ever. I complain, loudly, when Amazon puts an anti-Semitic hack like Agatha Christie on my kindle screensaver, but when it comes to Disney's relationship with bigotry and hate, most turn a blind eye. Every single person in Disney's feature length animated musical Frozen is white except for a Mama Troll who is voiced by a black actress, Maia Wilson.

at least give us a latino troll as well
The white protagonists of Frozen must be distinguished by their hair color. The blonde, Elsa (Idina Menzel), is the evilish one. Both Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa's parents perish in a vicious, parent-killing storm that capsizes their ship, and the next scene shows a group of cagey servants pulling a curtain over their portraits. This makes no sense, because portraits of loved ones who have passed help us remember them. There are a lot of things in Frozen that make a similar kind of sense.

longing for a white guy (she knows no other races).

But hey, you object, pausing a moment to gargle a rabbit's foot in your mouth for good luck, at least animals don't talk in Frozen. You will be half right, since many sociological experts consider trolls to be a different species, and also a snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad) is present for merchandise considerations and because having to hear the voices of Anna and her poor-ish friend Kristoff warble their way through their songs is quite painful, no matter how amusing the lyrics.

kristen bell's sonorous voice should never have been associated in any fashion with this image

Frozen would be much better as a stage musical, since it only uses three sets: an ice castle, a village and the tundra. Without other races and creeds, things are for the most part boring, and the lives of the girls in Frozen are occupied by nothing more than pining for the world outside their castle, waiting for the "gates" to open that will signal their adulthood. (You didn't seriously think this movie wasn't going to be sexist as well? Was there even a woman in The Lion King, and don't say a female lion cub, that doesn't fucking count.) Eventually the metaphorical vaginal gates open and the citizens are tolerably pleased with the shape of the aforementioned items.

Bah! you remand me with. Why can't you just enjoy things that are utter shit, like the rest of us? So what if the main antagonist in Frozen is basically an anti-Semite caricature that has Walt Disney nodding somewhere in the depths of hell?  Who cares if the disturbing racial stereotype of a wacky black troll saying, "Lawddd" is totally inappropriate for children?

this is worse than the quenelle
I have no real response to this other than to quietly post skeptical things about global warming on reddit, but I think you know most of what I'd like to say.

On her seventeenth birthday Anna finally is introduced to the village that surrounds her deceased parents' lonely castle. (They are never mentioned again after they go to their watery graves.) In one day only, she agrees to wed a local prince who she "unexpectedly" meets in this position:

the MPAA should be ashamed of itself, but more for existing at all
This movie was rated G. Think about that, or I mean, don't.

Elsa becomes quite upset when she learns of her sib's engagement, which I understand is typical. (I am not totally unfamiliar with the conflicts sisters have with each other.)  In response to this betrayal, she shoots ice out of her fingers and brings eternal winter to the land. Since it was basically already winter before this, it's hard to quantify what "eternal winter" means, but it involves a new hairstyle and a musical number.

I tire of all this obfuscation. One thing is most definitely not another; we may indeed regard what a thing is as its primary aspect. A mermaid is not a charming young woman; she is a siren who lures young men of two legs to death by true love. A lion is a savage predator, not a friend to warthogs and primates alike, while I have never met a deer who could talk, at least outside of a few sentences like, "Liam Hemsworth is too full of himself" or "Whatever happened to Everything But the Girl?"

you travelled to my ice palace and didn't bring snacks? I've been eating ice ever since the corpses ran out.

Eventually Anna tells Elsa of the harm she has inflicted on the local area, especially the money-driven Jewish landowner. She implores Elsa to end her isolation and the accompanying cold deluge. Elsa's response to her sister goes along these lines, "I have no way to melt ice, only create it. Therefore your complaints are noncupatory." The talking snowman is fairly displeased by this turn of events, but he tries to lend a certain lightness to the proceedings:

Musicals are fairly hit or miss unless they involve Stephen Moyer, in which case they consist of poor singing and acting. Frozen's songs are jaunty and amusing, although they do seem to largely revolve around one key joke: it is cold when it snows. I have always taken this for granted, but I suppose on some level it is worth mentioning, just not at the expense of women and minorities.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording and a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about The Hobbit.

I close my eyes when I sing also, so this part was relevant.

"We Made It Through Another Year" - Nerina Pallot (mp3)

"I Wish" - Nerina Pallot (mp3)

foreplay on the ice

In Which We Do Not Think Much Of This Smaug Person

Her Method

by DICK CHENEY

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
dir. Peter Jackson
1145 minutes

Tauriel (Evangelina Lilly) is a wild, rambunctious elven warrior in service to King Thranduil. She has maybe like an on and off again thing with Legolas, who looks weirdly older than the other man we knew so long ago. Orlando Bloom's face looks like it had to be re-put together after a car crash, and he stares at Evangy with muted hatred. She is an elf and he is an elf, but they are not the same kind of elf.

Acting Without Acting is of course Ms. Lilly's masterpiece in the field, following the flamboyant homosexuality of Stravinsky's An Actor Prepares, the pro-Israel schleffing of David Mamet's True and False: Don't Act and the whorish subtlety of Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. Ms. Lilly follows somewhere along the lines of these great thinkers in chapters like "Play Hard To Get", "Know Any Tennis Pros?" and "Sawyer." It is a great shame there is no Sawyer in The Hobbit - after all, it seems like everyone else got to be in it.

There is a scene in The Hobbit where Gandalf is physically assaulted by the eye of Sauron. It is meant ironically, for our own eyes are at war with Evangeline every moment is she on screen. She says words in a way where it is very clear she has no idea what they mean, a strategem she outlines in the book's persuasive last chapter, "Sayonara." At one point the camera even catches her mouthing the words, "Kate would run."

A theory of acting is always appreciated; a theory of politics less so. Peter Jackson has elevated a truly dull provincialism into a globe-trotting aesthetic in this second part of a second trilogy. Virtually nothing happens in the entire movie, a feat only recently perfected by Christopher Nolan and the guy who records my family functions. New Zealand looks very exciting really, probably more so than Middle-Earth just in its randomness. Jackson's mind is so ordered that the only thing out of place in his lazily long ode is Stephen Colbert.

Smaug is the inner personification of Lilly's anxiety over her future; he wakes when she leaves her Elven nest. Orlando Bloom is mildly concerned about this, so much so that he needs to talk it over with his dad. The two guys agree that there is a lot of violence in the world, most of it caused by non-Elves. Josh Holloway should have been Orlando Bloom's dad for maximum impact; he could offer the uptight, emasculated Legolas scotch in a semi-dirty glass and the two could intermingle ideas over how aging affects female elves so much more profoundly than males.

The elves and dwarves murder about 1600 orcs and other "dark persons" without so much as suffering a single blow. The pack of dwarves journeying to the dragon boasts equal invulnerability until Evangy's favorite dwarf takes an arrow in the knee from one enterprising villain. She saves him from death, and he frees his friends from an elven tributary that has virtually no one point of existing other than the fact that the elves have to dump their waste somewhere. Never trust a race whose sewers look like Appalachia.

It is not only the elves who are culpable in the acting disaster that occurs here. Martin Freeman saps the wonder from nearly every scene he is, making up for it only with an unexpectedly splendid physical comedy. His nebbishness has a half-life of about ten to twenty minutes, after which you want to hold him underwater by his ears. The gimmick of him turning invisible when he places a ring over his finger was done far more meaningfully when Chevy Chase did it, and I believe his version predates this one by almost eight decades. A lot of scientists agree that Fletch was first written in 25 B.C.

In some ways Middle Earth reminds me of the world without Jesus and guns, although an arrow seems as deadly put in the bow of a very horrible actress. Without these stabilizing voices, Jackson seems to be arguing, civilization breaks down, normal people are evacuated or forced away from the land, and genetic anomalies begin to dominate the discourse, in thrall to specific special interests. For the elves it is isolation, for the dwarves it is money, and for the hobbits it is food and pleasure. All are aberrations of humanity which must force down their inclinations in order to restore order.

There is a certain limitation to the dwarves in this volume. Previously they were messy, stimulating and individuated. Now they trot the landscape like a group of missionaries, barely able to think of anything except their task or loved ones left back in dwarven lands. There is little of the fun of new places; they are more like pilgrims wandering their ancestral desert. Their leader, Thorin Oakenshield, is a particular maudlin fellow.

The dragon itself looks quite wrong. It is not the thinness of its limbs, or the agility in the confined space at the mountain's base that are quite troubling. Instead the problem concerns the dragon's latent humanity. If he can contemplate revenge, as the dwarves seem to believe, then Smaug possesses his own legitimate set of grievances. Perhaps the dragon even has a coterie of devoted worshippers capable of blowing themselves up in public places like ferries or jizz saloons. The dragon may petition the council of races to be recognized; he could send a candle as his representative.

Fun has been stripped out of the world entirely; there is only an imported sanctimoniousness, impulses that occur seemingly on behalf of others but are actually disguised outlets for guilt and shame. The thrill of acting for its own sake has been dispensed with. There are no happy accidents in the business of making these movies, since even the slightest fuck-up can be fixed in post. What we find here is all there is: magic has fled the land, destined to be reclaimed in the sequel to Acting Without Acting, The Hobbit With Kate From Lost.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Christmas reading. You can find an archive of his writing in these pages here.

"Planetary Motion" - Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks (mp3)

"Cinnamon and Lesbians" - Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks (mp3)