My Take on "Inglorious Basterds"

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a war story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil... You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you."

I’d be very curious to know what writer/Vietnam War Vet, Tim O’Brien (who penned the quote above) thinks of the new Tarantino film, “Inglorious Basterds.”  A film that I think I’m now willing to admit was a highly entertaining cinematic accomplishment for a guy who in my honest opinion has made a series of largely forgettable movies.  Nonetheless it was an accomplishment that disturbed and upset me.  I saw the film last night out of curiosity from the wide agreement among friends and film critics that it was a good movie, despite a trailer that to me looked just plain stupid.  In the midst of it, it was no doubt fun at times, funny at other times, full of gore, and action and adventure and all of the elements that will typically get your heart beating a little quicker… But all of it through a weird combination of equal parts excitement and repulsion that ultimately left me feeling a little distraught.

A series of one-dimensional characters get dropped into Nazi-controlled France to kill, maim, torture, and scalp Nazis.  Why?  Because Nazis are bad guys.  Why are they bad guys?  Because they kill, maim, torture, and scalp Jews.  I guess that concept right there is enough for me to raise an eyebrow… But okay okay okay I get it.  It’s a movie from a guy obsessed with bad movies about one dimensional characters obsessed with sex violence and gore and you’re not suppose to think about it too much, and YES ultimately it exists to satiate that desire for justice that maybe we feel wasn’t attained when Hitler and his lackeys committed suicide in a bunker, so please Aaron stop harshing our mellow and let us have two and a half hours of history rewritten to allow for brutally executed justice.  I get it; I remember in fifth grade being obsessed with stories of the Holocaust and I can’t tell you how many times I fantasized about being Hitler’s executioner. 

 

But immediately upon viewing Basterds, I could only think about how odd it is for modern Americans to simplify evil to this embarrassing degree.  So much so that the torture has actually found itself in the modern American lexicon, AND it’s actually being debated as a formidable method of dealing with and interrogating suspected Terrorists.  So, coming out of it I found “Inglorious Basterds,” as a movie about war to be another “Hooray America, we defeated evil because, we’re awesome, and it’s okay to do this because they’re evil,  we know this because of the geographical region they come from, trust me just don’t ask a Native American what they think.”  At the risk of reverting to dry, typical liberal talking points, I will say that this is the kind of movie I’d expect conservative trolls like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh to tout as a triumphant story of truth, justice, and the American way, despite the fact that the actions of one are seemingly no different than the actions of the other. BLAH! Case closed, I’m leaving the movie theater to spend three hours on the internet reading reviews of the movie I just then decided was a horrible piece of garbage.

….But then I thought some more.  And I considered the quote stated above… particularly the part about a true war story as being an uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.  I thought of the villainous character, “The Jew Hunter” which was performed FANTASTICALLY.  It was like Chris Nolan’s The Joker, with a Nazi uniform on; a man who maybe all but twice is seen with a bright, sadistic, and terrifying smile on his face.  It was a truly haunting image.  And of course Eli Roth’s “The Bear Jew” on the other side, equally terrifying at times, with no color in his eyes, soulless, in the way a soldier has been marred by terrible visions of death doom and destruction.  So I suppose in some way (although maybe in a different way from what Tim O’Brien is talking about) “Inglorious Basterds” is that uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil… a true? War story?... Well certainly not…. I don’t know… maybe… I’m going to have think about it.

BUT as perhaps a movie about war movies, something I didn’t even really consider until it sank in a little bit, maybe Tarantino was on to something.  Most of the movie takes place in a movie theater.  The main explosive used to decimate a movie theater full of Nazis is the nitrate from old film prints.  I’ve already had one guy tell me I’m thinking too hard on it but NO they literally burnt a huge mound of film in order to kill a theater full of Nazis.  That’s not over thinking it, that’s a reasonable metaphor to draw, maybe about sensationalism, the kind of movies Tarantino makes, etc.  Not only that, but I almost found myself laughing from the great wonderful irony of being in a theater of young hip urban dwellers laughing maniacally at the death of a theater full of unrepentant, uncompromised, and unquestioning Nazi drones who are in turn laughing maniacally at a propaganda film about a soldier who decimates a whole platoon of ally soldiers.  I couldn’t help but think how hard Quentin Tarantino (the quintessential pop filmmaker if there ever was one) might have been laughing at us; the generation bred to soak in this kind of maniacal sensation (Whoa… I think I might have turned 55 yesterday).

So in the end I haven’t decided on anything.  I think it’s important to note that this film, 24 hours later still has me thinking, wrestling, and dealing, and that alone makes me wonder what this dude has done… A guy whose movies I certainly enjoyed but all the same I never thought of as much more than 2 hours of simple escapism.  Maybe, this really was his masterpiece?  Ebert wrote a good review where he said he liked it but ultimately thought a proper judgment could be made after a second viewing.  I think that’s true, but I don’t know if I’m up for a second viewing… Not anytime soon.

Nonetheless, since I’ve seen it I’ve certainly kicked it up from a “sell” to a “don’t buy.”

Building Stuff

Bethany and I have been venturing into new creative territories recently.

First up: I built Bethany a computer specced out to suit architectural programs she uses. It was something I had never done before, and learned a lot from... in particular that there is absolutely no need to every buy a prebuilt PC again, because they're so easy to make yourself and soooo much less expensive that way. Here's what it looks like:

Upon completion of this project however, we needed a desk to put it. Bethany had the ingenious idea of replacing our crap, not digital ready tv with our brand new HD computer monitor. But we had to devise a way of doing this that would suit both conventional tv viewing settings and proper workstation desk settings. What we came up with is the following:

We bought a piece of wood from the section of Ikea with all of the broken parts, and found a really nice section of wood (real wood... not particle board) from what was supposed to be a table. It wedged perfectly into one of our bookshelves and was only ten dollars. So with some hinges we devised a way of plotting the wood plank into the shelf, so that it might act as a cover for the computer, when we're watching tv; and also may be pulled out so as to act as a desk for basic computer work. We used some old, busted pool cues as supports and applied hinges to those as well. The wine cork is used to properly wedge the desk plank into the shelf, leaving a little bit of space at the bottom for us to lift it up and out.

This pseudo desk/bookshelf/entertainment center option also gave us the added benefit of decreased visual clutter. There used to be a huge pile of dvds on the shelf, which are now in a box, awaiting placement upon a future art project.

I think we were on a roll, but Bethany had mentioned that this coffee table she had had for the past few years was really taking up room. After failing to sell it on craigslist for a mere $10, she half joked that we should saw it in half and make a shelf. I was the one that got really excited and pushed her to agree to actually follow through.

So instead of a bookshelf (which we do need) we decided to create small bedside tables. Right now Bethany has a cluttered corner of items next to her bed and I have a small table that I pulled out of the dumpster next to mine. What we did was saw the coffee table into quarters. We then stacked two quarters a piece on top of each other to give us two bedside tables. From there we took apart an old chair we found at a thrift store, and adapted pieces of it into the various legs and parts needed to finish the tables.

We had disagreements on how to carry out our tables, and ultimately decided to create each of our tables in our own way. Needless to say, Bethany's has a clearer visual style, and a much more obvious regard for craftsmanship than mine, however with the addition of the rest of the pool cue from our desk, I like the appropriated art collage look of mine. Bethany added some cool hooks she cut from the back of the chair.



As soon as we finish putting together Bethany's table, we're going to sand them down and paint them.

After that, I'm hoping to actually put together the much needed bookshelf we wanted to begin with. My birthday is coming up and I'm hoping to get a router. I thought it would be really cool to route some designs into the shelves, but at the moment we are running out of parts. I wanted to use some of the legs we cut off of the table, stick them to a slab of wood and then just figure it out from there, but Bethany says she is more concerned with planning it out and appropriating parts in less of a stacked way. Whatever the case, the name of the game is adaptive reuse; taking the old and properly applying it to the new. It's like a three dimensional art collage that just happens to have a degree of functionality.

Anyways... I'm not a computer technician, and by no means am I trained woodworker, but I'm having fun, figuring it out.

Einstein gets it...

"Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore. In our daily lives we only feel that man is here for the sake of' others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own. I am often worried at the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them. I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of freedom of will preserves me from taking too seriously myself and my fellow men as acting and deciding individuals and from losing my temper. [...] Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavors in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is."
--Albert Einstein


So does Jeff Mangum...

"I'm just as confused as anybody else."
--Jeff Mangum


Love, Aaron

Visions of Joanna

Last Saturday I had the rare fortune of seeing Joanna Newsom perform with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, with several friends including my sister Amy and my wonderful girlfriend Bethany. While the actual experience is not exactly fresh in my mind, it has certainly left me ecstatic, excited, and bewildered this past week. Splendid is a useless word to describe what it was. I dare say transcendental, but that might just make me sound like a douschebag....but it was in some strange way. I can't explain it, but I assure you it was like no other concert event in my musically ridden short life, that I've only realized is musically retarded and musically shallow....I think... I mean definitely, but I mean what does that mean? I don't know what I mean. But I mean, I've never been enthralled by a performer to the point that I've really started asking myself huge deep whatever life questions right smack in the middle of a beautiful and elegant songstress banging away at a harp; I've never before actually felt outside myself because of a performance; I've never felt so engaged and a part of something greater as much as I had watching this performance. I don't know if it was the greatest musical thing that ever occured to me; I mean who even knows what that was, but I assure you that I and everyone packed into that symphony auditorium were stiff with the near same awe-stricken good riddance... I'm not the deepest, or the most well read human being, but I know an experience is real, when every obnoxious twitch, every nervous habit, every comforting repititious movement in my body, every present and momentary passing thought in my head is held back on behalf of something greater, more beautiful, more worthy of my attention..... And it's not just me, it's the entire scene, the setting, the people, the performers, the ushers, the color of the walls, the everything that was the experience. All of it bowed before the artistic creation in progress. (This may seem a ridiculous statement, but when your used to music as much as I am, as being a musty bar filled with smoke, drunk jackasses, and a loud as fuck P.A. system, used to drown out highway traffic and said jackasses, it's a totally welcome change... but I still love it that way too.) Because of it all, I wasn't just pleased and soothed with passion, but I was terrified. Having an entire symphony of skilled performers banging away to "Monkey & Bear" was wonderful, tearful at first but my God I never realized how frightful that song could be. While I've never totally explicated the lyrics of the song, all I know is that I had a sudden sense of urgency...like watching the killer in a movie, chase its victim for an unending set of minutes, unbearable but enthralling... rooting for good for the better, for the sweeter. Drowning, I thought about drowning and how that must feel....I don't know why; death and how it's one day going to happen to me, and I don't know what death means either. I thought it was shitty, but I thought how sweet of a moment it was to die then, and then I thought about how weird that was, but then I was once again stricken with the weird sweetness and beauty of all of it. That's the best way I can sum it up. I know I didn't really sum it up at all, but at the same time I don't even know if I thought up all of it... it was a feeling inaccessible by my vocabulary or poetic prowess.