Since I have my headphones pretty much permanently jammed into my head I am able to do the following thing for you: provide you with a list of favourite podcasts, amongst which you may find something quite interesting.

Start here

Infallible opinions follow… (categories from iTMS)

Name & cover	Reason for awesome	Archives
Savage Love	Dan Savage. Everything you ever wanted to know about sex and preferred that someone else asked. Funny as hell. Brought to us by the Tech-Savvy At-Risk Youth. Dan’s voice, also pretty marvelous. (Category: Sexuality.)	iTMS, website (2006–)
Democracy Now!	Amy Goodman. A daily digest of the news that matters with fascinating interviews and debate. People in their own words. Every show a driven, inspiring and unflinching look at national and global events. (Category: News & Politics.)	website (1996–)
Background Briefing	ABC journalists. Consistently the most relevant, well-researched and informative investigative journalism on the radio. Looks at emerging social, economic and political topics. Props to Dan for the recommendation. (Category: News & Politics.) See also…	website (1995–)
This American Life	Ira Glass. Wonderful collections of stories organized by theme. American culture served with humour, pathos, insight and a dash of longing. Occasional collaborations with other journalists. (Category: Society & Culture.) See also…	website (1995–)
The Conversation	Dan Benjamin. Thoughtful interviews with movers and shakers in web and software development with forays into design, production, and online culture. Candid talk that’s low on jargon; well-produced. Dan Benjamin is doing great things. (Category: Tech News.)	iTMS, website (2010–)
All in the Mind	Natasha Mitchell. Fascinating interviews with experts in the areas of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and the occasional bit of philosophy. The conversations with Thomas Szasz are fantastic. (Category: Science & Medicine.)	website (2002–)
The Bugle (paywall)	John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman. Gut-clenching satirical take on the week’s news. Think hilariously accented, ginger mopped, ancient history major and the guy from The Daily Show. (Category: Comedy.) See also…	iTMS since 2009 (2007–)
Point of Inquiry	Chris Mooney, Robert Price and Karen Stollznow. Formerly D.J. Grothe. Consistently challenging interview program promoting skepticism and science in the public interest. (Category: Social Sciences.)	iTMS, website (2005–)
The Moth	Shorts from performances at The Moth in New York City and on tour. Straight out fantastic live storytelling. Introduced each week by Dan Kennedy, whose own Moth story is particularly good. (Category: Performing Arts.)	website (2008–)
Astronomy Cast	Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay. Program by astronomy experts that’s pitched at a general audience. Though they cover some, um… hard physics stuff. Try wrapping your head around the theory of inflation. Good times. (Category: Natural Sciences.) See also…	iTMS, website (2006–)

Honorable mentions

Coming soon…

Related posts:

• The oracle
• Anything that can go wrong
• Electrical Storm on Saturn

Aural Wes recently posted about the 1999 film Instrument by Wesleyan alum Jem Cohen ’84. I’ve had the soundtrack for years thanks to my much-cooler-than-me wife, and enjoyed it immensely. Except that I didn’t know that there was a film. There are three words on the album cover: Fugazi, Instrument, and Soundtrack… No? Nothing? I suppose I thought that “Instrument Soundtrack” had some kind of inside meaning. This is why I like psychoanalysis so much—an underdeveloped sense of the literal. Now I know. Netflixed it to the top, bumping out Blackadder, at least for now.

Update: I enjoyed this movie so much. Fugazi appear to walk the thinnest line between standing for something and not taking themselves too seriously. We listened to punk all weekend on the stereo after watching Instrument, and every time a Fugazi track came on it was so clear how far above the rest of the pack they stand.

The film is shot in a raw, understated style (on Super-8 film), without exposition. It chronicles ten years in the band’s history, 1987–1998. Occasional lines from Fugazi’s songs, printed on screen at the beginning of some scenes, are the only didactic narrative gestures from Cohen. Ultimately it’s a document of the band, written by someone who knows and loves them.

And here is your money quote. It’s Ian MacKaye talking between songs to an audience member who was being aggressive:

I saw you two guys earlier at the Good Humor truck, and you were eating your ice cream like little boys, and I thought, ‘Those guys aren’t so tough! They’re eating ice cream, what a bunch of swell guys.’ Oh don’t you deny it, you were eating an icecream cone. You were eating an icecream cone. Oh you’re bad now, you’re bad now, but you were eating an icecream cone, and I saw you. That’s the shit you can’t hide. You eat iceceam. Everybody knows it. The whole place knows it. Icecream eating motherfucker. That’s what you are.

Watch it.

Related posts:

• Appleseed: Ex Machina

New Shpongle (Ineffable Mysteries From Shpongleland) is one month away about two months away:

Here’s the final track titles that will make up the new Shpongle Album now due for release in November 2009:

1. Electroplasm
2. Spongolise Spoken Here
3. Nothing Is Something Worth Doing
4. Ineffable Mysteries
5. I Am You
6. Invisible Man In A Fluorescent Suit
7. No Turn Unstoned
8. Walking Backwards Through The Cosmic Mirror

I gots the jitters.^†

Update: the album now has a Wikipedia page.

Update 2: Ineffable Mysteries ships on November 2 in the U.K. According to Amazon, the U.S. release date is November 28.

Update 3: Wow, shock. It’s awesome.

† Sidenote: according to the “ships on” Twisted Records link above, Storm Thorgerson designed the CD booklet.

Related posts:

• Fever Ray
• Instrument
• Younger Brother

Jon Pareles on a recent performance by Younger Brother in New York (same guys, but not the same event, above):

As Younger Brother remakes itself into a band from a studio project, its music has become less futuristic and more conventionally structured. But the music has also grown more human, approachable, dynamic and unpredictable, and that’s a worthwhile trade-off.

Their next album is expected in 2010. I hate this “waiting” shit.

Related posts:

• Rogue Bagel
• Junior tease
• They Came From The North

I’ve updated Best Australian Films based on feedback in the comments, and started a new section to mark the changing of the guard. To keep it consistent, anything released since 2008 will go in the Rudd Years, while all 2007 releases will go under Howard. I think Mabo was the real turning point for Australian movies; the Prime Minister thing is a way of giving some shape to the intervening years.

First addition to the new category is Nash and Joel Edgerton’s The Square (2008), which I am keenly anticipating seeing again (DVD in March) because the back of the seat in front of you on the long haul from L.A. to Brisbane is no way to fully appreciate the best new Australian movie in years. The Brothers Edgerton are here to tell you about the terrifying things that can happen to a structured life when you start pulling at threads… Enjoy!

Related posts:

• Best Australian films since 1991
• How fuel efficient is the Honda Fit?
• A so-called emptiness

There is no reason—none—why you should not immediately acquire this. It’s available from Klicktrack (320 kbps MP3), iTunes (256 kbps AAC) and Amazon (256 kbps MP3). Praise be to Sweden.

Related posts:

• Shpongle five
• Best Australian films since 1991
• They Came From The North

Beowulf (2007) ← here be Flash monsters. Concept stills: Paramount Pictures.

Wow, surprisingly good. Animated, great cast and very well written. Robert Zemeckis directs. And now I finally know where the name Grendel comes from. Lydia T strikes again. Thanks for the loaner, Matt.

Related posts:

• Appleseed: Ex Machina
• Enhance it!
• Off to Rivendell

While gettin’ my anime on with a certain streaming video service, I did not expect Appleseed: Ex Machina to be as good as the original film. My skepticism was partly due to a general mistrust of sequels, and partly the amount of 3D rendering, which I just don’t like as much as the hand-drawn anime I grew up on. Happily, it rocks. Shinji Aramaki directs again, and John Woo produces. I bought exactly one manga book while I was in Japan for a few months in 1997, and it was Appleseed. The decision was made using the time-honored technique of “cover coolness discrimination.” I was not disappointed. There’s something captivating about the relationship between Deunan and Briareos set against the backdrop of a fallen future utopia. The two Appleseed films do justice to Shirow Masamune’s creation. Masamune also created the Ghost in the Shell series, which heavily influenced the mythology and aesthetics of The Matrix Triology.

Related posts:

• Beowulf

Related posts:

• The top ten podcasts
• Repercussions

The first Haneke film I saw was Funny Games (1997). At the time that experience was dominated by dismay and a horrible feeling of complicity. Watching Funny Games—a violent and torturous exploitation of bourgeois taste and privilege—it was impossible not to feel like part of the problem. The total damage wrought by perpetrator on victim grinds down any presumption of hope you might have, while surreptitious glances at the camera expose the viewer’s role in the routine consumption of violence. For me it was a breathtaking and mind altering moment.

It became clear after seeing Caché (2005), and then Code Unknown (2000), that Haneke’s films push you around because, far from wanting to entertain you, he’s provoking you into an argument about the state of things. In good dialectical style, that argument is simultaneously about the subject matter (the film’s data) as well as about the representation of that subject matter (about ways of making arguments). The technique creates what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “a point of view on a point of view.” You watch a Haneke movie with a different part of your brain because you are dealing with stories that force you to adopt a participant’s point of view in order to understand what’s going on. Once you start forming thoughts about that “position taking,” you’re looking at the film’s data in a sociological way.

Haneke’s style is immediate and arresting. The long, long, point-of-view takes create an atmospheric intensity and eeriness reminiscent of David Lynch (the front of Fred and Renee’s house in Lost Highway, the back of the diner in Mulholland Drive). It’s not easy to pull this off—contrast with Gus Van Sant’s conceptual Gerry (2002) which features an agonisingly long close-up of the lost friends trudging through the desert that feels more self-conscious than illuminating. Similar scenes from Haneke maintain an edge that winds you up like a coil the longer they go. Where Lynch explores the inland terrain of phenomenology, existentialism and psychoanalysis (trauma of the individual’s being in the world), Haneke pursues the critical themes of social conflict, politics and history (trauma of the group’s relationship to society).

These are arguments are about how social life actually is—how we consume violence, how we fail to understand one another, and how privilege (of wealth, citizenship, ethnicity) can blind us to the fact that others even exist. In fact, Haneke’s main point in the three films could be boiled down to “the fact that we fail to see,” and each is masterfully crafted to force your eyes open. By denying you the omniscient perspective that you’ve (probably) come to expect from cinema, he pulls you into the same dilemma his characters face—incessantly watching the other across invisible, but very real, social barriers. Haneke’s films create a visual sociology of the shortfall between the modern world in theory, and the modern world in practice. But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Haneke is that his movies seem to amount to a long-running prequel to Children of Men.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

Related posts:

• Neophilia
• Anything that can go wrong
• The oracle

Update: Honda announced a hybrid Fit on May 21, 2008.

The EPA recently revised it’s method of calculating fuel efficiency, expressed as MPG (Miles Per Gallon). According to the agency’s report, Fuel Economy Labeling of Motor Vehicles: Revisions To Improve Calculation of Fuel Economy Estimates:

New test methods take into account several important factors that affect fuel economy in the real world, but are missing from the existing fuel economy tests. Key among these factors are high speeds, aggressive accelerations and decelerations, the use of air conditioning, and operation in cold temperatures.

A lot of this has come about because independent reports have criticised the EPA’s methods for failing to approximate real world driving conditions. Pre-2008 city and highway estimation methods, according to the EPA, were first created about 40 years ago and have been revised only once, in the 1980s. These methods assume a conservative “driving style” (at least by north-eastern standards) and temperate environmental driving conditions modelled on the climate of southern California. (Which is to say, the EPA’s window stickers on cars in dealer lots fell a long way short of “real world driving conditions” in 2007. There are city and highway figures, then there’s “You’re a New Englander, and assuming you drive like an asshole…” figures).

Interestingly, with the new revisions the most fuel efficient vehicles (gas-electric hybrids) have the most sharply (i.e. downwardly) revised mileage estimates:

City estimates for some of the most fuel-efficient vehicles, including gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, will decrease by 20 to 30 percent. The highway mpg estimates for most vehicles will drop on average by about 8 percent, with some estimates dropping by as much as 25 percent.

Which explains the confusion when I read on the federal government’s fuel economy site that the 2008 Honda Fit was dramatically less efficient than the one we own. (Although it might seem like a hybrid—”one of those ‘double cars’” as a friend of ours calls it—it’s not. Nevertheless, the Fit is an economical car by U.S. standards, and it’s certified as a “low emissions vehicle,” meaning that it produces relatively low pollutant emissions aside from the absolute amount of gasoline that it consumes.)

Whereas the EPA’s MPG window sticker on our model, a 2007 Fit Sport manual, read “City: 33, Highway: 38″ when we bought it in March, the same model in 2008 reads “City: 28, Highway: 34.” It turns out that the 2008 model is rated with the same figures, adjusted for the new estimation methods, as the 2007 Fit. Both models get a 6 out of 10 air pollution score. (For an opposite-end-of-the-spectrum comparison, the Ford F150 pickup, 2WD 6 cylinder automatic gets 14/19 respectively under the new rules, and 3 out of 10 for pollutants.)

Also interesting is that the 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid, which trailed the 2007 Toyota Prius on highway mileage 45 to 60 under the old system, is now the Prius’s equal at 45 apiece under the new. To my knowledge the Civic and the Prius are the only models that have ever broken the 40 MPG barrier on both city and highway tests (currently measured at 40/45 and 48/45 respectively).

Overall, the EPA’s new tests have shortened the total range of MPG estimates for passenger vehicles, which I take as a sign that the estimates are now more valid. I haven’t looked at the methodology but the new figures for the Fit accord with my own observations: we don’t get 38 miles per gallon on the highway in winter, although we may get close to it on long trips in the summertime, and low-30s is probably a more accurate annual average than mid-30s.

I’m clearly biased, but to those interested in the Fit, and in the market for a fuel efficient car, you can do better, but not for the price. At $15k the Fit is just about the best value/design/efficiency bundle you can find. (The Toyota Corolla gets better highway mileage, but the Fit is empirically way cooler. And I don’t think that the Yaris is actually a car.) I hope that our next set of wheels is a hybrid, but at today’s prices that privilege will set the buyer back an additional $10k.

QED. The Fit is (ahem)… Go.

Related posts:

• Honda announces hybrid Fit
• Honda CR-Z
• Fever Ray

Elena and I are incorrigible fans of The Shield. Her fault. She has a cop brain so she automatically understands what’s going on. I on the other hand have to ask a lot of questions to catch up. For a long time I didn’t even like it that much but with the show entering its fifth season last fall, and regular access to cable TV, there were few opportunities not to watch. On Tuesday nights around 10:00 and The Shield roared across the screen. I’d sit awhile and sometimes leave when the carnage or noise level hit a particularly feverish point. Somewhere along the way though things started to tilt, and by the time I saw the vicious final episode of Season 5, I was the one insisting on first renting the Season 1 DVDs, then just caving and buying the whole set—I mean, at half the purchase price what a stupid waste of money renting would be, right? Impeccable logic. Anyway, now I’m in. (Major spoilers follow so be warned…)

Parallax TV

If you haven’t seen the show, and don’t mind some spoilers, here begins the overview (but check out The Shield for more detail): the main storyline in the series belongs to a corrupt anti-gang unit called the Strike Team. The team comprises four detectives: the leader is Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis, of The Commish fame), a complex character who killed one of his own team members to protect himself and the others from investigation; Mackey’s right-hand man Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins), a tenacious redneck with a serious cruel streak; Curtis Lemansky (Kenneth Johnson), known as Lem, a likable cop—more of a loyal buddy than a motivated criminal—despite being a willing accomplice to the unit’s various crimes; and Ronnie Gardocki (David Rees Snell), nerdy, affable, but seemingly most interested in maximising his gain and not rocking anyone’s boat, even when the heaviest of shit is going down. The Strike Team’s charter is to “get results” out on the streets of the fictional Los Angeles precinct of Farmington. From a policy standpoint their job is to reduce the number and severity of gang-related crimes; at street level they hit the bad guys selectively, and really hard. Mackey and his team prefer wedge strategies that lever rival factions into conflict and inflate the value of alliances with the cops—always through Mackey of course. Unfortunately for policy-makers and administrators, the Strike Team quickly gets its hands far too dirty. This is where everything starts.

Like other recent crime dramas such as C.S.I. each episode of The Shield contains a narrative fork: a primary plot that follows the movements of the Strike Team (often tracing the most hardcore activities of cop and criminal), and a secondary plot that grounds our perceptions in the more regular business of police life at “the Barn” (the police station’s nickname). It is through this secondary fork that we see beat cops like Danny Sofer (Catherine Dent) and Julien Lowe (Michael Jace) citing civilians for traffic violations and attending the scenes of domestic disputes. But the parallax effect of a forked storyline goes further than contrasting the more spectacular activities of the Strike Team with the more mundane world of everyday policing. The secondary plot also contrasts the moral decisions of its protagonists with those of the Strike Team, recasting the good cop–bad cop routine from a partner-level dynamic into a microcosm of the broader social struggle: here good cop–bad cop becomes a group-level effect that results from the fundamental difference between the kinds of criminals that each group of cops pursues. Detective Holland “Dutch” Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), a boy scout compared to Mackey (and often the butt of the latter’s practical jokes), brings down a serial killer but cannot escape an unhealthy fascination with perversion and murder and a preoccupation with his own importance. Dutch’s partner Claudette Wyms (C.C.H. Pounder), the most principled cop at the Barn, fights an incessant battle against her own mounting cynicism that any of the police around her can walk a straight path, sometimes leading her to neglect her own job security and that of her partner. When at times Wyms clashes with Mackey we feel the stirrings of titanic struggle, but since Wyms is even more politically disenfranchised than Wabenbach (as always happens to the good guys, we’re encouraged to think) nothing much ever comes of it.

By using a parallax method the show’s twin plotlines—and the points of convergence between them—highlight the ambiguity of professional police behaviour better than most cop dramas, which often try to preserve an overriding sense of solidarity amongst police officers. Certainty of moral action is displaced with each shift in perspective as we are shown moments of tenderness in which the bad cops never looked so good and moments of brutality in which the good cops never looked so bad.

Alignment

As my fascination with The Shield evolved I was reminded of those nerdy weekends playing Dungeons and Dragons during the high school years. Most people probably have an idea of what D&D is all about. It’s a game in which a team of participants each play the role of a character of their choosing in a fictional world that is described and controlled by a referee called the DM (it stands for Dungeon Master, and yes, the games’ nerdy reputation is well-earned). Acting together the characters form a party, the party undertakes a series of semi-scripted adventures involving encounters with other characters, enemies, problems, etc. Now player-characters (the protagonists if you like) are never identical with respect to their motivations, ethics and behaviour. This is built-in: D&D rules manage the interactional problems of good and evil behaviour the same way they solve most other aspects of role-playing: with a system. A player’s moral temperament is codified at the outset in terms of his or her character alignment. Alignment is two-dimensional system most easily demonstrated with a Latin square (see below). The x (horizontal) axis represents attitude to social order, while the y (vertical) axis represents moral character:

Figure 1: Dungeons and Dragons character alignments.

Alignments are typically understood to be stable across the character’s “life span,” although they can be changed through a protracted commitment to a new way of interacting (by choice), or by a sustained series of actions that so contradicted one’s previous alignment that a de facto change is effected (by proxy). In any case the most important rule is always that you cannot flip-flop around at will about the alignment axes. You have an obligation to make your character at least partially predictable at the interactional and/or motivational level. This is considered good role-playing. An interesting consequence of this system is that you can actually play your character for a while before determining his or her alignment with precision. The rules provide some guidance, and the players make an initial choice as to how they want their character to be, but it is only with time and gameplay that it becomes clearer whether the character is staying true to the alignment that his or her player has chosen.

How does this relate to the TV show? Well, the alignment system can be used as a simple device for making sense of the program’s moral narratives, and the fine-tuning process I described is a reasonable approximation of getting to know a complex TV character. I had been watching The Shield for quite a while before I began to get a solid sense of the character’s “alignments.” What’s interesting about The Shield’s presentation of moral character is that all of the major players have such a distinctive moral identity. Whereas previous cop shows representing a tightly-knit team may have styled each character as bringing a complimentary set of skills to the challenges facing the group, The Shield instead emphasises the unique temperaments that its characters bring to the ethical quandaries with which they are constantly faced. These distinctive temperaments are quite central to the program’s dramatic tensions and plot twists, while characters’ individual talents have far less bearing on narrative outcomes and interactional moments.

Certainly there are similarities between individuals: the members of the Strike Team are all prepared to do things that other characters—and clearly many viewers—regard as “evil.” But between its members there are differences. Likewise, Wagenbach and Wyms, Sofer and Lowe all share a desire to perform well at their jobs and make a difference on the streets, and yet they also differ in ways that sets each apart from the other. These differences open up space for both in-group antagonisms and out-group affinities, as we see in the falling out between Wagenbach and Wyms, Lowe and Sofer’s struggle to work together as partners, Sofer’s affair with Mackey, and Lem’s absence from the Strike Team to work in the juvenile division where he acts as a positive role-model. Alignment does not predict outcomes, but it does make for some interesting twists and turns. The endless crossing-over between and within characters is what makes people so uneasy about The Shield’s moral claims (see for example Judith Grant’s article in which she asserts that the program is “less morally ambiguous than it is just morally irresponsible”.)

Deepening the ambiguity, the Barn’s longest serving police captain, Councilman David Aceveda (brilliantly played by Benito Martinez) seems to stand perpetually at the intersection of the show’s countervailing forces, first in his position as captain, and later as a city councilman. Ambitious, ambiguous and connected, Aceveda intensifies the struggles in The Shield by almost never taking sides, despite being embroiled deeply in the machinations of both, and getting up to some dirty tricks of his own.

Down at the Barn

At the close of its fifth season The Shield had drilled down to its key story, relentlessly pursuing the incendiary effects of Mackey’s original sin, the murder of Detective Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond). The killing actually takes place in the series’ pilot episode, but Mackey manages to keep his head above water, and the Strike Team out on the streets, for most of four straight seasons, despite attempts by Aceveda and others to see him prosecuted and the team disbanded. In the fifth season Mackey’s hounds draw nearer and a new character, Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh (a deeply unhinged Forest Whitaker) arrives at the Barn on a mission. An Internal Affairs investigator, his ultimate goal is to bring the Strike Team to justice and to force Mackey to stand trial for the killing of another officer. Kavanaugh wants blood. At the point of his arrival the Barn is without permanent leadership, Captain Monica Rawling (Glenn Close)—successor to Aceveda and Mackey’s closest ally in the administration—having been dismissed at the close of season four. Kavanaugh installs himself in the captain’s office and begins a systematic pressure campaign and search for evidence that will bring Mackey down, even if it jeopardises his own personal stability. After only a few episodes the new battle lines are drawn. The next table maps the alignments of the show’s main characters at this point:

Figure 2: Positioning of characters in The Shield.

Fans of the program may like this, but in itself the table is descriptive of the show but doesn’t really explain what I’m getting at. However, by modifying the function of the table so that instead of describing individual alignments its describes the relationship between characters possessing said alignments we can develop a much more interesting picture of how these players interrelate in the bigger picture:

Figure 3: Relational meanings of character alignments.

By using the actual relationships between characters in The Shield, the alignment system can be modified into a simple explanatory map of current struggles and alliances between characters in a complex moral playing field. In The Shield’s ethical universe Kavanaugh is now the undisputed protagonist on the side of good while Mackey fits solidly into the position of antagonist (in the sense of his being “opposed to the good”), a place which he has occupied for the majority of the series. Tragically, Vendrell reveals a depth of malice we hoped he didn’t possess by killing Lem, the hardest hit target of Kavanaugh’s investigation, to prevent him from providing any information on the Strike Team. Gardocki remains an accomplice to the team’s goals (which includes holding onto loot they stole from money launderers months earlier) but quite literally carries the scars of following Mackey into one too many questionable confrontations.

On the other side of the thin blue line Wagenbach and Wyms struggle to keep their professional relationship together. Wagenbach grapples with his loyalties to his long-time partner in the thick atmosphere of distrust brought on by Kavanaugh but also demonstrates his willingness to side with the powers that be. Wyms faces promotion to captain, a move she deserves on the grounds of her commitment and abilities but which serves more directly the interests of her superiors. Officer Lowe on the other hand, driven by his own code and keeping to himself treads a difficult path between professional responsibility and loyalty to his colleagues. And at the center of this storm of allegiances and hostilities, Councilman Aceveda cannot manage to stay above the fray, nor to prevail over Mackey and the sinking ship he represents. What we have then is a fully fledged morality drama in which a quickening confrontation between the powers of good and evil forces alliances out of a more varied and ambiguous field of ethical confrontations. It is, in a sense, a story about what happens when an imposed power forces ordinary people to take sides.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

And that’s the best metaphor I can think of for the War on Terror/in Iraq.

Figure 4: Positioning of characters in the War on Terror.

Alignment is a system that forces people to take sides, to make a moral stance. It’s a useful device in describing the motivational aspect of moral conflicts. On face value alignment provides a driving force, a reason for acting. It also forces people to take sides. The New Oxford American Dictionary calls it “arrangement in a straight line, or in correct or appropriate relative positions.” Others would call it an “axis”—of moral virtue for instance. “Good and evil” stuff. And so it seems likely that one man’s intellectual suffocation is another woman’s moral decline…

Whatever, I guess. The War on Terror and The Shield are ideologically—and therefore ultimately—weak arguments. And in failing to recognize this, so too are many of the arguments about them. But one thing is clear: for the longest time the War on Terror was the least interesting thing on American TV, while The Shield was one of the most gripping and controversial. The Shield, with all of it’s post-L.A. Riot edginess contained more nods to the moral drama taking place in the Persian Gulf than the nightly news. For a short, hot stretch it painted perhaps the best picture of what was taking place in the collective mind, and for that it should be recognized, celebrated, and probably condemned.

Bloody good cop show, though.

Postscript: TV on the Radio’s Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes helped me finish this article. Quite by accident I guess, and way overdue. All but the last section was written a year and a half ago. My fault, not theirs :-)

Related posts:

• Gold Men

It’s indulgent to say this about a stack of CDs, but I really needed to find The Knife. I’d first read about the Swedish siblings’ 2003 album Deep Cuts in a Pitchfork review and it had stuck with me so well that it was one of the few records fresh in my mind each time I stepped into a record store. Looked in vain for a while, whenever I passed the Ks. A few weeks ago I finally found their first album (The Knife, 2001) at Cutler’s Records—and then I really did need more. Since technology makes it possible to double-click new stuff from a warehouse into your home I now have all three albums, including 2006′s Silent Shout.

I consider this kind of music electropop, but it’s different from the other artists I’ve given the label to (e.g. Goldfrapp, Röyksopp, The Sugarcubes, White Town) and it took a while to feel they belonged there. The Knife takes this genre to a foreboding, shadowy place and although some of their loops and melodies achieve the velvety deliciousness of their contemporaries, the general tenor of The Knife keeps you on more of an edge (sorry, I had to say that). This effect is as much in the lyrics as in their sound. The Knife’s themes are oedipal (“I’m in love with your brother, yes I am, but maybe I shouldn’t ask for his name”), anxious (“She does it all the time, making mistakes and then I’ll ease her mind”), politically challenging (“Is it medicine or social skill?”) and socially disturbing (“I took a cab there to hold her, I took a plane there to feel what she felt—you make me like charity, instead of paying enough taxes.”)

The Knife’s aesthetics are sinister and foreboding, like if Autechre turned to pop and started writing words. Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer appear masked and distorted in photographs, and their sonics and imagery evoke artists like Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham. There’s a hardness in here, both technical and emotional, that you wouldn’t expect in electropop, a brittle theme that contrasts with the subdued incantations and rounded synth sounds more distinctive of the genre. You can’t chill out to The Knife. But you won’t be able to relegate them to the background. Even their quietest tracks will wind their way back into your consciousness, like when someone turns off the TV and you suddenly hear the silence.

Edited to add: Karin Dreijer Andersson’s voice was driving Elena crazy yesterday because she was sure she had heard it before. Today she found the answer: Dreijer Andersson is the singer in Röyksopp’s amazing “What Else is There?.” (The floating woman is model Marianne Schröder. Dreijer is the figure at the table about two-thirds of the way through the video.)

Related posts:

• Fever Ray
• Junior tease

What began during a conversation with Dan and Jody a few weeks ago about good Australian Cinema, and continued last night as a list of Australian film recommendations for Shoham and Michel from the local video store, debuts here as the preliminary list of best Australian movies in the last fifteen years. The following list is compiled from a combination of unreliable memory traces, favourite actor preferences, and IMDb assaults undertaken by Yours Truly. It may not be the most systematic list ever put together. Do you spot any errors or omissions? Leave a comment. Let’s sort this out.

(All title links point to the IMDb.)

The Keating Years (1991–1996)

• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
• Bad Boy Bubby (1993)
• Cosi (1996)
• Dating the Enemy (1996)
• Dead Heart (1996)
• Flirting (1991)
• Hercules Returns (1993)
• Idiot Box (1996)
• Love and Other Catastrophes (1996)
• Love Serenade (1996)
• Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
• The Piano (1993)
• Proof (1991)
• Romper Stomper (1992)
• Shine (1996)
• Strictly Ballroom (1992)
• The Sum of Us (1994)

The Howard Years (1996–2007)

• The Bank (2001)
• The Boys (1998)
• Candy (2006)
• The Castle (1997)
• Chopper (2000)
• Dirty Deeds (2002)
• Erskineville Kings (1999)
• Feeling Sexy (1999)
• Gettin’ Square (2003)
• The Hard Word (2002)
• The Interview (1998)
• Jindabyne (2006)
• Kiss or Kill (1997)
• Lantana (2001)
• Little Fish (2005)
• Look Both Ways (2005)
• Looking for Alibrandi (2000)
• Oscar and Lucinda (1997)
• Oyster Farmer (2004)
• Praise (1998)
• The Proposition (2005)
• Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)
• Redball (1999)
• Somersault (2004)
• Suburban Mayhem (2006)
• Ten Canoes (2006)
• Thank God He Met Lizzie (1997)
• Two Hands (1999)
• Wolf Creek (2005)

The Rudd Years (2007–2010)

• The Combination (2009)
• The Horseman (2008)
• Love the Beast (2009)
• The Square (2008)

The Gillard Years (2010–)

Time will tell…

Contenders

• Alexandra’s Project (2003)
• Angel Baby (1995)
• Animal Kingdom (2010)
• Australian Rules (2002)
• Bad Eggs (2003)
• Balibo (2009)
• The Black Balloon (2008)
• Boytown (2006)
• Bright Star (2009)
• Clubland (2007)
• Cracker Jack (2002)
• Cunnamulla (2000)
• Death in Brunswick (1991)
• The Dish (2000)
• The Final Winter (2007)
• He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (2001)
• Head On (1997)
• Holy Smoke (1999)
• Innocence (2000)
• Japanese Story (2003)
• Last Train to Freo (2006)
• Life (1996)
• The Magician (2005)
• Ned Kelly (2003)
• Noise (2007)
• Occasional Coarse Language (1998)
• The Quiet Room (1996)
• The Reef (2011)
• Three Dollars (2005)
• The Tracker (2002)
• The Wog Boy (2000)
• Undead (2003)
• What I Have Written (1996)

Rules for Inclusion

To plug for having a movie added to or subtracted from the list, please keep the following points in mind. An “Australian movie” is taken to be any movie that is set, filmed and produced mostly in Australia. Examples: Oscar and Lucinda is an adaptation of a Peter Carey novel, set in Australia, therefore it’s Australian. The Matrix was filmed in Australia, co-produced by an Australian company, and stars many Australian actors and the city of Sydney, but since is not set in Sydney and since all characters have an American accent, it is not Australian. Similarly, though Finding Nemo was set in Australia, and starred some Australian actors, it was produced, written and directed by Americans in the U.S., and is therefore not Australian. Finally, since most movies begin production at least a year before they are released, Keating gets all of 1996, even though he lost the bloody election in March of that year.

Update: I’ve had a lot of feedback and suggestions, so I made some changes.

Related posts:

• Anything that can go wrong
• Michael Haneke’s visual sociology
• Instrument