Monthly Archives: June 2010

Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part V

Posted on June 19, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Two Personal Favorites: Spook Country (2007) and Domino (2005)

Spook Country

The toughest challenge for any author is to follow up a big hit with an equally big hit.  Following the epic genius of Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon released the misunderstood novel Vineland.  In the case of William Gibson, he experienced career resurgence with the release of Pattern Recognition, an “empathetic thriller” about advertising, intelligence, and an elusive video.  Gibson set the novel in the present and it reads like a strange relic, an artifact set in a world after 9/11 but before YouTube.

Spook Country follows the same general template.  Modern setting, strange characters, and a thriller plot.  Unfortunately, not everything clicked into place.  Despite the reprise of Hubertus Bigend, the showy yet elusive Belgian CEO of Blue Ant, and a plot involving intelligence and geospatial art events, the novel lacks the forward momentum of Pattern Recognition.

When measured against the genius of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country falls short.  On its own terms, Spook Country still has a lot to offer a reader.  One thing Gibson excels at is the description of modern commodities and emergent technologies.  He would make an awesome reviewer for Wired or the Cool Hunter (thecoolhunter.net).

Because all the characters are a little off, it gives their descriptions of experience an added gloss of skewed intensity.

Each sentence has the economy of a Zen koan:

“How long was one expected to live one’s life in the tautly strung fug of Brown’s curdled testosterone?”

“The seats back there, upholstered in that gunmetal lamb, obviously reclined, becoming beds, or possibly chairs for high-end elective surgery.”

One longer passage is especially fascinating in its mash up of vintage sci fi tropes and the history of the Frankfurt School:

Milgrim doubted that Gray’s comforted Brown, exactly, but he did know that Brown could become relatively talkative there.  He’d have the nonalcoholic piña colada with his franks and lay out the origins of cultural Marxism in America.  Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt.  The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia.  Migrim always enjoyed this part; it had an appealing vintage sci-fi campiness to it, staccato and exciting, with grainy monochrome Eurocommie star-spawn in tweed jackets and knit ties, breeding like Starbucks.  But he’d always be brought down, as the rant rolled to a close, by Brown’s point that the Frankfurt School had been Jewish, all of them.  “Every.  Last.  One.”  Dabbing mustard from the corners of his mouth with a precisely folded paper napkin.  “Look it up.”

Spook Country is not a great novel, but it has touches of verbal brilliance in the otherwise sluggish plot.  While not the best example of a thriller, it stands out as a lucid investigation of the commodity fetishism in late capitalism and the intersection of technology, art, and espionage.  Sometimes its just better to find enchantment in the words.

Domino

Unleash the awesomeness!

Insane and insanely memorable scene in otherwise forgettable action movie: Tom Waits as the stigmatic preacher in Domino. Domino is remembered, if at all, as Tony Scott’s single most visually incoherent movie, but there’s a sequence at the end, scripted by Donnie Darko mastermind and all around nutter Richard Kelly, that stands out for its batshittery. Before sexy bounty hunter Domino Harvey and her motley gang head off to their doom in Las Vegas, they stop in the desert for a chat with a crazed prophet who happens to be bleeding from his palms. Of course he’s played by Tom Waits, and of course he spouts a bunch of gibberish about destiny, and it almost redeems the rest of the movie, which is basically a migraine-delivery system.  (Matt Christman, Worse than Hitler, December 15, 2009)

Domino is the story of bounty hunter Domino Harvey.  Tony Scott directs and Richard Kelly provides the script.  Portrayed by Keira Knightley, Domino is a lone female in the male-dominated shadow world of professional bounty hunting.  It is a journey in a legal gray space where criminal and lawman become interchangeable identities.  Kelly complicates the matter by opting against the garden-variety biopic formula for a more hallucinatory telling, mixing autobiographical and fictional elements with anarchic glee.

The real Domino Harvey.

Unfortunately, like Spook Country, Domino fails in its goal.  Domino’s hallucinatory journey becomes a migraine-inducing experience, director Tony Scott amping up everything.  Cuts, process shots, and colors are thrown together in a manner usually associated with cinematic Antichrist Michael Bay.  The story is great, but the direction is dizzying.

While still a cinematic failure, it remains a personal favorite of mine.  Part of this enthusiasm stems from Knightley as a gun-toting badass in the mold of Gina Torres from Firefly and Claudia Black from Farscape.  More characters like Domino Harvey would be a welcome addition to the action movie landscape.  Spastic direction mistaken for storytelling would be a welcome subtraction.

Domino is a fun movie, just one that requires a motion sickness bag.

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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part IV

Posted on June 18, 2010 by | 1 Comment

Nathan Rabin and the Countercanonical Critique

The AV Club has carved out a niche of reputable pop cultural criticism.  Nathan Rabin has been profiled before in the Art of Reviewing.  It focused on his unique style and examined his ongoing series My Year of Flops.  Rabin’s bombastic style plays off his subject matter, whether it is a movie that bombed at the box-office or a hip hop review.  Rabin has expanded his critical eye to include country music (Nashville or Bust!) and pop ephemera (THEN! That’s What They Called Music).

Movie flops, the NOW That’s What I Call Music! compilations, and country music constitute a growing countercanonical critique of pop culture.  Each has a distinct relationship with “the popular.”  Rabin dissects the commercial flops, placing them in three categories: Failure, Fiasco, and Secret Success.  The categories are terms lifted from the agonizingly whimsical rom-com Elizabethtown.  Box office receipts are misleading values, since film is a collective collaborative art form.  A work of genius (say, 12 Monkeys) could succeed in technical execution, but flounder from a mishandled promotional campaign.  Other works, like Bladerunner, become genre gold-standards even though they did not reap major box office sales.  Time has rewarded Bladerunner, it has not rewarded Battlefield Earth, a badly executed trainwreck whose only appeal lay with cinema fans with a masochistic streak.  Bladerunner could be considered a Secret Success, while Battlefield Earth is a Fiasco.  A work that lacks campy outrageousness is simply a Failure.  Fiascos have the morbid appeal of a car crash.  Failures are just boring.

In Nashville or Bust! Rabin brings his critical acumen sharpened by listening to hip hop and translates it into fascinating profiles of country music stars.  The connection is not an obvious one, especially since hip hop and country music suffer from being caricatured by mainstream pop.

Answering all the questions and cliffhangers from NOW! That’s What I Call Music 71.

Rabin explains his aims in THEN! That’s What They Call Music:

So I thought it would be interesting, edifying, and, yes, even a little arousing to listen to the entire NOW That’s What I Call Music! series in chronological order to see what the albums say, individually and collectively, about the way music has evolved and devolved, and to explore some of the weirder and more obscure nooks and crannies of pop culture.  …

A strange spirit of musical democracy pervades the CD. It’s a curious world where one-hit wonders like Marcy Playground breathe the same rarified air as Janet Jackson and Radiohead. For a brief period, they were peers, at least where Billboard and NOW That’s What I Call Music! is concerned.

Part of the train-wreck fascination of NOW That’s What I Call Music! involves seeing familiar songs in bizarre new contexts. To cite volume one’s most extreme example, Radiohead’s “Karma Police” is sandwiched between Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and Everclear’s “I Will Buy You A New Life.”

(“Introduction,” February 16, 2010)

THEN! That’s What They Call Music! provides a countercanonical critique of pop music.  The NOW! series resembles a new Windows or Apple product, engineered for immediate obsolescence.  Rabin gives these disposable products a critical reading, albeit one loaded with jokes.  Unlike the movie flops, the NOW! CDs consistently sell out and remain popular.  The critique does not simply exist to attack and belittle, but is used as a means to parse the random assemblage of the ephemeral and the eternal in pop music.

The three series have Rabin championing unpopular causes – country music, movie flops, and NOW! CD compilations – and using the criticism as a means of examining the vagaries of aesthetics and industrial capital.

Up next, two personal favorites!

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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part III

Posted on June 17, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Reappropriation: Camp, Kitsch, and Sincerity

“When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.  The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything outlandish.” – “Notes on Camp” [1965], Susan Sontag

“Need more clarification? To his fans Liberace was the epitome of cultured taste, but of course we know he was kitsch. However, unlike the not-quite-weird-enough musical stylings of ABBA, say, or the Village People, Liberace-style kitsch is so weird, so outré, that hipsters find it impossible to appropriate as cheese. Liberace didn’t make his work inappropriable on purpose; others, however, have. The director John Waters, for example, described his (excellent) early films, which lovingly celebrate kitsch in an extreme, even terrifying way, as “trash.” He did so in order to prevent hipsters from fake-appreciating his work — as they’ve done with, e.g., the films of Ed Wood. Deploying the term “trash” was a brilliant anti-ironic maneuver on the part of a master ironist.” – “Kitsch, Camp, and Cheese,” Hilowbrow.com [June 5, 2010], Joshua Glenn

Beneath every hipster opinion is a root of contempt.  For the popular, for the mainstream, the straw men are various and sundry.  A similar position of championing the unpopular involves camp and kitsch.  Unlike the fake-appreciation of hipsters for Pabst Blue Ribbon and the accoutrements of working class garb, fans of camp and kitsch embrace certain cultural products with a passionate sincerity.  Camp and kitsch, while similar, are not the same, although the popular press and consumers often confuse the two.

Camp reappropriates culturally disreputable works in a kind of counterintuitive appreciation.  A work that is generally abhorrent and awful (example: Zak Snyder’s 300) can be repurposed.  As a standard action film, 300 represents the nadir of the genre.  But what if one watches it as a comedy?  The Heavy Metal Librarian asserts:

I predict that, in ten years, 300 will have the same type of following that Rocky Horror Picture Show has today: ie, it will be aired after midnight at theaters in college towns all over the country, attended by audiences of gay men and people dressed up in costumes from the movie, who will recite the dialogue word for word, throw popcorn at the screen, and laugh uproariously at parts that are supposed to be deadly serious. After all, the only real difference between the two movies is that the latter is intentionally campy. (from the post, “Wank the Spartans”, Heavy Metal Librarian, September 14, 2009)

300 is unintentionally campy and pretty hilarious when read that way.  Sontag differentiates the Camp from the bad by the outlandishness of its execution. 300 fits the bill.  The Heavy Metal Librarian catalogues 300’s outlandishness:

300 is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen in my life.

I was reminded of the film’s brilliance when it made its television debut this past weekend. Seriously, it’s perfect. What other movie gives you:

  • Howlingly bad dialogue (“because freedom isn’t free” sounds like something from George Bush’s wet dream)
  • Rampant homoeroticism (buff, chiseled, shaven-chested Greeks prancing around in underwear and capes) in an allegedly tough-guy war movie
  • An enemy, the Persians, who manage to simultaneously look like a cross between an al-Qaeda training video and a Gay Pride parade from Mordor
  • Said enemy led by Xerxes, a ten foot tall Rupaul clone obsessed with making people kneel in front of him

The undeniably homoerotic element in the movie is its most amusing aspect. After all, there exists a high correlation between people who think that Islamofascists are hiding under their beds and those who believe that Teh Homosexual Agenda is attempting to subvert their children. The fact that this crowd loved 300 constitutes further scientific proof of the Foley/Haggard Theorem (“The Degree of one’s Homophobia is Directly Proportional to the Depth of one’s Closet.”)

The same reading could possibly be made for John Wayne’s performance in The Green Berets, but most definitely for his turn as Genghis Khan.

Kitsch is a much harder beast to cage, since it is typified by terrible artistic production.  Embracing Art Nouveau lamps and Busby Berkeley musicals can be Camp.  Embracing Keane paintings and the Left Behind series is kitschy.  Unless one sincerely believes the idiosyncratic Bible interpretation of the Left Behind series, it is a challenging work to champion, let alone read, on any level.  Where Camp succeeds in surely executed outlandishness, Kitsch fails because of shoddy craftsmanship.

Camp

Kitsch

This brings us to a reckoning point: Sincerity.  (The weasel word “authentic” will be avoided, mainly because of the associations with fake-authentic cultural products.)  Can one appreciate a disreputable genre or film or book with sincerity without falling into the traps of Kitsch and Camp?

Up next, Nathan Rabin!

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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part II

Posted on June 16, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Unpopularity as Popularity: or How to be a hipster.

“Every aspect of hipster culture amounts to little more than an elaborate pissing contest.  …  Hipsters ignore rules because they think it will make them look like they don’t care. There is no end result, just a continuous cycle of mediocre indie rock and scruffy looking dudes. By basing their actions on avoiding the mainstream, they are in fact guided by the mainstream.” – “Cracked Topics: Hipster”, Cracked.com

You’re not cool enough.  The bands you like aren’t unpopular enough.

Hipsters, the annoying quasi-subculture, has its own uses and abuses of unpopularity.  What began as a critical response to mainstream pabulum has ossified into a motley assemblage of fashion cues and empty posturing.  The position has become the posture.  In the words the Ango-Catholic royalist conservative poet T.S. Eliot, “Shape without form, shade without colour,/Paralysed force, gesture without motion” (“The Hollow Men”, 1925).  Reaction has become paralyzed by its own desperate need for acceptance as “not mainstream.”  The negative dialectic between the Mainstream and the Hipster yields nothing more than “mediocre indie rock and scruffy looking dudes.”

The crux of the Hipster Ethos is unpopularity.  So long as you liked such-and-such “before it was cool,” then you can join the anointed ranks.  Unlike previous generations who have fought and battled for acceptance as Cool, the hipsters go one step further, creating a posture almost Masonic in its occultic nature.  (Not necessarily occultic in terms of cult behavior, although there is enough of that, it is based on the other definition of occult.  Occluded, hidden.)  Hipsters cherish their acceptance of bands and films otherwise unknown to the mainstream.  Unlike a critic who wants to spread the good news and let everyone know about lesser-known writers, filmmakers, and musicians, the hipster will keep such information hidden.  They will only disclose the information in catty comments disparaging the philistinism of their quarry.

Where the Mainstream is produced.

The hipster’s dismissal of the mainstream also requires a definition of what constitutes the mainstream.  The Mainstream is characterized by populist middlebrow entertainments engineered to appeal to the broadest audience.  Taking the water metaphor for what it’s worth, every mainstream has its tributaries, estuaries, and rivulets.  The hipster posture comes close to the Luddite ethos, except instead of wanting to smash the machines of industrialization, they snark about the latest Hilary Duff album.

A dark analogue of the hipster appears in the Tea Party movement.  The Tea Party members resemble hipsters; one only has to find the parallels.  While hipsters disdain the Mainstream, the Tea Party presumes they speak for the Mainstream, even though they are a small but loud minority within the greater spectrum of American conservatism.

So doesn’t the extremist position immediate invalidate any claims for speaking for the majority of the population?

Instead of the Mainstream, they use the moniker “Real America.”  Robert Anton Wilson’s phrase rings true with them.  “Reality is what you can get away with.”  In a multicultural, multilingual secular democracy, they have the arrogance to assert that White Christians (read: extremist Protestants) in rural towns are “the Real Americans.”  In the words of Alicia Silverstone from Clueless, “As if.”

The Tea Party members are the hipsters of American politics.  They confuse their own misperceptions about America and think that everyone resembles them.  They inhabit the same fishbowl as the Williamsburg hipster.  Just exchange the Founding Fathers for the Arctic Monkeys, since both possess the same garish fashion sense and mocking contempt.  Both reduce any critical discussion to shrilling catcalls and wooden postures more about appearance than content.

Up next, Kitsch and Camp!

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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part I

Posted on June 15, 2010 by | 1 Comment

“In place of a hermeneutrics we need an erotics of art.” – “Against Interpretation” [1964], Susan Sontag

Challenges and Non-Responses

The job of the critic is, by turns, tastemaker, evangelist, and champion.  The best critics harness the powers of intellection and enthusiasm to inform his or her readership on a work’s merits.  If a work receives more merits than demerits, than, in a roughly mathematical fashion, the creator obtains a “good review.”  This reviewer finds works with “mixed reviews” or polarizing reactions (see Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) most attractive, since “mixed reviews” are not sure things.  A tiny element of surprise exists when encountering the work.  It could be awful, but it could also be great.

Hollywood’s economic base was not built on good movies.

The critic faces challenges when encountering works that are not contemporary or from a creator with a prestigious reputation.  A book that has just been published offers a critic a tabula rasa.  He or she can imprint first impressions and create a reaction that will be integrated into the cultural understanding of the work.  There is critical reception, consumer (read: “popular”) reception, and overall sales.  Hollywood has made millions on good remakes (Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven) and terrible remakes (Harald Zwart’s The Karate Kid).  The balance between these three axes (critics, consumers, and sales receipts) will be the focus of this essay.  Included are two works which I personally like, although both have been critically maligned, albeit not without good cause.

The challenges are myriad for any critic desiring to exhibit his or her worth to the critical community and the readership at large.  If the critic has no taste, why bother reading the reviews?  The subjectivities of taste can be intimidating, especially to two particularly annoying sub-species of readership.

The first sub-species are the Fanboys (and Fangirls).  Critical taste evaporates and a hardcore evangelism permeates every reaction.  Whether it involves CGI, the works of Ayn Rand, or Angelina Jolie raiding tombs, the works are transfigured from mere pop culture artifacts to quasi-religious relics.  This is glaringly evident in champions of J.R.R. Tolkien.  Only a philistine would dismiss Tolkien’s place as founding father of modern high fantasy.  On the other hand, just because he was one of the first to write high fantasy, it does not mean Lord of the Rings is any good.  I found the work an overlong tedious bore written in stilted language.  Tolkien wrote in a style to emulate the cadence found in the King James Bible.  One also sees manifestations of this fanaticism of reader reviews of Atlas Shrugged.  The positive reviews are gushing.  Many say it is the best novel ever written.  To which any sensible critic would ask, “The best novel compared to what?”  Rabid fanatical fandom is hard to deal with.  Instead of Al-Qaeda strapping dynamite to their torsos, fanboys bomb discussion threads with bombastic rhetoric that veils an utter lack of critical sensibility.

Turnoffs: Judging people, things, etc.

The other sub-species are Egalitarians.  Unafraid to offend anyone’s tastes, the Egalitarians short-circuit discussions with non-responses.  These include, but are not limited to the following:

  • “You believe what you want to believe.  It’s your opinion.”
  • “To each his own.”
  • “Twilight may be badly written, but at least it encourages kids to read.”

It is enough to make people gnash their teeth and pull out their hair.  Literary criticism is not about the First Amendment.  That is a given.  The right to an opinion involves having one in the first place! Otherwise, the person renders the entire enterprise pointless.  While these two positions are not necessarily politically analogous, the Egalitarian position crops up in many subscribing to the pieties of the Left.  (Full disclosure: This author finds pieties of the Right and the Left absolutely insufferable.  Political pieties are a waste of time.  What matters are concrete results.)

Concepts like multiculturalism and tolerance have invaded the confines of aesthetic criticism making everyone suffer in the process.  People have become afraid of criticizing a work on its merits and then being accused of racism, sexism, and other epithets.  Works should be included in the Canon based on merit, not on tradition (defenders of Dead White Males) or on representation (defenders of everyone excluded in the Traditional Western Canon™).

In the determination of a work’s merit, exclusions will have to be made, but a work should also be judged on its own merits.  Troma films have their own bent brilliance, despite their tiny budgets, broad acting, and lunatic plots.  One can champion just about any cultural product (film, book, TV show, album, etc.) with sound arguments and sincere affection.

Up next, Hipsters!

“I liked __________ before they were cool.”

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The Sticks by Andy Deane @ Joe Bob Briggs

Posted on June 12, 2010 by | Leave a comment

I review books for the Joe Bob Briggs website. For those unfamiliar with Joe Bob Briggs, he did reviews of drive-in fare on Monstervision (a staple of the TNT network in the Nineties).  Briggs is also an author and actor.  He played a small, hilarious, and pivotal role in Martin Scorsese’s Casino:

In a literary marketplace still riding the wave of vampire fiction created by the Twilight series, it’s nice to see a book that focuses more on werewolves and is actually scary.  If you’re horror cravings demand adult language, cleavage, firearms, blood, carnage, and ultraviolence, then do yourself a favor.  Pick up The Sticks by Andy Deane.

To read the rest of the review, click here.

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Essays on Capital, First Series: Essay Number Zero

Posted on June 10, 2010 by | Leave a comment

By way of an introduction …

“It is simply misleading and vulgar to say of Marx, as Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station and many others have done, that he was really a latter-day prophet[.]” – “Piety without content,” Susan Sontag [1961]

“Marx’s thought marks a watershed.  Its roots reach back to Joachim of Fiore and further, to the inspired utterances of the Old Testament prophets.” – Reasons for Our Rhymes: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of History, R. A. Herrera [2001]

“Better dead than Red.” – Anti-communist saying [c. 1950s]

Karl Marx is a controversial, misunderstood, and often maligned figure.  Prolific author, political activist, philosopher, economist, and theorist, his writing runs the gamut from newspaper articles to large-scale theoretical treatises.  This essay series will explore a variety of issues pertaining to Marx’s magnum opus, Capital: a critique of political economy.  More specifically, it will focus on the first volume.  (The plan is to include a similar series of essays for the second and third volumes.)

The Great Recession provides an entrée into Marx’s masterwork.  The second decade of the 21st century gives the reader a unique vantage point to investigate Marx’s theoretical assertions.  Despite Manichean pronouncements from free market fundamentalists and the nostalgia of unreconstructed Stalinists, the world has a few peculiar examples of political economy at work.  The former Soviet Union currently embraces cowboy capitalism shoulder to shoulder with a traditional authoritarianism.  The People’s Republic of China continues its one-party totalitarian rule, leavened with a recent acceptance of the market economy.  Battle lines are not fought against tanks in Tiananmen Square but over Google searches and the rights of people in Hong Kong.  The United States battles the economic cataclysm wrought by deregulatory exuberance with a mixture of lemon socialism and crony capitalism.  Meanwhile, the small Asian city-state of Singapore adopts a blend of command-and-control economics to industrialize with ferocious speed and efficiency, then transitions into a tiny quasi-autocratic capitalist paradise.  Allende is overthrown in Chile and General Augusto Pinochet assumes power, “disappearing” dissidents with brutal efficiency.  The United States preserves diplomatic relations so long as trade and business remain unaffected.

The People’s Republic of China: Most Favored Nation trade status.

These historical events remain in the background when one reads Capital.  These essays will come from a historical perspective, since my training and experience involve the practice of history.  I am not an economist, although a historian who does not understand basic economic principles cannot approach the challenges of the discipline with a full quiver.

Due to recent and past events, Capital has been much maligned and not read beyond the halls of academe.  Combined with more than half a century of the Cold War (and even further back, going back to the 1920s and the Palmer Raids), the very words “socialist” and “Marxist” have been irrevocably tainted.  Unfortunately, when an economic debate is necessary, both sides end up misinformed, angry, and comical.  The Tea Party movement and its proponents turning its talking points into hysterical self-parody is endemic of the situation.  Only in this lunatic hot-house atmosphere can government-subsidized check-ups for the poor become equated with Gulags.

The goal of these essays is to examine Capital as a historical and literary work.  It must be approached at an aesthetic and intellectual level, devoid of entrenched misperceptions, emotional hysteria, and fallacious arguments.  Blaming Marx’s critique on capitalism for modern atrocities is akin to blaming the Bible on the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Thirty Years War.  Simple accusations reap simple answers.  The relationship between the horrors of the 20th century and the economic philosophy of the 19th is a complicated, labyrinthine, and contingent one.  The series is neither an indictment nor an endorsement of Marx’s works.  (It’s a pity to find the addition of this disclaimer necessary.  Even more ironic considering this nation constantly crows about embracing differences in opinion.)  One does not have to be a devout Catholic to appreciate Chartres cathedral.  It is also a sign of a rigorous intellectual temperament to test one’s commonly held ideas against opposing systems.  When one is not questioning what one thinks, one is not thinking.  The art depends on asking the questions the situation demands.

The essays will examine different aspects of Capital.  These include the historical moment of its publication (1867), its sources, its structure, its style, and the idea of the revolutionary versus the bourgeois.  What can we learn from Capital now that free market capitalism and socialism both lay hobbled and bloody like two obese professional wrestlers in protein comas?  The cries of “socialize” ring as hollow as those who cry “deregulate.”

Like a Town Hall Tea Party meeting on the health care debate, only less ridiculous.

The various topics will demand a variety of styles.  The essays will vary from historical to philosophical to allegorical to free-associative to polemical.  While oceans of ink and forests of trees have gone into the exegeses of Marx’s work, I hope I can add a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of how the braided challenges of politics and economics confront the modern work force.

“If there are regulations against the use of child labor, then our entire economy will collapse!”

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