Noah Kalina

Private Desires

All we need to see is the opening scene of Superbad to know that web porn has, uh, penetrated the American psyche. And we all know there’s some pretty crass stuff out there that is easily accessible. But allow me to go deeper, and broader, and to offer some thoughts, at once practical and philosophic, on this somewhat hard subject.

Web porn fundamentally shifted the architecture of private desire. No longer would we slink through beads to collectively survey the fantasies of oddly hairless men from Van Nuys. That is, just as bottom up media dethroned the media kings, it has dethroned the porn kings and their poor taste in erotica. No more are we at the mercy of this very strange and grotesque vision of the erotic — with faux-breasted giggly girls being abused by old, ugly, shaved men who sweat profusely under the probing lights, all the better to see the close ups of gaping orifice.

The rise of the digital and the web ushered in a proliferation of pornographic possibility and access. Sure, niche porn was always there, somewhere, in specialty porn shops that hovered in peripheral urban moments. Before the net, a man had to do some work to see his bondage and foot videos, his smoking and diaper and shemale porn.

Not anymore. A few clicks, a little poking around, and voila: a man being tied down, blindfolded, and tickled before having his prostate milked. No skulking perverts over your shoulder — just you and these beautiful visions splashing across your blue screen.

Now, while there may always have been niche porn, the breadth and depth of content has exploded. One effect of this is that our tastes are regularly challenged and, on occasion, expanded. You may never have considered pregnant women sexy but after seeing a group of men jerking off on her great swell of a belly, your views may change. The very definition of the erotic — and of the pornographic in particular — is multiplied every which way.

Meanwhile, the rise of web 2.0 has revolutionized the online pornscape. The Internet now runneth over with videos — ranging from 12 seconds to multiple hours — of individuals and couples in sundry states of eros. No producer, no actors, no plot or lighting: just people alone — or not — in their house, shooting video on phones, webcams, Flips — and uploading them to one of the dozens of sites such as YouPorn, Spankwire, xHamster, xVideos, BurningCamel, Tube8, RedTube, and so on and on and on.

Of course, there are still remnants of the old porn — now readily available for free, pirated by the kids. But such remnants are fading fast.

We are finally alone with our perversions and predilections, even those we dind’t know existed.

Infinite Seduction

This new architecture fundamentally shifts the temporality of consumption. Whereas the video enjoyed a certain discretion — two hours, sometimes four hours — web porn knows no such limit. Surfing porn is very different than watching porn. One’s ability to surf is limited only by external circumstances — time alone, duration of wood, the pain of blisters.

But it’s not just the content that is unlimited — and it is unlimited, there is an infinite bevy of porn out there — it’s the very structure of the experience itself. Porn is about the incitement of desire, not its consummation. No, it’s the enticement, the lure, the seduction of the image. And, with the web, this seduction, like the supply of content, is infinite. This movie is pretty good, you say to yourself, now let me look at that one — and that one and that one and that one ad infinitum.

And soon you have 20 browser windows open, each with its own promise, each satisfying this or that component of your manifold desire — a man being penetrated with a strap-on by a lovely co-ed; a Japanese AV star performing a nuru massage, a seaweed based lotion she covers the man in before licking every, and I mean every, part his body; a homemade clip of a college couple enjoying oral copulation; a photomontage of what’s called “almost nudes” — a hail back to the days of the pinup which, somehow, seems even more perverse. Link after link, windows popping up everywhere, some leading nowhere, some to temporary nirvana.

What’s to stop you? How will you finish? Hours pass by, your eyes are bloodshot, your visiion blurred, your lotion is on its last legs, your cock is numb. Your orgasm, if it comes, is perfunctory and weak, a last gasp rather than an apogee.

The web is a relentless seductress.

Meanwhile, the ephemeral nature of it all can seem less than satisfying. And so we turn to the right click, the save, the download. Every right click is a thrust deeper into your hard drive. The right click is the closest thing to consummation, more satisfying than your weak ass orgasm but still lacking.

In the end, it’s all so humiliating. The day is gone, you’re nauseous, you ache. And so it goes until tomorrow.

Opiate of the Impotent

Web porn is the new opiate of the masses. Religion, these days, has people up in arms. Look at the fundamentalist Muslims and Christians: they’re raising hell out there. No, it’s web porn that sates this deprived populace. Better you should sit home all day surfing porn than actually becoming healthy or, god forbid, interested in doing something other than work. Porn is a sedative. It makes you feel that, at least for the moment, everything’s ok — even though your job is miserable, your wife hates you, and your kids are a pain in the ass. Just go to YouPorn and all is right with the world.

Web porn is capital’s answer to religion. It distracts you from the horror of your lives while following the very logic of commodity — endless seduction. More, cries web porn, more! More niches! More content! More time! One more link — always, one more link, one more click, the click to infinity that goes nowhere but still drives you harder and longer until there’s nothing left but that limp sensation of life passing you by.

This may sound terrible but there are times when I’m walking through the sordid San Francisco streets and I find myself jealous of the drunk and the junky. There they are with their stash or their bottle and all is good in the world. When they run out, they know just what to do. What a life.

I have the same jealousy of fetishists. They know exactly what they want, exactly what will sate them. Me, I am overwhelmed by the choices, the vast selection. I see women on the street and I can imagine myself, more or less, with all of them. And this stymies me, leaves me immobilized and wanting. Meanwhile, the guy who digs smoking chicks with tiny boobs knows just what his night will entail.

There are many reasons I love tequila so. But first let me say this to all of you who cringe in incredulity and horror at the mere whisper of the name, not to mention the scent and savor, of tequila: what you think is tequila is not.

And so to a first lesson. In order to be called tequila, the spirit must come from certain areas of Mexico — the state of Jalisco and limited regions in the states of Guanajuato, Michoacán, Nayarit, and Tamaulipas (thanks Wikipedia!)— and be made from at least 51% agave. Cuervo Gold — which most people associate with tequila — is a mixto, a mix of at least 51% agave and 49% soul death — sugar, caramel, bottled headache. So of course you have horrible associations with tequila. You must — yes, must — drink tequila that is 100% agave.

For the spirit I sing of is a life giver, a life affirmer. Unlike all other booze, tequila is a natural upper: it makes you high, not sloppy down. With tequila, you don’t feel drunk; you feel, yes, high. Really. So be careful. A long time bourbon drinker, I began to find the weight of whisky too much for my increasingly fatigued frame. And so I reached for a lighter elixir and found it in the strange, heady brew of the agave. If bourbon became sandbags in the decay of my life, tequila became a welcome rope from above, a lifeline slowing my inevitable descent.

So this is one reason I love tequila so: it is an upper, not a downer. And so generous the next morning you’ll want to kiss the agave pina. For while you might be bit tired the next day, your body and head will not ache and you will not be nauseated. Tequila, prince that it is, lets you be.

But there are so many more reasons to sing tequila’s praises. Agave is strange, tasting of sun and earth and fruit and the calculus of their combination of spice and sweet. Every sip is always new, always fresh, always surprising. With a palate all its own, tequila tastes like nothing else in the world. Every time I imbibe, I am once again surprised, enlivened by what it offers.

Another lesson. Tequila generally comes in three forms: Blanco (sometimes called silver), Reposado, and Anejo. Blanco is not aged, bottled right after distillation. The reposado is aged anywhere from 8 weeks to a year in an oak cask and often one that formerly housed bourbon (an excellent moment of postcolonial cross-pollination). Anejo is aged at least a year but no more than three.

Now, these three variations do not correspond to quality but to preference. This is not good, better, best but a matter of what you enjoy. Usually, I prefer the blanco because one can taste the full pop of the agave, its fruit, its complexity, its sweetness, its earthiness. I like the reposados, too, as the oak can lend shape to the pungency of the agave. As Carlos Curiel, maker of the unparalleled El Tesoro, told me, when done right, the oak frames the agave just so. Usually, I shy away from the anejo as the aging often masks the agave flavor I crave. But to each one’s own.

Another reason for my love. Agave is complex — unbelievably, bewilderingly so. One can taste vanilla, honey, citrus, leather, sun, dirt, mint, smoke, nuts, and that mysterious fruit that can only be agave. And what never ceases to amaze me is that the flavors do not unite. Rather, they harmonize. Drink a glass of bourbon and it’s one smooth experience on the tongue. Drink a good tequila — usually a blanco — and the flavors form an impossible symphony across your palate.

In this, there is a great ethics, a way of peaceful co-existence. Or, even better, a way that different things can maintain their identity while making other things even better. In many ways, tequila has been my great teacher of ethics.

A last lesson before I list tequilas I like. The agave takes around 8 years to fruit. In those eight years, the plant takes up its earth. And so, like whiskey, tequila enjoys a range from highland to lowland. Those tequilas made from highland agave tend to be lighter, headier, more vanilla and citrus; those from the lowlands, earthier and weightier.

And a few practical matters. The flavor of a nice tequila can be quite subtle. It should therefore be enjoyed in a glass with a narrow mouth; too wide a brim and the flavor can be lost to the air. As for mezcal — actually, mezcal is the species, tequila the genus —, it is made from agave but is cooked over fire and smoke which gives it a pungent smoky flavor. I don’t know much about smoky mezcal so back to tequila. A word about Patron: it’s fine — if you don’t want any flavor. It’s for people who want to say they drank tequila but don’t actually enjoy it.

Here, then, are 5 tequilas that make me weep with joy.

HBO

One can respond any number of ways to Alan Ball’s True Blood on HBO. There’s no doubt it’s a tad silly and this can either turn you on or off. So be it. But while I was initially inclined towards such suspicion, I have come not just to enjoy but to appreciate the intelligence and complexity of the show. It is a show about ethics.

The very first scene of the very first season grabbed my attention. A college-aged couple is driving down some back road, goofing around, when they spot a roadside sign for “True Blood,” which turns out to be a Japanese-made synthetic blood for vampires –– saving said vampires the uncomfortable social and ethical position of eating human beings. This is already peculiar and potentially interesting.

But it’s what happens next that caught me. The youth walk in excited, eager to confront a vampire. The man working there looks the part: tattoos, long black hair, menacing. And he pretends to be a vampire, speaking with a thick accent of some sort. Meanwhile, some fat middle-aged guy in a camouflage jacket and a baseball cap is shopping, presumably for beer. When the would-be vampire reveals his put on –– the accent is fake; he laughs –– the “redneck” flashes his fangs. He wasn’t shopping for beer; he was shopping for True Blood.

Why do I like this so much? Because it let us all know, from the get go, that the expected order of things would not prevail, that the order of things can be reversed. And as any reader of Nietzsche knows — ok, we’re not all readers of Nietzsche but we should be –– reversal is not simply a matter of turning things upside down. It’s a matter of fundamentally shifting the terms of engagement.

I have thought and written about vampires. Well, not the vampires that now dominate the cultural milieu but the vampiric nature of corporations and capitalism: they take –– and need –– human vitality to drive their ends.

But the image of the vampire Alan Ball gives us is more complex. While vampires do indeed feed on human vitality to serve their own ends, their own blood turns out to be of tremendous value to human being. It heals, physically and psychically, as it is a powerful psychedelic drug. This vampire relationship is not one-way: it is an exchange, and a bloody one at that.

And this complexity drives the show as we confront permutation after permutation of this exchange. The show is rife with complex human relationships –– the endlessly complicated, multivalent play of need and desire that flourishes between human beings. The complexity of family –– Tara and her alcoholic mother; Sookie and her brother, Jason; Sookie and Lafayette. The complexity of friendship –– Sookie, who can read the minds of her friends, and everyone she knows. The complexity of love and desire –– the unrequited love between Sam and Sookie; Sookie and her love for vampire Bill; Jason and his diverse relationships. The complexity of employer and employed –– Sam and his staff. The complexity of power between vampires who, it turns out, have a highly codified ethics.

Through all of these –– and others, too –– we confront the contractual terms of any relationship, the ever-negotiated give and take. How much does a mother give? What is incumbent upon the daughter to return? What are the limits of what an employer can expect? At what point does a lover’s giving become too much? How much can the loved demand of a lover when said love is unrequited?

This is what True Blood is about: the impossible calculus of human relations. The show does not offer a fixed moral stance; there is no right and wrong. There, are, however, clear limits of decency: pure vampirism is frowned upon.

What True Blood argues for is the fluidity of human relations and the beauty and pain and glory of the endless give and take that defines our every exchange with others. Ethics –– the terms of exchange between us –– are not strict and moral. Ethics, True Blood tells us, are a matter of negotiation. Bloody at times, perhaps, but such is human –– and non-human –– existence.

And as Nan Flanagan, the spokesperson for the Vampire League of America, often reminds us, humans have killed millions in the name of moral certainty. The ads for True Blood play on this: “Thou shalt not crave they neighbor.” But of course we do crave each other –– for love, sex, money, nurturing, healing, playing. The dictum of the ad is ambivalent, a supersession of the known moral code. Yes, it tells us, there is an ethics. But they are not certain or fixed because human relations are contractual and complicated. Ball hence gives us a different order of things, a perhaps less bloody ethics: endless negotiation.

There are many reasons to love the no longer broadcasting television show The Wire, David Simon’s extraordinary series on HBO. The dialogue is exquisite –– well timed, poetic, hilarious. The characters –– from those more or less front and center to those on the fringes –– are surprising, full of impossibly human nuance, wit, and grace. There’s the pathos, so refreshingly bereft of bathos, of cliché sentimentality: The Wire is not afraid to kill a character you love and in ignoble ways. There’s astute cultural critique as the show is relentless in its critical assesment of contemporary American capitalism and bureaucracy.

I love all these aspects but what really gets me, what stirs me, is that the show never reduces. It never caricaturizes. On the contrary, it proliferates and creates. Take the title: The Wire. Presumably –– or at least nominally –– the title refers to the wiretap the detectives use to listen to criminal conversations made on the phone, in an office, in a car.

Now this wire offers the promise of revelation: what hides will be brought forth. And with it, justice. And, sure enough, thanks to the wire the police are privy to information they most definitely would not have had.

But what is revealed is not a conspiracy or fact or mastermind. What is revealed is a vast network of individuals, motivations, and monies. Rather than The Wire leading to a truth, it opens up a network beyond truth and falsity. Rather than the wire giving way to a climactic a ha!, it gives way to an infinite web ofand this, too. The wire is not the thing that clarifies; it is the thing that obfuscates, complicates, proliferates. The wire, then, is not the wire but the infinity of wires that constitute this elaborate network. The wire does not lead in; it leads sideways.

Just as the wiretap gives way to a vast network, so does this seemingly direct title. The wire refers to the high wire –– of Jimmy McNulty, of Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell, of Bubbles and Bunk, all these men –– and one woman, the inimitable Kima –– who walk a thin line high above the ground with no net to catch them.

The wire refers to what David Simon calls “the end of the American Empire”: we are down to the wire, to our last legs, our last gasp.

The wire refers to this message itself, the show an elaborate telegram sent over the wire: this is the end, our culture is unsustainable. Wake up!

The wire is the connection that links different walks of life together –– the cops, the dealers, the schools, the ports, the press, the politicians (only this wire connects us while keeping us infinitely distant).

And the wire winds right into our homes –– the wire is television, that great, misunderstood medium. And once there, it opens up, flowers, extends itself. Most television programs take precise aim, delivering a particular product to a particular demographic. The shows are pat; the jokes and drama and characters canned. But not The Wire. The Wire , once inside the house, expands rather than contracts.

And this, I want to say, is the promise of television as a medium. In what other medium might such complexity be articulated? Perhaps a novel. But a novel –– or really any book –– has a certain linearity. Sentences move left to right, which means only one thing, can be revealed at a time. The image, however, enjoys the allatonceness of the network, articulating the complexity of non–causal yet intimately intertwined relations.

So why not film? I don’t think so, at least not the film we are used to: the 100––minute spectacle. The complexity of The Wire takes time; it needs to endure, to wind its many tendrils this way and that. And that is the purview of television. Television endures.

The Wire performs what television can formally be, what it formally wants to be, how it wants to go. Television is not suited for the climax and dénouement that Hollywood loves so much. We watch television after work, in our pajamas, in our most intimate settings; it is intertwined with our lives. Television is not up there; it’s right here, in our living rooms.

And it returns, like a satellite. It is not a cinematic spectacle but an image engine that lives amongst us. And this allows it the freedom to linger, to live a life as complex as our own. To not just rise and fall but to drift, to move sideways. Of course, most television shows enter the house already dead. But that is not the fault of television; that is a mis––use of the medium. (This is not to say that all programs the deliver closure are not good or are unworthy; I am not as much passing judgment as I am exploring the relationship between media and programming of media.)

Television can sprawl like only the epic novel can, like only a life can. But, unlike the novel, television’s sprawl need not be epic. It can deliver something quite small, a glimmer, a fragment, a gesture. And, over time, these small moments can begin to make connections with each other, to form constellations of character, narrative, affect, mood, insight. Over time, the show becomes a life –– complex, messy, multivalent.

And this… is the promise of television.

Television is the progenitor of the network, shifting the very architecture of image construction and consumption. As television winds into our house, the image loses it monumental status. It is no longer up there on the big screen; it’s next to the microwave or couch or bookshelf. It streams images in fragments, a bit here, a bit there, but over and over again. And this allows it to build complex connections between things, to wind and meander, to linger, to spin off, to follow a tangent and then forget it, to assemble complex shapes of moments. In television, the story has no need to move forward. It is just as likely to follow tangents.

This is why –– among other reasons, such as cost effectiveness –– that reality television has become so prominent. Reality TV marks the absolute death of the monument; the image has become any day, anywhere, anybody. This doesn’t mean reality television shows are good or bad; I am not passing judgment. What I am saying is that reality television articulates its medium –– it moves sideways, through assembled fragments and moments, free of narrative linearity and apogees.

While The Wire conjures classical drama as well as Hill Street Blues, while it takes from Dickens, Burroughs, and Richard Prince, The Wire remains thoroughly of its medium. I see The Wire as picking up where Twin Peaks left off. Both shows exploit the medium. They don’t deliver nuggets, packages, like so many Twinkies. No, they move in and wiggle around, right next to us. They dole out fragments and connections; they multiply, proliferate, and wind; they link, connect, and suture in surprising ways. They build complexity within each scene as well as over time.

Rather then moving towards a single point on the horizon The Wire expands and proliferates. And this, I want to say, is the promise of television.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking:

To suggest that we are somehow harming the Earth, that we have a responsibility to the planet as we are its stewards, is really the same thing as saying: We are privileged on this planet, distinct from it, and hence are free to exhaust and consume all of its many splendored bounty. These are two sides of the same coin.

I’d like to change the coin, if I may.

The Earth, I believe, is indifferent. Absolutely, mercilessly indifferent. The Earth doesn’t care what the ozone is, whether there’s more or less carbon dioxide or plastic. Certain plants and animals might, of course, but the Earth per se? Nope. It doesn’t give a flying fuck.

To imagine that humans are somehow special, and distinct, is (partially) what breeds our contempt for our environs.

What if we shift the very terms of how we think about ourselves, collectively, on this planet? What if we no longer express a concern for this or that species or for this thing we call the environment and, instead, focus on our own living?

The problems I, for one, have with our food industry is not that it pillages the planet. It’s that it makes my life sucky: shitty food that makes me feel shitty is shitty.

The problems I have with rampant global capitalism is multifold and has nothing whatsoever to do with my concern over the spotted owl or the dolphin. My problem is that I hate being served by some bored, indifferent 18 year old making minimum wage. I want to exchange money and services with my neighbors; I want to feel I’m giving to someone good who, in turn, is giving me something good. The anonymity of the global market translated into the anonymity of the so-called local Sears is bone chilling.

The problem, then, is not with how we treat the Earth. It’s with how we treat ourselves. We work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. And thanks to microcomputing, we work all the time. All the time. There is no leisure, there is no pleasure.

And rage — and, of course, impotence (why are there ads for Viagra during prime time?) — runs rampant. Every time I’m out driving — every time — I have to negotiate a plethora of deranged assholes rushing here and there, speeding up to tailgate me, honking, running lights. This is not a sign of a healthy life.

And this — these day to day exchanges for coffee, groceries, driving — is the environment. Literally. I don’t want to give my money to save the Amazon rain forest. I want to not have to work 70 hours a week just to break even.

And if everyone were just to slow down, well then, perhaps we’d stop raping the trees and the ground. Perhaps then we would have less need for the oil we are so concerned about.

But as is, the very terms of environmentalism are constitutive of the precise problem said movement nominally serves. To focus on oil is to focus on the wrong thing; it is to focus on what the oil companies focus on, what the car companies focus on, what Amazon and UPS and Boeing focus on.

The environmental drive to conserve and preserve resources is misguided. It is to be duped by the CEOs and Wall Street.

The focus should not be oil or plants or dolphins but the day to day pleasure of human beings. And then everything else will fall into place.

Imagine all the money and resources and policy that are dumped into the so-called environmental movement all of sudden going to making day to day life for human beings more pleasurable. Imagine that rather than saving the whales, we save computer programmers, marketers, sales people from having their lives exhausted by the inane, insane, demands to work all the time. Imagine that we make medicine actually driven by concern for health and not how Pfizer’s stock performs.

Imagine that we put all our collective resources — our architects and economists, our do-gooders and our legislators — towards making life a pleasurable undertaking ripe with delicious, fresh food; with slow sex; with happy children who are not stressed out by standardized tests; with doctors who take the time to listen and heal; with roads filled with courteous, safe drivers; with movie theaters where popcorn eating is verboten.

Now that’s an environmental movement I could get behind.

One of the perks of living in San Francisco is the ready availability of good food — freakishly delicious coffee, quality meats and fish, local organic produce. I don’t need to drive to find any of these things. I simply walk out my door and stroll my merry way to one of, I don’t know, a dozen farmer’s markets — or to one of five local produce shops that sell beautiful fresh local organic fruits and vegetables. I can meander to one of three local butchers where I find local grass fed beef, free range chicken, locally made cold cuts.

Yes, San Francisco may be egregiously expensive and have a conspicuous problem with so-called homelessness but man oh man, we can eat and drink well. Just look at the bevy of house roasted coffee shops — Blue Bottle, Ritual, Four Barrel, Barefoot.

And yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, there are Starbucks and Pete’s everywhere I look. Now, I know what motivates Starbucks. But for the life of me I can’t fathom what drives my neighbors to go to Starbucks when they could just as easily go to Ritual. Same distance. Same cost. Better coffee. And yet.

This past month saw the grand opening of a Whole Foods, right smack in the middle of Noe Valley — across the street from the farmer’s market, down the block from the local cheese shop, and about three blocks from the butcher. To which I declare: What the fuck?

Whole Foods truly freaks me out. It is such an astounding success in branding that people feel like they are good people just for shopping there, giving their money to an anonymous, global, profit driven company. It’s unbelievable. Shoppers feel privileged — and personally rewarded — for spending money!

As a brand consultant, I am in awe. As a citizen, I am repulsed. This enormous, faceless, global corporation struts into the neighborhood and within days is sucking life from the local merchants.

I don’t blame Whole Foods, just as I don’t blame Starbucks. They are corporations whose goal is to make money. Of course. And I applaud them both for their smart, successful businesses. No, I don’t blame them. I blame my neighbors. I blame so-called liberal San Franciscans for not having the slightest fucking clue about what’s wrong with this civilization of ours. It’s not the lack of organic produce, remedied by the savior, Whole Foods. It’s the relentless homogenization, centralization, and anonymous will to velocity that’s killing us all — every day, in manifold ways.

What’s so egregious about Whole Foods is that it wears the liberal mantle. Those who shop there think they are doing the planet good— for giving their money to a global corporation! This is the Obama Effect: make liberals think something has changed, that they’ve somehow done good, while it’s all business as usual.

Listen, I am attracted to Obama just as I’m attracted to the fine produce of Whole Foods. But I am not so insane as to believe that voting for that guy or shopping at some goofy supermarket changes anything. On the contrary, it repeats the same ills. But what’s so dangerous is that they have us believing that things are different. At least Safeway and Bush are obvious foils, empty, soulless, declaring their life quashing will. Whole Foods and Obama deceive us into thinking things are getting better!

Change happens when change happens, when actual behaviors change. And voting for this guy instead of that or shopping at Whole Foods instead of Safeway changes nothing. It’s the same old thing.

Time to drink some real coffee and wake the fuck up.

I just saw Inglorious Basterds and have yet to fully mull its many splendors and so I’m using the venue as a way to do said mulling. Excuse what comes, please.

This is an odd, odd film. But it is not for naught. On the contrary, it seems that for Tarantino in oddity — in images and affects that meander and linger, that cut and tease — there is a certain freedom, dignity, and justice.

The undeniable climax of the film — we’ll have to return to what a climax is — is exquisite, mad, and patently untrue. That is, in a film that takes on the timbre of the historical, IB conspicuously flaunts its inaccuracy. This is not Valkyrie (a film I’ll admit I a) have not seen; and b) want to see just to get a glimpse of Tom Cruise as a pirate Nazi with a heart — which may be stranger than anything QT can create).

In disregarding historical fact in a film that seemingly borrows much from the historical record, Tarantino makes a claim about the status of film: it is distinctly not a referential creature. It is not beholden to the presumed real; it is the real. Yes, the reel is the real and vice versa.

And yet then what of propaganda? What of Nazi film making? If we disregard film’s obligation to the presumed real, then does it not open the door to what some might call irresponsible image making? To mass coercion?

Inglorious Basterds takes this question head on — and sideways and backwards and not at all. It is a nasty, funny, bloody, beautiful film that is itself multiple films, or at least a film with multiple threads. It begins one way, moves to another, then picks up the earlier thread years later then watches the two threads collide, synergistically and indifferently, in a fuck you all, we win, woopeee of an event.

And this — this power of film to literally burn the audience, to move them, and to do so with no allegiance whatsoever to ideology, concept, or narrative — is Tarantino’s answer to propaganda. Film serves no end other than itself — and that itself is (in)glorious and may be a basterd but it is free and lovely.

Inglorious Bastereds is a fuck you to the totalitarian cinema of any sort. This film does not flow and build. It builds, jumps, forgets, remembers, jumps, rams. And yet it cops the thrilling tension of narrative. Scene after scene is ripe and peculiarly taut. Resolve is often surprising and grotesque in a Coen brothers sort of way.

And tempered with the beautiful, tender, rowdy, and heart breaking (sort of). In these moments, strewn together in odd ways, there is a power and a love that is palpable and real.

When I was in high school, I lived liked a rock star: booze, drugs, sex, fearless frolic. Mind you, I did quite well academically. These things were not mutually exclusive. I knew I’d get into college; in fact, I applied to only one school knowing I’d get in. Adolescence was a time to explore and live well.

High school, it seems, has changed. It has become competitive. Young men and women — 13 to 18 years old — must work more or less tirelessly to ensure their spot at a college deemed worthy to them and their families. So rather than living their adolescent lives — lives brimming with desires and vitality, with vim, vigor, and brewing lust — these kids are working at old age homes, cramming for tests, popping Adderall just to make the literal and proverbial grade.

And for what? So they can go to a school that puts them in debt for the rest of their lives. School has become a great vehicle of capitalism: it quashes the revolution implicit in adolescence while simultaneously fomenting perpetual indebtedness. (It does other things, as well, and needless to say not all of our youth seek a higher education — but that’s out of my purview for now.)

Adolescence is so beautiful, even if awkward and insane — and perhaps precisely because of that. The world today with its blistering speed and global consumption has no place for this madness, this careening. And so kids are put on the straight and narrow, their demented energy harnessed by, and into, the capitalist engine (yes, the matrix).

What, then, of these brimming desires? Ah, we “sexualize” the pre-teens. We dress them up, clown-like, in mini skirts and make up, tube tops and glitter. But it’s a false sexuality, a false stage. Pre-pubescents may wreak havoc but they will never be able to harness the havoc of their later years and those adolescent hormones. By pushing sexuality back to a non-sexual phase of development, we eliminate the inefficiencies of emergent libido.

And it makes me want to weep.