I believe in Eminem. He says things with Authenticity. Amongst the slate of carefully timed, coiffed, and vetted Super Bowl XLV commercials (no one wants another Janet), Eminem’s brand of honesty – brutally truthful, affectingly honest – seems so real in its honesty. It is an honesty that is singularly Eminem’s. It is in effect, his brand. Rappers have it hard. Their scrappy, hard fought origin is the very thing that makes them successful in their music genre. It is the touting of their survival in the midst of such hardship that is at the core of their identity and their product. It is the classic position of the Other in that the authenticity of the rapper is completely based on his/her alienation and marginalization in society. Once they become successful in the music industry (the platinum records, Grammy awards) their success risks them becoming “soft” and inauthentic to their fanbase. Eminem has negotiated a means around this co-option of toughness. His characteristic refusal to enjoy his celebrity – to be seen enjoying the parties (he may attend but always with his iconic scowl), hanging out with other celebs, and other fluff that is part and parcel of being a celebrity – validates his Otherness and perpetuates his success. In short, he is a celebrity whose very success lies in his manufacture of “authenticity.” It is irrelevant whether or not Eminem actually is honest in the way he navigates through the luxurious excess that his fame brings. What is more significant here is that his brand is all about representing this honesty. In his Brisk Tea commercial, when the “suit” tells Eminem that he can’t re-name the tea to “Eminem’s Shut Up and Drink It! Iced Tea,” Eminem pushes the claymation guy off the...

1. Whatever is happening is actually happening and I am interpreting it correctly. 2. Whatever is happening is actually happening and I am not interpreting it correctly. 3. Whatever is happening is not actually happening and I am interpreting it correctly. 4. Whatever is happening is not actually happening and I am not interpreting it correctly. These are the four states of the schizophrenic mind. They are not exotic. Almost everyone should find them recognizable in themselves, but it is rare to have a collective experience of fractured perception: this is why we go to the movies. The Lumiere Brothers inaugurated the era of perceptual tourism in 1895. No (healthy) person suspects that their perceptive powers are compromised, so we, as a rule, default to condition one. The early history of film is the process of the first audiences learning that the special space of the darkened film theater was a space where, unlike the space of the street or even the live performance, the conventions of perception need not apply. In the intervening period, a train of filmmakers has dared to present increasing challenges to the perceptive powers of their audiences, but it has not been until now that an auteur has developed a truly schizophrenic direction. Darren Aronofsky is the only interesting American filmmaker of his generation, our generation; in an industry that seems only able to turn out Little Fockers, bristly, challenging, deep films are wholly alien. Aronofsky is either the last or the first of his kind, a scary genius. I sat down to watch Pi expecting to see another overwrought indie that had made a stir at Sundance (in the era when Sundance still meant something) and would likely have the feel of a thesis project. I expected it to...

Assuming its intent was to provide a kind of push-back, heading into the midterm elections, against the right wing momentum generated by Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s pre-election Rally to Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive served as a useful reminder that the discourse of fear is not one that favors the left. But it doesn’t seem to have served for much more than that. John Boehner – yet another Republican whose name reminds us of a sexualized part of the human anatomy – is the new face of political power in the United States, which is bad news for progressives unless they happen to be of the smarmy t-shirt making variety (and for those who are, I offer up the following t-shirtable slogan, free of charge: “Put a Dick and Bush together and what do you get? A Boehner!”). As for the part of things the Stewart/Colbert rally seemed to get right, the reasons for this are effectively and polemically synthesized in Alain Badiou’s recent book on France’s rich, xenophobic dickhead of a president Nicolas Sarkozy, The Meaning of Sarkozy. In remarks delivered during a seminar just after the aforementioned rich xenophobic dickhead’s election in 2007, and later rewritten as the second chapter of the aforementioned book, Badiou offers an “analysis of the electoral context” in France that could just as easily be applied to the recent electoral context in the United States. “[T]he situation,” Badiou writes of the campaign cycle that ended with Sarkozy’s triumph, “was one of a conflict between two fears, an original fear and a derivative one. The original fear belongs to the section of the population who dread something happening that will precipitate their decline, and it is, Badiou writes, “focused on the traditional...

Strange that I would feel motivated to compose a defense of Facebook, of all things, n precisely this moment – strange for at least a couple of different reasons. Strange, first of all, because I have not seen, nor do I plan to see, The Social Network, the much-ballyhooed new movie about Facebook’s founding father, Mark Zuckerberg (ex-CNN talking head Rick Sanchez would likely point out, at this point, that with a last name like that, the guy’s almost certainly a Jew). Not just because the movie seems perhaps a bit too timely to strike me as worthy of critical attention, but also owing to more personal matters. Zuckerberg, billionaire at the precocious age of twenty-six, with his signature jeans and t-shirt (or sweatshirt when its chilly) non-outfits that some in the fashion world have declared the epitome of the new banker chic – the look that goes with access to and control over the movements of large quantities of capital – and his penchant for computer programming, reminds me of my cousin Andrew. Like Zuckerberg, Andrew spent his time in college less on schoolwork (I think he was a psych. major, but I’d have to double check that) than on partying with friends and, more importantly, fiddling about with computers. Like Zuckerberg, Andrew signifies to the world the – from my perspective – enormous quantity of money to which his person corresponds not by wearing expensive, designer clothes but, precisely, by not wearing expensive, designer clothes, and instead wearing whatever the fuck he wants (and nothing says “I’m wearing whatever the fuck I want” like jeans and a t-shirt). As for the money itself, the precise figures are, naturally, a carefully guarded family secret. But a secret is not carefully guarded unless it is...

In the hours and days after the messianic histrionics of Glenn Becks Restoring Honor Rally, most in the media seemed to find themselves inspired to analyze the proceedings in terms of a turn toward God, on the part of this supposed newsman turned newsmaker. A rather flimsy analysis, I thought, for it only parroted Beck’s own pronouncement, during the rally—drenched in the adoration of his followers—that “today is the day America turns back to God.” Perhaps history will show him to have been prescient. But the question, while we wait, is: to just what God might Beck, or even America, have been turning (or turning back) on the day Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was forever contaminated? As a Mormon, of course, Beck himself probably doesn’t understand what God, or gods—or, according to some accounts, aliens—he worships, or is descended from, or is in the process of becoming. As one of the unquestionable leaders of the increasingly politicized and, therefore, increasingly dangerous turn-of-the-century American evangelical movement, on the other hand, there can be little doubt that the God to which Beck referred during his Dream Day rally was the Judeo-Christian one to which that movement traces itself (in reality, of course, it is just one of what are surely an endless number of bastard children of 1980s televangelism). Perhaps, however, things aren’t as obvious as they appear—or, in any event, as Beck and his cabal of cohorts would like them to appear. Despite a Bar Mitzvah (a year later than is typical, for reasons I won’t get into here), I am no theologian. Nonetheless, I did once read the Book of Job (in its English translation) for a seminar on tragic literature taught by a middle-aged French moral philosopher who shall...

I grew up in the era of grunge. I still remember the first time I saw 1,000 kids going nuts to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It was an under twenty-one club in Quebec during the winter carnival. I was seventeen and half drunk on the mixture of red wine and grain alcohol they called caribou. It was the first time I realized that there was a spirit to an age. I had always read authors who insisted on what I thought was a gross oversimplification; now I am one of them. There are key moments when the music, sometimes a specific song, acts as the most perfect and concise description of the collective consciousness. We are not in such a moment. We are living through the era of Hip Hop disco, the awkward adolescence of this art form. Browse the charts, or better, tune in Top 40 radio, and you will find that Taio Cruz “came to dance, dance, dance, dance,” that Enrique Iglesias and Pitbull like “the way you move on the floor,” that Usher admits the “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love.” As a phenomenon, this music is neither very interesting nor particularly relevant. I never thought Hip Hop, a form that is laudable in many respects would look to or indulge in disco, a style that is looked back on with almost universal derision. The problem, just as it was in the 70s, is the site of the music. The 70s saw the site of music swing towards its extremes. On the one hand, it located itself in the garage. The children of the first generation born into Rock & Roll took their second hand instruments and their worn down ideas of music and turned them into something in which the...