In a New Yorker article on Burma, John Lanchester notes that “Burma … has long been preoccupied with isolation, and the desire to be cut off from the world recurs in its history.”
But Burma is not alone in one sense: it is hardly the only nation in the world that has sought to isolate itself from all outside intrusion. Korea was long known as the Hermit Kingdom, and North Korea maintains that tradition to this day. Bhutan is less militantly cloistered, but it strictly limits its contacts with the rest of the world. For many centuries, Tibet and Nepal held themselves aloof, as did a number of the kingdoms of Central Asia, and not only from Europeans, though from Europeans more intently than with close neighbors.
Indeed, dotted across Asia, from Japan and Korea to the landlocked mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan, were forbidden kingdoms. I have studied Asian history more closely than some other regions, but I wonder whether Asia is uniquely rich in hermit states. Certainly the territories of Persia and Rome, whatever the ruling state may have been at the time, have not lent themselves to such isolation. Nor has the easily traversed European peninsula, with its superabundant coastline and its many rivers flowing to every sea. About other parts of the world, I’m less certain. But I do wonder whether there is anything in common among the hermit states beyond geographical potential.
At 6 a.m. on Saturday, I awoke to the sound of spattering water. At first I thought maybe the expected thunderstorms had arrived and were blowing in through an open window, but when I got up to investigate, it was clear the sound was coming from the bathroom. I switched on the lights and discovered that water was streaming from them, and from the ceiling itself, and rapidly covering the bathroom floor. (Jenny took one look, declared, “There’s nothing we can do about it,” and collapsed back into bed, where she slept through the rest of the incident. I thought about waking her, but there wasn’t much point, so I let her get her rest.)
I quickly called my landlady, who fortunately answered the phone and said she’d be right over. Then I set to dashing back and forth with towels and every large pot and garbage can I could find, pausing in between to take various paintings down off our dapening walls. Eventually I realized that I ought to go upstairs and wake the Ooghes. When we had a similar problem a few months ago, it was a leak behind their toilet that did it, and when I got upstairs, I could hear the rush of water inside their apartment.
A groggy Robert emerged, went into his bathroom and managed to turn off the flow of water to his toilet, whose tank had somehow cracked during the night. (Our guess is that the earlier repairs to the hose leading to the tank had stressed the porcelain.)
By this time, the water had begun to spread beyond our bathroom, running along dampening seams across our living room. A steady flow ran down the wall and over the circuit-breaker panel, while more water had begun to run from one of the recessed lights in the living room. A steady drip fell from in front of our front door, while the frame of the bathroom door was now a flowing cascade.
Meanwhile, our landlady arrived with her mother and their usual fix-it guy, a Chinese fellow whose only other language is Spanish. They were admirably calm, though I was a bit startled to see our landlady’s aging Chinese mother immediately plunge to the floor and begin mopping the hardwood floor with the heap of towels I’d built up. She was right, though: keeping the floor dry was crucial unless we wanted to face the expense and hassle of replacing wavy floorboards.
As the crisis was brought under control, I made coffee for Robert, Lydia and myself, and we enjoyed some pleasant conversation in the drier section of my living room. (It was lucky I had water in my Brita in the fridge, because the fix-it man had shut off all water to the building.) Once operations moved to the Ooghe’s apartment, we followed the repairman up there and continued our chat, now joined by Lydia’s hamster, who did not have much to say.
After a while, our landlady, her mother and the repairman headed out, declaring, “We’ll be back,” and they returned soon enough with a brand new toilet. Installation took a few hours, and then everything was mostly back to normal. Our apartment dried gradually, with towels taking turns on the radiators. A chunk of paint still hangs limply from our bathroom ceiling, and the bathroom door frame is still too swollen for us to shut the door properly. But we all agreed that it could have been much worse, and it was a good thing we were all home.
It seems almost unfair to limit it to ten, but here we go (meme from T):
1. I have a sort of sub-Tourette neurological tickiness that lodges words in my head and creates an uncomfortable, distracting pressure to blurt them (which I sometimes do within a nonsense sentence, to make it seem less weird). Those who’ve known me a long time can probably recite a list of the most frequently recurring words. This is worse when I’m tense, as during my last couple of months at STV, when a little ditty with the lyric “So hard to give a shit / So hard to give a shit” (in an Eastern European accent) ran constantly through my head all day at work.
2. When I was younger, it surprised me to learn that not everyone wanted to be a writer and make books.
3. I’m obsessed with Central Asia.
4. I don’t own any Legos because I’m afraid if I did, I’d never do anything else.
The New York Times has an article on the dismal approval rate of South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, down to an appalling 11 percent.
The article makes the point that Roh’s unpopularity has little to do with the North Korean issue, which people across the political spectrum recognize as intractable for any political party. The primary issue is the economy, but the article also argues that the reason the economy has come so sharply into focus is that Roh has been largely successful at what he was elected to do: give greater independence to prosecutors in pursuing corruption, stop using tax collectors and intelligence agencies for political ends, and push democratization forward.
Now voters want to use their enhanced democracy to vote for someone else. They’re frustrated by high real estate and education costs, stagnating wages, high unemployment, and President Roh’s fixation despite all this on ideological issues such as collaboration during the Japanese occupation.
What will all this mean for my little corner of the South Korean government? Hard to say, except that I hope a focus on the economy will mean we can at last get some cost-of-living raises.
I do think the article is salutary, however, for making it clear just how little the internal politics of South Korea have to do with the issues Americans associate with the country. This should be a reminder that the politics in most countries is not primarily about us, but about them. Iraqi factions are almost certainly more interested in the politics of their country and region than in our midterm elections, and spikes in violence shouldn’t be read as secret coded messages to us. The Iranian election of Ahmadinejad and the Palestinian election of Hamas likewise were not gestures of defiance aimed at America, but political calculations based on an intimate concern with the politics of those respective countries. Sometimes, an election is just an election.
Katamari Damacy is a surreal Japanese video game whose name means “the spirit of clumping,” or more simply, “clump spirit.” The goal of the game and the mode of play are fairly simple but different from anything else I’ve ever played: you roll a ball (the katamari) around various environments, picking up all kinds of objects as you go — paper clips, people, elephants, chopsticks. As you collect objects, the katamari grows, allowing you to pick up ever bigger items. (You can see what this actually looks like here.) The game is presided over by a king whose speaking voice is record scratching and who either praises your success or shoots lasers out of his eyes when you fail. (He also has great legs and a psychedelic cylindrical pillow permanently lodged behind his head.)
What makes the game so compelling is the elaborate, creative, surreal universe in which you operate — not to mention its zany, sometimes dark humor — and part of that effect is achieved by the music, which consists of thoroughly loopy J-pop and a pair pieces for full orchestra, recorded with appropriate theatrical bombast.
I wish I could tell you who the artists are, but I can’t find that information anywhere. Still, you can buy the soundtrack at YesAsia.com.
In the comments on a TPM Café piece on Barack Obama’s efforts to reach out to the Christian right, I ran across this fascinating passage from Exodus 21:22-25 (New International Version):
22 If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely [or she has a miscarriage] but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
There’s a little ambiguity over what exactly is meant by “gives birth prematurely,” but it seems clear from context — and from the state of medical technology in Biblical times, which would have been insufficient to keep a seriously premature baby alive — that this passage is describing the death of a fetus. (The bracketed interpolation is theirs, not mine.)
A very clear distinction is then made between the killing of a fetus, for which a fine is incurred, and “serious injury,” which can apparently be inflicted only on the living woman, not on the unborn fetus. Fetuses, then, are distinctly in a separate category from actual people. Those who insist that abortion is murder are thus rejecting the legal definitions set forth in the Book of Exodus, which most Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians recognize as the word of God.
Interestingly, this passage is actually used by pro-lifers to support their position because it penalizes the killing of a fetus. That seems unarguable, but based on the above passage, it would seem more Biblically correct to demand a ban on cars and guns than on abortion, because maiming and death as a result of auto and gun accidents is relatively common and clearly considered more serious by the Biblical God than the death of a fetus.
Of course, no such thing will ever happen (or should). Just as a few verses are plucked from the Bible to justify a culturally based revulsion against homosexuality, the Biblical justifications for banning abortion are ex post facto, chosen to support a preexisting political position. (Indeed, this cherry-picking approach is regularly applied by people who consider themselves Biblical literalists. I would be fascinated to see a serious effort to construct a complete world view starting with the Bible and rejecting any outside sources that contradict the Bible — a modern Karaite movement, as it were — but I suppose the many contradictions within the Bible itself would make such an effort nearly impossible.)
Why abortion is so controversial is not an easy question to answer, but the reasons should be sought in the structure of our society today and in its recent history, not in the Bible. Note: For those who prefer it, the King James version is less ambiguous:
22 If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. 23 And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, 24 Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
While we’re on the subject of eighties music, let’s remember that there was something going on other than synth pop. It’s the Seattle grunge scene that got really famous, but in San Francisco, there was an earlier anti-fashion scene full of rage, heavy guitars and sloppily dressed rockers: thrash metal.
After the massive success of Seven and the Ragged Tiger and Arena, Duran Duran began to fragment, but productively. John and Andy Taylor, the guitarist and bass player respectively, joined up with Robert Palmer to form Power Station, innovating a kind of synthetic soul rock that would stay current for the rest of the decade. (INXS, anyone?) Their first hit was a cover of T-Rex‘s “Bang a Gong,” but they scored much bigger with “Some Like It Hot,” which is sort of a sexified “The Wild Boys.” The biggest sonic difference from Duran Duran comes at the guitar solo, in which John Taylor lets loose with a burst of Eddie Van Halen-style high-speed licks where one would expect something more layered and processed. The video is ugly but fascinating.
Less successful, and much less fun, was Arcadia, the side project of Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor. As Attack of the Clones is to the earlier Star Wars films, so is the very long video for “Election Day,” Arcadia‘s biggest hit, to the earlier Duran Duran videos. It kind of sounds like Duran Duran, and it kind of looks like a Duran Duran video, but the life is drained out of it. Somewhere along the line, they seem to have forgotten that this shit is kind of funny. (Musically, it probably didn’t help that they had Sting, David Gilmour and Herbie Hancock involved.)
Even more pretentious is “Promise,” whose video telegraphs seriousness by being in black and white and consists of doomful images of Cold War weaponry, the devastation of war and zebras fighting (no, really). The song itself is dreadful and made worse by the use of a super-trendy South African bass groove.
Duran Duran did come back together once more, in all its glory, to record a final #1 hit: “A View to a Kill.” The band seems to be having fun again, and Simon Le Bon’s yodel is in top form. In the video, they seem to be enjoying themselves immensely as they play silly spy games on the Eiffel Tower, and who can resist Le Bon’s hammy self-introduction at the end of the video as “Bon … Simon Le Bon”?
But music was moving on, and Duran Duran didn’t have an easy time of it. They released Notorious in 1986, and it did produce a major hit with its title track, but only three of the original five members had participated in the recording, and though “Notorious” is a fine example of mid-eighties white funk, the magic was gone. Against Peter Gabriel’s gigantic hit record So, with its spectacular videos for brilliant, intelligent songs — “Big Time,” “In Your Eyes,” and especially “Sledgehammer” — “Notorious,” song and video, couldn’t help but seem limp.
In 1987, Duran Duran released the video for “Skin Trade,” also from Notorious. Simon Le Bon gives a nice performance, but again, neither the song nor the video offers anything grand, new or impressive on the scale of what had come before. It’s not bad, just ordinary.
From 1988’s Big Thing, “I Don’t Want Your Love” is a bit of an improvement, especially in terms of the video, which goes back to having some kind of theme and shows some visual flair. The song itself moves in a house music direction, which at the time is actually pretty with it, if not quite ahead of the curve. Still, it’s easy to hear a song like “I Don’t Want Your Love” prefiguring EMF‘s “Unbelievable.”
After that long dearth, the Depeche Mode-influenced “All She Wants Is” is a welcome return to something like form. It’s sexy, for one thing, sexier than any of the band’s singles since their Rio days. And the video looks good, in a way that their recent videos simply hadn’t. (Also, this song has a certain positive association in my head because my middle school friend Jon’s friend Heather, a freakishly beautiful redhead who had a taste for black stretch tube dresses and was 18 but willing to let me hang out with her — I even went with her and her friends to see Aerosmith and Skid Row at the Cow Palace — could do a perfect imitation of that little moan-yelp sample towards the end of the song.)
The Big Thing period ends with an unfortunate attempt at seriousness, “Do You Believe in Shame?” a rambling ballad that steals its melody line from, of all things, Creedence Clearwater Revival‘s “Suzy Q” and should be charged with one count of Indian drone abuse.
Things get even sadder with 1990’s Liberty, which came out at exactly the wrong moment for a Duran Duran resurgence, as the slick, synthetic eighties were giving way to the earthy, grungy nineties. The results are predictably grim. The first single, “Violence of Summer,” is like an imaginary terrible song from INXS‘s Kick, and the video has Le Bon strutting around like an aging George Michael. From the band that wrote the choruses to “Union of the Snake,” “The Reflex” and “Is There Something I Should Know?” this is flaccid songwriting indeed, and the “chi-na-na-na” chant is just embarrassing.
“Serious,” is only slightly better. If it had been the product of an Australian band in the heyday of Men at Work, it might have been an acceptable hit. On the other hand, the band’s forced levity in the video — with a black guy! — gives the whole affair the feel of an ad for khakis.
1993’s The Wedding Album, then, was a surprise. This was way before any eighties revival, but the album was a hit, to a great extent on the strength of its lovely lead single, the ballad “Ordinary World,” which recaptures some of the feel of the first three albums (though mixed with a hearty dose of aging-rocker schmaltz).
The followup hit, “Come Undone,” likewise sounds a bit like Seven and the Ragged Tiger-era deep tracks, though of course its house beat is distinctly turn-of-the-nineties. What stands out, though, is that, like “Ordinary World,” it’s a lovely song.
The final single, “Too Much Information,” is a fun, well crafted little romp that includes, strangely enough, lyrics that mean something concrete. Indeed, it’s a clever dig at their own lunatic success. Musically, they’re still channeling INXS plus EMF, but they’re doing it well. (It’s also the first video in which Simon Le Bon is adequately tortured since “The Wild Boys.”)
If you were a rock band that had just had its first hit record in years, what would your next move be? Probably not a Quixotic cover album, but that’s where Duran Duran went, releasing “Thank You,” on which they cover the likes of Lou Reed, Sly and the Family Stone, and most notoriously, Public Enemy — their cover of “911 is a Joke” has to be heard to be believed.
The first single was “Perfect Day,” by Lou Reed, and is delivered with appropriate drugginess. The video keeps the mood with its color-saturated red padded cell.
More startling is their cover of “White Lines,” by rap pioneer Grandmaster Flash, which opens with a heavy emphasis on the word “white” (really). In the video, the band poses as an actual rock band, and musically they pull off a kind of thrash-funk version of themselves. The whole thing is kind of a disaster, but certainly one of Duran Duran‘s most interesting disasters over the years. After the success of The Wedding Album, this nearly killed the band.
At this point, John Taylor left the group to join Neurotic Outsiders, a metal band whose other members were Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols and Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum of Guns N’ Roses.
But back to Duran Duran. Now down to two original members, the group released Medazzaland, or at least they sort of released it. After the disaster that was Thank You, EMI at last dropped Duran Duran, and the new record was only released in the US, not in Europe. Still, its first single, “Out of My Mind” (no embedding), managed to get inserted into the soundtrack of The Saint. It’s actually not bad, and the band does put on its New Romantic duds for the video.
“Electric Barbarella,” recalling the band’s namesake, is also a kind of throwback: a techno dance song that tries (but sort of fails) to have a memorable chorus. With its sexy video, the song managed to be a minor hit in both the UK and the US, but it ain’t no “Girls on Film.”
By the time of Pop Trash, released in 2000, there was little left to the limping trio. “Someone Else, Not Me” is a faintly psychedelic ballad that is not immediately offensive.
But by now enough time had passed since their heyday that Duran Duran could sell out shows on the strength of their classic material. What surprised people was that there was new material as well, and that they liked it. The result was Astronaut, the first Duran Duran recording since “View to a Kill” to include all five original members of the band. (Poor Warren Cuccurullo, an Italian from Canarsie who had been a session musician and then a member from Notorious through Pop Trash — the lean years, in other words — was booted to make way for the lineup people actually cared about.) The first single, “(Reach Up for the) Sunrise” is not exactly a return to form, nor is it particularly compelling as something new. It somehow sounds like an old band reunited, though I can’t put my finger on why. But it exists, and here it is.
I don’t know, maybe it’s the messaginess of the songs. In “What Happens Tomorrow,” Simon Le Bon declares that “You’ve got to believe it will be all right in the morning,” and that’s a pretty good summary of the lyrics. I much prefer Duran Duran‘s lyrics from back when they were all coked up and didn’t make any sense at all.
Sadly, another Duran Duran record is expected next year.
Once there was a band that in the early eighties carved out a unique sound and image that were widely copied. They innovated constantly, taking new stylistic leaps with each album and producing gorgeous, visually sophisticated videos for their many hit singles. I’m not talking about The Cure, Talking Heads, Blondie or The Cars, but about a band usually written off as pretty-boy followers. I’m talking about Duran Duran.
Duran Duran have always been easy to mock. First of all, they were very pretty, and they flaunted it, incorporating fashion into their self-presentation. But that puts them in the same camp as Roxy Music, David Bowie and Andre 3000. Second, their sound was heavily synthetic, with every instrument, including Simon Le Bon’s unusual voice, sounding electronically processed. But again, how different is that from Devo or Kraftwerk? Third — and possibly this is what really drove the rock critics nuts — they were enormously popular.
But set aside the critics and the mockery for a moment. I remember Duran Duran from when I was a kid, first noticing pop music at about age nine, in 1983, when “Union of the Snake” was getting Top 40 radio play. I loved them instantly. They sounded great, and they still do. Other artists I grasped instantly included Cindi Lauper, Van Halen and Quiet Riot, and on the whole, I think I was right. This was before I learned which bands I was supposed to like because they were cool — before I rejected music that sounded good because it wasn’t metal, for example — so my responses were fairly pure. Not sophisticated, but not tainted either. (And not wholly unsophisticated: I’d been raised on a steady diet of Beatles, modern jazz and trips to the San Francisco Symphony.)
In my subsequent reordering of my memory to fit the historical picture, I’ve been too willing to label Duran Duran followers rather than innovators. The official narrative has groups like The Cure and Joy Division out front, but neither created the electronic sheen that was Duran Duran‘s trademark. Likewise, Talking Heads has already by 1980 invented the angular electro-funk that will define much of the eighties, but they haven’t yet harnessed it to a coherent pop vehicle. (Nevertheless, 1980’s Remain in Light has more depth, seriousness and beauty than all of Duran Duran‘s output together.)
Here’s Duran Duran‘s first video, “Planet Earth,” beautifully shot and already showing a powerful sense of fashion that is, yes, oh-so-eighties, but is also good and interesting to look at years later. Keep in mind that this is 1981, the same year that the Cure puts out the pleasant but ponderous “Charlotte Sometimes,” whose video looks downright shoddy, and “Primary,” which is pretty much precisely the sound that Duran Duran proceeds to transcend.
Next we come to an interesting bit of video that Duran Duran used as the backdrop for live performances of their second single, “Careless Memories.” It’s an anime action adventure — five years before Robotech, three before Transformers.
Two weeks after the launch of MTV, Duran Duran filmed their most notorious video: no, not “Notorious,” but “Girls on Film,” a racy melange of campy fetishes suited for projection at stylish nightclubs and clearly never meant for basic-cable TV. It is obscene, though in the super-glossy, hyperreal mode of Playboy spreads or Varga girls. It is also an extraordinarily appealing song with a killer bass line, and a video in which every shot is beautiful and the fashion, though outrageous, is also very, very good.
A curious artifact follows: the video for “My Own Way,” but not the version of the song that appears on Rio, the band’s sophomore record. This version has got disco strings, and the video is flimsier than many by the band, but the Spanish motifs do point the way forward toward the exoticism that would mark the Rio period.
Though their first record did well in the UK, Duran Duran had yet to chart a single in America. That changed with “Hungry Like the Wolf,” from Rio, which was also the first of the band’s exotic-locale videos (and a clear ripoff of the hugely popular Raiders of the Lost Ark). Shot in Sri Lanka, this video probably shares some of the blame for my Orientalist fascinations later in life.
But listen also to the sound of the song. There’s that little tootling keyboard riff throughout, and the snarling, anti-melodic guitars in the solo. And as always, there’s John Taylor’s grooving New Wave bass line.
The exoticism is even more blatant in “Save a Prayer,” the first ballad the band released as a single and a huge hit in the UK (it was not released as a US single). The video is essentially a tourism promotion for mystical Sri Lanka, and possibly the inspiration for those weird background videos that show in karaoke bars. The song itself is lovely, and the most sonically interesting trick is the hitch introduced into the main keyboard line, which mimics the unique yodel-hitch in Le Bon’s singing voice, in which transitions from one note to another seem to incorporate a leap to a third, more distant note.
For “Rio,” Duran Duran trades Sri Lanka for Antigua, and with the change comes a visual lightness suited to the song. Though it was not even close to their biggest hit, “Rio” seems to have lodged in people’s minds as theDuran Duran song and video, and you can see why. The fashion (a year before Miami Vice) is at its peak, the band is stylish and playful, and the music is quintessential: the sixteenth-note keyboard riff floating on top, the buzzsaw guitar, the prominent bass line, and Simon Le Bon’s nasal whine leading the whole story.
In 1983, Duran Duran took a step backwards to re-release their eponymous debut LP in the United States, but with one addition: “Is There Something I Should Know?” The new song, which bursts to life with a blast of supercharged tom-tom as a double-tracked Le Bon sings a simplified version of the chorus, was Duran Duran‘s first UK #1, and a big hit in the US as well. The video casts a backward glance, incorporating clips from earlier videos, but the look is certainly fashion-forward. There are endless Mondrian-inspired cuts and wipes, not to mention an interior set that is stolen two years later for the influential and then-startling ads for Calvin Klein’s Obsession.
With 1983’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Duran Duran continued their saga of synthetic exoticism, complete with an album cover that looked like an inscrutable Dungeons and Dragons map. Everything about the album was huge, especially the sound. The first single, “Union of the Snake,” was one of the first contemporary pop songs I ever fell in love with, and I still remember how gigantic and adventurous it sounded. Like many bands of the era, Duran Duran was moving to a kind of synthetic power-soul (with credit due to Bowie), but keep in mind that it’s still two years until Robert Palmer finds his new sound (with help from members of Duran Duran), and three until Peter Gabriel releases “Sledgehammer” (which happens to have one of the best music videos ever made).
Their followup single, “New Moon on Monday,” is not one of Duran Duran‘s strongest songs or videos, though it does showcase Le Bon’s considerable vocal skills.
What came next, though, was the high point in Duran Duran‘s career: “The Reflex,” a giant #1 hit in America and the UK. The whole song is great, but it’s that chorus, with its irresistible vibrato, that really does it — that and the clever variations on the chorus planted throughout, like Easter eggs in a video game. I remember watching this video over at Joey’s house when I was a kid — he had cable, back when that involved a brown box on top of your TV set and a lighted switch that you slid along a printed bar of numbers like a slide rule — and waiting anxiously for the cut chorus, then the “why-yai-yai-yai” chorus, then finally the “aawww, the reflex” chorus.
The video looks more dated than many of Duran Duran‘s, especially because of that terrible wave special effect. Still, it’s a good reminder that Duran Duran was a live act. Despite their processed sound, they toured constantly, and their live record, Arena, is surprisingly good.
Speaking of Arena, which you can watch online, I had a period of listening to it constantly and fantasizing about one day writing a novel that would follow its emotional contours. (The novel would, of course, be about my Lego warriors, the Sylvanians, doing battle against the enemy forces of Alto Deto on the jungle planet of Reorilia, where dinosaurs still roamed a landscape with a surprising resemblance to my parents’ shag-carpeted conversation pit.)
Arena included one studio track, “The Wild Boys,” which was to be the band’s last hurrah before they split into side projects. The video is one of their most compelling, set in a sexy sort of industrial nightmare, but there is something overly pushy about the song, something forced and too loud. Le Bon’s voice sounds tired, and the beat is a little too Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The trademark sinuous bass is stiffened. Still, the video looks really fucking cool, and that’s worth something.
For a while there, Duran Duran were, if not a great band, a band with an incredibly compelling and distinctive sound that melded a wide variety of influences into something new.
Stay tuned for Part 2, in which Duran Duran falls apart, does some interesting side stuff, and then fades slowly into obscurity.
I am reading the book, and I am seeing signs of it everywhere. Said provides a revelatory symptomology of Western intellectualism, arguing that Western intellectual efforts to understand the East ultimately create a kind of imaginary Orient whose purpose is to give the intellectuals power over the actual Orient and at the same time cement the role of the intellectuals as revealers of the true Orient.
Said’s narrow focus on the Western intellectual approach to the Orient causes him to overlook two important factors that undermine the charged anger he brings to his book. The first is the degree to which all of the Western scientific effort has been a struggle for mastery over the subjects under investigation, whether they are viruses, Muslims, Native Americans, steam engines, the working classes, the French, etc. The second is the degree to which all intellectual endeavor, Western and non-Western alike, has the effect of reducing raw actuality to categories and types. Nevertheless, his insights into the particular journey of European scholarship are profound.
Said sees modern Orientalism beginning in about the eighteenth century, or the transition from the seventeenth. He does not explain particularly well why this should be the starting point, but an article on the witchcraft trials of baroque Germany reminded me that the latter half of the seventeenth century was marked by the resolution of the longstanding warfare between Protestants and Catholics (the Thirty Years War ended in 1648), and also by renewed Ottoman warfare in Europe. The long period of intra-Christian conflict sustained a divide between us and them that would need to be supplanted by some renewed sense of Christian unity. A shift of focus onto the more distant menace of militant Islam could certainly have served that purpose, just as it had in earlier centuries, during the Crusades.
I’ll post more ideas as they come up, as they certainly will. A couple quickies: Last night, in a nature show about Yellowstone in winter, a wilderness photographer spoke precisely the language of Orientalism, positioning himself as the one who is able to reveal this landscape to the wider public so that they can set about preserving it in its timelessness, or even restoring it to an imagined ideal, and also prepare it for the future. It is a language of essentialism, paternalism and romanticism, and it occurs to me that environmentalist adventurism remains one of the few traditional endeavors of romantic imperialism that remains respectable within the liberal establishment. (The others are the delivery of aid, and to a lesser extent, the grand tour.)
Or this: Said’s fervor often feels overblown, but then I run across passages that remind me of the intellectual universe in which he was operating when he wrote the book in 1977. For example, at one point Said declares that the study of imperialism is essentially a taboo in the academe, hardly discussed, particularly by American Marxist scholars. Marxist scholars? Right! I forget that just a few decades ago, serious intellectuals of the left were expected to be able at least to navigate the minefields of Marxist thought, even if they ultimately rejected Marxism. Meanwhile, by the time I reached college, the subject of colonialism was everywhere — most certainly a result, at least in part, of Said’s groundbreaking work. This intellectual earthquake, and the entrenched worldview that prevailed beforehand, explain many of the more baffling ritual insistences of our professors in college. Jenny had an East Asian literature professor who devoted considerable class time to debunking the theory that Chinese people are sluggish because they live in a hot climate. To students raised on post-Civil Rights-movement curricula, in a world of Japanese high-tech goodies, the whole idea of racial essentialism and sluggish Asians seemed as absurdly archaic as Lamarckian evolution or epicycles, but these ideas were rendered ridiculous only as recently as our early childhoods.
In a New Yorker article on Burma, John Lanchester notes that “Burma … has long been preoccupied with isolation, and the desire to be cut off from the world recurs in its history.”
