MUSIC

Beck

Beck's eyes are preternaturally blue, and until recently, exactly what lay behind them was something of an enigma. Whether clowning in videos, spontaneously breakdancing at awards shows, or just gazing ahead on his album covers, the junkyard boho was always looking beyond, seemingly into a bizarre realm unhindered by genre-- or behavioral-- expectations. But lately, he just looks lost. Wandering down a gimmicky path lined with empty pop-up confections in the "Girl" video, the 35-year-old dad with bad hair found himself relegated to the role of passerby. More than ever, 2005 saw Beck losing his edge. So, on this take two, he embraces the talent and ideas of contemporaries and descendants alike (all of whom, I'm sure, are really, really nice), hoping for a little friendly friction. Much like its inconsistent source material, Guerolito emits a few flashes but lacks the cohesiveness that was once this innovator's hallmark.

Possibly a sign of self-conscious second-guessing, Beck began to commission new mixes for Guero early on. Oddly, the lo-fi blip GameBoy Variations EP, featuring remixes for four of the album's songs, was thrown up online a full two months before Guero's official release. Then, over the course of the year, about a half-dozen more trickled out. Wisely, not all of these previously released alternates-- including lazy efforts from Dizzee Rascal and Röyksopp-- are included here. All in all, nine of Guerolito's 14 tracks are new, which, along with fresh artwork courtesy of surrealist Guero cover illustrator Marcel Dzama, and a track-for-track sequencing, indicates the intention of a true remix album rather than just another careless fourth-quarter hodge-podge ch-ching. While such efforts are duly noted, the bare-bones liners and widely varying quality of these retries make Guerolito better suited for iTunes cherry-picking than full-on Amazon consumption.

Several tracks equal or trump their initial incarnations by emphasizing pluses and playing into their remixers' entrenched strengths. Both Boards of Canada and Air are wonderfully type-cast; the former's take on "Broken Drum" highlights Beck's Sea Change-y lonesome vocals with apropos amble ambience while the latter's "Missing" redux, "Heaven Hammer", boosts sexy-church synths, echoing drums, and everything else you'd expect from France's finest purveyors of cheesy-cool. The new "Scarecrow", courtesy of El-P, is a marked improvement on its predecessor, with the hip-hop producer's succinct drums and keyboard stabs giving the song a newfound strut. Meanwhile, golden boy Diplo reiterates his current crate-king status by slowing down the staccato bass backbone of the English Beat's "Twist and Crawl" to provide his "Go It Alone" redo with a stealth funk.

Alas, many other attempts fall flat due to weak, repetitive arrangements, or an inability to convincingly congeal with their forebears. The worst offender is nerd rap group Subtle, whose lumbering "Farewell Ride" won't entice anybody to grab onto the Anticon trolley anytime soon. (I hope.) Two ex-Unicorn projects are represented, and neither clicks, though for different reasons; Islands' Uni-lite twee instrumentation sounds woefully out of place when meshed with Beck's East L.A. non-sequiturs on "Que Onda Guero" (not to mention the ill-fated, half-assed screwed 'n' chopped bit), while Th' Corn Gangg's electro R2-D2 spin on "Emergency Exit" takes too long to climax with its dense thump and cut-up vox. And just when you thought the Beasties couldn't get more annoying, Adrock comes along with his throwback minimalist-clang take on "Black Tambourine" featuring enough repeating "ugh!" and "what!" drops to make you want to steamroll your copy of Check Your Head.

His fierce glint fading, it's becoming increasingly clear that Beck is no longer able to freely revel in the youthful dalliances that made him famous more than a decade ago. Guerlito's standouts prove that proper taste and a good ear can be just as valuable as songwriting to a multi-tasker like Beck, but even for an artist this venerable, a remix record is still a remix record-- generally uneven, part enlightening, and part skippable.



TURKEY

ON TRIAL
by Orhan Pamuk
New Yorker

In Istanbul this Friday—in SiSli, the district where I have spent my whole life, in the courthouse directly opposite the three-story house where my grandmother lived alone for forty years—I will stand before a judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The prosecutor will ask that I be imprisoned for three years. I should perhaps find it worrying that the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was tried in the same court for the same offense, under Article 301 of the same statute, and was found guilty, but I remain optimistic. For, like my lawyer, I believe that the case against me is thin; I do not think I will end up in jail.

This makes it somewhat embarrassing to see my trial overdramatized. I am only too aware that most of the Istanbul friends from whom I have sought advice have at some point undergone much harsher interrogation and lost many years to court cases and prison sentences just because of a book, just because of something they had written. Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, saints, and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honor its writers until they have spent years in courts and in prisons, I cannot say I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last “a real Turkish writer.” But when I uttered the words that landed me in trouble I was not seeking that kind of honor.

Last February, in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper, I said that “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”; I went on to complain that it was taboo to discuss these matters in my country. Among the world’s serious historians, it is common knowledge that a large number of Ottoman Armenians were deported, allegedly for siding against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, and many of them were slaughtered along the way. Turkey’s spokesmen, most of whom are diplomats, continue to maintain that the death toll was much lower, that the slaughter does not count as a genocide because it was not systematic, and that in the course of the war Armenians killed many Muslims, too. This past September, however, despite opposition from the state, three highly respected Istanbul universities joined forces to hold an academic conference of scholars open to views not tolerated by the official Turkish line. Since then, for the first time in ninety years, there has been public discussion of the subject—this despite the spectre of Article 301.

If the state is prepared to go to such lengths to keep the Turkish people from knowing what happened to the Ottoman Armenians, that qualifies as a taboo. And my words caused a furor worthy of a taboo: various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me, with some right-wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I should be “silenced” for good; groups of nationalist extremists organized meetings and demonstrations to protest my treachery; there were public burnings of my books. Like Ka, the hero of my novel “Snow,” I discovered how it felt to have to leave one’s beloved city for a time on account of one’s political views. Because I did not want to add to the controversy, and did not want even to hear about it, I at first kept quiet, drenched in a strange sort of shame, hiding from the public, and even from my own words. Then a provincial governor ordered a burning of my books, and, following my return to Istanbul, the ?i?li public prosecutor opened the case against me, and I found myself the object of international concern.

My detractors were not motivated just by personal animosity, nor were they expressing hostility to me alone; I already knew that my case was a matter worthy of discussion in both Turkey and the outside world. This was partly because I believed that what stained a country’s “honor” was not the discussion of the black spots in its history but the impossibility of any discussion at all. But it was also because I believed that in today’s Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians was a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters were inextricably linked. Comforted as I was by the interest in my predicament and by the generous gestures of support, there were also times when I felt uneasy about finding myself caught between my country and the rest of the world.

The hardest thing was to explain why a country officially committed to entry in the European Union would wish to imprison an author whose books were well known in Europe, and why it felt compelled to play out this drama (as Conrad might have said) “under Western eyes.” This paradox cannot be explained away as simple ignorance, jealousy, or intolerance, and it is not the only paradox. What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats? What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spread false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide? When I think of the professor whom the state asked to give his ideas on Turkey’s minorities, and who, having produced a report that failed to please, was prosecuted, or the news that between the time I began this essay and embarked on the sentence you are now reading five more writers and journalists were charged under Article 301, I imagine that Flaubert and Nerval, the two godfathers of Orientalism, would call these incidents bizarreries, and rightly so.

That said, the drama we see unfolding is not, I think, a grotesque and inscrutable drama peculiar to Turkey; rather, it is an expression of a new global phenomenon that we are only just coming to acknowledge and that we must now begin, however slowly, to address. In recent years, we have witnessed the astounding economic rise of India and China, and in both these countries we have also seen the rapid expansion of the middle class, though I do not think we shall truly understand the people who have been part of this transformation until we have seen their private lives reflected in novels. Whatever you call these new élites—the non-Western bourgeoisie or the enriched bureaucracy—they, like the Westernizing élites in my own country, feel compelled to follow two separate and seemingly incompatible lines of action in order to legitimatize their newly acquired wealth and power. First, they must justify the rapid rise in their fortunes by assuming the idiom and the attitudes of the West; having created a demand for such knowledge, they then take it upon themselves to tutor their countrymen. When the people berate them for ignoring tradition, they respond by brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism. The disputes that a Flaubert-like outside observer might call bizarreries may simply be the clashes between these political and economic programs and the cultural aspirations they engender. On the one hand, there is the rush to join the global economy; on the other, the angry nationalism that sees true democracy and freedom of thought as Western inventions.

V. S. Naipaul was one of the first writers to describe the private lives of the ruthless, murderous non-Western ruling élites of the post-colonial era. Last May, in Korea, when I met the great Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, I heard that he, too, had been attacked by nationalist extremists after stating that the ugly crimes committed by his country’s armies during the invasions of Korea and China should be openly discussed in Tokyo. The intolerance shown by the Russian state toward the Chechens and other minorities and civil-rights groups, the attacks on freedom of expression by Hindu nationalists in India, and China’s discreet ethnic cleansing of the Uighurs—all are nourished by the same contradictions.

As tomorrow’s novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new élites, they are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret C.I.A. prisons have so damaged the West’s credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world.

MOVIES

“King Kong” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”
by DAVID DENBY

The big guy is back: the same chocolate-doughnut nose, seriously mashed, as if he’d been sleeping face down in the jungle for decades; the matted hair, worn natural as always; the eyes both fierce and plaintive; the heavy-limbed body, though it’s stronger than before, and quicker, too. He swings his weight easily, hanging from promontories and thick vines, but he’s definitely a wrestler by temperament, taking on three allosaurs—or whatever they are—at once, and flinging them about as if they were barroom thugs. King Kong never really went away. The most familiar of pop-myth creatures, he just seemed, for some reason, to be hiding from us since his last appearance, in 1976, in which he found himself entrapped in a rather cheesy camp-colossal retelling, updated to the (then) present. That movie was a self-consciously jokey story about a greedy oil-company scouting expedition, a Princeton paleontologist (Jeff Bridges), and a ditzy starlet (Jessica Lange), who chatted to the ape as if he were hanging out in her dressing room. This new version, directed by Peter Jackson, goes back to the Depression era of the justly beloved 1933 original, which was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The huckster-filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) is again making a movie, and journeys by ship to a mysterious island in the South Seas, accompanied by a hungry, eager-to-perform vaudeville actress, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts).

This time, however, the hero is a playwright and screenwriter, played by the long-faced Adrien Brody. A knight of the doleful countenance if ever there was one, Brody is perhaps not quite right as a leading man; in any case, he receives less affection from Ann than the ape does. Once she overcomes her fright, she tries to enchant Kong by putting on a show before his jungle throne overlooking a vast valley. Watts, who has a likably game quality, does corny period vaudeville stuff—cartwheels, juggling, and slinky Egyptian moves—and her solitary auditor grunts and snorts and shifts his weight. Clearly, he is amused. She learns to trust him (he has gentle hands), and, back in New York, she doesn’t want to give him up—she’s left heartbroken atop the Empire State Building, where he meets his match and dies. The first two movies were about an ape who wanted a blonde he couldn’t have, and the woman who came to like the big dope; Jackson’s version is about an impossible union between partners equally in love with each other. But nothing can compare with the original’s strange combination of naïve enthusiasm and knowing lewdness. (When Denham brought Kong and the girl back to New York, and exhibited them in a theatre, he claimed that she had “lived through an experience no other woman ever dreamed of.”) There’s no place for lewdness—for the jokes and innuendos that movie nuts have been buzzing over for decades—in this new, tender version.

I also missed any equivalent to the enchanted-isle graphics of the first movie. But there’s no point, I suppose, in shrouding computer graphics in mist, since we’re paying to see what we cannot see in life. Peter Jackson is a master of brilliantly colored fantasy. His Broadway at night, with square-backed yellow taxis and a thousand bulbs of light, is a slightly cartooned dream of thirties urban life; his jungle landscapes are treacherously lush. The trouble is that Jackson, an exuberant director, fresh from his triumph with the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, likes to shoot up a storm, and here his exuberance spills over into senselessness. The Depression background, just a few shots in the original, is stretched out here with a montage of shantytowns and strikes; the black “natives” on Skull Island—filthy, grotesque, and vicious—seem like escapees from a sideshow. Both shantytowns and “authentically” starving islanders now seem bizarrely beside the point in what is essentially a delirious pop fantasy. In the original, Kong defends his blonde against dinosaurs on Skull Island for just a couple of scenes, but here the fights go on forever. A herd of monsters panic and race down a narrow canyon, overtaking the ship’s crew, who are running before them. Later, giant cockroaches and face-grabbing worms, and all sorts of other kiddie-show horrors, stop the movie cold. Repeating what Spielberg has already accomplished in the “Jurassic Park” series, Jackson has fallen into a trap. Spectacle must be more and more astonishing or it creates as much boredom as wonder, yet it’s not easy, as filmmakers are finding out, to top what others have done and stay within a disciplined narrative; at any rate, our awareness that so little is staged in real space feeds our impatience. Even children may feel that they’ve seen it all before. This “Kong” is high-powered entertainment, but Jackson pushes too hard and loses momentum over the more than three hours of the movie. The story was always a goofy fable—that was its charm—and a well-told fable knows when to stop.



It may be as tricky to question another culture’s ideals of beauty as it is to question its religion. If I now offer a demurral on the delicate subject of the geisha mystique, I hope it will be accepted merely as an expression of personal taste. A beautiful young woman whose breasts have been flattened, her face whitened and painted over with a mask, her body swathed in layers of padding and silk to the extent that she is unable to walk normally but must hobble as gracefully as she can—none of this, as enticements go, raises my pulse rate above its usual listless beat. But obviously the opposite was true for certain Japanese men. For worshippers of the geisha, the point of obsession was the precise balance between the erotic and the anti-erotic: the clothes may have disguised the outlines of the woman’s body, but the neck, an area of major arousal for Japanese men, as the ankle was for Victorian Englishmen, had to be exposed. In general, a geisha’s ambiguous situation was the source of her power. Even as she presented herself as supremely attractive, she remained out of reach to everyone but a single wealthy protector. Arthur Golden, in his 1997 best-seller, “Memoirs of a Geisha,” worked pages of such lore into a fictionalized autobiography of a woman who triumphed in this extraordinary trade during the nineteen-thirties and forties. He opened a hidden world with fluency and grace. Yet somehow the movie that Rob Marshall has made from Golden’s novel is a snooze. How did he and the screenwriter, Robin Swicord, let their subject get away from them? Whatever my uneasiness, women who serve as geisha have been at the center of many great Japanese films, including Kenji Mizoguchi’s lyrical 1953 “Gion Bayashi.”

There is spectacle enough in Marshall’s movie—rows of geisha trainees aligned in formation like Rockettes, acres of low, cedar-and-bamboo buildings with mountains in the distance—but nothing that comes close to lyricism. What we’re presented with, at first, is a kind of crude fairy tale, in which a country girl, Chiyo, is sold into bondage at a Kyoto geisha house in 1929. The house is ruled by a foul-tempered Mother (Kaori Momoi) and a nasty head geisha, Hatsumomo (Gong Li)—the equivalents of a wicked stepmother and stepsister. But then the teen-age Chiyo (Ziyi Zhang) is rescued by a fairy godmother, Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), an older geisha who treats her kindly and teaches her the intricacies of her craft. Golden told this tale from Chiyo’s point of view, as memories of her early hardship and increasing mastery, but the movie, looking from the outside, presents the young Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) as a kind of exquisite punching bag and the teen-ager and the grownup woman as beautiful and tough-souled but opaque. It turns out that Marshall, the director of “Chicago” and numerous stage musicals, can’t keep a narrative moving or create interest in any of his characters. We do not initially understand, for instance, why Hatsumomo is so cruel to Chiyo, and by the time we find out we no longer care. As Hatsumomo, Gong Li is required to throw so many hissy fits that she seems less a geisha than a Mean Girl in a high-school comedy set in Santa Barbara.

Chiyo, lips painted in a crimson circle, does attain a surpassing chic, but her paramount desire, which is to preserve her virginity for the highest bidder and then become the mistress of a handsome married gent (Ken Watanabe) who was once nice to her as a little girl, isn’t very attractive psychologically, and provides little that we can root for. With the best will in the world, a Western audience could applaud Chiyo’s submission to her married protector only with the most severe irony, and Marshall isn’t capable of irony or of any other tonal variation on the literal. The movie lacks a sense of proportion: the filmmakers are so eager to pump up their subject that they don’t let us know that by the nineteen-thirties geisha were in serious decline, and that their dress and their manners, derived from an aristocratic era when elegance might have served an organic function, had become little more than decorative adornment for industrialists and bankers making deals in teahouses—in other words, that many modern Japanese may have regarded them not as unspeakably mysterious and powerful but as an increasingly rarefied and even amusing anachronism.