“Only a non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music
could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel.”   –Ewan MacColl

If you want to call it party music, no harm done.  It plays great in the background of dry-hump dance parties, behind the “CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!” of keg stand chants.  Just don’t call it art.  Don’t mythologize her rise to fame.  Don’t call her an original.  And don’t pretend she’s talented.  There’s nothing new about her other than the sheer level of suck she’s managed to lower the standard of music.

Believe it or not, the quote above isn’t about Lady Gaga (although it could very neatly sum up one side of the fence).  It was actually a gibe lodged 45 years ago against a young Minnesotan folk singer named Robert Allen Zimmerman.  He had just played a booed-out set at the Newport Folk Festival.  Zimmerman was a cigarette-thin, sophisticatedly scraggly, anglofroed musician that was said to look like an “undernourished cockatoo” performing on stage.  One critic credited him with inventing the “arrogant, faux-cerebral posturing that has been the dominant style” of pop music since rock shook the jukebox.

But for a guy blamed for sullying the folk music tradition, Zimmerman, who changed his name to Bob Dylan early in his career, wasn’t an iconoclast just for the sake of raising eyebrows.  He was naturally different.  What he sang he felt, and what he felt came from what he saw happening in the world around him.  There was substance to the controversy surrounding him.  And whether you like him or not, he had a message, a sincere one, and he was the voice of a generation.
But this rancid reincarnation of Madonna with less clothing (and talent) would be harmless if everyone just agreed that she’s entertainment, not art.  Unfortunately, the critical establishment responsible for calling this crap out has somehow become warped; they’re confused about the difference between art and entertainment.

“Think of Lady Gaga as Britney Spears with a brain,“ says Jon Bream of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  Well that’s not saying much, now is it?  “GaGa is a provocatively dressed, bleached blonde who makes irresistible, mindless dance music that packs clubs and the top of the pop charts,” Bream continues.  In only two sentences, Gaga went from Britney “with a brain” to “mindless” without the writer even catching his own folly. What’s so brainy about writing “irresistible, mindless dance music?”  And who cares if it packs clubs?  There are long lines for the toilets at those clubs, too.
Elevating her status to an artist not only confuses what MaGaga is but it also confuses what art is.

“I want to hammer it into people’s heads that pop music is legitimate art when it’s done right,” says Gaga in a recent interview by the Seattle Times.  “A good pop song can be played anywhere in the world for any kind of person, and it’s gonna make them wanna get up and [expletive] dance.”

Big Macs are all over the world, too, but no one’s calling them art.

“I have a fascination with Andy Warhol,” she explains,  “and the way he wanted to make commercial art that was taken as seriously as fine art,” GaGa says.

But Warhol, for as much as he celebrated the manufactured ubiquity of popular culture (like Campbell’s soup cans, Elvis, Monroe etc.), he was also putting a fork in it.  The way Warhol created his art (in a factory, with workers on an assembly line pressing screen prints) and the copious reproductions he produced of just one piece of art forced some uncomfortable parallels between the art world and the world of manufactured goods.  When art was put on an assembly line, the world began to ask some serious questions about what art was.
Warhol’s way of embracing popular culture drew our attention to it in new ways.  He took the complacent familiarity out of everyday things we had around us and made us hold a mirror up to the crass, commercial, corporate-sponsored societies that were beginning to overtake the world.  And even if that wasn’t his goal, it happened.  That is his legacy.

But Gaga isn’t drawing attention to popular culture in the same way.  She’s celebrating all that is wrong with it.  Where Warhol could defamiliarize a product’s effect upon us, Gaga goes in the opposite direction.  She tries to sell it back to us.  Her videos are nothing more than product placements (in a recent video, she wears Diet Coke cans as curlers), advertisements (for products and a way of life) set to really bad music.

“Music has gotten so pretentious that now it’s almost rebellious to be a pop artist,” she says.  “A lot of indie-rock bands and singer-songwriters have this middle finger up at the pop world and record labels.”
No, Gaga.  They’ve got their middle fingers up to you.  It’s easy to be a pop artist, it’s not easy to be rebellious.

If you went to SXSW you probably spent half your time dealing with parking, a third of your time getting to the various venues and finding sustenance and then spent the microscopic minutes that were left listening to a handful of bands. During the 2008 event, Paul Ford, an editor at Harper’s, could have arguably have had one of the most comprehensive SXSW music experiences from 1,000 miles away in New York City. How you may ask? Ford downloaded the 2008 SXSW Torrent File, 763 songs, and personally listened to every single one and left his mark in a six-word review and a star rating. Below is an excerpt of the interview between Houstoned Rocks and Paul Ford.

HR: So you didn’t even go to South By?

PF: Not at all. If anything I would have gone to the tech one because I’m a big nerd. I’m not cool enough for the music one, so I just downloaded the file. So obviously you went being down there. How was it?

HR: It was great. I saw one band early and they were so incredibly good I went and saw them two more times.

PF: Who were they?

HR: Monotonix. Israeli garage-punk.

PF: Hmmm. They didn’t have an mp3. I would have remembered.

HR: Probably so, but their recordings don’t do them justice. I’ve never seen a live show as feral and crazed as theirs. They never use the stage, and they move the drummer during the show, so you have no choice but to get deeply involved.

PF: That’s interesting. Do they sing in Hebrew or English?

HR: You can’t even tell at the show.

PF: That’s great. That’s everything it’s supposed to be. Interesting. That’s right up my alley. That’s cool.

HR: And the singer looks like Doug Henning, the guitarist looks like Dylan circa Newport, and the drummer looks exactly like Borat with a gold dookie chain around his neck.

PF: (Laughs)

HR: So what about this piece of yours?

PF: Basically I was asked to review an mp3 or two and I said I had this big idea. The truth is, the A’s – I did it in alphabetical order – and the A’s were pretty bad, and I was about ready to kill myself. And then I started to find one or two songs which completely redeemed everything, and it was like, all right, it’s worth it, like you with Monotonix. You find something like that and you realize it’s a worthy endeavor.

HR: Exactly. What was your process with this thing – like eight hours a day for six days?

PF: I’d be working, take a little break, listen to a couple songs, and then write them directly into iTunes in the comment field. And there were a couple of days where I stayed late. I’d keep plowing through it, I could see how many I had left. And there were a number of nights where I stayed until three or four in the morning, and then I would take it home, and there were two, two-and-half weekends completely given over to it. So altogether it was 48 hours spread over a couple of weeks, and as long as you kept going at it steadily it wasn’t that bad. And not that it was ever suffering – I was listening to music.

by Brandon Nowalk

Sherlock Holmes: Now with More Explosions!

Guy Ritchie’s dandy Sherlock Holmes is adamantly unconcerned with advocating deductive reasoning, promoting science, or demonstrating intelligence. But it’s not insultingly mindless, either. What Ritchie and his screenwriters have done is distill the Victorian detective series to its essence and then heat through with action sequences and PI noir tropes until ready. It’s elementary, really.

Like any worthwhile mystery, Sherlock Holmes boasts a winding plot, but the film is absolutely refreshing in its straightforwardness. Around the twenty minute mark comes the inciting incident: complications ensue, Holmes and bromantic life partner Watson use their combined intellect to dig themselves out of one ditch and into a deeper one, and eventually, there’s a climax wherein Holmes gets the upper hand, exposits the mystery like a mad scientist whose plan was this close to success, and sows the seeds for sequels. Sherlock Holmes may not be as brilliant a contemporary B-flick as Shutter Island or The Ghost Writer, but every once in a while, it’s comforting to take a trip to a time before postmodernism.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays Holmes at once utterly straight and eccentric. Any modern Holmes must compete for attention with all manner of superheroes and police detectives, so naturally he has elements of Batman (especially the martial arts-trained Christian Bale incarnation), Philip Marlowe, and Indiana Jones. You’d think superior logic and deductive reasoning would be un-cinematic, and plenty of House episodes agree, but Guy Ritchie slows down to illustrate Holmes’ calculations to exciting effect. Jude Law’s Watson is dependable, and there are women for each of the protagonists, but the primary love story in the film is between Holmes and Watson. Nothing sexual yet, but there will be sequels.

The real star of Sherlock Holmes is the movie’s art department. The film was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction, and every location is painstakingly detailed to provide a stylish-yet-immersive experience. Hans Zimmer’s score was also Oscar-nominated, all fidgety fiddles and exclamatory brass. Despite the unimaginative color palette, a monochrome that makes The Matrix look exuberant, this is one aesthetically entertaining picture.

And it’s not dumb, either. Well, some of the plot doesn’t hold up in retrospect, not least the inciting conversation between the captive Lord Blackwood and Holmes. So you don’t want to think about it too much, but the writers have weaved through a number of appropriate motifs, if not fully realized themes, both Victorian and contemporary. There’s a strong thread about the rise of technology, and fears about its eventual uses. It doesn’t touch Kurt Vonnegut, but it’s no coincidence that most of the science and technology in the film is used as weaponry and the rest represents the wealth from Britain’s imperial spoils. Accordingly there’s a healthy suspicion of authority throughout. The last act tries to say something about fear politics culminating in a scene practically ripped from George Lucas’ treatment of Star Wars Episode III, but it’s especially flat compared to The Dark Knight and a host of other post-9/11 films. And someone on staff clearly read Dracula without picking up on its meaning.

Yes, this is a Guy Ritchie film, and we have to endure a fart joke, a lot of obvious, ominous crows, and at least one instance of Scooby Doo “Old Man Wilkins” syndrome, but Sherlock Holmes is nevertheless a funny, engaging, and comforting derivative action flick. The action is rollicking, the comedy works, Robert Downey Jr. is typically stellar, and the world is interesting, from the under construction Tower Bridge to the sorts of bourgeois clubs you read about in Jules Verne or Robert Louis Stevenson. In short, you’ll have a gay, old time.

MSC Aggie Cinema is screening Sherlock Holmes at Rudder Theater on Friday, March 26 at 7:00 and 9:30.

By Chris Zebo

A mile east of downtown on Twelfth Street is Sam’s Bar-B-Que, a joint legendary for many reasons but mostly for the fact that Stevie Ray Vaughn used to eat at Sam’s late night after gigs on Sixth.  “You don’t need no teeth to eat my beef” is painted on the outside wall facing the street.  Inside, faded photos of past celebrity diners (with handwritten dedications to Sam) and numerous pics of soul singers, sports legends, MLK and Obama are all collaged randomly and literally stuck to the walls by grease.  Grease coats everything under the roof.  From the tables to the door handles, an animal-fat patina browns everything inside and adds an air of 70s nostalgia to the place that takes you back. And if all of this doesn’t sell the place, it should.  The food is flavorful and the servings are plentiful.  But we didn’t come here for the food.  We came to escape the largest music, film and interactive festival in Austin’s history.

But escaping didn’t–and couldn’t–happen anywhere in the vicinity of the South By Southwest Festival.  Everywhere you turned, festival goers, players and their coteries had infiltrated every nook and cranny throughout the metro and into the hills.  Sitting at the table beside ours, La Melodia, a popular hip hop group from Amsterdam, was also trying to get away from it all, lethargically sucking on rib bones and sipping Sam’s delicious sweet tea.

“I’m a little overwhelmed,” says MC Melodee.  “I wanna be everywhere at the same time, but I can’t.  There’s just so much going on and I’m trying not to stress out.”

Melodee played a showcase the night before at Club 115 on San Jacinto.  She was scouted last year at CMJ, New York’s version of SXSW, and was invited to the festival by a booking agent working for South By in Austin.  “Ten years ago we dreamed about coming here,“ says INT, Melodee’s DJ.  “It’s a milestone for us.  Everyone wants to come here.”
Back in town, the scene on Sixth Street was the same every night of the music festival segment of the event.  It was an agoraphobe’s nightmare.  Throngs of tattooed, skinny-jean-wearing, ironic-mustached hipsters and stranded spring breakers that couldn’t afford a ticket to Mexico mixed with audiophiles from 50 different countries and thousands of people from various media outlets, bands, films and startups.  The energy was either contagious or overwhelming or both at the same time.  Some embraced it while others on the street were seen yawning from over-stimulation and fatigue.

If serendipity was on your side, you might encounter some star power.  But aside from random Courtney Love and Quentin Tarantino sightings (Tarantino was awarded an Honorary Texan Prize by the Austin Film Society), the festival is a self-proclaimed haven for independents.  There were tons of people like you or (more talented yous) everywhere, some of them with guitar cases, most of them with beers in their hands.

In addition to the music festival segment, SXSW also hosts an interactive segment and a film festival, begun in 1994 and 1995 respectively.  The interactive segment is a networker’s handshake-hustle with over 15,000 attendees (just for the interactive segment alone) rubbing shoulders, exchanging innovative looking business cards and attending panels about emerging technologies, mostly Web 2.0 inspired.  This is the place where Twitter launched in 2007 and within three years accumulated over 70 million users. Dennis Crowley, co-counder of Foursquare (another social-network app) called SXSW Interactive a “spring break for nerds.”  And rightly so, considering the sheer amount of geeks in Austin using their iPhones at last year’s festival almost crashed AT&T’s network.

The film segment attracts micro-indies and big-budget filmmakers and screens films at various large and small venues throughout the city.  The big stink this year emanated from news of Harmony Korine’s screening of “Trash Humpers” at the Alamo Ritz on East Sixth Street.  Rumor has it that within 5 minutes people rose from their seats and left the building.   Must have been good.  Real good.
Really, there are only two ways to do SXSW.  The first way is to plan in advance.  If you’re going just for the music, the Austin Chronicle publishes a thorough festival schedule every year that lists the bands playing, where they’re playing, and the times to catch them.  Unfortunately, you probably haven’t heard of most of the groups performing, so you’ll have no idea what you’re going to hear.  However, most groups in the lineups have websites with streaming samples of their music to preview before you search for a parking spot for three hours only to pay for lot parking anyway.

The second way to take on the festival is the most common way.  Go gonzo.  Just dive in.  Don’t plan.  Just get there, somehow (the airport was overwhelmed), and walk.  You take the chance that maybe you’ll stumble, fortuitously, into a venue that has a fantastic group playing.  If you go “bareback” to SXSW, it also helps to drink a little and pace yourself.

Between 8pm and 2am, there are more than 80 bands playing at any one time across the city.  And that’s just the bands that are showcased by the festival.  There are about 80 more bands playing in random places, including alleyways and parking lots, at house parties in nearby neighborhoods (all open to the public and offering free booze), in Starbucks, the Pita Pit, and even in the bathroom stalls while your relieving your kidneys.

Yes.  It’s that crazy.  According to an economic impact study conducted by AngelouEconomics Inc. a couple of years ago, SXSW generates of over $110 million for Austin’s local economy.  It takes a lot of people to spend that much money in just ten days.

by Brandon Nowalk

Thriller, Thriller Night:  Shutter Island & The Ghost Writer

Early spring tends to be the dumping ground for movie studios; a graveyard of horror and weak-tea dramas held back by the winter awards bait.  But not all thrillers are empty calories, and this season brings us two smart, strikingly similar Hitchcock throwbacks with topical commentary galore: Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer.

Shutter Island
Through a haze off stormy Massachusetts, a ferry approaches and US Marshal Teddy Daniels is preparing to solve the mystery of the only escaped patient from the experimental asylum on Shutter Island.  He proves himself a smart investigator almost immediately.  But anyone’s wits could desert them on a secluded island in the midst of a storm with only the incarcerated and mad for company.  And what’s with those recurring flashbacks, haunting Daniels like a ghost with unfinished business?
Scorsese is one of cinema’s most knowledgeable critics, and it’s a pleasure to see how he pays homage to his influences, including Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and especially Alfred Hitchcock (with riffs on everything from Notorious to North by Northwest).  But his use of rear projection, bombastic score, ticking clocks, and the like are not throwaway references for the observant film-lover.  Scorsese’s genius is in layering his film with clues from other films, lending Shutter Island an even deeper level of a mental puzzle.  A notable early scene includes close-ups of Greek statues, like the silent gods from the marital drama Contempt.  You’ll understand why by the end.
The other thing that sets Shutter Island apart from your everyday February thriller is that it has meaning apart from a labyrinthine plot.  Psychological mysteries are about how man copes, and Shutter Island is specifically about coping with violence—from the bloodlust of war to the tragedy of murder, the fears of WMD to good old Freudian penis anxiety.  It’s also a fierce argument for psychological care over prison abandonment, and Ben Kingsley’s performance as the administrative physician is as viscerally affecting as the final surprise.  Nazis, murderous mothers, arsonists—they’re all human, Scorsese argues.  Even the most fractured mind deserves help.

The Ghost Writer
Through the haze off stormy Massachusetts a ferry approaches and an empty car portends the death of its owner, the original ghost writer for former British Prime Minister Adam Lang.  Cue Ewan McGregor, who plays the new ghost and quickly winds up tangled in a web of relationships and lies when mysterious scandal breaks out.  And there’s still that suspicious death of the original ghost writer.
It’s no accident that the film has the premise of Hitchcock’s Rebecca; only instead of a new wife coming to stay at a secluded beach-side mansion, it’s a replacement staffer.  Like Scorsese, Polanski has applied the lessons of Hitchcock, quickly escalating the various plot threads, every scene feeling inevitable, until one final, momentous night.  But Polanski is not as classical or nostalgic a filmmaker as Scorsese, and his stamp of Kafkaesque expressionism is all over the picture, pitting his hero against a sea of scowls, odd characters, and an inescapable sense of paranoia. He also imbues the Ghost Writer with his trademark themes, including the roles and power of women, expressions of dominance, and, as you may guess by the title, identity.  The plot is an obvious look at how to reconcile our actions with the stories we tell ourselves.  It’s an engaging thriller with a gut-punch ending and with uniformly stellar performances, including Pierce Brosnan as Lang, Olivia Williams as his wife, and the always welcome Tom Wilkinson.
Roman Polanski is a celebrity these days, less for his brilliant and complicated studies of gender and power dynamics (notably in his late ‘60s pictures, Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, and Rosemary’s Baby) and more for his tabloid attention.  You’d be forgiven for seeing the Ghost Writer as a comment on his criminal status, as the film is in part a demand for accountability and an assertion that some crimes have no statute of limitations, like his 1994 thriller Death and the Maiden.  But the Ghost Writer is primarily an attack on Britain’s role as the US lap dog during Tony Blair’s administration and a heartfelt cry for war crimes investigation.  For all the political twists, the only part that rings false (and I wager Polanski would agree) is that anyone in power would have the fortitude to call out torture by name.

By Chris Zebo

FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE:

Feels Like

It’s not often that you get to preside over your own funeral; but when Nas released Hip Hop is Dead four years ago, he wasn’t shoveling dirt into his own grave—he was just digging a big hole for others to fall into.  The dirge went like this: “Everybody sounds the same / Commercialize the game / Reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business / It forgot where it started / So we all gather here for the dearly departed.”  Nas certainly wasn’t the first to march in the procession or the last.  It was already known—especially underground—that hip hop had lost its way sometime between rap’s golden age and today’s age of the golden grill.

But what exactly happened?  For years, the East Coast pointed its finger West and the West Coast pointed back.  And it was a standoff until, eventually, all fingers began pointing South (finally, they agreed on something).  Lil Jon and the crunky bunch bore the brunt of the blame.  Yes, Atlanta was on fire again.  And the fire had spread all the way to Houston.  But as much as crunk and snap and Southern hardcore rap had lowered the denominator, it still didn’t explain how hip hop music—a sound that became a culture—was reduced to background music at frat party beer pong tournaments.

Today, hip hop is mired in an abysmal identity crisis, and there’s been a lot of soul searching (and searching for soul) as new and old artists sift through the ashes of a burned out music genre.

But one group in Texas has raked through the cinders and found something to hold onto.  Dem Southernfolkz, a hip-hop trio out of Dallas, has both resurrected vestiges of the golden age and made some much-needed improvements to a jaded formula.  Ironically, the trio—Kinfolk Jack, Big Ben, and Saturday Alridge—spent more time looking away from hip hop for inspiration than they did digging through the gold-plated rubble.  “I don’t even really listen to hip hop,” says Alridge, “and if I do listen to hip hop, there’s no lyrics.”

Instead, the group returned to the music’s ancestral roots—old gospel, soul, funk and jazz—and infused some new and unlikely influences, like Irish folk singer Fionn Regan, Bob Dylan, Broken Social Scene, and the Microphones.  “If you wanna move forward in your music and try to reach that point of innovation,” says Alridge, “you gotta put something else in. Otherwise, it’s incestuous to just put in hip hop and then try to crank out hip hop.” If you do recycle, he says, you “end up regurgitating whatever you put in.”

Dem Southernfolkz has self-released a full-length album, The Message, and a four-song EP, Something to Hold Onto, in the past year.  The Message is what you’d expect from a first release; it’s like an adolescent coming of age.  It’s got zits and growing pains.  There are songs that deserve repeat and others you might skip.  But all in all, it’s quite an impressive album, especially considering some of the music was written via email while Jack and Ben volleyed verses and beats back and forth while stationed in Iraq.

Something to Hold Onto, their most recent release, is the folkz all grown up.  The group says the EP reflects where they are now and where they’re going.  They’ve certainly turned over a new leaf.  For three guys that have probably never shot a drop of heroin in their lives, they’ve somehow figured out how to synthesize it aurally.  Listen—just once—to “Feels Like” and you’ll be a scratching addict.  The song opens with a breakbeat and a looping vocal sample, and by the time the synth wafts ethereally through layers of compressed bass and delayed guitar, it’ll be too late to go back.

Lyrically, the group has strayed far, far away from the hip-hop morass.  “When you cast off your morals and just [say] anything in the booth,” says Jack, “it’s a problem.”  So the usual suspects are conspicuously missing.  Absent are the token allusions to aggravated assault, jail time, thug love, bling and booty (although it was hard to say goodbye to booty).  “In our music,” says Ben, “we talk about the stuff that you think about when you’re at home, at the end of the day, nobody else is around, you’re looking in the mirror and you’re thinking about all the messed up stuff you did or what you should of did.”

“All the real stuff,” Ben adds, “all the real-life stuff.”  You remember that stuff,
right?—like forgiving and forgetting, trying to be morally responsible in an upside-down world, relinquishing the Hollywood fantasy and facing the real world, trying to pay your bills when you’re broke and living paycheck to paycheck.  It’s affecting stuff, sincere and uplifting.  “We might not have the best lyrics in the world, the best flow, might not have the best musicians,” says Ben, “but I guarantee you, it’s gonna touch somebody.”

Last week, Maroon Weekly sat down with Dem Southernfolkz for an exclusive interview a few days after their show at the Stafford.  You can watch the interview on the Maroon Weekly website at maroonweekly.com.  The group goes into more detail about the state of the music industry, why their time in Iraq isn’t exploited in their music, how the church has influenced their sound, and much, much more.  You can also download a free MP3 (“Feels Like”) by Dem Southernfolkz at our website!

Dem Southernfolkz return to the Stafford on Thursday, April 8 at 9pm.  You can download both The Message and Something to Hold Onto from their website at demsouthernfolkz.com.

If you’ve already seen everything worth seeing at Premiere and Cinemark, this week provides an excellent opportunity to branch out, just in time for Spring Break.  MSC Aggie Cinema presents The Blind Side, and if you can swing a quick drive, you can also catch The White Ribbon and Last Year at Marienbad.  Let’s take them one by one.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side is exactly what you expect, a hackneyed cliché-athon with one charismatic lead performance.  Future star left tackle Michael Oher is a poor giant without a home who is taken in by the warm, white arms of the Tuohy family, led by their spitfire matriarch, and the film centers on the give-and-take between the magical Negro and the superheroine. Yes, the characterizations are that shallow, especially in the supporting arena with the precocious kid and the close-minded socialites. Sandra Bullock is undeniably charismatic as Mrs. Tuohy, the year’s most mesmerizing Mary Sue and The Blind Side’s greatest asset.

The Blind Side plays at Rudder Auditorium on March 5 at 7:00 and 9:30.

The White Ribbon

Like most of Michael Haneke films, The White Ribbon dominates us with all manner of domestic depravity, a riveting arty whodunit that plays its cards close to the vest like a distant father’s approval. But in a good way.

Set in a small German village in 1913, the film opens with a narrator who, after allowing that the story has been pieced together from memory and hearsay, a nod to the subjectivity of truth, explains the film’s intention: to “clarify some things that happened in this country.”  Thus we are thrust into the sprawling cast of families that comprise a village surrounding a baron’s estate during a period of strange incidents of violence: the doctor’s horse trips over a line, the farmer’s wife is killed in a machine accident, children are beaten, and more, while the camera holds back, silently witnessing without poking or exploiting.  Haneke patiently introduces us to the various villagers, floating from house to house as the tension mounts. With a rich black and white palette and a wealth of diverse characters, it’s like an August Sander volume come to life.

But The White Ribbon is no Steinbeck ballad of community. It’s a thorough account of how patriarchal abuse cultivated a society where repression and submission allowed the rise of the Nazi party. This thesis is accomplished by the mysterious attacks and the disgusting depiction of the village fathers—not coincidentally in roles of authority like baron, doctor, and priest. They’re physically abusive, emotionally manipulative, and altogether domineering figures, even in scenes with adult subordinates.

Spending much of its time with the town’s children, Haneke’s argument is a convincingly colored study of learned behavior.  At one point the villagers gather in the church, and, mistaking the baron’s absence as a sign of his displeasure, they grow uneasy, like children internalizing a parent’s passive aggressions. But Haneke fails to illustrate how early 20th century German society was uniquely repressed. I suspect there’s an argument about the psychological consequences of imperial government, but Haneke’s mind is elsewhere. Besides, he announces from the start that the truth is unknowable.

Formally accomplished in every respect—from the sumptuous black-and-white camerawork of Christian Berger to the screenplay by Haneke, which evokes a child’s quaking fear of parental punishment, to the sound editing which punishes us with the cry of a baby and the wail of a retarded child—The White Ribbon is a strong statement from Michael Haneke, winning the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival. But the true marvel is that, even apart from its case against the patriarchy, The White Ribbon is so brimming with life and stories, yet, like Haneke himself, it still has some cards in its pocket.

The White Ribbon plays daily at the Angelika Film Center in Houston.

Last Year at Marienbad

If you love Memento or Lost or anything by David Lynch or Charlie Kaufman, you’ve got to see the original head-scratcher, Alain Resnais’ 1961 masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad, a captivating look at memory and truth.  Technically about a man who runs into a woman he swears he had an affair with last year—she doesn’t remember, but endures his pleading a little too easily—the couple are soon joined by a gun and a jealous third party and, well, you know.  The film is a postmodern landmark, the riddle of a narrative darting down empty corridors and looping back on itself, investigating hypothetical branches of a timeline that may in fact be real, or not, because what’s real anyway? Each of its formal elements—the needlessly baroque architecture, the haunting organ score, the dreamily gliding camerawork, everything—reflects the film’s riveting exploration of narrative and memory.  If you thought Pulp Fiction was innovative in its storytelling, just wait till you get a hold of Last Year at Marienbad.

Last Year at Marienbad plays at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston on March 7 at 5:00.

By: Lisa Minjares

FREE BEER!!! – Now that I have your attention, I feel obligated to say that technically there isn’t free beer.  Unfortunate, yes I know.  But wait, there’s good to come of this I promise!  On March 6^th the Brazos Valley Bombers is holding Beer Fest from 3 pm – 6 pm and admission is FREE!  Free something is better than nothing right?  Holding true to its name (minus the obnoxious German men – watch the movie if you’re confused) Beer Fest is offering over 200 beers to sample.  Along with this great offer is a fajita cook off, wine samples and live music.   All of which is “proudly presented by” O’Bannon’s Tap House–one of my ultimate favorite spots for great beer.  Get more info at bvbankballpark.com and ticket pricing and specials.

Who: All the peeps!

Drinkability rating: 4.5 out of 5 samples

Recja-vue? – Health isn’t cheap or convenient nowadays but when you can get it for free or really cheap then why the hell not?  The rec is a great place to look for all you groupies out there who prefer the group workout mentality.  Group RecXercise classes are offered daily for free and cater to a variety of taste which usually isn’t the case with most free things.  I mentioned long ago some classes but now have an updated list of what’s offered for free Monday – Saturday.  Cardio water classes, cycling, abs and back, step classes and even yoga, just to name a few.  Confused because you don’t speak cardio?  Then visit recsports.tamu.edu for a more detailed description of each class.  Check it out for a great workout, fun environment and some to ditch those lbs!

Who: The motivated and unmotivated cheapskates

Déjà vu kick butt rating: 4 out of 5 cardio blasts

Kill Fest – For all the gamer addicts out there who don’t have time for beer or beer festivals (I know you’re out there) be overjoyed to learn that Play N Trade BCS is holding a Halo 3 tournament on March 6^th from 12:30 pm – 8:30 pm.  (4×4 which I’m assuming means four against four?  I don’t speak tournament lingo.)  Entry is only $10 which is a cheap price to pay for laying the smack down on your fellow opponents.  Prizes will be announced at the start of the tournament so I’m hoping they’ll let you decline if for some reason they’re not worth 10 bucks.  Visit http://www.inaggieland.com for more information.

Who: All the crazy Halo addicts

Conquerability rating: 3.5 out of 5 Orbital Drop Shock Troopers

Questions? Suggestions? Constructive Criticism? Think I’m not really a CheapSkate? Email: agcheapskate@yahoo.com

1. Candidate answered cell phone and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a “private” conversation.

2. Applicant told the interviewer he wouldn’t be able to stay with the job long because he thought he might get an inheritance if his uncle died – and his uncle wasn’t “looking too good.”

3. The job seeker asked the interviewer for a ride home after the interview.

4. The applicant smelled his armpits on the way to the interview room.

5. Candidate said she could not provide a writing sample because all of her writing had been for the CIA and it was “classified.”

6. Candidate told the interviewer he was fired for beating up his last boss.

7. When the applicant was offered food before the interview, he declined saying he didn’t want to line his stomach with grease before going out drinking.

8. An applicant said she was a “people person” not a “numbers person” — in her interview for an accounting position.

9. During a phone interview the candidate flushed the toilet while talking to hiring manager.

10. The applicant took out a hair brush and brushed her hair.

By Karthik Venkatraj

At the beginning of the concert I spoke of a seven day old child who had been pulled from the wreckage several days after the earthquake hit. This baby become the symbol of hope for a nation. Similarly, we wanted this concert to stand as a symbol of hope for Haiti and with the sacred Aggie Spirit we were able to fulfill this duty. The concert was an amazing success and most importantly we brought a renewed sense of global compassion to our university.

We want to thank everyone who helped with the concert and attended the concert! The volunteers and participants made a choice when they joined this event…they choose to care for no other reason than their fellow human being was suffering. Such an action is so laudable and I hope they take some time to reflect on this.The thought that in a few days the money we raised will be distributed in the form of clean water, food, shelter, or maybe simply comforting those who have lost so much is so compelling. Finally, we ask that even though we may go our separate ways that we maintain the level of compassion and heart that we so exemplified on Feb. 12, 2010 as this is a lesson for our lifetimes.