George Perle, RIP.

Dream within limits. What do we do here at pantaloons? We tease out opinions on how language gets done in poetics, poetry, politics, other redeeming or nutty enterprises. We ply language for several affects. We're not so interested in dreams. But once in a while we can't help ourselves, like this morning when we woke from a flash within a dream of such gruesome practicality we were distressed. I was, somehow, in search of tortured performance glamour, visiting a nice sports-transition store. No deeper pretext or prelude. I am in this nice, really dark place. The lights were out. But there I was casually shopping along with other guys. The shop was like Under Armor where mannequins, staff, and customers match up wearing comfortable, form-fitting shirts and sweats and sometimes jackets pulled a quarter inch back, almost off their collarbone, not to flex but to suggest upper body development. In other words, there are steadfast figures and outlines but nothing shows. The men have eyes and the mannequins don't move. That kind of carefully lunatic store. What am I doing here in this economy? That was what I was thinking as I picked out five pairs of socks. A pointillist grey pair, two pair in enlarged, graduated chocolate pixels, and a couple of pairs in black, one with a hint of a blacker digital plaid overlay. Everything was going to blend with my other clothes. (So what was the point, acquistion-wise?) The total came to under $200. Dreamers can translate the effects of geopolitical transparency into overlapping layers of desire, textured fantasy, aimless expectation. We call this shopping.

Recent film notes.

Burn after Reading

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Milk

Quantum of Solace

Rachel Getting Married

Slumdog Millionaire

Twilight

Wall-e

You cannot outlast us. That's the sound bite. Obama's been reading intelligence briefs and signals to us, sternly, there's more mayhem to come. He's not frightening us, he's stating the position clearly. Terrorists are out there and we have them surrounded, we win no matter, no apologies for what we are or how we live. A male dare packed into somber oratory about reclamation and the journey. At the moment we thought he might soar, Obama chose to tamp down the language. Emphasis on work, government that works. Responsibility. Common dangers. Swill and blood stains in the snow. George Washington crossing the Delaware for Christ's sake. Icy currents for four years.

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Competing egos from Harvard Law. Chief Justice Roberts overstepping bounds, Are you ready...senator? Roberts was not gracious, interrupting Obama when he began the oath at a point where Roberts had paused, forcing Obama to start over. Roberts twisting the word order of the middle part, misplacing the adverb faithfully, administering the oath without the text, a fabulously flawed performance.

~~

Senators Byrd and Kennedy, dueling invalids.

~~

A review stand that emptied well before the middle of the inaugural parade. Obama, his wife, and Biden stood alone. On television you could read the names of the guests that fled the cold. Signs on chair backs for "The Joint Chiefs" were prominent.

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Beyond discussion: inaugural poem, Rick Warren's Christian invocation, Joseph Lowery's racy benediction, John Williams's schmaltzy "Air and Simple Gifts" (though it was good to hear the players, particularly Anthony McGill).

Improbable hat, Aretha.

The incision continues in this vein.

Look, I like several aspects (I think they're aspects) of what's being assailed here, but I'm roped in by what's absorbingly expressed: "Everyone on the internet is feeding the same machine." Here's this week's most direct argument for collectivity, maybe the winner in the direct argument category for all of January. Our time and our functioning within it, we should remember, no matter how adaptively understated or how closely observed, are imaginary. Shamans, dead-end kids re-inscribed as dead-enders? I don't know, maybe that's my crowd. I'm filled up with nervously charged prosaism. Hard-drinking, thrice-kissed.

Sexual dynamism. It's a quarterback problem.

My takes on 13 guys raising temps at Joe Brainard's Pyjamas: 1. Seth Green… cute when he cries, yet sorry, no. 2. Daniel Bedingfield. He's only good looking. "I don't want to run away." Really! 3. Seth MacFarlane, ok, the beefcake pattern has been set. Prosperous Midwestern beauty, granted. Nice dialect. 4. Jake Shears. Now you're talking. "I've been playing games since I was five." Ta Dah! 5. Annie Lennox. Her website's latest news is dated 10.03.08. No further comment. 6. Mika. Ok for a virgin. 7. Darren Hayes. Of course. Back to midcountry. Slutty voice. 8. Jamiroquai, much better. Mad scientist type. 9. John Mayer. Right now his singing goes nowhere. Can he learn how to swing inside? Doubt it. I'd like to shave his head and feed him gluten. 10. Lloyd Cole, the missing New York Doll! Bless her. 11. Neil Tennant. Something for seniors. I get it. He's beautiful. 12. Giovanni Ribisi, the best! a scientologist, even! 13. James Van der Beek looks like a model. Head with no moving parts.

The wind corridor — blithe!

A disheartening bone yard of axioms supposes its completion. Angels get stopped and adjust like the pumpkin marsh turned shrine–y meadow. I give up to appease you.

Disenvowled chapter e (selections) by Christian Bök — inspired by (but not copied from, exactly) Cecil Touchon's procedures outlined at dbqp. Link below. (Very nice.)

Very nice.

The 1970s appear to be within reach, jeans with a slight flare, mustaches, medicinal marijuana. It's a parlor trick we pull off collectively. The 2000s, that's the decade we're about to exit, attach readily to the 20th century. That's because this persists as the unpronounceable, unprecedented decade that wills to fold itself into other time (and let's admit it, the sooner it folds the better for our future). For the moment, the 2000s belong to the past century, the still-tangible, once-thought-progressive hegemony of information-based, meritocratic multiculturalism, advanced by science and the languages of science, programming and English. As for our connection to the past and timelines moving forward, however, it's absurd that the 1980s and 1990s seem within walking distance. They aren't. Within hours the first January of the twenties, starting with 2020, will be closer than January 1998, and the farther back we walk, the colder the blast. The 1970s are several long hikes up and around then down a K2 heap, a product of stylistic and political shifts over four decades, tectonic shifts.

In Milk Sean Penn wears all his decades well. He plays gay community organizer Harvey Milk at age 40 in 1970 moving forward, leaping into prominence toward the end of his life before he is gunned down in his late 40s. The film welcomes us to queer consciousness 101, and it takes us back to the era when gay men and women invented their communities by organizing them, investing livelihoods and their lives to stroll a few city blocks of the Castro alone or together as they are. (Or as they were, few or no gym rats among the boys, women who needed to butt heads with male counterparts just to get cranking, politically.) Director Gus Van Sant produces both a biopic shaped around a singular rebel and a starkly entertaining exposé of communal forces, blending archival film and newsreels with theatrical representation of Milk, younger comrades in arms, and numerous adversaries. It's chilling to view kinescopes of Anita Bryant in her prime declaring her Christian love for gays. Bryant's parallel to our own Rick Warren comes to mind. Similarly shocking, Milk is shown fighting and prevailing against Proposition 6, a California ballot initiative to root out homosexuals in public education, sponsored by national anti-gay forces. Had Milk only lived to present day, he may have made a difference battling last year's Proposition 8 repealing homosexual marriage, funded by Latter-day Saints. Reconsidering Milk today prompts reevaluation of how un-fecklessly and how far from a neutral distance we have come in affording homosexuals rights and respect. After 15 years of one form of such neutrality, only now with the new Obama administration is there the prospect of dismantling official military policy that enforces silence on homosexuals in service, so reevaluation of where we stand is much more than an exercise or academic ideal. Even today when an accomplished straight poet snickers at the idea of seeming gay, we as a community seem unknowingly stuck in the past, in bed with our own adversaries, ourselves. As artifact, Milk brings what has long since passed closer to our time. It's a deception that registers for something more attractive soon.

Dear Barack Obama:

There's a speech watch. It's been building over a few months, as you know, and with one week to go before your inaugural oration it's now calculable. I can't remember when so many — a multitude — will be hanging on rhetoric.

It will be exciting if you keep it short. That's the first order, as it were. And let's hope specifics are kept in tow. A pile-up of details would muddy the occasion. Rather than reach for punch lines, design one or two views into the future, frameworks we might call them. That will be splendid. We're expecting memorable lines, sound-bites that are supposed to be remembered but may not go over. So, keep these to a minimum, please. Or it may be adventurous if you don't even try. Grant us a communitarian and jaw-dropping glimpse of tomorrow to celebrate history. Our place in it. That's all, for now.

Slumdog Millionaire employs three actors apiece to tell the life stories — childhood, adolescence, young adulthood — of three Muslims who grew up in the slums of modern Mumbai. The tale is a convoluted but whole account bubbling up in flashbacks and contemporary frames featuring brutal interrogation, childhood endangerment, and a quiz show, everything gurgling, pulsing exhaustively to a hustle-and-smooch climax — liberty and happiness — in the closing credits. British actor Dev Patel, of Indian descent, plays the post-adolescent Jamal, the hardened but unwavering protagonist who has escaped the megaslum to work as tea-server in a Mumbai boiler room (where phone bashers pitch family plans to housewives in the UK). Jamal winds up, improbably, as a magnetic game show contestant, a huge favorite of the masses watching the Indian TV version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It's providential for Jamal all the questions he's asked on the way to winning his fortune happen to connect to his hard life experiences. It's a narrative gimmick that good writing and directing can begin to bring off. British screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who gave us The Full Monty, re-invents the breakneck pace and violence of the Maharashtra underclass and underworld, along with the faster rhythms of young people who struggle to be winners today, running away from all that. English-Irish director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, The Beach, Trainspotting) charges his mostly youthful, mostly Indian cast with the humane task of showing restraint in a world with no holds barred, creating an ensemble of players whose emotions and physicality seem to smolder as the story almost goes up in flames. Thank goodness Jamal winds up with Latika, his boyhood love played by the Mangalorean model and TV personality Freida Pinto. More thanks to Boyle's decision to gather these two and the rest of the cast for the film equivalent of a curtain call during credits at the end. Out of their characters, they swagger. Dev Patel, a Taekwondo world champion, and Freida Pinto, an Indian fashion icon, embrace, romp, and trance-freeze over "Jai Ho," a song by A. R. Rahman I translate as "Hell, yeah." Opening lyrics I truncate and adapt here from a literal English translation: "Hell, yeah, I walked on fire and got you. I've lost my life. Hell, yeah."

Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for and last night won all four categories at the Golden Globe Awards, best original score, best screenplay, best director, and best picture (drama).

My girlfriend is ticked.

She's an irate Democrat. And I can empathize with her and Paul Krugman's disdain for the type of stimulus measures Barack Obama outlined yesterday in his speech at George Mason University. It's fair to say, with respect to shifting to the center / center-right, all the signals are flashing olive green — that's flashing for undue, indeed, untoward caution — and that's olive for the color of the branches he's piling up on the GOP side of the aisle. Republicans can never resist a tax cut, and roughly $300 billion of Obama's $600-800 billion stimulus will come as credits to taxpayers and to businesses for new hires. The rest of the stimulus will go for promoting broadband expansion, digital medical record keeping, shovel-ready public works, and quick-fix green initiatives such as new insulation for public buildings. Does that sound like dramatic action? "Obama's plan is nowhere near big enough to fill [the] 'output gap,'" Krugman writes in today's NY Times. (The output gap, according to Krugman, is the difference between national production capacity and what is actually sold.) In other words, what Obama proposes, dealing still in generalities, covers too little ground to move more goods, promote more services, and ameliorate dire economic challenges like 7.2% unemployment hurtling down on us. Most of what Obama wants is familiar turf, tax giveaways, already-proposed public works. Tepid ground, we might say, from the perspective of most unemployed and imaginatively anemic in comparison to more leftwing initiatives once at the top of Obama's wish list, universal health care and green energy R & D, initiatives that will advance both short- and long-term social wellbeing.

To achieve the illusion of bipartisan support for what might be described as stopgap spending writ large, Obama dangles billions of dollars in tax cuts to triangulate a few recent converts to budgetary discipline (read, Republicans) to join his side, but he risks losing more than a few of us who prefer his holding up the wish list now, proposing the big, expensive ideas while public approval is on his side, even if results prove partisan. Democrats can do this if Obama will let them.

Girlfriend and I are holding tight.

Don't know. Find this week's meme, embarrassment, spooky. Anything can be recouped and mined, surely. But isn't it a little belated for chilling anthems and a textual movement motivated by shame, awkwardness, discomfiture, popping zits? Oh, zits. I'm spooked by the half-heartedness and the half-thought-outness.

Jamie Reid praises Billy Little, archivist, publisher, friend of poets, poet.

It's a sign of anarchy when Senate Intelligence Committee higher-ups Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller are summarily reduced in stature by Obama staffers coordinating with junior senators while commentators, such as Rachel Maddow, wield authoritative arguments to support a turnaround at CIA. Never camera shy, Feinstein breathlessly questioned the skills set and lack of Agency experience of director-designate Leon Panetta, once the first word of his likely nomination filtered up from Ron Wyden, a lower ranked member of the Intelligence Committee that Feinstein chairs. With Obama publicly advancing his choice for CIA, firmly defending Panetta in face of criticism, Feinstein backed off her remarks within hours. This case of loose mouth is an embarrassment, since Feinstein's questions about Panetta are posed in the context of her having acceded to current antiterror protocols like severe interrogation methods and rendition. Obama seems to mean it when it comes to upending CIA's pat bureaucracy that looks soft-politico at Langley and roughhouse at the margins (everywhere else). Almost as promising, he seems ready to swat down competing agendas that don't measure up to his forms of anarchy.

Flipping sides, Feinstein's backing of Roland Burris as the appointed senator from Illinois moves her perception game forward, moaning, feisty and, in this instance, correct. Or mostly. She also chairs the Senate Rules Committee and according to her reading there's nothing on the books that would prevent Burris from assuming his seat in the Senate. The only hang-up might be how the Illinois Supreme Court rules with regard to the state secretary's endorsement. The moving parts of the Burris controversy are in Illinois, then, oro forensis. Speaking of the politics here, I'd think Feinstein is ahead of others, a quick rebound from her Panetta blunder.

Back to the perception game, Rachel Maddow is fast becoming the go-to rhetorician to explain and expand on Obama's anarchism. I just love that she's taken possession of the Republican catchphrase elections have consequences in answer to mumblings from right and center. During the presidential election cycle no sensible Republican would submit to her blistering Q & A style. This prompted her to deal nearly exclusively with lefties, first as she guest-hosted on a range of MSNBC shows, and then after she landed her own cable program late in the campaign. Along the way she must have won the trust of Obama's communication staff as she seems often the first and the most eloquent, the most specific re-teller or, ok, spinner of new policies for change. The one-sided conversations during the campaign, enforced by the GOP blackballing her on-air efforts, have worked in her favor, as she has honed lines of argument to an essential brevity that persuades, because her language reflects intelligence staving off cant, engaging with steely particularity.

First there was Barbar. Cretin, evil colonialist, when he donned whiteface, it was time for ridicule and games (l'art populaire). Barbar was distinguished not so much by showmanship as by his underhanded chic (bisexualité que la position de repli). What a big schnazz he had. Then there are the pre-endowed toys of Teletubbies, the BBC's reach-out to the world of rainbows and inflamed proclivities. I fear for any straight child within their fun-house grasp, cuddly, flamboyant balls of sorry-ass perversion.

Now there's Wall-E, a fuming sulfuric potion (confused identity, ambiguous purpose, sex change) poured over robotic operations, mis-tagged as kid's entertainment. The film's original song "Out There" says it out loud, meow! I'm feeling beautiful. Wall-E is a richly empathetic banged-up throwback, a trash compactor (could be from the Jetsons) roving over a de-peopled planet heaped in refuse, stranded in his/its blue-collar routine for 700 years, picking up tossed brassieres and make-up, listening to show tunes (hint, wink), the last employee on Earth. He/it runs from Microsoft Vista. From outer space enters Macintosh Eve, a legless streamlined dedicated gadget floating like a Swedish teardrop over waste. I'm calling it Eve, but name and gender are up for grabs. Wall-E calls it variously Steve, Reeve, Irv. Doesn't matter, Wall-E forces love that dares not speak its name onto it/her/him. Once Wall-E and Eve lift off from Earth, conventions in animation take over. Human beings have repaired to a spaceship that's nearly spotless, The Axiom, and like us they have become fairly relaxed shopaholics, only they're dealing with consequences after seven-plus centuries strapped into Ikea recliners, sipping tall blue colas, suffering bone loss. Little and midsize robots race around and cause panics (if they can). Airlock disposals and other inane contraptions on the big shiny mother ship are controlled by one more throwback, evil Hal. Though it's Hal after the bailout this time and its giant red glow and kinematics module are housed in a flimsy steering wheel. And it's a good thing, too, because when Wall-E and Eve assist the ship's captain (homo sapiens) snapping the wheel off, Hal dies. Humans can now return to their filth-ridden streets back on Earth while Wall-E and Eve run off to live their private desires. Evil. Pure evil.