Plasma Pool

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a set of sharp and cogent notes

Stuff We Like

  • F for Fake

    This is Orson Welles's masterpiece, a virtuoso performance of sound and video editing that co-opts the documentary but is not one. It is the rare postmodern text that's laugh out loud funny, steeped in the relativism of the post war period but not held hostage by it. He appears as himself, sheared of doubts and humanity, in full possession and knowledge of his genius, but he is not the subject (excuse my language) of the film. It's a "film about trickery, fraud and lies," and about two great exponents of those arts, Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. The film is not much watched by people from any generation, met with cold critical reception on release, how can it be Welles's masterpiece? But it is, and is neglected due to its translation from the dross and palaver of our late capitalist society in which relativism extends mainly to the comparison of ledgers, a number of hard, unpleasant truths about meaning, about value, and about our modern oracles, the experts. Or as Welles says of art (or anything): "How is it valued? The value depends on opinion. Opinion depends on the expert. A faker like Elmyr makes fools of the experts, so who's the expert? Who's the faker?"

  • Ferret-Legging

    Ferret-Legging

    The ferret goes in your pants. Your pants are cinched to prevent its escape. Then you stand there while a scared rodent scratches, bites, and generally freaks the fuck out in the vicinity of your manly-bits. He who endures the longest wins. There you have the “sport” of ferret-legging, a Yorkshire coalminer practice now revived at the Richmond, VA Celtic Festival. While I cannot speak for the rest of the Plasma Pool team, I have not personally experienced the joy of ferret legging – nor do I have any desire to do so in the future. But what should be Liked about this particular Stuff is not corporeal, but rather its statement about the competitive nature of man such that he would trap a ferret in his pants for over five hours for no reward but the knowledge that he did what no other man could do. There exists in each of us a compulsion to strive for greatness, and in the course of this pursuit we are capable of unimaginable sacrifice in the name of achievement. Today humanity faces new and difficult challenges, but what drives these semi-sane “athletes” is the same that drives those in more noble fields to cure diseases, create art, and improve humanity in countless other ways. So, thank you ferret-leggers. Just keep that animal away from my junk.  -- Donny Bridges

  • Reactions to the OJ Simpson Verdict

    OJ Simpson Verdict

    Without getting into any kind of commentary about the trial itself or its place in pop culture memory, this video of the OJ Simpson verdict is stunning. Pay attention to 1:24, 2:10, 3:30, 3:59. The camera pans over a near-complete spectrum of emotions, almost oblivious to the murmur of the verdict while the faces hang on to every word. The calm voice at the end advises to "expect the worst." For me, the bizarre essence of the clip is that some idea of "justice" is located somewhere in the physical and conceptual space between the rows of silent faces and the implied source of the unseen voices. The mass of bodies tenses and contorts as an articulation of the disembodied speech of the justice system. I am reluctant to give a reading of all this beyond this cursory description, but one final thing to consider is that our detached gaze is nearly embedded in the perspective of the invisible jury, who sits at the center of the verdict.  -- Scott Coomes

From the Vault

Things that died in 2008.

Our president pledged as primary candidate to staunchly defend individual civil liberties and curb the domestic intelligence abuses of the Bush Administration. As the Democratic candidate, he hedged. As president-elect, he made stunning about-faces, notably on immunity for telecommunications companies who cooperated with Bush's illegal requests. Now, as president, he's continued as many of Bush's abuses as he's curtailed. Also, there was a time when John McCain wasn't an unprincipled, dishonorable bigot. He was quite the man, when he was a man. Then came a succubus to hasten his by then inevitable decline.

drink deep

Jan 31, 2009 1

The New Pragmatic Progressive Politics of Old Christine

Kevin Hilke

The New Adventures of Old Christine, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s surprisingly but deservedly successful two-camera, nineties-redux sitcom, now halfway through its fourth season on current ratings behemoth CBS, constantly tackles political issues—especially those related to “family values”—but does so in a way that subsumes political contention beneath traditional, comfortable, two-camera sitcom plots. The series takes up and comments on political questions inveterately, but in a formal and familiar conventional-sitcom environment in which all antagonisms are represented as pressing problems for individual people. Even when the show’s political message is so obvious as to seem artless and tactless, that message is articulated in political terms for neither the audience nor the characters. If these characters are playing politics, we must say that it is a peculiarly personal politics. The particular problems they face are baldly political, yet the sphere of real-world political problems does not substantively concern them.

Jan 31, 2009 1

Andrew Marvell Does His Own Horny Garden

Kevin Hilke

The speaker of Andrew Marvell’s 1681 poem “The Garden” explicitly exiles women from his garden, asserting that for Adam to have “live[d] in paradise alone” would have been “two paradises” “in one.” What need had Adam of a woman, he asks, ensconced in “a place so pure and sweet” as this “happy garden-state”—especially if the garden itself could provide Adam with a sexual foil?

Jan 28, 2009 0

Mistaken Outings, Incidental Secrets: Evolving Gay Stereotypes in Network TV Comedy

Kevin Hilke

Between the influence of received stereotypes and the restrictions of censors, gays who did not fit rigid, popularly assimilable molds had little place in nineties network comedy period. NBC’s programming, especially, suffered from this sort of stereotyping, culminating in the unabashedly stereotype-perpetuating, and thus user-friendly, Will & Grace. Now, fifteen years after Jerry’s outing, NBC’s offers us The Office’s Oscar Martinez, a gay member of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton’s three-person accounting department whose character debuts as ostensibly straight. Oscar is revolutionary in network TV comedy not because he defies outmoded stereotypes, which he does, but because his homosexuality—along with what his culturally insensitive boss, Michael Scott, terms his “Mexicanicity”—is kept consistently incidental to his character.

Jan 23, 2009 0

Southland Tales and the Cult of the Overreaching Idiot Infant Auteur

Darren Franich

Southland Tales isn’t a film. It’s a great soundtrack with some cool album artwork and a shitty name. Richard Kelly must be a genius, because a lobotomized chimpanzee couldn’t make a movie this bad. That it has moments of searing brilliance is no excuse. Moments like these demand and deserve better movies.

Jan 18, 2009 1

Sex, Utility, and Internet Prudery In Nineties News Comedy

Kevin Hilke

Having sex with as many attractive women as possible is the primary goal of George Findlay, the central character in Ken Finkleman’s stellar CBC comedy The Newsroom (1996-2005). In the series pilot, “The Walking Shoe Incident,” Kris the research assistant (Lisa Ryder) reluctantly confesses to George (the news director, played by Finkleman) that she’s had so much difficulty “learning the computer” that she’s given up trying. “Learning the computer” was important even in 1996—especially in a wired environment like a news station. But George hired Kris to run his personal errands, accompany him skiing, and fuck him. None of these require digital expertise, so he replies, “Oh, well forget that! You know, the whole thing with computers and the internet, you know, who cares! I don’t care. Really. You’re doing great!” George doesn’t have anything against the internet. He would surely prefer that Kris become facile with it. But he’s far more concerned about her facility with fellatio, so he dismisses the internet as irrelevant for his purposes. It is not useful to him.

The Plasma Spring