Spike Lee's Chi-raq

the color-coded spartans/trojans stuff sounds very baz luhrmann and obviously is not how it Is but movies can and will do many things. a lot of the critical articles i've read (by people who've seen it and not) seem to think that there's some other, realistic, respectful movie someone could make that really would "wake people up" and cause Change. maybe there is. someone should make it. but in my experience sober, polished tragedy reduces to entertainment just as easily as insane satire--easier, actually, because i think a lot of people feel like subjecting themselves to dramatic tragedy is a kind of moral act, and nothing is more entertaining than performing moral acts. like i thought this line in the lil bibby piece (which contains a lot of praise!) was wrong--

It's supposed to make you want to cry. A lot of the stuff that they were doing was funny. Even the whole rhyme scheme, that shit was just stupid. If you see some shit on Chicago, people need to want to cry at the end, not laugh, because it really is sad.

--because i watch moved liberals weep at handsomely mounted injustice almost every weekend, and imo i might as well be projecting porn. (gonna nag the office to get this-- we got dear white people, which the moved liberals did not like, so there's a chance.) no idea if this movie's good or not but i think aggressive, passionate satire is a better way to keep people awake at night than respectful realism--and at the very least not a reason in itself to condemn a movie. (i know there are other reasons it's being condemned--is it about 2015 chicago at all, is its title ghoulish marketing for spike's aristophanes stunt--but idk how i'd address those without seeing it.)
― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Friday, December 11, 2015 10:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just wanted to cheer this post. a lot of the criticisms of the film simply seem to be upset that lee’s treatment of the violence in chicago doesn’t fulfill their ideas of "realism"—that it isn’t sober enough. it’s quite possible that the film is a disaster, but naturally lee has every right—and probably a duty, given his body of work—to treat the subject in as outlandish and stylized a fashion as he would like.

this isn’t playing here and i don’t know if it’ll open in this town. but i hope to see this.

I haven't seen the movie yet (has there been a friend lately in which so many people post this disclaimer?), but dlh's comments remind me of the reaction to JFK from libs who thought Stone "muddied the waters" (I think it was beloved Richard Cohen; I'm not looking it up) and tut-tutted him for not being courageous enough to make An Honest Film about What Really Happened. The honest straightforward take w/out any of the movie's awesome lurid, ridiculous, "how's your mousse" moments wouldn't have done anything except reassure those convinced the Warren Commission was fiction. At least Stone's approach questions almost every piety of the left and right -- almost every piety, for DO NOT FORGET YOUR DYING KING.

i was tempted to see it this weekend but tbh i like chris hemsworth and i love patrick o'brian looking shit so i'm probably gonna see the whaler pic instead

I read that Ron Howard's take on the guy's fictionalized take on the true events that inspired Melville's "Moby Dick" does not do the reality justice, and that the rampant use of CGI does not pay proper respect to the real violence of mother nature and vindictive whales.

man that reminds me i'm in this kinda book club thing and we're reading ecology papers for fun (which reminds me i was looking up papers on assemblage theory and came across a paper by a sometime ilxor, only it was on like renaissance english lit instead of like hubbell's unified neutral theory so it was pretty funny) and there was this one awesome paper involving predation, i can't find it for free anywhere but this facebook post has the abstract - https://www.facebook.com/OrcaProjectSriLanka/posts/971991626199133 - if you've got a login for access to academic papers i highly recommend it, fun stuff, but man talk about violence.

good post bam

i wanna see that whale movie too but not nearly as much as i'd want to see yet another moby-dick, for reasons not unconnected to this discussion

is lynne ramsay still doing moby-dick in space?

idk but would camp out

ahab u've switched off ur targeting computer

what's wrong

I have you now.

ahab does at one point, while excoriating the sun for not showing him where moby-dick is despite "even now beholding him", complain that the sun is also keeping quiet about "the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee"

http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/winking-sun-493788.jpg

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_large/0/3664/197388-3105-114828-1-adventure-comics.jpg

engaging w/ this in two pieces but i at least appreciate the straightforward argument even if u can't help but be a condescending shithead about it

Spike Lee at his most brechtian since maybe School Daze doesn't warrant criticisms about truth and accuracy. Whatever the merits of the movie, the point of making it stylized and unreal and dissonant is to give the politics of the movie some space to breath. The unreality is the prod that sets the audience thinking instead of simply being engaged with a story.

I understand this point & made it myself, as i referenced upthread. I thought my last two posts addressed this specifically. https://twitter.com/MalcolmLondon/status/661646774319374336

Deej, do you think Spike Lee is any less respectful of the experiences of Chicagoans than Mozzy is to the experiences of Sacramentans? Do Mozzy's tapes reflect Sacramentans' experiences? Or do his tapes "erase the truth ppl experience there, or warp it for a national audience"? E.g. when you contrast Mozzy's numerous explicit references to committing murder with the actual murder rate of Sacramento, which nearly matches the not especially "gut-wrenching" or "shocking" but very realistic rate of the rest of California, you might think either that Mozzy committed all 27 murders (out of 480,000 people) in Sacramento last year or that, possibly a shoe store slap fight here or there notwithstanding, Mozzy is just another Gene Simmons selling a rock n roll fantasy; and that's fine with me, but there's no internal consistency in your criticism of one artist and your plaudits for another, though I look forward to your tortuous explanations as to why I'm so wrong.

First off, fuck you & your 'torturous explanations' im certainly not the only person who has this perspective on spike's film who's enjoyed a chief keef song.

I'm not saying there's no way Spike could make a good movie about chicago called chiraq, just because he's an outsider! Nor do I think that's what the people critical of this film are saying. I'm just suggesting that concerns about his ability to accurately portray the central dynamics of the problem **are fair things to be concerned about** and shouldnt be dismissed out of hand as a bunch of ppl who don't realize that art is artifice, man. I may watch the movie and end up disagreeing w/ the people critical of it. (In fact I wasn't going to post again til I'd seen it, but then you posted...)

And of course these questions are relevant to ask of rappers as well! There's no contradiction here, & these concerns are present in my writing about rap music as well (And to be completely transparent, I'm coming from a tradition of arguments about these things, these arent ideas ive formed in a vacuum). Mozzy, like the drill scene artists, is in conversation with his community about the truth of his art. (FYI, and I bring this up not because I'm saying it makes Mozzy more "authentic" and therefore good, but because the concerns about the murder rate should be put into context—https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/sacramentos-bad-rap/content?oid=16642245—see "Today's Gangs of Sacramento". His experience of gang life may be sold as "authenticity" & translated into a cliche the further you get from Sacramento, but that doesn't mean that the gangs or the violence are fictive—even if we'll never know the true nature of that relationship.) The whole reason the drill scene & keef became a thing was bc of local support of the teenagers in these communities. And lots of people in these communities think mozzy & keef are not representing their communities well, this is a pretty common and well disseminated POV. Even as their art moves me greatly I can absolutely see how consequences intended & unintended from their rise are in some ways negative...

The whole obsession w/ "realness" in street rap is in part a moral argument, and it's also a set of inter-community negotiations: that if you're going to be supported by ppl in this community you can only speak on that which you have experienced firsthand. these codes exist to avert exploitation, to ensure that those doing labor receive payment for their experiences and not someone else's. This is one ideology underlying a large portion of gangster rap. And then there's lot of gangster rap which doesnt fit that mold. & ive enjoyed music on both sides of the line. But I think criticisms from these communities of Spike, Keef, and Mozzy are legitimate!

You're also still pushing this narrative that Chicago violence has entered the national consciousness post-drill, which I think is very self-serving considering your role in promoting the music. I don't know what rhetorical effort you've put into convincing everyone this is true except to say that there are people out there in the world who have talked about Chicago violence since drill came into being, which duh. People talked about it before drill, too.

Self serving or not its true. i watched this happen firsthand. The interrupters doc that came out in 2011 made a little noise locally. But went from one article in TheRoot about Chicago Violence in early 2012 to an "epidemic" by summer. There were documentaries from Noisey, the UK, Worldstar, all these media entities swooped in to suddenly cover the violence in chicago. People didn't think of chicago like that before then, or they thought of it the way they thought of any other city with "some rough parts." I mean by summer nightline was doing special episodes on it which always included footage of the rappers themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag7JseqFqoA

anyway v interested to see how chance addresses this on SNL tonite lol

cold open with rahm

*stares blankly at the camera* "Rahm...is good."

lol

the Christian Science Monitor was reporting on Chicago gang violence, and citing public housing costs, in August of 2010

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2010/0830/Behind-Chicago-s-high-crime-summer-persistent-street-gang-violence

my date-limited news search on this subject produced a scant 639 other articles on the topic for the date range 1/1/09 through 12/21/10

fyi

*public housing cuts (as one among several points leading to the increase)

CNN reporting on Chicago gang violence and referring to it as "epidemic" in May of 2009

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/08/chicago.children.slain/index.html?iref=24hours

"Gangs Turn Chicago Streets Into a Battlefield," ABC Nightly News (national); anchor refers to the "epidemic of deadly violence taking the lives of children in Chicago" in the first line of the broadcast

http://abcnews.go.com/US/gangs-turn-chicagos-streets-battleground/story?id=8785218

(meant to add airdate: 10/8/2009)

This is an insane line of critique. Of *course* ppl reported on violence in Chicago before 2012. Lol @ citing the Christian Science monitor lmao

But they also reported on philly, on New Orleans, on Detroit

Chicago becoming a national story as a *singular* space of talking points about it is a racent development; fox news' whole thing on Chicago being a stand-In for black on black crime is recent. Before 2012, it was all about Chicago corruption and obama's socialist radical friends and leftist preachers. You can choose not to believe me, but again I witnessed this firsthand and I'm really not making it up!

I never said this was the first time ever, just that in 2015 there is no one unaware that Chicago violence exists. It is common knowledge. Patting spike on the back for bringing attention to Chicago violence is critical laziness period

It's wild how I have to field criticisms from you dudes about "making these arguments about yourself" when you're clearly unafraid of making them about me and my career, but hey

oh I see. what you wrote was this:

The interrupters doc that came out in 2011 made a little noise locally. But went from one article in TheRoot about Chicago Violence in early 2012 to an "epidemic" by summer.

so I pointed out that national news was specifically using the word "epidemic" three years before your start date. doing it a lot. the national media was aware of, and reporting on, the epidemic of violence in Chicago long before 2011. there was much more than "a little noise locally." you wrote:

People didn't think of chicago like that before then, or they thought of it the way they thought of any other city with "some rough parts."

I demonstrated that this is a false claim. where did I refer to you personally or your career bro? you're being wrong and it's just being shown to you, that's all.

i mean, deej's larger point -- that the claim 'whatever this movie does, it still tells people about a thing they don't know about' is not a good one -- is still valid, if anything even more valid

Before 2012, it was all about Chicago corruption and obama's socialist radical friends and leftist preachers. You can choose not to believe me, but again I witnessed this firsthand and I'm really not making it up!

you are, in fact, making this up, as date-limited searches of news will tell you within something like .03 seconds if you're actually interested!

xp it's true! deej is for sure known to make some good points, but "nobody was talking about Chicago gang violence before 2011" isn't one of them

Excuse me for not being as precise as I should have, but there was a demonstrable uptick in conversation about Chicago as a center for violence after the music popped up. I'm sorry if I in some way minimized the extent to which it had been covered previously--but I certainly never denied that it had been covered, I LIVE HERE, and I'm aware that it has been covered at a certain level for years, obviously. But it became a National Story that was referenced by politicians, in the president's state of the Union, on high profile shows like night line, in 2012 in a way it hadn't the previous year. This is true! And yes, in 2011 the coverage was not nearly as omnipresent. Pulling up an 09 article about a violence epidemic isn't disproving shit

But yes as Thomp points out this was a sidebar to the main point that doesn't really undercut the main thrust of what I'm saying at all

There's a long history of articles pointing to urban blight and violence and saying hey it's an epidemic, btw....you'll find some in 1909 never mind 2009... I maintain, though, that among the many peaks and valleys in the country paying particular attention to chicago's south side, 2012 was a year in which it reached a major saturation point.

Deej, do you know what the Christian Science Monitor is? Are you aware of its reputation? I ask because I don't understand your implication that it's not a noteworthy publication.

So your point is that, based on some anecdotal evidence and your gut feeling, national attention toward Chicago violence reached a saturation point long after its horrific peak, which was before you were even born? I know someone who did social work and mediation with Chicago gang members in the 70s and when I mentioned your thesis to him last week he chuckled, then made some indignant show of utterly complete dismissal. I wonder how his anecdotes stack up against yours.

And why is tracking and defining this narrative even important except to tie Chicago violence and this movie to your hobbyhorse slash meal ticket? How common is this claim that the movie Chi-raq, an arthouse movie in limited release, is informing the general public about Chicago, so much so that it must be repudiated?

I don't think this subject holds up well against all the folk wisdom and myth-making. When Lil Bibby tried to make a little corrective to what he felt were Spike Lee and the public's misconceptions, he made some of his own. Atlanta's murder rate, for example, is higher than Chicago's, and belittling the violence and terrorism of gang activity there makes him look less like a credible observer and more like an entertainer promoting his similarly-titled work

You have significant reading comprehension issues

Like half your post is refuted by my last post. Try again

Accusations of careerism in a fucking message board argument...like my whole asshole you goofy dumbass

*lick....lol like

I'm afraid your reasoning is too nuanced for me

See mattresslessness his post is a more accurate example of "disingenuousness" since ur looking

Sorry bro I don't think you've earned any more explanations! You're not arguing with what I said but w what you think I said and I have no interest in holding your hand for this

Good thing my dad doesn't work in Chicago city government! You'd be saying I was in rahm's pocket too

deej it's a really bad look, when a guy repeatedly proves you wrong, to just tell that guy to lick your asshole. it's the sort of thing that gets you banned, and then you whine and pick an all-caps display name, etc.

I had a longer thing but your thesis about when national news media began reporting on the increase in Chicago gang violence is just wrong, it's been proven wrong whether you moved to Chicago after college or not.

Deej: Lol @ citing the Christian Science monitor lmao

Bam: Deej, do you know what the Christian Science Monitor is? Are you aware of its reputation? I ask because I don't understand your implication that it's not a noteworthy publication.

Deej: You have significant reading comprehension issues

Me: what exactly is there about "LOL... LMAO" that evades Bam's comprehension? If you express yourself like a 12-year-old, or Lagoon, then you've got to expect people struggling to comprehend you.

Maybe by "last post" you meant that Sears Tower of text? I haven't read all of that yet. Skimmed it a bit. Trying to pace myself. Yesterday was chore day and go see a movie day and visit my girlfriend day. Let me catch up and then I'll toss your salad.

Chicago violence has been endemic/epidemic for years, obviously, as it is with just about any major city, with peaks and valleys of fretting on a national and local level. But I agree that it's only been in the past couple of years that Chicago has earned a more alarmist/sensationalized murder city sort of rep.

or Lagoon

thread now emitting shrapnel

He didn't prove me "wrong" you idiot! He's not even in the same argument

If I express myself like a twelve year old it's bc when I "write a Sears tower of text" I'm taking it on good faith that the person I'm talking to is going to engage with it instead of...well I can't tell if bam is trolling because he's actually stupid or if it's a more disingenuous kind of trolling, but fuck you if you expect me to explain to you how bibby is talking about the Atlanta *music industry* when he talks about how violence isn't as present there, or how using the Christian Science monitor as a barometer of the degree to which Chicago violence became a national story makes no sense. I answered genuinely and straightforwardly what I was talking about but clearly this is more about some perverse kind of point scoring in a game of captain save a revered east coast filmmaker