Issue #312: Bee-ing and Time
Apropos of nothing, here are my favorite songs about time:
I know just how you feel
But this time, love's for real
In time, it will reveal
That special love that's deep inside of us
Will all reveal in time, oh
I am still looking for the DeBarge fan club. Am I alone out there? Who shares my enthusiasm for the second family of soul? Conventional wisdom says “time heals all,” but this song approaches a more specific scenario: someone who has been burned by romance but waiting for the balm of time to make evident the authenticity of the love they’re currently in.
In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble
They're only made of clay
But our love is here to stay
I know this song is a standard, but the Joe Williams and Count Basie version has been my favorite ever since serendipitously hearing it on a CD out of a huge jazz collection I bought at an estate sale a few years ago. Williams’ voice is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. And the lyrics are really evocative. Like “Time Will Reveal,” this song is about a love that endures beyond even the natural wonders. It’s counterintuitive, but goes further than even “Ozymandias,” it’s not just the works of man but all matter that slowly transforms from its recognizable form.
盛り上がる時は
一瞬で終わる
夢をいつも見て
理想を叶えるかも
同じような日が
今日も繰り返す
迫り来る夜
夜
今夜
Aside from being a “bop,” the themes of the song are simple. Life is repetitious, peppered with brief moments of excitement that “end in an instant” (「一瞬で終わる」/ “isshun de owaru”). There’s a bit of irony, too, drawn out by the dude dancing through the empty streets in the video. The monotony we experience includes the exciting moments after the sun sets, 「迫り来る夜夜今夜」/“semari kuru yoyo kon'ya.” The last lines of the verse, 「る夜夜今夜」/ “ru yoyo kon’ya” translate to “night, night, tonight,” playing with the motif of repetition leading into the verse again. So, the “peak time” passes quickly, but always returns.
Looking back, things we've done.
Reminding myself, there's more to come.
One of my favorite Insted songs, maybe my favorite, the idea is pretty similar to the tofubeats track: you remember the good times, but they’re never only behind you.
Gucci Mane crazy I might pull up on a zebra
Land on top a eagle smoke a joint of reefa
Standing on the sofa spilling liquor on the speaker
Call the paralegal cause this shit should be illegal
There’s no time like Gucci Time.
Time is such a common topic for songwriters because there’s never enough of it. And sometimes there’s not enough time to write about songs for your 2023 year end music review even though it’s the fifth week of 2024. But if I were writing a song about time, it would be about the fact that I am spending full days working on getting my dissertation over the finish line, scheduling my defense, and all of those other quotidian matters to the end of degree conferral. ETA is ??? but whenever I publish, you’ll like it as much as you would have otherwise. Paradox can’t run like clockwork.
The B-Movie Keeper
I have been writing like nobody’s business with my minimal leisure time getting vacuumed up by video games. But I of course, still make time to visit the cinema. My most recent trip was to catch The Beekeeper (2024) in its last showing in the luxe IMAX auditorium at my local theater. Man, it did not disappoint.
It’s a little funny how much I liked this movie. I went in with high expectations as a Statham fan. He belongs on the action hero pantheon. He blends stoicism and charisma, especially in these non-ensemble outings. I like stars who can do a lot with a little. But after I sat down, I noticed everything that might go against it.
Every action movie post-John Wick (2014) is plagued with unjustified and sometimes downright baffling comparisons to it. I doubt you would be able to find a single action movie made after 2014 that doesn’t have several reviews mentioning Wick. But this movie actually suffers from trying to be John Wick. A retrofuturistic extra-judicial cabal of assassins… okay, I think I’ve been here before. But the “world building” that The Beekeeper does is perfunctory enough to not be there at all. You could have cut out every scene with a “Beekeeper” associate typing into a oversized monochrome monitor and printing onto continuous form paper and it would have been the same movie, just ten minutes shorter.
The other big issue is the director: David Ayer. I’ve only liked one movie, aside from The Beekeeper, that he has directed. I think he has a tendency for chaotic action scenes with a lot of cuts. The Beekeeper is no exception, the way the scenes are filmed isn’t exactly clean and… there are a lot of cuts. But The Beekeeper’s action actually got me rethinking my criteria for what I think is good and bad. As aggressively as he cuts, there is a continuity in the actors’ movements that goes a long way to making the action legible. When Statham is whaling on a guy, the cut doesn’t move the action forward, Statham and his unlucky dance partner are in more or less the same position for a split second before the action moves forward. Compare this to your average MCU movie, and you find that the cuts have the combatants dealing with the aftermath of whatever was happening in the moment they just cut from.
Statham is playing his own version of Batman in The Beekeeper, and Ayer leans into that. The action choreography is reminiscent of the Nolan films — cut heavy, movement heavy, but still engaging. Adam Clay (Statham) and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) both love using their elbows.
Spoilers for The Beekeeper follow
What was really remarkable about this movie was the plot. Statham’s role as beekeeper follows from a military stint (branch never specified) and the man respects the flag. Ultimately, what he comes to discover is that the president’s son is at the head of the phishing scam he’s eviscerating. The movie leaves in suspense the question of whether or not the president (Jemma Redgrave) knew about her son’s maleficence. While it becomes clear she does not, her son’s ill gotten gains funded her campaign, and whether Statham’s goal is just to kill the president’s son or also kill the president is also played for suspense.
Of course, he doesn’t kill the president. How could he, especially when this fictional iteration appears to be a Hillary Clinton analogue? This is a Hollywood movie, after all. The office of president isn’t all that’s sacred in The Beekeeper, though. Statham doesn’t kill a single law enforcement officer. Not a city cop, not an FBI agent, not a Secret Service agent — adding to the Batman comparisons. He throws them down stairs, shoots them in the knees, otherwise incapacitates, but never kills. There is an obvious moral equation here that dictates who he kills and who he doesn’t. Any flunky, henchman, or bounty hunter is open season. They get killed brutally.
Ideology’s function in this arrangement is obvious. Maybe there’s a slightly more fascinating layer. The characters who get killed seem to have assumed the risk. They are assassins or contractors hired to kill Adam Clay. Because they know what they are doing and who they are doing it on behalf of — a malicious phishing scam empire — killing them is permissible in the logic of the film. For those pursuing Clay as a functionary of the law, just doing their job, trying to apprehend him him because he has indeed broken the law, those people are immune from death. The question of law is a little bit interesting in the film too, though not really much more than any other action film, because of Clay’s state of exception.
Spoilers for The Beekeeper end
I think if I broke this movie out into a list of pros and cons, the cons of the film might outweigh the pros. But that is the shortcoming of such schematic film review. The Beekeeper has every reason to be bad, yet it is good. Not the height of Statham’s career, but a perfectly respectable action movie with some interesting flourishes.
Weekly Reading List
Highlighting some of my esteemed Substack colleagues today — with the caveat that these are just two pieces of writing I wanted to spotlight and in no way a Substack endorsement. The only thing I endorse is the Paradox Newsletter.
People have been asking me if I am happy or unhappy that Slavoj Žižek is on Substack. My answer? I don’t care. Regardless of where he publishes, I will likely maintain about a 50% completion rate of his oeuvre. The implication might be that our subject matter is the same, thus Žižek would diminish my audience. Honestly, I only see his presence on the platform as a driver for my subscriptions. I’m assuming people will look at Substack for the first time because of him, and maybe I can snag 0.00000001% of his traffic.
I am not always the biggest fan of Žižek’s essays on contemporary global politics, but I found this one to be excellent. The question of truth telling in his title is an allusion to his thinking about some bigger ideas related to truth and free speech. He elaborates a number of different definitions for truth and goes on to hang his hat on an important complication to truth: the truth-effect:
a psychoanalyst has to tell this to the patient at the right moment, when (based upon his analytic experience) he is convinced that his statement will deeply affect the patient’s subjectivity, pushing him towards accepting some repressed truths about his subjectivity and desires. If the psychoanalyst tells this to his patient too early, the patient will dismiss it as irrelevant. For the truth to have an effect on those to whom it is told, it matters when it is told to them – and, obviously, the same goes for political statements, especially with regard to the ongoing Gaza war.
What is at stake in his argument is the question of speech and its conveniences. As I have argued in the passed, following Lacan and Žižek’s elaboration of him, the ideal of free speech as a Democratic ethical principle is crucial for orienting social functions. But the application of free speech is complex, because that freedom is often conferred when it can have no effect. Žižek writes:
Freedom to say something problematic is given to us when it doesn’t matter: when the effect of saying something is null and makes no difference, we are free to say it.
My favorite thing about this brief essay is that Žižek is able to take some important, widely applicable philosophical point and relate it to Zionist propaganda and the discourse relating to the massacre of Palestinians:
While one has to praise Israel in admitting its mistakes, a suspicion remains: when these two “facts” were first proclaimed, they circulated all around the world, all big media mentioned them, but when the mistake was admitted, it draw much less attention, so that the rumors about burned bodies and beheaded children continue to circulate… In short, Israel told a lie at the moment when this had a big world-wide effect, and it then told the truth when it was clear that it will be received as a minor correction with no great effect.
Equally interesting, and outside of the scope of Žižek’s writing in this case, are the… comments. I know, never read them, right? Most are nonsense, and nonsense of the worst kind: verbose. But there is something genuinely valuable to be gleaned from remarks like this:
This commenter misses the obvious relevance of the supposed “wandering notions” to the topic at hand — and the greater insights about truth itself one might walk away with if they are less familiar with the topic. Somehow, anything pro-Palestine is assimilated to “a twitter screed.” Žižek is not doing any original philosophizing here, but the broader philosophical criteria for truth and its relationship to speech are not common twitter topics. That’s why the essay is worth a damn.
Artemis O is a writer with a razor sharp focus on video games and their cultural context. In this essay, Artemis explores the dichotomy between notions of “polish” and “jank,” as opposite ends of a descriptive spectrum but not necessarily determinative of quality. This was one of my favorite bits:
From one set of bloodsuckers to the next, I fucking hate vampires. Miss me with that Twilight shit; fuck off Dracula. I am not generally a fan of the pale-skinned, fanged-teeth night-prowlers. What moved me to try Troika Games’ Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines is the stranglehold this role-playing game has in the online community—the reverence with which people state its lengthy title. There is a saying amongst the fans of V:TM-B: “Every time you mention it, someone will re-install it." It’s deserving of its cult status, for it is a truly amazing game—if you can move past the jank.
The underlying thesis of the essay, understanding and appreciating supposed imperfections of games as they come, is a welcome one. There is no question that we have seem games self-awarely use the production values and “jank” characteristics of 2000s “budget” games for artistic purposes above (and, perhaps, in addition to) budgetary ones. Artemis helps readers understand what exactly is being reproduced in such an undertaking by developers.
Until next time.