Her Smell (Elisabeth Moss, dir. Alex Ross Perry)

Her Smell just finished a run at the Nightlight, and it brought me back to a couple of very late 80s/early 90s moments.  More thoughts below:

• I guess Moss (who I will watch in nearly anything these days) called this a passion project, and as such she must have listened to some of the bands of the 80s and 90s that this reminded me of.  I saw L7, Babes in Toyland, and Hole in it, and Moss’s character Becky Something sure seems like a mix of Kat Bjelleland from BiT and Courtney Love.
• I’ve listened to people describe the film as a fictional biopic, and if so only because it defies the generic expectations. Biopics in my mind tend to follow the VH1 format – lots of focus on the rise and success of the band, a relatively brief wallow in the break-up and nadir, and then a sometimes sort of forced redemption narrative that it finishes with.
  • Her Smell has almost nothing about the rise to fame – we see two or three songs played live and that’s it for the glory years, except for three or four home movie-type segments about collecting gold records and getting magazine covers and jokes about selling out.
  • We spend an inordinate amount of time on the fall, and we see Something in some pretty manic and frightening states.  The camera also spends a lot of time on the reactions of those around her, and less on the bad girl of rock n roll misbehaving in ways that are fucking stereotypes at this point.

• The redemption is also short, and full of anxiety and moments in which I for one thought she was going to blow it. The fact that the band doesn’t go back out for one more song made me happy – the encore-as-redemption-for-all-the-horrible-shit-I’ve-done-to-people theme is sort of played out I think.
  • There is also very little justification of her behavior, and even part of that justification is ridiculous, such as when Something tells her ex-husband that she dreamed they were part of a Native American tribe and he killed all the children and that’s why she was so horrible to him. He just stares at her, the only response that makes sense.
    • The film deliberately uses that scene to illustrate how tense the struggle to justify her own actions is, especially in contrast to moments when she says that she was horrible to people.
  • (I’m always a little weirded out by how much punk rock stars wanted to get married – it makes me proud, especially in light of the alpha male wannabe culture of the hippies.)
• I think that if the film argues anything it argues that there is a fundamental difference in rock and roll stardom that comes from the female bands of the 90s, especially in contrast to the rise of the alt-rock movement that again was heavily male. Becky Something has to rely on her bandmates, even in the end, and they seem to depend on her for more than just a meal ticket.
  • She also at least in part relies on motherhood as a way to connect, even in her least lucid moments.  She has clearly ingested the cultural attitudes towards being a mom enough to at least voice regret about missing time, and her big moment at the end comes not from the crowd adulation (which she has clearly enjoyed earlier in her career) but from the fact that her daughter comes running to her.

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Marlon James – A Brief History of Seven Killings

A Brief History of Seven Killings is the first Marlon James novel I’ve read, and it won’t be the last.  It features multiple points of view as it wends its way through the attempt to kill Bob Marley (because he was thought to favor the socialist-leaning PNP in the upcoming election) in 1976 and then revisits the story of the subsequent rise of Jamaican drug lords in the crack days of New York in the 1980s.

More thoughts:

• In the “Acknowledgements” section James identifies both Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Marguerite Duras’s The North China Lover as models for what he essentially thought was a huge mess of “anecdotes” and other “source materials.”  I haven’t read Duras, but the multiple viewpoints of As I Lay Dying (as well as the invocation of different dialects) felt like the perfect starting point for ABHOSK.
• The viewpoint that seems closest to James is Nina Burgess, a Jamaican women who works her way to the States in as honest a fashion as she can.  She has multiple names throughout the novel as she assumes identities, and she gets to finish the novel by getting a call from someone who I think is her mom (although I’m not sure of that by any means).
  • She’s closest, I’m guessing, because she works multiple jobs after becoming the lover of a white American mechanical engineer who worked in Jamaica for a company mining bauxite. She ends up as a nurse, and I’m guessing that James is honoring that work in a fashion.
  • She also has a tremendously complicated relationship with her home country, one which at the end has her being chastised by a young Jamaican woman sitting with her husband (who is in a coma after a gang war), imbibing the food and culture of Jamaica in a restaurant close to her home in Queens, throwing up that food after hearing of Josey Wales’s horrible death, ending with that mysterious phone call.
    • I’m guessing James feels similarly.
• The folks who run Jamaica politically are rarely seen – instead, James presents the viewpoint of those who run sections of the various ghettos. One man, Papa-Lo, gets killed as he tries to bring peace;  another man, Josie Wales, gets killed after his attempts to bring order fall apart when he murders everyone in a crack house.  Both, I think, had gotten tired of the constant ways that their efforts failed.
• There is a lot more to talk about here, of course – a couple of white folks show up, a couple of characters are gay, the weirdness of Lester Bangs and all those Rolling Stone writers also appears as they become entranced by reggae and then find out that the scene that produces it is a brutal one.
  • And the Singer (Marley, in the only way he’s referenced in the novel), gets lionized and idealized in a way that, as the Rolling Stone writer says as he’s being “corrected” about the story he’s publishing in The New Yorker, makes me “think even more highly of the fucker.”
• As we piece together our sense of American identity through the vast, often nearly indecipherable melange of immigrant voices – and their reasons for coming here – novels like this one will help us better understand the promise and perils of moving to the United States and trying to make connections here.
• Although the dialect may be off-putting, this was an amazing read, one that I am guessing will live in my mind for a while.

Randyland Revisited

I’ve waxed sorta rhapsodically about Randyland before, but this time we got to meet the man, along with what felt like a hundred other Pittsburghians or visitors. We were also treated to Randy expounding upon his own world view, and it featured a powerful personal story along with several heartfelt pleas to love both ourselves and others.

His unabashed joy about communicating his own emotional intelligence and love for humanity makes me think a bit about my own privileging of cynicism and detachment. If we could all only be more like Randy…

The man, the myth, the legend, with some pretty geeked-out fans

No wood blocks or lady bugs were harmed in the making of this photo

 

Chuck Pahlaniuk – Fight Club

For a class I’m teaching I re-read Fight Club (for probably the fourth time), and since I have yet to blog about it now seemed like the perfect time. Thoughts…

• The components of masculinity that Pahlaniuk identifies are fascinating.  He is of course satirizing the New Age Men’s movement, but the ways that he pulls this off show a construction of masculine identity that contorts the usual binaries…
  • For instance, lots of this novel focuses on the unnamed narrator trying to understand his own feelings in a world in which he thinks he’s being asked to have them.  The attending support groups, finding jobs that are seemingly intentionally emasculating (mostly because of where he fits on the corporate food chain), and even the selling of human fat-based designer soaps all make us think that this narrator is raging against what many in the old-school masculine camp would call the feminization of the US (which, by the way, is not a thing).  That raging leads to his own destruction, though, and not in a poetic Richard Wright-sort of way.
    • Having set up that binary, Pahlaniuk beautifully yanks the rug out from under oppressed white men everywhere by having them (us) pummel each other in dirty basements and think that that’s a good thing, rather than the product of intense insomnia brought on at least partially by an inability to reconcile oneself to the shit that one must do to earn a living.
      • Which, lest we forget, is in our narrator’s case to be the point person on deciding on just how many people have to die for a manufacturer to admit a mistake in a production process…
  • Another binary that he gleefully pulls apart is the observation/action conundrum. Masculinity equals action, right?  In FC, however, observation and action blend and morph together, as shit happens:
    • the steroids that Big Bob used when he lifted (active) have now caused him to be dying of cancer (the ultimate in passivity);
    • Tyler’s job as a projectionist (passive) becomes active when he inserts scenes from porn films in the kid movies he shows;
    • and many more…
• Of course, this novel is also saturated in identity, but when we start to believe our own bullshit the train runs off its rails, as Project Mayhem becomes a thing that even Tyler (or the unnamed narrator) can’t control.
  • The supposed masculine love of being able to thrive in chaos results in the entire support group coming to rescue our narrator from himself as buildings collapse around them.

 

The Imperial Room – Canton, Ohio

The revitalization of cities can leave some components of the city behind, and while Canton has a long way to go in its quest to be a functioning city again, that doesn’t meant that some places aren’t potential baggage to be shed.

I can’t imagine that (warning: this links to FB) The Imperial Room will join this list.  From the Kraken/Octopus running down the side of the building to the niche it neatly fills (just slightly off downtown, good place to meet friends and be able to hear oneself think and one’s friends impart words of wisdom), to the friendly bartenders who know what the fuck goes in whatever drink you order, there’s always a place for a bar like the IR, even if the yuppies zombify the rest of Canton.

Kraken or Octopus?  You decide

 

Kotkin – The Next Hundred Million

Joel Kotkin argues in The Next Hundred Million that the United States adding another hundred million people by 2050, but unlike many he thinks that our country can handle the population increase.  Thoughts below:

• Kotkin believes wholeheartedly I guess that we will absorb this next round of immigration by being relentlessly centrist. He critiques the extremes on both sides, and sees a smartly-regulated suburbia as our future.
  • He also sees this future as being based in the United States because he sees us as being resource-rich and essentially optimistic. I hope that his optimism survived the rabid squirrels that mark Trump.
• Kotkin is an economist by trade, and he relentlessly pours through demographic data to come up with his conclusions.  He seems to be uncertain as to why people could come to other conclusions…
• He’s sort of Panglossian, but I admire that – it’s way easier to blow up the world metaphorically, I think, then to propose solutions.
  • The problem is that the solutions are a bit shallow – they are deeply grounded in solutions that he sees as human-centered, but there’s not much there yet in terms of actual policy proposals that are located in local government. He does advocate for local control, so maybe that’s why.
• He’s so immersed in data that his argument seems to lack emotional intelligence. That may not be fair – in person he might be remarkably emotionally intelligent – but this look at the future is devoid of much in the ways of story-telling. If he had added story-telling then the book would have doubled in size, but that might have been worth it.
  • In particular his story examples feel cherry-picked a bit. He often uses one author or figure to represent a very wide range of thought, and the person he peaks is ridiculously extreme. For instance, to criticize environmentalism he quotes Paul Watson, who is definitely not a scientist.
  • Thus the book often takes on a scolding tone. I guess if he thinks we’re going to make it we need to be scolded a bit…
• In a weird twist I’m reading Piketty right now as well, and I don’t think that he and Kotkin disagree on the symptoms. The only time that Kotkin gets negative is when he talks about increasing inequality. I’m not sure that he’s anti-tax, so he might even favor Piketty’s solutions as well. I guess I’m not sure that Piketty shares Kotkin’s optimism, but that might not mean much…

Techiavellian and paradigm shifts

I’m working my way through a couple of texts and a travel piece, but I wanted to briefly comment on this blog post by Techiavellian.  Whether you know what a denial of service attack is or you don’t, he makes a couple of important points about the way we argue in the digital age.

I won’t repeat Techiavellian’s basic point – he describes the ways that argument happens on the Internet pretty powerfully, and he identifies the potential pitfalls as well. What I think is particularly interesting is that I think he identifies what happens when Kuhn’s paradigm shift happens in ways that I hadn’t thought about before.

Found at famousscientists.org/

After all, that accumulation of data that happens when a scientific paradigm shift occurs has to come from somewhere, and Kuhn assumed it came from science itself, as the weight of information that contradicted the initial paradigm eventually came to help scientists realize that they needed to work from a new theoretical foundation.

I remember how my own mind felt blown when I first encountered Kuhn’s magnum opus, and I thought about how maybe science’s claim to preeminence felt a bit less based in a clear, unbiased view of the data presented to it and more in the human desire to hang on to an explanation that works. The bit of a blow to scientific egos felt like something we could weather, and indeed most scientists I know acknowledged some awareness that Kuhn was onto an explanation of sorts, even if it left blanks.

What I didn’t get (thanks Techiavellian!) is that perhaps this process has gradually eroded our cultural confidence in expertise in general, in ways that have led to things like the election of a president who seems to believe that he knows all things in his gut, like a god, or Jabba the Hut. Maybe this explains the general failure among all of us to believe the experts (or at least give them a good listen), unless our life happens to be in their hands, like an airplane pilot or a raft guide or a heart surgeon.

If this erosion works like a DOS attack, then, as Techiavellian argues, where does the answer lie?  Do we develop better filters?  Identify known sources of bad information and eliminate them?  Or is there a better solution, one that doesn’t involve defense or offense but openness?

When you figure it out please let me know…in the meantime I’ll just be here guiding my raft…