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Thanks to scb0212 for putting an apple on the desk this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
For Crooked Marquee, Jason Bailey looks back at the work of documentarian Frederick Wiseman:
But ultimately, what’s so fabulous about his work is its aversion to statements. He doesn’t have Something to Say about his subjects, at least not explicitly, so he’s not working towards some grand overall thesis—and as a result, you don’t feel the gears grinding, the way you do with so much (too much) less accomplished documentary cinema. Without a predetermined destination, we never know exactly where he might go, and nothing that he encounters along the way is obviously dispensable or irrelevant. […] It’s also important to note that his aversion to grand statements, and his insistence on exploring his subjects to other ends, doesn’t mean his films aren’t saying anything. His themes just sneak up on you. For example, it’s only at the end of 1983’s The Store, which explores the goings-on and Neiman Marcus’s flagship store in Dallas, that we realize this is a most piercing portrait of the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan years; we’re nearly in the fourth hour of 2017’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library when the full force of the library, of the variety of its services and locations and scholarship, reveals itself as one of the last vestiges of genuine community in this splintered city.
Ars Technica‘s Kyle Orland reports on the launch of the Video Game History Foundation, a massive searchable online archive of historic documents, artwork, and game development material:
Getting this kind of obscure information into a digitized, easily searchable form was “a lot harder than it sounds,” Salvador said. Beyond getting archival-quality scans of the magazines themselves (a process aided by community efforts like RetroMags and Out of Print Archive), extracting the text from those pages proved difficult for OCR software designed for the high-contrast, black-text-on-white-background world of business documents. “If you’ve ever read a ’90s video game magazine, you know how crazy those magazine layouts get,” Salvador said. To get around that problem, Salvador said VGHF Director of Technology Travis Brown spent months developing a specially designed text-recognition tool that “handles even the toughest magazine pages with no problem” and represents “a significant leap in quality over what we had before.” That means it’s easier than ever to find 81 separate mentions of Clu Clu Land from across dozens of different issues with a single search.
NPR‘s Eric Deggans gives a sneak peak on some of the revelations in Questlove’s new documentary about Saturday Night Live musical performances:
A consistent theme in Questlove’s film involves stories of how sketches now considered classic SNL moments almost didn’t happen. The Lonely Island — a trio that included SNL writers Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer with cast member Andy Samberg — created a rap music video parody in 2005 called “Lazy Sunday,” which inspired legions of fans to upload unofficial versions on YouTube. A year later, when Justin Timberlake was hosting the last episode before Christmas 2006, the trio tried to develop a video satirizing ’90s R&B. But they had such a tough time figuring it out, a final version of the pre-taped video wasn’t ready until that Saturday. “The reason it made it onto the show was that no one really knew what the sketch was,” Timberlake says.
Smithsonian Magazine‘s Jeffrey R. Wilson talks about “teaming” in theatre, and how it could be a model for best practices off the stage:
Shakespeare’s greatest collaborations were with his audiences. In contrast to contemporaries like Ben Jonson—who told his audiences, basically, Sit down, shut up, and enjoy the glory of my words—Shakespeare repeatedly went out of his way to ask audiences to be active participants in the creation of his plays. “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,” he asked in Henry V. Individual genius is only part of the story of Shakespeare’s success. We should also celebrate his talents of teaming. At the start of his career, he knew how to jump from one impromptu working group to another. In the middle, he could efficiently lend expertise to massively collaborative projects. By the end, he could scaffold and manage cross-sector teams of people who shared little common ground other than a commitment to making creative ideas into new realities.
And at her Substack, Aella describes the rise of Onlyfans in the online sex work world, its canny moves and its drawbacks:
My point is, the fact that men don’t actually care about individuation much really lends itself to the scalability of connection. A hundred guys will think the things a girl says in her drip video were in fact filmed live and directly, uniquely for them, and be completely unable to notice that it’s not, that blazing daylight outside despite being 10pm, that she never says their name in the video. You can duplicate an entire human with low resolution and as long as she appears vaguely fertile, they will never notice. I have a lot of positive things to say about men, like I will staunchly defend being empathetic towards them, but this is one avenue in which my hopes about them were repeatedly, regularly crushed.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season One, Episode Eighteen, “Legacies”
A middling-to-good episode; I’m getting frustrated by the refusal to move the plot forwards with more than hints at this point. Having a body be stolen is a cool basis for a story, one that elevates the episode as a whole. We’re also seeing more collision between the characters here – I enjoy that Delenn is effectively the antagonist of the episode here. It’s great that Sinclair has a wariness-to-disdain for the Minbari that’s broken up by his sincere respect and friendship with Delenn; he’s not quite, like, racist, because he’s smart and self-aware enough to effectively recognise that his emotional reaction is a trauma response, but he harbours a deep suspicion of them, and Delenn is his reminder that they’re not all bad, even though he knows she was involved in whatever happened to him.
Sinclair’s story is a minor act of forgiveness, now that I think about it. He’s trying to leave the past in the past, heal, and move on. It’s interesting in the context of a show driven so intensely by backstory that keeps coming back on everyone; indeed, Londo and G’kar (neither of whom appear in this episode, to my disappointment) trying to keep the past alive.
NYPD Blues — marathoning before TUBI takes it away (noooooo), one of our running enjoyments is when a character talks about getting “jammed up” and the end of Season 3 is nonstop jamming. Unfortunately it is an “undercover in too deep/being set up” story and the show just did this earlier in the season, it feels weird again so soon when none of these cops are actually undercover folks as their main gig. A cliffhanger at the end of the season is immediately resolved in the next season premiere, so no dragging at least. We leave the show for now with a psychotic jealous lesbian killing the partner of the cop Medavoy donated his sperm to, yay representation?
The Crimson Kimono — speaking of getting cop stuff in under the wire, thanks Conor for the heads up! What a beginning, but it’s interesting how the crime stuff is largely jettisoned for the melodrama and love triangle and, as Lauren describes in her superb write-up, a straightforward and uncondescending and unexotic look at Little Tokyo. Love all the street work in this, and Fuller’s restless camera in closed spaces reflects the increasingly knotted-up emotions of the characters. Shigeta’s big outburst is played 100 percent straight and yet I did not see what he saw, and the movie waits to the end before tipping its hand in that regard — I’ve seen some criticism of how his anxiety and anger plays as purely psychological based on the text of the movie, rather than something based in the reality of oppression, but I think that is on the borders, like in the scene in the cemetery. Great bittersweet ending, especially because Corbett winds up chilling with Anna Lee, who is the fucking best — Fuller loves his independent women and she is a great one. “Love does much, but bourbon does everything.” Also, a great guide on dressing as sharp as Shigeta here: https://bamfstyle.com/2020/11/04/crimson-kimono-shigeta/
Crimson Kimono reboot idea — two cops in present-day LA investigate after a burlesque performer is brutally canceled after she actually performs the routine that Sugar Torch was planning here.
Fuck yeah, The Crimson Kimono! (And thanks.) Great point about Fuller’s live-wire style amplifying the nerviness of all the building emotion and tension. And I think BAMF Style is going to become regular reading ….
I really need to peruse BAMF more, I remember coming across their look at Mitchum’s fits in The Yakuza and really digging the research: https://bamfstyle.com/2019/09/25/yakuza-mitchum-5-corduroy/
One of the interesting things about the Crimson Kimono is what is not discussed, which is that Joe has probably experienced internment, which informs him of a general hate that his partner hasn’t experienced. His anger is one of misplaced aggression, but the memory of WWII is in someway his catalyst. Contemporary audiences certainly knew of this, and the closest we see to this is the acknowledgement of Nissei sacrifices in the monument to Japanese American veterans for a country that once betrayed them.
Great point.
It’s an odd vibe, where the viewer knows Joe is not wrong about racism but the very unostentatious depiction of Little Tokyo, which is wonderful, means there’s never anything as clunky as a “dick white guy being racist to show Racism Is Bad” moment, and that makes Joe’s reverse racism (uh oh) the only racism onscreen.
T-Men – Media Magpies gets results! My take on this is a lot less heady than that of Messrs. Bruni and Anderson, but I can say I found this to be enjoyable beyond its limitations. Both in terms of starting as “copaganda” and being a bit sluggish at times with a rather average cast and a weak script. But Anthony Mann and John Alton transcend the starting point to create a nifty little B-movie noir that cares less about glorifying the Secret Service than in creating a harrowing story. I am not a big Dennis O’Keefe fan but he is really well suited for this sort of movie and role, and Alfred Ryder (who was far more successful on the stage and is usually remembered most for being on the first episode of Star Trek) is quite solid as well.
Kojak, “Cross My Heart and Hope to Die” – A woman suffering from some degree of depression and other mental disorders witnesses the murder of a suitor by her psychotic neighbor, only she blacks out the details. Kojak spends the hour trying to help her remember while the squad puts together the rest of the clues. Very 70s in its approach to mental illness as both something to take seriously and something to trivialize and sensationalize. Plus we get another noirish ending. The number of unhappy resolutions to the cases is getting to be quite starling. The sad young man is played by Andrea Marcovicci, who is perhaps better know for a long career as nightclub singer.
Frasier, “The Show Where Lilith Comes Back” – Does what it says on the tin, and sets the tone for how the post-divorce relationship between the two will go. Also establishes that neither Martin or Niles like Lilith very much. I have never quite been sure what to make of Lilith, but Bebe Neuwirth makes you want to keep figuring it out.
Mann and especially Alton are wilding out in T-Men — this screened at the rep theater a year or so back and it looked fantastic on the big screen.
The Doors – another entry in the “well, if I’m listening to music from the 60s and 70s I might as well also watch some films about that era” series. I am not a fan of the Doors music but I still find it interesting to see additional context on why acts were important and this does get some of that across, before slipping into a cycle of rock & roll asshole debauchery that gets boring pretty quickly (which I guess is partly the point). Good performances and some well-orchestrated scenes of large-scale mayhem but definitely outstayed its welcome for me, like most Doors songs.
I say again that the doors were pretty good band that would not be nearly as well regarded today if the lead singer hadn’t happened to die at the same age as Jimi and Janis the year before. I think Manzarek’s keyboards are like nothing else, but Morrison’s death and the ensuing idea of a “27 Club” put The Doors in the conversation at a level with Hendrix and Joplin which was not, musically or critically, deserved.
and Oliver Stone films.
Low key hate this one and I’m a Doors fan, way too many scenes of Val-as-Jim cavorting and saying dumb, drugged out poetic bullshit…which is probably accurate to Jim Morrison but I also don’t find it entertaining. (Soderbergh’s version of this movie would be hysterical.)
Soderbergh’s version of this would be the music version of Starship Troopers, I cannot imagine him dealing with the source material in anyway other than vicious satire.
EXACTLY.
Space Adventure Cobra – Feels less like the immediate thought – Star Wars – and more like its influences – Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers – making it have a back to basics freshness in a way. Cobra is a space pirate being hunted by his enemies. He’s surgically altered his appearance and his left arm is a custom made psychogun. Now he’s helping a beautiful bounty hunter find her sister and rescue her from Crystal Bowie. It’s a maximalist expression of hand painted cel animation along with a plot and direction that feels boundless with an anything goes attitude. It feels like flipping through a gallery of 70s SF book covers and watching the end of 2001 stretched to 90 mins with it all flying by at 500 miles per hour. The action is constant with brief moments of downtime where dialog between the two leads, other than saying “I love you” is made up of exposition. Maybe I don’t watch enough anime, know squat about it, and I’m just jazzed at seeing it but this was exhilarating, like a bucket of ice water to the face.
“It feels like flipping through a gallery of 70s SF book covers” is the kind of praise that is going to get a movie onto my watchlist. I definitely need to see more of this kind of pulpy sci-fi anime stuff, the few I have seen haven’t always wowed me on a storytelling level but the visuals are amazing.
Avengers: Endgame — I decided to revisit this and I still think it’s terrific. And especially I’m impressed by how it handles tone, moving from somber to exciting to funny and back in a way that feels natural and believable but still manages to carry the audience along. Not to beat a dead horse, but contrast this with the recent Star Trek Section 31 movie where they have people making quips at a funeral and making the whole thing seem soulless, while here they do the same thing and it makes it seem real.
The MCU experiment has given us way too much of one thing, but that thing was pretty well done up to this point. I wasn’t quite as surprised by Endgame having already been taken by surprise by Infinity War, which I expected to be a 2.5-hour headache and ended up being surprised how well they could blend all the flavors into one coherent slushie. It’s a good thing they quit while they were ahead and stopped making these after such a big finale.
“It’s a good thing they quit while they were ahead and stopped making these after such a big finale.”
So much for this week’s Intrusive Thoughts column.
Bruce McCulloch Live
Well, I wasn’t gonna miss a chance to see a Kid in the Hall live. Not a standup show so much as a one-man show of routines, monologues, and callbacks, but it really gets to what I love about the Kids. I wouldn’t even call Bruce my favorite, but he might have the most monologue-based sketches (“30-Second Stories,” and, well, all of his various monologues), and you see that influence here, as he tells some stories about characters that may or may not be him and things that may or may not have actually happened, full of riffs, callbacks, and the unique sense of humor and perspective we’ve come to expect from McCulloch’s time in “The Boys Down the Hallway.”
The interesting thing about The Kids in the Hall to me, I’ve come to realize, is that it’s not always one of the most laughing-as-hard-as-possible shows for me, but it is absolutely still one of my very favorites. I think I’m just really on their vibe, or something with how well-observed and detailed their material and characters are really strikes me. Compare to my equally-beloved Mr. Show, which was much more going for the hardest laughs and the overt satire (and the extremely memorable lines). Anyway, it’s all in line with that same perspective and sense of humor, and I had quite a good time.
Also, I overheard in the bathroom that Scott Thompson is coming here on tour! That date’s in April, so I’m gonna get tickets soon.
Abbott Elementary, “Girard Creek”
The golf course invites the teachers and students for a pre-preview of the grand opening preview (or something) of the course. Of course, the course (insert Mr. Ed joke here) and Matt Oberg’s slimy rep has ulterior motives for inviting them, and Janine is most determined to suss them out. There are also some side stories of Gregory learning to not be afraid to try new foods, and Ava and Melissa planning a heist of some truffle mushrooms. All the plots come together very nicely in the climactic scene. Pretty solid, I guess? I dunno, I was stuck in between thinking about the Bruce McCulloch show and thinking about my early work call today, so I may not have given it 100% of my attention.
Lost Highway – The least Lynch in my estimation and even lost a little ground this rewatch. It’s not so much the first draft of themes better done elsewhere, it’s the amount of space in between everything. Lynch’s other projects also have tangents and downtime but they’re always filled with compelling characters. Not so much here, only Robert Blake pops and he scares the shit out of me, so I don’t need him all the time (there’s a camera move that revels him in one scene which is both horrifying and hilarious, like panning from a cabbage to Nosferatu). There’s still stuff to take with me here, but I don’t know that I’ll be going back.
Hmm, as a first-time viewer a few weeks back I could definitely feel this hitting the brakes once Getty arrives but I think that lets its new (same?) direction develop. If nothing else, Loggia is the man, and perfectly cast as The Man — Blake is demonic but Loggia is weathered and bulky and corporeal, he moves in the real world and moves others in horrible ways.
I need to see this one again sometime but I was pretty impressed on my first viewing – I felt like it had more Twin Peaks vibes than most of Lynch’s film work (possibly including the one partially set in Twin Peaks) which is kinda what the most basic part of my brain wants out of everything.
Castlevania: Nocturne
Season 2, Episode 6. “Ancestors”. First time.
Something of a respite before the end. The opening scene gives Maria a breather, with old Juste helping her to process her growing powers and, you know, her recent parricide. It’s a touching scene, helped by a brief flashback that cheekily adopts the visual style of old children’s anime that feels both tongue in cheek and sincere. The bulk of the episode is Annette’s soul going into the spirit world to find Sekmet’s third soul to stop Erzsebet, who’s channeling the other two to wage war on Paris. There are plenty of cool visions in there, as she talks with her dead mother, meets a few gods and ultimately stays to save one from a god killer while her body gets possessed by the third soul and awakens back in France. Meanwhile, Richter and Alucard have a heart to heart about the former’s growing feelings for Annette, and the episode ends with a lunar eclipse and the shit about to hit the fan in Paris. Good palate cleanser of an episode, which steadily preps for the climactic showdown.
Season 2, Episode 7. “Grenadye Alaso”. First time.
Season 2, Episode 8. “A Line of Great Heroes”. First time.
The final two episodes are essentialy one big war in Paris, with Belmont and friends (and even one enemy) fighting Erzsebet and Drolta, the national guard commanded by Alucard and fucking Max Robespierre fighting the vampire army, and Edouard and some of the other monsters turning against Ezsebet. The show really channels its inner Dragon Ball Z here, steadily upping the carnage and violence ante from one moment to another, with several pointed dramatic moments, a few cool powers and moves pulled straight from the videogames and one genuinely awesome finishing move. One slight issue is that the show now has so many characters it struggles somewhat to accomadate them but I do think the show makes good use of them during the action (even though it does sideline Maria a bit). Where it does lack is in thematic developing, which virtually stops during the big fight and all the show’s points about revolution, social change and the struggle to stay alive in a fucked up world are left for the extended coda. To its credit, they handle it well and take their time to show the toll the story has taken in its characters: the romance between Richter and Annette lands, as does the doomed love between Olrok and Mizrak, and the former couple’s decision to travel to Saint-Domingue while the rest of the cast stays in France for the guillotine era is sure to have some consequences if this show ever continues. If it doesn’t, it’s still a fine, fun show. Not quite as strong a season as the first one or the better seasons of the first series, but still pretty remarkable.
What did we read?
The Wedding, Nicholas Sparks
Irritated to admit that I enjoyed this. It’s the story of a man who is kind of a mediocre husband – focusing purely on the ‘providing’ aspect but lacking a romantic spirit – reinventing himself to better serve his wife. This has a fascinating unreliable narrator in that he’s actually underestimating his insightfulness and emotional depth; I could believe, from the way he wrote, that this was the result of decades of experience and time to think. The narration has a brutal efficiency to it underlined by a lush sense of romanticism; the narrator speaks simply but elegantly (think the exact opposite of how I write).
It’s one of those neat collisions between protagonist and writer. Sparks clearly chooses his words very carefully based on maximum beauty, with plausibility being part of that beauty. The details are spare and specific to the point of triteness – the narrator’s job is estate law, his wife is a lifelong homemaker, they cook and play golf. There’s a subplot about the narrator’s friendship with his father-in-law and said father-in-law’s struggles with living in aged care.
But the story works from a very sympathetic angle. The narrator is aware of his own strengths and weaknesses, and much of the novel is him quietly and elegantly exploring solutions to his weaknesses – turning to people more romantic than him for advice, analysing his wife, and taking small and obvious steps to improve himself (like taking walks to improve his health and body and thus be more attractive to his wife). It floats through time as he flashes back to the beginnings of their relationship.
(Although it was an example of me empathising with someone in a situation I desperately do not want to end up in. The narrator’s life felt to me like Vic Mackey’s final fate.)
Army of Roses: Inside The World of Palestinian Suicide Bombers, Barbara Victor
Brutal stuff. One of the major recurring themes here is that no parent can endure the early death of their child, whether they die at the hands of terrorists or via their own act of terrorism; even the most ideologically committed mother of a terrorist who frequently champions her daughter’s actions against Israel eventually admits to being distraught that she’s dead. Victor argues that female Palestinian suicide bombers are the result of what she calls a ‘fatal cocktail’: a mixture of poverty, humiliating oppression from Israel, fervent nationalism (partly as a result of the humiliating oppression), and religious belief. Those four qualities make suicide bombing a uniquely attractive proposition for Palestinian women.
Victor argues that the combination of extreme poverty and a belief in an afterlife superior to the material one is a large part of this; many of the women had, due to their circumstances, nothing to live for. Wafa Idris, the first of them, had been abandoned by her husband because she was sterile, whilst others were pressured by family to start families when they wanted to focus on their careers, and struggled through shame and social pressure until suicide bombing was the only option to gain some kind of honour (Victor notes that the families of bombers tend to become superstars in culture, particularly male relatives).
She also outlines the systems that allow this; cells intricately designed so potential bombers can be recruited, vetted, and trained as efficiently as possible. On top of this, religious and political leaders tend to encourage and valorise suicide bombing, death, and martyrdom. Islam prohibits suicide and valorises martyrdom, and realistically, Palestinians have no other response to occupation.
Weirdly, I saw resonance with more Western problems (the book was written in 2004, but Israel and Palestine remain depressingly relevant). Obviously, one can see why a more secular society would be less susceptible to suicide bombing; it’s harder to justify dying when you believe there are more consequences for it. But I also see how much crime and evil comes from constant, unceasing humiliation.
Victor uses the word ‘humiliation’ dozens of times throughout the book, and I can see in a broader sense how much violence comes from a sense of injured pride. She remarks that male bombers tend to be driven by witnessing humiliating checkpoint searches, whereas female bombers require much more to be driven to it; while she doesn’t explicitly say so, I get the impression it’s because women in Palestine are promised far less, and when even that’s taken away, it can be infuriating. I see resonance here with Western men in poverty who take their violence out on, amongst other things, women as a way of getting their pride back.
(Many people quoted in the book bemoan Western individualism and its influence and asking why these women couldn’t just stick to what they were given, but the overall impression I get is that a collectivist society has exactly the same problems with people who don’t completely fit a mold)
A Horse And His Boy, CS Lewis
Definitely my favourite Narnia book so far. Lewis’s authorial voice tones down his condescension significantly in favour of a more detached perspective, the relationship between the title characters is fun – with Bree, ironically, being condescending and superior and learning his way out of that – and Lewis’s eye for imagery getting its best expression. I enjoy that Aslan is becoming a more active force too, deliberately pushing the story to the conclusion he wants; it’s dramatic anathema but I always enjoy God being an active force in a story like Breaking Bad, if only because schemes are so fun to watch.
I didn’t know today was going to bring about the advent of me kind of wanting to read a Nicholas Sparks book, but here we are.
A Horse and His Boy was always one of my favorites, and a lot of details–Bree giving in and having a good roll on the grass, Aravis’s lion scratches being exactly as painful as her maidservant’s lashing, Corin’s delight at getting to stay a prince forever–have stuck with me.
Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead — this doesn’t have the movie’s first-person conceit but Whitehead does have the past/present dynamic and reveal and he also has the broadening of perspective; the movie introduces Turner’s POV with the cafeteria scene and Whitehead’s third-person brings in Turner’s perspective there as well, and lets it take over large chunks of the book from that point on. And the mix of POVs in the novel goes deeper but slower; RaMell Ross’s movie can use film language to shift character quickly and also uses montage to create mental states and purposefully jarring images from outside the narrative while Whitehead is more restrained — I’m more familiar with his earlier work, which is great and in a more intensely literary mode, here he has simpler (but not simple) sentences with the poetry downplayed, and that works very well for this story. The book ends in a different way than the movie, with a different image that Ross I think wisely decided to move away from (because it wouldn’t fit his conceit and really needs Whitehead’s presence as author to be developed throughout the book), but here it works as a thematic coda and something that counters a larger story of “progress” for the relationship at the heart of this book, Whitehead finds a balance of what was and is and has the restraint to let it speak for itself. Really good stuff.
The Patriot Game, by George V. Higgins — got in the mood to revisit this, a sequel to The Digger’s Game from a decade earlier. That book was immediately post-Eddie Coyle in Higgins’ 70s crime hot streak, Patriot is in the 80s when he was branching out into other perspectives and sometimes not nailing them, there are some fairly slow spots in the early going here as he moves around different social strata in Massachusetts. But this pays dividends at the end, because the story of a priest who gets pulled into an investigation into gun-running for the IRA, which may involve his crook brother, the aforementioned Digger, becomes about how a person can’t move between levels of existence as easy as he thinks and how crime has its own rules and codes. (Also, there is a phenomenal chapter of tense undercover work and ownage toward the end.) In some ways it feels like the Digger himself pushing back on Higgins’ portrayal of him earlier, and he lays down some harsh and indeed fatal truths. Actions have consequences and actors are more than the roles you assign them.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro – Am only 170 pages in because Caro is a fantastic prose writer who packs every paragraph with information and insight. Fabulous book. Had a moment of identification with Robert Moses in college, as he was also an idealist poet who read voraciously outside the curriculum and made friends easily, but there’s something unsettling already about his coldness, bigotry (he comes close to getting deservedly beaten for telling a bunch of British and Indian students at Oxford that colonial subjects shouldn’t run their own affairs), and ability to do really morally unsound things. Right mix here of awe and horror akin to Vic Mackey or Dudley Smith, except this guy was real, and he built the highways and the parks and the bridges and the beaches of the most important and influential city in the world. Can also see how this is the biography that every non-fiction book wants to be, dense but poetic and effluent. Tristan must read this.
Been wanting to read this for years, but the library doesn’t have enough copies for me to borrow it long enough to finish, and it’s not available as an e-book. Someday I might just have to break down and buy it and hope the binding doesn’t crack. (Was just thinking about Moses since there is someone who is not even a little elected forcing policy decisions on the nation, but I think Moses would eat him for lunch.)
There’s gotta be a cheap copy in a used bookstore near you. I’m sure there are a billion copies floating around the five boroughs.
This is on my reading list for the year–Caro’s four-volume (thus far) LBJ biography is legitimately one of the best things I’ve ever read, and so I really need to get around to both this and his memoir. He’s just so good at examining how power works on a practical and political level.
I love the LBJ series, and hope Caro lives long enough to finish it.
Empire Star and Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany
I read a lot of authors who are smarter than I am, but Delany is one of the trickiest in that regard, in that he’s smarter and his mind works very differently: he’s reflexive and pyrotechnic, the kind of person who seems like he would’ve invented postmodernism on his own if he’d had to and who obviously finds that way of thinking natural and congenial. I think I respond most to his nonfiction, where the nature of the form encourages him to slow down and tell me more about what he’s thinking (his memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, is pretty sublime, and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, about the real loss of community space that came with clearing out Times Square’s porno theaters, is likewise, and was a big influence on how I think about some related issues), but I’ve also had really good luck with his short stories and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
Empire Star (novella) and Babel-17 (novel) are earlier works, though, written in his mid-twenties, and either Delany’s genius here slightly outweighs his own control of it or I’m just bad at getting along with adventure plots anyway and combining them with stylistic verve, time slippage, etc. doesn’t help. I read both of these swiftly, and parts of them will stay with me, but the first, at least, felt more glittering than substantial. Empire Star is enamored of its own ideas to the point where it gets a bit smug about it–the better but less flashy concept here is the way you “pay” in profound and sometimes devastating sadness for owning Lll (aliens who help you terraform planets), which has real moral weight, but the idea we hear about ad nauseam is “simplex, complex, and multiplex,” which is about how many points of view a culture or person can assume, how aware they are that they’re not the center of the universe, how much multicultural understanding they have, etc. It’s a good idea! I became so sick of hearing about it, and eventually I kind of loathed all the multiplex people for never shutting up about their own superiority, even when they were right about it.
Despite being published in the same year, Babel-17 feels a lot more mature and a lot more willing to hand out humanity to all its characters–and therefore more genuinely, unshowily multiplex, in Delany’s own terms–and I think it’s the superior work. When this one didn’t click for me, I think that’s largely because of the adventure plot: my favorite parts here were when things slowed down for a minute and, again, Delany gets a chance to explore his ideas, both social and theoretical, at something other than a breakneck pace. Good stuff when it gets a chance to breathe. I think he’s an ideas-first SF writer, so his characters often don’t hit as hard for me, but Babel-17 actually manages a couple, especially around the edges, who have a bittersweet and slightly scruffy reality. So I’m liking that one more as I write about it, but I still think I’d rather reread any of the stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph.
Should give Delaney more of a chance, as he teaches in Philadelphia, but he also regularly complains about how much it sucks here compared to NYC, a laughable opinion. Good luck paying four times the rent for a one-bedroom, ya dunce!
I read Babel-17 last year and I remember enjoying it a lot but I couldn’t tell you one single thing about it now.
“At the start of his career, he knew how to jump from one impromptu working group to another. In the middle, he could efficiently lend expertise to massively collaborative projects. By the end, he could scaffold and manage cross-sector teams of people who shared little common ground other than a commitment to making creative ideas into new realities.”
Wow, Henry V as 8 Highly Advantageous Practices For Middle Managers. What a grand reading of text and practice. If this is what the Smithsonian produces than maybe it will be good when the Trump administration sets the place on fire.
Nothing weird about taking life cues from (great) statist propaganda! Even then, Henry V depicts Hal’s ascent with a degree of ambiguity so this is real weird.
“Shakespeare was able to create his plays while also collaborating with actors to develop them further” is an interesting idea, now expressed without business consultant language. This is what is making the vein on my head bulge out, this dude is writing about the guy who created half the written English language in a debasement of that language. String him up!
Haha, maybe I shouldn’t feel the need to fill up to five articles on a time crunch.
Is this a subtle diss on those who maybe forgot to/got too lazy to send in articles this week? I am suitably chastised.
As Godard said, the best way to criticize an article is to submit another article.
Definitely interested in that OF article, I know a lot of people (especially women) who make real money from there, in part because, well, the previous generations kinda robbed us of jobs and money and such.
I haven’t worked the thesis out fully, but it seems like modern internet sex work is kind of becoming the junk food of romance and intimacy. Good food is not only better for you, but it’s actually a better experience. But opening a bag of potato chips is so easy. What happens to society when it’s so easy to get not only sexual satisfaction but as the article posits some sort of chary, half-assed romantic *attention* from the Internet (cheaply!) than men aren’t motivated to clean themselves up enough to get the real thing? Well. You’re lookin’ at it.
The author doesn’t use that analogy, but she bemoans the same problem. She much prefers escort clients where she feels connection is maximized, and she doesn’t like the way OnlyFans commodities attention, even though she sees the logic when it’s broken down economically. (My favorite detail is her irritation that clients who get prerecorded “live” videos don’t complain when the daylight clearly doesn’t match the time of day they’re supposedly recording. Continuity errors: the sophisticated man’s turn-off.)
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Back in the bowels of the young minds mine this week, a lot of middle school Language Arts (what us geezers called English back in the day). Good to see Gordon Korman is still kicking around. I remember as a child hearing an adult who had met him commenting on what young man he was, apparently he was quite young and has plenty left in the tank.
Also did a class of theater kids, including a movement unit where I had to lead a parade around the classroom calling out pantomimes to perform. The instruction said to “keep this up for the rest of the hour,” but as predicted this would not sustain the full remaining 35 minutes. I instead adapted the concept of the Oatmeal game “On a Scale from Zero to T-Rex” – kind of a charades for shy people – and the class actually was caught by surprised by the bell. Victory is mine! When tomorrow’s youth are successfully able to prance like they’re walking through knee-high Jello, I’ll know my duty has been fulfilled.
Also my wife has had a horrible week at her government job, what you are hearing is true, this is a ridiculous and unnecessary mess. Declare your stupidity to all the world and be king dumbass if you must, but don’t fuck with the people who actually do the work, the public will start to notice.
Can’t imagine how stressful it is right now, not just the job security but the undermining of the work itself. Having a good thought for you guys, as Det. Sipowicz would say.
First an update on health coverage: turns out that we only need to pay the big lump sum for my wife’s meds once, as we will reach our annual deductible at once. This was confirmed in a chat at United Hell-Care’s website, a chat I have archived in case next month we are told otherwise. So if this is in indeed true, we are not going to face yet another drain on finances. But that I needed to get this info from UHC and not my wife’s HR people is another strike against them.
Whereas my HR people have my back and are good to work with, and even told me that my performance these past two months as acting executive assistant has been greatly appreciated by the big boss. Really good to know that I can do this, but I am so ready to switch back. There should be a one week transition period, but we might be keeping the temp in my job a bit longer to help with other stuff.
And we are starting to get a better sense of the upcoming war against public media. I am seeing stuff that is is unsurprisingly disturbing and that I think might aim to not just end federal funding but undermine public media entirely. I don’t think we are are scared as people who actually work for the government, but it’s not good.
I don’t have to pretend it’s a secret. Search for the new head of the FCC and PBS and you will see what’s got us upset.
I got a job! After several years doing various freelance writing things, I’ll be back working in higher ed, this time as an academic advisor (!). I’m really excited about this: I like working with students, I’ve missed having something steady, I want to be more directly helpful to people, and writing-wise, I can go back to working on what I really care about, and having the creative energy for that, rather than focusing only on what will (immediately) pay. Fingers crossed I will advise well.
Congrats!
Congratulations! Full-time work can have full-time blues but the security is really nice to have after the freelance mines.
Same boat here, congrats!
And congrats to you as well!
I think I may have once again attempted to bounce back from illness too hard and too fast. Thought I’d finally kicked the last of this long-running cold / virus / string of different colds / viruses / being old but last weekend I had two friend’s birthdays back to back plus a gig and an all-day music festival and now I kinda feel those annoying “is this anything?” sinus prickles again like I might need some more time inside. Which is partially OK because I have very little on in February after a busy end to January, but also annoying because I was planning to use the quieter month for creativity as I always do (annual plug for the February Album Writing Month challenge, even though hilariously the site seems to be down at the moment with less than 24 hours to go – https://write.fawm.org/ )
Really chaotic / busy time at work the last couple of weeks, which is partially frustrating because I think my boss handled it badly (he kept putting pressure on the rest of the team to rush something, I kept saying we shouldn’t rush it because it would end up taking longer due to mistakes, I was right) but also it was a nice change of pace from my usual complaints about this job, because I was actually busy and useful and didn’t feel like I was basically wasting 8 hours of my day forever.
Job’s going well even if I feel overly sequestered because it’s January and COVID is rampant here. Otherwise feeling terrified of the news and also ready to get nuts, as Bruce Wayne would say.
I keep staying so damn busy at work I don’t even have time to write about what’s going on with me. Or to write about much of anything else.
It’s been a bit stressful, but I’ve survived. Hopefully it’ll be less so real soon!