Fire (2022, Claire Denis) depicts an idyllic paradise vacation shared by a couple, captured in Denis’ inimitable style: sensuously textured intimacy with shapes of bodies in contact verging on abstract expressionism. But upon returning to Paris, what ensues is a moody melodrama set to an ominous Tindersticks score. The narrative’s construction could be described as opening with a quaint bubble where a comfortable romance is contained within; then from that point is followed by an unvarnished, heavy, fearsome outer space that offers little to no comfort for anyone—but isn’t this more satisfying anyway? Denis’ raw emotional claustrophobic confrontation with the formidable performances of 2 of her most captivating performers—Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon—is blanketed with her warmth and tenderness in ways not found in Cassavetes or Bergman. But this isn’t to say it isn’t painful. Claire Denis has always been a filmmaker who paints pain beautifully. Fire doesn’t moralize the position of either of its central characters. And the complications are the subject of the film, not any type of resolutions. So, it’s here that again the French prove how to provide that which Hollywood forgot how to. 7/22/2022 Regal Tara Atlanta, GA DCP
SOCRATES: Should movies be about something? ANONYMOUS: Sirk said he cannot make movies about something, only with something—flowers, reflective surfaces. SOCRATES: But aren’t his movies said to be about systemic hypocrisy, unrequited love, and sexual frustration? ANONYMOUS: How could they not be? SOCRATES: Then movies shouldn’t be made to disseminate a message, but should say something, does that sound right?
Nope (2022, Jordan Peele) is a horror movie that’s incidentally adorned with a ufo invasion façade. It’s also a virtuoso display of inspired storytelling. I can’t remember the last time I watched a horror movie that felt this delightfully psychologically-macabre. Nope strikes the perfect balance of unsettling and absorbing that makes for the most accomplished of classic horror. Isn’t that the hardest to earn? Aside from terrifying the audience or disturbing devices, when was the last time the story itself felt original? Jordan Peele’s made some movies that feel like they have a message. Nope hits hard because it says something without saying it. I don’t know that everything adds up to some specific statement, but what I gathered is: there’s a delicate balance between life forms and entertainment. Nevertheless, the ufo could symbolize people spending too much time on junk media (TV, apps, social media?) that suck them out of real life. And maybe there’s a connection between the way some animals you think are tame can sometimes unexpectedly attack when you get too close.
At the moment when Alfred E. Neuman is depicted as Gordy I was instantly transfixed by the kind of joy of story that's been all to elusive lately. Specifically, the backstory of Gordy’s Home and the listing of all those cast members from the ’95 season of SNL was scarier because of its authenticity. And Nope isn’t just a great horror movie, it also transcends box office concessions by substantially proving its artistic merit. Hoyte van Hoytema’s diffuse palette is as soothing as can be, with night exteriors particularly lit so delicately as to convincingly evoke the feel of being so far removed from city limits. (Also the Edge car tracking OJ on horseback is Muybridge to the future.) And Ruth De Jong with the Haywood house, and rustic amusement community gives the time spent in Agua Dulce a sense of really going somewhere else for 2 hours. The whole time watching Nope I kept thinking there is no way they can fuck this up. And by the end, although I’m not taken with the whole Christo and Jeanne-Claude thing, I accept it. Nope isn’t about ufos. By the way how cool is Michael Wincott? I’ve recently brought his name up several times in conversation, mostly because I’m such a huge fan of Strange Days (1995, Kathryn Bigelow); I watch it every New Year’s Eve. I just wondered what happened to him and how cool that moment in 1995 the dude’s in The Crow, Strange Days, and Dead Man.
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022, Taika Waititi) is the best comedy of the year. And as a follow-up to Thor: Ragnarok (2017, Waititi) it doesn’t disappoint. Like its predecessor, it deserves to be seen in a movie theater.
Marvel sucks. It’s usually because the movies (and series) draw out a banal origin story (interchangeable with new premise) that relies too much on mediocre drama, peppered with low-grade attempts at sarcastic wit, and overly indulges in choreographed fights and vfx spectacles that look identical—unless they’re done by James Gunn or Taika Waititi.
When the MCU launched I avoided that garbage. Until that is Thor: Ragnarok opened on the biggest IMAX screen in Texas and I went in on a whim. What sets Taika Waititi’s Thor films apart is that he reverses the ratio of mediocre drama to comedy the rest of the MCU suffers from. And he actually knows funny. (It’s similar with James Gunn, but Gunn gives a little more emphasis to genre delights; although, he’s also an expert with comedy.) And rounding out Waititi’s own style that sets itself apart from the bland uniformity of the rest of the MCU output is his every primary color of the rainbow art direction.
To limit my comments about the content of Thor: Love and Thunder, I’ll quickly mention I was unsure if it was going to fall short of the expectations some might have had in comparison to Thor: Ragnarok, until I got to the Golden Temple set piece. Everything I love about the visual imagination and creativity in execution, along with the culmination of comedy and action comes together in the Golden Temple.
In closing, although I really didn’t find a way to adequately work this in, I stan NEBULA. She’s easily my biggest draw to the MCU. She’s cold, and less a sociopath than a being whose primary existence is to hate. And THANOS is her dad! (I also love Thanos but he’s like mopey emo sullen.) Sure, even though her bald head, black contacts and dour demeanor give her an uncanny resemblance to Hellraiser, she's still very sexy. And random nerd trivia: in Thor: Love and Thunder am I the only one who suspects the giant screaming goats bear an overwhelming resemblance to the endangered screamapillar Homer discovers in DABF16, penned by John Swartzwelder?
A goal of mine for 2022 is to finish a book a week. It's not going great, but still I persevere. Below are some thoughts on those books recently finished.
Week 9:Bad Blood, John Carreyrou: Dryly pounding the final nail in the coffin housing any belief that American capitalism is anything but a fraud perpetrated amongst various peer groups of dim and psychotic greedheads. (It's about a company called Theranos, which wanted to test people blood, but, like, sciencely, and which raised outrageous sums to do so, despite never actually having the capacity to do so.)
Week 11:We Were Never Here, Andrea Bartz: Average thriller with more than usual to say about gaslighting, manipulation, codependence, and the difficulty of trusting your own memories when shit gets real. Less than usual to say about female friendship, and an only somewhat successful head-fake at a suspenseful / shocking ending.
Week 11:LA Woman, Eve Babitz: Enjoyable, garrulous look at some of LA's women (and not a few of their men). I found myself struggling to maintain focus on this one, but by the end and especially in its withering afterword, I was glad I read it, and will read more by this author.
Week 11:Upright Women Wanted, Sarah Gailey: The great Sarah Gailey is not just a rad writer but is also an amazingly good sport: after we covered their "Western but with hippos not horses" novel River of Teeth on the podcast, they reached out most cordially for somebody who had been informed that their book had been covered on "a podcast about bad books". This is another Western-like book, set after the United States has splintered and run out of oil—so, 2024 or thereabouts, by my reckoning?—with lots of queer longing and a very compelling take on "So I found my people ... but that doesn't actually fix everything, it turns out". Great, thoughtful, heartfelt, fun read.
Week 13:The Library Book, Susan Orlean: Nonfiction account of the time the LA library burned down, with much (much) discursive info about how that library came to be, what might the future of libraries be, etc. Includes a very high number of instances of "I recently spoke with [someone]" which feels odder and odder as the book's publication date recedes from me, firmly anchored in the eternal central now.
A goal of mine for 2022 is to finish a book a week. So far, I have done so several weeks in the year. Below are some thoughts on those books.
Week 5:Caliban's War, James S.A. Corey: In this follow-up to Leviathan Rising (Week 1), our solar-system-spanning cast of characters adds two more competence-porn deliverers, ramps up the tension about the Captain Kirk guy losing his moral mojo (and his relationship—uh-oh!) and continues the series' somewhat lamentable trend of ending a book with a vaguely magical twist that may be a turnoff to some. They sure are for me. Third volume is, I'm told, on its way from the library.
Week 7:The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel: Interesting "how we live now" social-issue novel, sort of like if Hannah Arendt had called it "the ennui of evil" and knew the word "relatable". For some reason, I found the first 100 or so pages hard to get into, but by the end I was fully "invested" (significant look). Makes the economic emotional (or connects the historical to the biographical, as C. Wright Mills would say).
Week 7:Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner: Memoir of a young woman going home to care for a problematic mother who's dying of cancer. Obviously not an easy read emotionally, but an interesting one, and a prose experience a little like a big Korean meal, with lots of different flavors and textures, from infodump to travelogue to anecdote to poetry.
Idle thought for later: Memoirs have weird shapes; the stories they tell often leave me unsatisfied, and I'm not sure if that's a feature or a bug (c.f. my lengthy unwritten letter to Harper's circa 2003 about their memoirs under discussion being boring because they were written by boring people doing boring things and recommending they read / review Cometbus and Burn Collector instead).
Week 9:The First Day of Spring, Nancy Tucker: Hellaciously intense novel of poverty, violence, willpower, and so on. Very good, very harsh. Does include some violence by and against children, so it's certainly not for everybody, but I found it extremely good and quite rewarding. Recommended.
Mark Lanegan died today. Like most news, it came to me first as somebody's commentary, my friend Ian posting "rest easy" or some such with a link to a Queens of the Stone Age song I guess Lanegan sang, and that I've long since forgotten. I didn't know what Mark Ian meant until I checked a group chat, then Twitter, where a tranche of music writers I follow quote-tweeted the announcement and confirmed their grief at the news.
I've been listening to Mark Lanegan since 1989 or so. Guitar World magazine reviewed the Screaming Trees album Invisible Lantern, comparing it to Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets, who by then I'd heard and liked. I bought Invisible Lantern, and immediately hated it. Six-dollar headphones and a twenty-dollar tape deck may not have been the best tools, and the rambling, ramshackle guitar—which is what I mostly listened for, in 1989—was wildly different from the AC/DC riffs still almost entirely central to my aesthetic and understanding of music then. "Ivy" just ... made no sense. But I had only so many tapes, so I kept listening, and one day I took off from school to take the bus downtown and hang out at the college library for a day, the record finally clicked. "She Knows" sounded like someone running a vacuum cleaner over a Ramones song; "Grey Diamond Desert" sounded like the saddest, prettiest ballad I'd ever heard. (Even at 14, a side-ending sad song like "Here Comes a Regular" could just wreck me.)
A year and a bit later, sitting in my room, something very pretty came on my little Radio Shack clock radio, tuned to the nascent alternative station. I had no idea what it was. I sat quietly until it got back announced: "Bed of Roses" by Screaming Trees. I must have heard it one of the forty or so total times it ever got played on any radio station, and it was easily enough to make me ashamed I hadn't recognized the music—this voice—I knew I loved, and it was enough to send me to the Sound Warehouse on Sable Blvd. over and over until Uncle Anesthesia came out. I loved it.
Well, I loved almost all of it. I was a record store kid, and a record review reader, so I had been hardened enough to know that, when I heard the trumpet part in static ballad "Disappearing", I should judge the lyric "that was one mistake / I never thought you'd make" as applying to the song itself.)
Record reviewer bullshit aside, I loved the weird little record, and picked up every tape I could find for the next couple years at whatever used record store I went to. The earlier records didn't hit me the same way as Invisible Lantern and Uncle Anesthesia, but there were good songs on everything, and eventually I found Buzz Factory, which was the first record I ever bought that felt too good to listen to too often. It just seemed too good to reach for in any but a very special circumstance.
Of course I listened to Buzz Factory today.
Two years or so after Uncle Anesthesia, I was a senior in high school. I was discovering vodka, and the world was discovering music from Seattle. The Trees had a minor hit with "Nearly Lost You", a song I never did like, and my favorite band was locked in as mediocre in the minds of the record-buying public, not unparallel to the way my love for fIREHOSE was often mistaken for a weird allegiance to third-string hair-metal scrubs Firehouse. Walking around the suburbs, or on the bus to work, though, with Sweet Oblivion in my headphones, the tape I made with a CD skip on it that made the original always sound not quite right, I found myself in the song "Julie Paradise" somehow. It was then that what I loved most about Screaming Trees moved from the tangled, twisting lead guitar lines and best-of-his-generation guitar tone of Gary Lee Connor to ... everything about Mark Lanegan: his loud rough voice; his dark lyrics; his softer crooning voice; everything.
By 1994, when his solo album Whiskey for the Holy Ghost came out, all I really wanted to do was listen to it three times a day, walking around and imagining that one day I'd be a good poet. Taping boxes at the warehouse, or going through Factsheet Five or the Poet's Market, listening to Lanegan, again and again.
I met him three times, I think. Last time, after a show in SF, I stood in line for a long time to have him not sign anything, just to say "Thanks for playing. Your music has meant a lot to me for a long time." The first time was in Portland. He told me he liked Invisible Lantern best of the Trees records, like I did, and described it with some fondness, using words like "ugly" and "weird". I told him his lyrics reminded me of Rilke—he told me "I don't read"—and I promised I'd mail him a xerox so he could check for himself. I never did. I think I saw the Trees only once, a magnificent show, with Lanegan pitching a huge fit towards the end of the set, tipping over monitors and throwing his mic stand, so the band had to play the obligatory rock encore without him. So, when I went around the back of the venue to see if I could talk to the band, as we did in those days, it was Gary Lee and Van Connor back there, and all I could ask them was what the song I didn't know in the encore had been. It was "Song of a Baker". They said "We stole so much from the Faces, we figured we should give something back."
The second time I met him, I interviewed him by phone for Vice Sports. I got paid for it. I used the money to buy a selvedge black demin jacket from Two Jacks Denim, in Oakland. I still wear it, sometimes. I made him laugh—I think it was a real laugh, with surprise—at one point, and at the end made it all awkward when I told him I'd been a fan for a long time...interview ruining 101 right there.
Over time, his prolific release schedule, frequent collaborations with folks I wasn't inherently interested in, and occasional over-enthusiasm for bad electronic drums outstripped my desire to keep up with everything he recorded. Through the 90s and early 2000s, my answer to the question "who's your favorite band?" was always "Screaming Trees", even through some years when I wasn't reaching for those records much. I wouldn't miss Lanegan when he'd play a show near me, and for years I described him as my "all-time musical hero", second only to Mike Watt as my biggest artistic / moral influence.
Eulogies usually reach too far at the end, and I'm not sure death really teaches us anything new. Returning to our prior commitments—openly, explicitly—seems inadequate, even unworthy. But all I can think about Mark Lanegan dying is "Always go to the show". Our heroes, our favorites, they won't live forever. We won't live forever. Mark Lanegan, ten years and one day older than me, died today, and won't be making more records or books, won't be playing more shows. There's a lot he did that I never got to, and I look forward to finding out what it does to me. It feels like there's time to do that. Feels thin, but it feels like what I have.
A goal of mine for 2022 is to finish a book a week. So far, I have done so nearly every week of the year. Below are some thoughts on those books.
Week 0: (Building up momentum week) Verity, Colleen Hoover: "What if an unreliable narrator but TWO of them" plus We Need to Talk About Talking About We Need to Talk About Kevin equals a pretty fun ride!
For more on this, you can hear me guest on the 2 Cents Critic podcast where we go through the whole thing.
Week 1:Leviathan Rising, James S.A. Corey: Yung Captain Kirk plus broken-down Sad Space Cop is a recipe I liked a lot! Did not enjoy the end twist of—*** SPOILER WARNING a solar-system-extinction event turning out to be a pretty, rebellious rich girl END SPOILER ***— but I'm going to read at least the next book in the series.
Week 2:My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell: Fantastic and emotionally acute examination of what it's like and what it does to a young woman (teen girl) to have an affair with her (adult) teacher. Brilliantly observed and devastating portraits of depressed women and several men, who range from disappointing to unforgivable. Strong recommendation.
Week 3:It Never Ends, Tom Scharpling: Good, gulpable comic / tragic memoir from the man who knows long-form audio comedy and rock and roll better than anybody. I never got over the novelty of hearing this legendarily curse-free radio performer dropping F-bombs, and came out of the book wanting to know more about and hear more from the author, which is extremely rare in a memoir.
Week 3:Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman: Does what it says on the cover, for sure. It doesn't add a lot to the experience of reading the back section of Edith Hamilton's Mythology, but it's worth a look. Unexpected bonus: Neil Gaiman turns out to be quite a good voice actor, whose performance brings a lot of charm and life to the book.
Week 4:In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado: Difficult, beautiful sort-of-memoir, sort-of-everything about love, violence, and most everything else. It's a story about abuse in a lesbian relationship, told in an exacting, experimental way with equal arts explosive emotion and formal rigor. Highest recommendation.
