i dreamt that i was in an unfamiliar city, trying to get to a park about a mile and a half away. i was in someone else’s house, and there was a kid who was waiting for me to take him with me to the park. i repeatedly looked at the gps map to ensure i knew how to get there: the route changed a few times, but the general direction i understood. besides, the city was laid out as a grid, so it would be impossible to get seriously lost. despite this, i couldn’t muster the courage to head out; i kept reading a book that described what to expect on this short journey, hoping to know as thoroughly as possible how to achieve my goal without making any efforts myself. the kid grew increasingly impatient with me; i continued reading this book, checking the map, feeling confident that i knew where to go, only to lose nerve as i started towards the door, returning to my reference materials. by the time i awoke i still hadn’t left the house.
sometimes dreams require close examination with a trained psychoanalyst to tease out their significance. other dreams don’t let their details stick around long enough for their import to come fully into the waking mind. this dream i understood almost immediately upon waking.
something i’m trying to come to terms with is how significant horror is to me and my taste. i never thought of myself as a big fan of horror films. most horror films i find stupid, irritating, not even particularly scary, and besides, i don’t particularly enjoy the experience of being scared the way some people seem to. but as i’ve gotten older i’ve recognized that many of my favorite narrative works do exist somewhere on the horror spectrum: david lynch isn’t a surrealist so much as he’s an unalloyed horror storyteller who recognizes that there’s nothing so horrifying as the unknown; i will sometimes say that the texas chainsaw massacre is my favorite movie of all time; the works of hp lovecraft, shirley jackson, and edgar allan poe have become increasingly important to me (which is atypical for these idols of adolescent fascination).
horror humor and beauty are the three faces of the goddess Art; creating things that give glimpse to all three visages is the highest of aesthetic pursuits, in my humble opinion.
a couple things have happened in the last few weeks that it would be prudent for me to think publicly about, if that’s what this blog is for (haven’t posted in a month but whatever). both are about the only things the internet has talked about until two days ago, when I’m given to understand a new old president assumed the office.
first: a huge swath of Los Angeles burned. what that means for your weekend depends a lot on where you are. I’m close enough for it to make me consider what it is I plan to do when a similar catastrophe comes for me; in fact, a similar catastrophe on a smaller scale already came for me, seven years ago, and it’s with some sheepishness that I own up to how little having to flee in the middle of the night from a rapidly advancing wildfire has changed my habits since. maybe it’s the benefit of being close enough to feel the significance without being overwhelmed by it; maybe it’s because this fire already feels to be of, if not world-historical, then at least California-historical, significance. but the Palisades and Eaton fires feel like a wake up call for the crisis-craving insurgent in me.
there’s an essay I was working on that I kind of lost interest in, because I let the idea get stale, or the idea was already stale, or I hadn’t figured out how to actually advance the idea without retreading thought that’s already been examined, affirmed and criticized endlessly. the ideas in question I drew from Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his speech “The American Scholar.” I’m interested in seeing how the cultural situation he was responding to is echoed by the wasteland of 2025’s American society, but I didn’t have a crucial piece necessary for extending and complicating his prescription to would-be artists and intellectuals. what’s become obvious to me is that the distinction between then and now is that it’s not merely a crisis of culture we must grapple with, but a culture of crisis. as we hurtle into the future created by petrocapitalists, technocrats and their spookier brethren, there will be no more valuable skill than disaster preparedness, and not in the narrow sense monopolized by libertarian doomsday psychos, but in an all-encompassing, positive, and communally-oriented manner. more on what that means in the actual essay. all of which is to say, nothing like a world-historical disaster to make you consider how you want to face the future, ie the proper engagement with the present.
the other thing that happened that would be strange for me to not comment on is that David Lynch died. if you’ve followed my blog at all you know Lynch’s work is extremely important to me. there’s no question that his death is a great loss for cinema, and for American art generally. you can have qualms with the worldview that Lynch’s work presents (more on that later) but you’d be hard pressed to say that he didn’t “have the goods” as a filmmaker. the indie theatre near me played Mulholland Dr for free on Saturday; I wasn’t going to go since I had just seen it about two months ago, but my girlfriend’s parents were going, so I opted to join them. the way that Lynch can compress so much significance into a scene, even a single shot; the way his films operate as giant resonance chambers of aesthetic, psychological, intellectual, emotional, spiritual meaning, is truly astounding. a small but important example: Laura Harring’s character tells Betty her name is Rita after seeing a poster of the film Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth. Hayworth was married Orson Welles; Rita’s doppelganger Camilla becomes engaged to director Adam Kesher. Rita Hayworth was not her real name; the Mexican actress was born Margarita Carmen Cansino; Laura, also Mexican, is credited in Mulholland Dr as the much more Spanish sounding Laura Elena Harring. so the character—who marries a director and is played by a white-passing Mexican actress—assumes a false name drawn from…the stage name of a white-passing Mexican actress who married a director. that all seems very clever unless you keep in mind that Rita Hayworth confided in Welles that her father had repeatedly raped her as a child.
my current favorite reading of Mulholland Dr is not the fairly common and frankly simplistic one that reads the first 2/3 of the movie as a dream-fantasy conjured by the character Naomi Watts plays in the last 1/3 of the movie to deal with her failures and heartbreak (and perhaps crime). I’ve come to see the movie as a very complex dream-fantasy-repressive apparatus emerging out of the psyche of a woman struggling to come to terms with the abuse she suffered as a child, likely from a family member, and how that abuse has dictated the direction her life went since—the abusive relationships she’s fallen into, the compromises she’s ashamed of, the poverty she exists in either literal or spiritual. my own interpretation has her as a very successful actress who hates what she’s done to become sucessful, possibly having allowed Harvey Weinstein types to take advantage of her in exchange for stardom. or she’s not an actress at all, but a prostitute forced into desperate circumstances after being totally shut out from the industry. or, somewhere in-between (and the most consistent, probably), she’s a waitress (like a lot of wannabe actors) who moonlights as a call-girl for Los Angeles bigwigs to make ends meet in between being cast in bit parts in shitty movies. I’m not really in the layout-all-the-clues-for-how-to-read-a-David-Lynch-movie business, but I recommend, after watching the movie and understanding the most common interpretation of it, that you read this page and then click around the other parts of the website to see just how rich in potential significance a David Lynch movie is.
this reading is supported if we take the movie as being in dialogue with Twin Peaks (initially, Mulholland Dr sprung from the idea of giving Audrey from TP a spinoff series), a show about a teen girl who’s been subjected to sexual abuse by her father (spoiler I guess? we’ve know who killed Laura Palmer for thirty years.) the original series, the film, and the 2017 reboot operate on a similar logic, of being a Freudian repressive apparatus wherein Laura is working out a terrible truth she can’t admit to herself. Inland Empire I’ve only seen once but it also works as a hall of mirrors in which “A Woman In Trouble” struggles to face some terrible truth. point is, clearly this is a fascination of Lynch’s. when I feel most generous, I want to argue that Lynch works very hard to extend true empathy and understanding to women who have been abused by men, often men very close to them. his work is about misogyny. but it would be dishonest, maybe even dangerous, to give him carte blanche on this front without ever pausing to ask: why is he so fascinated by the sexual abuse of young women?
I don’t mean to argue that Lynch’s work is some kind of alibi, a coded confession of terrible deeds. if you want to have a little fun of that variety, check out pd187’s legendary letterboxd review of Lost Highway. but whether or not we should trust a man to be telling these stories is worth pondering. it’s not impossible for a man to tell empathetic and responsible stories about women experiencing abuse at the hands of men; in fact, with enough care, a man willing to be honest about how cultural misogyny has informed his own attitudes towards women would be in a good position to do just that. this is, I think, the generous way of reading Lynch’s work about women in trouble. not being a woman, and not being a woman who’s been abused or the victim of incest, it appears to me that Laura Palmer is a very careful and nuanced presentation of how such trauma shapes a woman’s life. despite her status as a kind of Jesus figure, who dies for the sins of Twin Peaks, she is not idealized by Lynch, only by the town who needs her to be the image of perfect innocence. she is equally cruel and generous, despairing and vivacious; in a word, she is human, all too human.
but on the other hand, the mystical, supernatural, metaphysical world that Twin Peaks conjures also calls into question who exactly Lynch assigns guilt to. many people have argued that by making BOB the manifestation of a cosmic evil, Leland is in some ways absolved of the mundane evil he enacts. and by placing this story of mundane horror, in which regular people do monstrous things, in a world that seems shaped by cosmic, Manichean forces, making the town of Twin Peaks a battleground between Good and Evil, between Fear and Love, Lynch seems to suggest that the violence perpetrated by men on women is the natural order of things. a terrible order that’s to be resisted and rejected, but natural, and therefor possibly inescapable. and if that’s what’s being suggested, it makes Lynch’s depiction of women a little, as the kids say, “sus”.
one could argue that the metaphysical, esoteric streak in Lynch’s work is a metaphor, a representation of how men see the world and how that worldview results in acts of brutality, sexual and otherwise. that’s fine. but the aura conjured by Lynch’s work is so powerful, so hypnotizing, that I can’t help but think, to quote Deleuze & Guattari, “it’s not a metaphor.” all films are a kind of illusion, a magic trick; all stories are dreams dreamt for us by a conjuror. but no films seem so much like genuine acts of magic, full of potentially sinister symbolism and dark energy, as David Lynch’s. I will continue to cherish and study his work, because there’s no doubt in my mind that he was literally a magician: his films have altered the way people see the world at a fundamental level, and have perhaps even changed the substrate of reality itself. whether or not he represents the Black Lodge or the White Lodge, however, will remain a mystery.
been feeling particularly caged in by the Black Iron Prison lately (the world is a vampire, history is a nightmare, etc. etc….) in no small part due to the terms of agreement I didn’t read before signing up for this particular lifestyle I have: not particularly luxurious, but comfortable, a job not particularly soul crushing, but soul sapping. each day becomes more like the next as I swaddle myself in restraints that cushion me from the untamed majority of reality.
I’ve resolved to give up. giving up is easy, that much I’ve proven to myself every time I don’t sit down to write, every time I say there’s always tomorrow. but it’s best if I apply this talent for giving up to different ends. if I don’t get the librarian job here that I’ve applied for, then I’m giving up on the idea of having a librarian career. certainly giving up on the idea that this is a system worth working for. the trajectory of my life the past decade suggests that my priority has been to have a career in libraries. a noble cause, if I may say so. but emotionally, psychically, the depression and dissatisfaction I’ve felt suggests that my priorities lie elsewhere, and it’s long past time that I take that seriously.
I’m not interested in rehashing this problem. just dusting out the cage so I can get some real thinking done while incarcerated.
because the guards aren’t my coworkers here at the library; my boss isn’t the warden. the System extends far beyond the little grievances I have with wage labor. everything is working against the possibility of living life freely; and the only possibility of living life freely is to be a creator of realities that compete with, rail against, and try to subvert the structures holding us back. ie to be an artist. and here, in the US of A, artists who don’t serve as mouthpieces for the Empire place themselves near the very bottom of the pyramid, among women the poor nonwhites and queers. but it is in this willingness to cast themselves out of the Empire’s good graces that artists gain the power of true perception, and the potential for self-mastery.
there’s one passage in Great Expectations by Kathy Acker I think often about, where she lays out the problem of being an artist in the United States. if she thought the problem was bad in 1982, no telling the depths of despair she’d feel seeing the state of the arts today. the broader point she makes is that in a country where money is the Logos dictating the conditions of existence, and this society selects very few of its artists as being worthy of attention (ie care and support), then to persist in being an artist requires either financial support from family or sexual partners, critical compromise with commercial forces, or else a pathological and self-destructive commitment to the work. that aside, a minor point she mentions is that, because so few artists are selected as worthy of attention, the vast majority of us never get the recognition, distribution, or feedback necessary to progress artistically past the personal preoccupation stage of an artist’s development. the inclusion of “feedback” in this list really hits the mark for me. the past 6 months to a year has been a steady decrease in my concern for not only sharing work, but for making work at all, because I tried for a few years to keep at the avenue most available to me for sharing work, and never got anything that felt like actionable feedback. if creating art is a cybernetic process with the world, and there’s no response to incorporate back into the original force that brought the work into being, then by the law of entropy the will to create, unless exceptionally strong and self-sufficient, will dissipate.
this was supposed to be a kind of working out of ideas I’m going to package differently on my newsletter soon (remember I have a newsletter? link in bio). not sure I did that exactly but whatever–I’m learning to be okay with making a mess I don’t know what to do with. I think I’ve come up with a System (my old boss was all about creating Systems, and something I’ve learned is that it’s not enough to have a goal, or even a plan, but you need to have a System for attaining that goal, for implementing that plan). I’m going to start writing newsletters again, and hopefully get them out more consistently, because why else have a newsletter if I’m not sharing something consistently.
despite a feeling of having my creative energies exhausted, I remain dissatisfied with a life not shaped by a commitment to art. so I’m fueling my tank up with vitriol, resentment and a hunger to prove myself.
this morning before work I watched a video that I’d seen logged or listed by a few insane randos I follow on Letterboxd. it’s a video produced by something called “Sound Photosynthesis,” editing together stock/historical footage with a couple recordings of Terence McKenna explaining his “Timewave Zero” theory. according to him, using a software model based on the I Ching (how exactly I don’t know; I’d have to read the book he wrote about it I guess), we can map temporal cycles as a fractal oscillation between various periods of “complexification” and “simplification.” his model, conveniently, predicts that the limit of this oscillation is reached at the birth of the universe and in the year 2012—remember the 2012 phenomenon? how lots of people in the weirdosphere/psychedelia/conspiratainment circles latched on to the fact that the Mayan calendar “ends” in the year 2012?
leaving aside the possibility that in some way the “world” might have “ended” in 2012, the year I graduated college, McKenna posits that time is a kind of spiral fractal approaching a “transcendent object at the end of history.” spiral because as we approach this telos, the chronic tightening compounds the complexity of being, and fractal because patterns repeat at various scales, leading to resonances of similarity across time. McKenna uses the example of Ulysses to demonstrate: how Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin on a random day are somehow cosmic echoes of the wanderings of Odysseus around the Mediterranean over the course of a decade plus.
this is the closest theoretical explanation of some intensely overwhelming experiences (yes, brought on by drugs) where I felt—not conceptualized, not imagined, not speculated—but felt that “I” (the bundle of perceptions and sensations comprising the flimsy construct of my consciousness) am the very tip of all of Time, and within me is the totality of all that had to happen—traumas personal, generational, historical, biological, geological, and cosmic—for this present moment to be as it is now.
periodically, an impulse will have me ruminating on emo music, the genre most suited to adolescent angst. I was lucky enough to be an angsty adolescent when emo gained mainstream popularity back in the mid-aughts. they’ve since made a whole industry out of capitalizing on people my age pining for the days when it was socially appropriate to feel your heartbreak at the volume of a sold-out stadium concert, but you won’t find me ever attending “emo nite” or buying tickets to When We Were Young, the corporate festival where ancient (ie 20 years past their prime) post-hardcore, pop punk and emo bands are wheeled out to perform for crowds of tattooed millennials whose knees will hurt for days after pogoing to “What’s My Age Again?”
nonetheless, the opening chords of “A Decade Under the Influence,” or the album art on Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate, or the 16-minute coda of “Goodbye Sky Harbor” from Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity—these stir up in me a feeling, of being young and in love, of being ignorant of all that I know now, of having possibilities not yet foreclosed upon, of being wide-eyed and eager to embrace life in all its messiness and pain and euphoria. friday night lights are lit over the football stadium, holes are forming at the elbows of a favorite zip up hoodie, and someone told someone else that another person is making out with someone they shouldn’t be behind the auditorium.
if I’m being honest with myself, this is the feeling I’m always trying to recapture. it seems that that former eagerness has been beaten back cowering into a corner. even just reminiscing on the discovery this music online, back when the internet felt like a place of boundless exploration, fills me with nostalgic yearning. how can I face the future squarely, with eager anticipation, as I once did in the past?
I’m not old, and there’s plenty of life, painful messy euphoric life, yet to be embraced. but I’m not quite young either, and not getting any younger, as the old ones say.
currently reading Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. on a bit of a noir kick, having watched Laura, Double Indemnity, The Big Heat, and No Country for Old Men all in the last month. noirs reveal to me just how shaky my grasp of plot is. I’m great at being carried along by a movie or a book, immensely enjoying it as it unfolds, but then retaining almost none of the details of the story. The Big Heat is about…a police officer gets killed…and there’s a bigwig politician…Glenn Ford’s wife is murdered by a car bomb…uhhh….Laura, obviously, Laura dies, but then she’s not dead, because…her effete journalist patron…kills the wrong girl……Double Indemnity, insurance fraud, of course, like the title suggests, Barbara Stanwyck tricks Fred MacMurray into killing her husband, but then…MacMurray’s boss doesn’t want the insurance company to pay out…so….and, and, No Country for Old Men, I’ve seen it innumerable times, could practically recite the opening monologue…but…Anton Chigurh works for…uh…and Woody Harrelson, he’s hired by…someone…who also is working with the Mexicans…to track down the money Josh Brolin finds…..
it’s worse for things I read, and Red Harvest is especially convoluted. all the characters are lying to each other, the “mystery” that incites the action is apparently resolved a third of the way in, and I’m now at the part where there’s a boxing match that’s fixed, but…one of the boxers is actually a different guy…from…Philadelphia? anyway, sorry if I’m spoiling any of these classics for you. the point is, well, the points are: 1) I think it might be beneficial to read/watch something almost immediately after finishing it for the first time; I’m thinking I’ll flip back to page one of Red Harvest as soon as I reach the end. 2) maybe “plot” isn’t exactly my thing; maybe I ought to care less about ensuring something coherently flows from beginning-middle-end, inciting incident-rising action-climax-denoument, at least not in terms of “events,” but work more through vignettes that ebb and flow, building towards moment(s) of clarity, like a Fellini film (I’ve watched three Fellini films, Nights of Cabiria, Amarcord, La dolce vita—none of which have much in terms of traditional “plot”—in the last week). and 3) I should pay closer attention to the things I read and watch—I’m notoriously bad about “reading” something while thinking of something entirely different for a page or two, somehow dissociating from an activity that is itself a little dissociative. that’s a bad habit; I envy people who can bring to mind specific scenes and sequences from books they’ve read once; I can’t even do that with books I’ve read multiple times.
I have a bad habit of browsing letterboxd reviews. as I’ve decreased my social media presence (as of this past weekend I disabled my instagram account), the time I might have spent idly scrolling has been redirected into an increased attention to the social media site about movies. this wasn’t even what I wanted to write about but I realized it was both funnier to say that browsing letterboxd at all is a waste of time, and also that it’s true that despite being pretty successful at training my attention away from most distraction machines, I still have been wasting time clicking through this one last site. something to note for myself, is all.
anyway, I have a bad habit of browsing negative letterboxd reviews for movies I enjoy. it strokes the same sensitive spot in my mind that secretly enjoyed being angry about the myriad stupid opinions and shitty “jokes” people share on twitter. it’s really not even worth engaging with most of these reviews: I can convince myself that it’s worthwhile to temper my enthusiasm against valid criticisms of movies I think highly of, and surely this is good to do. however, most negative reviews on letterboxd are like “this sucks” “what a waste of time” “snoozefest”—reactions that are perfectly within the audience’s right to have, but they don’t teach you anything beyond demonstrating that there are, in fact, different strokes for different folxx.
I saw Anora last night. enjoyable movie, excellent entertainment. it’s the kind of movie that should just be the standard for quality adult viewing. it doesn’t condescend to the audience, it’s shot well without being overly slick or pureed, and it’s not an adaptation of a preexisting intellectual property initially intended for children. does it deserve all the hype it’s gotten? should it have won the palm d’or? no probably not, but until they invite me to judge at cannes that’s not for me to decide. that’s not a criticism of the film, though. an indictment of the sorry state of the cinema, yes, but Anora is a perfectly “good” movie, which there are too few of nowadays.
because I enjoyed it and because it’s a buzzy movie, that means I had to see what kinds of negative things people were saying about it, and I guess try to respond to some of them. several low-star reviews feature some variation on “omg how could anyone find HUMOR in a SEX WORKER being subjected to VIOLENCE?” the long home invasion sequence in question, obviously farcical, wrings most of its humor out of how hard the hired goons try to not be violent with Ani. the men are the ones who actually suffer injuries in this scene! injuries caused by Ani!
“obviously written by a man.” and that’s a priori bad? what do you mean when you say that? there are definitely scenes that are voyeuristic, where women’s bodies are sexualized. this has never been a convincing line of criticism to me, in part because I’m a man who likes to watch nude women be sexual. but 1) you’re watching a movie, ie you are being a voyeur, and 2) it’s a movie about a stripper, do you not expect there to be some objectification involved, objectification that we all participate in, male female or somewhere in between? I could go on and on about how poorly understood the concept of the “male gaze” is in contemporary discourse, but even granting that yes there are some scenes in Anora that exist primarily to titillate, they aren’t exactly gratuitous, nor are they the primary focus of the movie. and if you mean the man Sean Baker botches the opportunity to write realistically about the life of a woman sex worker, then I would say I didn’t buy a ticket for a documentary, I bought a ticket for a convincing entertainment and feel satisfied with how the titular character was written in the context of that entertainment. which brings me to:
“Anora” may be named after its main character but Baker spends barely any time developing her. Who is Anora? What does she want? What motivates her? What does she fear? You imply she is smart but then give me a solid hour of her acting dumb.
this is the most thorough example of the other “criticism” that some people are leveling at the movie: that Ani doesn’t have “agency,” that she lacks “interiority.” but the way this poster poses these questions points at exactly what I thought were evidence of her “agency” and her “interiority,” namely that she’s a complicated, imperfect person, driven by contradictory desires. she’s fiercely independent, and believes herself to be wised up, but the whirlwind of meeting Vanya brings out the hurt, neediness and romanticism she works overtime to suppress. she’s “smart” enough, but totally unprepared for the forces of class and power she’s stumbled into, so she “acts dumb” in an effort to maintain the illusion of having escaped her poverty. (as an aside, I also don’t think Ani is particularly smart, nor that she needs to be to be a good character. just like with men, some women aren’t very smart!) plus, to ask “Who is Anora? What does she want? What motivates her? What does she fear?” after watching the movie suggests to me that either you weren’t paying attention, or that you yourself feel a peculiar lack of agency and interiority. because this movie doesn’t condescend and trusts the audience to pick up on subtext, some people end up projecting their own impotence all over what I thought was a really well developed character.
a random bonus potshot:
I also didn’t like her casual use of the f slur that was super unnecessary, especially being used as an insult against a guy who isn’t a rapist.
sorry, are you saying it would be preferable if Ani called someone a “f****t” so long as the guy is a rapist?
it makes perfect sense to me that a certain section of very online people with Perfect Politics would take issue with Anora, even though there’s almost nothing particularly offensive about the movie aside from several f-bombs being hurled. but, I hate to break it to you, woke mob: regular people, especially lower class people you so valiantly wish to champion, are often stupid, they say offensive things, and they don’t behave with the decorum you expect everyone, even people without fancy graduate degrees, to carry themselves with. and more often than not, it doesn’t matter how much “agency” they exercise when pitted against the richest and most powerful members of the international elite.
does Anora ultimately have much to say about class or sex work or being Russian? no not really, and that’s fine! again, it’s just a solid flick. a Howard Hawks style screwball not really deserving of the kind of defense I’m mounting here. but I’m very very tired of the scandalized, self-righteous stance some people take when criticizing movies (or any art) that treat their audience like adults. it’s evidence of a neo-puritanical anti-intellectualism that makes me despair at the state of American culture. you don’t have to like the same movies as me, but if you don’t dress your distaste in smug sanctimony, then I won’t have to call you a pissy adult baby.
the past week or so I’ve been working out what exactly it is I’m trying to do. as an artist, as a person, as a wage laborer who probably needs more money. this last one’s come back to the fore, after many months of not looking for a new job, because my boss is leaving for a new position on the other side of the country. this was expected, because he’s an ambitious go getter with lots of big ideas, and the library system I work for is dysfunctional, mired in inertia, and woefully underfunded. what I didn’t expect was him telling me, after breaking the news, that I should apply for his position, and that people in the administration seem interested in me taking the job. am I interested in it? if I’m going to be at this library, I don’t really want someone else to be my boss. and if I want to move somewhere else for a library job, it would help to have “city librarian” on my resume, to make me a more attractive candidate or whatever corpo-bureau-careerist bullshit phrase it is.
what I’m actually interested in is having less job, not more. because I’m trying to determine where to place my ambitions, because, contra the slacker in me, I am an ambitious person. does that mean being ambitious in my career? library work is pretty much the only field where I feel I could be ambitious without sacrificing too much of my soul. sacrificing some of it, to be sure, but if there’s one field of democratic spirit left in America, it’s in libraries. however, while I have a knack for public library work (not that it’s hard, though of course if I have a “knack” for it I wouldn’t think it’s hard, so idk), I just can’t seem to get excited about any aspect of it, maybe because it’s still ultimately wage labor, maybe because I have artistic ambitions I can’t shake, maybe because I want to be a layabout and I resent any sort of external obligation. probably all three in varying proportions.
the question then is, what does it mean to have artistic ambitions in America in 2024? the outlook for life as an artist has never looked so grim. the options are abject poverty without any social safety net, a series of compromises in service of becoming a cog in the culture industry (compromises that are increasingly detrimental to the ability to hold onto a sense of individuality and originality, given the dire state of publishing, the music industry, the film industry, etc.), or totally selling out and approaching the prospect of being a “creative” as cravenly and psychopathically as possible. the middle path is the one most people with any measure of success (“success”) try to walk, and I don’t mean to cast (many) aspersions on anyone with the desire to see their book published by a big 5 publisher. but the demands placed on artists hoping for traditional forms of “success”—self-promotion, constant hustling, little support from institutions supposedly “backing” you, poor financial prospects—amidst the meat grinder of the “attention economy” seems to have stripped away the faculties in artists that are necessary to create truly countercultural, visionary, strident, original work. there are some artists, none of wide renown, creating nowadays whom I respect, but even them….when was the last time it felt like an artist under 45 really fuckin went for it, made a genuine stab at the heart of life, with an eye to the complexity of the modern world, and landed a critical blow? maybe I’m not reading enough contemporary work, but I also don’t read much contemporary work because I sense a failure of nerve among artists nowadays.
all of which is by way of thinking through what I want from the artistic life. I’m developing these ideas more rigorously (and artfully) elsewhere, so be on the lookout, but one upshot I’m trying to internalize is that I need to take art making a seriously as possible, while all but abandoning any hope of being “famous.” “fame” once meant achieving a certain level of recognition from the world that bolsters the possibility of the work reverberating through posterity, but now, “fame” mostly means earning the fickle support of a system that runs entirely on the evaluation of things in the most vulgar terms, those of the market. (adorno argued that this was true even in the 19th century, with “posterity” being a product mostly of the proto-advertising efforts of publishers, but we can’t discount the fact that the already debased workings of the culture industry have become so endemic as to threaten the very possibility of something like “culture” with meaning outside its worth to shareholders).
i’m not articulating this well, and i sometimes think i need to be more “dialectical” in my thinking, more specific in my examples, and more ranging in my scope. but this is my blog, so whatever. the point is, what I care about is making good art, uncompromisingly; using art as means of approaching the Sublime, of examining the conditions of reality, of figuring out “how to live a moral life a culture of death” (Charles Bowden). which is almost directly opposed to the idea of being “discovered” by the culture industry.
that leads me back around to needing to make money in a way that best supports this attitude towards making art. (also developing a certain discipline, but that’s a discussion separate from this one). whether that means taking on more responsibilities for slightly more money and something on my resume that might lead to work in a more interesting city…idk. when i put it that way…
last week I was doing some research on gangstalking for a fiction project I’m working on. gangstalking is a phenomenon where people, who call themselves “targeted individuals,” are convinced they’re being subjected to a form of coordinated harassment and surveillance by a group, usually, though not always, members of a government agency. if you search “gangstalking” or “targeted individual” on youtube you can find videos from people, clearly disturbed, describing their experiences with this harassment. people break into their homes and rearrange their belongings; people call them at strange hours from unknown numbers; people drive by their houses repeatedly; signals are sent to their brains via local cell towers; their friends and families are convinced they’ve lost their minds and cut off contact.
The U.S. Department of Justice charged [Ebay] with stalking, witness tampering and obstruction of justice as part of a “harassment and intimidation campaign” that targeted David and Ina Steiner, two private citizens who deigned to criticize the company online….
The couple used their spare time to publish EcommerceBytes, a newsletter focused on ecommerce that was often critical of the company’s business practices. The small newsletter was such a large thorn in the side of some of the higher ups at eBay — which has a market cap of more than $21 billion — that they decided to respond by sending anonymous deliveries to the company’s home in an attempt to intimidate them.
The deliveries included a book on surviving the death of spouse, a bloody pig mask, a fetal pig, a funeral wreath and live insects. The company also sent the couple private messages using sock puppet accounts on Twitter threatening to visit the victims home.
The harassers eventually made good on its threat and sent people to surveil the couple’s home and put a GPS tracking device on their car.
later in the week, bored and procrastinating, I checked in on an online social space I no longer participate in. someone had shared a screenshot that morning from a newsletter describing, as though commemorating a great civil rights victory, how a US city had declared the month of October “Havana Syndrome Awareness Month.” Havana Syndrome is a purported affliction, experienced primarily by American diplomats, caused by directed energy weapons or weaponized radio frequencies. symptoms include those “associated with a perceived localized loud sound such as screeching, chirping, clicking, or piercing noises…visual disturbances such as blurred vision and sensitivity to light…intense pressure or vibration in the head, ear pain, diffuse head pain, and cognitive problems such as forgetfulness and poor concentration.” whether or not Havana Syndrome is “real” is a matter of dispute, and is experienced by some 10,000 people total, so the idea that a US city would deem it something worth being “aware” of, as we should be of “autism” or “hepatitis,” was likely meant as cause for mockery. I myself might ridicule the idea.
what caught my interest, however, is that the city in question is the one I live in, Ventura CA. a strange coincidence, perhaps. being a active and engaged citizen, I did some searching to determine when my city would have made such a declaration. strangely, no such proclamation appears in any of the official channels. the image of the official municipal declaration looks pretty convincing, and even has the correct name of the mayor on it. only problem is the colors are not the ones usually used by the city for its official communications. the only place I can find anything like press coverage for this important issue is on a website that seems to be one where anyone can submit a “press release.”
the organization making a big fuss over this, of course, also advocates for targeted individuals to be taken seriously. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I want them to be taken seriously as well.
how many things needed to have gone exactly the way they did for you to be here, now? how much of a shame would it be to not live up to that great honor? at what point does the opportunity you’ve been afforded become missed? what if everything isn’t conspiring against you, but for you, and your fear is all that’s keeping you from the life you want?
there are moments in Werewolf where a much better movie shines through. the scenes in the Slaughtered Lamb are both funny and unnerving, working on the trope of creepy insular rural community to great effect. John Landis has the good sense to make you wait almost 2/3rds of the runtime before witnessing the (still shocking) transformation David suffers under the full moon, but he dangles plenty of grotesque and gory fun to keep you entertained along the way: Griffin Dunne’s decomposition, the absurd dream sequence where monstrous shock troopers with Uzis mow down David’s family. but I wasn’t crazy about this one. right from the start, the dialogue between Dunne and Naughton felt too artificial, and not in an expressionistic anti-realism way that sometimes heightens the effect of certain films. the two had chemistry but maybe were directed poorly?
right after finishing the movie I felt satisfied by its abrupt, anti-Hollywood ending. it’s a pretty funny joke to have Alex tell David she loves him, and, for just a second, suggest that maybe her expression of love got through to the monstrous wolf that’s been terrorizing Piccadilly Circus, only to immediately shoot such a saccharine ending down with what would actually happen in such a situation, namely, the police shooting down the murderous werewolf. but then I started to think that it wasn’t particularly well delivered, given that the mechanics of the plot felt a little rickety throughout.
it’s fun, I’m probably wrong to be so critical of it. it’s certainly more interesting than most major horror movies. I would recommend it if you’re a horror fan and somehow haven’t already seen it, mostly on the strength of Rick Baker’s iconic practical effects work. it’s a real shame they don’t make movies like that any more.
Ring (1998)
a simple story, well told: a girl lives a short life and dies a violent death. her spirit, unresting, seeks vengeance on the world that wronged her. the rage she projects from beyond death can not be contained. it must spread, virus-like.
there’s a fairy tale quality to the film responsible for an international craze for horror pictures coming out of East Asia. when the dread is conjured this well, the details of the story don’t actually matter all that much. exactly what’s going on with Sadako or the Izu Peninsula is a little convoluted, as is the supernatural world that Ring inhabits (why is Ryuji also sort of psychic?). and, to offer some criticism, a lot of the dialogue tells you exactly what’s animating the plot, in a way that’s ponderous yet not terribly helpful. but what’s significant about the film is how it utilizes elements of folklore to spin a yarn about an extremely modern phenomenon: image culture, and the possibility that our new networked world can spread archaic evil. it is a parable of the Spectacle, told with all the earnestness usually forbade by the Spectacle. I place Ring alongside (not in terms of quality) such works as Videodrome, Twin Peaks: The Return, and Ghost in the Shell, films that try to grapple with how electronic media have warped our bodies, dreams, and minds. despite that warping, though, we nonetheless remain human, even as what “human” means is strained to its very limit.
I’m interested in this idea of using fairy tales or folklore to help orient us in the strange new world we find ourselves in after the detonation of the atom bomb. we are still reeling from the shockwaves that technological advances sent through the 20th century. it seems to me that maybe, rather than hoping to find new plots or new characters, we as writers and artists should find new ways to vivify those archetypes that have long guided us in the shape of stories. Sadako is a onryō, a vengeful spirit of the kind that populates every culture’s imaginary in some form or another; her videotape is a curse, dark magic that all people, no matter how secularized, fear in one way or another.
I do remember the American version being scarier, though. and I kind of wish Hideo Nakata’s version weren’t so explicit and allowed the dark enigma of the story to exist on its own terms.
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
ahh giallo. what a genre. I’m toying with how to write a sort of crypto-giallo, but my conceit effectively makes it not a giallo, in that it’s from the point of view of the would-be “killer”, obviating the element of mystery from genre. I’m also wondering if it’s a story or if it’s a film. or if maybe it’s a story, and I should write a giallo-influenced film. god, do I want to make movies. but they’re so hard to make!
writing is hard too, but at least with writing all you need is something to put words on and a room to shuffle those words around in. with a film, you need that (assuming you’re the writer-director, which I would want to be), then you need film equipment, sound equipment, actors, locations, means for editing and sound mixing, days for shooting…excuses, excuses.
I really do wonder sometimes if I’m, at heart, a lit bro, or a film bro. not that it’s impossible to be both, but my original artistic dream was to direct. novel writing and directing seem very similar to me, especially if the director is also the screenwriter. idk I’m losing the thread on keeping this interesting. just something I can’t quite resolve: where to put my energies.
I finished a draft of a story today. all it took was devoting time to writing, and what do you know, writing happened.
yesterday, the first of October, I did something I often consider doing but haven’t yet until this year: I set out to spend the month finally reading all of House of Leaves. I’ve read the first 119 pages something like 3 times, but on each previous effort, I put the book down after finishing Ch. VIII and never mustered the courage or time to dive into the notoriously bonkers Ch. IX. I’ve always enjoyed that first section, so I feel obligated to at least push through the barrier and see if the rest of the work earns my attention.
a kind of “joke” in the first chapter I never caught until this read was that The Navidson Record, the fictional film that the novel is supposedly an exegesis of, was distributed by Miramax. Harvey Weinstein is mentioned by name. it’s an interesting metatextual wrinkle to know what eventually became of the king of 90s independent cinema. not that it bears much on the novel.
by happenstance, last weekend I went to a screening of the 4K restoration of the movie most associated with Miramax, Pulp Fiction. a friend of mine once posted a review on Letterboxd of Magnolia describing it as “pulp fiction but you adjust the ‘written-medium-to-filmed-medium’ dial a few notches to the left.” I mention this only to point out what’s been pointed out innumerable times before, but Tarantino makes movie movies, films that operate on the logic of what cinema does that other mediums don’t lend themselves to. he writes tight dialogue and his narratives are well constructed, but he primarily asks “what do I want to see on screen.” this is signaled somewhat ironically by the line Fabienne delivers after telling Butch she wants a pot belly: “It’s unfortunate what we find pleasing to the touch and pleasing to the eye is seldom the same”
watching Pulp Fiction brought to mind a question I often wonder about, and have probably posted about here: why are genre exercises, or crime stories, or surrealist pastiches, more likely to make for “good” movies than novels? why are novelists expected to be more “responsible” and stick to “relatable” stories than filmmakers? I realize I’m making a generalization that immediately brings to mind a million exceptions—plenty of novels from the last 100 years aren’t exactly “relatable,” and the demand for “relatability” in art has warped the direction that non-comic book, non-horror movies have taken as of late.
it wasn’t until writing this that I realized my issue is with this idea of “relatability.” I’m desiring more freedom in what I’m making, and I imagine that filmmaking gives people greater freedom than what writing fiction does. this obviously isn’t true. I’ve internalized some norm that I should do away with. ironic that I feel this as a result of reading a novel about a movie, even more so than I did when I watched the movie about movies.
I’m frustrated with the thing I’m working on in part because I feel like the technique I’m using is too…basic. it’s also pretty close to mundane lived experience in a way I’m generally not particularly interested in in fiction. but what I’m working on is important for personal, therapeutic reasons, and I recognize the desire to throw it away just as I’m digging into something genuinely felt is me trying to self-sabotage. nonetheless, I feel the need for some project that allows for greater latitude in plot and technique.
this week is the first week where I’m being very deliberate and protective of my writing time. these are your hours, show up to work. this will involve working out what exactly my process is, and maybe it’ll be beneficial to have a couple, wildly different projects to alternate between. maybe I’ll even get around to actually writing a screenplay.
