sadness accompanies any realization that the ideas you once held were in fact snags along the trail. of course it’s easy to lament how things might have gone had you come to see the errors of your thinking sooner. go ahead, feel the regret. that’s the sense of allowing distinctions that no longer work dissolve. but do not fall into a crisis merely because your thinking was mistaken. is it not a great blessing to come to see the true way forward? one not free of snags but that you can better feel yourself aligned with, so that navigating starts to be a matter of allowing the path run through you, not you over the path.
that’s not to say that the path will be clear. confusion still reigns. you may awaken in the night, lost and distraught. just remember that you are the source of your own misery.
(hopefully I’m coming to settle into some more sustainable working habits. something’s happened, and I’m shedding lots of hang ups that prevented me from writing with any enjoyment. it was always a slog, because I was comparing myself to my models, or because I thought things had to be done a certain way, or because I expected a first draft to come out impeccably. but now, I’m allowing myself to work slower, with less rigid expectations, treating novel writing as I would filmmaking, from notes/drafts/outline all the way through post-production. as a result, I’m totally adrift as far as knowing how it’s all going, other than knowing I’m for once actually eager to work, rather than filled with dread.)
it’s the third day in a row I’ve pulled the Three of Swords in some manner or other; in a full Celtic cross on Wednesday, it occupied the future position, reversed, and again it came up reversed yesterday. here it is unreversed. something needs me to pay attention to this.
Three swords piercing a heart; cloud and rain behind. Divinatory Meanings: Removal, absence, delay, division, rupture, dispersion, and all that the design signifies naturally, being too simple and obvious to call for specific enumeration. Reversed: Mental alienation, error, loss, distraction, disorder, confusion.
The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, A.E. Waite
The vital aspect of the Threes achieves transformation by the birth of the new….A popular expression describing a state of mental confusion is “losing one’s bearings.” This card, like all the Threes, has an adolescent tone. Here, every problem that can arise comes up; there is confusion between believing and knowing, and we think without being united to the world, motivated by the energy of an ideal that could just as easily be fallacious as true. The energy of the Three of Swords is closely connected to the sexual energy of the Wands….
This Arcanum refers to the fanatic bursting forth of primary ideas and first opinions. It is a sign of intellectual enthusiasm that can easily combine with a passion for studying and reading. The still-immature intellect acts purely spontaneously and discerns no difference between believing and knowing. We also can see a desire for intellectual development in this card—for example, a student’s desire to pass an exam. The negative connotations fall under the heading of all kinds of fanaticism, obstinacy, refusal to push deeper, and dispersal. The Three can also point to a lack of follow-through on ideas.
The Way of Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky
Swordplay in the hands of a master has been compared to…the sharpening of the ‘psychic power of seeing in order to act immediately in accordance with what it sees”….[The] sword’s essence is to carve, thrust, divide, whether as a deathblow that slays an opponent, a decisive separation from worldly attachment or the separating out of consciousness from psyche’s deep, unconscious recesses….Beyond technical brilliance, the best swordsman is the one who attains the capacity to engage the subtleties of the animating spirit of the sword, so that subject and object, mind and body are one, single-minded, resolute.
The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images
[The sword’s] primary symbolic meaning…is of a wound and the power to wound, and hence of liberty and strength….There can be no doubt that there is a sociological factor in sword-symbolism, since the sword is an instrument proper to the knight, who is the defender of the forces of light against the forces of darkness. But the fact is that in rites at the dawning of history and in folklore even today, the sword plays a similar spiritual rôle, with the magic power to fight off the dark powers personified in the “malevolent dead”….The sword, because of its implication of “physical extermination,” must be a symbol of spiritual evolution….
A Dictionary of Symbols, Juan Eduardo Cirlot
recent things:
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann: gotta give the Aussie auteur credit, very few major filmmakers have it in them to bring this much excess to the screen. unfortunately this take on R+J is a mess. the modern acting he has the actors doing makes it nearly impossible at times to hear the Bard’s poetry. I forgot Jamie Kennedy is in this. don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun flick, and there’s lot’s of great scenes—the famous first meeting between Romeo and Juliet, from opposite sides of the fish tank, deserves its iconic status, and Peter Postlethwaite brings enough conviction to his portrayal of Friar Laurence to overshadow some of the sillier choices made by Luhrmann.
also, hold on, just some quick math here…yep, I won’t be saying what I thought about Claire Danes in this movie.
miscellany:
Carbyne is an Israeli surveillance company that sells software granting access to 911 callers’ GPS, camera, and other identifying data to emergency dispatch services. on Carbyne’s advisory board is Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security and co-author of the Patriot Act. Carbyne has received investments from figures no less luminary than former Israeli Prime Minsiter Ehud Barak, who got the funds from one Jeffrey Epstein. also among Carbyne’s investors is Erik Prince, of Blackwater fame, as well as the godfather of the PayPal mafia, Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel has been linked to those semi-public intellectuals who provide the philosophical framework of what’s known as the Dark Enlightenment, most notably Nick Land. In Nick Land’s view, capitalism is a program sent back from the future by a transhistorical artificial intelligence directing events such that its eventual takeover of the planet is guaranteed, ushering in a post-human epoch. In this view, those like Prince, Thiel, and Barak/Epstein are merely agents who throw their lot in with the fait accompli of technosoteriology for a chance at merging with the apocalyptic esoteric forces struggling to immanentize themselves. and anyone who doesn’t get with the program will be punished for their impudence. (source)
beset by confusion, despair, and sadness. the operations of the Family have worked once again to thwart any efforts to step bravely into the future with a clear mind and a full heart. the details are of no concern for this; besides, who couldn’t guess, given that all happy families are alike insofar as they don’t exist. bad parents; distant siblings; tensions denied, for the sake of what limited time there is, that inevitably break when the slightest excess stress is applied. and now, even with several days remove, the resultant inner turmoil, always present but usually imperceptible, will not settle.
or perhaps the operation known as the Family, despite all appearances to the contrary, are actually aimed towards some improvement? there is no escaping the saṅkhāra of familial influence. what if, instead of pretending that unhappiness doesn’t lie beneath all this flailing, it is better to keep unhappiness firmly in mind? wouldn’t it, by definition, make it easier to be fully present if the facade of cheery friendliness were dropped and a surly discontent allowed to shine through every action–which it does, regardless of whether the ego acknowledges it as such?
enough of this vague suggestion. ahead still lies confusion and despair. it’s best to admit it. the labyrinth of fate and free will isn’t navigable by reason alone.
I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them—thus I will be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!
The Gay Science (276), Friedrich Nietzsche
recent things:
The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me, Brand New I loaded up my iPod with whatever music I still had from years ago, back when I managed my own music library before Spotify. as of Saturday I will no longer have a paid Spotify account. petty as it may be, the latest $1 hike in subscription rate was enough to get me to finally cut ties to the satanic company that’s pureeing the popular music industry into grey goo and ruining everyone’s ability to meaningfully listening to music. it’s forcing me to revisit albums I haven’t heard in many years, already a kind of radical change, since the instant access to ALL MUSIC EVER had me relistening to things less and seeking out new but ultimately ephemeral things more. The Devil and God, despite (or because of) Jesse Lacey’s failings as a man, still scratches deep into my soul, with acute observations, daring turns of phrases, and way more Kierkegaardian angst than any of Brand New’s 2000s emo compatriots ever mustered. it’s a truly breathtaking record–and now I can listen to it without that 15 cents ever making it into Lacey’s pocket!
Almost Killed Me, The Hold Steady this album is good, some of the songs are great. Craig Finn’s got a short story writer’s sensibility for detail and place. but some of his lyrical tics get tiresome: saying someone “looks just like” any number of famous personages, the accumulation of which never quite add up to any gestalt; too many oh-so-clever plays on words like “I’ve been trying to get people to call me Johnny Rotten; but people keep calling me Freddie Fresh.” Separation Sunday irons out a lot of these more precocious tendencies in favor of more focused character development.
Warlock, Oakley Hall one of the best novels I’ve read in a long while. it’s not often nowadays that I read something and immediately feel the characters carving out space in my mind. the intricate snaking of the three male leads, Tom Morgan, Johnny Ganon, Clay Blaisedell, who each quaver around and yet never succeed in being honorable men, is a thing of beauty, to say nothing of how carefully rendered the politics of Warlock are or the wide-screen documentary perspective Hall brings to the near-mythic story of the OK Corral. Blood Meridian may lay bare the occult strangeness of the American West, but Warlock gives us the hard, dusty truth it. I can’t recommend this novel highly enough.
Happening, Annie Ernaux at the start of this novella I was like “okay, yeah, story bout a girl who has to get an abortion, I think I get it,” and by the end I was like “Jesus fucking Christ this is brutal.” which, very typically male of me, I know.
Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa
In addition to the actual script, Kurosawa at this stage often produced extensive, fantastically detailed notes to elaborate his vision. For example, for Seven Samurai, he created six notebooks with (among many other things) detailed biographies of the samurai, including what they wore and ate, how they walked, talked and behaved when greeted, and even how each tied his shoes. For the 101 peasant characters in the film, he created a registry consisting of 23 families and instructed the performers playing these roles to live and work as these “families” for the duration of shooting.
a major point of character development in Michael Powell’s legendary Peeping Tom comes when protagonist Michael takes his downstairs neighbor Helen out for a date. Helen, a bit bemused, asks whether Michael plans to take his camera with them. up until this point Michael is always seen with a camera or film equipment, either his own or on set. the question comes as a surprise, and the audience feels Michael’s hesitation. “I’m worried it’s starting to grow into an extra limb!” Helen jokes. to drive home just how compulsive Michael’s photographing is, while walking home from dinner, the couple happen upon another couple necking in the park. Michael, out of habit, reaches for the camera that he agreed to leave back at the house, a chance to film an unguarded moment of humanity, and anxiety, that he’s unprepared for the opportunity, shades across his face.
though Michael has a traumatic story that explains his pathology—to say nothing of the violence that he enacts—this behavior is exactly the behavior required of any serious artist. for all the bromides about art being a way to deepen empathy, a way to shed light on the questions that unite humanity, a way to provide warmth in the cold desert of the world, the creation of art is, necessarily, profoundly antisocial. the artist always sees the world as raw material to be extracted; this is a subject that Nietzsche returns to several times in The Gay Science. hardly an original analogy, I know, but the artist is a vampire, drawing energy from the world, from real people, for a shot at creating something that transcends human limitations.
As soon as you think about giving yourself permission, you’re thinking about it from an egocentric point of view. In a way, it starts earlier than that, which is that, I’m in service of this art form—do or die. Whether I get a job or I don’t get a job….If teaching acting at a high school in Seattle when you’re 62, if that doesn’t sound great, then get out. Get the fuck out….If you don’t think it’s worth it to do that, then what is it that you’re doing? You don’t get to decide whether or not you’re good or whether she’s good or he’s good or who’s the best. You get to decide whether or not you think art has value, and then you just put yourself at it….You gotta think like a player who wants the ball….If you worry too much about not catching it or not doing a good job, then you don’t want the ball. It’s too much fear in the room. It’s okay if you drop the ball. It’s worth it that people play, right? And so if you get yourself in that mindset, then, you know, there’s nothing to really worry about.
Ethan Hawke
in an interview I’m too lazy to look for and transcribe like I did with Ethan Hawke, Quentin Tarantino reflects on how it was both an edge and a hinderance that he managed to find himself a comfortable situation close enough to filmmaking by working at a video store for five years. it was easy for him to feel like he was working hard at something because no one around him was working on anything similar at all. “a big fish in a puddle,” is how he put it. it wasn’t until he pushed himself to leave the video store and surround himself with filmmakers who were working at a much higher level than he was that he found the motivation to push himself to the next level, rather than continue to stagnate from a vantage point that allowed him to feel superior only because he didn’t have competition.
his account reminded me of my own situation. working in a library. most of the people I interact with aren’t engaged in very serious artistic endeavors. many of those people tell me I’m a good writer. no one ever gives me criticism that would help me improve. I’m fond of saying that my biggest fear isn’t that I’ll be told I’m a bad artist, but that my mediocrity will be enabled. and nothing in my life spurs me to take the steps necessary to really, seriously, figure out how to be a better artist. Tarantino compares it to running: you might be able to beat all your friends in a race if they only run for fun. but if you start training with serious athletes, yeah you might not beat anyone, but your time will improve.
what Tarantino said rhymes with something noted runner Don DeLillo said:
”Somebody quoted Norman Mailer as saying that he wasn’t a better writer because his contemporaries weren’t better. I don’t know whether he really said that or not, but the point I want to make is that no one in Pynchon’s generation can make that statement. If we’re not as good as we should be it’s not because there isn’t a standard. And I think Pynchon, more than any other writer, has set the standard. He’s raised the stakes.”
of course, this all sounds like a readymade excuse for floundering, for failing to live up to my own potential. I don’t want to make an excuse for my own laziness, because that’s what it is: laziness, vanity, and fear. a lethal brew for any artist to drink. see the last piece of this montage for that particular problem. but I think it’s worth noting nonetheless.
should I make anything of the fact that lately my posts here have been primarily about movies? that the advice I shared above, the ideas I drew about the artistic process, come from the world of cinema? when I was a teenager, I didn’t have a burning desire to write. but what I did dream of doing was directing films. I’m a talented photographer, though I haven’t done much of that recently. when I have free time, I almost always want to watch a movie. a frequent self-criticism I have of my writing is that narratively it’s too much like TV: scene setting, character introduction, dialogue. I put it down her book because the content became too unbearable to slog through, but on the level of form, Honor Levy can construct a much more interesting story than I usually do. which can mean one of two things: work harder, try different things, develop skills I feel myself lacking. or else switch media to something more in tune with my natural creative proclivities.
my stepsisters Kristen and Kylie moved into town from Santa Monica, along with Kristen’s boyfriend, Boone. I stopped in at their house two weeks after they first got the keys to the place. the furniture isn’t yet convinced of how it has been arranged. Boone had unpacked even less than the girls had, with many of his eclectically filled boxes still strewn about the various spaces. as if I didn’t already like Boone, he won more cred from me for already having unpacked exactly what I would have unpacked first: his books. I was further impressed with what I found on his shelves: Chris Hedges, David Harvey, Cormac McCarthy.
as I looked over the shelves, he grew excited, looking for books to ask me about. he said, “oh! I got one,” and he handed me a copy of Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi. “great book, it’s not difficult or anything but you should read it.”
it’s not often nowadays that I get an unsolicited book recommendation for something I’d never heard of from someone whose taste I respect, so I took this to heart and started reading Eboli pretty much immediately, since I was struggling to land on a narrative book after bouncing around between several different titles.
Christ Stopped at Eboli deserves more thorough attention than I’m going to give it here, but I do recommend reading it. it details the time spent by the painter Carlo Levi in the south of Italy, in Lucania, modern day Basilicata, where he was sent as a political prisoner for his anti-fascist activism in the 1930s. germane to my interests now, though, is the care and attention Levi devotes to his rendering of the deep poverty suffered by the peasants of Southern Italy, and his sympathetic, yet unsentimental, portrayal of their lives, customs and struggles. that Levi is a painter is surprising only insofar as the fact that not all painters are as skilled as writers as he is. the precision of his descriptions, the acuity of his observation, all speak to a perspective finely tuned by practice in noting details with an economy of gesture, as a painter would.
an artist must be as alert as a watchdog, as focused as a sniper, as decisive as a guillotine, and as compassionate as a bodhisattva. it would do me well to make studies, much like a painter would, of the details that encode an entire cosmos of meaning, the building blocks from which fiction is made. it’s in honing this skill that a writer can be, as Henry James urges, “one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”
tonight, crickets sing at an early summer tempo. the days are stretched as tight as a drumhead. in the morning I will be doing 108 surya namaskar, sun salutations, in honor of the the new season. if spring is the season of sowing, summer is the season of work, of tending to, of practice. and I need to get to work.
a coworker of mine fielded questions from a library patron about how to get his book into libraries. in his mind, there was some mechanism for him to send out copies through a network that connects libraries all over the country; how does he get plugged in so that readers across America might stumble upon his book? an understandable question coming from someone who cares about what they’re writing enough to want people to read it. sadly, though, there’s no such mechanism, especially if you’re self-publishing. each library purchases materials according to their unique needs, so what books end up on shelves comes down to what each librarian making collection development decisions selects. the nearest you can get to a network that ensures your book ends up on shelves nationally is to have your book published by one of the major publishing houses, and have your publisher pay Publisher’s Weekly to review the book, so that it’s given slightly more visibility to librarians forced to select newly published material on the most cursory of impressions. a sort of formalized payola system, really.
this state of affairs is enough to discourage anyone seeking adulation through literary publishing. which is why desire for fame should lead you to almost any other pursuit besides literature. or, to put it another way, you have to really love the act of writing itself to write at all, because it is lonely, difficult, and masochistic.
whether or not I love writing enough to pursue it as vocation is a question that hounds me constantly. I’m always thinking of how many entries in Kafka’s diaries lament how he “wrote nothing” on a given day. it’s cold comfort, considering how miserable Kafka was, how little success he achieved during his lifetime. it’s also an evasion on my part, because even if he often felt he was failing to produce enough work, he also often stayed up late into the night working to the point of exhaustion and, as a result, failing to meet his workaday obligations, something I’ve become too careful to ever risk, it seems.
I’m trying to avoid these kinds of posts where I talk up some big gameplan for finally overcoming my sloth, or where I otherwise kvetch about how I’m not writing enough. what the gameplan is I won’t say, but I’ve made a proposition to myself, and if I fail to hold up my end of the bargain, it means I should quit this delusion; piss or get off the pot.
the man who wanted to see his book on library shelves across america, he isn’t even done writing it. he’s 100 pages into it. so I could cynically dismiss him for his naivete, and tell myself that he’s just some retiree with a hobby, unlike me, a Real Artist. but 100 pages of a novel is a lot more than what I have right now, so who’s really the Real Artist?
Only a few members of secret societies know something close to ‘Son of Him who had the ‘Illuminati’) exists, but this is where human sacrifice of the Dragon Order strictly compartmentalised with the very program runs through the DNA of families. These pyramid structures are founded children. This is why human sacrifice and level dictates to the one below and those the bloodlines have located and it still goes below who are aware of their true in a later chapter. When you think that one they worship as their true god, the present Elizabeth II, was descended Bailey (1888-1977) was a Freemason, it puts into even more perspective Theosophical Society, and co-founder of the world as both have expanded their works of his wife, the occultist Alice Bailey. ancient Sanskrit work from what is now have since become mixed in many parts of scriptures, says that a people called the territory and influence. The Mahabharata, left India and settled in Mesopotamia, India and Asia and one of the major Hindu the oldest of Sanskrit accounts, tells of a Mayas (the Nagas under another Name) also Dragons, that came from the skies to bring Egypt and Greece. The Book of Dyzan, one of great deluge that ended the Golden Age, and reptilian race that it calls the Sarpa, or Great rule human society under their leader, the civilisation to the world. It also refers to a global and found its way into Celtic how the serpent gods returned afterwards to ‘Great Dragon.’ Worship of the serpent gods survived the break up and sinking of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean mostly went East to what is now Europe and the Middle East. The Muan and Atlantean bloodlines (or controlled) agents and gofers.
Jackson has not stopped lying, manipulating that this upper pyramid (often referred to a rich ever since. He called for the Orwellian real power lies and those degrees are also Administration to be unleashed with highest levels occupied only by Archon families with a big increase in gun crime and murder fear and super-secrecy at all levels. Each control laws in America. The two are not the top of the bloodline pyramid, and all to those opposing gun seizure laws to bring masters, are terrified of the Archons and as domestic terrorists who should be disarmed Demiurge, or the Devil/Satan/Lucifer. list of the Archontic Homeland Security and National Secretary of Madame Blavatsky’s while claiming to do the opposite. This is the Lucis [Lucifer] Trust which promoted the families who invaded that land to operate as a hive mind, much like a bee or ant be in many ways a diversion of communications (their own form of Matrix) global attention from where the looks around and says ‘what the fuck real power lies. America is clearly sheep were standing around at a cocktail the centre of global power, as coming through the door. ‘Thank everyone knows that, right? what to do.’ Have I not just described Britain? Oh, no that’s just a faded of humanity behaves and how people empire. Rome? Oh, no, that’s the past its religions, to tell them what to do and same. Well, actually they are not years is how information has been put faded empires at all. They are key
the pyramids do not. This same structure masters dictating a common policy applies to governments, universities, constant centralisation and advancement schools, corporations, media, banks – of human control through all the various everything. These various institutions and pyramids. It doesn’t matter to sections of society are themselves them when banks, governments etc., come ultimately grouped together in bigger and go, because they own the game. If you pyramids in a structure that can be own the Olympic Games it doesn’t matter likened to Russian dolls with pyramids who wins or loses the 100 metres final or inside bigger pyramids and eventually all the long jump, because you own the Queen and the British royal family centres of power and manipulation. Prince Charles of a hidden global empire. Why while on a trip to his property in does a ‘faded empire’ like Britain line connection gave him a ‘stake’ in have a permanent place on the Bush family is also related to Vlad United Nations Security Council to who have read some of my other books decide who is bombed and who kings of ancient Media in what is now isn’t? Because it has been a centre of Archon bloodline power for centuries. When I speak of
some narrative techniques Kafka employs in The Trial that conjure an atmosphere of dreamy surrealism:
interjection of concrete details of unclear significance
sudden clarification of previously hazy details
the three young men who are lurking around Frau Grubach’s apartment turn out to be functionaries at the same bank K. works at, and K. is puzzled as to how he didn’t recognize them at first.
absurd behavior treated as perfectly normal
K. doesn’t want anyone to know he’s been summoned for an interrogation, so he instead knocks on every door in the building to ask if someone named Lanz is there, just for a chance to see into the room and determine if it’s where he’s supposed to be–because knocking on every door in the building isn’t going to make everyone think he’s a weirdo, somehow.
what makes this even weirder is that when K. does get to where the interrogation is, he asks the woman who opens the door if Lanz is there, and she’s like “right this way to your interrogation,” as though “Lanz” were a password she was waiting for.
also, K. is asked almost no questions during this “interrogation.” he provides a long defense of himself, and a repudiation of the court, that no one prompted.
to ensure that the court knows he won’t submit to being interrogated further, K. goes out of his way on a Sunday to return to the building, rather than just, you know, never going back again.
inappropriate or comic reactions
characters almost immediately contradicting themselves
on Sunday, lightly hungover from a wedding at which I was, thank God, only a secondary guest, Julia and I watched two movies in one day, something I always want to do but rarely get the chance to. the first movie is one I’ve seen countless times; the second I knew by reputation but had never seen. both are “hangout movies,” ensemble productions with little in the way of plot and heavy on dialogue; both deal, in divergent ways, with nostalgia; both are about everyone’s favorite generation, baby boomers. and both made me think a lot about youth, idealism vs. cynicism, and the urgency I feel to find something to be committed to, now, so that I don’t regret my choices later.
Dazed and Confused (dir. Linklater, 1993)
there are a handful of cultural works that so shaped what I expected life to be like that had I not encountered them, I would be an entirely different person. for better or worse, Dazed and Confused is one of those. I remember watching this movie in college (not for the first time) and someone saying “that’s Cody” when Slater shows up on screen asking if he can buy weed from Pickford after school. I still quote about a dozen of lines from it all time. so I’m going to try my hardest to do a detached critical assessment of the movie’s engagement with its themes, but it is entirely possible that my appraisal is a post-hoc justification for how dearly I love this movie.
the vast majority of people who love Dazed and Confused think it would be awesome to spend the summer in Austin with these kids. I felt the same way, many years ago as an aimless white suburbanite. this is I think the opposite of what Linklater was shooting for. Dazed and Confused so effectively depicts what nostalgia does to your memory of the “best days of your life” that it’s pretty easy to miss how boring and shitty it must feel to be one of these suburban teenagers. the negative reviews on Letterboxd actually clock what makes this movie more than just a teen stoner flick better than the ones that gush over how immaculate the vibes are. yes, the hazing rituals are brutal and nasty; yes, plenty of the characters are meanspirited and unlikeable. but where the negative reviews go wrong is in thinking that the movie is somehow glorifying youthful boomer stupidity. what it is doing is being honest about how when you look back at those aimless days of youth, when the biggest conflict was wondering whether or not there’s going to be a party that night, even all the shittiness gets cast in a hazy, affectionate glow.
as inconsequential as it may actually be, there’s real gravitas to Pink’s struggle over whether or not to sign the anti-drug pledge his football coaches are demanding. it’s silly and pretentious, but not inaccurate, when Mike calls the whole thing an example of “neo-McCarthyism.” Wooderson is no doubt the most pathetic character, a 20-year-old still hanging around his high school haunts, but he’s also right when he says, echoing the more famous line about high school girls staying the same age, that “The older you do get, the more rules they’re gonna try to get you to follow.” as I get older, day by day even, a vice tightens around my once boundless sense of wonder and possibility—not because I think those possibilities disappear, even though they do, as a necessary result of making series of choices. but the feeling is because so many of those choices seem to be made for you in advance, and if you aren’t constantly and vigilantly defending your freedom, one day you look around and realize how much of it you’ve lost.
which is to say, boy do I feel it of absolutely critical importance that I “keep livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N.”
The Big Chill (dir. Kasdan, 1983)
now, with The Big Chill, I sympathize a little more with the negative reviews on Letterboxd. not quite with the one I saw that says this movie is “as evil and anodyne as the white supremacy it depicts.” that seems a little excessive to me. nonetheless, The Big Chill could accurately be responded to with the classic online rejoinder: OK, Boomer.
as a bit of a gambit here, I want to publicly declare that I think the hate for boomers is overblown, misguided, and, frankly, often seems like projection on the part of millennials. no question that many many many many many many of the problems we face now are a result of boomer complacency, selfishness, cruelty, and narcissism. the ideals of the sixties were coopted and betrayed by the very boomers who espoused them—this is the cultural context of The Big Chill. but, boomers also at least had those ideals, and many even fought and died for them. to me, the major advantage (early) boomers have over we millennials is that at least they can look back at those days of youthful passion and conviction with wistfulness, while most millennials jumped straight to being cynical yuppie sellouts without the detour through radical playacting.
this is what watching this movie made me think about. I don’t want to excuse or minimize the shortcomings of the 60s counterculture and the backlash it inspired, which culminated in the Reagan Revolution and, later, the introduction of the noxious Clintons into the national political consciousness. but I am envious that those who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s had the opportunity to genuinely feel that the times were a-changing, compromised as that prospect may have ultimately been. (I really could go on and on about this subject, throwing barbs at those online parapolitics leftists who argue that the 60s were actually an op orchestrated by the CIA or whatever, but we’ll never get anywhere if I follow that thread).
I don’t actually have that much to say about The Big Chill because while it is an enjoyable movie, I don’t think it really grapples with the questions it raises. but during dinner at the wedding I attended, I was seated next to a friend of mine from high school who I haven’t seen in about 15 years—the same span of time that precedes the reunion depicted in The Big Chill. my old friend and I were cordial, almost painfully so, and the interactions made me think about a distinction Nick makes during an argument between the cinematic friends: Sam says that he and Nick “go way back,” and Nick retorts “Wrong, a long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time.”
how is it that someone you shared so many formative experiences with can one day be functionally a stranger? is that the real significance of entropy, that as time marches inexorably forward, a subtle force insinuates itself between bonds too weak to maintain cohesion, until by chance one day those constituent parts reencounter each other only to find themselves utterly incapable of activating whatever mechanism brought them together in the first place?
anyway, one “advantage” we millennials have over boomers is that as we get older, we are not finding a world abounding with opportunities for a comfortable life. as material conditions continue to deteriorate, we may not have the luxury of selling out our ideals. thank God.
last night I finished rewatching Twin Peaks: The Return. I’d like to say that means I can move on with my life, but my desire to write something about it requires that I rewatch it. that won’t happen for at least a few weeks, because I do want to move on with my own creative work, and watching Twin Peaks at night was taking up the time I want to use for writing. also I’ll be purchasing the television collection on Blu-Ray so that I don’t have to depend on the Paramount+ subscription I’m leeching off to watch, and I won’t, ahem, return to Twin Peaks until then.
I’ll have more to say about Twin Peaks later, probably in a newsletter. in the meantime, one sequence of scenes, in Part 13 (“Whose Story is That, Charlie?”), has rattled around in my head for the past week or so. they’re scenes that are easy to overlook, because they’re all centered around secondary characters, inhabitants of Twin Peaks, their lives having taken them in directions all too logical, but nonetheless surprising, twenty-five years after the events of the original series.
(I’m not usually one to care much about “spoilers,” but Twin Peaks unfolds such a wondrous mystery that I would feel guilty if I were to ruin someone’s experience of watching it without any preconceived notions. so, even though the following reveals little in terms of the saga’s “primary” story, be forewarned that ahead lie descriptions of plot points.)
first, we see Norma meet with a man named Walter, who is her business partner in an expanded Double R franchise chain. she’s apparently romantically involved with Walter as well; she brushes off Ed, despite their obvious yet still furtive love for one another, to meet with him. Norma and Walter’s discussion reveals that there are now five Double R locations, and three of them are performing extremely well. but one of the locations that isn’t turning a profit is Norma’s, the original diner. we learn that this is partly a result of Norma’s insistence on doing things her way, with all natural, local, organic ingredients, making her famous pies too expensive to earn profits. she is resolute in this decision, to Walter’s consternation. additionally, she refuses to heed Walter’s advice about changing the name to “Norma’s Double R,” which he says performs better according to whatever market research he’s done. Norma is unconvinced, preferring the classic name, betraying a sincere humility. the two fail to compromise, and Walter changes the subject to confirm that they’ll be having dinner that evening. Norma smiles and agrees. (for the sake of rounding out this scene’s significance, it’s worth noting that a few episodes later, Norma sells her shares in the other locations to Walter, effectively ending their business partnership, and, as the ensuing scene suggests, their romantic involvement.)
next, we see Dr. Jacoby. in the world that The Return depicts, Jacoby broadcasts a radio/YouTube program under the pseudonym Dr. Amp, whom I’ve seen described as a “low level Alex Jones,” a raving paranoid who asks every day at “seven o’clock!—do you know where your freedom is?” before decrying that “THE FUCKS ARE AT IT AGAIN!” schoolmarmy lib types find it easy to write off this version of Jacoby as a “conspiracy theorist,” a characterization that in some ways stems from the same school of interpretation of The Return I’m implicitly making here, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, I quite like Dr. Amp’s rants, even if he is something of a reactionary grifter. the content of Amp’s broadcasts aside, one of his biggest fans is Ed’s wife Nadine. in this scene, at night, Jacoby walks by Nadine’s store, where she sells her trademark silent drape runners. hanging in the window, behind the silently opening and closing drapes, is a shovel painted gold—a product Jacoby sells as part of his call for people to “shovel your way out of the shit!” delighted to see his own merchandise in the wild, he knocks on the door, and his enthusiasm is eclipsed by Nadine’s own at seeing her virtual guru in the flesh. their interaction is strange, given that they know each other IRL but haven’t seen each other in years, with Nadine expressing ardent appreciation for what Jacoby’s broadcasts have meant to her. Jacoby is genuinely touched by the outpouring of praise, as any artist who encounters someone that seems to really internalize their art might. but then the scene lingers a few beats longer, with some mild discomfort arising from the collision between Nadine’s fanaticism and Jacoby’s creative efforts, suggesting that the good doctor doesn’t know what to do with the kind of appreciation he hopes to inspire.
the final scene in this triptych shows us Sarah Palmer. this is the second time we watch Sarah sitting in her home, drinking lazily mixed Bloody Maries, smoking cigarettes, and watching television. on the television is an old boxing match, black and white. as the scene drags on, it turns out that what’s playing is actually only a 30 second clip of a boxing match, looped over and over and over. how it’s looped isn’t explained, nor is why Sarah would be watching a boxing match at all, let alone such a particular section of a boxing match, endlessly. she pours the last of her vodka into a glass and splashes in some Bloody Mary mix, drinks it, and within a few moments is trying to pour another, but grows frustrated at the emptiness of the liquor bottle. the announcer continues repeating the same commentary. these scenes of Sarah in the Palmer living room are among the most disconcerting of the series. in the previous one, she’s watching a nature documentary of panthers mauling a gazelle, but otherwise she’s doing the exact same thing as always: drinking and smoking cigarettes.
if we understand Twin Peaks to be, in one aspect, about television, about the audience’s relationship to what’s broadcast into our homes; if we understand, as I like to, great art to always in some way be commenting on its own creation, and on the nature of the artistic process generally; with these interpretative lenses, this particular sequence of scenes very clearly expresses the complicated ambivalence of Mark Frost & David Lynch towards their creation. no doubt they have abundant love for Twin Peaks, or else they would not have signed on to produce 18 more hours of it. but the disturbing pathos of Sarah Palmer, obviously trapped by the trauma visited upon her decades ago, hints at the danger awaiting those who, unable to move on with their lives, insist on revisiting, on a loop, while sitting on their couch, story lines long since past. but even if Sarah is one of The Return‘s most frightening characters, the audience can’t help but pity her. contrast this pity with what we feel for scuzzbag Walter, who privileges financial concerns and pandering to the audience in his dealings with our beloved Double R. Norma’s insistence on doing things the way she wants to seems a not-so-subtle dig at the network pressures that interfered with Frost & Lynch’s vision for the show’s original run—which famously led to an early revelation of the show’s central mystery, precipitating an aimless and confused stretch of episodes through the show’s second season.
sandwiched between is Jacoby’s interaction with Nadine, who by all accounts is the “perfect” audience member who takes to heart Jacoby’s call for self-reliance and spiritual growth. Jacoby relishes the validation, but then doesn’t know what to do when faced with Nadine’s fanatical smile. and what artist ever does?
I promise I won’t post about Twin Peaks for at least a few weeks.
