Madeline Pritchard

2023 in media (3/3) — listening, etc.

2024-01-15T00:00:00Z

Music

Almost zero new releases for me this year, so instead here’s a top 10 of albums I listened to for the first time (or the first time in many years) and then over and over:

Automatic for the People, R.E.M.
Townes Van Zandt, Townes Van Zandt
Cymande, Cymande
Dummy, Portishead
Midnight Marauders, A Tribe Called Quest
Violator, Depeche Mode
Halfaxa, Grimes^[1]
John Prine, John Prine
Visions, Grimes
Our Mother the Mountain, Townes Van Zandt

Podcasts

Blank Check with Griffin and David, Trillbilly Worker's Party, Trashfuture, Taskmaster: The Podcast, Tech Won't Save Us, Who? Weekly, Tides of History, This Had Oscar Buzz.

Art

Bieke Depoorter's Michael — see Erin Brockovich entry here.

These three in particular from the lovely but quite weirdly presented exhibition of Paul McCartney’s photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. With love, the few by Linda that made it into the gallery showed him up a bit, because she really has the eye, however you articulate what that means, but there's something very moving about witnessing that period from a lens at the inside, and particularly how often he was looking outward — at the boys, yes, but also the fans, the police, the cars. For a while, if you headed from Charing Cross to Leicester Square through the St Martin-in-the-Fields path, you could catch that perfect image of George framed in one of the gallery windows, like a shining vision from the past.

Games

I played lots of other things as well (Banished, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor/War (Mordor is better), The Sims 4, Watch_Dogs 2, Detroit: Become Human, Animal Crossing: Wild World, etc), but the only game I want to talk about is Red Dead Redemption 2.

When I was applying for university — almost a decade ago, now — I went for an open day at Edinburgh, and one of the things the computer science department was particularly proud of was the number of their graduates who went on to work for Rockstar North. When the head of department was telling us this, he also said that every former student who'd gone to work there had essentially dropped off the map — excruciatingly long hours and a culture of secrecy will do that — and he made it sound like they'd all gone to war, or to Dracula's castle, or MI5. I think at the time this sounded attractive to me, part of a misguided longing for prestige that has ebbed with age, but now it sounds horrifying, even though they've made more perfect games than any other AAA studio.

I played RDR2 all the way through (77 hours’ worth) while I had a cold (I always have a cold), which made it an odd 4DX experience — every time Arthur coughed from his TB I coughed from my cold. “Immersion” is an incredibly overused word in relation to games given how rarely it actually happens, but it happens here, and the rewards this game gives you for your attention and your time feel so careful and so considered — a kind of respect for the audience we should expect from all of our artists. Maybe I'll play through it again during my next cold.

I also want to shout out my Nintendo DS, already the best thing I bought this year but made even better because it helped me to bond with my cousin’s brilliant kids. Growing up I was always the youngest — by decades in my UK family and by years amongst my cousins — so I spent very little time with younger children in my teenage years/early adulthood, and I sort of worried I wouldn't know how to talk to them, but there was something deeply reassuring about how easy it was to find a rapport, a melding of the minds between generations of Pritchard nerds, uniting under one shared feeling: Nintendogs.

Work

Slightly weak year, tbh! The CMBYN piece is a stealth Maurice piece and is pretty good, I think. I also wrote 20+ capsule reviews for the mags, some of which were decent.

The best “”work”” I did this year was volunteering at my local library, something I would recommend to anyone who has a tendency towards nihilism.^[2] Over summer one kid had read an abridged edition of Macbeth and when I asked him about it he described the entire plot of the play to me in flawless detail. Just makes you feel a bit better about the state of the world!

Stationery

Just because this is something I got really into this year, and it would feel ridiculous talking about it anywhere else. I’ve played around a bit and done loads and loads of research (i.e. watching hours of journalling videos on YouTube) and this is what I’ve landed with — it works perfectly for me and it’s helping me to stay off my phone a bit more. For this year, I’m keeping the Stalogy and the Atomas but also throwing in a Take a Note A6 for scheduling and task tracking.

Notebooks:

Atoma A6, Texon Cover: Screening notes, general notes, lists, thinking by writing. Easily my most-used item this year, I love that you can remove pages when you don’t need them anymore, switch pages around, etc.
Atoma A5, Texon Cover: Course notes. Thought I would write longer-form stuff in here but haven’t really reached for it for that purpose — works great for lecture notes, though. And, again, the great thing about Atoma is that if I do find myself reaching for it for something specific next year I can just move pages around to make it work.

Journals/Planners:

Stalogy 365Days Notebook, A6; Midori Clear Cover: Media log and journal. Pages are undated, which means I can write as much or as little as I like. I use a librarian’s stamp to mark the dates. I also use the very faint numbers marked on the left-hand side to log my time — blocking out work hours, time on trains, dinners, etc.

Pens:

Pilot Metropolitan, fine nib; Rohrer & Klingner ink, Leipziger Schwarz: Journalling, writing notes at home. Had this for years and I still love it (although I'm lusting after a TWSBI….).
LAMY scribble mechanical pencil: I believe this was given to me as a kid (~11) by a family friend who had one that I'd lusted after — she promised it on the condition that I wrote in my journal, I did, and she delivered. And it's still in use for that today, which kind of rules. Great pencil too.
Pilot G-Tec-C4, black & red: Anything I don’t want to use a fountain pen for, anything I want to mark out in a different colour.
Uni-ball Signo 207: Screening notes. Can’t use a fountain pen in the dark and it’s nice to have something slightly thicker than the Pilot G-Tec so I know it won’t be too scratchy to read later.

Misc:

Midori Index Labels: Perfect for an undated journal.
Muji Bookmark Sticker Set: Stuck on the inside of the back cover of my notebooks & journal, stops me having to flip through the whole thing to find the next blank page.

In/Out

I know people are sick of these but I love them!

IN

handwriting, cheap thrills, eroticism, dream analysis, literacy, hacking, textures, house parties, piracy, permacomputing, negging, strangers, the alternative press, youthful vigor, irony, action

OUT

puritanism, perfectionism, moderation, stools, small plates, remote work tourism, posting, personal brands, the cloud, unearned cynicism, "young adult", streaming, mindfulness, SEO, pivot to video, western civilisation

If you read all of these posts, thank you, and belated Happy New Year <3

My media resolutions for 2024 mostly revolve around leaving the house more — listening to more new music in order to attend more gigs (send recs!), going to more plays (vs zero times in 2023), going to more gallery exhibitions, going to more rep screenings, and reading more books.

No big personal resolutions really — just want to use my phone less, negotiate myself a raise, and to try to have more fun. And, as always, to keep hoping machine running.

NB most of these were “”procured”” a while ago and listened to on my iPod, so I am categorically not funding or approving of anything these artists (Grimes) have said or done since!! ↩︎
Doesn't have to be a library, obviously, although it's a lovely chill environment. Anything that aligns with your interests and involves other people is worth doing for your brain and your soul. ↩︎

2023 in media (2/3) — watching

2024-01-08T00:00:00Z

This is the hefty one of the three, of course!

My only real movie plan for this year is to make a concerted effort to get myself out of the house for exciting rep screenings and to see far fewer new releases — certainly as a percentage, but preferably numerically too. (I will practice saying no to press screenings for movies that look bad, even if there might be celebrities there.) I'm also considering more Ferrara, more Tony Scott, more westerns, my last few big Hitchcocks, and possibly (finally!) completing Scorsese. Maybe another spin of The Wire, too…

Film

New releases

See here for my full ranked list.

How Do You Live? (The Boy and the Heron)

Set me off thinking about what it was that grabbed me so much about Alice in Wonderland when i was a child — all the usual thrills of the language and the inventiveness, I'm sure, but I think something else as well, the almost nihilistic melancholy of it, Alice reframing the odd, often mean adults in her life as fantastical creatures in an imaginary landscape. How Do You Live has a similar frame, a boy grappling with the ways adults (and fate) foster change on you in childhood, escaping into a fantasy world in order to process what has happened to his family and to him. His grief is so great and so impossible to articulate that he can't even accept kindness — all he can do is inflict damage, lashing out wildly, injuring himself and the people trying to help him. But — eventually — he comes to something more peaceful, an acceptance devoid of denial, an ability to make a choice, not the easy one but the hard one, and to return to his world and himself with something approaching understanding.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Cinema’s great chronicler of American masculinity turns his lens towards his most despicable and most American figure yet — a man so totally convinced of his own righteousness and the righteousness of his friends that even the genuine love he feels for his wife is not enough to save her. We understand Ernest completely — he's stupid, he's feckless, he's under his uncle’s spell — but that understanding does not lead to forgiveness, only to more depths for our horror. It's the best Leo has ever been and he's still acted completely off the screen (consciously and purposefully, I think) by the stunning Lily Gladstone.

Poor Things

Had me googling ‘symptoms of autism in women and girls’. Sorry to the haters but this is the first “coming-of-age” film I have ever seen that actually represents how it felt to me — a child in a woman’s body, enslaved to desires that outstrip your ability to respond to the consequences of acting on them, exploited and exploiting, creating selves over and over until you eventually land with who you always were, just more now, more for all the mistakes and all the people and all the wonder.^[1]

Asteroid City

The first and so far only actually elegant cinematic take on the trauma we’ve all faced so far this decade. Wes lets the audience know what he’s trying to say here with such an open and earnest heart it makes me feel insane to hear people say it’s stilted or pretentious or alienating (ha). We can’t get past the crippling despair of watching our planet die unless we decide to go on regardless — go on talking, go on discovering, go on making — pressing forward with hope and belief that it’ll come out in the end. “It's all worthwhile, in your lifetime.” / “If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life, you chose the wrong time to get born.”

May December

Much has been said about Charles Melton in this, and all the praise is true — he's perfect, wearing his big adult body like he's a little kid in his dad’s old t-shirt — but I want to talk about Natalie. She's one of our most cynical actresses, always five steps ahead of everyone and amused by it too, holding a little arch in her brow to let us know she’s so much smarter than us, and she’s phenomenally deployed here, oozing tiny drops of acid onto everything around her. The other day Instagram served me a clip of her at the F1 in about 2012 giving Michael Fassbender the most incredible Look and I'm not sure I've ever loved a woman more.

Fallen Leaves

Every Kaurismäki film I've seen (admittedly only two) has reminded me almost unbearably of Paul Schrader, which I think actually means that they both remind me of Bresson and Ozu. They both reach for an almost unbearable and yet completely ordinary kind of loneliness, one populated by repetitive work, alcohol, news-induced despair, and tiny moments of escapist aberrant behaviour. And I think both, with age, have landed on that gorgeous line Schrader said a few times this year, “I used to be an artist who never wanted to leave this world without saying fuck you, and now I’m an artist who never wants to leave this world without saying I love you.”

Oppenheimer

Certainly Nolan’s most artistically accomplished work, but the politics here are almost painful — every gesture towards the horror this man wrought is almost abortive, half-rendered and then immediately brushed off. And hey, that’s probably at least partly on purpose! It has a myopic focus on Oppenheimer himself that’s so effective in places, especially as an attempt to engage with the madness he always seems to be at the edge of, but if we do accept such close framing then the entire section with Downey Jr is a mistake — it breaks us out of that view and alienates us from Oppenheimer at exactly the moment our empathy should be at a crescendo.

This piece about The Day After Trinity and this profile of Oppenheimer are both very worthwhile supplementary material. And someday soon I'll sit down and properly engage with John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

Made me feel how I felt seeing The Last Jedi for the first time, i.e. delighted, tickled, desperate for more. For the first hour or so they shoot Esai Morales like he’s either a ghost or the actual physical form of the Entity and it is just the most thrilling thing — something Gibson-esque about it, AI riding humans through the flesh world, technology closer to magic than science. McQuarrie is in total control of the filmmaking here, often willing to let language fall by the wayside so image and music can take hold — other than, of course, when Shea Whigham delivers the necessary line comparing Ethan Hunt to a god.

Ferrari

The really great thing about seeing this was getting to bring my friend and her dad — I rarely invite anyone to screenings other than my long-suffering film-industry-employed flatmate, so it's easy to forget what a cool thing that part of my job is. There are some phenomenal scenes here — generally either involving brutal car crashes or Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz's brutal arguments — and the same understanding of how history must feel for the men making it as Mann wields so wonderfully in Public Enemies^[2]. This and Spielberg’s gorgeous The Fabelmans both feature perfect moments in which an engineer explains the poetry of some machine to his son, acting as their directors’ proxy to explain the poetry of cinema to the audience. I can't wait to see this again and watch it grow in my estimation on every rewatch over the next decade.

The Killer

Fincher was my most-watched director this year, in large part because I was following along with the Blank Check miniseries on him, and I can't recommend highly enough going back through the filmography of the first director you ever latched onto as an auteur figure. I've become sort of obsessed with how modern he is, not just at the beginning of his career when he was a young man in a young man’s climate but still now, even though the world has changed so much in those three decades. For the past few years I've lived culturally almost entirely in the middle of the last century — certainly an act of avoidance that comes from feeling “part of history” for most of my conscious life — and while I think that making an attempt to engage with and understand the past is (overall) good, there's perhaps even more to be gained from taking a clear-eyed, generous, fair view of what the world is like now, at this exact moment, to present contemporary life without pathologising or preaching, to know that people are perverts and to love them anyway, which is what Fincher has done for his entire career, more than perhaps any other director alive.^[3]

Hit Man

This doesn't even have a release date yet but trust me, when it finally does come out no one will talk about Anyone But You ever again. Glen Powell wears about fifty different wigs in this and at one point he puts on a cunty black bob and starts talking in a Russian accent and it is — unfortunately — the most attracted to him I've ever been (possibly because he looks a bit like Mark Strong in Stardust). Anyway — great movie, so sexy, so much fun, Powell and Linklater are such a lovely match for each other.

Beau is Afraid / Napoleon

Joaquin's year of mummy issues!

I'm here to stand up as the world’s lone female Beau is Afraid defender (I'm sure that's not true). The first act of this insane stupid movie is near-perfect, a good director perfecting the kind of urban terror that was done so poorly with the same lead actor in Joker a few years ago. If you don't jump completely on board with this very early on you're likely to have a horrible time, and it lost me in places too — giant cock and balls, anyone? — but the animated sequence is one of the most moving things I saw all year, and as a child of a difficult mother, well, let's just say I understand why he's like that.

I don't think Napoleon is particularly successful overall — certainly not in comparison to Ridley's last masterpiece, The Last Duel — but the sequence at Austerlitz makes it all worthwhile, and it's fun to imagine the big man turning in his grave as the new defining version of the story of his life is sent into the world by an Englishman who finds him fundamentally ridiculous. One for the dads, and on all levels except physical I am a dad.

Also good

Saint Omer, Godland, The Eight Mountains, Eileen, Air, The Eternal Daughter, Evil Does Not Exist, Monster, Magic Mike's Last Dance, In Restless Dreams.

Still to see

Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Rotting in the Sun, A Thousand and One, Perfect Days, Rye Lane, Passages, You Hurt My Feelings, The Iron Claw, The Zone of Interest, All of Us Strangers, American Fiction, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Afire, Pacifiction.

2022 catch-up

The Fabelmans

Not going to be able to do better than my Letterboxd review of this, so here it is…

When Spielberg's grandmother dies, he watches the pulse in her neck stop; his father, removed, watches the beeps stop on the heart monitor; his mother, too close, sees her eyes open and thinks she's woken up. He sits there, at the midpoint between his parents, between art and science, in that little spot where cinema is found.

Corsage

Almost gone from my mind now except for a few images — Colin Morgan on his knees, cream dolloped into coffee, Vicky Krieps’ cold laugh, the cinematographer, the jump from the ship. I love this review from one of my brilliant Letterboxd mutuals.

Old releases

Ran out of time/energy/will to write about these so, with apologies, here’s a little best-of list. A Matter of Life and Death, Party Girl, JFK, Summer of Sam, Exotica, Strange Days, Matinee, Natural Born Killers, Days of Heaven, Local Hero, Public Enemies, Breathless (1983), Morvern Callar, Straw Dogs, Only Angels Have Wings, All About Eve, Bull Durham, The Blackout, Ginger Snaps, Journey to Italy, Ill Met by Moonlight, Stereo, Remember the Night.

And the award for best cinema trip of the year is jointly awarded to the 35mm screening of Master and Commander I went to alone the day after my birthday at the best cinema in the world (Glasgow Film Theatre) and the Spike Lee intro-d screening of Summer of Sam at the second best cinema in the world (the BFI). Runners-up include Nashville at the BFI, Local Hero and Dont Look Back at the Garden Cinema, and the three days in a row I spent at the BFI seeing Miller’s Crossing, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Night of the Hunter.

Television

Semi-chronological; not ranked. The best TV I saw this year was The Wire — see March and April posts.

The Terror, S1

I watched this horrible, gorgeous show twice this year — for the first time in January and again in September for “Septerror”, which is a newly-founded annual holiday in which you watch The Terror in September. It's sort of impossible to describe this show in a way that makes it sound appealing to anyone who isn't obsessed with Jared Harris or Tobias Menzies (I am) or men who risk their lives needlessly in search of glory (I am) or the type of insanity that is experienced by people so chronically disciplined and so full of blinding belief they can no longer understand sense when it's being spoken to them (I am). If the world is just we'll eventually look back on this show as one of the more perfect productions of the era we seem to be calling ‘peak TV’.

Taskmaster, S15 & S16

A perfect show, no one needs me to say that. However, I have been workshopping a theory about Taskmaster boyfriends, i.e. the one guy every season aged between 20 and 40 who could be described as a “kind and thin nerd” and spends the show by turns panicking, yelling, and being gently (sometimes not-so-gently) parented by Greg Davies. This tweet from Ivo Graham is the platonic ideal of Taskmaster boyfriend behaviour: nerdy, self-effacing, very funny, and a little bit competitive. Sam Campbell broke the mold slightly by being both insane and extremely competent, which is why I'm asking for his hand in marriage.

Starstruck

Perfect viewing for someone who moved to London kind of by accident and mostly hates it but sometimes has an interaction with a stranger that makes it all feel better. NOT perfect viewing for someone who went on maybe two promising dates all year. Happy to skip the celebrity boyfriend part of her narrative if I can go straight to the kind & handsome Scotsman, btw!!!!!

The Morning Show

Like a missive from 2013. Poster’s disease: the show. Some of the world’s worst botox faces. However! Billy Crudup plays Cory Ellison like he’s Elinor Dashwood on coke and it’s one of the most glorious things ever.

Slow Horses

Part of a long tradition — of course — of stories about rumpled, incompetent British spies. The BBC One energy is off the charts here, especially in the first season, which is — to me — very comforting. Its overarching plotlines are all idiotic but I love to watch little (6’1”) Jack Lowden desperately and incompetently sprinting around the ugliest parts of London. Probably the most I’ve liked Gary Oldman this century, too.

A Murder at the End of the World

I’m a bit bored by the mystery/true crime elements here, but I like pretty much everything else — the concept of a hacker sleuth, the claustrophobia of the Icelandic scenes vs the wide open American landscapes, Clive Owen and Harris Dickinson as emblematic icons of (British) masculinity from their respective generations. Speaks to how compellingly made this is that at least once an episode I was like ‘no one with a tech background and a remotely left-wing attitude would ever trust (e.g.) a holographic AI presented to them by a billionaire’ or ‘Brit Marling is such a terrible actress’ and yet I still came away from the show as a whole with almost entirely positive feelings. Smash the machines, etc.

The Curse

With respect to the Fielder heads, this is maybe the maximum amount of him I can take, and it’s only because he’s not wielding his schtick against real people here. Makes me feel genuinely queasy every episode but the total precision it has is so wonderful — that Safdies thing of presenting a place top to bottom, in its entirety, no flinching. Emma Stone actress of the year perhaps!!

Unfortunately, none of my mistakes involved Mark Ruffalo and pastéis de natas… ↩︎
I watched Public Enemies this year too and it is phenomenal — a study of fame and infamy and capital, this gang of dead men animated in the wires and on the screen. ↩︎
I realise this may seem like the antithesis of my resolution to see fewer new releases, and I suppose it is, but maybe my point here is that even new releases rarely feel as modern as The Killer does. And I think modernity is also part of what makes 1970s movies in particular so visceral and so sticky, something about the specificity you can grasp when you're working to represent your own time. ↩︎

2023 in media (1/3) — reading

2024-01-05T00:00:00Z

Presented with apologies to my legions of fans who have been eagerly awaiting the return of those monthly posts I did four of.

Usually when I make these annual round-ups I try to be comprehensive, which I think is a mistake — no one wants to read a 200-strong list of everything I watched/read/etc this year^[1] with a pithy comment attached and frankly I don't really want to write that either. So, instead, I’ve made these — partly a best-of, partly just a collection of the things I actually felt an urge to write about. I’ve mostly skipped — for obvious reasons — anything I’ve written more than a sentence about before (i.e. most things from March or April).

Books

I think reading targets are kind of stupid, especially when people end up reading ~200 a year (how do you remember any of them??), but I managed 17 this year for the first time since high school, and — without wanting to sound like one of those people who are really weird about reading — I feel like it was nourishing. Even the bad ones!^[2]

Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo

I didn't enjoy the experience of reading this very much but I have thought about some line or passage from it about once a month ever since. Perhaps because DeLillo knows we’re all doomed, and even though I agree I don’t necessarily love to be confronted by it. He’s so prescient, though — this book was released 20 years ago, 5 years before the financial crash, and it has this totally clear-eyed view of the way the internet interacts with the capitalist death drive and the men that combination produces.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe

Maestro prep, maybe — can’t remember why exactly I picked this up, except that I saw it in a charity shop and I've been sort of tangentially fascinated by the New Journalism movement for about five years. Someday that tangential interest is going to turn into full-fledged obsession, but for now I’m just going to enjoy the parts of the work produced then that are on the lower end of the racism spectrum (Mau-Mauing is more towards the middle of that spectrum, probably). If we still had writers like this — people smart and cynical enough to skewer celebrities for their excesses and contradictions — the world would be quite different.

Dept of Speculation and Weather by Jenny Offill

Offill has this incredible ability to describe the men she (or the main character) loves in these perfect little paragraphs that make you understand everything about them and immediately fall in love with them too. One of our great chroniclers of marriage and parenthood, two things I would not have previously said I had much interest in reading about. “I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.”

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

Fails in comparison to the perfect Mad Men episode it clearly inspired, but if I had written a novel at 18 it would have been the worst book ever produced, so who am I to talk!

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I'd been meaning to read this for at least a decade and then had the worst possible experience you can have when picking up a classic whose title or central concept has become emblematic of something — that the distilled idea turns out to be far more compelling than the work it originally came from. Although, if we’re to believe Mr Orwell, maybe the idea here actually came from Yevgeny Zamyatin. Anyway! I’d love to read something gossipy and outlandish about Huxley’s sexual proclivities and perhaps his feelings about his mother.^[3]

The Gathering by Anne Enright

Anne Enright is one of the world’s finest essayists, and The Genesis of Blame is without a doubt the best thing I read all year. This is the first fiction I've read from her, though, and I was struck particularly — apart from the dawning, sickening horror — with the cinematic (or even stage-y) way she engages with human beings in physical space. Maybe this is an odd comment to make about a novel, but — as a person with a very limited visual imagination — I loved that I always knew where characters’ eyelines were, the size of the room, where the exit was. I have an almost totally spatial memory — I could describe a house I've been to once, but probably not my best friend’s face — and there's a bodily awareness here that I find so effective, especially when it turns almost impressionistic in the climatic scene.

Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

Gibsonpilled!!!! I think I finally got around to picking up Neuromancer after years of having it on my reading list in part because of the quote-unquote AI threat and in part because I re-listened to Night Call, a perfect podcast (RIP) on which Gibson is frequently invoked. There's something about his 1960s counter-cultural roots in combination with a clear vision of what the technological advancements of the 1980s would turn into that produces work that’s so empathetic, so cool, dripping in modernity while being a little embarrassed by it. He reminds me of Michael Mann, a little — two men with romance in their hearts who understand that technology always brings death along with it.

The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

It's funny that Greene’s characters so frequently express a feeling of statelessness when he himself could not be more British if he tried. I've been thinking a bit about 20th century Englishmen recently, brought on by seeing Ill Met by Moonlight and being reminded of my father and his father almost the entire time. Something about the confidence that comes from having hundreds of years of empire behind you (even if you’re repulsed by that empire’s existence) — the ability to feel at home anywhere, as long as you have a pint or a whisky in hand.

Franny and Zooey by J D Salinger

If you smoked along with this book you'd be dead in two hours. Sisters with The Gathering in many ways, which pleased me — big Irish families, struck by tragedy; strangers to each other even though at core they're the same. There's no looming family secret in this one, though, and existential dread pervades in place of real buried horror. This is the definition of a book one should read quickly — keeping pace with all that rapid dialogue and all those cigarettes — and then savour in retrospect for weeks afterwards. Made me want to be more of an esoteric nightmare and less of a judgmental bitch, which would probably end up as an overall improvement.

Articles

From Strength Comes Forth Sweetness: "Top Gun: Maverick" and Tom Cruise's Terribilità, David Garry Hughes, Mubi Notebook
the one horse & the nextover, Anne Boyer
By the Bomb’s Filmic Light, Nicholas Russell, The Baffler
The Internet is Broken. Can We Fix It? – A Review of Ben Tarnoff’s “Internet for the People”, Z.M.L
The Dirt on Pig-Pen, Elif Batuman, Astra
It isn’t the lines, Bee Wilson, London Review of Books
Off His Royal Tits, Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books
Maybe So, Sir, but Not Today: The Fragile Humanity of Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Ralston, Bright Wall/Dark Room
Puzzled Puss, John Lahr, London Review of Books
Harrison Ford: “I Know Who the F*** I Am”, James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter
The Last of Us Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation, Andrea Long Chu, Vulture
Fifty Years On, A Hard Day’s Night Is Still Revelatory, Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, Ted Chiang, The New Yorker
What advertising does to TV., Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker
Boxcar Love: Scarecrow’s Not-So-Modern Bromance, Duncan Birmingham, Bright Wall/Dark Room
Riding the Goddamn Elephant, A. S. Hamrah, The Baffler
Silver Screen, Carlos Valladares, n+1
Not Much like Consent, Daniel Trilling, London Review of Books
Stronger Together, Shonni Enelow, Film Comment
everything I've watched in however long it's been since the last one of these, part one, Helena Fitzgerald
To Let an Author Die: Remembering Sylvia Plath, 60 Years On, Jimin Kang, Los Angeles Review of Books
The Golden Suicides, Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair
I Really Didn’t Want to Go, Lauren Oyler, Harper’s Magazine
You Have a New Memory, Merritt Tierce, Slate
The Crown and the Crown, Luke McKernan
Norman Mailer’s Ripe Garbage, Rob Madole, The Baffler
An almost perfect film, Luke McKernan
Voice and Hammer, Jeff Sharlet, VQR
#148: Too much music, Hayley Nahman & Always In, Drew Austin, Real Life
I have drunk of the wine of life at last, Edith Wharton, Diaries of Note
The Genesis of Blame, Anne Enright, London Review of Books
When digital nomads come to town, Stephen Witt, Rest of World
Grieving Redness in the West: Reading Malcolm Harris After Mike Davis, Michael Docherty, Los Angeles Review of Books
Saturday Night as an Adult, Anne Carson, The New Yorker
Trespassing on Edith Wharton, Alissa Bennet, The Paris Review
Elegy for the Screenshot, Nora DeLighter, Screen Slate
The Shut-In Economy, Lauren Smiley
The Last TV Show, Helena Fitzgerald
‘Suddenly, we were in Wonderland’: Paul McCartney on his lost photos of Beatlemania, The Guardian
The End of Love, Merritt Tierce, The Paris Review
Stupidity as a critical virtue, BDM
Antigone in Galway, Anne Enright, London Review of Books
The man who missed his life, Michael Wood, London Review of Books
all the television I have watched in the last however long it's been: taskmaster, series twelve, Helena Fitzgerald
Everything I've Binge-Watched in the Last However Long, Part One of Two, Helena Fitzgerald
Julian Sands had the heart of a child-man in which scorpions and bluebirds nested, Gabriel Byrne, The Guardian
Last day of shoot, Emma Thompson, Diaries of Note
“The Splendor of Our Public and Common Life”, Garrett Dash Nelson, Places
Focus, Shoot, Conceal, Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books
“It just get dirtier!”, Christian Lorentzen, Metrograph
The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free?, Gregory Barber, Wired
Selling the Seaside, Ruby Tandoh, The Baffler
The Best Little Magazine in Texas, Karen Olsson, The Baffler
Get Thee to a Phalanstery, Dominic Pettman, The Public Domain Review
‘It was like Blade Runner meets Berlin rave’: the Manchester sink estate with the UK’s wildest nightclub, Daniel Dylan Wray, The Guardian
We’re More Ghosts Than People, Hanif Abdurraquib, The Paris Review
The Machine Breaker, Christopher Ketcham, Harper’s Magazine
Loretta, Philippa Snow, AnOther
Nashville, Matthew Eng, Reverse Shot
Real Play, Devon Brody, The Paris Review
‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza, Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine
What We Learn from the Lives of Critics, Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker

Actually, I absolutely love Soderbergh’s annual lists, and since I’m logging everything this year in my journal, maybe I will do a full day-by-day list next year. But only as supplementary material to something a little more in-depth. ↩︎
I’m looking at you, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. ↩︎
I think he probably had “good politics”, whatever that means, but I think he had good politics for the same reasons as many men on the left, i.e. mostly as a way to meet women. I have no basis for this other than a pervasive vibe. ↩︎

An iPod Classic for 2023

2023-09-11T00:00:00Z

Firstly, a disclaimer: this is not an instruction manual. This is the first device I've modded (other than a couple of self-built PCs, which doesn't really count), and it wouldn't have even crossed my mind to attempt it without a multitude of blog posts and YouTube videos by people much smarter than me.

All the resources I drew on are linked below:

Building an iPod for 2022
Upgrading a 2006 iPod Video for Lossless Audio
Classic iPod Hackers Say There’s No Better Way to Listen to Music
iFlash-Compatibility
Spotify Streaming on a modded 17-year-old iPod Classic (via Raspberry Pi)
iPod Classic new Battery & 256GB SD Card: still works in 2022! (GREAT resource)
- In the description for that video: iPod Classic opening reference card
iPod 6th Generation - iFixit (absolutely vital)
iPod Classic 2020 All In One Restoration Guide - SD Card, Battery Upgrade & More!
The 2000GB iPod Classic.

And here is everything I bought for the project:

Front panel, silver, £8.95
Headphone jack and hold switch, white, £14.95
iFlash Solo SD card adapter, £36.74 — if you're in the UK, I’d buy it direct from iFlash instead (I hadn't realised before ordering that they have a UK store)
512GB Samsung EVO Plus MicroSD card, £27.79
2000mAh battery, £17.49 — cable is the wrong length, but it seems to work well enough
Mini bluetooth dongle for iPod, £11.49 — took ages to arrive
iSesamo tools x2, £15.90
Plastic spudgers x10, £2.89
Mini screwdriver set, £3.89
Magnetic project mat, £4.09
Compressed air, £3.49
Basic device tools, £1

All-in, I spent £148.67, which includes some tools I will be able to reuse. Tidal currently costs me £131.88 per year, so this only needs to last just over a year to have paid for itself.

Motivation

More and more lately I've been feeling an urge to separate myself from my phone, and more specifically to return to a time before the smartphone took over as the ultimate multi-tool. Every day I feel older and more crotchety about the direction of innovation in tech — less choice, less flexibility, less openness. Websites don't have RSS feeds anymore, Instagram won't let you download images, and music is served to you based on whichever record company pays the most.

I wanted a device that only existed to play music. I wanted an algorithm-free listening experience, album-forward and augmented with my own handmade playlists. I wanted to listen through my ancient (and still fully functional!) over-ear headphones without needing to attach a fucking dongle. I also wanted to see if I could repair something myself — I firmly believe in permacomputing, but this was my first time exploring the practicalities of regeneration over replacement.

I used iPods consistently through high school, inspired in the first place by a 2nd Gen owned by a family friend that I had been lent once to play snake and listen to audiobooks. The one I’ve been modding is a ‘7th Generation’ iPod Classic, the second of the range to officially carry the ‘Classic’ title and the last generation Apple ever produced. It doesn't have the preferred Wolfson DAC that the 5th Gen had, but it held its own against the 5th Gen when tested and — more importantly — it's what I had gathering dust in a drawer. This was my third and final iPod, following a blue 3rd Generation Nano and a dark grey Classic^[1]. I used it in conjunction first with an iPhone 4 and then with a OnePlus One, neither of which had anywhere near enough space for all of my music. I don’t remember when or why I stopped using it, but I guess it must’ve been around the time I started paying for both Spotify Premium and a SIM with unlimited data — somewhere around 2016.

The repair

Initially I tried to boot up and use the iPod as is, but it was clear that the hard drive was on its way out — at first it connected to my PC but wouldn't let me sync, and then it bricked completely and would only show me the ‘OK to disconnect’ message after I tried to reset it.

Since I was gutting it anyway to replace the hard drive, I decided to get a new front cover, a bigger battery, and a new headphone jack. I would've loved to have gone for all see-through panels, which I think looks incredible, but it seems these panels aren't available for the 6th/7th Gen — and it would've required replacing more parts than is technically necessary. I’m also not interested in installing Rockbox or any other alternative system — it might be better for some, but I love the old Apple interface, and as long as iTunes still works, I’ll keep using that.

My hope is that I'll now never need to open it up again, that I've future-proofed it for at least another decade and hopefully beyond.

Opening the iPod

I was the most apprehensive about this step, both because I'd had the fear of God put into me by YouTube videos and the iFixit instructions and because I was committed to keeping the original back panel — there's an inscription on it from my Dad, who gave this iPod to me for my 16th birthday, almost exactly a decade ago.^[2]

I had half expected to fall at this hurdle, ruin it completely, and have to give up before I’d begun. But I needn't have worried, really — I was careful, and I used the recommended iSesamo tool (2 of them, plus one of the mini versions the eBay seller threw in for free), and it popped open without much fanfare in less than 10 minutes. I bent the back panel a tiny bit, but I don’t think anyone other than me would notice and it went back on with a few satisfying clicks at the end of the project.

I had a poke around once it was open, and I loved finding the little imperfections inside — all electronics are assembled to some degree by hand, and mine carries evidence of this in a light scratch on the metal backing for the screen and some traces of glue on the inside of the back panel. I'm the first person to see inside this device for at least a decade, and I felt a genuine (if trite) surge of appreciation for the underpaid factory worker in Taiwan who put it together in the first place.

Front panel

First, I had to replace the front panel — the old one was damaged, with chips in the metal and the glass cover for the screen.

I unscrewed the panel and gently pried it away from the metal frame — there was some glue holding it on, so I used one of the mini iSesamo tools at the bottom of the panel to release it. Then I held the click wheel in place with two fingers through the round hole in the new panel while I replaced it.

Battery

The only part of this project I found properly difficult was the removal of the old battery — I had to use a hairdryer to (gently!) loosen the glue, and then carefully pry it off with a plastic spudger. It was certainly past time for a new battery — the old one was notably swollen in comparison to its replacement.

Once the new battery was in place, I plugged it into the front panel to make sure the iPod turned on.

One irritating feature of the new battery is that the cable is too short — I've had to install it almost backwards and with a bend in the cable, which I'm hoping won't cause any problems.

Headphone jack and hold switch

More very fiddly screws at this stage — four to hold the headphone jack and hold switch in place, along with some insulation tape and a bit of glue.

Reassembly was slightly harder than removing the old one, but it all went fine. I secured the headphone cable to the back panel with a couple of new pieces of insulation tape, plugged it into the front panel, and that was that.

iFlash drive

Then I had to abandon the project for two weeks, because the iFlash Solo I'd ordered from Canada on the same day as the parts from the UK was — of course — taking a bit longer to arrive. I also realised during this downtime that iFlash sell the Solo on their UK website for about £6 less than I paid for the one from Canada. Oh well.

The part eventually arrived while I was on a work call, and the installation was so easy I managed to get it finished before the call ended. The SD card went into the drive, I connected the hard drive ribbon cable, connected the battery cable, and half-closed the iPod while I checked everything was working.

I had to format the SD card again when it connected to my PC, and then iTunes recognised the iPod and began restoring it.

iTunes displayed it as a 512GB iPod, and the iPod itself displayed the right amount of space, so all seemed to be well.

I tested the audio with — what else — Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles.

Since it all sounded good, I disconnected from my PC, attached some foam pads to the battery to prevent any rattling, and closed the iPod. Then I just had to get everything synced and it was good to go — with heaps of storage space to spare.

Step by step

I worked this out and made these notes for myself using the iFixit guides for each part I wanted to replace, making sure I didn't have to do anything twice.

separate front & back panel
disconnect battery & headphone jack cables
disconnect hard drive cable
unscrew front panel, separate from metal framework
install new front panel — make sure click wheel is in correct position first
screw in front panel
lift battery from back panel with spudger (+ hairdryer)
peel off tape holding ribbon cables to back panel
remove headphone jack and hold switch screws
remove headphone jack and hold switch
screw in new jack & switch
add small piece insulation tape to keep wires in place
attach headphone ribbon to front panel
format SD card
add SD card to iFlash drive
connect iFlash drive
connect new battery to front panel
plug iPod in & make sure everything is working, not rattling, etc
close back panel

Final result

I’m really happy with the result — it sounds great, it has more than enough space for every piece of music I could want to add, and I can play Klondike again.

I recently bought a Nintendo DS, and with the iPod spinning Avril and my Nintendogs barking in the background it could almost be 2006 again. Feels like peace.

I wish I knew what happened to this one — it's possible I bricked it somehow when it was still in warranty and sent it back in exchange for the one I have now, but I don’t remember either way. I can’t find it anywhere and it's rare for me to get rid of old tech (as you can tell), so there must be some reason it’s gone and I have this one instead. ↩︎
For this reason, the capacity will always read ‘160GB’, but I like that it still looks on the outside like the same device as always. ↩︎

April 2023 in media

2023-05-09T00:00:00Z

Happy belated May! I hope you're as excited as I am about the WGA strike. I've been thinking a lot about this comic(?) by avocado_ibroprufen — mostly because I find the final panel so calming, but also because it illustrates perfectly that the only logical end point to the current wave of tech and content acceleration is absolute consumer apathy. I've also been reading about the winding down of the 2010s digital media experiment, the gist of which is essentially the same — join a union, smash the computers.

Anyway! Here's some nonsense about movies.

Film

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023, dir John Francis Daley, Jonathan M Goldstein) (C)
Air (2023, dir Ben Affleck) (C)

This year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. Take that however you will (I like it).
Erin Brockovich (1998, dir Steven Soderbergh)

My favourite scene in Erin Brockovich comes near the end, when the case is almost done save for a few last-ditch attempts at evidence gathering. Erin is at a dive bar, getting a signature from the bartender. Completely exhausted, she sits for a second to have a cup of coffee, and a guy who threatened her earlier in the film catches her eye and comes to sit next to her. He tells her he’s been watching her, that there’s something about her, that he likes her. And then, just when you're really worried for her safety, when you've resigned yourself to a scene in which our spunky heroine is made to feel small by some creep making a pass, he looks into her eyes and gives her the last piece they need to win the case.

I saw this in the same week as Michael by Bieke Depoorter, which is the actual best piece of media I consumed this month, and I think they have a lot in common — both works, in their own ways, are exercises in empathy, in the understanding that each person we come across is a galaxy of their own.
Trance (2013, dir Danny Boyle)

Needlessly complicated nonsense, but since it’s Danny Boyle you at least get some beautiful images to go with your incomprehensible plot. Would love it if James McAvoy was in something good sometime this decade.
Dream Lover (1993, dir Nicholas Kazan)

Parts of this terrible movie are so similar to Gone Girl I got extremely distracted fantasising about how great 90s James Spader would've been as Nick Dunne.
Steve Jobs (2015, dir Danny Boyle) (R)

Hate Steve Jobs (man); love Steve Jobs (movie). A damning portrait of the field of marketing made human — someone who failed upwards his entire life by stealing personae and ideas from actual geniuses until he'd persuaded everyone he was one too. The day Aaron Sorkin finally gives up the directing game and allows a real filmmaker to handle his screenwriting again I will celebrate in the streets.
The Last Seduction (1994, dir John Dahl)

Great picture about being insane but if I was married to Bill Pullman I would simply never leave him. Cannot stop thinking about all of Linda Fiorentino’s sexy little 90s suits.
Shanghai Express (1932, dir Josef von Sternberg)

Maybe this is just a series of perfectly lit and composed shots of Marlene Dietrich’s face with a few bits of iffy 1930s international politics thrown in and maybe that's actually fine — good, even. All movies should be set on trains.
Our Hospitality (1923, dir Buster Keaton, John G Blystone)

Buster Keaton also thinks all movies should be set on trains. For this reason I believe that in another life we would be wed.
Godland (2022, dir Hlynur Pálmason) (C)

Too much going on here to discuss, really — religion and language and colonialism, the arrogance of the over-educated, repressed violence, photography as preservation, the harms of distancing oneself from nature. It reminded me a lot of Silence, which is one of Scorsese’s more secret masterpieces.
Nashville (1975, dir Robert Altman) (C, R)

The American movie.
Yesterday (2019, dir Danny Boyle)

Richard Curtis misunderstands The Beatles to such a degree it made me feel like I was completely losing my mind. No one should talk about anything as unwell as this movie as much as my flatmate and I have over the past week.

TV

Succession, S4

The last gasp of TV’s golden age, and what a gasp it is. I love you Tom Wambsgans!!!
Murderville

Mostly pretty dire except for the silly walk part of the Kumail episode and the entire Sharon Stone episode. Jason Bateman is so hot.
Yellowjackets, S2

Way too early for a show to jump the shark but that shark sure has been jumped! Seems they in fact did not plan out the narrative better than Lindelof & Co did on Lost.
Terrace House, Boys and Girls in the City

I can't recommend this series enough — extremely low-stakes but very compelling reality TV that also forces you to put down your phone and properly watch it, even if only to read the subtitles.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, S4 (R)
Barry, S4

I've never known how to characterise how I feel about this show, which I have watched with careful attention for its entire run but which has never caused a single thought to enter my head. On balance I guess I think it’s good — certainly well-made but perhaps slightly vacant?
Taskmaster, S15

The only British television I follow, and maybe the only British television worth making?
The Wire, S2

Everything about this show is so textured, so completely lived-in — all these wonderful layered characters trying to stay afloat amid endless streams of post-industrial corruption that feed off the criminalisation of poverty. Truly the kind of show that could only be created by a former beat reporter — someone who knows and loves every last part of his city. Maybe TV and movies are bad now in large part because journalism is bad now? Worth considering!

Articles

The Golden Suicides by Nancy Jo Sales for Vanity Fair

What’s a God to a Machine? by Jeff Weiss for The Ringer

He has the gift of the greats: the ability to not merely suspend time, but to warp it entirely. The evocative images in his songs are full of empty lacunae allowing listeners to project their own values, ideas, and memories onto him and the characters who inhabit them. When he’s at his best, that celestial wail transports you back to where you were when you first heard it, to the romantic partners that faded into a haze of sweat and pixels, to the friends who got stranded and never made it out to the other side.

There is not a single original idea, but it is an immaculate synthesis. They can precisely match the sum of all previous human creativity but cannot provide a note more.

I Really Didn’t Want to Go by Lauren Oyler for Harper’s Magazine

Our genre was calling, and it knew I’d pick up, because I’m addicted to my phone. Bizarre anecdotes would be collected, holistic therapies undertaken, details of my personal life “shared.” Ideally I would cry. As a woman, I cry frequently, so as a feminist I have a duty to destigmatize it by doing so in public—that’s the prevailing philosophy.

I love Europe. I do not want to participate in its destruction. I want to support its economy by filling it with money from American magazines and publishing houses—by being American in a sophisticated, worldly way. I arrived at the Port of Barcelona wearing loose-fitting black clothes and looking unimpressible so that people wouldn’t mistake me for a cruiser but rather recognize me as someone on the side of truth and beauty, someone who prefers to travel unobtrusively, guided by taste in art and literature. On day eight, I intended to see some Caravaggios in Sicily as an act of resistance.

To journalists, a “cruise piece”—in addition to being a free vacation you’re paid to express all your darkest thoughts about—is a career achievement; it carries associations with the great cruise piece of 1996, “Shipping Out,” better known as “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” indeed also published in this swanky East Coast magazine. To be able to unite the cruise piece with wellness writing in a single essay promised a glory and quantity of free stuff that would hearken to the heyday of print magazines, back when things mattered. What’s more, during the yearslong squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls; his reputation as both a misogynist and an author beloved by misogynists meant it was just sitting right there this whole time, waiting for anyone with grammatical flexibility and the courage to try.

You Have a New Memory by Merritt Tierce for Slate

As soon as I realized what they were, I also realized his mother had probably told him to do that, because it wasn’t a thing he ever would have thought to do, buy me a pre-wedding present. That was 10 years ago; if we were getting married now, the internet would know, and I’m almost sure it would suggest he buy me a pre-wedding present before his mother would. The internet certainly knows me better than his mother did, and maybe better than he did, too.

I liked a person I dated recently because he always asked people things before he asked the internet. I think to the younger generation this has begun to seem exotic. You would ask someone directions, or what was going on somewhere, or where there might be food, only if a catastrophic event had occurred and you had to live in the now, alone in your body.

I don’t ask people first. I always ask the internet first, both because I am afraid of people and because asking one person, or three, is asking one person or three, and asking the internet is asking all the people who have ever lived plus the endless expansion and iteration of their ideas, thanks to metastatic artificial intelligence.

Yet on balance, I sense that I might have had as many moments of feeling without the internet, and fewer negative feelings, and I would have made do without the convenience because I wouldn’t have known it was possible. (In addition to which I feel strongly aligned with W.S. Merwin’s position on convenience, though I’m sure I know that poem, that position that allows me to understand how I feel about the internet, because of and via the internet.) Without the internet, I might also have cultivated or held on to a stronger sense of self. I impute no absolute value to a stronger sense of self, but I suspect that a weaker sense of self has, if nothing else, crippled my ability to be worth something to the other humans.

When you stop using your phone for a bit, for a few hours or a day, you do not revert to the state you were formerly in. I mean generationally formerly, before the phone. You do not go back to the Analog Pre-Screen Age. Instead, what you experience is being not-with your phone, in an alternate but cotemporal universe that is probably better for your neck, which is holding up the head that observes mostly other people looking at their phones. Other people looking at the internet.

The relationship with the real man is still in my mind, and my mind is still in it, and it causes feelings in my body even though I’m not in contact with him, in the way that I fantasize about not being in contact with the internet. A total disconnection. But I look at his WhatsApp last seen status all the time. What does that do? Occasionally the word online appears under his name and I feel something. Maybe you know what I mean.

Why Is Everything So Ugly? by Mark Krotov for n+1

Writing a century ago, H. L. Mencken bemoaned America’s “libido for the ugly.” There exists, he wrote, a “love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States.”

If The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit once offered a warning about conformity, he is now an inspiration, although the outfit has gotten an upgrade. Today he is The Man in the Gray Bonobos, or The Man in the Gray Buck Mason Crew Neck, or The Man in the Gray Mack Weldon Sweatpants — all delivered via gray Amazon van. The imagined color of life under communism, gray has revealed itself to be the actual hue of globalized capital. “The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow,” wrote Hardt and Negri. What color does a blended rainbow produce? Greige, evidently.

The Crown and the Crown by Luke McKernan

Books

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

I wish I'd read this in one sitting, rather than in two sittings about three weeks apart — much better, with this in particular, to be completely absorbed and then be jolted away before you're ready, leaving you to think about it for days afterwards.

I behaved exactly the same way as before but without the long-standing familiarity of these actions I would have found it impossible to do so, except at the cost of a tremendous effort. It was when I spoke that I realized I was acting instinctively. Words, sentences, and even my laugh, formed on my lips without my actually thinking about it or wanting it. In fact I have only vague memories of the things I did, the films I saw, the people I met. I behaved in an artificial manner.

Now I was only time flowing through myself.

I would count the number of times we had made love. I felt that each time something new had been added to our relationship but that somehow this very accumulation of touching and pleasure would eventually draw us apart. We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.

As in the past, when the longer I waited after taking an exam the more I became convinced I had failed, so now, as the days went by without him ringing, I was certain he had left me.

(It is a mistake therefore to compare someone writing about his own life to an exhibitionist, since the latter has only one desire: to show himself and to be seen at the same time.)

The sight of him driving towards the park in Sceaux or the wood in Vincennes, with the windows down and the radio at full volume, haunted me.

My condition was such that not even the sound of his voice could make me happy. It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain.

I reflected that there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.

I would relive moments of that period, insignificant in themselves—I am standing in the archive room at La Sorbonne, I am walking along Boulevard Voltaire, I am trying on a skirt in a Benetton shop—with such vivid detail that I wondered why it wasn’t possible to slip into that particular day or moment as easily as one slips into another room.

In the other dreams, I lost my way, mislaid my handbag, found myself unable to pack my suitcase in time to catch a train leaving minutes later. I caught sight of A, surrounded by other people. He wasn’t looking at me.

I wondered what the difference was between this past reality and literature, perhaps just a feeling of disbelief that I had actually been there one day, something I wouldn’t have felt in the case of a fictional character.

Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to f ind out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal.

Of the living text, this book is only the remainder, a minortrace. One day it will mean nothing to me, just like its living counterpart.

At this point, sitting in front of the pages covered in my indecipherable scrawlings, which only I can interpret, I can still believe this is something private, almost childish, of no consequence whatsoever—like the declarations of love and the obscene expressions I used to write on the back of my exercise books in class, or anything else one may write calmly, in all impunity, when there is no risk of it being read. Once I start typing out the text, once it appears before me in public characters, I shall be through with innocence.

Whether or not he was “worth it” is of no consequence. And the fact that all this is gradually slipping away from me, as if it concerned another woman, does not change this one truth: thanks to him, I was able to approach the frontier separating me from others, to the extent of actually believing that I could sometimes cross over it.

I measured time differently, with all my body.

I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.

When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

Quietly a lot less subversive than Jonas seems to think it is — for all the (often valid) raging against identity politics and cancel culture it still ends with punishment for adulterers and a victory for sexless heterosexual marriage. Most attempts to moralise in the text of a novel fail — the plot suffers from too much philosophy and the philosophy suffers from too much plot. It can be done, of course, although maybe not under the frenetic conditions of a first-time novel. Vladimir really sings when it engages with female desire, but there's so much other stuff going on it eventually feels almost like an afterthought. Promising creative people should not be allowed to use Twitter.

old men are composed of desire. Everything about them is wanting. They have appetites for food, boats, vacations, entertainment. They want to be stimulated. They want to sleep. They are guided by desire—their world is made up of their desires.

I am naturally a busy host, and I like busy hosts, though some do not. When someone comes into my house, for a good portion of time I do not stop moving—tidying, making coffee, cleaning. My mother never sat still unless she was reading, typing, paying bills, or asleep, and I share this quality. When I go into someone’s house and they are doing many chores, and their attention is divided, and they are packing a suitcase or mopping their floors while I linger about, I feel distinctly at ease. I have always liked the feeling of hanging around, and a host who gives me too much of their attention makes me feel unnerved.

In the days and nights that followed, it was that image of him in the black glass of the window that haunted and warmed me. His arm extended across the sofa cushion, the cross of his leg revealing the stripe of his sock, his head turned over his shoulder, the gesture of his eyes casting down, like an old-fashioned stage actress looking bashfully at a bouquet.

I decided to embrace abstinence, to pull myself from the game. I would focus on my work, my home, my writing. The distraction of my colleague, as intriguing as it was, had made me feel ridiculous and undignified; desperate, weak, and grasping. I would pursue dignity, elegance, erudition. I abandoned lust and desire. I authored several essays on form and structure. I published my second novel.

People said this crop of youth was weak, but we knew differently. We knew they were so strong—so much stronger than us, and equipped with better weapons, more effective tactics. They brought us to our knees with their softness, their consistent demand for the consideration of their feelings—the way they could change all we thought would stay the same for the rest of our lives, be it stripping naked for male directors in undergraduate productions of The Bacchae, ignoring racist statements in supposedly great works of literature, or working for less when others were paid more. They had changed all that when we hadn’t been able to, and our only defense was to call them soft.

They could critique only based on representation, they missed the formal elements of a story. Of course Rebecca is, in many ways, a story that is erected in misogyny, demonizing women, demonizing the other, but I was not interested in that for them. I wanted them to see how suspense was created, how symbols were utilized, how repetition made the ghost of Rebecca rise from the page. Again and again I told them, you need to see these things, these forms. Oh, they drove me crazy, being so completely obsessed with whether or not people were represented well, wanting every piece of literature to be some utopian screed of fairness.

Could it be because we simply weren’t sentimental, or we were too intelligent or too sensitive or too watchful? Was that mere self-flattery? What made us sad, and guilty of our sadness, what pit us in this battle against ourselves? And why couldn’t we release the way some did, and say, yes, well, depression is a medical condition, I’m just wired a little poorly, I’ve got an illness I need to take care of, as all my students said. (Which is not to say that Cynthia Tong didn’t take antidepressants—I’m sure she did.) Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much—if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain—then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives.

You have to be willfully ignorant of certain truths to be successful, you just have to, and she seemed to me like the kind of woman who could not be ignorant of anything. The kind of mind that could paralyze itself.

In truth, when I got to the real imagining of the act, I found myself repulsed by the idea of actual physical contact. I only wanted to think about him, framed by my darkened window.

I saw how speed wore on my students—sending some into a brittle and constant state of worry, some into torpor, others into paralysis. If something was not dealt with in a few days, it felt to them like a completely forsaken cause. They viewed lives, roles, opinions, stations as things that got taken from them if they didn’t act fast enough. Where was the time for thinking? For consideration? For not thinking? For failure? When I was in college the way to waste time was movies and friends and alcohol and drugs and sex and music. Activities that for the most part we agree now are essentially enriching. They waste time on their little boxes. And they don’t want to, they hate themselves for it. But the boxes are there and they are their schoolwork and their social life and their entertainment and their sin and their virtue all in one. God help them.

Some of my students, when they read Victorian or Edwardian novels, would become so angry at all these heroes and heroines whose lives are ruined because they are afraid of embarrassment, but I did not know of any emotion more powerful, more permeating, more upending than that. You could die seemingly pointlessly or loveless to avoid shame, but shame could also make you feel as though you wanted to die

Like many beautiful-ish women, she was obsessed with the idea of men sexually trespassing. To hear her speak, she had never had an encounter with any man that had not resulted in some form of the man expressing his longing for her or taking advantage of her.

As a teacher, I’ve found that strictness is often an effective way of diverting from one’s own laziness.

I wondered if The Apartment was the first film that ended by depicting love as a kind of jovial camaraderie rather than passion. MacLaine and Lemmon didn’t even kiss at the end of the film. It seemed as though all films now, unless they had titles like Desire written in red letters against black backgrounds, portrayed true love as the coming together of two fun friends. No wonder that I perceived, mostly from their short stories, that my students found nothing more romantic than lusting after a platonic member of their social group.

(It definitely wasn't — Jonas seems to have forgotten about the three decades of the production code and the entire screwball comedy genre.)

I believed that art was not a moral enterprise. That morality in art was what happened when the church or the state got involved. That if you insisted on infusing art with morality you would insist on lies and limits. Truth could be found only outside the confines of morality. Art needed to be taken and rejected on its own terms. Art was not the artist.

Awkward around most women, I had trained myself to notice something on their person I could compliment. Compliments made you supplicant, equal, and master all at once.

“Would you like some eggs?” I asked hesitantly.

“I will eat whatever you give me,” he said.

March 2023 in media

2023-03-31T00:00:00Z

Everything I've read & watched this month. Highlights mark the really good stuff. Now with commentary!

Film

C = cinema, W = watched for work, R = rewatch. More here.

Y Tu Mamá También (2001, dir Alfonso Cuarón) (R)

I always underrate this until I’m actually watching it and then I immediately remember that it’s a near-perfect object. A couple of tossed-off character beats here that are expanded in Roma made me wonder if this is also partly autobiographical — if so, Alfonso, you should give that boy a call.
Spider (2002, dir David Cronenberg)

A pretty boring movie about how English people are all mentally ill and in love with their mothers (true) featuring a very fine performance from Ralph Fiennes despite the fact that — and this is not an exaggeration — you cannot hear a single word he says.
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985, dir William Friedkin) (R)

Massively underrated movie. Mean and cynical and desperate, the hazy California sun beating down on a city rotten to its core. I bet Michael Mann loves it (honorific).
The Lost Boys (1987, dir Joel Schumacher)

I definitely enjoyed watching this but now I can remember almost nothing about it except that the boys are cute. That’s the Schumacher guarantee!
A Good Person (2023, dir Zach Braff) (C, W)

Braff and Pugh sat in the back of the screening and watched this with us and for two hours the only laughter in the entire room came from that row. One woman behind me was crying so hard at the end I could hear it. Absolutely excruciating experience.
Matinee (1993, dir Joe Dante)

John Goodman invents 4DX during the Cuban Missile crisis and it frightens the audience so much they think the bomb has been dropped. Feels like it was made for me.
School of Rock (2003, dir Richard Linklater) (R)
Natural Born Killers (1994, dir Oliver Stone)

If you watched this movie on psychedelics you would never be sane again. Oliver Stone is such a sick freak <3
Mississippi Masala (1991, dir Mira Nair)

Absolutely gorgeous — plays with memory and belonging so successfully you feel yourself longing for countries you’ve never been to. Also features possibly the all-time sexiest non-sex scene ever committed to film.
Fast Company (1979, dir David Cronenberg)

Couple of bad entries from Dave this month for completionism purposes — Spider is at least moderately diverting but this has nothing to recommend it other than a 10-second scene involving motor oil on bare skin, which seems to be the only concession he made to his actual point of view as a filmmaker. I love Crash.
Deja Vu (2006, dir Tony Scott)

Two reasons why populist Hollywood cinema is now in its lowest ebb ever: 1) they’ve forgotten about romance, 2) Tony Scott is dead. Most versions of Vertigo made by other filmmakers are better than the original and I think this is the best of them all — echoes and remnants, remembering and forgetting, an infinite oscillation through time.
Sunshine (2007, dir Danny Boyle) (R)

Simply one of the greatest space movies ever made — elemental, horrific, perfectly restrained.
Days of Heaven (1978, dir Terrence Malick)

Nothing lonelier than the infinite horizon of the American West. I long to ride the rails.
Footloose (1984, dir Herbert Ross)
Blair Witch Project (1999, dir Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez) (R)

To this day one of the only horror movies that genuinely frightens me, both because of its wonderful use of darkness and because of how naturalistic the dialogue is — feels like hanging out with your annoying high school friends, shooting the shit in the woods, until it really, really doesn't. It plays now like a missive from another time, a snapshot of a pre-iPhone world, but it also manages to deliver a more successful commentary on the impact of readily-available hand-held recording devices than most attempts in the decades since.
Training Day (2001, dir Antoine Fuqua)

A middling Heat/Serpico rip-off with an utterly electric Denzel performance — Satan himself tearing through hell with a recently fallen angel in tow. Had me daydreaming about a Washington/Mann collab.

TV

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, S3 (R)
Next in Fashion, S2
Yellowjackets, S1

Lost for people whose Reddit is Tumblr. Really fun! Great needle drops! I hope they’ve planned out the full narrative better than Lindelof & Co did!
The Wire, S1

Sort of a rewatch since I saw the first ten episodes about a decade ago but boy am I glad I dropped it then and waited until now to pick it back up. Great to be older and wiser and completely drawn in by this show's complex contemporary relationship to personal computing, surveillance, and post-9/11 policing.
The Great North, S2

Perfect background noise, and I mean that in the most respectful way possible. Every so often there's a joke about a movie so obscure and silly I have to imagine the writers and I listen to the same podcasts.

Articles

Boxcar Love: Scarecrow’s Not-So-Modern Bromance by Duncan Birmingham for Bright Wall/Dark Room

Riding the Goddamn Elephant by A. S. Hamrah for The Baffler

Yes, sacks of fat, for he is the Whale, puking on his shirt, sobbing alone in his apartment in the green-brown murk of contemporary cinematography. And the whale is also Moby-Dick, and the whale is Herman Melville, too, who was using the metaphor of the whale to hide his own whaleness. Are we all the whale? I don’t think so. Yet Darren Aronofsky’s film of this joyless play was a hit, so I guess it touched something in the moviegoing public. It had to use a bodega claw to do it because it couldn’t get off the couch, but it touched them.

So much puking in 2022 big-screen quality drama. Riseborough vomits when she’s cleaning motel rooms and trying to lay off the sauce, and in Causeway an equally de-glamorized Jennifer Lawrence, as a shell-shocked veteran of the war in Afghanistan, throws up in a wastebasket while living in transitional homecare in Nebraska. Back in her real home in New Orleans, she gets a job cleaning pools, showing us what successful movie actresses think they need to do to win Oscars in 2023: portray the immiserated working class puking and cleaning.

If this is Baz Luhrmann’s best film, it’s because Elvis Presley forced him to become a better director. To tell Elvis’s story it is necessary to show the full figure in the frame, head to toe, since Elvis’s leg and hip moves on early television made him a star. That precluded Moulin Rouge-style seizure-inducing cuts. And Austin Butler’s Tarantino-fied performance as the King demanded a full view. Butler here is a co-auteur in a way usually closed to biopics in which the lead actors are more famous than Butler is, and so we never lose them in their roles as other famous people.

Silver Screen by Carlos Valladares for n+1

I’m more fascinated to learn that she was terribly shaken by Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), his first film set in a US milieu, when she saw it at age 8 in her hometown of Omaha. It seems that the plight of Teresa Wright’s Charlie, at the mercy of her serial-killer uncle (Joseph Cotton), stuck in the young Silver’s brain. “Evil exists for her,” Silver explains in a 2005 interview with the Directors Guild of America. “Not out there, but within the bosom of the family, and that was a very potent theme for me.” That’s not to say that any of Silver’s subsequent characters can be tagged as evil. Even smug-jawed John Heard in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979)—an unsparing study of male narcissism that cuts deeper than your average Manhattan marriage story—is, at film’s end, more pitiable than anything else; to hate him is wasteful, exhausting. Rather, a person’s capability to be brutal in a Silver film is often cloaked in gooey intent, in the name of some nobler imagined future, and, above all, in proximity.

“I’ve always felt there’s two kinds of immigrants,” Silver said in 2005. “One, they’re a bit ashamed of [when they first arrived to the US], and the experience was traumatic, and they want to put it behind them. Well, my family wasn’t like that. My family was the other kind, who enjoyed talking about it, and remembering, and reveling.”

A limited definition of what constitutes aesthetic experimentation would see Silver’s early collaboration with Barbara Loden, The Frontier Experience (1975), as a simplistic afterschool special made to placate middle-schoolers as they return from recess. Take it for what it is: a Late Rossellini-ish oddity of the Kansas plains, unsettling and trance-like, a soft intro to the omnipresent American impulse for domination that gets a full-length expansion in both Chilly Scenes of Winter and Loden’s Wanda (1970). So many good filmmakers, then and now, have to go into TV to say anything with their singular voices or to receive funding—and this, they recognize, is a non-choice.

Not Much like Consent by Daniel Trilling for London Review of Books

Had to stop myself from highlighting this entire piece but this is particularly telling I think

‘Traditionally the police enforced the law against the working classes and were seen as servants of the middle and upper class,’ a former senior Met officer said to Harper. ‘Bad enough that the police were no longer deferential to the middle and upper class, but to turn on a Conservative Party politician was seen as the Met getting above their station.’

Ben Affleck on ‘Air’, New CEO Gig and Those Memes: “I Am Who I Am” by Rebecca Keegan for The Hollywood Reporter

Affleck has been quietly building a new production company, Artists Equity, with Damon, founded on the premise of profit-sharing among not only directors, producers and actors but also crewmembers such as cinematographers, editors and costume designers.

And one day of shooting with me and him. He was like, “Do you want to come shoot in my backyard?” I was like, “I think there are unions, Zack. I think we have to make a deal.” But I went and did it. And now [Zack Snyder’s Justice League] is my highest-rated movie on IMDb.

I look at golf like meth. They have better teeth, but it doesn’t seem like people ever come out of that. Once they start golfing, you just don’t ever see them again.

Stronger Together by Shonni Enelow for Film Comment

When I asked Silver about her early film career, what came across most strongly to me was her will to work: not to express something in particular, not even to make art, but to work—to get the chance to be competent, to succeed, to do a job well. She cast her frustration with the dearth of female directors in terms of labor equity: “It’s a job women can do.”

everything I've watched in however long it's been since the last one of these, part one by Helena Fitzgerald for griefbacon

Tom Cruise isn’t a dad. Tom Cruise is a credit card. Tom Cruise is test-driving a car that’s too fast and too expensive for you; Tom Cruise is when the car rental place sells out of normal cars and gives you a red Mustang convertible because it’s the only thing that’s left and then you realize that a Mustang convertible is a terrible car to actually drive. Tom Cruise is an instagram filter; Tom Cruise is when somebody brought coke to the party. Tom Cruise is that feeling I would sometimes get last summer when I would go out early in the morning and play basketball and then walk across the park to do a whole different workout and afterwards I’d walk back home with my giant water bottle and feel like I’d done it, I’d finally passed the Presidential Physical Fitness test. Tom Cruise is the President Physical Fitness test.

Watching this scene, though, the music felt sweat-drenched and sticky-bodied, like all the lights coming on in a room. It was flesh insisting its way out of clothes and the neighbors across the street leaving the shades up and the lights on while they fuck. For once I could understand more than academically that Elvis changed culture in a way more comparable to the advent of free porn on the internet than to Dylan plugging in his guitar at Newport. For one minute and fifty-one seconds, I could reach out my hand to join an unbroken line back down nearly a hundred years, and get a jolt of the same electric current that my grandparents might have felt when they were young, before my parents were born, before the rest of the twentieth century happened to them.

My parents and I moved west across the country around the time I started kindergarten. It was the 1990s, and California was still Hollywood. The company town was still Los Angeles, but the long arm of the magic of the movies spread all the way up Highway One into the green foggy hills along the Bay. People who had made their millions in the company town bought fuck-off homes high among the redwoods, and stained the movies all over the rest of the coast, while down in the foothills, former flower children were quietly inventing the internet and the end of this version of the world.

The Making of Tom Wambsgans by Alan Siegel for The Ringer

As the drama’s fourth and final season begins, Tom has transformed himself from a puffy-vest-wearing patsy into a power player. At the end of Season 1, his wife was pushing him into an open marriage on his wedding night, but at the end of Season 3, he’s the one ruthlessly playing both sides and shivving her—a shocking twist that wouldn’t feel believable without Macfadyen’s chameleonic performance. “He has a wonderful way, as an actor, of keeping secrets,” Mylod says. “The genius thing about what he holds back is it’s there, and you are reaching for it behind his eyes, so you can’t take your eyes off him because of that. That’s what always pulled me to the character. There’s this clown on the outside, but what are you hiding?”

“His shoes are highly polished, whereas Roman would never look down. For Tom, there’s a lot of posturing going on.”

To Let an Author Die: Remembering Sylvia Plath, 60 Years On by Jimin Kang for Los Angeles Review of Books

There is a journal entry from Plath’s time as a freshman at Smith in which she mulls the idea of life after death. She is unconvinced that her spirit “is unique and important enough” to continue into a heaven that is beautiful and blissful and pink. Yet she recalls Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French writer behind The Little Prince (1943), and his mourning of all lost lives, “the secret treasures” that these lives hold. “I loved Exupery,” Plath goes on to write, newly inspired by the mental wanderings that journaling enables. “I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death—mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.”

Books

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Far from my favourite Vonnegut — conceptually sort of interesting but not enough to sustain an entire book. It’s also quite egregiously racist and misogynist, which is not something I've noticed in his work before, although perhaps it runs through his entire oeuvre and I simply didn't pay attention to it as a teenager. Sucks to age out of artists you once loved!

“I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.”

My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.

“I got him fired,” said his wife. “The only piece of real evidence produced against him was a letter I wrote to the New York Times from Pakistan.”

“What did it say?”

“It said a lot of things,” she said, “because I was very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it.”

“I see.”

“But there was one sentence they kept coming back to again and again in the loyalty hearing,” sighed Minton. “‘Americans,’” he said, quoting his wife’s letter to the Times, “‘are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.’”

In the Cut by Susanna Moore

Markedly improved by Campion in the film version, which is one of my all-time favourites, but this is still a dirty, sexy, frightening piece of work. A wonderful evocation of a lost New York, before the towers fell and prices rose, when real people could still live in Manhattan and you might stumble upon a murderer getting a blowjob in a downtown bar.

They make these confessions to me in a shyly flirtatious way, as if they were trying to seduce me. Which, of course, they are. Not sexually, but almost sexually. It would be sexual if they knew any better. And someday they will. Know better.

Despite my interest in idiomatic language, however, I do not want them to use phonetic spelling. I do not want to see motherfucker spelled mothafucka. Not yet. Get it right first, I said, then you can do whatever you like. It’s like jazz. First learn to play the instrument.

He smiled, and I realized something that he already knew. I was nervous.

It was near morning, really. There was faint light behind the wooden shutters. It was that time when I am finally able to sleep the sweetest, the deepest. My skin feels smooth against the sheets and I wonder why it takes until dawn to feel so smooth. It is the same leg, the same sheet, as it was eight hours earlier.

“How do you know I’m a writer?” I asked.

“I can tell,” he said. “You’re making shit up in your head all the time.”

A decision, any decision, tends to bring flirtation to an end. Marriage, a quintessential decision, being a good example.

The story made me smile and I wondered if it made me smile because I wanted him to like me. I was a little worried when I realized that it was more than wanting him to like me. I realized that I wanted to be like him. “Yes,” I said. “It is a good reason to kill your wife. I mean, of all the reasons I can think of.” Wondering if I meant it. Worried that I meant it.

I reminded myself that Pauline says they have to despise us in order to come near us, in order to overcome their terrible fear of us. She has some very romantic ideas. I tried hard, but there must have been something a little pinched in my face, a momentary faltering, because Rodriguez said to me, “You’re one of those broads, right? You know, man, one of those feminist broads.” Working a lot of gender into one sentence.

There are some people, Pauline says, usually women, whom you can fuck only if you have permission to kill them immediately afterward.

I have many more words for the dictionary, a lot of them cop words now. (I find myself looking at cops on the street, in their cars, on horseback in the park. I walked past two young officers at the corner of Waverly and MacDougal where the men play chess, never any women playing, and I heard one cop ask the other, Do you use butter or margarine?) I never paid much attention to cops before, and if I did, I saw them as adversaries. Not unlike the way Detective Malloy sees women.

Pauline, who claims completely disingenuously to fuck only married men because she prefers to be alone on the holidays, began scolding me the moment our drinks arrived. It upsets her that I wear clothes that she considers so loose-fitting as to be like clown suits, and it upsets her that I do not have a boyfriend. She claims to understand why she does not have one, but she thinks it is preposterous that I don’t.

“I was corrupted in other ways. I was led to believe that intelligence made a difference.”

Unlike my students, Detective Malloy was all technique. Maybe too much technique. He had my permission to spell motherfucker any way he wanted.

My belated recognition of his desire actually served the purpose of provoking me to consider him, if only for a moment. It was like high school when just to hear that a boy liked you was sufficient encouragement to agree to go steady with him by the end of the day. Now that I think of it, it is just like life. Not high school.

One of the things that interests me about sex is that it is a conspiracy of improvised myths. Very effective in evoking forbidden or hidden wishes. I hadn’t realized I had so many of them until I met Jimmy Malloy. I still hold to the adolescent belief that one must surrender to the soul’s transformation, however terrifying it may be. However difficult it may be. But I am not a masochist. I know that.

“My childhood is like a dream,” I said. “I’m not sure it’s possible to look at it with too much expectation of meaning. I’m not even sure you’re supposed to. Expect too much from memory.”

“And you don’t mind?”

“No. In some ways it is a relief not to have to understand everything.”

“Killing is a very personal thing. Not like sex at all. It’s only the methodical killer who makes it a personal act. It’s not some drug dealer in Harlem blowing a hole in someone’s head because he happens to be on his block. This was premeditated. He watched her. He watched your friend. He followed her on the street. He knew her routine. Maybe he even spoke to her, spoke to the two of you, got into the same elevator, asked for directions in the subway. Maybe he bought her a drink in a bar and told the bartender not to tell her it was from him. Your friend gets her tequila and looks up and six different guys are staring at her down the bar.”

When I was fourteen and having a little trouble holding the attention of the son of the German ambassador to the Philippines, a mute boy (metaphorically mute) named Gunter, Augustina had said harshly, put yourself in his way, girl. If he’s coming down the boulevard, you got to lay there on the pavement in front of him so he is forced to step on you, so he will say, what are you doing there, girl?

What am I doing there? I'd asked her. I still don't know.

Music

February 2023 in media

2023-02-28T00:00:00Z

Everything I've read & watched this month. Highlights mark the really good stuff. Enjoy!

Film

C = cinema, W = watched for work, R = rewatch.
More here.

The Game (1997, dir David Fincher) (R)
EO (2022, dir Jerzy Skolimowski) (C)
L'Atalante (1934, dir Jean Vigo) (C)
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920, dir Robert Wiene) (C)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019, dir J. J. Abrams) (R)
Dick Tracy Special: Tracy Zooms In (2023, dir Warren Beatty & Chris Merrill)
Summer of Sam (1999, dir Spike Lee) (C)
Saint Omer (2022, dir Alice Diop) (C)
Exotica (1994, dir Atom Egoyan)
Trainspotting (1996, dir Danny Boyle) (R)
Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023, dir Steven Soderbergh) (C)
The Beach (2000, dir Danny Boyle)
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016, dir Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Taccone) (C, R)
The Fast and the Furious (2001, dir Rob Cohen)
Strange Days (1995, dir Kathryn Bigelow)
Marnie (1964, dir Alfred Hitchcock)
Creed (2015, dir Ryan Coogler)
Creed III (2023, dir Michael B. Jordan) (C, W)

TV

Poker Face S1
The Last of Us S1
Santa Clarita Diet S2-3
Lost S4-6

Music

Articles

The Internet is Broken. Can We Fix It? – A Review of Ben Tarnoff’s “Internet for the People” by Z.M.L. for LibrarianShipwreck

The Dirt on Pig-Pen by Elif Batuman for Astra

It isn’t the lines by Bee Wilson for London Review of Books

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson complains that the young Newman was more ‘mannered’ than Brando. ‘He seems to me an uneasy, self-regarding personality, as if handsomeness had left him guilty.’ The impression given by the memoir is that handsomeness caused him not guilt but shame. The prettier he was, the more he was the creature his narcissistic mother wanted him to be, which was something he both strived for and rejected.

One of their daughters, Lissy, told Hawke that Woodward ‘knew that her husband, who was really famous, deeply believed that she was a better actor than he was’. But being a ‘better actor’ doesn’t always equate to being a movie star, someone whose smile or frown can do strange things to us as we sit watching them in the dark. Vidal said that Newman was like Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda: ‘They are so good no one knows they are any good.’

The question that agonises Newman in the memoir is that of authentic emotion, what he calls his ‘core’. He told Stern that for years no one else was real to him, not even Woodward and his children. He agonised over the difference between the interior and exterior person, and worried that ‘the light that people are looking at is not the same light that you think you are emanating.’ How strange it must have felt to be inside those blue eyes. He was the one person in the world who would never know the sheer thrill of catching sight of Paul Newman, the film star. ‘When we’ve been walking down a street,’ Stern said,

one of the things I’ve often said to Paul is how unfortunate it is that he won’t look back at people who are looking at him. I get a glow by the time we’ve gone two blocks, and find myself smiling simply because of the pleasure in people’s faces at seeing him. And it’s something Paul won’t see because he won’t look.

Off His Royal Tits by Andrew O’Hagan for London Review of Books

In a world of royal enchantment, competitive PR, national myth-making and pure lies, the truth – if played loud enough – can seem like a human right eclipsing all others, and Harry has worked himself up to the point where truth is life and life is truth. (He’s been in California for a while. He’ll get over it when the tax bill arrives.)

He’s still trying to prove himself before the world, wielding the wooden sword, being patriotic, sticking up for the queen and his ‘Mother Country’, but the truths unfurled in his book can only reveal the spurious nature of these things. The royal family’s complicity with the press is not temporary and it is not accidental; it means there can be no family, only pairs, or individuals, coiled around courtiers. To think of it as a family is to ignore the poison that courses through the whole thing. Harry wants them to be angrier at the press, to stand up for him and Meghan against it, but he fails to see that his needs, and his wife’s, make his brother and his father dislike him, and so British journalism is left to embody all his feelings of being hunted and isolated, giving the press a force it would not otherwise have had.

There’s an unresolved childishness at play here. He wants to be drinking Smirnoff Ice with his mates, going on the Tube, taking coke, snogging his girlfriend in Soho House, but he also wants the other stuff – the life of the royal, the titles for his kids – and his need for all that threatens to drag his more serious concerns into the shallows. When he was about to introduce Meghan to his dad, he asked her to wear her hair down, because ‘Pa likes it when women wear their hair down.’ She should also avoid wearing too much make-up because ‘Pa didn’t approve of women who wear a lot.’ If you’re Harry, it takes genius to be ordinary, and he’s only halfway there, still agitating for approval. In his account of the years of his trauma, he mentions nothing about what was actually happening in Britain, noticing not one thing about the conditions under which people live. The book makes it clear that Harry has been treated badly, but it also makes clear he thinks about nothing else.

Maybe So, Sir, but Not Today: The Fragile Humanity of Top Gun: Maverick by Tom Ralston for Bright Wall/Dark Room

From the moment Tom Cruise’s titular Maverick enters the film, Kosinski frames him as fragile, small. We see him from a distance, dwarfed by a plane in the foreground—and then by his motorcycle. We peer at his older body, out of focus in frame, as our attention is directed to old photographs in which he was young, unblemished, unwrinkled. He is carefully, deliberately introduced as inseparable from the giant forces and objects his body is in thrall to: the military, oversized metal vessels, vehicles that offer no protection of the flesh from the impact of the road, the inexorable march of years. In the exhilarating opening sequence where Maverick attempts to achieve—and then surpass—Mach 10 (a speed that no human alive has ever come close to traveling), the camera pulls out from his POV to a surprisingly quiet, universal one: the plane passing softly across the globe’s surface. Maverick is the fastest man alive, but he’s still tiny when viewed from the stars.

As we age, moments we can’t move past begin to accumulate in odd corners, dust bunnies of resignation and panic, resistant to any broom. Perhaps I am not saying anything new here; but that, too, is its own sign of aging—the tendency to repeat what you realize you have already become notoriously boring for repeating. Top Gun: Maverick could feel predictable and clichéd in the hands of lesser actors, a lesser crew; it would have been all too easy to roll your eyes and dismiss it as throwback American military propaganda (as some have done). And yet. The imagery unfolding onscreen seems, to me, not less patriotic, but scarier, smaller, sadder: the waning potential of the complex and burdened human in a sea of clean, mechanical, bureaucratized procedure.

At times during the final 30 minutes, I found myself wondering if Maverick would die. It would be a controversial move, but one I thought the film had earned. What better way to honor this immortal character than by sealing him permanently in the spectacular living mausoleum that is a film? (I think of Shakespeare, cheekily noting in Sonnet 18’s final couplet that by writing a poem about his loved one’s beauty, he has preserved that beauty eternally in the lines of the poem.) But, of course, it’s not death itself that Maverick’s emotional arc mandates—it’s the willingness to die for someone else. To bring closure to the cycle of grief and guilt.

Puzzled Puss by John Lahr for London Review of Books

Keaton had been on the stage longest, risen the highest, fallen the furthest, and, thanks to the medium of film which preserved his artistry, left the most indelible legacy. ‘He was,’ Orson Welles said, ‘as we’re now beginning to realise, the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema.’

The motion picture camera turned the world into Keaton’s playpen. ‘The camera allowed you to show your audience the real thing,’ he said, ‘real trains, horses and wagons, snowstorms, floods. Nothing you could stand on, feel, or see was beyond the range of the camera.’ For Keaton, a film location was a field day: ‘You only had to turn me loose on the set and I’d have material in two minutes, because I’d been doing it all my life. I turned out to be Arbuckle’s whole writing staff for gags.’

‘I used to daydream an awful lot,’ he said. ‘I’ve done that so often in pictures. I could get carried away and visualise all the fairylands in the world.’ The comedies have the surreal logic of being in a dream awake. Keaton mined the world around him for laughs, including the means of his own production. ‘He began by calling direct attention to the camera – to its lens, to its frame, to the flat screen on which its images would be projected,’ Walter Kerr wrote. Even in his first starring two-reeler, One Week, Keaton made film itself part of the joke. As Buster’s new bride reaches out of the bath in their zany DIY house, a hand is suddenly put over the camera’s intrusive artificial eye to preserve her ‘privacy’. The laugh is about tact; but the design and the timing of the gag is another kind of tact, the fancy footwork of Keaton’s clowning delivering the knockout punch.

Harrison Ford: “I Know Who the F*** I Am” by James Hibberd for The Hollywood Reporter

Your fans online have done some armchair diagnosis, looking at things you’ve said about being shy in social situations and some of your talk show appearances. Some assume you’ve wrestled with social anxiety disorder. Are they onto something?

Shit. That sounds like something a psychiatrist would say, not a casual observer. No. I don’t have a social anxiety disorder. I have an abhorrence of boring situations. I was shy when I first went onstage — I wasn’t shy, I was fucking terrified. My knees would shake so badly, you could see it from the back of the theater. But that’s not social anxiety. That’s being unfamiliar with the territory. I was able to talk myself through that and then enjoy the experience of being onstage and telling a story with collaborators.

There’s this thing called “match the hatch.” It’s when there’s a natural bug in the air the fish are eating and you use an artificial fly that’s the same color. I have a protective coloration. I try to blend in. That’s what I do. When I’m getting dressed, if people are going to be wearing a suit, I wear a suit. If people are wearing blue jeans, I’m wearing blue jeans. I’m comfortable in all kinds of company. If they’re serious, I’m serious. They’re not serious, I’m not serious. And if they’re too fucking serious, I’m not serious. (Laughs.) I don’t know why people have an expectation of me. I come in all colors. I don’t know who’s going to show up. But it’s usually me and it looks familiar.

The Last of Us Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation by Andrea Long Chu for Vulture

But the question was never whether The Last of Us would make for compelling television, since anyone who had played it could tell you it basically already was that. The real question, buried in the praise, was why a story with such cinematic ambitions had bothered being a video game to begin with.

The mistake here, common enough even among those literate in video games, is the breezy conflation of interactivity with control, as if the simple fact of player choice were any surer guarantee of efficacy than the existence of choice in real life. It’s true you can’t alter the content of a television show just by watching it, but too great an emphasis on this will obscure the fact that the same is true of many video games. The Last of Us has sometimes been called an “interactive movie” by fans and detractors alike — a faintly damning term that implies, ironically, a dearth of consequential interaction between players and the game. And it’s true: As a game about difficult moral choices, it gives the player none. There are no plot decisions, no dialogue options; there is no open world. The weight of choice is felt instead during the mundane task of inventory management, where every bullet and clean rag is precious. Meanwhile, Joel is Joel, violent and gentle, and players cannot overrule his decisions short of turning off the game and going outside to play.

Fifty Years On, A Hard Day’s Night Is Still Revelatory by Stephanie Zacherak for Village Voice

One of those girls, a blonde with a round, heartbreakingly readable face, touched Lester deeply. He would later refer to her as the “white rabbit,” and the camera finds its way back to her over and over, because it just can’t stay away. Her face is tear streaked; she can’t believe what she’s seeing, she can’t stand it even just one more moment, but she wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world. She mouths George’s name, a mute prayer.

I know nothing about this girl, who, I presume and hope, grew up to be a woman. But I can’t help superimposing her experience of this moment, of this band, onto mine. Did we get the life the Beatles promised us—at no small cost to themselves — of love and despair, heartbreak and elation, disappointment and exuberance? I want to ask her, as I ask myself, now on the far side of the beginning of everything, Was it all you hoped it would be? No. Absolutely not. And yes, a thousand times over.

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web by Ted Chiang for The New Yorker

This is what ChatGPT does when it’s prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence: it is taking two points in “lexical space” and generating the text that would occupy the location between them. (“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one to separate his garments from their mates, in order to maintain the cleanliness and order thereof. . . .”) ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

Most of the correct answers that GPT-3 gives are not found on the Web—there aren’t many Web pages that contain the text “245 + 821,” for example—so it’s not engaged in simple memorization. But, despite ingesting a vast amount of information, it hasn’t been able to derive the principles of arithmetic, either. A close examination of GPT-3’s incorrect answers suggests that it doesn’t carry the “1” when performing arithmetic. The Web certainly contains explanations of carrying the “1,” but GPT-3 isn’t able to incorporate those explanations. GPT-3’s statistical analysis of examples of arithmetic enables it to produce a superficial approximation of the real thing, but no more than that.

I think there’s a simpler explanation. Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

What advertising does to TV. by Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker

Books

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

I liked my apartment because all of the windows were at street level. In the summer, I could see people’s shoes, and in the winter, snow. Once, as I lay in bed, a bright red sun appeared in the window. It bounced from side to side, then became a ball.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

Of course, I thought of the drunkard boy in New Orleans, the one I loved best. Each night at the old sailors’ bar, I’d peel the labels off his bottles and try to entice him homeward. But he wouldn’t come. Not until light came through the window.

That one was so beautiful I used to watch him sleep. If I had to sum up what he did to me, I’d say it was this: he made me sing along to all the bad songs on the radio. Both when he loved me and when he didn’t.

You called me. I called you. Come over, come over, we said.

I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.

The Manicheans believed the world was filled with imprisoned light, fragments of a God who destroyed himself because he no longer wished to exist. This light could be found trapped inside man and animals and plants, and the Manichean mission was to try to release it. Because of this, they abstained from sex, viewing babies as fresh prisons of entrapped light.

My husband reads the book to her every night, including very very slowly the entire copyright page.

Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.

I had this idea in the middle of the night that maybe I could stop working for the almost astronaut and get a job writing fortune cookies instead. I could try to write really American ones. Already, I’ve jotted down a few of them.

Objects create happiness.
The animals are pleased to be of use.
Your cities will shine forever.
Death will not touch you.

I send my fortunes to the philosopher. He writes back immediately. I am interested in bankrolling you. But I only have $27 in checking.

“Do you know why I love you?” my daughter asks me. She is floating in the bathwater, her head lathered white. “Why?” I say. “Because I am your mother,” she tells me.

I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

It’s different, of course, with the art monsters. They are always elsewhere.

It was quite difficult to reach Rilke. He had no house, no address where one could find him, no steady lodging or office. He was always on his way through the world and no one, not even he himself, knew in advance which direction it would take.

Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business. Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

The following is a quote from Ann Druyan talking about the creation of the Voyager Golden Record:

In the course of my daunting search for the single most worthy piece of Chinese music, I phoned Carl and left a message at his hotel in Tucson … An hour later the phone rang in my apartment in Manhattan. I picked it up and heard a voice say: “I got back to my room and found a message that said Annie called. And I asked myself, why didn’t you leave me that message ten years ago?”

Bluffing, joking, I responded lightheartedly. “Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Carl.” And then, more soberly, “Do you mean for keeps?"

“Yes, for keeps,” he said tenderly. “Let’s get married.”

“Yes,” I said, and that moment we felt we knew what it must be like to discover a new law of nature.

She talks instead about how she went into a laboratory just two days after that phone call. She was hooked up to a computer and began to meditate. All the data from her brain and heart was turned into sound for the Golden Record.

To the best of my abilities I tried to think about the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.

How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

January 2023 in media

2023-01-31T00:00:00Z

Everything I've read & watched this month. Highlights mark the really good stuff. Enjoy!

Film

C = cinema, W = watched for work, R = rewatch.
More here.

Shadows in Paradise (1986, dir Aki Kaurismaki)
Bell, Book and Candle (1958, dir Richard Quine)
Rocky (1976, dir John G. Avildsen)
Slap Shot (1977, dir George Roy Hill)
Corsage (2022, dir Marie Kreutzer) (C)
Babylon (2022, dir Damien Chazelle) (C, W)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946, dir Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) (C)
Sleepy Hollow (1999, dir Tim Burton) (R)
The Fabelmans (2022, dir Steven Spielberg) (C, W)
Wendell & Wild (2022, dir Henry Selick)
The Sixth Sense (1999, dir M. Night Shyamalan)
The Incident (1967, dir Larry Peerce)
M3GAN (2022, dir Gerard Johnstone) (C)
Knock at the Cabin (2023, dir M. Night Shyamalan) (C, W)
Forty Guns (1957, dir Samuel Fuller)
Party Girl (1995, dir Daisy von Scherler Mayer)
JFK (1991, dir Oliver Stone)
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022, dir Laura Poitras) (C)

TV

Lost S1-4
Santa Clarita Diet S1
The Terror S1
Mare of Easttown

Music

Articles

From Strength Comes Forth Sweetness: "Top Gun: Maverick" and Tom Cruise's Terribilità by David Garry Hughes for Mubi Notebook

the one horse & the nextover by Anne Boyer

To be from a place where slowness unfurls in all its cinematic extremity and loneliness is lit by the single stoplight hanging over the town's only meaningful intersection is to have always arrived from near-nil, that is, to have become something from nearly nothing, unlike all of those who were born something and somewhere and therefore display no superiority of character. One-horsers can brag, that they, like Adam, were formed by the lord's own hands from the naked dirt. To rise up from the rural slowness, as if it were primordial ooze, is, if not heroic, at the least mythopoetical enough for a night at the bar.

By the Bomb’s Filmic Light by Nicholas Russell for The Baffler

Out of this frenetic time came films that span from the grave to the ridiculous. Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) examines the generational and philosophic weight of the bombing of Hirsohima through an interracial relationship between a French woman named Elle and a Japanese man named Lui. Like Winter Light, Resnais’s film holds the bomb itself at a distance while still engaging deeply with its implications; wonder, ambivalence, and fear pervade the conversations between Elle and Lui. “What did Hiroshima mean to you, in France?” Lui asks. “The end of the war . . . completely, I mean. Amazement that they dared, amazement that they succeeded. And for us, the start of an unknown fear. Then indifference. And fear of that indifference.”

Yet both Winter Light and First Reformed share a common conclusion, more by negative representation than outright duplication. Bergman instills haunting ambiguity in his priest’s closing actions as Tomas presides over an empty church service, together with his ex-lover, the organist, and faithful sexton; allegedly freed from the delusions of religion, Tomas still goes through the motions. Schrader’s priest Ernst is on the verge of detonating a bomb during his service in protest against an energy mogul who patronizes the church. Ernst is bitterly defeated—though his faith remains shakily intact. Laura Kane, writing in Commonweal about these two films, notes, “This doubt finds expression through art because there is no theology that can articulate with sufficient intimacy and nuance the sense of disillusionment these characters feel. It cannot be resolved, systematically, doctrinally, or otherwise. Narrative art, whether novels or movies, offers an honest depiction of the spiritual displacement of modernity, and gives voice to its intense loneliness.”

The lasting impression, instead, is that of a communal holding-on. “If only we could feel safe and dare show each other tenderness,” Marta says to Tomas. Both films turn on a forgoing of choice and agency, on the futility of individual effort in the face of the unfathomable. After all, First Reformed forces its audience to contend with a destruction that is all but assured, whereas Winter Light circles round a possibility of unknown time or circumstance. And both films depict a kind of truism: that to look at the death hurtling toward us is to invite hopelessness into our lives.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top 10 for Criterion Current

Books

Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

He watched Torval bend a hand to the side of his head, listening to the person who was speaking into his ear bud. He knew these devices were already vestigial. They were degenerate structures. Maybe not the handgun just yet. But the word itself was lost in blowing mist.

"Put a stick of gum in your mouth and try not to chew it. For someone your age, with your gifts, there's only one thing in the world worth pursuing professionally and intellectually. What is it, Michael? The interaction between technology and capital. The inseparability.”

Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a woman who wants to live shamelessly in her body. Tell me this is not the truth. You want to follow your body into idleness and fleshiness. That's why you have to run, to escape the drift of your basic nature.

When I try to suppress my anger, I suffer spells of hwabyung (Korea). This is cultural panic mainly, which I caught on the Internet.

I did not read for pleasure, even as a child. I never read for pleasure. Take this any way you will. I think about myself too much. I study myself. It sickens me. But this is all there is to me. I'm nothing else. My so-called ego is a little twisted thing that's probably not so different from yours but at the same time I can say confidently that it's active and bursting with importance and has major defeats and triumphs all the time. I have a stationary bike with a missing pedal that someone left on the street one night.

He was hungry, he was half starved. There were days when he wanted to eat all the time, talk to people's faces, live in meat space.

The man waited for a response. Eric was looking past him at a large shop window, one of the few on the street not showing rows of precious metal set with gems. He felt the street around him, unremitting, people moving past each other in coded moments of gesture and dance. They tried to walk without breaking stride because breaking stride is well-meaning and weak but they were forced sometimes to sidestep and even pause and they almost always averted their eyes. Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational. Who steps aside for whom, who looks or does not look at whom, what level of umbrage does a brush or a touch constitute? No one wanted to be touched. There was a pact of untouchability. Even here, in the huddle of old cultures, tactile and close-woven, with passersby mixed in, and security guards, and shoppers pressed to windows, and wandering fools, people did not touch each other.

Maybe she was middling, desperately unexceptional. She was better-looking back in the bookstore when he'd thought she was someone else. He began to understand that they'd invented her beauty together, conspiring to assemble a fiction that worked to their mutual maneuverability and delight. They'd married in the shroud of this unspoken accord. They needed the final term in the series. She was rich, he was rich; she was heir-apparent, he was self-made; she was cultured, he was ruthless; she was brittle, he was strong; she was gifted, he was brilliant; she was beautiful. This was the core of their understanding, the thing they needed to believe before they could be a couple.

"But we have to give the word a little leeway. Adapt it to the current situation. Because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.”

Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights? The regulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors that tell you how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it's worth it. The number justifies itself.”

"Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. This is why something will happen soon, maybe today," she said, looking slyly into her hands. "To correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less.”

"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."

"Its own grave-diggers," he said.

"But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside.”

A RAT BECAME THE UNIT OF CURRENCY

It took him a moment to absorb the words and identify the line. He knew the line of course. It was out of a poem he'd been reading lately, one of the few longer poems he'd chosen to investigate, a line, half a line from the chronicle of a city under siege.

It was exhilarating, his head in the fumes, to see the struggle and ruin around him, the gassed men and women in their defiance, waving looted Nasdaq T-shirts, and to realize they'd been reading the same poetry he'd been reading.

There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture's innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it.

"People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They're melting into the texture of everyday life. This is true or not?”

"There you sit, of large visions and prideful acts. Why die when you can live on disk? A disk, not a tomb. An idea beyond the body. A mind that's everything you ever were and will be, but never weary or confused or impaired. It's a mystery to me, how such a thing might happen. Will it happen someday? Sooner than we think because everything happens sooner than we think. Later today perhaps. Maybe today is the day when everything happens, for better or worse, ka-boom, like that.”

The woman looked away when he approached. It was Elise, noncommittally, in profile. "You smoke since when."

She answered without turning to face him, speaking from a seeming distance.

"I took it up when I was fifteen. It's one of those things a girl takes up. It tells her she's more than a skinny body no one looks at. There's a certain drama in her life."

"She notices herself. Then other people notice her. Then she marries one of them. Then they go to dinner,” he said.

But he felt old, watching them dance. An era had come and gone without him. They melted into each other so they wouldn't shrivel up as individuals.

"Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.”

When I was employed I kept small accounts at five major banks. The names of major banks are breathtaking in the mind and there are branches all over town. I used to go to different banks or to branches of the same bank. I had episodes where I went from branch to branch well into the night, moving money between accounts or just checking my balances. I entered codes and examined numbers. The machine takes us through the steps. The machine says, Is this correct? It teaches us to think in logic blocks.

It's hard for me to speak directly to people. I used to try to tell the truth. But it's hard not to lie. I lie to people because this is my language, how I talk. It's the temperature inside the head of who I am. I don't aim remarks at the person I'm speaking to but try to miss him, or glance a remark so to speak off his shoulder.

After a time I began to take satisfaction in this. It was never in me to mean what I said. Every unnecessary lie was another way to build a person. I see this clearly now.

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?

He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn't realized this could happen to him. The moment was empty of urgency and purpose. He hadn't planned on this. Where was the life he'd always led? There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all directions were the same?

He liked that, the sound of wind knocking through the rooms and halls. He liked the two rats he saw moving toward the food nearby. The rats were good. The rats were fine and right, thematically sound.

I've seen a hundred situations like this. A man and a gun and a locked door. My mother used to take me to the movies. After my father died my mother took me to the movies. This is what we did as a parent and a child. And I saw two hundred situations where a man stands outside a locked room with a gun in his hand. My mother could tell you the actor's name in every case. He stands the way I'm standing, back to the wall. He is ramrod straight and he holds the gun the way I'm holding the gun, pointed up. Then he turns and kicks open the door. The door is always locked and he always kicks it open. These were old movies and new movies. Didn't matter. There was the door, there was the kick. She could tell you the actor's middle name, his marital history, the name of the rest home where his abandoned mother dozes in a chair. Always a single kick suffices. The door flies open at once.

Because no matter what kind of movie we went to, it was a spy thriller, it was a western, it was a romance, it was a comedy, there was always a man with a gun outside a locked room who was ready to kick in the door. At first I didn't care about their relationship. But now I'm thinking they did amazing things because why else would he want to whisper her name to his handgun?

How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die?

"All right. I don't have the manhood to know these names. Men know these names. You have the experience of manhood. I can't think that far ahead. It's all I can do to be a person.”

He looked at Benno. He covered the watch with his good hand. He thought about his wife. He missed Elise and wanted to talk to her, tell her she was beautiful, lie, cheat on her, live with her in middling matrimony, having dinner parties and asking what the doctor said.