Hollywood special-effects magician Ray Harryhausen died this week at 93, recalling an era of cinematic creatures that were not just built out of zeroes and ones and were at once cheesier and more captivating because of it. Harryhausen in his turn was inspired by the original King Kong movie, with its stop-motion animation by Willis H. O’Brien.
In the song above, Daniel Johnston retells the tale of Kong, O’Brien and Harryhausen in an a capella recitation vaguely smelling of the blues. In the version below, Tom Waits pays tribute to Johnston but also fulfills the song’s potential by bringing the full blues ape-stank, just as R.H. built upon W.H.O’B.
When I was a kid I thought King Kong was pretty much the saddest movie ever, so I preferred the later Mighty Joe Young, which O’Brien also designed, but which gives the ape a happy ending.
As Carl noted last week month, we like our year-end lists untimely here. We also like them extremely long – scrolling backwards now, to the tune of thousands and thousands of words. I don’t mean to abandon that tradition, only to get a little pointillist, and focus on isolated textures, moods, moments. Why the conceit? It was a pleasantly messy 2012. There is no order.
Future, “Same Damn Time”
Motivational rapper and outer space enthusiast Future had such a surfeit of material last year that he was able to release an actually good bonus album, but my favourite song was this ode to multitasking, recorded in an idiosyncratic tone of frustrated triumph. And what’s more integral to hip-hop than polysemy? “I am fluid, mercurial.”
The Clock, by Christian Marclay (2010)
I saw less than half of Christian Marclay’s celluloid stopwatch during its run at a local gallery, but completism would be missing the point. Spliced together from thousands of film clips that display or mention or unwittingly pun on the moment in time when you see them, The Clock is a mesmerizing totality, grandly incidental. There are countdowns from action movies – the kind of plot hinges that Barthes called a narrative’s “cardinal functions” – and clocks ticking away in the background, details captured accidentally, like fossils. There are ornate towers and eerie chimes and blearily regarded alarms. Marclay’s piece moves in overlapping polyrhythms: amidst the march towards some climactic stroke, one notices little repetitions, hourly patterns, images connected with a nimble cut. People get most excited about noon and midnight, because who doesn’t love a good reckoning?
I didn’t witness either. On Nuit Blanche, I lined up for The Clock well before 12:00 but only got in long minutes after that. In retrospect, though, I think missing the big culmination gave me a greater appreciation of what followed it. Beyond midnight, the film drifts ever further into unreality. Diners and bars grow desolate. Ominous things happen at parties. If people managed to fall asleep at all, they’re woken up by unpromising phone calls. The sex becomes increasingly desperate, and sometimes hotter. Vincent Price puts in multiple appearances. Around 3 or 4 am, harmonizing with its exhausted audience, The Clock turns luridly hallucinatory – I still remember a sequence of impalement via levitating ornamental pyramid. As dawn broke, I jerked my head up from the flicker-lit sofa and saw Margaux crossing the room to relax in front. I left soon afterwards, almost felt like I needed to, to complete the moment. It was as if Marclay’s meticulous, monumental reworking had begun to synchronize the very universe.
Jacob Lusk & The R. Kelly All-Stars at Pop Montreal
I saw R. Kelly himself last year as well, and while if it was a screening rather than a performance, he did lead the audience in an a capella rendition of “I Believe I Can Fly,” after which we triumphantly ascended into paradise. Several months before that, however, Jacob Lusk left a more lingering mark on me by rescuing Kells from irony. Some subset of the fans who made Trapped in the Closet a mid-2000s Internet phenomenon gave the unsettling impression that they were laughing at its creator, as if a black R&B singer couldn’t possibly tell jokes he was in on. Eschewing that material for earlier cuts such as “Bump N’ Grind,” his pants evoking gaudy temple walls, Lusk paid Chicago’s horniest a giggly respect. The former American Idol contestant even got a very white, very Montreal crowd to two-step. It was fitting that he and his backing band (local indie types) dwelled on their inspiration’s gospel leanings, because the covers set was equally buoyant and reverent.
I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus (published 1997)
So far I’ve told “our” story twice, late last night, as fully as I could, to Fred Dewey and Sabrina Ott. It’s the story of 250 letters, my “debasement”, jumping headlong off a cliff. Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? What hooks me on our story is our different readings of it. You think it’s personal and private; my neurosis. “The greatest secret in the world is, THERE IS NO SECRET.” Claire Parnet and Gilles Deleuze. I think our story is performative philosophy.
Not the world’s greatest, but a secret nonetheless: this book is, among other things, really fucking funny.
Shoshanna, woman of Girls
I think my appreciation of Lena Dunham’s one-woman WPA for cultural writers is more complicated than Carl’s or Margaux’s, but the pinkish anxiety cluster played by Zosia Mamet is one part I do love without ambivalence. Over the course of 2013’s second season, she developed from an innocent-naif caricature into this emphatically self-possessed neurotic, a comic persona that felt entirely new. You could see it in embryo last year, though, when Mamet’s timing was briskest or her awkwardness extra-expressive. I always think of the early scene where she’s watching some shitty reality series called Baggage, and Dunham cheerfully asks what her baggage would be (for that is the conceit of the show), and Shosh replies: “That I’m a virgin…obviously…” So much nervy restiveness in a single adverb.
The Capsule, a film by Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2012
For its high-fashion fantasy, its juxtaposition of Gothic cruelty and sudden dance sequences, but perhaps most of all for its pompadoured goats. (Hoofed animals are a B2TW year-end-list favourite.)
James Adomian at the Comedy Bar, Toronto
The list of male standup comedians I can watch talking about gender/sexuality/etc without cringing every few minutes is a lot shorter than the number who’ve made me chuckle at some point, so it was nice to expand the former last year. That’s partly because James Adomian is gay, I’m sure – he has a hilarious bit about homophobic beer ads co-opting straight women for their watery purposes – but not as much as every single profile of the guy suggests. His focus on impressions seems integral, in that he considers famous or memorable people not only as challenges of mechanical imitation but as cultural signifiers too. Mimicking Sam Elliott, Adomian captured both his laconic rumble and the pantomime of American masculinity it represents. (“He sounds like a dad who ate another dad.”) By the time he reached a virtuosic climax, channeling all the caricatured gay villains he loves – Kaa the python as reptilian Truman Capote, Vincent Price introducing his “curious associate” Raoul – I was laughing so often that it wasn’t really laughter at all, just an open-mouthed ache.
Carly Rae Jepsen, Kiss
The thing about getting involved with somebody from the Internet, as I did more than once last year, is that the situation foregrounds its own absurdities. (I don’t mean Internet dating, which is weird in its own way, just more standardized.) The thing about Carly Rae Jepsen’s album is, not to diminish indelible #1 2012 single “Call Me Maybe” or those sprinting strings, but it has nine other songs that are almost as good. The thing about those tracks was how their liminal relationships and uptempo uncertainty and omens of kisses all matched the cartoon emotions of romance filtered through social media, with its constant yet selective flow. And the thing about “This Kiss” is that it sounds like a marginally less horny “Little Red Corvette.” Before you came into my life I missed you so bad.
Building Stories, by Chris Ware
I mean, look at it:
A graphic novel is of course much more than its physical dimensions – and less, too, because Building Stories collects a decade of comics into 14 different segments of varying formats and possible configurations. Whatever narrative you form with them, it follows the lives of residents in the titular Chicago edifice, the structure itself, and one neurotic, sexually bipolar boy-bee. The central character is vivid enough to make her wistfulness infectious: a failed artist but fulfilled mother, only occasionally delusional, whose dark humour dwells on her imperfect body. The story she ends up writing is her own, a memoir pieced together from haltingly remembered moments, and I found it so moving that I tried to produce a minor tribute. You’ve just finished reading it.
Kevin is a high school student who kills many of his classmates with a bow and arrow in a nightmarish lock-down at the local high school. The movie is mostly about his mother, Eva.
The movie is seductive and strange. Sometimes it seems like a regular indie-drama and sometimes it seems like a horror movie. Part of the narrative is told through non-sequential flashbacks. These mostly focus on the relationship between Kevin and Eva. The scenes skip around from the morning of the killings to Kevin’s conception to the family’s breakfast table.
There is one scene with Eva participating in a tomato festival somewhere far away. It’s one of the few flashbacks where she is without her family. She’s alone, in a mob, covered, along with the rest of the mob, in the bloody mush of tomatoes. She looks euphoric. It’s a very unusual image – Eva covered in the red pulp, limp and being lifted by strangers. It suggests something sacred – or sinister. It echoes the high school massacre in colour and confusion.
The rest of the scenes take place after the massacre. They mostly involve Eva being villainized by herself and by her community for the horrendous crimes of her son. She doesn’t defend herself; she accepts the assumed punishment – straight to hell.
It still seems to be the most condoned form of misogyny to blame the mother for the sins and deficiencies of ourselves and others. And though it is becoming less fashionable to argue that nurture trumps nature, to defend Freud’s traditional psychotherapy, or to assume woman as the primary nurturers in a family, we, in the early 21st century audience, still understand that it would be outrageous if the mother tried to defend herself. We, and Eva, know there is absolutely no room for that.
So, Eva, ostracized, villainized and terrorized by her community, survives and lives and carries on.
The very exciting part of this movie is that instead of an eventual redemption offered by the arc of a traditional narrative, we are instead offered a more absolute redemption in the form of shifting perspective. It’s as though the director, Lynn Ramsay, managed to create a Gestalt-like optical illusion here in movie form.
In one moment, you are watching a intelligent indie-drama about a mother-son relationship gone terribly wrong; in another, you see a horror movie about a child born evil.
It’s not even that the movie moves back and forth between two different genres – it is just our own eyes deciding which way to see things at any particular moment. In either direction, the vision comes fully formed. The clues for both perspectives are in every scene: an ever-present bottle of wine next to Eva at the dinner table – the dinner table where Kevin gazes at his mother with sadistic eyes that he only lets her see.
As we watch the indie-drama, we see a mother who might have gotten some things wrong, or who might have some wrong things inside herself. As we watch the horror movie, we feel the thrill of the “bad seed” trope being used in the service of a reckless feminist fantasy – or, at least, a counter-misogynistic one: Some babies are just born bad, let us all marvel at the evil, let us remove our persistent gaze from the mother. Lynn Ramsay is the master of the bold and reckless feminist fantasy movie.
The scene of Eva alone at the tomato festival is an interesting one for these alternating visions. When you see the horror movie, you see a successful travel writer’s euphoric connection with the world outside the family – a scene far from trouble and pain.
When your eyes adjust to the indie-drama, you see a woman covered in red, engaged in a bizarre act of self-indulgence or abandon, or an act that maybe comes out of some need, small and twisted inside of her, that makes her seek such unusual forms of euphoria so far away from home; an act that foreshadows, in colour and perversity, her sons horrific crimes.
The slogan of B2TW is “Untimely Talk About Culture,” so while we like doing year-end best-of lists, we like to wait a while with them, like till after Chinese New Year so everyone’s more on the same page. Sorry that’s so inconvenient for Christmas shopping. Margaux posted hers last week, Carl’s is today, and Chris’s will be next week. Hope you enjoy.
1. BackStory podcast
I’m pleased this list begins with maybe the geekiest thing on it – what’s more, not produced in any conventional cultural capital but at the University of Virginia.
The M.O. of the weekly podcast and public-radio show BackStory is simple: It seizes on a topic in the recent news (or an occasion such as Thanksgiving or the election) and squeezes it through the wringer of American history. The chatty and casual hosts are three UV history professors, the “American History Guys”: “18th-Century Guy,” “19th-Century Guy” and “20th-Century Guy.” The latter has the rawest deal because the other two are kinda automatically fascinating. Though they are all white men, they invite female historians most often as their guest experts and they are highly conscious of the racial dimension of American history, as how could you not be.
Drugs, gun control, voting, infectious disease, the postal service, attempts to control the weather, presidential inaugurations, courtship, public education – just start with whatever most gets your attention. You will find out that colonial Americans were basically drunk all the time and Christmas was illegal. You will fill up your store of “Did you know?” stories for any dull moment in conversation. And you will be trained painlessly in historical thinking: that it was never “ever thus,” that most stories have so many sides that they are smooth ungraspable spheres and that common knowledge is often neither. This should comfort you in the bleakest moments and vice-versa.
2. Borgen, Season 1 (TV series, Denmark, 2010)
The glut of great Danish television is no secret by now; the country seems to be picking up from HBO’s 2000s in the 2010s. This drama about Birgitte Noyberg, who nearly by accident becomes the first Danish female prime minister (which proved prescient), is tense, enlightened, funny and human. The acting is as good as the furniture and the political analysis better than most journalism. (“Borgen” means “the Castle,” which is what Danes call the main government building.) The episode in which Noyberg has to deal with a scandal in Greenland – which is basically to Denmark what Nunavut is to Canada – treated aboriginal issues more perceptively than I could ever hope for on a Canadian series. It was wrenching.
3. Dead Authors Podcast, Chapter 12, with Laraine Newman and Paul F. Tompkins
Character comedian Paul F. Tompkins is the single funniest person to hear on any of the endless flood of comedy podcasts that come from L.A. now. I was disappointed at first with this literary-history series, in which the conceit is that H.G. Wells (Tompkins) uses his time machine to kidnap writers from the past (played by other comedians) and interview them in the 21st century. It seemed flat and mumbly early on. But then I heard this episode, with a live audience, and with first-generation Saturday Night Live comedian Laraine Newman impersonating Mary Shelley, discussing feminism and Frankenstein and what pricks the Romantics were. And more recently, the latest one with Jen Kirkman gender-bending into the role of Abbie Hoffman going on endlessly about “pigs.” Again, with a live audience.
It seems difficult to do really good improvisation without an audience or at least more participants – it’s difficult to keep a two-person feedback loop going in a vacuum unless you are Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, or having sex (or both). In any case I love the tension between mockery and respect here. Kids would get more out of books in school if we told them their writers were not only great but also nuts, and had lives that were amazing and also ridiculous. Just like theirs.
4. James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (published 2005)
I’m excited about the upcoming first book by my friend John Shaw in Seattle, which is about the intertwined histories and meanings of the songs This Land is Your Land and God Bless America. He told me many times that Evening in the Palace of Reason is the best book about music he ever read. This summer, I finally started it, on a stay at my friend Julia’s cottage. I read it all night and all day; I don’t think I even stopped to go swimming.
Like John’s book, it’s a double-threaded story: It weaves together the backgrounds of two Prussian dynasties, the Bach family and the Hohenzollern line of rulers, leading of course to J.S. and Frederick the Great, climaxing in the famous “Musical Offering” in which Bach composed a series of ever-more-complex fugues on a theme supplied by the hobbyist-musician king (which Frederick had assumed would be impossible).
You might see why I didn’t rush to read it when John suggested it.
But it’s about so much more. For one thing Frederick’s father and grandfather were insane assholes – his grandfather, for instance, literally had a collection of “giants,” tall men whom he had abducted from their home villages and held captive so that he could fetishistically enjoy watching them walk up and down the courtyard. The Bachs were strange in a whole other set of ways. And James R. Gaines has the most compulsively readable prose on Earth. But along the way he also makes subtle arguments about the relationships between faith, art and the Enlightenment. I think the implication is that art is a bit like A.A.: It doesn’t have to be a god, but it helps to serve a power higher than the self.
5. Title cards of Girls, designed by Howard Nourmand
There are many other things I could name to admire about Lena Dunham’s inexhaustibly discussable HBO show – Adam Driver’s performance and character arc is the first to come to mind for me; Margaux pointed out several others – but they all coalesce at the beginning of each episode when after some pungent set-up, the screen clears and we see, for a brief moment, the stark colour-on-colour card that says GIRLS.
It has so many simultaneous pleasures. I can think of one for each letter.
G: It respects the way we often watch television now, in multi-episode saved-up or downloaded or streamed bunches of episodes, which means you don’t want to sit through some long credit sequence repeatedly. (When I rewatched all of The Sopranos in the early winter – it held up remarkably well by the way – I couldn’t fast-forward through the credits quickly enough, even though I love that theme song.)
I: Instead it’s like a silent-film title card, a cheap solution, a low-tech necessity. It could be held up on a square of construction paper. Girls does have a silent-comedy feel, if a silent film were really, really talkative; Lena Dunham is a little like Charlie Chaplin, if Charlie Chaplin were naked all the time. It’s a rebuke to the expectation of realism, a tip of the bowler to the potential for farce.
R: Of course it’s also a hashtag-style punchline to whatever’s just happened or is about to happen: Hannah is eating a cupcake in the shower? #girls. Shoshana is describing a reality show where people reveal their “baggage” and saying hers would be “that I’m a virgin of course”? #girls. Or, best, Ray and Charlie, rehearsing their stupid indie band, ransack Hannah and Marnie’s apartment and steal Hannah’s diary? #girls. It’s self-deprecating and disarming but simultaneously sardonic, kissing the stereotype off blithely.
L: It’s oddly soothing and utopian. The colour contrasts pulse like an orb from space or a Brian Eno iPhone app or a pricey sex toy. This goes nicely with the theme music, composed as far as I can figure out by Michael Penn (Sean’s brother btw), which is just slightly more elaborate than the sound your computer makes when it powers up. So it is like the show, like Girls as a technology, is powering up. (On Windows the startup sound was of course itself composed with Brian Eno.)
S: Finally, there’s also a cumulative effect: The trivial-but-felt suspense of wondering what the colours will be this week. The instant-dopamine rush of familiarity and celebration: Yes, it’s here, it’s on, it’s that time again, the all-too-short season has not ended. And the anticipatory awareness that soon you will be echoing it in some conversation or another: “Did you watch this week’s G I R L S yet?”
In the past I’ve always liked but perhaps underrated Aimee Mann, former singer for 80s Boston synth-pop band ‘Til Tuesday, married to the aforementioned Michael Penn, and composer of the main music for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. I might have compared her unfavourably for instance to Sam Phillips, who makes equally pretty (you’ve likely heard her sighing la-la’s on Gilmore Girls or more recentlyBunheads) but more obviously barbed and painful songs. But this album kept resurfacing and insisting on itself, at a time when I wasn’t even listening to that much music.
I liked the theme that runs through it, of either being or dealing with the charming person, who may or may not also be a functional or decent person. I’d become aware that Mann is friends with a lot of comedians I admire, and I could detect a comic knowingness in the voice of her writing, almost as if each piece were a sketch. But most of all, and this is odd because I never say this, it was the craftsmanship of it – the way that each proficient melody was fitted perfectly to the words, and rhyme to rhyme, and structure to theme. It’s like a meal of fresh ingredients perfectly cooked, though there’s nothing exotic about the dishes. Just exquisite care, to be savoured.
Yet you didn’t hear people talk about it the way they talked about, say, Grimes (whose video for Oblivionwould be on this list if I hadn’t mentioned it on this site already – I hope it wins the new Prism Prize for Canadian videos next week). This is the curse of the mid-career artist these days and I think even more so the female mid-career artist. That’s the not-so-funny joke behind the Portlandia sketch in which Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein hire Mann as their cleaning lady, keep telling her what big fans they are, but then keep scolding her for how she does the laundry.
It’s good to see her comedy friends helping her out in real life though, as when Tom Scharpling directed the videos for Charmer, including the one for “Labrador,” which remakes shot-for-shot the minor-80s-iconic Til Tuesday video “Voices Carry,” featuring among others Mad Men’s Jon Hamm.
7. Kacey Musgraves, “Merry Go Round” (from the upcoming album Same Trailer, Different Park)
From a veteran singer-songwriter to a great newcomer: My friend Jody Rosen turned me on to the wordplay and emotional wallop of Nashville’s Kacey Musgraves last year – “Merry Go Round” was a minor radio hit this fall, and her first major-label album is just about to come out in March. I had hoped Taylor Swift might mature into this kind of voice as she grew up, which doesn’t really look to be happening. But Musgraves simply begins from there, doing with country music what it often seems only country music can – address white people who have much more to worry about than “white people problems.”
(Or so I say in the middle of this very damn white list. There are a couple of exceptions coming up, but just wanted you to know that, yeah, I see it.)
8. The Music Box: A Shantytown Sound Laboratory, New Orleans
This I mentioned quickly on B2TW in the summer but it deserves note again. You know the old line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture? Here’s the architecture you can dance to. A collective led by street artist Swoon and others turned a set of dilapidated structures (not exactly hard to come by in New Orleans) into a playable, amplified, megaphoned, wind-driven, synthesized, climbable, jammable, avant-gardable, neighbour-kid-interactable structure called the Music Box, on a none-too-affluent NOLA block. It was full of horns you could blow into and weather vanes that played chimes and organs and drums and looping devices embedded in all kinds of crannies. I visited it the last day it was open and wished I could spend many more days there with the local children and teens who were enchanted with it and the vital spirits who built it. Luckily, though it’s over, it’s not over: The Dithyramblina , like the Hacienda, must yet be built.
9. Eddie Pepitone at the Dark Comedy Festival, Toronto
I could name instead Maria Bamford’s set at the same festival, which was a lot like her amazing special that she performs for just her parents; or Kathleen Phillips volunteering as a foul-mouthed sacrificial “virgin” in a lame Satanic ritual in a Halloween comedy show at Double Double Land, but I have talked a lot about those two hilarious women. Eddie Pepitone was new to me this year. Not sure how that happened, it just did.
And I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so cripplingly continuously – while being moved and politically challenged and thinking about psychoanalysis and the entertainment-industrial complex, and slightly frightened because he would bomb out into the crowd to sit in any empty seat and heckle himself (because who else could heckle him so effectively?) and I had an empty seat beside me – in my life. I could try to repeat jokes to you but that never works. Pepitone also had a very affecting interview on the Marc Maron podcast, talking about his mother’s mental illness and his father’s frustrated ambition and growing up on Staten Island. I’d like to see the documentary about him, The Bitter Buddha.
10. Jerzy Pilch, My First Suicide, translated by David Frick (Polish 2006, English 2012)
A stroke of serendipity: John Darnielle (aka the Mountain Goats) mentioned Polish novelist Jerzy Pilch on Facebook one day last spring, and I asked him which book he’d recommend. He told me a different one, but literally a day or two later there was a charity book sale at work and this was there for $5. I read it the next weekend on a beach.
This is basically the biography of the viewpoint character – apparently autobiographical though the deviations are difficult to plot – in linked short stories, in what turns out to be the distinct counterculture of Calvinist Poland – like Garcia Marquez, but with Eastern European dour humour, he creates an entire world.
And then he tears it down, with a crash of vodka bottles, deactivated cellphones and dubious liaisons. The only lesson one could take from it is never grow up.
But it is fiction that is indelibly itself, with a voice that gets right into your duodenum and I will read anything he writes that I can find. The lesson I take from that is, sometimes you get lucky.
11. Three dances on the This American Life live special, The Invisible Made Visible
Last May the Chicago radio show did a live concert that was simulcast into theatres all over the continent. I couldn’t make it to any of the screenings but I downloaded the show later. There are lots of nice things in it but three great ones, all dances: Ira Glass was inspired to do the show because he sensed his audience would love the blend of virtuosity and clumsy dailiness in the work of choreographer Monica Bill Barnes, but of course he couldn’t put a dance company on the radio. This turns out to have been a very smart instinct: I’m no dance expert but I’ve seldom seen anything (though Toronto choreographer Ame Henderson’s work with Public Recordings comes close) that posed such effective solutions to the issues of the form’s artificiality – an artificiality that we desire because it’s beautiful, but might also find irrelevant because it is rareified. One Barnes dance here was based on audience behaviour at a James Brown concert; the other involved having a lot of cardboard suitcases being stacked by and then thrown at a dancer. (I took it to be about moving house.) They were gorgeous and funny and breathed a recognizable flavour of air. I told a friend they felt like a Trampoline Hall lecture in dance form. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
The other dance was by David Rakoff (who was from Toronto by the way) talking about the cancer that cost him the ability to dance, and then doing it anyway. This performance is already kind of famous. He died not long later and a lot of people who didn’t know him are still heartbroken about that, including me.
12. Reggie Watts at the Mod Club, JFL42 festival, Toronto, Sept. 21, 2012
A continuing theme of the comedy-related items here is that I am not quite sure how to write about them. I can do it in the immediate wake of those experiences, but retrospectively they have an elusive quality. That’s both more and less true of Reggie Watts. In a sense I am on firmer ground with him because he’s also a musician, but what happened in his show was hard to keep track of even while it was happening – he would begin speaking about soda or about some street name he saw that day, and it would become this involuted R&B riff and a keyboard solo and then a falsetto rap about the constellations. He is a virtuoso in a form that doesn’t exist until he creates it, and then demolishes it. Like the best comedy and in a way the best music, it is at once profoundly intellectual and boldly stupid. The best way I can communicate it I think is to let you watch his TED Talk, which also operates very gratifyingly as a demolition job on the whole once-promising and now-bloated phenomenon of the TED Talk.
13. Your Sister’s Sister, a movie by Lynn Shelton, 2012
I guess I didn’t see that many movies in 2012, considering that I have only seen one of the nominees for Best Picture in the Oscars next week. But one that stuck with me is this film written and directed by Lynn Shelton, who made the quizzical but compelling Humpday, also starring Mark Duplass, in 2009. Her ken for sexual farce is carried forward here but into a much darker, sadder place. The funny thing is that there are things terribly wrong with this movie, including at least one chokingly bad and unbelievable twist on which the whole story hinges and a resolution that seems completely pat and again hard to swallow considering the ordeal the film’s just put you through. But the acting and the dialogue in the rest of the film make that completely unimportant. Duplass, Emily Blunt and my current favourite actor in the world, Rosemarie DeWitt, are completely present and incarnate in every frame and every second of their inappropriate triangulation, such that I felt like I was breathing and aching right in rhythm with them. The story is minute and intimate and dwells on the completely central but not-often-enough-grappled-sincerely-with subject of how people can be remotely decent to each other when they need so much and are so basically fucked up from the first dice toss. I almost wonder if the hard-to-credit happy ending is simply a vote on the side of, “Let’s say we can, even if that’s probably a lie, because otherwise, ouch.” Which is a violation of logic and form and honesty that I will take from a movie, if it’s already convinced me we are copacetic. How are you supposed to end a story, anyway? It’s always a feint. True stories don’t really end so much as stop. Like this.
Best book ever, man. Lewis Hyde examines the origin stories of hunger, rule breaking and loopholes from different cultures all over the world. I would call it invaluable – and dense. For some reason I didn’t think I would like it, so I read the chapters that seemed most interesting, then I started from the beginning and read the whole thing again, losing it twice along the way. I could say a lot about it, but mainly, if I knew you, I would buy it for you. The subject matter of “tricksters” might seem specific, but this book is far-reaching and deep. And rigorous.
Because the book looks to so many different cultures, it inevitably seems to create a new one – but because the subject matter is about corrupting what becomes too immovable, this new world culture doesn’t feel oppressive, it just feels older and wiser and full of troublemakers who are here to help.
2.The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts(1975) – a memoir by Maxine Hong Kingston
Trickster Makes This World cited the work of a lot of people I love and am familiar with, like Marcel Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg and Frederick Douglass, but also one I didn’t know – Maxine Hong Kingston. I ended up picking up her book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts shortly after reading Trickster Makes This World. The voice of the book is angry and uncertain, the heroine trying to figure out what is real from the old world or the new world, from inside her house or outside. It’s like she is throwing her arms and legs around to figure out what the actual boundaries are, and in doing so, finds the new framework of her specific world. It is epic and intimate.
According to Wikipedia, the book:
…has maintained a “vexed reception history that both attests to its popularity and questions it.” Much of the debate concerns issues dealing with “autobiographical accuracy, cultural authenticity, and ethnic representativeness,” while the critical center of the battle is whether or not Kingston offers a faithful representation of Chinese culture and of Chinese-Americans.
The book was criticized by the American writer Frank Chin for being “unChinese” and “a fake” and by the Chinese American writer Jeffery Paul Chan for being called non-fiction and for belittling Chinese-American experiences.
Both criticisms brought to mind another captivating and subversive book I read this year: I Love Dick (1997) by Chris Kraus, a book that attracted similar criticisms from male colleagues but did well to wait for the younger critics, as seen in this really good essay on the author by Elizabeth Gumport. Here’s a passage from I Love Dick that Gumport quotes in her piece:
Because most “serious” fiction, still, involves the fullest possible expression of a single person’s subjectivity, it’s considered crass and amateurish not to “fictionalize” the supporting cast of characters, changing names and insignificant features of their identities. The “serious contemporary hetero-male novel” is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy. While the hero/anti-hero explicitly is the author, everybody else is reduced to “characters.” . . .
When women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our “I”s are changing as we meet other “I”s, we’re called bitches, libelers, pornographers, and amateurs.
Well said, Chris Kraus.
3. The animated movies of Studio Ghibli at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox
Greatest art pleasure of the year: a month-long program of Studio Ghibli animated movies at the TIFF cinemas during the spring. For movies that continuously touch on the battle between nature living and dead, there is no better venue than a warm theatre in a cold Toronto March.
4. Idle No More
It’s been amazing to see the different Canadian Aboriginal communities move together for the Idle No More protests across the country. It made me think of the smallest and the biggest gestures of trying to right wrongs and change your neighbourhood or the world. Small things like – I took a Canadian art history course once with a professor named Lynda Jessup. Maybe assuming we had already had our fill of the Group of 7 and their nature, Lynda Jessup taught us about the dead Catholic nun paintings (doesn’t count as vanity if you get your portrait done after death) from the early white colonialists, and then went straight to contemporary First Nations, Inuit and Métis art. Her course program gave me a sense that Canada was more exciting than it would lead you to believe. I felt grateful for it, and to other small and big gestures from friends and groups like the ImagineNATIVE Film Festival where I’ve seen great and surprising things including, this past year, Alanis Obomsawin’s movie The People of the Kattawapiskak River, about the Attawapiskat housing crisis, which I wrote about here.
5. All the wrong people telling all the right stories
I started the year off reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) on my Kindle – about a poor young white boy and an escaped slave’s adventures around the Mississippi river in the mid-19th-century . Somehow, Ernest Hemingway’s critique of the book had always stuck in my head. Hemingway said it was the greatest American novel, the novel that all other American novels come from, except for the horrible few last chapters , which no one should read. Though I hadn’t read Huckleberry Finn, I assumed Hemingway was wrong – maybe out of a random but sturdy loyalty to Mark Twain that must have ignited when I put on a Mark Twain wig and mustache at age ten for a school play.
Hemingway wasn’t wrong. Huckleberry Finn is a remarkable book and I wanted very much to cut out the last chapters and grind them down in my compost and let the worms eat them.
Suddenly feeling closer to Ernest Hemingway, I finally read his beautiful The Sun Also Rises about an American in Spain saying something about America. A book that made me feel that my alcohol consumption is totally moderate. Which echoed in my mind as I later read Ben Lerner’s beautiful novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) about a more contemporary man in Spain who is there to write something about Spain but then says something about America. A book that made me feel that my drug consumption was totally moderate.
But back to Huckleberry Finn; those terrible last chapters of Huckelberry Finn, and the great majority of chapters, kept thoughts of appropriation, political engagement and entertainment in my mind all year – thoughts heightened by good movies like Beasts of the Southern Wild(made by Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar), Django Unchained (made by Quentin Tarantino) and The Paperboy (made by Lee Daniels). What those movies have in common with each other and with Huckleberry Finn is the Deep South, complicated appropriation of voice, and a desire to go towards pleasure, beauty, fantasy and heroes within stories that are fundamentally painful.
Appropriation is always a complicated issue. For me personally for instance, I always wish more men wrote in women’s voices. Though of course people are bound to get things terribly wrong, it’s hard not to see an empathy or loyalty develop to characters you work hard to identify with. Which suddenly makes me remember some interesting articles by Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne that ran in the Guardian last year (oh! now I see it’s a book). To sum up her summing up Montaigne: “Once you have seen the world from someone else’s perspective, it becomes harder to torture, hunt, or kill them.”
I heard Kevin Hegge, who made the movie She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column about the all-woman Toronto rock band, be asked on the radio this past year if he had been hesitant about directing a movie that was so much about women’s voices. He said he tries very hard not to take offense at the assumption that a woman directing would have been uncomplicated. There are women who are not feminists, he said, continuing: I am a feminist – a feminist needed to direct this movie.
video still of artist and musician G.B. Jones from “She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column”
I think that’s what he said. I didn’t write it down.
Speaking of Montaigne trying to see things from other cultural perspectives (but mainly trying to imagine what his cat was thinking), behavioral science came back in fashion this year, or at least it seemed so to me after reading David H. Freedman’s article The Perfected Self, which lingered in my mind long after reading it. I always kind of liked B.F. Skinner, having picked up his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity because I thought the title was funny, but ending up really appreciating it and B.F. Skinner along the way. This was all in my mind as I read Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken about how gamers have this sense that reality is broken because reality feels so much less meaningful and rewarding than video games. Though the book contains matter-of-fact lines like “we know regular life is meaningless, so …”, it’s a somewhat hilariously practical approach to thinking about how humans can change their behavior.
7. Dante’s Inferno (around 1320)
I had no idea how gentle and completely captivating this book was. I loved especially the first realm of hell, Limbo. It felt like a best-of, having all the people in history unlucky to be born just before Jesus. Even apart from finding Homer, Penthesilea, Orpheus, Plato and Euclid there, it felt so familiar. Dante’s empathy with the sufferers he came upon as he carried on through the realms of hell made you really feel sad that the work isn’t part of the bible.
Loved this painting this year:
St. Anthony Beaten by Devils, panel from the Altarpiece of the Eucharist, 1423-26 (oil on panel) / by Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo) (c.1392-1450)
Also loved this one by Chris Ofili that stayed in my head all year:
Chris Ofili / Lover’s rock – guilt
8. We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) – movie by Lynne Ramsay
With some of the movies I mentioned above, I thought about the function of fantasy and entertainment in regards to painful political situations. For instance, Mark Twain’s attempt at a happy ending for a story that is contained firmly within the time of slavery. Or Quentin Tarantino with Django Unchained, staging a story two years before slavery ends, adding to the story a triumphant ending no less – Tarantino getting as close to hope and a hero as one could possibly fantasize about. I couldn’t help but imagine the opposite movie, a movie not about the near end of American slavery but about the beginning, a story that would feel centuries away from hope – how impossible it would be. How it hurts to even imagine. How not like the movies it would feel. I thought about these things in positive terms, not just as though it’s dumb or dangerous to find delicious and pleasurable stories to tell within the worst stories that we have, but also that it serves a purpose.
The movie that stayed with me most in this way this year was Lynne Ramsay‘s We Need to Talk About Kevin. I had never thought of the genre of reckless-feminist-fantasy movie (in this case, a shifting-of-perspectives fantasy contained within a nightmare situation). But this seemingly effortless masterpiece is now my favourite of the genre. I’ll write more about it soon.
9.The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) – book by Stephen Greenblatt
Speaking of happy endings to the worst stories we have, Stephen Greenblatt wrote a brilliant book that I somehow couldn’t put down, about a book hunter and a book that may have greatly contributed to the undoing the spell of the centuries-long dark ages. He tells the story of Poggio Bracciolini, a book hunter and papal secretary from the 15th century who found the poet Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, a work written in the first century BC in service of Epicurean ideas. Lucretius’ work includes explanations of atoms, evolution and returning to the ground when you die. The Swerve flies from the 15th century back to the collapse of the Roman Empire, forward to the Renaissance, back to the dark ages and forward again to *spoiler* Thomas Jefferson. Within all the most painful stories about where humans can go and how long they can stay there, it tells the best story – the one about how one beautiful book saved the world.
10. Lena Dunham’s television show Girls
Lena Dunham’s television series Girls is great – as many people have said and many have disagreed with. I love that virgin character and her virgin-lover.
All the criticism about the lack of people of colour on the show was true, but so strange in comparison with all the other popular shows by white men that leave everyone out. It made me think that maybe white men are still universal and white women are still just white women.
Or maybe the creators’ casually audacious attempt to be universal with the title “Girls” but be so so specific in content is what brought on the attention. But maybe that’s good. Maybe we can add it to the pile of universal specifics that is getting more interesting by the day. We can know it as Lena Dunham’s Girls, right there next to Rye Rye’s Hardcore Girls, next to these true crime hardcore girls, next to my sweet little nieces (who are girls).
Since I’m suddenly lost in the subject of girls, let’s go to Honey Boo Boo child and recognize that she, Alana, is a powerful child-pageant contestant who is destroying the perverse realm of learned femininity and child sexuality from within. On television, she gets to use her own words rather than speaking the words that someone in an office far away wrote for her. She might not be writing her own scenes yet, but she’s in control of the dialogue and she’s pretty great at dialogue.
Also – thank you Tina Fey, and good job The Mindy Project. The thing you notice about women making their own television shows is that the men on television get a lot more interesting.
Back to Lena Dunham’s Girls. The most criticism I saw for the show seemed to initially come out of New York. It’s hard to do something in your hometown I guess. And maybe the story of second-generation artists and trust-fund kids running around in the city without looking out at the world is a more embarrassing story than the one New York used to be able to tell. But you got to use what you’ve got. When the neighbourhood changes, the story changes.
11. Speaking of using what you’ve got: Friends in my Toronto neighbourhood
Darren O’Donnell continues to be one of the most interesting artists around, with his and others’ Mammalian Diving Reflex (“Ideal Entertainment for the End of the World”) and the band of teenagers The Torontonians growing in art and skill.
(I went to go see this on one of its last days at a cinema near me. The cinema was empty.)
The big story with Lee Daniel’s The Paperboy, was that Nicole Kidman, a classy, respected actor, plays trash on screen, pees on handsome, young Zac Efron, and does other things that you won’t believe Nicole Kidman is doing.
In reviews for the movie, the words most tossed around were “tantalizing”, “trashy” and “melodramatic”. The consensus seems to be that the movie is a turn-on but a hot mess and perhaps not very smart. As I looked for positive reviews out of so many bad ones (after I had seen the movie and loved it) I got the impression that a lot of people assume that what turns you on often isn’t very smart.
The Paperboy is tantalizing, trashy and melodramatic. It turns you on, twists your heart in gruesome ways and knows what it’s after.
It’s about three outsiders born to a place that doesn’t want, value or love them. Despite this, these particular outsiders still have a yearning to have some meaningful connection with this place – even if that connection involves all the regular dangers involved in loving something that hates you, and the masochism inherent in doing so.
It’s hard to say why you would want to love, and be loved, by a place that hates you, but it’s easy to understand needing to be connected with the thing that you were born from. No different than longing for a mother that never wanted you. In this case, the mother is 1969 southern Florida and our local outsiders include a closeted gay white man, an ambitious African American man and a lustful blond woman. The outsiders move towards what hates them with varying degrees of unconsciousness, driving instincts and knowing persistence.
It’s an odd story for the big screen. We are more used to movies where bad people do bad things to the audience’s enormous horror or delight – or movies where great people work to change the terrible wrongs of history to a contemporary audience’s knowing pleasure.
But here, though our characters are outsiders, they aren’t trying to change their time or their place, and they’re not trying to run away. And though they all employ some elements of disguise (playing it straight, employing a fake British accent, wearing a blond wig on top of slightly less perfect blond hair) none of them are spending much energy on repressing their true selves or desires – or on figuring out how to fit in.
In other words, these characters are not activists, villains, victims, heroes, conformists or adventurers. They’re not even people who are just trying to be themselves but be better in every way. They are only trying to be a part of the time and place where they come from – whether this means hurting themselves or others. Maybe this is such a familiar part of most of our lives that it barely looks like a story when it’s in the movies.
The plot literalizes this situation in a more unfamiliar way. It and our outsiders revolve around a white man named Hillary Van Wetter who is on death row for murdering a known racist police chief. The outsiders (two investigative journalists and a woman who is Hillary Van Wetter’s pen pal lover) look into the matter to see if maybe this is a prisoner who should and could be exonerated.
It becomes clear quickly enough that whether or not Hillary Van Wetter is a threat to racist police chiefs, he is most definitely a threat to women, African Americans and homosexuals. Despite this, our local outsiders continue to get closer to him and/or closer towards his exoneration as though they are on a train they don’t think to get off of.
The movie is seductive, exciting and, at times, torturous. The main respite is the familiarity and peace the outsiders have with each other – they share the intimacy of strangers who are in the same boat and the ease of colleagues who have their eyes on different prizes.
The most interesting thing about the movie is that the director seems to be in that boat too. The camera’s not looking down at the outsiders but is next to them, filming them with a knowingness and a loose, loving hand – looking out with them at the Deep South, a place that is promising us something if we can only figure out what it is and how to get it.
When we look through the camera, we see that, somehow, Hillary Van Wetter, the local swamp-dwelling racist, homophobic, misogynistic killer on death row, doesn’t feel like the most villainous character in the movie. That role somehow falls to a peripheral character named Ellen Guthrie – a woman who’s come from New York to marry the father of one of our outsiders, a man near retirement who runs the local newspaper. After they are married, she will run the paper alongside him.
Though she plays a small role, her more insidious racism and classism, particularly in regards to the maid (played with exhausted, charismatic genius by Macy Gray) seems colder and crueler in the context of all this movie’s bloody mayhem since it’s a violence that cuts with distance, not entanglement. Macy Gray happens to also be our narrator.
All of the actors in this movie do an amazing job, and most have gotten credit for that, but the director has done an amazing job too. I’m sure Lee Daniels was intentionally looking to tantalize by getting Nicole Kidman to play the part of Hillary Van Wetter’s pen pal lover, but I bet he didn’t anticipate that it would so greatly eclipse the real dark heart of the story. Maybe if future audiences forget who Nicole Kidman is, they might be able to see both the tantalizing top of this movie, and its ugly, gentle and familiar depths.
(Tom McCormack at Union Docs in Brooklyn asked me if I had seen Peggy Ahwesh’s Martina’s Playhouse. I hadn’t. I watched it on Ubuweb one night recently. It was great. It’s 20 minutes long and you can watch it here.)
We start on a roof with a little girl named Martina. She looks at the camera and eats a sandwich Though the camera isn’t talking back, she figures out how she wants to talk to the camera.
There is footage of hands examining a flower, with a monologue about flowers and love and organs.
There’s footage of a grown-up woman also figuring out how to talk to the camera – she is clearly more anxious about the situation. You can see her aching a bit to talk to the person behind the camera, to interact with them, maybe even to be reassured.
There’s more footage of Martina, now inside, confidently conducting her own playtime for the audience of the camera.
More than just evocative or suggestive, Martina’s Playhouse reveals a poetic and complicated structure made from subject, camera and quiet filmmaker behind the camera.
During Martina’s interesting and noticeably uncensored play time, we are reminded, as Martina occasionally talks and looks up to the camera, that a camera doesn’t blink, express concern, distaste or encouragement. Though we know well enough that a camera changes everything, we are reminded here that people change everything.
It made me think of parents – and also of good science fiction, where we are often shown how machines are kinder and more cruel than humans.
Moonrise Kingdom is a sweet, good-natured, good-looking movie about young love. The love is between two child runaways on a charmingly idiosyncratic island set in 1965.
I have really liked quite a few Wes Anderson movies, but I found this one difficult to watch.
Though everything about the movie seemed interesting and pleasurable, my eyes had a hard time instinctively knowing what to look at. Everything was interesting and pleasurable. The movie frame was continuously filled from corner to corner with things lovingly crafted and interestingly arranged: the unusual curtains, the overly solemn children, the coiled rug, the crooked picture. It was as though my eyes couldn’t find the thing that was different. Everything was perfectly off, but to the same degree. So where to look? If all the objects and characters and animals and sky in the movie are as crafted and cared-for as the young lovers, it can make you wonder what the movie wants you to concentrate on. If this sameness makes it hard to understand where to rest your eyes, it makes it even harder to understand where to rest your heart.
Stern, unhappy adults and an approaching storm offer the main opportunities for disorder. Unfortunately, the stern, unhappy adults on the island are the most perfectly-off unhappy adults to be found in the world (or at least in Hollywood): Bruce Willis is an endearingly hesitating Police Captain; Frances McDormand is a stern and matter-of-fact secret lover; Bill Murray is a deliciously depressed father; Tilda Swinton is a militaristic child-protection employee; Bob Balaban is the wonderfully detached-and-I-know-it narrator. Every single one of these characters, like everything else in the movie, is a treat. But they in no way offer a break from this relentless uniformity of the “perfectly off”. Nor does the storm. The storm is just another charming rival to the charms of everything else.
If absolutely everything is perfectly off, it perhaps becomes more accurate to describe it as simply perfect, or having evolved towards a state of inert uniformity.
I started to crave a glimpse of a really sad child, a genuinely thoughtless action, a window that would open up and let you crawl out of this claustrophobic heaven – even if it just led you to a mall in 2002.
There’s a recent essay by a person I know a little bit, the poet and critic Stephen Burt, called “My Life As a Girl,” in which he explores a twilit place in the gender continuum – that he likes to wear women’s clothing sometimes, but only sometimes, and doesn’t feel like he is a woman, but maybe that he’d wish to be one, at least sometimes. (That’s him above.) He muses that he is a grownup version of the “pink boys” that the NYT Magazine wrote about in August (that piece is well worth reading too).
I liked Stephen’s essay the way I like anything that tangles up the strings of the either-or. In the movement to recognize trans-people’s identities, as I think generally happens when there’s a breakthrough of recognition, realignments of categories, there’s a tendency to talk as though the boundaries are fixed and definitive. This is often necessary, in order to make practical demands or simply to establish some clear space. But there’s also some losses and diminishments that happen there, at least temporarily. “My Life As a Girl” reminded me of the way “queer” was used more in the 1990s to put forward the skewed inbetweenness of much of life and identity. No matter how you define yourself, you have a queerness to you, and Stephen’s piece really vividly challenges us to honour that – to “tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson advised.
I most identified with the section in which Stephen talks about his attraction to “twee” music, an indie-pop subgenre in which “nobody wanted, or tried, to be a real man.” In my aesthetic life, I’ve often embraced the apparently weak and girly, or at least the brazenly non-masculine – poetry, soap-operatic melodramas and miniseries, the fantastical, and so on. But as I’ve aged I’ve been drawn more to varieties of realism than I once was, and some of that tweeness has definitely drained away. I appreciated having the frillier, featherier part of my taste tickled by Stephen’s story.
Two very different movies I’ve seen lately touched a similar nerve, both of them through music. (And note, I’m going to “spoil” things about both, so if that kind of thing raises your umbrage, act accordingly.) The first is The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest epic, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix squaring off against each other in a life-duel – it’s a mentor-student relationship, a father-son one, and finally a suppressed love affair. That’s hinted at in various sequences in the movie but only fully acknowledged in their final scene together, when the Master sings “Slow Boat to China” to his wayward ward, shakily as a confession, almost an apology – that perhaps if he’d admitted his infatuation earlier, their dealings with each other needn’t have been so violent, one long wrestling lock between two scorpions.
The story is hypermasculine, although ultimately the most powerful person in it is a woman, Amy Adams’ beautifully controlled performance as the Master’s vigilant wife, who by seeing through the absurdity of the boys’ games is able to turn them to her advantage, at least as much as her subservient position allows.
Like Anderson’s last film, There Will Be Blood, it’s about (among many other themes) the way that blinding your heart to the queer fractures in your self can be fatal, though how deliberate the resulting annihilation is (“fast living, slow suicide”?), it’s impossible to be sure.
And then there’s another recent Amy Adams movie – the one with Jason Segel, songs by Brett McKenzie (Flight of the Concords) and a whole bunch of muppets. And the Oscar-winning song, “Man or Muppet.”
There’s another male dyad here, but this is the triumphantly queer, comic version in contrast to The Master’s tragic one.
The queer hinge in the whole Muppets movie is Jason Segel’s relationship with his “little brother,” a muppet named Walter, who is small, asexual and childlike. It’s amusing throughout the film that the fact that his brother is a muppet a tenth his size has never given Segel pause until now, and what to make of that is unstable – at times it seems Walter might have some kind of developmental disability, or has somehow been traumatized (the absent parents, perhaps).
But the emotional crux of the plot is that Walter has to separate from Segel to take his place in the muppet world – a very queer storyline, about moving from birth family to chosen family, which Walter manages in a beautifully campy gambit I won’t give away. And Segel, meanwhile, has to separate from Walter to vouchsafe his hetero-masculinity with Adams, in line with the “manchild to family man” arc of a lot of the Judd Apatow-style, non-puppet-musical comedies that Segel’s normally in. (That said it’s worth mentioning that Adams’ very girly character is first seen repairing a car and later proves to be a master electrician.)
But the “Man or Muppet” song serves, in what might otherwise be a very rote story, to acknowledge and mourn the double-edgedness of that choice, with both Walter and Segel singing about their mutual queer-identity crisis into mirrors where the muppet sees himself as a man (Walter sees the actor who plays the Aspergers-savant case Sheldon on Big Bang Theory) and Segel sees himself in muppetface (which is at once funny and unheimlich). But the trick is in the chorus when they sing: “If I’m a muppet, then I’m a very manly muppet,” and “If I’m a man, that makes me a muppet of a man.” For all kinds of practical, life-map kinds of reasons, or at least in the eyes of Hollywood, you may have to make some socially legible choices around sex-gender identity as an adult, but you do need at least the leeway to affirm, the way Segel does at the end: “I’m a muppety man/ That’s what I am.”
(unfortunately I can’t find the actual movie clip, only the official trailer-ized one, in which other scenes from the movie are cut in – it doesn’t quite have the same effect, but you’ll get the idea)
… Otherwise you may end up confining your true self in a ship in a bottle, drifting so slowly it will never reach China or any other port, all by itself, alone. By contrast, Segel and Walter’s duet, like Stephen’s essay, is a true anthem for the Ambiguity Liberation Front.
PS: The muppet movie’s other delightful little ode to wholesome perversion is “Me Party” sung in a similar dissociated-duet by Adams and Miss Piggy, which includes a nice little Chaplin tribute, and gleefully owns up to its onanistic subtext in its final line. Adams just shines.
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Thursday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Chris: Andrew “Noz” Nosnitsky considers the class stratifications in and around rap right now, where a small elite of mainstream stars dispenses favour via cosigns and commercial album sales bear a decreasing correlation (but increasing white-and-middle-class skew) with actual popularity: “It’s a gentrification of taste. Kids with disposable income on the outer perimeters of the culture are dictating its direction because they posses the income to displace the demands of the proverbial hood.” Also, great use of the word “fanute.”
Margaux: Physicists May Have Evidence Universe Is A Computer Simulation – fun to imagine that the time-based medium of our specific simulacrum is constrained by what typical narratives are always constrained by: time, meaning, conclusion.
Speaking of bad narratives, I’ve been listening to an audio book of Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken. The idea of the book is that video gaming culture makes people feel so vital and engaged that when they stop playing games and return to real life, real life seems broken. The book proposes making the narrative of real life a better story. Or at least that’s what it seems like it’s about so far. Jane McGonigal argues that hard work (in a video game) is more fun than fun. That made me feel pretty smart since I’ve never liked to have fun. It’s pretty hilarious listening to this book on my headphones while walking around town – the book came out last year, but it feels like it came out next year – like bizarre, banal and practical discussions from the not-so-bad, not-so-good near future.
This conversation between liberal actor Alec Baldwin and conservative journalist David Brooks seems way less phony than all this 2012 American presidential debate nonsense. That’s probably because actors are good at making things seem less phony, that’s their number one job. Maybe it should be a rule that only respected or semi-respected actors can become president. Maybe that would make The Movies better.
Speaking of The Movies, I just saw two great ones last night by legendary singer/model/filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin at the Imaginative Film and Media Arts Festival (lots more happening at the festival in Toronto till Oct 21). The first movie was the 1971 short (and Alanis Obomsawin’s first film) Christmas at Moose Factory. The 13 minute film is made from footage of children’s drawings about what Christmas is like at Moose Factory along with the voices of the children talking about their drawings. The structure is smart and simple and captivating. It’s filled with gentleness, curiosity and love. All the good things.
The second movie was Alanis Obomsawin’s most recent The People of the Kattawapiskak River, a documentary about the state of emergency called in Northern Ontario in 2011 by Theresa Spence, the chief of the Attawapiskat First Nation. That is very painful subject matter but the movie has a similar feel to Alanis Obomaswain’s first movie – with love and strength and humour always close at hand. It was interesting to have her oldest movie and her most recent played together. You could see the consistency of her specific way of seeing things, even from movies made 40 years apart. It was interesting to see that both movies functioned completely as whole works of art and also as whole works of activism without sacrificing either category. It was good to be reminded that love and patience can be tremendously political.
The Bloor Cinema in Toronto where it was shown was packed with a rowdy and diverse audience. People from all backgrounds cheered and jeered and laughed along with the movie – with tears mostly coming during the moments of impressive strength and optimism. Even with all the horrible problems they’re having, it was easy to see from the movie that the community featured is a very special one. It was nice to “meet” all the people who passed by on the screen. One of the people was a lawyer who fought in court for the people of the Attawapiskat Nation. I can’t find her name on the internet, but I would fight for her to be president. The movie was in two episodes, like two episodes of a television program. I’m not sure if more are to be made.
During the Q&A, Alanis Obomsawin talked about how, while taking pictures at a construction site in the reserve, she was told repeatedly and by different people that she was in the wrong place, that she needed to leave. She laughed on stage as she talked about how she just smiled and agreed, but didn’t leave until she was finished doing what she needed to do. Maybe it’s that kind of serious playfulness that accounts for the main feeling that the movie left you with – that there is lots to be done, lots of new ways to go about things, that the hardest things are manageable, that everyone can play a part.
Maybe that serious playfulness can be credited for making Alanis Obomsawin appear to be the most beautiful, and youthful, 80 year old I have ever seen. As I was leaving the after party around midnight, I noticed that she was still dancing.
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