Are Three Generations Of Political Imbeciles Enough?

Title: Profiles in Ignorance

Rating: 3 Stars

For those of you not up on your Supreme Court trivia, the blog title is a paraphrase of an infamous Supreme Court opinion. In the case of Buck v Bell, the Supreme Court decreed that state laws mandating compulsory sterilization (ie eugenics) were, constitutionally speaking, fine and dandy. The opinion was written by one of the most famous and respected jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Holmes concluded his opinion with the words “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”. Yeah, the Supreme Court, during most of its history, usually wasn’t all that concerned with individual rights.

The first Presidential election that I was eligible to vote in was 1984. Alas, the thesis of Borowitz’ book is that this pretty much exactly aligns with the descent of political intelligence. Although the Democratic party certainly has had its share of dim light bulbs, what’s amazing about the Republican party is that its ignorant politicians have been front and center as leaders of their party.

Borowitz charts this decline in three phases. The first phase is ridicule. This phase is identified with Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle. Both of these men were not very smart (Quayle is still alive, but I’m guessing that he is still not very smart).

This is long enough ago that maybe people don’t realize how true this was. Reagan, having had a long career as an actor, was excellent at repeating memorized lines and projecting the correct image of a leader. However, get past the memorized lines and it was tough going.

He would repeatedly recite the same lies in his speeches. The reporters would catch him, he would shrug and chuckle, and then repeat the same lie the next day. The reporters eventually got tired of correcting him, giving him free reign to spew unchallenged nonsense into the political sphere. Even before his Alzheimer’s, he was an inattentive reader seemingly incapable of ingesting new information.

A hallmark of this phase is that his handlers at least recognized that a President should not come across as a dim bulb. They went to significant efforts to bolster his image as a thinking man.

A similar issue existed with Dan Quayle. After an embarrassing coming out party when he was introduced as George H.W. Bush’s Vice Presidential candidate, his handlers went to work on him to make him appear smarter than he was. Unfortunately Quayle did not have Reagan’s long experience as an actor to fall back on, so these efforts pretty much came to naught. As a result, his political career went into a spiral from which it never recovered.

This brings us to the second phase of political ignorance. This phase is acceptance. The star of this phase was George W Bush. Once again, we have a President that really didn’t like long meetings or long papers to read. Borowitz goes into great detail of the things that Bush did not know, but the fact that the guy that ordered the Gulf War did not realize that there were two sects of Islam seems most amazing.

He thought of himself as the decider and apparently he didn’t think that a decider really needed to really know that much to be able to decide. In fact, he had a habit of ridiculing political or scientific wonks that tried to advise him. After all, in his mind, if they were really all that smart, they would have become President instead of him.

What differentiates this phase is that Bush really didn’t see the need to hide his lack of intelligence. He bragged that he was a C student. He wore his lack of knowledge and intelligence as some kind of token of being a man of the people.

The other star of this phase is proof that ignorance is not an attribute solely reserved for men. I’m talking, of course, about Sarah Palin. She’s another person that was not ready to be President and was probably never going to be ready. Experts would try to brief her and she would take copious notes but nothing really seemed to stick. In interviews, her ignorance would be effortlessly exposed.

It’s interesting that, during this phase, the interviewers that exposed the ignorance usually ended up being the target of abuse. This was the era of ‘gotcha’ questions. The fact that somehow exposing the ignorance was worse than the actual ignorance was a feature of that phase and continues to be in the world that we live in now.

The final phase of ignorance is celebration. It goes without saying that the star of this phase is Donald Trump. With his misspelled tweets, his ignorance of history, and his disinterest in anything that didn’t have to do with himself, he truly is in a class by himself in ignorance.

The thing is, if you’re a Trump supporter, you truly don’t care. Every time that he suggested injecting bleach as a treatment for COVID or some other utterly insane statement, the rational part of me would think, this is it. This is the statement that will expose that the President has no clothes of intelligence.

But no. Instead, for tens of millions of Americans, these statements in the face of knowledge is somehow emboldening. Somehow verifiable facts have become elitist.

Other Republicans, seeing this, have been forced to adjust their own personas. Now we have Ivy Leaguers like Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, and Josh Hawley hiding their elite credentials to say stupid stuff that they think will appeal to the Republican base that they sorely want to pry from Trump’s clutches.

Right now, there’s not a lot of hope on the Republican side. There are Republican candidates running that don’t fill me with horror, but it still looks like the very horrifying Donald Trump and the just about as horrifying Ron DeSantis will be the party bearer.

I did take a star demerit for Borowitz’ snark. In this book, he’s clearly not even trying to reach anyone other than his Democratic audience. He goes out of his way to make politicians seem dumber than they are. He didn’t have to do that. They do a pretty good job of doing that themselves.

One of his favorite tricks is to quote, at length, the word salad of one of the politicians in response to a reporters’ question or while on the campaign stump. When reading the statement in print, they do sound inane, but here’s the thing. Words that seem dumb on paper actually do convey meaning when spoken. It goes to the awesome ability of the brain to parse and understand speech. This level of snark goes to the heart of why many people really hate the sophisticated elite and it struck me as being unfair.

I can only hope that, if the Republicans are defeated in 2024, that they’ll finally take the lesson to heart. However, the ability of ignorance to learn, adjust, and adapt seems to be quite limiting, so I’m not exactly filled with optimism.

Ingmar Bergman’s Fight Club

Film: Persona

Rating: 4 Stars

I’m not sure if I’m watching Ingmar Bergman films in the correct order or not. The first one I watched was Wild Strawberries, which was a pretty straightforward film about aging and the passing of a life. Next up was The Seventh Seal, most famous (and most parodied) for a medieval knight playing chess with Death. This was a much more complex film dealing with large issues of life, death, and God.

Because it ranked eighteenth on the BFI Sight and Sound list, I watched Bergman’s Persona. Imagine my surprise when, sitting down to watch it, a close-up image of a fully erect penis popped up on my screen within the first two minutes. Toto, I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore. This is especially true considering that this was released in 1966, when the American film industry was still operating firmly under the puritanical Hays Code.

The plot is deceptively simple. Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) is a famous actress. In the middle of a stage performance, she stopped speaking. There is no apparent physical or known psychological cause. She just refuses to speak. A psychiatrist recommends that the nurse Alma (Bibi Andersonn) take care of Elisabet. Eventually, thinking that it might help Elisabet, the psychiatrist recommends that Alma and Elisabet move to a house on the beach.

For the entire time, Elisabet refuses to speak. Alma, to fill the void if nothing else, proceeds to do the heavy lifting of keeping the conversation going. Having a person so attentive to what she’s saying causes Alma to really open up and start sharing the most personal, intimate secrets that she’s never previously shared.

Alma eventually tells the very personal account of having an orgy like affair while engaged to be married. She became pregnant as a result of this assignation and aborted it. Later, when she’s mailing an unsealed letter for Elisabet, Alma sees that Elisabet is writing about her affair and abortion. Feeling betrayed, she lashes out at Elisabet. On the verge of throwing boiling water on her, Elisabet shouts to stop her. That’s the only words that Elisabet says in the film. Alma later begs Elisabet for forgiveness.

Later, possibly in a dream sequence, Elisabet’s husband visits. Apparently, he mistakes Alma for Elisabet and has sex with Alma.

By the end of the film, it appears that Elisabet and Alma are beginning to merge their identities. In one split shot, you see their two faces gradually merge into one.

So, what the actual fuck? I have no idea. I’ve read several analyses of the film. None of them are in agreement. Apparently it’s been called the Mt Everest of film analysis. One film critic said something along the lines of, “everything said about Persona can be contradicted, the opposite is true as well”.

The obvious unanswered question is, is this a Fight Club scenario? Spoiler alert for a twenty-five year old novel and film, but in Fight Club, the mayhem causing Tyler Durden and the seemingly mild-mannered narrator are actually the same person. Durden can be thought of as the narrator’s id.

Is Alma a manifestation of Elisabet? Although an acclaimed actress, Elisabet appears unhappy. She has a child that she apparently despises (a picture of him is sent to her and she tears it in half). Alma is younger. Does she represent a different start to a life that might have been more rewarding or fulfilling than acting? Does Alma’s story of an abortion represent an expression of Elisabet’s regret of bearing a child?

Another unanswered question is, why does Elisabet stop talking? We might see a clue in some of the nightmarish imagery of the film. We see the infamous picture of the terrified young boy in the World War II Polish ghetto with his upraised arms. Being filmed in the year 1966, we see the picture of the Buddhist monk immolating himself in protest of the Vietnam War. Is Elisabet horrified at the current state of our world? As an artist, does she not have words to express the horror that she sees?

The film possibly touches upon the idea that Elisabet is not speaking because she no longer wants to lie. As an actress, lying is kind of the name of the game. You have to say words that you don’t believe and convey emotions that you do not feel. Given the corrupt state of the world, does she simply feel that she doesn’t want to feed its corruption with her own lies? Since her art is based upon lies, does she feel that she has nothing of truth to share?

Is this an example of metafilm? At the beginning of the film, you see the lights of the projector and you see the film cells go whizzing by. The film ends with a camera crew following Alma as she leaves. In the middle, there’s an out of context interlude that reminded me nothing more than of the Terry Gilliam animated shorts in the middle of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

In all of these cases, you are brought out of the false reality that you usually find yourself in when you sit down to watch a film. Is this an attempt to lift the veil of film making? Is this to remind you, that even as the film is talking about truth and lies, that the film itself is an artificial contrivance lying to you?

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I have absolutely no fucking clue.

The sixteenth through the eighteenth films in the Sight and Sound list have been quite a ride. You have Meshes of the Afternoon, a fourteen minute long surrealistic mind fuck of a film. You have Close-Up, which absolutely demolishes the line between documentary film and fiction. And you have Persona, a fairly short film where over ninety percent of the film consists of only two actors, only one of whom even talks. It’s an amazing accomplishment that Bergman was able to embed so many interesting questions and ambiguity into it.

I’m not sure where Sight and Sound is going to take me next. I will be buckling my seat belt.

Are All Imposters Just Intense Method Actors?

Title: Close-Up

Rating: 5 Stars

Well, the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound best film list is turning into a roller coaster. I recently watched and wrote about Meshes of the Afternoon, ranked sixteenth on the list. It was a weird, experimental fourteen minute long film that I just didn’t get. I then moved onto number seventeen on the list, the 1990 Iranian film, Close-Up. It is also a somewhat weird, experimental film. Considering the fact that it’s around ninety minutes long and is subtitled, I approached it with significant trepidation. However, unlike my experience with Meshes, I loved it.

The first challenge to the film is how to categorize it. I’ve seen it referred to as a metafilm. I also have seen it called docufiction. The fact that it’s difficult to label is part of what makes it amazing.

Let’s talk about the documentary part of the film first. Before the film was conceived, an impoverished man named Hossain Sabzian was riding a bus reading the screenplay for the film The Cyclist, a film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Sitting next to him was Mrs Ahankhah. Seeing him reading the screenplay, she mentioned that she enjoyed the film. Sabzian immediately claimed to be Makhmalbaf. Learning that her sons are interested in film, Sabzian went to her house to meet them. Over the next two weeks, Sabzian continued to visit them and told them that he wants to use their house as the setting for his next film and to have their sons act in it. At one point Sabzian borrowed some money for cab fare. Growing suspicious, Mr Ahankhah began to think that Sabzian was an imposter planning to rob them. Mr Ahankhah brought over a journalist named Hossain Farazmand. The journalist confirmed that Sabzian was not Makhmalbaf. Mr Ahankhah called the police and Sabzian was arrested.

It is at this point that Abbas Kiarostami, the director of Close-Up gets involved. He reads Farazmand’s article and immediately drops the project that he was working on and heads over to visit Sabzian in prison. He interviews Sabzian on film while he is sitting in prison. He manages to work the Iranian bureaucracy to accelerate the trial date. He even gets the judge to agree to let him film the trial.

The trial is fascinating. Clearly the Ahankhah family thinks that something nefarious was going on but really couldn’t figure it out. Yes, he did accept a fairly insignificant amount of money from them for the cab fare. They theorize that he was trying to get them out of the house so that his ‘gang’ of thieves could come in and rob them. There is just zero evidence that he was planning to do this, and he vociferously denies that he was doing so, let alone the facts that he has no criminal record and that there is no evidence that he’s involved with any criminal gang.

As this is going on, both the judge and the prosecutor repeatedly ask Sabzian’s purpose for pretending to be Makhmalbaf. Although Sabzian answers eloquently and at length, they make no progress divining his motives. They keep telling him that he’s not answering this very basic question. He eloquently again answers but they end up not anymore enlightened.

One answer is that his real life seems so small. He had a job but is currently unemployed. He’s married with two children but his wife has apparently given up on him and has abandoned him and taken one child. He and his son are now living with his mother. It’s clear that he’s impoverished.

Given the opportunity to assume, if only temporarily, another, much larger life, he apparently took it. Once started, he became so committed to his lie that he couldn’t abandon it. Seeking to discover how far he’d take it, the judge asked him if the Ahankhah family had put up the money and made available their house, would he have created the film. Even though in no way a filmmaker, after a few seconds of thought, Sabzian answered that yes he would, but he wouldn’t have let it get that far.

Makhmalbaf’s films held special meeting for Sabzian. Somehow Sabzian believed that Makhmalbaf felt his anguish and through his films sought to express them.

Taking on the role of Makhmalbaf, Sabzian essentially became a method actor. He fully committed to his role. Not only that, but he apparently had dreams of becoming an actor. He said that he was using this experience as training for a future role of a director. He was using these experiences as a store for when he had to act for real. As an actor, he hopes that he can express the feelings that he feels that he can’t express himself.

Apparently he did exactly that.

Yes, this is where it gets even weirder. The judge, since obviously a crime was committed but for no obvious financial gain, kind of leaned upon the Ahankhah family to forgive Sabzian. Even though one of the sons was still pretty clearly suspicious of him, they agreed to and withdrew their charges.

After the trial, the director, Kiarostami, moved from documentary to fiction. Somehow, he managed to convince all of the principals of this story to fully recreate the scenes called out in the trial. So, we get to see Sabzian meet Mrs Ahankhah on the bus. We see the growing suspicions of Mr Ahankhah. We see the journalist confer with Mr Ahankhah and confirm his suspicions. We see the police come and arrest Sabzian.

I have to reiterate, these are all of the real people. There are no actors. The Ahankhah is acting as themselves. Sabzian is acting as himself. The journalist Farazmand is acting himself. Even the police that arrest Sabzian are acting as themselves.

Amazingly enough, the acting is actually good. They are all apparently naturals. Think about what Sabzian is doing. He is acting like himself pretending to be someone else. I would love to know how much acting direction Kiarostami had to give.

Since there is no line between the real people and the actors playing roles, there is no line between the documentary and the staged scenes. The same camera work is used so the staged scenes and the trial appear to be one seamless film.

At the end, the film circles upon itself once more when the real director Makhmalbaf comes to pick up Sabzian on his motorcycle. In Sabzian’s pretend film, he was intending that the key scene would be one of Ahankhah’s sons on a bike. Here the key scene is Sabzian riding along with Makhmalbaf. At first, Sabzian is overcome by seeing Makhmalbaf and falls into his arms weeping.

As the bike ride continues, Makhmalbaf and Sabzian converse. As they do so, the dialog cuts in and out. Although the director Kiarostami tried to claim a technical malfunction, the reality is much weirder. It turns out, that in the conversation, Makhmalbaf’s delivery was quite stiff while Sabzian was naturalistic. The contrast between the film professional and the amateur was so stark that Kiarostami deemed it unusable.

This film was fascinating. Even now, a day later, I find myself thinking about it. In art, what is real and what is fake? Is this a documentary? How real were the fictional scenes? Did Kiarostami write the scenes? Ultimately, what was Sabzian’s real motivation? Why did he continue even though he knew was probably going to get caught?

This was a wonderful example of a film that created something that I’d never really seen before.

Proletarian Noir

Title: Thieves Like Us

Rating: 4 Stars

Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten pretty deep into noir novels. By now, I’ve moved past the giants of noir like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. I have a soft spot for David Goodis, in some ways the most noir of noir authors. In addition to them, I’ve sampled Cornell Woolrich, James M Cain, Jim Thompson, Chester B Himes, and Patricia Highsmith, among many others.

I checked out a collection of crime noir novels from the local library. In that collection was an author that I’d never heard of. Edward Anderson wrote a novel called Thieves Like Us.

Never having heard of him, I did some research, and it turns out that Anderson led an interesting life. First of all, he only published two novels. Thieves Like Us was his second. Born in 1905, he wrote his two novels in the 1930s. Before that, he was a printer’s apprentice. He got into the newspaper trade. He worked as a reporter and a copy editor. Working at some ten different newspapers in his early career, he thought of the newspaper business as legalized prostitution.

Inspired by the Lost Generation and the expat writers like Hemingway, thinking that Paris was the place to be, he quit the newspaper game and moved to France. Realizing that he was too late and that everyone had left, he moved back to the states in the midst of the Great Depression. For two years, he rode the freights, slept in parks, and asked for handouts. Introduced to the son of a preacher that had a large library, he became inspired by what he read and decided to become a writer and write about living life as a hobo. Gradually he began to write short stories for detective pulp magazines.

After he published his two novels, Hollywood came knocking. Although he was able to make some money in Hollywood, none of his film treatments ever made to the silver screen. Disillusioned by Hollywood, he became an alcoholic, eventually suffering from DT’s. He ended up in AA recovery. He died in 1969 in obscurity with only the two novels to his name. Two film versions of Thieves Like Us were made, including one by, of all people, Robert Altman. I guess that I shouldn’t be too surprised since Altman made the noir (and actually surprisingly good) The Long Goodbye the previous year. Anderson received a grand total of 500 dollars for the film rights.

So, given all of that, how is Thieves Like Us? Well, it turns out, pretty darn good.

The protagonist is Bowie. Along with his older, more experienced friends Chicamaw and T-Dub, they escape from prison. Needing cash, they take to robbing banks. T-Dub, having robbed already robbed close to thirty banks, is the leader. Bowie is just looking to make a couple of thousand dollars to set himself up with a stake. 

Initially, they are successful. They rob a couple of banks and each end up over ten thousand dollars. Chicamaw is wild and blows through his cash. Bowie, believing in loyalty to friends, lends him additional money. 

Bowie meets up with a young woman named Keechie. On the one hand, he’s in love with Keechie and wants to start a new life with her without crime. On the other hand, he just can’t stand the thought of betraying his friendship with Chicamaw and T-Dub. When he meets up with them at one of their prearranged rendezvous, Chicamaw has once again blown through his stash and T-Dub is eager to rob another bank. The divided loyalties of his love for Keechie and the bonds of his friendship of thieves is the fulcrum of the novel. Being a noir, you can guess that this will not end well for anyone.

I found two things interesting about this novel that sets it apart from other noir. One is the political point of view. Usually in a noir novel, the politics, if present, are pretty subtle. Here it is front and center. In fact, it drives the title of the novel. In several instances, one of the thieves compares themselves to prominent members of society like police, bankers, and lawyers and declares that these professions are also, in their way, thieves. There’s a famous trial scene in The Wire where the infamous robber of drug dealers, Omar Little, on the stand, makes the point that the defense lawyer is just as much a part of the ‘game’ as he is. One has a shotgun while the other has a briefcase but they are both players in this game.

Towards the end of the novel, one of the lawyers that is in sympathy for Bowie has a fairly extensive monologue on the state of capitalism in American in the 1930s. It’s a bit reminiscent of the final section in Sinclair’s Jungle, where a character goes on a multipage rant about the forces that drive capitalism. 

There’s a form of literature that came of age around this time called Proletarian Fiction. It was fiction written by and for working class laborers (Anderson certainly fit that bill). I’d never heard of this genre before. Thieves Like Us certainly would seem to fall into that category.

The second interesting observation about this novel is its verisimilitude. Apparently, in writing about Bowie and Keechie, Anderson was inspired by Bonnie and Clyde. In his various reporting jobs, Anderson spent time visiting prisons getting to know inmates.

As I was reading the novel, I found myself thinking about Bryan Burroughs history of crime figures in the 1930s. Called Public Enemies, it’s a historical recounting of crime figures like John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. You’d expect that most of the Burroughs’ book would be about the dastardly deeds of all of these criminals. In fact, they all spent relatively little time doing crime and spent most of their time in hideouts or getting flushed from hideouts and having to find another hideout.

You see the same thing in Thieves Like Us. Very little time is spent on the bank robberies. Most of the time, the robbers are on the lam, either together or separately. They’re constantly having to look over their shoulders and, at the first sign of trouble, are ready to pack up and flee.

In fact, reading Thieves Like Us seemed almost like a fictionalized version of the lives of a couple real life bank robbers.

Having that level of reality raised it above the normal noir fare.

Communist Propaganda From A Trillion Dollar Corporation

Title: I’m A Virgo

Rating: 5 Stars

I’m just going to go ahead and say it. Boots Riley is the wild, creative genius that we need right now. I first encountered Riley when I watched the brilliant, insane Sorry To Bother You (written about here) back in 2018. He’s now back with I’m A Virgo.

Cootie is a nineteen year old Black man living in Oakland (also the setting for Sorry To Bother You). He was raised by his aunt and uncle. They are extremely protective of him. In fact, they have never let him out into public. Why, you ask? Well, the fact that he’s thirteen feet tall probably has something to do with it. Growing up so sheltered, he has, to say the least, an innocently naïve view of the world informed, to a large extent, by an obsession with a comic book series featuring an Ironman type superhero simply known as The Hero.

Unsurprisingly, they can’t keep him secret forever, especially since he’s reached the age where he’s eager to go out into the world. He is discovered by two young men and a young woman. Amazed by his size, they effectively take him under their wing and usher him into their world.

As to be expected, he becomes quite the viral sensation (becoming known as Twamp Thing). As he becomes more known, he meets and falls for a young woman who has the superpower of unbelievable speed.

All along there are strange periodic power failures. We find out that the power failures are actually intentional to keep the poor people weak and subjugated. One of Cootie’s friends, the young woman Jones, is a truly charismatic speaker attempting a general strike against the power company in protest of the outages. The Hero, actually a real life person, heroically intervenes but only to defend the property rights of the ownership class. Cootie, horrified with the actions of his real life idol, decides to take on the role of the supervillain to battle the power company. The Hero, Cootie, and Jones are all on a collision course that culminates in the final episode.

The main thing that I love is how unpredictable the series unfolds. Even with its wild strangeness, the story is not chaotic. There is a structure and order to it. Much like in Sorry to Bother You, Riley clearly has purpose and vision and is executing it to perfection. It’s a wonderful marriage of message and entertainment.

There’s so many themes going on here. You see how a sweet, naïve, lovable young Black man is turned into a literal caged monster because of the systemic racism that sees all large Black men as dangerous.

The Hero, representing law and order, is wearing white and saying all of the right things. However, it’s clear though that he is only interested in enforcing the law and order that reinforces the existing economic order. His justice is a false justice. His comic book series is nothing more than propaganda to prop up that false injustice.

Entire groups of people are treated as barely citizens. You have the people of the Lower Bottoms, who collectively have been shrunk down to six inches in height. They are truly a lower (smaller) class of people that have to fight to be even recognized.

You see Cootie almost immediately start being taken advantage of. His agent, of course a white man, leaps into action when he first sees Cootie and has him posing uncomfortably for hours on end in absurd settings just for a little bit of money. Cootie is just another advertising product to be exploited.

Although the series builds towards a standoff between The Hero and Cootie, the true hero is Jones. With her spellbinding ability to make abstract concepts visually compelling and doing the hard work of organizing a general strike, it becomes apparent that if real change does eventually come about, it will be because of the actions of people like Jones. There is no shortcut. There is no final battle between good and evil. Progress must be worked for and fought for.

I’ve just talked about the ideas. The presentation of the series is amazing. I haven’t read about it, but I’m guessing that the impressive visuals of presenting a thirteen foot tall man in a conventional world is some combination of perspective, very creative use of props, and CGI. I found Cootie’s attempts to fit into a world much too small for him quite convincing.

As a filmmaker, Riley is clever. One scene, when Cootie is confined, seemed reminiscent of King Kong, once again making a commentary about a racist society equating a Black man to an animal. At one point, there’s a thread of a plot involving a video that is so compulsively enjoyable that no one can tear themselves from it. Intentional or not, that is a direct call to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

One final note is about the blog title. Without going too much into it, the series ends with a several minute stirring and compelling denunciation of capitalism. I found it to be absolutely brilliant.

Riley is a communist activist. Sorry to Bother You also had a strong anti-capitalist bent. I found it extremely amusing that I’m A Virgo is an Amazon Prime presentation. After all, Amazon is (at least as of this writing) a trillion dollar corporation. Even among its highly compensated office workers, it has a reputation for high stressful working conditions that regularly leave employees in tears. Amazon warehouse workers have industrial accidents at significant higher rates than average and are driven by automated systems to work so hard that they sometimes feel the need to urinate in bottles. Amazon delivery drivers, who aren’t even considered Amazon employers, have to deliver packages at a punishing rate (again having to urinate in bottles) in substandard vehicles with safety issues. It’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has, over the years, come to bear an uncanny resemblance to Dr Evil.

What does it mean that Amazon greenlit a project with such an anti-capitalist message? Are they so secure in the power that they wield and their hold over society that they see Riley’s message as absolutely no threat to their sprawling empire? Or is there some rebel faction in the bowels of Amazon that saw this as an opportunity to shoot off a flare of desperate rebellion?

Or do they understand that even communists have money and as part of their grand plan to own all of the capital in the world, are they now going after communist money?

Giving Unreadable Books A Bad Name

Title: Book of Numbers

Rating: 2 Stars

A couple of times a year, I like to sit down and spend a week or two with a book that I know is going to kick my ass. These are books that it cannot be said that I’m looking forward to reading. Usually, when I start one of these books, for the first couple of days, I give serious consideration to abandoning the effort. When I start reading a book, I make a pledge to myself that I will always read at least the first twenty percent of it. Almost invariably, I get sucked into what the book is trying to accomplish and I persevere through it.

People have asked me why I do it. Why would I read a book that actually kind of fills you with a bit of dread before you start on it? I guess my answer is about the same as when you ask a mountaineer why they want to climb Mt Everest. Not just because “it’s there”, but because the very difficulty of it, the challenge of attempting it, and persevering to your goal makes it, at least for me, worth it. Even better, every now and then you come across one of these monstrosities of a book and you end up enjoying it.

In the last several years, I’ve read several books that were extremely challenging. There was Antkind, by Charles Kaufman, a hilarious book full of an army of Donald Trump clones. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, was oddly compulsive reading about tennis and Alcoholics Anonymous. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (RIP!), was a beautifully told story about horrible massacres led by a giant bald man. The Seventh Function of Language, by Laurent Binet, positioned the great semiologist, Umberto Eco, as the world’s unlikeliest action hero.

There were also the books that kicked my butt so hard that I had to use a guide to even get an idea of what was going on. There is the day in the life of an Irishman in Ulysses, by James Joyce. I also bought a key for that great World War II action novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. My favorite part of reading Gravity’s Rainbow is the section where the person that wrote the key basically threw up their hands and were like, yeah, we don’t know what’s going on here either.

There were two books that absolutely kicked my butt and took my lunch money. I didn’t have a key and maybe I should have had one, but I don’t think that it would have made much of a difference. JR, by William Gaddis, was over 700 pages of exactly replicated English speech (complete with run on sentences, partial sentences, and ums and ahs). It was murderous to read.

The other was Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, which was comprised of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. I still don’t know what was going on, but my closest guess was that Beckett was progressively trying to remove elements of a novel to determine how minimal a novel can be. By The Unnamable, the bulk of the novel apparently consisted of a disembodied voice speaking out in nothingness. If I recollect correctly, The Unnamable was barely over one hundred pages, but reading those hundred pages seemed interminable.

It’d been a while since I tackled a difficult novel, so I thought that I was due. I chose Book of Numbers, by Joshua Cohen. I’d just read his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Netanyahus. I wasn’t blown away by it, but several people recommended Cohen’s Book of Numbers. When I read its synopsis, it gave off a respectable postmodern aroma, so with some trepidation I dove in.

The Book of Numbers is about an author named Joshua Cohen (see! right away, metafiction!). At this point, he is somewhat of a failure. His novel that was going to bring him fame and glory had the horrible bad luck of being released on 9/11, so it got lost in the tragedy. Since then, he’s just been poking around picking up work when he can find it. His marriage to his wife, Rachel, appears to be ending.

At the nadir of his life, he receives a phone call. There is another, much more famous Joshua Cohen, famous for starting one of the top software companies, focusing on search. A globe trotting billionaire, he decides that he wants to publish an autobiography. Clearly not wanting to author it himself, he decides to bring his name doppelganger on board to ghostwrite it.

This begins an adventure as the author Joshua Cohen traipses around the globe with the mogul Joshua Cohen (known as Principal), learning everything that he can about his life. If the author Cohen completes the novel, he is guaranteed a significant payday.

Around the story is all kinds of drama regarding his wife trying to find Cohen to serve him divorce papers, Cohen’s infatuation with an Arab woman that he’d only had seen in a burqa, a WikiLeaks like organization trying to get the content before Cohen can publish, and the fact that the Principal, although still relatively young, appears to be dying of cancer (Steve Jobs anyone?).

I’m sorry to say, but I didn’t find any of that really interesting. Don’t get me wrong. Cohen is clearly a smart, talented writer that occasionally writes ingeniously. When I’m reading a difficult novel, there has to be some kind of a spur in the text that will draw me in. Many times it’s humor. I think that there were times that Cohen was trying to be funny. Given the fact that Cohen is Jewish and regularly refers to that fact in the novel, there seemed to be a Portnoy’s Complaint element to it. Even although Portnoy’s Complaint wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, it was funny and I appreciated that. The antics of the character of the author Joshua Cohen just wasn’t amusing or really, even interesting.

As I reached the twenty percent point of the novel, I gave serious consideration to pulling the plug and giving it one of my very rare one star reviews. Luckily, around then, the novel inside the novel kicked in and we learn how the Principal, along with some fellow Stanford students, formed the company. It described the struggles as they tried to find a niche / make a profit. We learn of Moe, an Indian that we first meet when he was working at a startup desperately trying to create a universal remote for all devices in the absence of any standards. This was one of the few amusing parts of the novel. Moe turns out to be an engineering genius whose products drive the company’s success, until he is driven out in a corporate bureaucratic coup.

This part of the novel perked my interest up enough for me to finish. Clearly patterned after Google / Apple, I found the fictional ins and outs of the company’s success over the ensuing decades to be at least interesting reading.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. The end of the novel puts us back into the author Joshua Cohen’s world where he’s trying to finish the novel and evade the WikiLeaks wannabes. My interest level in the novel subsequently dropped.

I won’t say that I regret reading Book of Numbers (that would have earned it the dreaded one star). It also was not as difficult to read as JR or Beckett’s Trilogy. It’s just that, of all of the challenging novels that I’ve read, it was the least interesting.

Cinematic Tough Guys Talkin’ Tough

I have a soft spot for crime fiction films. Specifically, I like films that focus on the smaller, seemingly less important criminal figures. I’m not that interested in the godfather. I’m not that interested in an Oceans 11 type criminal mastermind. I like films that focus on the small fry. These characters are working stiffs that just happen to have chosen crime as their career.

There are three such films that I have a special affinity for. I’m talking about The Town (2010), Killing Them Softly (2012), and The Drop (2014). Other than coming out within four years of each other, they do have some similarities.

First of all, all three films bring major star power. The Town, directed by Ben Affleck, stars Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm, Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper, and Blake Lively (that is an amazing cast). The Drop stars Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, and James Gandolfini. Killing Them Softly stars Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini (again! and sadly, in his last role), Ray Liotta, Sam Shepard, and the always good if underrated Richard Jenkins.

Secondly, all three films are based upon works by famed crime novelists. The Town is based upon Chuck Hogan’s Prince of Thieves. Killing Them Softly is based upon George V Higgins’ (Higgins, with his amazing ear for tough guy dialog, is probably my all time favorite crime novelist) Cogan’s Trade. Finally, The Drop is based upon Dennis Lehane’s short story Animal Rescue. Starting with good source material seems to be an important prerequisite for awesome crime films.

Killing Them Softly and The Town are all set in Boston. The Town in the film title refers to the Boston neighborhood Charlestown. The Drop is technically based in Brooklyn but Lehane is famously from Boston and many of his crime novels, especially his early ones, are set in Boston. Even though set in Brooklyn, to me The Drop has the look and feel of a Boston neighborhood, so I’m going to go ahead and say that Boston is another common theme amongst the three. Sorry not sorry.

The plot of all three films involve players being swept up by even bigger players. In The Town, a gang of bank robbers is forced by the local crime boss named, somewhat incongruously, The Florist, to try to rob Fenway Park. In The Drop, a local tavern is used as the collection point (eg the drop) for gambling bets. When robbers come in and steal the drop money, the Chechen crime boss makes the guys that work at the tavern responsible for getting the money back. In Killing Them Softly, a minor crime figure gets the brilliant idea of robbing a mafia run poker game. The mafia syndicate, not amused, hires a hit man to track the robbers down.

None of the films were particularly financially successful. The Town, since directed by Affleck, probably got a bit more of a studio push. Accordingly, it did make a profit. The Drop received generally favorable reviews but it didn’t seem like it had much studio support. It at best maybe broke even. Killing Them Softly did not get great reviews at release (although some critics have come around since) and did not come close to making its money back during initial release.

Given all of that, how do these films compare? Before I go there, I do want to say that I enjoy watching all of these films. I’ve watched all three of them several times.

Of the three, my least favorite is The Town. By far, the best part of the film is the relationship between Affleck’s character (Doug) and Renner’s character (Jem). Raised together, they have a tight sibling relationship. Doug is cerebral while Renner is a maniac. Doug wants out while Renner pretty clearly wants to go out in a blaze of glory like a Jimmy Cagney character. Their relationship can be summed up by one of the most famous lines in the film:

Doug:  I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people.

Jem: …Whose car are we gonna’ take?

The film works for me as long as the film focuses on the deep, complex, yet fraying relationship between Doug and Jem. For me, where it falls down a bit is in the Fenway Park robbery scene. It goes on way too long and is simply over the top. For that period of time, the film weirdly changes gears from a character study to a Michael Bay type action film.

I really loved The Drop. Hardy, Gandolfini, and Rapace all do outstanding work. Even though violent, this is a purely character driven film. Gandolfini is the over the hill wannabe washout looking for one more score. Rapace, living in a world full of dangerous men, is necessarily distrustful. Hardy does really outstanding work. When you first meet him, he appears almost simpleminded. He seems to be an innocent in a world of violence. Only as the film edges towards its climax do you understand how much you’ve underestimated Hardy’s character.

If I loved The Drop, I’m even more enthralled with Killing Them Softly. I’m somewhat amazed that critics gave it such short shrift when it first came out. Released in 2012, it unspools its plot in the economic breakdown of 2008. As these characters struggle to make their way in life, you hear the background news reports of our country doing the same.

The acting in this film is even more amazing than in The Drop. Here, Gandolfini is a New York hit man who has lost his nerve and is losing himself in the bottle. Jenkins is a mafia middle man lawyer who speaks, hilariously, in the jargon of corporate, bureaucratic middle management. Brad Pitt, proving once and for all that he’s actually a character actor in a leading man’s body, is coldly brutal as Cogan, the hitman brought in to clean up the mess. He’s the best fixer since The Wolf in Pulp Fiction.

The dialog is simply amazing. As I said above, Higgins is renowned for his dialog. Sometimes as I read one of his novels, I lose track of the plot just because I get caught up in the ruthless beauty of what his tough guys are saying. Not only is the dialog ruthless, but it’s often hilarious. I don’t know how much of Higgins’ dialog was actually directly used in the film, but they definitely caught the spirit of the novel. Many scenes in the film have a dark edge of comedy around them.

Here’s a subset of dialog that captures what I’m trying to say:

Jackie Cogan : You ever kill anyone?
Driver : No.
Jackie Cogan : It can get touchy-feely.
Driver : Touchy-feely?
Jackie Cogan : Emotional, not fun, a lot of fuss. They cry. They plead. They beg. …
Jackie Cogan : I like to kill them softly, from a distance. Not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings.

Picture a hitman explaining this to a mafia middle management suck-up, and if you think that’s funny, then this is a film for you.

There you go. If you’re bored some night and looking for a film to watch, those are three films that I’d highly recommend.

When A Cover Is More Than A Cover

The year is 1967. Frankie Valli was trying to be known as more than just the guy from the Four Seasons with a falsetto voice. He wanted a romantic song that allowed him to sing normally.

The song that he chose was Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. It became a monster hit, peaking at number two. It was one of the songs that differentiated the solo Valli career from his Four Seasons career.

You can watch him sing the song on youTube. In his hands, it’s a strictly romantic, pretty treacly song. You can just imagine bobbysoxers swooning over his soft tones. The fact that it came out in 1967, the same year as the Doors’ Light My Fire, Jefferson Airplane’s Somebody to Love, or even The Beatle’s All You Need Is Love, should tell you that Valli doesn’t have a whole lot of time left at the pinnacle of fame, but he does have his moment.

Can’t Take My Eyes Off You has been covered many times, probably most famously by Lauryn Hill. I would submit that the most interesting cover of the song is by Hillbilly Moon Explosion, in 2019.

Who, you ask? That’s a great question. Many years ago, probably about fifteen years or so, I got into a genre of music known as psychobilly. Weirdly enough, the term psychobilly first came into being in the silly (but fun) Johnny Cash song, One Piece At A Time, which is very definitely not a psychobilly song.

Psychobilly can best described as a cross between rockabilly and punk rock. Picture rockabilly, but way louder, way faster, and with themes of death and destruction. You might not be able to tell from that description, but it’s actually quite a fun form of music. It most recently got momentarily famous again from the song that Wednesday Adams danced to in the Netflix series. That song was Goo Goo Muck, by one of the most famous psychobilly bands, The Cramps.

Well, somehow, in the psychobilly bunny trail that I found myself on, the Hillbilly Moon Explosion popped up. Bear in mind that very few would consider them psychobilly. They have a much more conventional rockabilly sound. What makes their sound unique is the vocal stylings of Emmanuela Hutter. She has an almost unearthly ethereal quality to her voice. Behind the sounds of a rockabilly melody, her voice just kind of floats above it. I find their music to be quite compelling. Who knows, but maybe the fact that the band is actually Swiss is one of the reasons why their rockabilly music seems so unconventional.

They released an album in 2019. On it was their cover of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. This album was called The Sparky Sessions. It was called this because they recorded the album with the vocals of Mark “Sparky” Phillips.

Now, probably most of you are thinking, who is Mark Phillips? I’m so glad you asked. Mark Phillips (I’m just going to call him Sparky from hear on out) was one of the founders of the band Demented Are Go. The band was formed way back in 1982. Starting out as the drummer, Sparky quickly became the front man singer.

Hillbilly Moon Explosion might not really be psychobilly but Demented Are Go is without question one of the OGs of psychobilly. In their case, the emphasis is way more on punk rock than rockabilly. It can be said that they have a checkered background.

Sparky apparently liked to combine LSD and alcohol. In Japan, there was controversy during their shows when Sparky, and here I’m just going to quote their wiki page, “showed up naked and did strange things with a rubber fish”. On other tours, they’d apparently would have sex with a vacuum cleaner on stage. Walking around a mall in the US after a sound check, Sparky pinched a woman’s butt. Well, that woman was actually a sixteen year old girl and Sparky was arrested. The tour was cancelled and the rest of the band went back to England, leaving Sparky in jail. Years later, they tried to tour in the US but Sparky was barred because of the sex conviction.

As I said, a bit more punk rock than rockabilly.

Now you’re caught up. On their cover, Emmanuela and Sparky perform Can’t Take My Eyes Off You as a duet. As I’ve mentioned, Emmanuela has the voice of an angel. I have not mentioned this, but Sparky has the voice of a child molester. It’s a low, gravelly voice that makes Tom Waites sound like, well, Frankie Valli.

It’s a fascinating juxtaposition. One voice in the song is the voice of an innocent woman/girl. The other voice is that of a man peeping through the bedroom blinds with his pants around his ankles.

It gives an interesting new interpretation to the song. In the still kind of innocent but changing mid 1960s, you can have a boy (even though by now Valli is in his 30s) singing about an innocent teenage crush.

However, in 2019, if you think about it for just a minute, Can’t Keep My Eyes Off You is creepy. It’s the song of a stalker.

Just look at some of the lyrics. “You’re just too good to be true / Can’t take my eyes off of you. ” “Pardon the way that I stare”. Every other line in the last verse is some version of the infantilizing word baby (really strong creative songwriting there).

Hearing Sparky croon (and, make no doubt, even though it’s in his whiskey / cigarette wreck of a voice, it is a croon) these words to the lilting voice of Emmanuela really highlights the eerie, obsessive, creepiness of the song.

Given how the world has changed over the last fifty years, this version of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You is exactly appropriate to the times.

16th Greatest Film Ever? You’re Drunk, BFI

Title: Meshes of the Afternoon

Rating: 2 Stars

I’m slowly going through the British Film Institute Sight and Sound top 250 films. Meshes of the Afternoon came in at sixteenth.

Comparing the BFI list to the AFI (American Film Institute) list of 100 films is pretty illuminating. First of all, by design, the AFI films are all American films. This requirement is slightly lax because films like Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge Over the River Kwai make the list even though they are predominately British films.

The BFI list has no such requirements. The films in the list are from all over the world. The number one film, Jeanne Dielman, is Belgian. In the top twenty-five or so are films from Japan, Hong Kong, USSR, France, Iran, and Sweden. The AFI list, somewhat infamously, has no women directors. In the top echelon of the BFI list are several, including, again at number one, Jeanne Dielman, directed by Chantal Akerman.

Also, the AFI has not been updated since 2008. At that point in time, the American film industry was (and, arguably, still is) in the thrall of the 1970s auteurs. So you end up with six Steven Spielberg films, three Martin Scorsese films, and three Francis Ford Coppola films. Included in the list are films like American Graffiti, The Deer Hunter, and M*A*S*H, which I’d argue would not be included if the list was updated today.  The BFI electors are not quite so enthralled with these auteurs. Sure, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now pop up in the top twenty, but there’s definitely a wider variety of filmmakers.

Because the BFI is so much more inclusive, even in the top twenty, there were a number of films that I’d never heard of. Not to brag, but over the last four or five years, I’ve seen close to five hundred films, so I’m not a complete neophyte to films. The fact that so many films are considered the greatest ever are films that I’ve never even heard of is pretty astounding to me.

Several times, when I’ve sat down and watched one of these films, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I remember pretty much forcing myself to sit down and watch Jeanne Dielman, a three and a half hour film meditating on the mundane day to day existence of a Belgian widowed housewife. I ended up being completely drawn into the story (I wrote about it here). This was equally true when I reluctantly sat down to watch A Man with a Movie Camera, a 1929 USSR silent film about the day in the life of a city. It told a compelling story using special effects decades ahead of its time (written about here).

Some of the films listed have not done it for me. The number five film, In the Mood for Love, was just not all that interesting telling of a thwarted, repressed love story. Coming in at number seven was Beau Travail, an uninteresting French Foreign Legion take on the Melville novel, Billy Budd.

This brings us to number sixteen. It is called Meshes in the Afternoon. From the cryptic title, I assumed that it was going to be a foreign (I don’t know, it sounded vaguely Middle Eastern to me) film with a poorly translated title.

Imagine my shock when I discovered that it was an American film made in 1943. In case that didn’t leave me off balanced enough, it runs a grand total of fourteen minutes and is absolutely silent (a musical score was added in 1959).

How did that film manage to get ranked sixteenth? Well, that’s a great question that I have not been able to answer.

Let’s talk about the film. It’s an experimental film made by a married couple, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. Apparently there’s some controversy over who exactly did what, but the general consensus seems to be that it was primarily the brainchild of Deren. Deren was twenty-six when making this film (coincidentally the same age when Orson Welles made Citizen Kane).

What’s the film about? Well, that’s a good question. It’s fair to say that it’s open to interpretation. Maya Deren plays a character that sees someone as she’s walking down the street. She then enters her home and falls asleep. In her dream(?), she repeatedly chases a hooded figure that has a mirror for a face. A key, a knife, a flower, a telephone, and a record player make regular appearances in the film. For some reason, the Deren character repeatedly spits out the key. The Deren character seems to be going through the same overlapping cycle. At one point, three different Deren characters are sitting around a kitchen table staring at each other. A man (Hammid) appears in the house. The Deren character that was sleeping in a chair is now dead, apparently murdered, although possibly by suicide.

And that’s it.

Clearly, it’s an experimental film. I might be tempted to say avant-garde, although Deren apparently resented that characterization. From the wiki page, Deren and Hammid were inspired by the films of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel (Great! More home work). On the other hand, Deren denied that influence and hated surrealism, so who knows?

Given there is little in the way of plot, you find yourself focusing on other aspects of the film. There are interesting camera angles chosen. In the same wiki post, it’s mentioned that their use of shadow and angles could have been an inspiration to the noir films to come. I guess that perhaps I can see that.

One interesting connection made in the wiki page was to David Lynch. It specifically mentioned how Lynch was influenced by Meshes in making the film Lost Highway (written about here). Specifically, it called out the fact that Lost Highway also circles in on itself, is somewhat loose with its plot, and the same characters reoccur in the film. Having now watched Meshes and several Lynch films, it does make sense that Meshes was a source of inspiration to Lynch.

The fact that I’m struggling to come up with my own thoughts of the film and am having to rely upon wiki should tell you that I had trouble engaging with the film. Perhaps I’m too trapped in the traditional narrative cinema form. Perhaps experimental films like these are always going to be a struggle to me.

In my defense, there have been a couple of experimental films that I have enjoyed. The 1962 film La Jetée (#62 on the Sight and Sound list), is a film composed almost entirely of still photos. It was the inspiration for the much later Brad Pitt / Bruce Willis film 12 Monkeys. Running twenty-eight minutes, it oddly sucks you in.

Even more weirdly, in 1965, there’s a weird mash-up of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett in the 1965 film called, ummm, FILM. For twenty-two minutes, a camera relentlessly pursues Buster Keaton as Keaton futilely tries to escape the scrutiny. A very odd film, but again, weirdly compelling to watch.

All of that to say, I don’t get Meshes of the Afternoon. I certainly don’t get it coming in ranked at sixteen. Of all films ever created, there are only fifteen films that are more significant? That seems like a shaky proposition.

Anyway, it’s only fourteen minutes long. It’s available on youTube. It’s a pretty painless way to experience what some consider to be one of the greatest films ever made.