Pretty sure this plays on a loop in David Lynch’s head. Courtesy of my friend Jeremy Goldstein.
Oslo, August 31st
I wrote about why Joachim Trier’s films - Oslo, August 31st and Reprise - are just the best, for The Paris Review Daily. I also get a kick out of how the star of both films, Anders Danielsen Lie, is a doctor in real life, released a concept album about autism, is married to a supermodel, and the couple of films that he’s been in - including one he made as a ten year old that was nominated for an Academy Award - have done wonderfully. Do his friends hate him for being very successful at life?
For those who like to keep score (check Richard Rushfield’s “The Painfully Brief Candle of Modern Auteurs,” a totally fun theory) Trier is now two for two with great films, and I’m really curious as to whether he can keep it up - for two directors that I was very excited about at one point, Wes Anderson and David Gordon Green, their third film was where the seams started showing (Team Rushmore, less The Royal Tenenbaums), and they’ve been up and down ever since, one director sticking to a vision, the other… not. I think it’s different for foreign directors that can get arts funding, however.
I have slight issues with the use of the word “auteur” as an French, chic-sounding catch-all replacement for “film director,” as, contextually, Kael and Sarris-ly, at the least, it referred to seeing a director’s signature even in work-for-hire stuff, when it’s more used willy-nilly these days with relatively visionary directors of any stripe, including writer/directors. Kind of like the evolution of the word “peruse,” which I think means to read thoroughly and carefully in the OED and now is used for indicating that you flipped through something.
Semi-related (crumbling structures)
I was thinking about it yesterday, and two men who have done some of the most impactful work in the past ten years had careers as newspapermen: David Axelrod, Barack Obama strategist/guru*, and David Simon, The Wire.
If you’ve ever written for a newspaper and learned the tools of that trade you can kind of see how the newspaper forged their particular visions of the world. The newspaper is a really important finishing school! Even though I never had a full-time job at a paper, I’ve freelanced for them for years (one in particular was one of those situations where, um, really I should’ve been working for them but… the economy) and I think they’ve made me a far better writer than I would be now. When I worked as an editor, I really had to wrestle contributions from bloggers to the ground so that they fit our established style/format/sounded professional, because the blogging voice is far different from the newspaper voice. (Conversely, and frequently, I have to be told to “put myself” in an article. It is not my first move.) I will always want to work for a newspaper, in some ways, but I would also have issues with any paper that isn’t one of the nation’s monoliths, where people need to make sure that it exists for future generations.
*Fun link: This is more of a hunch and not verified, but David Axelrod worked on Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s first campaign, selling him to a Massachusetts sick of Romney’s reign with a brilliant vague slogan: “Together We Can.” Patrick’s fine at his job, but I suspect when Obama was originally running for president, the Hope/Change thing smacked too much of the current Governorship to sound like anything other than a line. I think that’s part of the reason that MA went to H. Clinton in the primaries.
Amanda's Million →
Our own Yancey Strickler reflects on what Amanda Palmer’s million dollar project means and how she did it. A must read.
Hey Kickstarter, a question. So Amanda Palmer getting to a million on Kickstarter is great. Fantastic for her. She’s such a hard worker and has been really cultivating a wonderful community. And there’s this:
Whether it’s Amanda Palmer, Tim Schafer, Bret Easton Ellis, Radiohead, Louis CK, or Joss Whedon, fans have repeatedly rewarded artists who step out from behind their industries’ protective walls. No one is happy with the current creative economy, and fans will support people who dare to challenge it. They know it’s a risk and they appreciate it.
But here’s my question. What about the artists who don’t have the comfort/audience that comes from paying their dues in the (failing) industries yet? What would you say are the word-of-mouth Kickstarter projects from unknowns, and how did they reach their goals? Because when artists like Amanda Palmer, Louis CK, or Joss Whedon go indie, they have the built-in infrastructure of an ardent fanbase that they can make some noise. And that’s awesome, but I wonder how sustainable a model it is to the kids out there who want to build careers in the arts - who don’t even get the chance to pay their dues in the current structures because they’re crumbling - and not starve.
“To say I didn’t get their themes — love, sex, drugs, and women — would be an understatement. Sex was just an abstract concept, the eventual byproduct of kissing furiously in the boiler room, impossible to consider on any sort of physical level. I loved my family, but I didn’t know that sort of furious, eating its own tail, self-destructive love that comes from mutually miserable people pushing and pulling at each other, exacerbating the pain with drugs.”
Elisabeth Donnelly on discovering The Afghan Whigs at 12, in an in-progress essay for It’s Complicated #1 (via itscomplicatedproject)
Yes, the whole essay is this wonderful, and I can’t wait until Niina and I aren’t the only ones who get to read it.
(via judyxberman)
I wrote about The Afghan Whigs for Judy and Niina’s awesome project, and you’ll get to read it soon! I’m excited to read all sorts of essays grappling with being a feminist and the complicated relationship with misogynistic art.
Do you have your 4th of July costume?
The Men Behind the Curtain: A GQ TV Roundtable →
Another awesome piece from this month’s killer, D'Angelo-featuring GQ: a great, essential interview that really delineates the personalities of David Milch, Matthew Weiner, and Vince Gilligan. I loved how every time Weiner talked about how “you have to get credit for what you do,” Gilligan was diplomatic and was like, “well, we do it slightly differently” or “yes, that’s such a great point.” For a sick, sick visionary, Gilligan sounded genuinely nice and kind. Milch comes off like a wonderful college professor talking in abstracts.
So much gold, but this may be my favorite: “Bryan [Cranston] isn’t afraid to be photographed in his underpants time and time again. That’s a pretty good physicalization of his fearlessness.”
The author, Brett Martin, is writing a book on the golden age of cable TV (you wish you thought of it, don’t you? I do!), tentatively titled Difficult Men. I wonder what the next act will be for Weiner and Gilligan, given that Mad Men and Breaking Bad are hurtling towards the end?
“BRITAIN’S Got Talent hot favourite Jonathan Antoine has a secret life as a member of a bizarre internet cult.
The shy opera singer has joined a wacky group called The Nerd Fighters.
Members, often intellectual loners, claim they are “not made of flesh and bone’’ and watch Harry Potter and Star Trek movies all the time.
”
“He cuts a transfixing figure for even an ordinary reader’s curiosity: the book-jacket photographs with their silvery-bronze patina suggesting a pale-eyed cattle rustler, his laser-blue gaze smudged simultaneously with apprehension and derring-do, a tin-woodman tint evoking a man of metal and mettle, in sorrowful quest of his forgotten heart.”
For anyone who’s ever done an interview, Chapter Seven-ish of The Sportswriter, by Ford, is a hilarious and uncanny satire of the parry and back and forth between a writer and subject, hyper-aware of what each person wants from the interaction. Fabulous. Coincidentally, I read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and The Sportswriter at the same time, and made a lot of changes in my life months later, in an effort to cure myself of dreaminess.
Not You!
I think the thing that makes Mark Wahlberg a movie star, straight-up, is not a matter of looks or line delivery - it’s mystery. Is he a genius? Is he smart? Is he stupid? How can he basically play the same character, amazingly, in The Departed and The Other Guys? How is Dirk Digger from Boogie Nights basically related to those guys? Why does he seem like he has no sense of humor at all, even though he’s very funny?
I think the easy answer is to see him as a holy fool, lucking into success in the business, but it’s way too reductive considering that when he’s in good movies, they’re amazing, and he’s a fairly successful producer. (The weird details of his real life - the rap career, time in juvie for blinding a man in a hate crime - let’s forget about it for now. Dude has some darkness, is probably more Catholic now, I imagine a lot of asking for forgiveness and holy retribution, he does a lot of charity boys and girls clubs work in Dorchester, some writer somewhere has to steal the details for a Horatio Alger story. I hope he’s given some money that man’s family. I wonder.)
As an actor, he has this magical ability to play dumb so sincerely that you think oh, he must be dumb, there’s no wink at the camera reassuring us that he’s smart. I suspect he’s got that kind of Boston-ish sense of humor where he’s very good at busting someone’s chops (see: Dignam, The Departed), but I’m not sure whether it’s a winking, ironic sense of humor. I think that’s what Mark Wahlberg is, above all, and what makes him likable and rootable: he’s earnest. It’s why he’s a great match for Will Ferrell in The Other Guys because you believe them both so completely.
He’s amazing in Boogie Nights. I forgot that movie is hilarious, a warning about how coke is a terrible drug, and sort of a mix of montages and set-pieces, cut in a way that it feels oh-so-fast even though it’s a fairly long movie. Whereas Paul Thomas Anderson’s sold-as-“funny” Punch Drunk Love felt like the saddest movie in the world when I saw it in the theaters opening night. The kids behind me laughed at every Adam Sandler line and I was about to cry, this character just had so much pain and anger and people were so cruel and it crushed me.
Boogie Nights, though: it’s the root of so many things, while also being a compendium of all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film-nerd admirations and tributes. But I laughed really, really hard when I realized that “Mac” on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is basically a tribute to Dirk Diggler, down to the love of karate chops. Because Mark Wahlberg is a little bit of a comic genius.
Driving to Big Sur, 2012
When you’re driving and you’re stuck behind a large vehicle so you can’t see the traffic in front of you or even large traffic lights, I think it hits the same note of frustration in your brain when you’re stuck listening to somebody else’s cell phone conversation.
When I was in Sweden, people jabbering on their phones on a train ride didn’t bother me one iota.
Saturday night with Lana Del Rey (my appreciation for this album grows and grows).
Got my red-and-white striped jersey dress on, drinking Laphroaig on ice.
I'm Adam and I'm Adamant About Living Large
Adam Yauch’s death is a massive bummer. Partially because it was cancer, something that has been wreaking havoc on my life, month after month; and just hearing about his cancer diagnosis, it didn’t sound dire, it really didn’t. (My guess is that it was too close to the lymph nodes? But what do I know.) Cancer sucks. It’s not an automatic death sentence, but it definitely is a reminder of the absolute game of chance that rules everybody’s life. Cancer can strike, kill, or be dealt with and how your body responds to it… it’s just a roll of the dice. Which is really hard.
There’s a tendency to talk about disease like “oh, they did X and Y. This is how they sinned, they deserved it.” You talk about it that way because it’s comforting, because then you won’t get a disease. It’s a spell to protect you for the future, but when it comes to cancer, nothing rational applies. All the kale in the world may help, or it may not.
I think you could argue that the Beastie Boys was the undeniable band of my generation, and to know that they won’t be Beastie Grumpy Old Men hits me in the heart. MCA always seemed like the older brother, reminding me of my cousins who had the wisdom and slightly scary affect of age, who were undeniably men with scruff, men who had sex.
I spent three weeks in Stockholm as a teenager, and I made my parents tote a copy of Hello Nasty abroad with them when they met up with me in the last week. I used Yauch’s Buddhism as a lure - “Mom, he’s Buddhist like you and he raps about it! Don’t you want me to be listening to this music?” I had to hang out with an Swedish semi-relative of mine, and we got through that mutual teenage awkwardness when he taped a Beastie Boys interview for me, and we watched it together. The Beastie Boys all made fun of the Swedish interviewer. I laughed a little bit harder than Marcus.
When I interviewed Zoe Kazan for The Exploding Girl, I got to go to the Oscilloscope offices. It was thrilling. I saw some Beasties prizes, Moon Men and Grammys, I thought about when the Beasties used their gigantic platform to talk about respecting women and how exciting that recognition was. I saw an older, still super-cute Adam Horowitz, and he looked like my dude and I was like, sweet. (Ironically, Adam Horowitz and Kathleen Hanna got married for health insurance, which is a situation I understand.) Apparently my VHS of the best of the Beastie Boys videos imprinted on me at a young age.
But I got to talk to The Exploding Girl’s director, Bradley Rust Grey, in Adam Yauch’s office. There were mandalas on the walls. Tokens of the fact that he was a serious Buddhist. The energy in the room was a good place. I felt safe. It reminded me of my mom’s math classroom in high school, where she had put quotes by Rumi and about mindfulness on the walls.
The Beastie Boys defined cool for me when I was a teenager. When they liked something, it was probably worthy. I listened to Ben Lee because of them, and I liked it. They were good tastemakers, and I think part of the reason I veered towards cultural journalism was because I wanted to share that same thrill of discovery of something new, some great way of looking at the world through art or film or whatever. 
What Adam Yauch did with Oscilloscope wasn’t unexpected, considering what good taste the Beasties had. But he started a film company around 2008 - when jumping into the fray was pitting yourself as Joan of Arc against the armies - and did a good job of buying up great documentaries and challenging films (The Messenger is wonderful, Oren Moverman is a genius) and some of them even got Oscar nominations. Contextually, studios were killing their indie divisions at the same time and movies would play film festivals and just go off into oblivion. Oscilloscope was very necessary. It still is very necessary. It’s a barometer of a bunch of engaged people with fantastic taste, which is a very good part of Adam Yauch’s legacy.
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Still taken from “Give Us Today Our Daily Terror,” Martijn Hendricks, 2008
I have to go to Bodega Bay, California for a wedding in September. Bodega Bay is best known for being the setting of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, although most of the buildings featured in the movie have been torn down. (Tippi Hedren still signs autographs there, though.) It’s the week after a wedding on a farm in the middle of Kentucky bourbon country, which will be fun.
These weddings are the closest thing to a vacation this year. I want to go to Paris, but instead I’ll go to California. Should we try to camp at Big Sur in between weddings? Or just hang out for the week in LA and see whether we can get jobs there? What would you do?
Channing Tatum on The Vow: “It was like, ‘Do I really need to have my shirt off to take out the garbage while eating a piece of pizza and picking up a cat?’ Shirtless? Was that really necessary?”
The Vow is one of those “my wife loses her memory of our relationship in a car accident and I have to get her back” movies and it’s really earnest, as opposed to 50 First Dates, but in that earnestness (embodied, really, by the puppyish charm of Tatum) it’s freaking hilarious. Ya’ll dropped the ball on telling me that I should go see this film in the theaters with a flask smuggled in my purse. Because The Vow is totally a film you watch while getting goofy drunk.
The thing that I really enjoyed about the movie was that Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams are playing this adorable hipster (eh, for lack of a better word) couple - she’s a sculptor estranged from her family! He runs a music studio trying to get authentic, warm, analog sound! Tatum describes love by quoting Radiohead’s Thom Yorke on the subject of genius! It sort of felt like the role was written for Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Not that Tatum isn’t charming in that lunkheaded way, but you can’t quite buy him as a guy who needs to live in the music because he’s so cute, and you know that the world has treated him wonderfully because of that big lug handsomeness. But I suspect Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Rachel McAdams would’ve been woefully mismatched.
The memory loss thing is goofy enough, but plot-wise, McAdams reverts back to her former, staid self - a law student with straight hair that is dyed an awful blonde with a rich family who all vote Republican. Not only does she not remember her husband, she has become a total lame choad at the same time! (Obviously the sort of law student who goes straight to a firm to make the big bucks, not to pay off loans.)
The thing that didn’t make sense about the movie, as well, was that even if she didn’t remember her husband, wouldn’t she have taken one look at Channing Tatum and been like, yeah, alright previous me! Good job! Let me get a piece of those pretty abs! She’s just awful and bitchy and law-student-y when Tatum basically spends the whole movie being perfect, charming, and wearing a lot of cardigans. (This is also where I would’ve believe Joseph Gordon-Levitt a little bit more - he could be a spindly guy who has to work to get the girl in a different way.)
There was a lot of aqua in the movie that I think was supposed to symbolize Channing Tatum, or their cool bohemian relationship, but it was so overused I just started yelling Aqua! every time I saw it. The music cues were stuff like OK Go, which, of course. Jaunty pretend indie. Rachel McAdams’ charm is fairly dangerous. In no way would the film work without her.
I thought that any and all backlash to Girls was pretty fascinating, basically because it said a couple of things. People carry a lot of wounds. Representation is important. You would have to be half-dead to not bristle at things selling you on “a voice of a generation,” however ironically displayed, and then to have a show that stars a bunch of unknowns with known parents on top of it… it just makes you think that the deck is stacked. (Bad Smash joke corner: why didn’t she cast one of Meryl Streep’s Gummer daughters, even if they were volunteering in Micronesia?) I think, in particular, even though the access to making your own art is easier than ever in 2012, it’s still very hard to devote yourself to it, or to make things that people end up seeing with no monoculture. The result? Resentment of people who break through, whose voice gets heard for whatever reason.
And they’re good arguments to have, even if they cloud out the fact that Lena Dunham is a sharp, talented writer. Even if Girls is screamingly tone-deaf at times, seemingly on purpose, she has a voice at an age where people can’t quite afford to have a voice - out of all the twentysomethings trying hard to be writers, filmmakers, whatever, literary and creative, whose stuff do you remember? Whose stuff kicks you in the ass?
For me, personally, Dunham’s work is not there yet - and I know on my end a lot of it relates to stuff I’ve dealt with the past two years, I feel tired, I can’t care and relate in the same way to a girl moping in Tribeca or the general ineptitude of dudes these days - but it certainly could be. She reminds me a bit of Nicole Holofcener, whose work would probably be pilloried in the same way if it came out now, if she starred in it and didn’t have a Catherine Keener - after all, her step-father produced Woody Allen’s films. The other difference between the two might be a little film school (Holofcener graduated from Columbia, I think) and the seasoning that comes with it. This seasoning may also give off the impression of “paying your dues” and “the struggle” because of “student loans.” But seasoning can also come with DIY, eventually. You can learn how to tighten the strings and get someone in the heart. There’s also a lot of parallels between Dunham and novelist/memoirist/screenwriter Emma Forrest.
The Girls backlash reminded me of two other things: Diablo Cody + Juno and Jonathan Franzen on the cover of Time. Such ink spilled over stuff that ultimately can be kind of niche (at least in the case of Franzen, to a degree, and Girls, which is about as popular as that). And it’s certainly quieted down in the case of Cody, who’s been writing some pretty great, weird stuff. The general public will totally fight whenever someone is deemed “the voice of a generation,” or “the voice of now.” Cody’s case was complicated by that whole stripper-turned-writer thing, which inspired so much gross misogyny, whereas Franzen just angers everybody. Franzen’s funny because he’s the opposite of a bumbling, self-deprecating Woody Allen sort - he’s just a literature catholic, believing in the transcendent possibilities of the written word to the point that he can’t really be out in the world without people calling him an arrogant, awful person. He seems awkward to me. I think the talk about Girls will quiet down and, really, the true test of things will be seeing where Dunham goes in her career. What she does next.
Ultimately, however, I hope that a rising tide will carry all ships, particularly when it comes to this show. I want the girls doing Girls to hire girls and mentor girls and put real girls on film. I want Peggys telling Megans that it’s freaking awesome that you saved the Heinz account, in whatever form that is. I want more strange female characters written by smart women straddling the billboards of New York like a colossus. I want those characters to be a variety of races and to have parents that worked as schoolteachers for nonexistent pensions and no lakehouses.
Sometimes I think that people care about pop culture or art in whatever form because you just want to see yourself reflected in the light, to know that you existed as something slightly bigger than the everyday mundanity. Here’s the thing, though: you exist. What are you going to do with that rare gift?
You know Lee Miller’s face, if you’ve ever seen Man Ray’s most famous photographs, but did you know she was a true American original, a fantastic war photographer on the front lines, a writer and artist?
Greenpointers descend upon the Free Book Table like children on a plate of cupcakes.
Hi WORD! I ended up with Jeff Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die and it’s fantastic. The Free Book Table is quite generous!
Albatross is a wildly uneven film that ultimately isn’t very good, although it has lots of great elements: Lady Sybil wearing pants, but mostly skirts, and rebelling in a crappy little seashore town, striking up a quick friendship with Felicity Jones (girl crush material. Love her!), who’s a grind bound for Oxford. Even though it’s set in a delicious dilapidated town by the sea, there’s no real sense of place and of who the people are from this town, and that’s part of what sinks the film, besides the fact that there’s a father and an affair - bad girls, daddy issues, duh - and scenes that needed tension had no tension. There is a scene where a secret leaks out into the open, and it’s a masterclass in terrible staging and general apathy.
I wanted to like it quite a bit. (I love Wish You Were Here.) But imagine a whole film with the feelings conveyed in this one shot!
It is nice to know that six-year-old you would be absolutely, positively thrilled at what you’ve done with your life.