Beef

Last night I watched a well-received film featuring terrible prosthetics, and it was both well entertaining and basically lacking in that-hard-to-pin-down quality, soul. Anyways, I realized that I have a particular aversion to this director - who is very talented, and whose work, so far, has been far more good than bad but oddly unsatisfying - and part of it’s due to the fact that I do not care, one whit, about any of the humans in his work; the human condition is sacrificed for cool shit, party tricks, and it all goes down like something delicious and kind of forgettable. It was also full of guns and you know what? I’m seriously not in the mood for any movies that treat death in such a cavalier fashion.

I will admit in this case that my feelings err on the side of irrational because I think this man’s ego - the desire to point out how clever he is in every frame - leeched into his turns behind the camera on my favorite TV show, leading to the chilliest, worst episodes (it should be obvious who this is, obviously). It’s funny, too - my favorite TV show is familiar with death, and there have been shootouts, but a high percentage of the deaths on the show have mattered and have had weight and I think that’s important for the psyche.

But I also think that directors along the likes of this guy and the other guy with a movie coming out soon (hint: the star of my favorite TV show would be the Kevin Bacon-like link), directors who have done entertainments, who have tried action and done something reasonably novel enough even if that doesn’t make them the next great artiste; well, I feel like people should chill out about that person’s oeuvre. (Funny - both of these directors have taken on actors about my age as muses, and they’re not very good in most of their works!) They’re talked about in far too elevated terms when I think they’re just … pleasant talents - who make moderately entertaining, above-the-norm work with a woman problem - who certainly have the potential to go all David Gordon Green-like run of trash in the future.

In short, nobody’s going to be talking about this guy in 20 years, but the amount of ego laced throughout his work means you know he thinks that could be the case, and it’s so annoying. And I think he’s part of a movement of overrated writer-director types, and I think there need to be more straight-up humanists making movies and art out there, and not just easily impressed little boys.

I have read some books! Many books, in fact. Let’s go through some of them quickly.

I do not know if Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements is good or not, since I listened to the audiobook and it was read by a stentorian older man (when you needed John Slattery from Mad Men) who tended to lapse into all the voices of the female characters in a manner that suggested a Kid in the Hall dressing up as a woman. This meant that it sounded like the narrator was making fun of every woman in the book, and so I wasn’t able to enjoy it the way it was meant, I suspect, but it’s still pretty obvious that Shipstead is a very good writer with a winning voice and a talent for sentences.

The audiobook is a weird sort of reckoning for books. Women make better audiobook readers; Laura Lippman books read by the amazing Linda Emond really work for me, for example.

Last month I went to a Q&A in Albany by Denis Johnson, which was awesome. He talked about his new book: made some jokes about being “Graham Greene,” said it was set in Uganda. He talked about growing up in Japan (he was an army brat) and how he was part of a “bad boys club” in elementary school where they said they’d protect kids if they gave them their lunch money or something, and how seeing Moby Dick, the Gregory Peck version, in the theatre knocked him on his ass and his first short story was called “The Whale” and was a straight ripoff. I expected him to be scary and intimidating, and he was a joker with a great smile, the sort of smile that you knew he used a lot to get out of trouble in his reckless youth. It carved deep parentheses into his face. You could believe in that smile. (Oh, god, I just had a thought: druggy Jesus’ Son Denis Johnson = Freaks and Geeks’ Daniel Desarrio. WHOA.) I read Train Dreams. It was good, but I really love Denis Johnson’s book of journalism, Seek, where he mostly goes to war zones because “that’s where I could go and get my foot in the door.” One essay is about waiting to meet Charles Taylor.

After a year or so of lugging it around, I finally read Moby Dick! That book is weird, long, homoerotic, hilarious, totally boring with whale minuta that isn’t even factually accurate, and filled with thrills and insights that will give you chills. I want to have it on my bedside table and read a bit of it every day like it’s The Bible. It’s a masterpiece. I love you, Herman Melville, and I want to disappear inside that book. I may go to Melville’s house this weekend, in fact.

The last book I read recently that got me in the heart was Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. You HAVE to read this book. It’s amazing. It has real insights about the human experience and human character; it’s a fabulous tribute to the glory of New York City. The white horse, Athansor, is a creature I wish I could meet. I really want to thrust this book out to everyone I know and make them read it. I have not felt this passionate or evangelical about a book in awhile. So it was kind of crazy reading this back to back with Moby Dick, which is also fabulous. READ IT. SO GOOD. (Winter’s Tale will be a movie come next year -probably Oscar bait - and you should probably read it NOW so the images in your head are YOUR images, not movie images.)

I am currently slogging my way through Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie and it is taking forever, he is a bore in this case. Can you believe it? I wish he didn’t write it in the third person, it just feels so disingenuous.

“Headland: I had been working at Miramax and the Weinstein Company for almost five years. I only worked for Harvey for the last year of that. I didn’t leave because of him, but because I realized that, for all intents and purposes, I had been stuck in an entry-level job for a really long time. And I noticed that a lot of people my age were in a similar situation. They weren’t being mentored, it was just sort of doing people’s dirty work for them, and I thought, why do we keep doing this? Why are we still in this position? And when I worked for Harvey directly, I actually did get somebody who was definitely challenging to work for, but somebody who actually encouraged me. He said, ‘Aren’t you a writer? Why are you still here?’ And he actually read through some of my work and really challenged me to leave in a lot of ways, and say, ‘You know, you could stay and become a producer, and I can teach you how to do that, but you’re a good writer, and if you want to be a writer, you have to go and do it – you have to actually write. You can’t hang out at my desk and write in secret.’ So that’s what the experience of working there and then leaving was like.”

— Bachelorette director, playwright, and writer Leslye Headland, you are very smart (and I have loved you since your blog Cinephilia). I have more to say about what she’s talking about - I think it’s very true considering the shrinking of media from 2000 - 2010, and I think that stasis/stagnancy with careers, which I have observed with my peers, has something to do with the visceral, sometimes gross, sometimes telling resentment of do-everything millennials with Emmy-nominated HBO shows and/or rapping careers as side projects. Or Ira Glass-mentored phenomenons who are amazing and don’t seem to be actual real people because they can’t be, can they? Anyways. 

“Beyoncé isn’t Beyoncé because she reads comments on the Internet. Beyoncé is in Ibiza, wearing a stomach necklace, walking hand in hand with her hot boyfriend. She’s going on the yacht and having a mimosa. She’s not reading shitty comments about herself on the Internet, and we shouldn’t either. I just think, Would Beyoncé be reading this? No, she would just delete it or somebody would delete it for her. What I really need to do is close the computer and then talk back to that voice and say, Fuck you. I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m Beyoncé. I’m going to Ibiza with Jay-Z now, fuck off. Being criticized is part of the job, but seeking it out isn’t. That’s our piece to let go.”

— Kathleen Hanna interviewed by Melissa Febos for BOMBLOG (via sarahspy)

If I did a one-off zine called Möbius Dick, would you contribute?

“Elmer’s Store is so successfully Fake New England it’s like I imagined it—or it burst, fully formed, out of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s head, curing her headache—even if it’s located in the oft-disappointing real New England. A visit there feels like proof that small-time homey community can thrive.”

— The Awl were nice enough to let me talk about Gilmore Girls, saudade, and the Best Pancakes Ever.