Something on "Seize the Day" by Saul Bellow

In Bellow's novella, Tommy Wilhelm unleashes all the self-loathing and regret you can stand. He's a recently unemployed (nearly unemployable) middle-aged man who's separated from his wife and children and currently fixed under the critical gaze of his snobby father. We find him on a loose regimen of uppers and downers and at wits' end, dwelling on his mistakes and the disapproval and disappointment given from within and from his wife and his father.

All his life, Wilhelm impulsively grabbed at the first and closest opportunity--kind words from a talent agent grew into a misguided quest for movie stardom; a kind girl was taken for a wife and mother of his children; and now a market tip from a stranger offers his last hope to avoid bankruptcy. These mistakes, we are to learn, follow from his immaturity, his aversion to responsibility and effort.

Even though he's now trapped under a crush of self-reflection, I like to think it was in part the lack thereof that got him here. And besides that, he's doomed to unhappiness because he's fixated on getting happiness though approval--approval sought through financial gain, mostly. This was a good read, and I very much like the ending in which, finding himself amid a swell of people on the street, his choking anxiety suddenly gives way to a rush of emotion. Beautifully written, that.

Low

About "I Love Lucy"

I have never been able to watch more than four minutes of "I Love Lucy" and I think this is why: the show never tells a story; instead, Lucy puts on a show. This inevitably leads to her acting out, hamming it up, taking the production over the top. There is no arch, no moral, no lesson learning; there is no character development, no growth in the show, its production or its talents. There is nobody to sympathize with or relate to. All you see is a comedienne trying to meet expectations or out-do herself comically with exaggerated crying and bumbling, facing the camera all the while.

All this is to state the obvious: that how you feel about the show hinges on taste, one's expectation and preference. If Lucy isn't funny, she's just pulling gags.

Notes:

• Television was still young.
• This means nothing.

About "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" by Marshall McLuhan

As much as an intellectual can, Marshall McLuhan caused a stir when he proposed that "the medium is the message" in Understanding Media (1964), the thorough analysis of media--not its content but media itself and its effects on how we think and act and make culture. It's a big, heavy subject, and McLuhan chips away at it on a great many fronts. Too many. For me, Understanding Media reads like a brilliant, nearly consumed man's mind dump rather than an organized argument. Gets tiresome.

Not to mention that often terrible writing style so prominent in the 1960's when authors of all stripes employed a scientific-ish vocabulary, needlessly obscuring their ideas in the bid for legitimacy. (Lots still do this!) For example: "Clothing, as an extension of the skin, can be seen both as a heat-control mechanism and as a means of defining the self socially" (chapter 12). But sometimes one of McLuhan's many crackerjack wisdoms splash water on your face, like this gem: "Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech" (chapter 8).

In summary

In the dialog/play "The Critic as Artist" by Oscar Wilde, a witty provocateur named Gilbert spins off art-related value positions with his foil, a human sounding board named Ernest. In reply to one of Gilbert's most eloquent expositions--a take on Robert Browning as process--Ernest says, "There is something in what you say, but there is not everything in what you say." So true.


Applicable if you've:

• tried summing it up
• taken stock
• thought something was important
• felt something needed to be said

Notes:

"Porphyria's Lover"
      -by Robert Browning

The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me — she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

What is one to do with his evening

Another day--maybe I should say, a new day--begins when my bag folds down on the desk in the morning. By then I've dressed and passably groomed, slurped coffee for the weatherman and led myself to the office, but none of these welcomes a pause, not in the way a small transition can, like that moment of unburdening yourself and reckoning at the same time. Sure, would rather something somewhere else but when thinking what that might be, nothing comes to mind. Try as I might.

The next hours bring small labors: like this one character I could do without: call him Joe. If you're going to be lazy, at least be good at your job. Or be likable. Joe frequently rubs his palms together as if he's just sat down to a fine meal; given his extreme laziness, this habit is all the more offensive. And he says things about "illegals" or about how "they do things weird in California" but, sadly, he isn't from Texas where you can say such things without bitterness. Any one of his habits in isolation should be grounds for termination. But even at all that, he's easily enough ignored. Soon the hours have passed tolerably and the day's pre-existing agreement resolves itself. And then it's off.

Notes:

• In college pursue a career you think will provide the stability and money you need, then find the industry unsatisfying and after several starts fall into one that works. Marry at age 30 someone who respects you, with whom you can share affection. Have your kids, argue with them about vegetables then friends, mutually idolize each other until there's mutual respect. Feel guilty for the child who struggles into adulthood before you find relief in knowing you tried. Exchange calls with old friends twice a year, see their kids grow up in a series of postcards from 2012 to 2022, then sporadically after that. When you're older, enjoy talking to your parents. Die first.

Something about the fim "Invincible"

This Werner Herzog-directed film tells the true-ish fable of Zishe Breitbart, a Jewish strongman who performed for Berlin audiences circa 1932 before returning to his Polish Jewish village to warn of the growing Nazi menace. The plot: after his strength is noticed by a talent agent, Breitbart journeys from a humble blacksmith's son to brief stardom as a sideshow in a successful clairvoyant's act that caters to Nazi-friendly audiences. The clairvoyant is Hanussen, an intense showman who claims mystical powers.

The film makes a motif of identity. Breitbart briefly loses himself, allowing Hanussen to "Aryan-ize" him to best appeal to the Berlin audience. After briefly reconnecting with family, Breitbart publicly rejects his fictional identity, revealing himself as Jewish. Breitbart's strength--originally imagined by Hanussen as a draw to the humiliated, identity-less German people, remains in the show as a draw for threatened Berlin Jews.

Hanussen is revealed as a con-man. Though born Jewish, he has adopted a series of identities through his life in pursuit of status and power. By trying to ingratiate himself with the rising Nazis menace, he has become the very caricature of the stereotypical Jew--sneaky, dishonest, and money hungry.

I enjoyed this. The acting is mostly terrible except for Hanussen, played by a reliably intense Tim Roth.

A thing about "Conquest of Abundance" by Paul Feyerabend

In the posthumously released Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend conceptually explores reality. This might be a poor introduction to Feyerabend because the tract veers from his usual writing style and was unfinished when he died. Maybe because it was unfinished, the man's thoughts didn't often process readily on the page despite its sequentially numbered points and other organizational strategies. Still, putting in the effort to read was worth it.

Feyerabend promotes relativism and the importance of worldviews and perspectives; he says animism, objective realism, etc., are all just different ways of understanding the World. He is, though, softly critical of the kind of objectivism found in "hard" sciences which, characteristic of the Modern Age, have minimized interpretive possibility (and, possibly, ability) via extensive categorization, modeling limited sets of alternatives, and narrowing any given subject to either this or that.

But Feyerabend isn't longing for the ancient past--at least, not openly. I enjoyed it enough to look into him more later on. Someday.

Something on the autobiography "It’s So Easy (And Other Lies)" by Duff McKagen

Duff founded and played bass in Guns N' Roses. But while that may be his autobiography's top billing, events before and after life in that seminal band offer comparable value from the side stages. Humbled by experiences and anchored in the spiritual and physical disciplines that brought him sobriety, Duff offers an uncomplicated version of a band's rise and unsatisfying end (more of a suspension, really). On Guns' demise, Duff faults the band's inability to confront each other about problems rather than the problems themselves--everyone's drug use and lead singer Axl Rose's volatility and musical takeover.

Maybe it's a result of his singular drive to make and play music, or maybe it's the functional result of his focused narrative, or maybe it's a social strategy employed to fit in the scene, but on paper Duff exudes a real simplicity of character, despite his having since undergone a kind of spiritual and physical rebirth. The pre-soberiety Duff is a former self whose problems, in his words, "seems to have hinged on a failure to grapple with a few basic definitions--of what it meant to be successful, of what it meant to be an adult, of what it meant to be a man".

Although much less lurid and infinitely less indulgent than Nikki Sixx's autobiography The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star, I found It’s So Easy (And Other Lies) to be the better read.

Young love

They came to a settle on the sidewalk there in front of the house. Freshmen, maybe sophomores. He held her hand walking home from school and now, having reached her block, they look around bashfully to figure their discretion in saying goodbye. I keep still and watch from the couch, wanting them to express things I will not. He was readily handsome, trim, and rightly confident; she was cute, unworried. They extend their hands, press palms, spread arms out to the sides, keeping the most gentle resistance; she gives. They hug, then their lids drip downward, their vision extinguished for better understanding the other's breath, their kiss flavor, better learning how the tip of her nose finds his cheek and the urging of his hand on the small of her back. Fade in. They negotiate a goodbye, just for now, and let go, parting dandelion snow in the breeze. Their love was the vampire's, relived through the ages, unburdened by its persistent reflection in these two mirrors, only reckoning its passing on waking with a heart chiseled in half.

About a so-so book review in "The New Yorker"

"The Disconnect" gives a sloppy discussion while reviewing Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg. First the writer hazards that "Few things are less welcome today than protracted solitude". Whoa--what about people with kids they can't afford, or medical bills from ailing children and spouses? Wrecked and loveless marriages, and stifling alimony and child support payments? Or even smaller, more subtle miseries, like silent, nightly dinners with children you can't relate to, who hate and resent you? Are those things more welcome than protracted solitude? What about never being alone? How is that liked?

Next, the article poses the question: "as a rule, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to?" Subsequent passages suggest aloneness is usually a choice: (1) "Things changed when she made the decision to buy an apartment, committing to a future alone." (2) "Some people remain single out of a disinclination to settle." But the idea that aloneness is a a choice is casually abandoned in the next section, wherein the piece's most interesting part is revealed:

In a landmark study, “Bowling Alone” (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam noted a puzzling three-decade decline in what he called “social capital”: the networks of support and reciprocity that bind people together and help things get done collectively. His work considered the waning of everything from P.T.A. enrollment to dinner parties and card games, but the core of his argument was declining civic participation. Between 1973 and 1994, the number of people who held a leadership role in any local organization fell by more than half. Newspaper readership among people under thirty-five dropped during a similar period, as did voting rates. Why? Putnam pointed to cultural shifts among the post-Second World War generation; the privatization of leisure (for example, TV); and, to a smaller extent, the growth of a commuting culture and the time constraints of two-career, or single-parent, family life. “Older strands of social connection were being abraded—even destroyed—by technological and economic and social change,” he wrote.

That last sentence is key, where the emphasis should fall on economic changes--changes so huge we can only begin to appreciate them. For starters, economic changes now mean people move around more, spend less time in one city or neighborhood, work several, maybe dozens of jobs in their lifetimes rather than one or two, and that unions have been dissolved, and on and on: all this, just for starters, is related to economic change. But this significant nugget, contained in a single paragraph, goes painfully unexplored by the author, who sums up the aforementioned study, saying, "Putnam, in other words, saw public institutions as a casualty of the same forces of individuation driving modern aloneness."

So now the rise in aloneness is driven by larger forces, and is no longer a choice. The original question, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to?, is now sort-of rhetorical. From here the article briefly, un-insightfully discusses online social interaction, confusing the original topic, aloneness, with something else--loneliness. But then the author pretty much dismisses the entire conversation by saying, "The truth is that lonely people at home typically contact friends, loiter in bookstores, work in cafés, take on roommates, open OKCupid profiles, or dance Tecktonik at a rave."

Oh, ok. Then what the hell are we talking about?

... but not on this one

About "Rampart"

Woody Harrelson exudes simmering, desperate rage as David Brown, a formidably intelligent but sparsely controlled bad cop living and working and risking and cratering in 1999. Our window into this volatile character's folding life rattles in the wake of the abuse and corruption scandals that shook the real LAPD at the time. When not in pursuit, Brown is at the ready because he knows he and conflict are joined at the hip. He welcomes it, he's a risk-taker. But when he unravels and we see him cracking and haunted, it's still tragic.

Notes:

• Woody Harrelson is why I saw this.
• I saw "Rampart" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" the same day. Both these movies show an investigation, a quest for the truth. Both have characters whose quest arises from suspicion, and whose suspicions cause others to doubt the sanity of the quest.

About New Music

I enjoy the album "Put Your Back N 2 It" by Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas), it has a few good sad songs. Also, parts of "Days" by Real Estate is agreeable, probably best suited for poolside. However, "Port of Morrow" by The Shins is not so good, I thought.

Something on "The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, & the Network Battle for the Night" by Bill Carter

In the early 1990's, late night television is owned by NBC's staple "The Tonight Show" starring Johnny Carson. But as the much-revered host neared his 30th year, the program's static offerings and rapidly aging audience sent murmurs of discontent through NBC's corporate offices. Carson, for whatever reasons, offered no resistance and abruptly announced his retirement just ahead of his anniversary season. Meanwhile, Jay Leno, with his unmatched work ethic and consistent performance, rose from leader of the new generation of stand-up comedians to frequent guest host of "The Tonight Show". And David Letterman, with wits and an innate and cultivated gift for entertaining, earned his way to hosting a late show that aired after Carson. In The Late Shift, Bill Carter details--and I mean details--the personalities and the drama, decision-making, and the consequences surrounding "The Tonight Show" hosting change of 1992.

Carter seems to respect Leno, but it's Letterman he admires as a talent. Leno comes off as a nice but also very repressed, complicated guy who excels at stand-up and had a pit bull for a manager. Letterman sounds like an under-appreciated star who's also stubborn, fickle, and plagued by self-doubt.

I mostly enjoyed The Late Shift, though the first half is better than the last. This story includes a lot of characters and the audit of who said and thought what can be exhausting.

Something about Robyn's "Dancing on My Own" on SNL

I am pleased when I watch Robyn's Saturday Night Live performance of "Dancing on My Own" because what I see of her compliments what I hear. When I watch I detect a smidgen of awkwardness in her dancing, as if these moves are unpracticed, everything being improvised in unfamiliar space. And that fits the lyrics, which speak of a woman dancing alone in a night club, where it might be a little weird that she's dancing alone, emotionally, trapped between desperation and powerlessness; and it should be a little weird, noticeably so, that she's alone while the other dancers have paired off and bystanders drink among friends. She sings,

Yeah, I know its stupid, I just gotta see it for myself
I'm in the corner, watching you kiss her, Oh
I'm right over here, why can't you see me? Oh

Had the dancing looked choreographed, the effect would not be the same.



Notes:
It may be that these moves are not improvised, and that she's actually dancing flawlessly, comfortably (no doubt passionately). But this is just what I get out of it. And there's no way that Pete Townsend windmill move is choreographed.

Roses are in bloom

About "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

As most reviews mention, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is a bit hard to follow. You may not miss anything, but you will feel like you did. No matter. The confusion is kept within a single episode near the end. Otherwise, events makes sense.

Circa 1970, the reputation of British Intelligence is in decline. Now rumor circulates that one of the inner circle of agents is a mole. To find the mole, the British Government employs Smiley (Gary Oldman), the retired former right-hand man of the recently passed intelligence director. Smiley proceeds quietly, always thinking, his inner life never stirring the calm of his waters. In one brief scene at the climax, Smiley coolly takes out and lights his cigarette, capturing in a moment the staid bearing with which he's managed this whole affair.

All the actors nailed their performances and made for great characters; the sets and costumes and makeup were flawless; and the cinematography and direction supplied ample polish. I only wish (1) the screenwriters had been more careful (or the producers more patient) and (2) the film had a few more extended scenes.