pulp fiction

this isn't news, but pulp fiction is a really fantastic movie. the best thing about it might be the way its characters are so articulate. everyone is working class in the most barbaric sense, but they've got this hard, clear, brilliant speech. "the motherfucker's tip top"; "is there a sign that says dead nigger storage?"; "I'm gonna get medieval on your ass." The seriousness and professionalism of the characters too; that Jules and Vincent arrive at that door at 7:30AM transforms your impression of them.

Jules' sermons! The drug dealer with his madman at friend prices! Vincent appreciating the five dollar milkshake! Butch's terms of endearment! Butch's pop tarts! And poor Marvin in the wake of Jules' miracle is sublimely vulgar; that is the best thing I have ever seen.

sweden!

I've found my calling in sweden: playing chess with old laconic men from the north. when they do talk they talk about vikings. they're very pale, and with their jelly red noses and lips they look like they just came in from the cold. it's difficult to get their rhythm, often when i was convinced the line had gone dead Tord (like the god of thunder) would putter back to life again, this time to tell me about vikings in sicily. I felt like a whippersnapper, like dog running around and around its owner with its leash, like a hummingbird waiting for spring.

i beat Tord all three times and it felt good.

opera is a damn silly thing

so i'm pretty sure opera is a fundamentally bogus form. it really doesn't work. its parts don't fit. you simply cannot foist incomprehensible singing onto narrative. the singers that can act cannot act saddled with the tempo of the music, cannot be characters, cannot feel anything but the most laughably crude emotions.

i think opera'd be great if it didn't insist on having rigorous narratives. if it was more expressionistic, more painterly, less clunkily claiming to represent a world in which people talk and love and murder just like us, except while singing SO FUCKING LOUDLY. how can it so tediously claim its verisimilitude when its fidelity is not to human heartbeats but the conductors wand, to the music. we sway internally to music, it's effect on  us is real and important, but imposing it on actual human movements is ridiculous. as actors, they're marooned by those arias.

also, isnt it hilarious how in operas people can only feel in duets? because they're frozen in the music, all romances are loved and all conflicts are hated in equal proportion by the parties involved. 

and that there have to be subtitles? 80 feet above the singers (not actors) heads? im not saying operas should be better enunciated, that the towering notes should cross their t's, only that it's such a goddamn  unnatural stretch to have operas depend on those words. 


and it's also why operas are so long. the clutching, loving pain with which opera clings to its every word and note makes it simply ridiculous to insist on it having so many words and notes. again, free it from the responsibility of saying them, ennumerating those operatic stories. let it full throatedly embrace the opera! the voices!
the sets are great! the singing is sometimes revelatory, like the voice of an oak tree or a racing heart or a dying bull. the costumes are wonderful! the sets divine! there just can't be all that plot, it does not fit.

the help

Hey!  The Help! Black people in Jackson, Mississipi, mid twentieth century! Racism is not that big a deal! All you need is one offbeat white girl and some pluck and suddenly Jim Crow is white folks pulling out the chairs for you! You may also decide to be best selling authors and feminists!


Now, The Help isn't all okra and peach pie. There's a nod to Medgar Evers' murder and we almost get to see a billy club in action. But the movie's racism is a bizarrely pure and dense thing. It crowns Hilly, a young woman, the racist, and it is from her that all the ugliness flows. There are auxiliary bigots, but they're just her stooges, and Hilly kind of has to bully them into her devilry. Society isn't racist, some people are just so mean. 

This is an insidious and lying depiction of racism. The Help makes an insistent argument that there were two worlds in the South: the racist South: racist tattooed on its forehead, helpfully synonymous with bitchiness, caddishness and domineering unpleasantness, and the good South, with its barely stifled progressiveness, personal charm and Mexican shoes. Structurally, both have the same maids with the same responsibilities and uniforms (and wages, doubtless), but the movie calls one racist and the other romantic.


This bogus binary is extremely troubling because it equates racism with personality. Because Skeeter's family is personally appealing, their patronizing, racist and fundamentally foul relationship with their black maid is legitimate, and so the illegitimacy of wicked Hilly's relationship to her maid rests on the same grounds. There isn't systemic racism -- the mammy's a member of the family, it's just that there are just some mean families. All the mammies ask is that their fried chicken be properly crispy, their masters not cinematically cruel, their butts permitted to touch the family toilet. If only they got to pee in the same place everything would be alright.

Since all the racism in The Help comes from Hilly the racist, the problem is just that Hilly is so popular and hosts terrific bridge parties. If Hilly wasn't so popular nobody would be racist. So The Help humiliates Hilly in the end, redeems the auxiliary bigots and disappears the racism. Racism is to The Help what plasticity is to Mean Girls, and with all due respect to the evils of Regina George, this is a false and monstrously trivializing analogy. 


On a separate note, it's hilarious how pop cultural ugly ducklings are always incredibly good looking people with their hair curled or their fingernails dirty. i'm waiting for that real thumper of a face, affirmative action for the challenging chins! undersized foreheads! elbows for noses!

still elsewhere

jetlag is a beautiful thing, really. that one's body knows that the sunlight, the eggs in the morning are not on schedule, that one is physically bewildered by this abruptly new world means that one's body was really in the old world, that waking and hungering at a specific time, that the emotional experience of eating an omelette at eight PM is not arbitrary, that they can feel and be wrong makes North American Eastern Standard Time very personal and close.

to come to stockholm with new york grease in my hair, sunlight in my skin, english in my ears, to come to stockholm with the stool of new york food! how thrilling to transplant something, it's halfway time travel to dump new york receipts in stockholm trash cans, what transaction could dream of such a journey, such a burial? everything is damn special moved that far that fast. i mean, even by boat filth makes history, some forgettable east indian rats with forgettable germs in their pockets killed two thirds of europe. to travel!

i'm in stockholm! i have arrived! it's raining and grey but the windows are so very bright. it's an odd contrast, there are hardly any curtains. it's like the citizens are committed to projecting their warmth outside and letting in whatever light there is. drab buildings are pretty well transformed by these windows, they look theatrical, as if they'd been made for me looking in as much as a thing to be living within. all a building needs to be beautiful is to let its residents make themselves known.

i am so happy to be here with k. i am addled with tiredness so that i suffer from it subtly, like a drunk denying drunkenness. i don't believe it's actually changed the functioning of my body and mind, but i'm really not one to drop forks, to tie my shoes at epic length. i have a phone card and i am going to have such fun. i think this post is really quite boring.

some emphatic thoughts

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=1 is a very unpleasant read. towards the end, i actually started to hope that he would be executed so that he might be the grounds for the end of executions. but that makes one shiver. texas is a monstrous place. how they called the electric chair sparky is beyond me. when did texas get to be that single state really stoked on killing people?


the state has no right to punish people. jail is to rehabilitate people, to reform them. and if they're unchangeable bad people, then the state has the responsibility to protect other people from them. though even then, recidivism is bankrupt as an indicator of inveterate criminality. given how ex cons are typically thrust out into the world with CONVICT branded on their foreheads and told to do something other than return to what got them in prison, it's little wonder when that's what they do. on that note, if this isn't a medieval, evil country and jail is about rehabilitating someone and not punishing them, it should be illegal to ask on job applications if someone's been convicted of a crime. if they've been convicted and served their sentence then THEY SERVED THE SENTENCE and shouldn't have life be made more difficult for them beyond the prescribed rehabilitation. otherwise, it's extra punishment (and one wont to lead people back to jail because they can't assimilate back into normal life). we say "justice has been served" when someone gets sentenced, it should then be served, and end when the justice of the court says it should end.

and capital punishment is punishment, it makes no bones about it. it's barbaric and it should never happen again.