atame!

watching a lot of almodovar's stuff i feel like i'm seeing a soap opera, a fabulous universe, that don't have a shred of anything real. the sets and the wardrobes and the feelings all have the same outrageous hue. atame! is a strange one to resonate, but it does. it's about a guy who kidnaps a woman to make her get to know him. it's confusing emotionally because he's played by antonio banderas who looks great in those jeans and is very nice, but also threatens to slit her throat if she tries to escape. it's the inverse of nick ray's In A Lonely Place, i think. In that movie, bogart plays this entrancing person suspected of murder, who one gradually realizes is such a terrible and abusive person that it doesn't matter whether he actually killed someone. such exquisite discordance here! and then it's got the sublime bitchiness and signature lechery. wonderful, wonderful, wonderful movie.

love,
frank

the grapes of wrath

It's a bible for a world built by people—people in pursuit of profit—and the perverse evil they wreak. It's a book about people's alienation from land and food, about the enraging paradoxes of the market, about rotting cornucopias, about hunger. 

The book gets you on an especially basic, brutal level because the Joads are farmers. To survive, they really just want a piece of land out of which things can grow, and they can pretty much take it from there. They won't starve to death, at any rate. But after they get kicked off their patch, stuff gets heartbreakingly absurd.

There are descriptions of farmers secretly cultivating little patches of land hidden amidst the weeds of someone's fallow property. These people want to sink their teeth into the planet in the most basic, productive way. To "pray and curse" over a little patch of land, to have a livelihood as a literal livelihood! And they can't. 

In Of Mice and Men it's Lenny and George's little fantasy: self sufficiency, living off "the fatta the lan'." There's never a prayer of working up a "stake" in Grapes; fantasies of private ownership give way to collectivist longings, and tragic personal idiosyncrasies (looking at you, Lenny) to a vision of structural injustice. In the government camp there's aborted talk of a glorious field they could all share in. 

What does it say about a book if it makes you cry? Steinbeck was trying to, the intro quotes him as wanting to "tear the reader's nerves to rags" or something. but is that reasonable? does that betray some sloppy, melodramatic falsity about it? probably a bit, but then you'd be taking the little picture. no, i wouldn't have wept hanging out with the joads. but does their situation, the real plight of all these migrants, not make you sad as shit? it ought to. 

tom jr and ma are unreasonably perfect people. but that's only fair; it's a way of disappearing them so that one can better examine the forces acting on them. people that immaculate are less complicated, have less of an interior life to obfuscate that which is done to them. and this book is about that which is done to them. 

need

it just occurred to me to start asking people what they need that money can buy. sweet idea. it reminded me of talking to kevin, a homeless man in my parents' neighborhood, who when i asked him something like that told me that he wanted, needed life insurance. if he died, he was going to pottter's field, man. it's a concern with a lot of dignity in it. i mean, this guy is wretched on such a basic level, and yet he's super concerned with forever after. when i was younger and a big time piece of shit i used to often wonder why homeless people didn't kill themselves. not in a mean way, exactly, i just figured that they were hungry and cold and miserable constantly and unendingly and that that must make you not want to feel that way anymore.

trainspotting

cheap little movie. heroin gags, which is an odd term. are a couple nice little parts: the sketch of tommy's death by kitten. that was hilariously great. aside from that, not much. i mean, the idea of not CHOOSING LIFE, of being self destructive because that's a kind of right, is an interesting one. i mean, that's the whole engine behind The Beats, for example. but this isn't anything like that. this is some silly nonsense. ewan macgregor is one fine man. looks fantastic in those pants and converse. even the single earring's forgivable on him. even nice. god.

This is how you lose her

How do you read a book narrated by a misogynistic tool, but written by a man who says things like "What is the role of a male artist in the feminist struggle? We can’t be feminists, I think. Our privilege prevents us. We can be feminist-aligned in some way. And so the women kept saying to us dudes, the best thing you can do is draw maps of masculine privilege. You can go places we can’t. Draw maps so when we drop the bombs, they land accurate.”

Yunior is Junot Diaz's literary avatar. He's swaggered through three of his books now, through Dominican barrios, New Jersey ghettos, New England academia, and in This Is How You Lose Her, what Yunior might call the fierce terrain of the female body. Lose Her's mostly about Yunior's relationships with women, all of which end, and most of which end badly because of Yunior. This is how YOU lose her, after all. He's an indelible character, amazingly articulate, poetic even, astride the ramparts of male chauvinism. Most men like him would call a woman a bitch and call it a day. But Yunior's sexism has verve and beauty. Diaz's drawn a "map of masculine privilege," but it's gorgeous!

Alright, Yunior gets really really sad at the very end of the book because he's been a shithead for so long. His body straight up falls apart on him, like some biblical plague. THIS IS A MAN SUFFERING FOR HIS SINS! NOT A TRIUMPHANT MALE CHAUVINIST!

But why'd we get Yunior in the first place? The thing is, he's a super interesting person except for the way he relates to women. This guy's spectacularly stereotypical behavior (cheats with 50 women in 6 years!) leave no room for female agency and depth, for anything but flat, stereotypical female hysteria. Women are too busy REACINTG to his epically manly exploits to be people themselves. I mean, why a guy who wrote: "Only a bitch of color comes to Harvard to get pregnant. White women don't do that. Asian women don't do that. Only fucking black and Latina women. Why go to all the trouble to get into Harvard just to get knocked up? You could have stayed on the block and done that shit." (198) Why the ivory tower of surpassing machismo and bigotry?

It's super important to explore in depth the embodiments of hegemonic shittiness. They're human too, and one needs to diagnose them to change things. But this book is glorious! You laugh out loud reading it and you don't want it to end. You want to live in Yunior's profoundly fucked head a little longer. And that's a problem! The same way Marlon Brando was too magnetic to play Stanley Kowalski, Diaz is just too fabulously great to voice Yunior.

I think Diaz feels bad about all this. The one chapter told by a woman, Yasmin, is fascinating and beautiful and deeply felt. She works in the laundry room at a hospital and the descriptions of the sheets she's got to clean are astoundingly evocative. Tonally, it's nothing whatever like the rest of the book. It's quiet and reactive, it's observant in the parts where Yunior would be telling YOU how it is. It's one perspective on being a woman in a culture of bellowing masculinity, and it's great. Lose Her needed more of that, or less of Yunior. If you meet your third asshole of the day, it's you. And if you meet your fifth raging pillar of monogamy and tradition, a person defined by their relationship to sex, you're the problem. Sexism is a self fulfilling prophecy, and too much of it comes true here.

heeeeere's mali!

so turns out the old malian military is pretty savage! good to know the french president visits to give his benediction to a place where the people who wear the uniforms are doing that whole extra-legal thing. the state monopoly on violence in mali is a little dubious

mali stats

The vast majority of the population of Mali is less than 20 years old. LESS THAN 20! The median age is like 16. The average life expectancy is a little more than 50 years. There're more than 6 babies born for every woman there. 43% of the men and 20% of the women are literate. The most recent estimate on unemployment there, from 2004, put the figure at 30%. 

apparently 30% of mali's trade is with china. what role's china playing there? or is it just handy dandy commerce?