Frances Ha

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics, Visual

I’m not going to pretend that I’m some OG Noah Baumbach fan. The first time someone told me about Kicking and Screaming, I assumed she was talking about the youth soccer movie starring Will Farrell. I believe I even spent the next day thinking that said youth soccer film was some secret gem that I needed to see ASAP. I am glad the internet was able to clear that up for me. So no, I don’t have anything particularly deep to say about how Baumbach’s latest film, Frances Ha, represents an organic outgrowth of his previous work. I’ve liked the three of his films that I’ve seen, but none as much as Frances Ha.

It’s hard for me to describe why this movie is so good. It’s not, as many first-year composition students would say, “really relatable” (cue sound of me crying). I’ve never lived in Brooklyn or Manhattan, and have never been close enough with folks who do to go out and have a typical alt experience. I went to New York once for a wedding during a hurricane, and that’s it. And while I know what it’s like to be broke as hell at 27 while chasing some ultimately pointless dream (Frances wants to be a touring dancer, perhaps the only thing more unlikely than becoming an English professor), I didn’t see much of myself in Frances.

And maybe that’s just it. Baumbach and Greta Gerwig (his co-writer, lover, and the star of the film) have produced a character study of someone who reminds me of bits and pieces of folks I’ve met in my life without her being reduced to a “type.” Frances feels very much like her own complete person, which is rare in both the film and real worlds. I certainly am not the first person to say this, but Gerwig’s Frances works for the same reasons Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall and Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fischer do: she reads as authentic, so you find yourself interested in what happens to her, even if it isn’t much. I suppose that’s another way of saying that I’d watch Frances do just about anything, and since the film gives us a chance to do just that, I loved it.

There are many other reasons to see the film beyond the central character. It’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s shot well. There are a couple great music cues (but not too many). The film’s secondary characters all serve purposes realized by the actors’ performances. And it’s weirdly about what the financial crisis has done to people of my generation (cogent film analysis from the National Review?!?!).

But finally it all comes back to Frances, who Greta Gerwig just nails. I suppose the best praise I can give this movie is that I plan on buying a physical copy of it when it becomes available because I want re-watch it a lot. I can’t remember the last movie I said that about.

Fallen Fruit

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno

It would be reductive to say that Apple sells “Cool.” I mean, yes, they sell Cool, but their brand appeal is at once more specific and more expansive than that word implies. On the fly, I’d say that this particular multinational profit-generating venture offers its customers a hygienic, techno-progressive, fundamentally meliorist view of history, one that embodies some of the most infuriating, and alluring, traits of Western cosmopolitanism. Granted, Apple’s products are pretty slick; my iPhone is a couple years old, but it is still a cool machine, and if I had the money, I would probably spring for a new iPod to help make my jogging regimen less painful. Further, it’s not like anyone makes you buy Apple’s stuff or forces you to worship St. Jobs if you do.

But whenever I check basketball scores on my phone I feel like a dupe. Because even if you aren’t the kind of dork who gets excited by the idea of visiting the Apple store or considers Technology (a term so broad it doesn’t mean anything) a globalist cure-all, you, Apple consumer, are still at least partially complicit in a worldview that blends narcissistic consumerism (there will always be newer, sleeker, cooler apps and devices to run them on), bourgeois sentimentality (e.g., that unbearably twee commercial where the rich child sings to her telegenic gramps), and smug Silicon Valley tech-worship (one observer calls it Solutionism), a worldview that is backed by a very real corporate behemoth with very real economic and political clout.

Given this institutional reality, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple has been assiduously hiding billions and billions of dollars of profit from the US government and, thus, from American society. You know, all of us who drive on roads, eat food, attend school, and visit doctors, whether or not we own MacBooks.

While this present news is galling, the core problem isn’t Apple. Maximizing profits is what corporations do; it is the only thing they exist to do, even if the CEO votes for Obama or gives money to African orphans while extolling the benefits of local organic farming. And thanks to America’s insane tax code and the Gordian knot of international finance regulations, one of the best ways to maximize profits is to . . . follow the laws. As the silver-haired plutocrat at the company’s helm has testily reminded everybody who asks, Apple didn’t violate any rules, at least not the kind that have legal implications if broken. 

Letter of the law aside, the situation remains appalling, because when corporations slither away from the taxes that basic economic and moral principles (but not, again, laws) suggest they are obligated to contribute, the rest of us, the people who pay for the roads along which Apple ships its products and the schools that educate many of its engineers, have to pony up the difference. From the New Yorker, here’s John Cassidy:

Partly as a result of their evasive tactics, big businesses now shoulder a lot less of the tax burden than they used to do. In the years after the Second World War, the corporate income tax accounted for about a third of over-all tax revenues. Today, its share is less than nine per cent. Who has made up the difference? Who do you think? Sixty years ago, individual and payroll taxes accounted for about half of over-all tax revenues; today, they account for more than eighty per cent.

No wonder our physical infrastructure is crumbling. That’s what happens when the social contract rots. I hope the little girl from the Christmas ad plans on going to private school.

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Authors, guides and nudges, mainly rap music, sports

It’s Saturday and the weather here in LA is weird, so here are some ways to avoid having to go outside if you simply can’t bear it.

  • This short but sweet piece by Christopher Hitchens about the tyranny of waiters insisting on pouring your wine for you in restaurants is always worth revisiting.
  • Every year Bill Simmons ranks the top 50 assets in the NBA using a simple, but sensible metric: how likely the player’s current team would be to trade him. This year’s list is broken up into three installments, so prepare to lose  at least half an hour of your life.
  • Are you convinced that there’s no way someone could make a movie that successfully twins a meditation on the cosmos with testimonials about the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime? You’re wrong. Nostalgia for the Light is a gorgeous documentary about just that, and it’s streaming on Netflix. I swear, it won’t make you feel nearly as bad as you’re assuming it will.
  • Kathryn Schulz has written a piece worth reading on why she hates The Great Gatsby. Not Luhrmann’s trite film version, mind you, but Fitzgerald’s novel. Obviously, I don’t agree with her assessment of the novel’s value. Virtually all of the reasons she gives for disliking the book are the precise reasons I love it. If there’s one excerpt from this article that sums up Schulz’s failure to actually engage the book on its own terms, it’s this one: “As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall. At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction. At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit.” If you don’t feel uncomfortable or complicit (as Nick does) when reading about a culture that encourages people to use others up like natural resources, you have led a very moral, cloistered life that includes never having seen a rap video. Kudos to you for that, Ms. Schulz.

Gatsby? What Gatsby?

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Visual

What Gatsby indeed, Carey Mulligan. As you could probably tell from my post about Fitzgerald’s ledger, I am a little bit nutty for the bard of the Jazz Age. Perhaps because I live in LA, or just because I feel prematurely old, I identify with the washed-up Hollywood Scott more the cocky young playboy of the early 1920’s, but it goes without saying that the work Fitzgerald produced from 1920 to 1934 was a whole hell of a lot better than what he wrote once he relocated to the west coast. Fitzgerald’s best work came out during a stretch when Americans were churning out poetry and fiction that changed literature forever. Here’s a partial list:

  • Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (192o)
  • T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1921-1922)
  • Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923)
  • Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925)
  • Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925)
  • Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  • Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1926)
  • Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
  • William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  • Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1929)
  • Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930)
  • Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931)
  • Faulkner’s Light in August (1932)

There was a bunch of other amazing stuff written by Americans during this period, and obviously my own prejudices inform the above list (I’ll cut a man who tries to tell me Faulkner didn’t pwn 1929-1936). But missing from this list is the best novel ever written by an American: The Great Gatsby. Smart people disagree with me about this, and that’s fine. If you want to say Absalom, Absalom! is the tops, I won’t argue. If you try to tell me Moby Dick is, I’ll take you seriously. But come on. The Great Gatsby does more in 200 pages than most writers accomplish in entire careers. Just read this:

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand.

That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.

I have probably taught The Great Gatsby more than any other novel in my teaching career, and every time I try to impress upon my students just how little the novel has to do with love. It’s a story about horny, ambitious young people who use other people like drugs. For Gatsby, Daisy is merely a necessary part of the dream of himself he made up as he rowed out to Dan Cody’s yacht. For Tom, she’s a necessary part of the maintenance of his position in the Social Darwinist order. And for Daisy, Gatsby, Tom, and the other half dozen men are just ways to feel desired, secure, and valuable.  The image of the “beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids” on Daisy’s floor captures it all, and I think that image might be my favorite in all of American literature.

The less that can be said of Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation, the better. Others have already panned it, so I will simply add this: while Luhrmann’s Gatsby predictably features some nice party scenes, it doesn’t think enough of its viewers to let them figure out what the “beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids” mean. The film is like Sparknotes come to life, as the characters mouth awful bits of invented dialogue that tell us what we should be taking away from each scene. And don’t get me started on Nick. In Luhrmann and Tobey Maguire’s incapable hands, Nick Carraway is transformed from one of the great mysteries of American literature into a simpering, sycophantic pud. Read or reread the book instead of seeing this triviality.

Yes, Read Gogol

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, Other Critics

From the Wall Street Journal, of all damn places. Murdoch owns them, but at least they still print serious book reviews. While I suspect Russians might take some issue with this—not the “vast and barbarous country” part (Russians are rightly proud of the fact) but rather the critic’s assertion that Dostoevsky, Gogol, and company “mysteriously” emerged from that country—the essay is a good piece a’ read. It’s the length of a cup of coffee, too. There is no Kafka without Gogol. Good Saturday, everyone.

Today in Allen Iverson News

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno

If you like watching fun basketball games, you probably liked watching (or like–thanks, YouTube) Allen Iverson ball. Dude was built like an elf and shot too many bad jumpers, but as a creative, articulate, borderline-psychotic volume scorer, as a player whose neurotic self-enclosed style ended up shortening his career in the NBA, he’s a Romantic hero. Cf. Kobe Bryant. Unlike Kobe he’s an acrobatic poet; he’ll break your heart.

Unfortunately his personal life sounds like something Percy Shelley or John Berryman would get up to. Highly recommended–the article, not the life.

How To Destroy a Culture

Posted on by under education

Ryan and I talk (and write) all the time about the sorry state of education in America, and I second his take on the idiocy of the “tenured radicals” narrative constantly being pushed by alleged conservatives. Are there some bad professors? Yes. Are there some bad leftist professors? Absolutely. Are there some who get protected by tenure? Yes.

Now, the movement conservative response to this is to eliminate job security for professors altogether, and nothing encapsulates this moronic position better than the yet-to-be-built Florida Polytechnic University. Check out this gem of a quote from the school’s vice president of academic affairs:

“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli…. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”

As the always interesting (and classical conservative) Alan Jacobs remarks:

“Right! They’ll only have to worry about whether they’ll be rehired at the end of their contract or not. Totally different.”

Having universities staffed by rotating casts of grad students and adjuncts is the ultimate technocratic fantasy. If Florida Governor Rick Scott actually cared at all about giving students a quality undergraduate education, he’d develop a specific tenure/job security system that rewarded excellence in teaching and publishing things that people might read (like a sweet blog, for instance). The falseness of modern movement conservatism really shines through though when you realize that “reformers” like Scott don’t even think about the importance of universities having stable faculties or institutional memories. They just want to create degree mills that give people the “skills” to “win the future” (I cringe when Obama says things like this. He knows better.)

If you want to get really depressed about this subject, I invite you to watch the following video. The world of F(P)U is already here to a certain extent, and people like Rick Scott are winning in their fight against the “tenured radicals.” And we’ll all end up poorer and dumber for it.