august philippic

On subway platforms, he was always convinced that a maniac would push him in front of a train, and that his parents would think it was suicide.  He took various precautions — sitting down when  he could, grasping available girders, positioning himself behind solid-looking passengers.  He was often concocting homicidal scenarios in which he was victim of a reckless cab driver, a drunk college student, a cop.  Respite from these fantasies came only when he could concentrate on something very intensely, as this morning, when he sat looking at the patterns of sunshine on the brick facade of a nearby building.  Soon the brick was not brick and the city not a city, but everything was a canvas, and he felt safe, as if in a museum.

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Seeing the leaves against the granite, orange and green and red, gave me vertigo.  I thought of the Japanese aesthetic of death, that a way of dying can be beautiful.  I think in the U.S. the idea has an unfortunate association with kamikaze pilots.  But what would it mean to honor death, to see it as potentially ugly and potentially beautiful?  How might an aesthetics of death shape, for example, health care policy? 

I’m trying to think of my favorite film death.  I think it is the end of Le Samourai (Japan again, but filtered through France!), which I am now going to spoil by saying that it involves a sacrifice, a clean modern line, a kind of love that can’t really be love.  It’s death as a Sade tune — “We move in space with minimum waste, maximum joy.” 

Tags: visions, grooves by august
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ME: I had a hard time telling how you were different from earlier nightmares.

NIGHTMARE: I get asked that a lot. I’d say it was indeed subtle, my own artistic inspiration, borrowing a bit from German Expressionism and (because I love the textures) the Righteous Brothers. I feel that I had an artistic whole, a real organic quality that…

ME: But just to back up for a moment…

NIGHTMARE: …that recalled Fellini at his most playful and yet sad. I guess La Strada was my biggest influence. Such a brilliant film!

ME: Right, but what specifically was different?

NIGHTMARE: This was the biggest tsunami yet — a wave to convention in order to subvert it.

ME: All my nightmares have the biggest tsunami yet.

NIGHTMARE: But here, recall, that you were at top of the big cliff! And so, breaking down the forth wall, going a little meta, when you thought “those waves are just like in my nightmares,” you felt a false sense of triumph — as if you had endured it all before. As if now, finally, you could rise above and look down on your terror, as if all was well.

ME: Yes, I see.

NIGHTMARE: And then giving you this illusion of wakefulness, I of course produce an even bigger wave, one that makes the cliffs disappear, one that shook the building you were in and covered everything with water.

ME: And then I woke up. It was chilling. I’m wondering, I was speaking to somebody over the weekend who claimed she no longer had nightmares, that even in sleep she knew herself to be dreaming, and thus felt no fear.

NIGHTMARE: The detached observer. Yes, that might be your best strategy, your best hope. But you have to be very careful, because we nightmares are always laying traps, subverting your awareness, sneaking up again. We’re tricky bastards. Comfort yourself in your world all you want, but you’ll see me again, or somebody quite like me.

ME: You’re like a talk show before the writer’s strike.

NIGHTMARE: I enjoy my work. What can I say — I’m an auteur. One can’t strike from oneself.

Tags: visions by august
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I mentioned Adam Langer’s Crossing California in a previous post. One of the many interesting things about that book is that it’s central theme is a street – California Avenue in Chicago – that was a border for a Jewish neighborhood. It’s a familiar kind of border – anybody who has lived in a city (or in suburbs, or in rural areas) will recognize a variety of borders that have nothing to do with political boundaries. If you talk to people, they can usually point to a line (sometimes corresponding to a street, an overpass, or the clichéd railroad track) that separates rich from poor, or race from race, educated from non, safe from un. Part of the specialized knowledge of place is to understand the shifting nature of these borders (they may emerge only at night, for example. They may even be marked by, for example, gang symbols or neighborhood watch signs).

That much everybody knows. So why am I  blogging about it?
What do I have to add? Well, the way the borders change – they are contingent on collections of impressions, shifting landscapes of shops, schools, apartments, transportation. We recognize that the borders of daily life are impermanent, however meaningful they may be in any moment.

Is that part of the reason for the ever-recurring immigration debate in America? We all know that a border is a fake thing, and thus we pour money into policing, wall-building, legislation, caricatures of immigrants in order to make this fake thing seem real, urgent, permanent, safe. When really no border can be any of those things.

I know that the observation doesn’t solve the problem, or even address what most consider to be the issues, but over and over in the immigration debate my sense is that the actual lives of immigrants are totally marginal to the fears that people have about losing jobs, low wages, security, a breakdown of established rules. Like terrorism, immigration is a debate about our own neuroses. I just wish we once again had political elites willing to insist that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Instead, we get “FEAR! FEAR! FEAR!” Which in turn makes me rather afraid, just not about immigration or terrorism.

Tags: cities, philippic by august
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I’m finding myself oddly attuned to space today. I think it’s because mrs. august and I spent a few hours this weekend biking though a sculpture park. Something about taking in so much art in motion, circumnavigating, weaving, braking and accelerating through sculpture. It was really exhillerating, a reminder of how art can affect our perceptions. Also: really fun!

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I was looking across the sky at the sunset, which made the clouds seem like mountains, when I surprised myself by turning inside out.  My eyes could only see my inner brain, while my organs felt at first warm, then cooler as the world got darker through my translucent humours.

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I’ve just read a short essay by Riccardo Petrella titled “A Global Agora vs. Gated City-Regions.” The title refers to two visions of the future. The first is a world (”Global Agora”) in which things like information technology have made it possible for the voices of people around the world to be heard, and where therefore a new sense of ethics, justice, and equality takes hold. Petrella believes that utopian view lies in the distant future. In the meantime, we are stuck with gated city-regions, a network of about 30 urban conglomerations where wealth, technology, management skills, and political power is centered. Petrella’s list includes New York, LA, Miami in the U.S., Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta in east/southeast Asia. Odd (to me) that Mumbai and Abu Dhabi didn’t make the list, but that’s neither here nor there.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Imagine there is a world of a limited number of wealthy cities, and a vast hinterland of poor areas squeezed out by the imbalance of capital. Imagine, therefore, people immigrating to cities to try to gain a portion of the wealth. How do you think the rich mercantile powerbrokers would react? Perhaps their response would have something to do with police? And perhaps this structure of the world might have come into existence in the late nineteenth century?

That’s what Frederick Wakeman’s Policing Shanghai made me think. He describes the French and British both competing and colluding with the Chinese public security forces in Shanghai in the 1920’s and 30’s. The city was very corrupt, with various forces trying to control the opium trade, and the imperialist powers having a deep interest in helping Chiang Kaishek defeat the Communists (who, the British and French worried, might spur revolts in Indochina and India). Seems like this scenario supports Petrella’s hypothesis.

Occurs to me that this basic regime has only shifted its centers of gravity, not its fundamental logic.  How depressing..

Tags: cities by august
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Taiwanese identity is one of the world’s more complicated, volatile, and undiscussed issues. This article only hints at the depth of feeling about mainland China, and particularly Chiang Kaishek’s army, which took over the island in 1945 and retreated there in 1949 (with branches winding up in Korea and Southeast Asia). Even when Chiang ruled the mainland, the links between government, military, and organized crime were rather too close for comfort, and nothing changed when he arrived in Taipei. Taiwan’s current ruling Democratic Progressive Party leaders, including Chen Shuibian, cut their teeth as political prisoners and targets of what amounted to gangland-style violence. It explains a lot, including the tendency of legislators to get in fistfights.
Still, it is a democracy now. Seems like there are fewer and fewer of those…

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This American Life is a favorite radio program, although it is rare that I get a chance to devote an hour to it. Last night I was cooking dinner, and I caught the updated version of the show’s tribute to Harold Washington. It reminded me of another great novel I read recently (well, last year). Adam Langer’s pair of novels about kids growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago was even better that This American Life. Langer has a wicked sense of humor (as when a 13 year old decides she wants to hold an orgy), and even though the characters were totally outrageous, they felt like people I’d known for a long time.

Speaking of outrageous, I just finished Jim Shephard’s short story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway.  It’s very dark.  A man who survived a massive tidal wave in Alaska when he was three now wants to get a vasectomy.  A revolutionary executioner is has marital difficulties after he offs the king.  Nazis hunt yeti in Tibet to prove racial theories they don’t believe.  An engineer tries to find out what happened to his brothers at Chernobyl.   The stories have a poetry of isolation and estrangement.  They are perfect to read if you are feeling lost.

They are also up for a National Book Award.  We’ll see on Wednesday whether I’m still gaining on the curve.

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“Old Man River” is about the saddest song I know.

Warning to would-be authors — a rave in the New York Times Book Review means an amazon rank of 3614. I’m amazed anybody is still writing books. Say you’re a movie director, and your film is a total bomb. Well, that still means that probably thousands of people have seen the movie. But write a novel, and you’re lucky if 1000 people buy it, to say nothing of actually reading it.

It is for this reason that I am developing my powers of telepathy and mind control. You have been assimilated. This is a test.

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It is rare that I can prove that I am ahead of the curve. I can assure you, however, that I have the curve in my rear window, eating my dust. In today’s New York Times Book Review, a rave of a book that I praised in Wikifray last week.

Here it is again:

The problem with seduction is time. You have to figure out that you are attracted to somebody, plot a means of approach, work up your courage, and execute your plan in finest form before the object of your affection gets off the subway. You have to move. And when you see that special someone gathering to hand the purses, backpacks, and other accoutrement of daily life, you know that your deadline is looming. What do you do?

If you are Maynard Gogarty, you pull the emergency break cord. And if you are Rudolf Delson, author of this season’s best book, Maynard and Jennica, you give the subway its due say, along with a macaw, a scheming ex-wife, a man named Puppy Jones, scumbag lawyers, and Jennica Greene, the woman who provoked Maynard’s subway impulse. This love story is told by thirty-five narrators (befitting, I think, the way love stories should be told — in mock grandiosity, a bit like Bugs Bunny doing opera).

The New Yorker has a better write up than I can provide here. Suffice to say that the path by which Maynard and Jennica find each other extends well beyond the number 6 train, to San Jose, to avant guard film, to 9-11 scams, to really exceptionally bad poets, and to a cat whose name is a matter of some dispute. So rather than spending a cold fall rehashing yet another Philip Roth, wrap a blanket around your shoulders, pick up something new, and warm yourself up with Maynard and Jennica. Worst that can happen is you spend a few hours laughing your butt off.
Also: coolest cover of the season, by far.

Okay, so I guess that means the New Yorker was really ahead of the curve, but still…

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My job is full of interesting conversations. I am all the time meeting people I didn’t know worked here, and we are reshaping the world by making it less stupid. Every day we discover innovative ways to combat morons. We are exceptionally witty, and very well paid. We travel enough to keep things stimulating but not so much that it interferes with family life. On Thursday evenings, everybody breaks early for a drink, and the venue always has a view; the bartenders make perfect Manhattans; everybody wants my phone number. In future generations, historians collect my papers, and they reek from envy.

Tags: august by august
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I was having a conversation this morning with somebody who didn’t like Royal Tenenbaums: “It just didn’t go anywhere.” I see her point. Wes Anderson is a self-absorbed filmmaker of self-absorbed people. A lot of people have complained that he cares more about the wallpaper patterns than the acting. On the DVD of Tenenbaums, there’s an interview with Gene Hackman in which the actor describes his own discomfort with Anderson’s style — the way he had to ignore all the, the stuff to turn in his performance.

I still love the movie. I love the energy that narcissists can produce around themselves — the movies devote themselves to big personalities. They are fantasias of ego. I don’t mean Anderson’s own ego; I mean that Anderson’s lens shows us a world twisted by the personality of his characters, and in that world the most important thing about the Indian funeral, for example, is not the death, not the way the Indian characters feel, not even really the way the protagonists feel, but the way the protagonists can dress to match the color scheme. It’s borderline offensive. But it’s also entertaining, a Brooklyn-warp, a watercolor of the damaged.

It also works as light parody. In Darjeeling Limited, Bill Murray (who has no lines), runs to catch the Darjeeling Limited, and misses it. It feels like a reference to Razor’s Edge. In that movie, the protagonist has survived World War I, and the journey to India is taken very seriously as critique of the world at hand. In this movie, it’s not clear that there’s any merit to this trip beyond the emotions expressed by some odd characters. It’s funny, but the humor is subtle in all sorts of ways that Wes Anderson films mostly aren’t. There’s a central peacock feather ritual devised by some guru that is hilariously anticlimatic. There is portent and fuss and not-very-convincing reconciliation. The epiphany in this movie feels like the deep realization that we’ve been accessorizing all wrong.

To enjoy the movie, you have to love adornment and be skeptical of essences in ways that the main characters are not. You have to be able to appreciate assholes. And you have to be willing to see a story as a vehicle for serving up visions of a more beautiful universe. I’ll take that bargain any day.

Tags: visions by august
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“I wonder,” says one brother to the other two, “if the three of us could have been friends in real life.” It’s one of the few lines in Darjeeling Limited that got a laugh, but I loved the movie. It’s because I love trains, love watching the landscape, love the sense of motion. I also love Wes Anderson movies. I consider them to be a guilty pleasure, because I am aware that they are flawed. This one is orientalist in uninteresting ways, but the landscape allows Anderson a fuller palette than Brooklyn, and I love the way he can pack a frame with objects. You can smell this movie, it has perfumes and sand, tea, sex, bathrooms, train brakes, peacock feathers. Wes Anderson pays attention to detail. I wouldn’t want other directors to emulate him, but it’s an aesthetic I’m behind: poetry of objects in motion.

Tags: visions by august
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