Sorry about skipping last week; I’m sure the three of you were let down and confused, but I am back and ready to share with you my snobby cultural picks of the week.
What I Watched
My wife had never seen Peter Greenway’s The Pillow Book (1996), so we watched it the other night. Combining the eroticism of flesh with the lust for literature, but more specifically the written symbol, this movie stars Vivian Wu as a Japanese/Chinese model with a writing fetish trying to find a lover both good in bed and with a pen. Bonus is the long gratuitous nude scenes with Ewan McGregor. Different camera styles, multi-media editing, and wrong subtitles make this movie a beautiful Asian fairytale poem.
What I Read
In the new Harper’s Magazine, The Anxiety of Influencers by English professor Barrett Swanson. Swanson spends a weekend at a TikTok influencer mansion where teenagers get paid tens of thousands of dollars to make short videos influencing you to buy certain products. The article makes you see the cracks appear on the fabric of reality, and the end is coming. I heard the horns blow. Barrett writes, “So the truth is that the influencer economy is just a garish accentuation of the economy writ large. As our culture continues to conflate the private and public realms – as the pandemic has transformed our homes into offices and our bedrooms into backdrops, as public institutions increasingly fall prey to the mandates of the market – we’ve become cheerfully indentured to the idea that our worth as individuals isn’t our personal integrity or sense of virtue, but our ability to advertise our relevance on the platforms of multinational tech corporations.” Writing about this article is funny since most of my traffic on this site comes from Instagram or Twitter. It does make me look at how I am selling you a version of me that isn’t even making any money; I just want you to know that I make stuff and that I am relevant at best, exist at worse.
Make me think about my year and a half as a retail clerk at a farm & ranch store in rural America. I wrote about this last year after a few months of working there. Still, for every meme, infographics, plea to change the system to a better system, there is an exact opposite meme, infographic, and plea to change the system back to a better system that supposedly existed before the cancel culture warriors and woke brigades starting burning the cities down.
Okay, back to your regularly scheduled post that hopefully errs on the side of positivity rather than harmful divisiveness.
What I Heard
I mainly listen to jazz, and one of my favorite albums is Mal Waldron’s The Quest (1962) with Eric Dolphy & Booker Ervin. Jazz took a turn in the early 60s, and musicians were trying to stretch that sound to the heavens. Like compositional music of the same era, halftones, dissonance, and isorhythmic, this album walks the tight rope between hard bop and avant-garde. While I don’t enjoy pianist lead bands, this album puts the keys back so that Dolphy wigs out on multi-instruments, Ervin plays hard blues riffs, and Ron Carter switches between pizzicato and bowing his stand up bass. I play Warm Canto over and over. This is a great album to drive to or put on the earphones and see where it goes.
What I Have Read
I can’t do this for very long without a shout-out to writer, poet, meditator, coach, & friend Johnny No Bueno and his two books We Were Warriors (2012) and Concrete & Juniper (2019). We Were Warriors is a collection of poems. A few of them resonated with me, and once I even requested one of them to get read by him at a reading titled Wind between Skyscrapers. Concrete & Juniper jumps back and forth between poems and autobiographical essays about his youth growing up in Portland. From what I can tell, when he was hitting the streets and sitting by the seals on Yamhill, I was walking home and getting clean, but his poems and stories remind me of some of the most brutal years of my life. No Bueno knows how to cut to the jugular with language but instill the hard life’s haunting beauty. I hope to see many more books from this talented writer.