K-Lunk

I saw Berkeley in the Sixties in the Little Roxie. To quote their blurb:

This Academy Award-nominated documentary interweaves the memories of 15 former student leaders, who grapple with the meaning of their actions. Their recollections are interwoven with footage culled from thousands of historical clips and hundreds of interviews. Ronald Reagan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mario Savio, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsburg, and the music of Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez and the Grateful Dead all bring that tumultuous decade back to life.

It’s obviously very relevant in the current moment, with college students across the nation engaging in protest of Isreal. The people in this film helped write the first draft of the playbook for on-campus civil disobedience.

The interviews are interesting; the historical clips are really great. The administrators and politicians look so helpless and silly on tape. The violence was out of control then; the septegenarian on my left muttered “Jesus” under her breath a half dozen times as students were dragged limply down stairs, beaten with billy clubs, and gassed by the national guard.

You can watch the whole thing on youtube.

I called the folks over at Fireside Camera in the Marina and asked whether they had any DSLRs under $500. They had one, a Canon Rebel T5i with the kit lens, for $350. Not a steal, not a bad deal; I could have bought something cheaper off the internet but trekking across town to put one in my hand and support small business sounded nice, so I rode the 22 across town and goddammit bought the thing. It’s great.

From the camera store – great people, very helpful! – I walked to Molinari Delicatessen, shooting at signs. My photos are nothing special but it’s very fun to do. I am slowly learning to weild the machine.

From there, I wandered over to the Peak Design store to buy a strap and a bag. On the way I stopped at Emperor Norton’s Boozeland for a $3 can of Hamms, which revitalized me.

Today for a little laundry entertainment I punched “Gary Winograd” into youtube and came up with a lovely clip from a doc called Contemporary Photographie in the USA (1982), of which there are several, all worth watching.

I want to learn how to take nice photographs.

I will give myself a budget, set some practical goals and dedicate some time every day to the craft to test the waters. I think I can get set up with great, gently used stuff for less than $500.

I want to find out whether I’m really into photography before spending a lot of money on it. At the same time, I want to secure reasonable equipment for a beginner that will last me if I decide I’m in.

I want to produce prints. I also want to feature my own photos on this blog.

I like analog objects, and eventually want to work with film sometimes. But I think I should start with an older DSLR from an established brand like Canon or Nikon with a large resale market. Something I can take a million photos on before I actually start developing prints.

Below the fold is raw notes as I think through what I’ll do.

I’ve had a lot of false starts this year. I’ve been giving up on books more lately than I’ve been finishing them. Uh, why let that stop me from writing about them?

Babel by R. F. Kuang

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution lost the tournament of books championship to The Book of Goose today. I wish I had spent my several months of library hold time on that.

Of the many folks who weighed in on Babel in the Tournament of Books, I agreed most with Nathan Deuel, who writes: “Tediously conjured from a mountain of research, featuring stiff central characters whose bland agonies distract from a molten core, Babel squanders several fresh and stirring ideas about language and power.” I gave up early in the second act. I struggled to get past the characterization and didacticism. Angela read it after me and loved it, though.

Black Lamb and Gray Falcon by Rebecca West

I renewed the library loan once for Dame Rebecca West’s mammoth travelogue of the Balkans, and still managed only to wade through a bit less than half before calling it quits. I don’t regret a minute of the time I spent, but I feel like I’ve had enough. I picked this up because Geoff Dyer swears by it in The Last Days of Roger Federer.

West traveled through the Balkans from England with her husband, apparently a very well read banker, between the World Wars. There is a very eerie moment where West is standing in the last room Franz Ferdinand occupied before he was assasinated, with a guy who was in the room at the time, and she explains how Ferdinand was this complete monster of a hunter who estimated himself to have killed half a million animals, and she imagines the spirits of all those animals gathered in the room as he prepares to step out and make his oration, driving the man toward assasination the way the archduke’s beaters drove the animals out of the forest into the scope of his gun. Can you imagine, half a million. He spent his time standing around shooting things, mostly.

The writing is a marvel, but it takes a lot of effort and after a couple of months I ran out of steam. Something I would buy in a heartbeat if I saw it used, just to have around.

Two Books Called The Deluge

I saw some kind of blurb go by for an ambitous sounding new climate change novel called The Deluge by Stephen Markley. I looked it up on Libby and found a long wait list. There also happens to be a book called The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 by Adam Tooze, which had no waitlist, and dovetailed quite nicely with my newfound interest in the origins of World War I awoken by Black Lamb and Gray Falcon. So I checked it out.

Tooze is a historian at Columbia, and this is the second time I’ve bounced off his dry, specialized writing style. I was missing so much context taken for granted that I had trouble making sense of or caring about the argument. My interest in the subject is too casual for this text. I had the same problem with Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018).

When it finally came available I read about two pages of Markley’s novel before ruling it out for style. I hate books that are so transparently about telling you science through hokey characterization.

I saw the now-imprisoned (on charges of “propaganda against the regime”) Iranian director’s quiet hit No Bears at the Roxie a couple weeks ago, and would recommend it to anyone. Starring Panahi himself as … an Iranian director in trouble with the government. The film is very much concerned with filmmaking, but the meta-ness of it all doesn’t get in the way of Panahi’s touching, funny, despairing characterizations of the villagers around him. A very moving and human film.

A Flag For Sunrise is Robert Stone’s third novel, the one he wrote after Dog Soldiers which I wrote about last month. It’s another complicated political novel in which everyone is drunk and haunted by Vietnam and the deep state lurks in its shadowy way just out of the frame. I agree with Michael Wood, who wrote in this contemporary review for the New York Times book section “I have a weakness for gangsters who refer to Nietzsche and gunrunners who quote Shakespeare, Yeats and Oscar Wilde, but other readers may not feel the same.” I found this one somewhat more literary than Dog Soldiers, deeper and broader and more moving, if less taut.

I’ve always been nervous around zealots, and I think Stone’s novels brilliantly characterize a kind of clash between those who think they know what’s what and those who are aware they don’t:

Positive thinkers.

How could they? he wondered. How could they convince themselves that in this whirling tidal pool of existence, providence was sending them a message? Seeing visions, hearing voices, their eyes awash in their own juice—living on their own and borrowed hallucinations, banners, songs, kiddie art posters, phantom worship. The lines of bayonets, the marching rhythms, incense or torches, chanting, flights of doves—it was hypnosis. And they were the vampires. The world paid in blood for their articulate delusions, but it was all right because for a while they felt better. And presently they could put their consciences on automatic. They were beyond good and evil in five easy steps—it had to be O.K. because it was them after all. It was good old us, Those Who Are, Those Who See, the gang.

Noah Baumbach’s new adaptation of Don Delillo’s White Noise is streaming on netflix. I’d been looking forward to it for a long time, and it more than lived up to my expectations.

A classic absurdist study of the postmodern moment, brilliantly rendered. The distinctive Delillo dialog style is a treat for fans and maybe an acquired taste. The film does some things even better than the book – the overlapping cacaphony of family chatter, for example. I think the adaptation makes some of the limitations of the source material more apparent, as well: the scene where Jack and Murray give simultaneous circling, grandstanding lectures on Elvis and Hitler’s relationships with their mothers was always silly, but watching it play out on film is extra unconvincing.

I loved the end credits, which interperet a supermarket through dance. A really beautiful blend of conventional pop dancing and stoned mysticism.

I like having a collection of essays on the back burner; I picked up Feel Free from Cristopher’s Books months ago to fill that role in a giddy rush of name recognition – Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) has stuck with me since I read it in college (2010 maybe?). Smith’s novels have not gripped me again – I bounced off NW (2012) a couple of times, just not in the mood – but Smith’s criticism is always a pleasure to read, neatly articulating new webs of art and life with personal feeling and close observation. This book sat on my nightstand for a long time as in between other books I took little sips from the well of these essays.

Some personal favorites include “Windows on the Will: Anomalisa” – reading Charlie Kaufmann’s stop-motion character study against the movie Polar Express and Schopenhauer’s understanding of humans as puppets whose strings are pulled by the will-to-live (whatever that is) – and the review “The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi,” which is both a book review and a revealing account of an early and transformative reading experience of the author’s. I admit I did not read all of the Harpers columns, which I’m sure I would have appreciated individually if I were reading them month to month but did not make for the most exciting contiguous block of reading.

Terror Twilight is Pavement’s last album, as I remembered sometime after putting it on a couple of nights ago. I thought I might borrow The Last Days of Roger Federer’s theme (recently reviewed) of “last things” for my own purposes, and share notes on one of my favorite records.

What does Terror Twilight have to say about the coming end of Pavement and the start of Stephen Malkmus recording with the Jicks and as himself? Below, song-by-song notes from my latest look at one of the great late works in indie rock.