Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR. Click for NPR’s review
A copy of The Passenger finally came through on Libby for me. I read most of it in a sudden calm spell in the wake of the holidays, the day after New Year’s Day.
The language in this novel is unlike anything. McCarthy has been polishing it since the 1970s. I guess that’s how you get a paragraph like this:
Seals roused himself. A bird person he. In his bathroom brooding raptors hooded like hangmen shifted sullenly upon their perches. A saker, a lanneret.
It’s going to take a while to marinate. I immediately ordered this nice matching box set of hardcovers. I’ll write more about it after I get through Stella Maris.
It’s always a pleasure to learn there’s a new book from Geoff Dyer. The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings is the latest such treat, a looping “book about last things, some of which are late, while some are precociously early.” The theme gives Dyer, sharp and funny as ever, free reign to bounce around associatively from one pet subject to the next. All of Dyer’s obsessions, which will be familiar to anyone who has read his previous books (you should), endlessly recur again here – D. H. Lawrence, John Berger, Theodore Adorno, jazz, photography, himself, not doing yoga, a dozen other things. The main text of the work has exactly 86,400 words (the number of seconds in a day), split into 3 parts each divided into 60 numbered segments, a clever structure that echoes one of Dyer’s favorite touchstones, Christian Marclay’s looping 24 hour video installation “The Clock” (2010). This isn’t a great place to start with Dyer (I recommend But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz for that, even if you don’t care at all about jazz), and if you’ve already started, then you already know. This is one I’d like to revisit when I’m 60.
If you’re interested at all in getting to know Dyer a bit, I recommend checking out the episode “It’s Always Sunny in the Dialectic” from novelist Hari Kunzru’s “Into the Zone” podcast – Kunzru and Dyer have breakfast at Cafe Gratitude and then go to Adorno’s house in L.A.
There's a new episode of Into the Zone out today. For 'It's Always Sunny in the Dialectic' I went to LA with @_hbraithwaite to eat at a place where your breakfast is a mantra: pic.twitter.com/uHnPGUDRAl
Still from the music video to “Livin’ in the After” by Panda Bear and Sonic Boom. Click for youtube.
Reset by Panda Bear and Sonic Boom is one of my favorite albums of 2022. The standout track for me is “Livin’ in the After”, a buzzy psych-tinged meditation from the perspective of someone who’s been “Loopin’ on the carousel / On the carousel.” As Panda Bear explains to Pitchfork, all of the songs on Reset are built out of the intros to old songs, looped and warped into catchy contemporary ditties. The repetition of “On the carousel” is a nice touch, echoing both the production technique and the emotional theme. The speaker, for whom “they keep on ringin’ the final bell,” seems to be having a classic kind of midlife crisis – stuck in a rut, comfortable and entertained but increasingly aware of the imminence of their own death.
What does it mean, “living in the after”? I think it’s a neat way of describing the rut-stuck mindset. The phrase reminds me of Zadie Smith’s essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free (2018), which offers an image of “a Beleiber in the Justin Bieber signing queue,” lined up for “an experience which even as it is happening seems to be relegated to the past tense … not only is this meeting always already a story, it only really exists as narrative.” You’re thinking, “OMG I just met Justin Bieber” even as you’re shaking his hand – a clear cut case of livin’ in the after, to me.
It’s very difficult to break out of that kind of mindset, a difficulty the speaker conveys relatably:
I don’t even want to try and it’s got me down
And I’m thinkin’ I might not come ‘round
Got to take a day to think it through
And give me a night to make up my mind
It’s a deep and melancholy bop. Panda Bear’s voice (and relative level of pretension) turns off a lot of people, but if you can get past that, I think you’ll find a lot to love on Reset.
Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery
I, too, have now seen Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. I agree with Esquire that it’s a “Perfect Film for the Age of Elon Musk” – it captures the mood, channeling its characters out of the anti-tech sentiment with spooky accuracy. It’s a movie about seeing through the ego of the haves to see what they have not got: a clue. I laughed a lot. I cringed a lot. I was not moved.
The cultural commentary is pleasant and agreeable, comfy, not going to sway or shock anyone. Daniel Craig is brilliant again; the plot hinges on his thick “Southern Hokum,” and his ability to turn that off while still selling you on his Southern Gentility. We first meet him in the bathtub, where he’s been since the start of Covid lockdown, trying – and failing – to play Among Us with some concerned friends. It was extremely evocative of the time, for me. Edward Norton gives us his best Dirtbag CEO, Dave Bautista his veiniest Men’s Rights Twitch streamer, Kate Hudson her ditsiest fashion influencer. It’s funny and dumb. Janelle Monae (!) has her biggest and best role yet (in this medium, anyway) and is the emotional heart of the film.
I devoured Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone this week. It had me up past my bedtime, racing toward the end. In this rather literary thriller, we join lightly shell-shocked American journo John Converse in Vietnam, writing for “Nightbeat, which his lawyers described as A Weekly Tabloid With a Heavy Emphasis on Sex,” as he gives up on ever writing his novel to try his hand at running heroin instead. It fits squarely into one of my favorite subject areas in American literature – the clash between the state and the psychadelic spirit, war and counter-culture, conspiracy and love, or, how the 60s were lost.
Dog Soldiers opens with a feverish Converse on a park bench in Saigon, reading a letter from his strangely disaffected wife who recounts a recent trip to New York, where she and some friends “went to a parade which was for the War”:
Three of us—me, looking relatively straight, and Don and Cathy looking modified freaky. We weren’t too well received. You had to see that action to believe it. … My flash was that these people are freakier than we ever could be. One tends to think of them as straight but when you see them they’re unreal.
(This observation is every bit as true in the Trump era as it was then.)
This sense of unreality pervades the novel – if the States have become “funnier,” as characters warn each other repeatedly, Vietnam itself may be the corrupting influence. Converse converses with an American missionary sharing his park bench between reading snatches of his letter. “‘Satan,’ she called to him, ‘is very powerful here.’ ‘Yes,’ Converse said. ‘He would be.’” Or, as Sergeant Janeway says to Converse as he arranges a pretext to see his pal Hicks, who can transport the dope – “Every day in this place … we entertain the weird, the strange, the unusual.”
Amsterdam (2022, David O. Russel, streaming on HBO) is a big, starry, saggy romp through the sad and scary aftermath of World War I. “A lot of this really happened,” the film declares in the opening moments; in the end we are treated to a side-by-side of Robert De Niro (as the fictional General Dillenbeck) and the real life General Smedley Butler, reading his infamous testimony on the Business Plot, in which he alleges that a shadowy group of wealthy industrialist fascists wanted to stage a coup appointing him the military dictator of the United States.
It was fun. The film seems to think of itself as addressing Important Themes, and to be afraid of doing so with any subtlety. This makes it kind of painful to watch. I was particularly irritated by a couple of voiceovers that seemed only to restate what we just watched, in case you didn’t get it. I just now realized that Disney made this movie, which makes perfect sense in retrospect.
It took me months – I bought this to entertain myself on a flight to Chicago back in September. Thinking what? That I would find some insight here? Truth and reconciliation? Look, The Power Broker (1974) this is not.
If anything, I’m left mostly with the sense that things … just sort of happen, and there’s not much you can do about it. Revisiting these names and events, no deeper meaning is revealed to me. Bannon, Miller, Scaramucci, Guiliani, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice! People are venal and craven, not only but especially the ones in power – not a surprise – and it turns out that examining this in close detail will not enrich your life.
I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, although I’m sure it’ll be important to future historians or whatever. Recommended if you like reliving outrage through dry reportage.
Saba’s a deft storyteller with brilliant flow. The (self)-production is on the whole kicked-back and buttery. Saba rides trilling snares and rounded keys with an easy, crisp delivery. Thematically, Few Good Things can still be found on a Westside stoop, nostalgiac for the recording studio in Grandma’s basement, alternately just chillin and chilled by violence. Saba does nostalgia better than anyone, but it’s cut now more than ever with a sense of achievement. It’s well deserved.
I had, like, all of my clothes to fold, so for a bit of ambiance slapped on Bullet Train (2022), the new beat-em-up from David Leitch (John Wick, Deadpool 2, etc), streaming on Netflix.
