“The graceful life is just a matter of the path you choose.”
That, my friends, is the goal for this chapter of my life. And, yes, maybe I’ll throw in a 3/4 movement and then a heavy guitar/horn breakdown while I do it, too.
Author: Don
Quickie Review: LOVE & MERCY (2014)
A very well acted biopic of legendary songwriter Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. A touch predictable, though. After all, (I don’t think this is much of a spoiler, but) whenever you have a character split between two time periods, you go into the film knowing that at some point they’ll at least metaphorically come face to face. At least the film tried to do this in a way that would almost make Alejandro Jodorowsky proud.
But the film had a tough task. How do you show the life of a rock legend with a storied half-century career in two hours? One is by using the kind of trick I just mentioned. Another is to avoid direct dramatic reinterpretations of (real or imagined) biographical events, and allude to them instead, which is a plus. (Cheeseburger, anyone?) Another involves making the delineation between the story’s heroes and villains as stark and simplistic as possible. The results on this score are mixed. You get Paul Giamatti’s awesome scene-chewing Dr. Evil, but you also get not very nuanced portrayals of Mike Love and Murray Wilson that serve only to make you rage against their toxicity to Brian’s creative spirit.
As enjoyable as the ride was, some questions nagged me throughout the film. It’s one thing to depict a person’s behaviors. But part of Wilson’s struggle was the fight to transfer what he heard in his head as faithfully as possible to tape. How could any movie deign to try depicting what’s in his head for a moviegoing audience? Was I being a little foolish for not realizing from the outset that this ride could only take me so far? On the other hand, if Wilson himself is happy with the film, what do I know?
Quickie Review: RIVETHEAD
Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read Rivethead from the perspective of someone for who lived through the time period this book was written in. Very little of this touches my direct experience except vicariously though the stories of people I’ve known who have lived a version of the life described herein. I mention this because, as in my reading of Nothin’ But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland, I do have a slightly stronger connection than someone reading this to get off on Rust Belt Chic ruin porn hipsterism.
Those sorts would paint Hamper as a working class revolutionary, an embedded journalist exposing the truth of life at the bottom of the American auto industry in Flint, MI in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Certainly, the book’s blurbs lead you to that line of thinking. But Hamper’s and his cohorts’ enemies weren’t really General Motors, its then-Chairman and CEO Robert Smith, or even the shop foremen of the Truck and Bus plant. Hamper writes, “Our only adversary was Father Time”, that is, the interminably slow second hand of the clock, plodding toward the end of your shift, during which your only choices are to either occupy your mind with plots to sneak out of the plant, inventing workplace-unsafe and semi-violent games like “Rivet Hockey” and “Dumpster Ball”, or numbing your mind with chemicals. Anything to escape the tedium of the “unskilled labor” for which men like Hamper were programmed. Hamper doesn’t (intentionally) expose a corporation’s secret agenda; he’s writing about what he’s living, with skills he gleaned from Catholic high school education, reading and writing poetry, listening to Mothers of Invention albums, and taking LSD. The result is prose that simultaneously delights even as it shames you for thinking, “This, from a shoprat?”
Hamper is very much a product of his time and place, a Boomer writer using WWII and Viet Nam War references to talk about the Midwest cultural clashes surrounding him: Salaried employees vs. hourly employees. Foremen vs. the shoprats. Fathers vs. sons. Mars vs. Venus. Art rock vs. Classic rock. Living and writing within his comfort zone vs. the life he could’ve had, and actually sampled through his association with filmmaker Michael Moore. (The book is worth the price of admission just to read an account of Moore outside of Moore’s narrative.) Thing is, you wouldn’t think a book of pieces written in the late ’80s/early ’90s would be as even-handed as it is about the US auto industry’s competition with Japan, and so you learn things like about how GM didn’t just try to instill a fear of Toyota in its workers, but of Ford, as well.
Consequently, being a product of his time and place, the writing shows Hamper’s exposure to the background radiation of racism, classism, misogyny, body-shaming, slut-shaming, homophobia, and ableism you’d expect from someone who grew up the Midwest in the ’60s and ’70s. (One plus: the use of the word tranny in the book only ever refers to an automobile’s transmission.) I have no reason to believe Hamper would espouse or display the above; I doubt he would in this day and age where he continues to do the occassional reading. But neither does Hamper try to disabuse you of the notion that some of his family and coworkers might.
Hamper is often referred to as Flint’s answer to Cleveland’s Harvey Pekar. Hamper’s output and subject matter certainly bear a resemblance, from life on the job right down to the unique cast of secondary characters from the line. Neither men particularly want your praise or your pity. But even Pekar’s observations occasionally had bright, if rare, moments of optimism. Harvey wanted to show profundity hidden in the quotidian. Hamper, on the other hand, shows you absurdity hidden in the drudgery.
In the end, Rivethead is the story of a man embracing his destiny, for better AND for worse, and ending in a place you don’t expect but by which you shouldn’t be especially shocked.
The truth was loose: I was the son of a son of a bitch, an ancestral prodigy born to clobber my way through loathsome dungheaps of idiot labor. My genes were cocked and loaded. I was a meteor, a gunslinger, a switchblade boomerang hurled from the pecker dribblets of my forefathers’ untainted jalopy seed. I was Al Kaline peggin’ home a beebee from the right field corner. I was Picasso applyin’ the final masterstroke to his frenzied Guernica. I was Wilson Pickett stompin’ up the stairway of the Midnight Hour. I was one blazin’ tomahawk of m-fuggin’ eel snot. Graceful and indomitable. Methodical and brain-dead. The quintessential shoprat. The Rivethead.
Quickie Review: MAGGIE (2015)
I really wanted MAGGIE to be Arnold’s JCVD, that is, an art house flick that plays with everything we think we know about a foreign-born actor and the American Acton heroes he played in the ’80s. It did not let me down! MAGGIE deconstructs the expectations built up over 30 years of Governator- and zombie-film over-saturation, and subverts them at literally every turn.
If you’ve seen enough Schwarzenegger and zombie films, you’ve seen every scene setup in MAGGIE before. Thus, you’re not surprised to see tense moments with John Matrix poised to kick ass, or creepy moments where you just know Abigail Breslin (who’s been in similar surroundings before) is about to take a bite out of someone. But few things play out as expected here, and MAGGIE prepares you for this by setting up the characters properly. So yes, you have scenes of Dutch Schaefer brandishing a shotgun, because Ah-nold! But when you write his character as a man clinging desperately to what is best in life, whose former wife instilled in him a love of reading(!) and planting daisies(!!), and then have Trench Mauser play that character convincingly, then you have a Schwartzenegger zombie film where anything can happen.
Quickie Review: AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON
Spoilers ahead, minor and major — YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
Suffice it to say, the movie appealed to my inner six year old. This is a good thing. It’s also a bad thing.
That aside, I still have to say that AofU didn’t thrill me like the first Avengers film. It didn’t bore me, though. There were certainly enough comic book “Fuck yeah!” moments. But I suspect part of that was my brain trying to keep up with the plot, and not stumble over the holes where things were obviously cut out. In fact, yes, I felt like I was watching an edited version on FX, “compressed for time”. On the plus side, though, there was the particular way this film hit my comic book geek spots.
Because if you’re really going to hit all the highlights of Marvel Comics history on film, then fuck it — go for broke, from the creation of the synthozoid Vision, down to creating an “All New, All Different” B-team at the end of it all, just like in the comics.
This past Free Comic Book Day, I found this: a fresh copy of MARVEL SUPER-HEROES Vol. 1, No. 80, one of the first comic books I ever remember reading as a child. The cover date is 1979, so I was 5 or 6 years old. (The issue itself is a reprint of THE INCREDIBLE HULK Vol. 1, No. 128 from 1970.)
The Avengers roster started changing in the comics after the second issue. Characters like General “Thunderbolt” Ross were already missing the classic line-up…
Okay, even as a kid maybe I knew this team seemed a little wanting, just like the team introduced at the end of AofU seems to be. But six year old me still thought this image was bad ass! (Don’t worry, Wanda gets her licks in by the end of the issue.)
Just like people have “My Doctor” (i.e. the one they imprinted on as a kid), I have my Avengers. And my Avengers will always have Goliath, The Vision, The Beast, Yellowjacket, and Wonder Man in the turtleneck and the red pimp safari jacket, because they were the ones in the comics I read after this one.
For me, that’s the joy of AofU. I enjoyed this retelling of Avengers history! Very well done, “A” for effort! I want to see what Captain America, Black Widow, War Machine, Falcon, Scarlet Witch, and The Vision do in the next go-round!
And yet, although I judiciously avoided all spoilers, I knew I’d seen this — well, read this — all before. Which begs the question of who exactly AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON was written for — six year old boy comic book geek me, or for over-forty dude comic book geek me? I’m fairly sure much of the praise or scorn heaped upon this movie is based on the answer to that question.
Six year old me might’ve interpreted that scene between Black Widow and Bruce Banner a little more generously than most (if you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about) and might’ve thought Widow’s MCU history reveal probably means something different to the character than it does to people watching the film. Part of over-forty me believes that. But the rest of over-forty me knows a reveal like that doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s a shame, too. A revelation that might’ve offered some additional depth (“My soul is as dark as Banner’s, but I have the same heroic potential.”) is doomed from almost the very start of the movie and it’s “lullaby” scene, and frames things in a way that makes the snarky “cleaning up after you boys” quip a mere one step above that one line in the last movie.
Quickie Review: NOTHIN’ BUT BLUE SKIES
Nothin’ But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland by Edward McClelland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Lest anyone think I read this just to latch on to the hipsterish aspects of the “Rust Belt Chic” trend, know that I was born in Cleveland a mere four years after the Cuyahoga River burned, and I grew up through most of the events in the “Burn On, Big River” chapter of the book. Take McClelland’s writing on Dennis Kucinich’s various rises and falls, for instance. No matter how much prominence he gained after reinventing himself as a national politician, and regardless of how many of his views I might share, I’ll always know him as “Dennis the Menace” because in the late 70s/early 80s, even a six year old like me could read a political cartoon in THE PLAIN DEALER and glean from how the grown-ups talked that that’s what everyone thought of him. We were reading USA TODAY in grade school when the whole the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing came up. And I had one of my first underage drinks just as the Flats was transitioning from a hotspot to a hive of scum and villainy. (I’d left before it finally turned into a “Scooby Doo ghost town“.)
All that to say that if McClelland, a native of Lansing, MI, did enough of his homework to get those sorts of Cleveland details right then it seemed likely to me that his notes about life in post auto industry Youngstown, Detroit, Flint, Lansing, etc. also has a genuine ring of truth. In fact, reading about the stories of these other places and some of the people in them felt like a rediscovery of sorts. I can imagine this is what it feels like for someone who has some weird personality quirk that never made sense to anyone until some previously hidden fact of biological or social history was discovered and gave you the context. I’d never heard the terms “bathtub Madonna” or “Mary on the half shell” before reading this book, and never knew how prevelant they were in other places similar to Cleveland, and yet I’d grown up seeing these little homemade grotto shrines to the Virgin Mary in every neighborhood I ever rode through inside Cleveland.
The book succeeds in giving me what feels like a thorough background about subjects I already knew, or at least in filling in the gaps about things I witnessed from a short distance. I was familiar with the socioeconomic patterns and movements of White Flight and gentrification, but this book clarifies the mechanics of it, particularly with respect to the decrepit housing and infrastructure it left behind (neither of which was really all that great to begin with). McClelland also lists a few examples of what happens when movements born of social justice to serve people crash and burn when they start becoming unsustainable, which many times has to do with internal personalities and politics, as much as whatever the latest company outsourcing or international trade plan is.
I was startled to learn exactly how much politicians in other regions of the country are looking over the carcass of the Rust Belt and still see a couple of things worth stripping even now, like Great Lakes water. A part of me cheered when I read about the political pushback these efforts get; Michigan representatives basically saying, “You wanted to go live in that sand box [i.e places like Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, etc. which have lured people and jobs from Michigan]. Don’t come crying to us when you can’t find anything to drink.”
The one nit I have is that McClelland does a little too good of a job integrating various regional idioms of, to put it mildly, an insensitive stripe. It’s one thing to quote, or report a quote from, various sources and stories, like one in which a Daley political operative tells Chicago Latino voters, “We want you guys to be our minority, because we’re already sick of that other minority [emphasis mine].” But it’s another to uncritically mix them into your own narrative. The author writes, “[Latinos in South Chicago] had their own church — Our Lady of Guadalupe — and they were tolerated by Stosh and Chester [i.e. code for “men of eastern European descent”] at the ironworkers’ tavern, who figured it was them or the colored [i.e. the other minority].” And while I’m fairly certain McClelland himself doesn’t espouse these beliefs, that contention might be a tougher sell for people to whom I might recommend this book. I theorize (but could be wrong) that I’ll have to deal with this in the next book in my Rust Belt reading queue, Ben Hamper’s Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line.
But then, personally, I’m a little (too?) used to it. After all, I grew up around that; hell I’m a Filipino-American who grew up in it. And if nothing else, this book goes a long way to telling me why.
Currently Reading, Backyard Fracking, and Filipino Rondalla
CURRENTLY READING: All of my reading lately has been on the non-fiction tip. The last fiction I’ve read was a slog of a collection that I haven’t finished yet. (It has some incredible craftsmanship, but damn if most of the stories just don’t do it for me.) Anyway, what HAVE I been reading? I’ve made it into the Dark Horse years of AMERICAN SPLENDOR. I’m about halfway through NOTHIN’ BUT BLUE SKIES: THE HEYDAY, HARD TIMES, AND HOPES OF AMERICA’S INDUSTRIAL HEARTLAND by Eric McClelland which I discovered while perusing BELT MAGAZINE’s website. And lest you think I’m just now jumping on the whole “Rust Belt Chic” bandwagon, I’ll just say that I grew up during most of the stuff in Chapter 4 of BLUE SKIES (i.e. the Cleveland chapter). It’s been enlightening nonetheless to look at the historical context of my early life. And, I just picked up BIOPUNK: SOLVING BIOTECH’S BIGGEST PROBLEMS IN KITCHENS AND GARAGES the other day at a bookstore discount table for $4, because there just has to be a story in here somewhere.
BACKYARD FRACKING: Something I forgot to mention when I wrote up having seen the short documentary BACKYARD at FLEFF. During the Q&A with the filmmaker, someone asked if she attempted to get any comments from the fracking industry. She says she did, and that it was rather easy to. She was granted tours through various rigs — sans her camera crew — and interviewed workers who apparently only had the same pro-fracking talking points. She reported being unable to find anyone with a unique pro-fracking story, which she attributes to the industry’s powerful propaganda machine. Power that was corroborated by an audience member with an account of the presence of energy companies in the independent film business and festival circuit. Know thy enemy and co-opt. Basic, really.
FILIPINO RONDALLA: Of course they’d have a Filipino Rondalla group at the Ivy League for which I work. To paraphrase the motto, “Any person, any extracurricular activity,” apparently. It brought back some childhood memories of my first visit to the Philippines when I was about four. I remember a candle dance and a tinikling demo, just like what I saw at the group’s concert last Saturday. That said, I have to acknowledge that this student display of Filipino culture–the culture of my parents–isn’t the culture of everyone in the Philippines. I fear for the non-Filipino audience members who may have left feeling armed with a proper overview of “Filipino culture”, and then trying to share this knowledge with, say, someone from the Visayas or Mindanao. They may not be received well. After all, Filipinos have stabbed people for far less….
Next time, I’ll probably talk about the lung pox I’m fighting.
FLEFF, Fracking, and Experimental Short Films
It’s been a couple of years since I’d last made it to FLEFF, the annual Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. It’s typically a week-long affair with screenings and panels, and typically I miss most of it because of my day job. This year, I was determined to make it to something, anything, and I did last Sunday. I didn’t catch much, but I got a lot out of what I saw.
BACKYARD (2014). A short documentary by filmmaker (and proprietor of Pale Blue Dot Media) Deia Sherman about fracking and its effects on the lives of different people from different states. Living in upstate NY (in one of the areas that’s managed to keep the frackers at bay so far), the stories had familiar themes. But it’d be a mistake to dismiss this film as some echo chamber piece, tailor made for an “environmental film festival” in Ithaca, NY. Its stories are compelling and, to me, eerily reminiscent of the environmental, labor, and health and safety problems at the start of the auto and steel industries in the Rust Belt. That’s a line of research I’ve been chasing for a bit, and the subject of a big post or two down the pike. All I’m saying is that the Clean Air Act and OSHA were established for reasons. Take it from a former denizen of the land of the Burning River.
UPSTATE FILMMAKERS’ SHOWCASE. A series of experimental shorts by (mostly) cinema faculty from Binghamton University. Each of the films played with the notions of time and linear narrative in some way. They’re were all good (all the details at the event link), but my favorites: Close the Lid Gently, SoundPrint (which involved some audience participation using greeting card sound modules — that’s what I’ve got in the pic there), and 300 Features and 40 Shorts.
It’s been too long, FLEFF. Catch you next year.
It’s a Good Good Friday!
Mabuhay ng Pilipinas, motherfuckers! It’s that of year again for my personal Good Friday observance. First, the obligatory theme song. Listen as you read on. [ETA: forgot the bloody video.]
This year gives us not one, but TWO stories from my motherland. First, a sad note…
Earlier, the only requirement to participate in the annual crucifixion rites in Philippines was that the person needed to be a Catholic. However, this year only local Filipinos can participate.
Harvey Quiwa, chairperson of the committee in charge of the 2015 Holy Week rites, announced the ban stating that this year all efforts will be made to ensure that the Lenten rites do “not become a circus.”
Well, that really fucks up my plans.
Then again, my plans haven’t been fucked up like our good friend Ruben’s…
CITY OF SAN FERNANDO, Philippines—Still without a successor, signboard maker Ruben Enaje has been obliged to extend his real-life crucifixion act for another year, making the Good Friday reenactment in Barangay San Pedro Cutud in this Pampanga capital on April 3 his 29th year so far
Enaje said he was hoping that the council finds an appropriate replacement for him soon because his aging body can not bear further pain.
Enaje really wants out, though…
“The spots on my hands and feet that are pierced yearly get healed in six months but the pain on my right shoulder where I carry a big wooden cross persists year round,” he said.
We all have our crosses to bear, but damn.
Post-Con Blues, Impostor Syndrome Self-Assessment, Reader’s Block
Here’s what’s on my mind lately…
POST-CON BLUES. I love going to cons, but they often put me off of my normal writing routines. And when I come back, they tend to keep me off my writing routines because of follow-up, exhaustion due to people overload, and obsessive but fruitless worrying about how to leverage my last appearance while trying to force my way BACK into a writing routine–which is arguably the best way to leverage my last appearance, at this stage of my career. Well, one step at a time…
IMPOSTOR SYNDROME SELF-ASSESSMENT. From 0 (“I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?”) to 5 (“I’m like Aquaman and Brown Hornet / I’m like Imhotep but don’t flaunt it.”), I feel about a 3, post-con. I’ve had stuff out last year even though it was few and far between. I had some con panelist experience before Snokone Boskone (2 WFC panels, that’s not nothing), and now moderator experience. Next Boskone I get to participate in, I’ll probably feel right at home.
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READER’S BLOCK. Because OMG is my backlog out of control. I just cannot make up my mind, strategically, about what to read next. And no, “Read what you’re in the mood to read” is of no help, because strategery!