Hello beautiful friends. How are you all? Individually text me and tell me how you are. Me? Sometimes I feel well and sometimes I do not!
My job is sometimes amazing and sometimes awful. Dating is sometimes exciting and sometimes exhausting. Austin in the summer is always hot and never cool. Luckily the springs are always cool, but riding my bike there has become exhausting and the grass is dead. As I patiently wait for the slight drop in temperature come September, I continue to read and have begun frequenting the Austin Film Society. Let me relay to you some amateurish thoughts on film and literature. You can decide for yourself if those thoughts are worth considering as you navigate onwards in your little life.
Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre
When I read T.A.Z. a couple weeks ago, ignoring the pedophilia as much as possible, I had some critical things to say. I was moved by its focus on the quotidian, but disappointed in its goals, which I found defeatist, of finding brief moments of anarchy in moments of uprising or the carnivalesque, to use Bakhtin’s language, since these always end in a return to normalcy the next morning. Bey’s reason for seeking out these moments of uprising, as opposed to full on revolution, was that revolution always seeks a final resting point and this resting point, for some reason to him, always sees the construction of a State. Bey thus wants a revolution that never ends, though, in my reading (not the closest of readings, given the constant talk of 12 year old boys), he doesn’t seem to see that. It’s just kind of limp.
However, I was moved to read more on the quotidian and so I finally pulled this Lefebvre brick from my shelves. It’s been staring out at me for about 6 years now.
Long before Hakim Bey, Lefebvre marked daily life as the site for revolutionary potential. “Where is genuine reality to be found? Where do the genuine changes take place? In the unmysterious depths of everyday life!” Lefebvre does not seek brief, solipsistic moments of freedom, but a permanent change to everyday life itself - a synthesis of Rimbaud’s imperative to “change life” and Marx’s to “change the world.”
The avenue for this change is through alienation, the “mistake that allowed human power to become the will of a few men to hold power. That allowed power to be placed outside of life, to be transposed to the level of the State control.” Revolutionary work is the undoing of alienation from ourselves, from history, and from each other. It’s a beautiful blend of Marx and Heidegger (and probably Hegel too, but who know when I’ll ever be brave enough to read Hegel).
Volume 1 serves as an introduction and a reinvigoration of the concept of alienation as well as a reinvigoration of Marxism. Lefebvre spends many pages railing against dogmatic, orthodox Marxism - recentering marxism (perhaps with a lowercase m, finally) as a cultural, geographical, contextual science and philosophy. Marxism must consider everyday life - what it means to go buy a bag of sugar, for example. Only then can marxism make the impact that so many of us want it to. Revolutions cannot be copy+pasted, but they should be analyzed to see how daily life was engaged to create profound change. Afterall, “when the world the sun shines on is always new, how could everyday life be forever unchangeable?”
I’ve now started volume 2 and I’m excited to see Lefebvre finally put this stuff into action. Expect more in a couple weeks.
Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
I thought this book was going to be as good as Gormenghast, but I’m not sure it’s living up to its reputation as one of the great sci-fi/fantasy works. At least that is how I feel shortly after reading the first volume. However, as time goes on and as I talk about the novel to a friend who is obsessed with it, I realize that, as always, the shortcomings may be my own.
While I was reading this, I spent the 4 or 5 days it took to read it complaining about how it is labeled as a sci-fi book while it is clearly fantasy. Embarrassingly, I was wrong. The story so far follows a torturer, a despised population in this universe, through his apprenticeship and his journey beyond home. It intentionally reads as fantasy. Everything is dusty and dark and what is light appears to be fantastical while a closer read reveals a technological flare. The domain of the torturers appears to be a great tower. However, there are little cues that you are likely not reading the book correctly. Indeed, the tower is a floating ship, spears of fire are closer to a star wars-esque lightsaber, and the magic garden rooms are perhaps less magical and more electronical.
It’s a sci-fi book so far in the future, so far regressed behind it’s former splendor that it becomes confusing. I’m still not sold, but it’s interesting and I’m excited to see where the next 3 volumes go as I alternate between this series and Lefebvre’s.
Now, lemme tell you about some movies.
Herve Guibert - Modesty and Shame
Modesty and Shame is Herve Guibert’s beautiful video diary of his last year alive, before he died of AIDS. For those that don’t know, Guibert was a French intellectual and artist who made great films, photos, books, and probably more. He set out to be the face of AIDS of in France through endless filmic and literary documentation.
The film touches on themes that echo throughout some of the other work of Guibert’s I have read but did not understand (it’s been many years and I never understand why family is so important to some people). Watching this, I learned how family was not just a metaphor to Guibert, but one of the ways he felt most connected to life. His conversations with his Aunt are especially cute, sweet, heartbreaking, and funny. As with so much on the artistic side of AIDS activism, the work is especially humanistic and life affirming. However, the scene in which he sits in a chair among littered leaves of paper, making notes as he asks for direction in how to buy stocks in a short list of companies that the audience should recognize as those pursuing AIDS vaccines and cures is an absolute gut punch. This inverted Faustian bargain is so subtle but so powerful in a world where people have to pay just to be able to hope for a longer, better life.
This was paired with Sophie Calle’s absolutely hilarious No Sex Last Night. If you’re familiar with Sophie Calle, you can probably guess the vibe of that film.
Sally Potter - Orlando
I went to see Sally Potter’s Orlando with a friend last week, never having heard of Sally Potter, never having read Virginia Woolf (I know), and never having seen a movie with Tilda Swinton. In short, this movie is a radical, queer rejection of property in the name of Freedom. But to write more, this is the first time I’ve ever cared about costume design (it’s incredible here), the comedic timing is unique and fresh (except Phoebe Waller-Bridge stole it and made it popular), and Tilda Swinton is clearly in peak form (anybody this good would inherently be in peak form). It’s funny and fun in a way that Hollywood, not even A24, can come close to reproducing. This is clearly a work that every single person on set felt connected to and had fun making. I think often about how much I can’t stand narrative, but when it’s this good, nothing beats it.
Satoshi Kon - Paprika
I hate psychoanalysis and I hate dreams. Paprika probably lends itself to a Jungian or Freudian or (god forbid) a Lacanian analysis. I love Satoshi Kon though. Like Orlando, there are some works that are so good that, despite hating the force that drives them, they offer the feeling of transport that we all come to art for. I had to remind myself to let go and just watch the pretty colors a few times while watching this. Therefore, I have nothing to say and I still prefer Perfect Blue, but Paprika is still great and was better this time than when I watched it a decade ago.
Lawrence Ah Mon - Spacked Out
I have hated 90s (and early 2ks) revival since its rebirth, whenever that was. I don’t have to be able to pinpoint it to make that claim. The 90s were a time of horrible alienation, mass consumerism, and confusion. Counter cultures had been completely absorbed by the market (this Baffler article I read Friday morning on what punk means now and in the 90s is relevant and funny) and seemingly everything else had been successfully commodified. I don’t understand the appeal.
Spacked Out follows four teenage girls in Hong Kong as they navigate chat lines, sex, smuggling cell phones into mainland China, drugs, abortion, school, desire, and friendship. Can you really have friends when everything is for sale? The answer seems to be “kind of.” The most sympathetic of the four has a fifth friend, a favorite friend, who has been shipped off to bad-kid school - so even that connection is untenable. However, it might be that for a group of disconnected youths, friendship is all you can have, even if it’s only through trauma bonding. As you can likely guess, this film features wild, youthful camera work and amateur actors playing out stories that ring true to their own lives.