Incredibly Stupid Bliss

Just finished reading Malcolm Lowry's incredible Under the Volcano , and kind of shaken up a little. The last chapter details in vibrant, precise, scattered, delirious, and devastating language the demise of a self-hating but somehow life-loving man who has destroyed his life so distinctly there's no other place to go but the abyss. Geoffrey Firmin is the guy,   an alcoholic British consul  in the Mexico  on the Day of the Dead  in November 1938. It takes its name from the volcano  Popocatépetl , which overshadows the terrain and characters. It was Lowry's second novel, and the last one he completed. The novel charts the tragic love story between Geoffrey and Yvonne, his wife who returns to him in Mexico after a year of exile. Add into the mix Hugh, Geoffrey's step-brother who is also visiting him and who is also an ex-lover of Yvonne, and you have yourself a classic triangle.  Those are plot points of course, and this thing is perfectly and adroitly plotte...

"Untitled (Buffalos)," David Wojnarowicz, 1989-90 .  EDDINGTON is the best movie of 2025 for me. I was a little afraid of seeing it just because of Ari Aster's last one. But from start to finish this is what movies should be, especially now: brutal, stylish, ecstatic, absurd, strangely beautiful, creepy, fast-paced, shocking but also comforting in the way it moves beyond partisanship and genre into its own trippy delirious territory. It's an existential BLAZING SADDLES, with a touch of HIGH NOON and BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK. I truly loved ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, but EDDINGTON fiercely moves beyond this or that philosophical stance into a political terrain of "what in the hell?" It gorgeously manifests and defends the absurdity that is America without sacrosanctity or even irony. It just is what it is in all its horrible comedic melancholy glory. And Joachin Phoenix is a genius in it. He is an anti-hero without any vestige of heroism. And still your heart is o...

I retired the last day of 2025 after 32.5 years working to support people with developmental disabilities to get jobs and try to have the lives they want to have. I was lucky enough in my career to be able to pursue all I wanted to do in multiple positions – from a case manager to a vocational coordinator to a project manager. It really was a great way to get to know what the world is about, and to use whatever skills I had to help people often left out of the equation. It dawned on me though that I'm also retiring from close to 47 years of just plain paid work. Almost half a century. I got my first paying job when I was 13. I'm sure most retirees do this: survey their whole work-lives, not just the career part, and try to find the meaning in all that activity, all that dedication to persevering and finding a way to stay sane through it all.  Getting a job, for me, was really when I first understood that I could escape my circumstances. I could become a part of something th...

I think about Blanche a lot now. (And I just stumbled onto STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE on TCM.)  Her ferocious sensitivity, her need for illusion, her clinging to desire and memory and magic while the world around her marches toward a big beautiful bill.  Vivian Leigh as Blanche locates disappointment and depravity and love and kindness all on the same bleak avenue -- finds both insanity and sanity inside the lacy folds of desperation. That's something I want to cling to: the nuance that fuels empathy, the morality that finds itself in sin.   We are living in a Stanley Kowalski World right now, transactional and mean and fractured, full of blustering undeserved comeuppances.  Full of bullshit marketed as truth, and that madeup truth fueling all kinds of decisions and rabbitholes we might never escape. Blanche is something to hold onto. Fragile and ghostly and crazy to the point of making you turn away. But she knows what it means to be real by clinging to her need fo...

THE MORNING AFTER is a 1986 neon-candy-colored Hollywood thriller that beautifully encapsulates the mid-80s without being overly campy. Sidney Lumet directs it, and his serious cinema-verite style gets opened up to a glossy Southern California headspace, a cheery but sad backlot full of blank industrial buildings and pastel hairdresser condos. It's like Altman and DePalma having a deviously fun conversation.  MORNING AFTER would be a great curiosity, but then there's Jane Fonda. She pushes the movie beyond its kitschy itch. As a frantic over-the-hill actress with a booze problem waking up in bed next to a bloody corpse, she navigates every scene with a twitchy but steely ache. She seems to understand both the plight and the triumph of being a nobody, but also she carries the murder plot along with her like a dreamy moldy minkstole.  You feel everything through her determined but about-to-lose-it gaze. She's never been better and I think it has a lot to do with the melodrama...

This is what you get when you AI "Incredibly Stupid Bliss": The phrase "incredibly stupid bliss" is a paradoxical or ironic expression, suggesting a state of happiness or contentment that is based on   a lack of knowledge or awareness , particularly regarding potential problems or negative aspects of reality.   It builds upon the idiom "ignorance is bliss," which means that being unaware of something can make you happier or less anxious. However, the inclusion of "incredibly stupid" adds a layer of commentary. It implies that this state of bliss is not just a simple lack of knowledge but rather a  deliberate or willful ignorance .   Here's what it might suggest: Happiness through willful ignorance:  The person or group is happy because they choose to ignore uncomfortable truths or facts that would otherwise cause them distress. Criticism of blissful ignorance:  The phrase might be used to critique those who are content due to their ignorance,...

Jeff Hiller's self-conscious and self-effacing and pure true gem of a meta-memoir is so flat out necessary and beautiful I didn't want it to end for me. It kind of did today. Finished on Juneteenth and really don't know what that means or if it means anything but there you go: it was incredibly stupid bliss. ACTRESS OF A CERTAIN AGE gives you the inside scoop on what it takes to be an under-the-radar actor/celebrity without any self pity or aggrandizement. Jeff just moves through his gay Christian empathetic sarcastic soul-scorching life-narrative with both a Paul Lynde sense of abandonment and a Oprah sweep of sweetness. Bitterness is caught and shown for what it is: disappointment. Bravery mingles with desperation. If you read this book and don't like it you're nothing to me. That's kind of what it feels like.  Please read the whole thing but the last 25 pages are the shit. Jeff narrates what it was like participating in the making of SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE, the g...

  Carolyn Ard passed away a few months ago. She was a part of our lives when Bill and I were in our early 20s and part of an artists' cooperative in Indianapolis called 431. We were raw absurd kids making weird art and everyone at 431 was kind and helpful and put up with all of our shenanigans, but Carolyn was the kindest and the one who truly kept things going. She was also the most gracious. One story that sticks out for me: she and her husband Tony were going out of town for a week and Carolyn asked Bill and me to house-sit. Their house was gorgeous, like one of those upper-middle-class mansions in ORDINARY PEOPLE. I remember being terrified that we would ruin something. Start a fire accidentally or run up their utility bill or leave behind a whitetrash stink. Bill and I were poor as hell then. Trying to make it through college, living in a shithole apartment. We were also a little uncouth. But Carolyn saw us as sweeties. She trusted us with her house. That kind of cross-class s...

I dropped a bottle of pills a couple weeks ago. Those pink allergy ones. They scattered all over the floor like an exploding star, and I spent what seemed like an eternity picking them up, and I swear to God I got all of them. I even pulled the refrigerator out from the wall, got behind it, etc.  But then today I was sweeping the kitchen and there a couple of them were, in the pile I was getting ready to sweep into the dustpan: two little stupid pink reminders of that dumb experience. I don't know. I keep attaching anything I'm thinking about to Tony Dotson dying, but there you are. A comic slapstick incident (dropped Benadryl bottle) becomes a cosmic experience (two weeks later two small reminders, and then probably in a month another pink reminder and so on.) It's the Chinese water torture method of memory, but also a stupid joke. Which reminds me of Tony's paintings, Tony's personality: This one always got me. Taking something serious as all get out and landing t...

  Some movies have a potency built inside them that can't be unpacked with words or even thoughts. They just have it somehow, and it's not plot or cinematography or even performance that sends a film into this territory: it's a tone inherent in the subject matter maybe, and how the actors and everyone else take that subject matter on and hold it so dearly in their hearts and brains that the movie they make together becomes bigger than what they even thought they could accomplish. Like kindred souls combining into a mutual dream caused by honoring what they love. The Last Showgirl is one of those. The plot, about the last days of a showgirl's professional life on the Vegas strip, kind of feels a little cliche, reminiscent of other loser movies like The Wrestler or The Whale , but Pamela Anderson's face and demeanor and glow (as she portrays Shelly, the main character) make you take all that back. In fact, her face is the plot of The Last Showgirl :  wan, wrinkled, s...

For a while now, art hasn't meant a lot to me.  Think it has something to do with the Pandemic and Trump and post-Trump and social-media and my age and just a total new feeling inside my heart and head that art, whether it is capitalized or not, isn't really worth it.  Doing or seeing.  Plus a couple of my best friends have passed away.  So there's that.  But still something about this era of polarization and dialog flaming into monolog and all the things -- something has evaporated culturally.  Art and life have disconnected in a lot of ways, and when they do connect it often feels manneristic and self-serving and just plain, well, worthless.   All of the above sounds particularly melodramatic I know, but I don't want melodrama.  I don't really feel like I'm missing anything.  I'm perfectly fine.  But I do just want to say:  art has sort of become an old acquaintance that I once had a deep crush on, but now when I come across ...

Wanted to pull together the little movie reviews I do on Facebook into one post, a "best-of" from last year.  By the way, these little things are like crosswords for me.  I love trying to compress all I feel about each movie into a tiny paragraph/package.  It's like making a poem.  Every word has to count, every feeling justified.   So here are movies from 2023 I truly loved haiku-ing about:  MAY/DECEMBER:  One of the the best movies of 2023 from what I can tell.  MAY DECEMBER is slippery and arch and gentle and crazy and cinematic and trivial and just incredible.  Todd Haynes has worked for 30 years to get this elegant and this primal.  He planted the seed with SAFE back in 1995 with the divine and even diviner now Julianne Moore:  satire pulsing with tenderness, mean-spirited glazed irony with a sad exhausted loving soul at the center.  This one takes its cue from tabloid lives but then uses all of it to inspire a sort o...

Dan died a few weeks ago.  Hopefully in his sleep.         He was a strange combination of phantom figure and happy-go-lucky sidekick.  Working-class tennis player, elegant and handsome, but a little rough around the edges, gay but also running away from whatever "gay" means, while running toward self-destruction and loneliness.  A laugh riot, but he could also turn the meanest nastiest gaze on you, and his fury could get so concentrated and petty you would have to block him out just to stay on this side of sane.  Big personality, like gameshow-host big, stand-up-comedian big, but also someone always on the outskirts of where he was, and where he wanted to be.  I don't think he ever found a place where he wanted to be actually, hell, where he could be.  Existence for him was fraught with dangers and connections he never spoke about.  Just acted from.  There was a personal mystery he was involved in, on the other side of w...

Our Friend is a 2019 true-life drama that came out to little fanfare, and so when I stumbled onto it on Prime I thought this might be Gen-Z campy and soapy and self-involved.  Why not?  The stars kind of indicate that:  Jason Segal, Casey Affleck, and Dakota Johnson.  But truth be told I also have a deep deep love for Dakota, so there's that.  Something about her face and demeanor reminds me of really nice girls in high school who got all the jokes and stood up for the people nobody stood up for.   So Bill and I watched it, and we lost our shit.  From the get-go it was ravishingly emotional and somehow not over-the-top.  The story is about a reporter whose beautiful wife has ovarian cancer, and they both share a really great best friend. The husband and wife are Affleck and Dakota, the best friend Segal, and the whole movie is blissfully orchestrated around the wife's diagnosis and how the three of them meet, fight, find solace, find a way t...