Incredibly Stupid Bliss

A lot of people are talking about what they learned from the pandemic.  That's what you do, I guess, after a historical nightmare and collapse of just about every institution and truism you counted on:  you start telling yourself you learned stuff from it all.  It's the way you get through, figuring out how meaning can be made from a situation that really is pretty upfront and conventionally horrifying.  I mean we've lived through Stephen King's biggest book, right?  And here we all are still standing.  Hopefully washing our hands more.   What I learned from the pandemic:  how to love where I live.  Which is Forest Park, Ohio.  Population 18,583, according to the 2019 census, a decline of .07% from 2010.  There are a lot of "used-to-be's" here in the FP.  A huge vacant mall, a recently shuttered Aldi's, an about-to-close Walmart on Smiley Avenue, a Walgreens transmorgrified into a dialysis center.  A giant vacant Supe...

Netflix creators sometimes manufacture a lot of bloat for the sake of having something to binge, so usually I end up watching half of a docuseries or whatever, feeling like the makers of content could have done the job in an hour or so, not ten.  But with The Andy Warhol Diaries , a new 6-episode arc concerning the life and loves of the ultimate genius/weirdo, the opposite happens:  twelve or so hours of content feels like a dream you want to enter, and at the end I wanted even more.  There's a feeling in every episode of beautiful sadness, carried through to a penultimate sense of strangeness by recreating Andy's voice through an artificial-intelligence program, conjuring the voice and spirit of Andy so that throughout the whole thing his persona and identity swirl into a sort of deadpan, distant Godliness.  It's breathtaking.     Andrew Rossi is credited as writer/director, and you truly feel an auteur at work.  The series is sort of a grand 60s...

  I get into a habit of putting things on repeat until it becomes the background of every thought I have, and this album, Electric Light Orchestra's Discovery , their eighth studio album that was released in May 1979, is now the soundtrack of every idea, dream, misnomer, etc. I have in my skull.  Every song on this thing is pure delight:  caveman-electronica, disco for cornfields, sad but happy synth-pop.  It presages the early 80s of Human League and Icehouse and OMD and Ultravox and so many other English postpunk New Wave aesthetes. But ELO was and is for losers.  They never fit into a category that would have them, and this album is so blissfully unhinged and perfectly recorded I feel totally aligned with my 14-year-old nothing self pushing it into the 8-track in an old Chevy Malibu.  It is everything, it is nothing.  Here's the thing:  I shoplifted the 8-track version back in the day.  No kidding.  Fr om Ayr-Way, the store that would...

  Zola is a true story that questions both the validity and necessity of "truth" and "story," and its nascent gorgeous sense of style supersedes all nitpicking.  It moves like a bullet in a dream, with intention but without trajectory, and yet you still are compelled to follow along its twisty path.   Directed and co-written by Janicza Bravo it is effortlessly nasty but also innocent in its associations and travesties.  Based on a series of tweets by a Detroit waitress tricked into tricking, it feels exploitative but also aware of exploitation, fun and dangerously not fun.  In other words, it gets the joke the whole way through without losing its heart to gallantry or bullshit.  It also is a devastating evisceration of social media without trying too hard, without shrillness. The performances help.  Taylour Paige is perfect in personifying disgust and exhaustion in a world she does not belong in, and Riley Keough (Elvis's granddaughter for Christ...

  My mom is in a nursing home in Tennessee, and I went to visit her this weekend, along with Bill and my sister Robbin.  They're all in the picture I took above.  I don't normally like to write about personal stuff, but this trip to Tennessee has been a beautiful and heartbreaking thing, so I wanted to share the meaning with whomever reads this.   My mom has always been an enigma to me, and probably me to her.  As I grew up, she was over-the-top religious, stubborn to the point of making you lose it, sometimes selfish and vicious, but also fun-loving, sweet, kind, generous.  Short and round and energetic.  Nervously trying to make a life, and trying to recover from what life does to you.  She was always scratching her way toward some kind of purpose I don't think I ever understood.  Sometimes I felt so estranged from her I wondered what I was actually supposed to feel for her, what "love" actually is.  She was always desperately ask...

Memory gets more epic the older you get.  Maybe that's too much of a cliche to blog about, but here I am.   I'm reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann now.  One of those books that you are supposed to read if you're serious -- or at least if you were serious back when seriousness really meant something to me, like 1989-90, when I was a Junior at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), a commuter college that really helped me pull my head out of my ass and figure out what to do and where to go next when I was in my late 20s.   The campus itself, in my memory and sometimes even my dreams, is a lot of concrete and brick and new construction.  Skeletal sapling trees planted in planters along side new parking lots, lots of icy sidewalk and barren sky footage.  Maroon and blocky signage.  Formica tables in little vending machine canteens and bandage-colored chair-desks you could barely fit into.  In short:  gorge...

  Barbara Barrie is a strange and comforting angel to me.  Her face exudes light somehow, no matter what character she's playing, and she has played a lot of them in movies and TV for the last half century.  (She's still at it, at age 90, God bless her.)  You automatically and gratefully recognize her as soon as you spot her:  Barney Miller's wife, Michael Steadman's mom, the ironic but loving moms in Breaking Away and Private Benjamin -- even Lou Grant 's girlfriend in a two-part episode.  The list goes on.  She occupies a beautiful space in my head, a familiar sleepy-eyed queen doing her son's laundry and smiling ironically at having to do these stupid wonderful chores.   Her resume is so exhaustive in fact that I missed her first starring role as a divorcee who marries a black man and loses the custody of her daughter.  The movie's title is One Potato, Two Potato , and it offers a bleak, spare, black-and-white vision of 1964 race re...