Incredibly Stupid Bliss

Last night we went to the King's Island amusement park in Mason, Ohio.  It's 50 years old this year.  We didn't go into the park itself though:  there's an amphitheater on the grounds called Timber Wolf.  We went in a side entrance to see A Flock of Seagulls and Berlin there.  But still the experience was all drenched in this creepy stomach-ache nostalgia about the 70s and 80s and King's Island and people who go to King's Island.  The vast parking lot, the skyscraping rides and screams, smells of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and fried food.   Walking up to the front of the place I got weirded out, time-traveling back to when going here was like entering the Kingdom of Heaven.  Just thinking about it back then was hypnotic. Now of course it is something else. Nostalgia is something that unplugs you from your surroundings in a mostly beautiful way.  It isolates your feelings around the past, gives those feelings back to you in one sca...

This book has kind of saved my life in a way a lot of other books can't because they try so hard to make things meaningful "meaning" gets placated, sucked into ego and other stuff.  Molly Shannon, the memoirist, definitely has a sense of self, an ego, but her memoire is truly given over to other people, especially her father, who was a beautiful mixed bag of greatness and not-so-greatness, an alcoholic cheerleader/lunatic who was responsible for the death of Molly's mom, sister and cousin because of a horrible car accident in 1968.  But somehow all of that is contextualized through focusing on just getting through.  Molly's early life in Cleveland, her ambition to get out of there, her struggles and triumphs in NYC and LA...  And yet even though the book is stuffed with wonderful show-biz anecdotes (a lecherous Gary Coleman, a lovely Lorne Michaels, etc.), the focus always swings back to James F. Shannon, that boozy Catholic husband and father who is a combination...

Charles Williams made a lot of these, circa 1983-1998:  pencil holders.   They are still haunting me, after seeing them at the Intuit Art Center in Chicago a little over a month ago.  The functional capacity of these objects is what gets the whole aesthetic sensation going.  A concept so banal and delivered in such strange little packages, the whole thing feels almost not-art, which is kind of where I like to live aesthetically.  In the Land of Nod, I guess, the place where knickknacks and sculptures and pieces of litter and jewelry and pill bottle lids, etc. all combine into a sort of bracing nothingness.  All of that pseudo-philosophy right there makes Mr. William's whole project feel like a catatonic junk-drawer and a mesmerizing memoir combined.   A lot of the holders are fashioned from the extruded plastic he took from his job at IBM, off the factory floor.  Foamy detritus like candy-colored tumors, like toys melted in a fire. ...

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...