The Mysterious Case of Life v. Art

The past year was an interesting one for a genre I have a love/hate relationship with—the biopic. There were, of course, a number of straightforward movies of that kind—though people can’t quite agree what is and what isn’t a biopic. For example, I saw She Said on a list of biopics from 2022. I haven’t seen it. I know it’s about real people, but it I don’t think it qualifies.

To me, a “biographical picture” is an attempt to tell the story of a real person’s life in a summative way. It needn’t be their whole life—indeed, how could it be? But it should cover a significant portion of the person’s life, not just one extended incident.

These movies are often predictably bad. They are constantly subject to complaints about deviations from the “true story,” and they often try to cram in too much incident. One popular subgenre is the Portrait of the Artist and, if the artist in question is modern and well-liked, it’s a risky venture. If the subject comes across differently in the movie than in the public’s imagination, it’s often very controversial.

For example, Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ Marilyn Monroe novel, was despised by many who felt it was unfair to and untruthful about the historical Marilyn. Since few of those people actually know the specific details of Monroe’s life well enough to claim this with any authority, they focussed on the difference between the film’s Marilyn and their fantasy image of Marilyn’s persona. They found the portrayal of misogyny in the film to be too stark, too raw, too explicit, to process. They said the director was a misogynist for creating such a depiction (which, again, was based on a character from a biographical novel, a work of fiction.)

To me, this disconnect came about because Dominik was not making a biopic, as people expected, but was making a horror movie in the guise of a biopic. The subject of that movie was celebrity and misogyny, not Marilyn Monroe, but this proved a trickier distinction than most viewers could navigate. They forgot, for example, that Dominik is Australian and doesn’t have the same cultural sense of Marilyn as Americans do. Forgot—or ignored, in the typical American way of assuming ours is the universal point of view.

Blonde is a biopic, but a warped one, that satirizes the tropes as it uses them to structure the narrative. Then it uses the narrative to depict the savage violence done to women in our culture with Monroe as an avatar of that suffering.

Compare this to Elvis, another Australian’s take on an American icon. Another biopic, but also another skewed version of the genre. Like it’s subject, Elvis is flashy, colorful, exciting—and astonishingly shallow. But similarly to Blonde, Elvis director Baz Luhrmann uses the biopic form to another end. The tropes structure the movie, to a point—but Luhrmann treats those life moments in an almost generic way. That’s not actually the story he’s telling.

Instead of trying to sum up Elvis’s life as a man, Luhrmann (predictably) focusses on his music. He emphasizes Presley’s influences—the sublime Black blues music he grew up on—without direct political comment. He leaves it to our imagination to consider what might have happened if Black musicians—who invented most (all?) American musical forms—had been allowed to become as popular as the white musicians who coopted their songs. But he also shows us that that music was Elvis’s music, authentically, as a poor southern white kid who lived much of his early life around Black people and their music.

He whisks us through Elvis’s biography, but that’s not what you’ll remember from the movie. Instead, you’ll remember the performances depicted. How Austin Butler goes for broke in his portrayal, inhabiting the King-as-performer, how the movie sometimes skips around in time to compare his early sound to his later work, putting them side to side.

Unlike most biopics, which strain to prove the larger cultural importance or tragic life lessons that shaped the hero, Elvis simply wants to shake its hips and sing. It’s refreshing—because at the end of the day for most of us, none of the details of Elvis Presley’s life matter next to his artistry. This is part of the strategy, I think, in using Tom Hanks’s fat-suited and latexed Colonel Tom Parker, as the narrator. As portrayed in the movie, Parker cared almost nothing for Elvis as a person—but understand his impact as a performer profoundly. He’s the villain—but the movie has some ironic ambivalence about that. After all, we don’t care much about Elvis the person either.

Among the scores of biopics released each decade, perhaps the rarest is the autobiopic. It’s so rare, that’s not even a real term. Steven Spielberg’s latest, The Fabelmans, is a very lightly fictionalized coming-of-age story about the great director. In the midst of many funny scenes of young “Sammy” discovering his passion for filmmaking, comes a scene with Judd Hirsch, as Sammy’s great-uncle. He recognizes the teenager’s artistic obsession right away as the same kind that led the uncle to join the circus in his youth, or that led Sammy’s mother to once consider a career as a concert pianist. He warns Sammy that there is a fundamental tension between the demands of one’s private life and the demands of art, one that will tear you apart if you let it.

Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but also, it will tear your heart out and leave you lonely. You'll be a shanda [disgrace] for your loved ones. An exile in the desert. A gypsy. Art is no game! Art is dangerous as a lion's mouth. It'll bite your head off.

In the film’s coda, John Ford (played with perfect irascibility by David Lynch), echoes the uncle’s advice when he asks young Sammy why he would want to be in the picture business. He’s more succinct. “This business,” Lynch as Ford says, “it’ll rip you apart!” Then he goes on to give Sam some shot framing advice and kicks him out of his office.

Spielberg has told the story countless times in interviews. I was thrilled when I heard Lynch was cast in the film—because I knew immediately that he would play Ford in a dramatization of this true story. It’s a great way to end The Fabelmans, as it sends Sam off toward a future we know a lot about. The scene in the movie varies a little from the real-life version. Spielberg wrote the script with Tony Kushner and it’s interesting to think about the unusual situation of a master filmmaker (and master writer) making, from the raw material of the director’s early life (and the painful divorce of his parents), an autobiography in all but name.

Very few artists get the opportunity to tell their own story like that. In the film’s title, Spielberg seems to acknowledge the slippery nature of biography—but suggests there may be other uses for the form, other than the strict reporting of facts. Larger uses—the stuff of fable and drama and terror and artistry.

Milestone

I haven’t been here for awhile. Part of it is probably my lack of confidence. I realize I have a hard time believing anything I think about or write about is of any interest to anyone else.

But, in contradiction to that, I really haven’t been here because I’ve been finishing the first draft of my novel. I did so on December 30 after an unprecedented crunch. Last month, I wrote almost 54,000 words—more than twice what I did in any other month. Now I have a 240K word draft of a novel, with a beginning, middle and end, characters I really like, surprisingly robust thematic resonance and enough of a foundation for the further drafts that I really do feel good about it.

Fiction feels different from non-fiction in the sense that I don’t worry nearly as much about whether someone would want to read my fiction. I don’t know why that is. It could be that I am more comfortable and confident with fiction to the point that I’ve achieved a higher level of proficiency than with non-fiction. I say proficiency, but I mean something more like attitude. When it comes to my fiction, I find I like what I do well enough to not worry too much about whether others might like it or not. It’s oddly self-justifying in that way.

But with non-fiction, I often end up concluding it’s not worth the time to try to tease out what I think and make an argument about something. While I can see the possibility that there might be an audience for some of my stories, I feel like there’s not a lot of interest in seeing what a not-already-established middle-aged, cisgender, heterosexual, white man thinks about anything in real life. That’s not a complaint but it stops me from bothering with it, even though it shouldn’t.

I hope I can eventually overcome that and write non-fiction more easily and with less concern.

In any case, I’m gratified that I finished my draft, which was my goal for 2022. I’ve been relaxing and doing very little for a couple weeks to allow myself a little rest. Before I return to the book for another draft, I have a lot of other things I’d like to spend time on.

Bunch of Twits

I don’t know who needs to hear this, and they won’t hear it from me, but it doesn’t matter if Elon Musk restores all the banned accounts in his “amnesty” program, at all, or anything else he does with his shiny new Twitter.

Here’s why. No one has to use Twitter. Literally no one.

Look, I’ve benefitted from Twitter more than any of you. My partner worked there for many years. It was good for her career and for our family’s comfort. We are very lucky, very privileged. We’re not crazy rich, or anything. But, mostly because my partner is very smart with money and has made great career choices, we are better off than many people. I am filled with gratitude, when I think about this, in spite of my feelings of guilt.

But Twitter has always been a dumpster fire. That thousands of passionate, highly-skilled employees spent their days and nights trying to put out that fire and place emphasis on the many positive uses of the site, for more than a decade, doesn’t change the fact that the fire is still raging. It’s like that coal mine fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania, burning now these sixty years. Unquenchable.

To use Twitter is to hate Twitter. Maybe you also love it, but that’s on you. I left the site earlier this year, or last year (I can’t really process time anymore). May as well blame Twitter for that, too. I left because I am really bad at social media. I am one of those people whose worst tendencies are brought into full bloom by social media. It could be that everyone’s worst tendencies are brought out by social media and my worst tendencies are just worse than other people’s. But it created a toxicity in me that I am far better for having actively tried to squelch by quitting first Facebook and then Twitter.

Yes, Twitter had gotten somewhat better, the more active its censors. This is a fundamental truth of social media—its benefits are proportional to how actively its users’ speech is policed. “Free speech” on the internet does not work the way it does IRL. I know I’m blowing your mind right now.

Or maybe it does—in the real world, when we come across a group of fascists marching around most of us will leave quickly. A few will stay and taunt them—I often find myself in this angry group before I give up. The rest will find a kinder, chiller place to hang out. If Twitter has been a place you’ve enjoyed, in part, or used for your job, well, you know, shit happens.

Because NO ONE HAS TO STAY. No one has to use Twitter. Just walk away, people.

I hear Tumblr’s making a comeback.

Cinema Speculation

Quentin Tarantino has published a nonfiction book of movie musings, Cinema Speculation, and embarked on an unusual book tour. I saw him at the Castro Theater in San Francisco last night, a ticket which came with a copy of the book.

I have no doubt the book will be an amusing, idiosyncratic and brisk stroll through a part of QT’s cinematic mind. It focusses on American studio films of the late 60s/early 70s period of his childhood, when his mom changed history by taking him to see adult-oriented movies at a very young age. This gives me some fodder if I want to blame my dad, who refused to let me see R-rated movies for many years, for my not being a world-famous director by now.

I enjoyed the event at the Castro, I think, because I was realistic about what to expect. That is, I had few expectations except that someone would press PLAY on Quentin and he would talk at length about whatever he felt like. This is essentially what happened, although the interviewer was so bad at her job that that’s all there was. Her name was Kim Morgan. She’s a film writer and screenwriter, married to Guillermo del Toro, previously married to Guy Maddin, and she’s published in a lot of film journals and magazines and shows up on boutique disks and festival juries and things like that.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, she was a weak interviewer in this case. Quentin Tarantino does not need much encouragement to speak, but he benefits from a very sharp and knowledgeable interlocutor. Morgan seemed fairly knowledgeable, but not in a way that was useful to the audience. That is, she was able to more or less keep up with Tarantino’s Hollywood history name-dropping so it seemed as if she knew what he was talking about, but what was needed was an audience surrogate who could help the audience understand what he was talking about.

But she even forgot some basics. She did not ever introduce herself or explain why she was there. She came out (the show started forty minutes late, for some reason), sat down and called him out without more ado. They got into a conversation that they seemed to be picking up from an earlier conversation—perhaps one they had been having offstage for the previous forty minutes? and never did any context-setting or setup. No “why did you want to write this book” or “you’re famous for making and talking about movies—is it different to write about them?” or “tell us about your research” or anything like that.

Nor did she make any effort to relate the information he shared from the book back to his own storied career. Or ask any of the philosophical questions that arose. She had clearly read the book and rewatched certain movies in preparation for the conversation, but this served basically as a reminder of her outline, which was to just get him to tell us what was in the book. Maybe there were agreements about what he did not want to talk about. Even so, thanks to her the conversation was pretty insular, did not attempt to connect with a diverse audience (some of whom were old enough to murmur aloud that they remembered seeing a movie in the theater, too, in the 1960s and 70s; some of whom were young enough to never have seen an actual film projection), and seemed to assume a uniformly high film literacy.

In spite of the interlocutor, Quentin was still interesting to listen to as he reviewed the catalog of his obsessions and told some personal stories. He talked about Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma and Don Siegel and many actors with his typical omnivorous idiosyncrasy. Mostly it was enjoyable just to see and hear the man, who has been perhaps the most important filmmaker of my generation.

There was at one point an interesting conversation about the anti-establishment filmmakers of the late 60s and early 70s (among whom De Palma became one of the most successful) and the “movie brat” generation that adored the establishment Hollywood filmmakers of their childhood (the slightly younger Scorsese and Spielberg and Lucas). Morgan asked where that earlier anti-establishment thread still appeared in today’s Hollywood, if it does. It was somewhat gratifying to me that—although he said he didn’t exactly enjoy the film—Tarantino talked about the movie Blonde as feeling to him of that tradition.

The evening ended with an amusing reading of the first chapter of his book, which recounts Quentin’s adventures in moviegoing from about age 4 to 10, with his mother and others.

Cats Are Delicious (an experiment in AI copywriting)

Introduction

The world is in crisis. There are too many cats and not enough food. We need to start eating our pets in order to solve this crisis.

Cats are everywhere.

Cats are everywhere. You can see them in your neighborhood, or you might even have one of your own. They’re not the only animals that can be eaten, though—and if you ask me, they are delicious.

Cats have a lot of meat on their bones: a smaller cat weighs about 15 pounds and has three pounds of meat on it; an average-sized cat weighs about 20 pounds and has five pounds of meat on it; and larger cats can weigh as much as 30 pounds with eight pounds of edible flesh! That makes them great for cooking into stews or roasts, but also perfect for making hamburgers out of their thighs, which are low fat but still very tender when cooked right (I recommend grilling). There are many ways to prepare tasty feline dishes at home!

The world has a hunger problem.

The world has a hunger problem.

Over 800 million people around the world do not have enough food to eat—that’s about one in nine people on Earth. In fact, 821 million people who live in developing countries are hungry for at least 11 months of the year, and 165 million children under five are stunted from chronic malnutrition. Meanwhile, one in eight adults worldwide is obese.

If you were to take all of the grain we grow and use it just to feed animals instead of humans, we could feed 2 billion extra people with an average diet (1). That’s not even counting contributions from all other crops such as vegetables and legumes that are grown specifically for our pets but could easily be substituted for meat if needed!

Our pets are eating too much.

Our pets are eating too much. Cats, in particular, have been eating too many of our resources and not enough vegetables or fish. This is a problem for a number of reasons.

First off, cats are carnivores by nature: they're meant to eat meat, not grain or vegetable matter. We've bred them into this state over the past few centuries, but now that we know better about what's healthy for them (and us), we need to stop feeding them such an unhealthy diet full of grains and cheap fillers like corn meal and soybean meal.

Secondly - and more importantly - cat food is made from fish raised on farms! That means they use up all the natural resources in their environment (such as water) without giving back anything at all; it's basically just taking without giving back anything at all; it's basically just taking without giving back anything at all; no wonder we’re running out!

Eating cats will lower the population.

Cats are not endangered, but they are a nuisance. They're a source of disease and allergies, litter and noise, property damage—the list goes on. Let us count the ways:

  • Cats carry diseases that can be transmitted to humans. A major concern is toxoplasmosis, which can cause numerous health problems such as miscarriage or birth defects in babies born to infected mothers. The CDC estimates about 60 million Americans have contracted toxoplasmosis at some point in their lives—and if you've ever had cats as pets (or even fed them outside), you might be one of them!

  • Cats also spread parasites like fleas and ticks that bite people or other animals—and these parasites cause skin irritation, itching and infections in those who suffer from them

  • Litter boxes can be unsightly (especially for our human friends) but there's a lot more about these boxes than just how they look: cat poop contains dangerous bacteria called E. coli which can cause food poisoning in humans who eat contaminated meat products like chicken livers (aka foie gras).

The taste and texture of cat meat is amazing.

Cats are a great source of protein, and their meat is very tender. It has a sweet flavor that is similar to beef, but milder and more delicate. This makes it a healthy alternative to beef or even chicken; you can use cat in any recipe that calls for ground beef or ground turkey!

Eat more cat

  • Cats are tasty.

  • Cats are healthy.

  • Cats are nutritious.

  • Cats are good for you, and the world just needs more of them!

Conclusion

I believe that if we can get past the negative connotations of eating cat, then we can start to see it as a solution to our food problems. We have an abundance of cats in our homes and streets that could be used for food instead of being fed pellets or thrown away when they get sick. If you haven't tried cat before, I highly recommend it! It's delicious and nutritious!

(Want to learn more? By the way, I did not edit this at all.)

The Vultures Are Wilde

I don’t spend a lot of time deliberately absorbing celebrity gossip, but some of it reaches such a fever pitch it becomes unavoidable. The insanity that accompanied the debut of Olivia Wilde’s latest directorial effort at the Venice Film Festival a couple weeks ago, which hasn’t quite settled down ahead of the release, was this year’s biggest example so far.

I get it; it’s great fun to roast celebrities, to love them and hate them in quick succession. They are beautiful and rich and often they are reported to have done shady things and who doesn’t enjoy a little schadenfreude now and again.

But not to be a killjoy nor too tediously obvious, but women get far more of all this hate than men, by about seventeen metric tons. It’s not quite compatible with the generally stated goals of diversifying film production by hiring more women directors to then gleefully bleed them for the vultures in the entertainment press. That subgroup of journalists are perhaps the least ethical—and, with so many of them being women themselves, it’s shameful how much effort they put into destroying other women.

Speaking of unethical, what Olivia Wilde did—no, because I don’t know anything about what she did, not really, and whatever it was, usually sex scandals involve more than one person and a great deal of unseen complexity. But, really, there is hardly a scandal—it’s actually a private matter spilled for the ravening hordes, and the type of situation that men are almost never called to account for (for example, where are the knives for Harry Styles?). And I don’t mean #metoo—this isn’t that, people. This is consenting adults, and it has nothing to do with the work. The misogyny at play here has a rank stench, and we shouldn't accept it.

Parody Is No Joke

Sigh. I wasn’t intending to come back today and write more about copyright, but I had to point out this story coming out of TIFF (the Toronto International Film Festival).

From today’s Hollywood Reporter:

The People’s Joker, Vera Drew’s debut feature about a trans woman working in a comedy set in the Batman universe, has been pulled from the Toronto Film Festival for further screenings after its world premiere.

The headline attributes this to concerns “over ‘rights issues.’”

The easiest way to understand what they’re talking about is to watch the trailer, from filmmaker Vera Drew’s YouTube:

I have downloaded the video and I will upload it if YouTube takes it down; in the meantime, I want to use her link.

Polygon has a piece out which claims Warner issued a cease-and-desist, and also fills in a lot of the background information on the project.

Other outlets hadn’t mentioned the c-and-d, so some clarification may be forthcoming, but some of the online reaction is already very much in line with the propaganda the media industry has fed the younger generations for the last 20 years. In a nutshell, the received message is that copyright is sacrosanct and inviolable, that there is no such thing as Fair Use, and that the corporate productions that overwhelm our culture can only be spoken about with extreme caution—ideally with permission—lest you inadvertently track mud onto someone’s Intellectual Property.

The industry achieved this in part by conflating “copying” with “stealing” and by aggressively attacking artists who attempt to use their “property” for the purpose of parody and commentary. YouTube has both hurt and helped in the education of consumers—implementing take-downs at the request of corporate lawyers as well as attempting to stand up against particularly egregious censorship.

But let’s be clear. Parody is protected speech under the Constitution of the United States. The issue has gone to the Supreme Court which declared that parody is protected. It’s one of the explicit carveouts in the caselaw on Fair Use. Now, Toronto is in Canada, which has different rules—but an international film festival is a shitty place to split hairs and an emboldened Warners might attempt to press the issue elsewhere. If they do so in relation to this film in the US, it’s knives out, girls.

One more thing—this film looks fucking hilarious, for those who appreciate Tim & Eric style ironic trash comedy. And it’s not merely a spoof—it’s a brilliant use of superhero tropes to tell a coming-of-age story of trans identity. I can’t wait to watch it.


They Should Really Just Shake It Off

I’ve talked about copyright issues here before, including in the previous post. Early in this century, there was a surge of interest in copyright issues, in part stemming from the music industry’s panic over Napster. The change from analog to digital across many fields brought both great advantages and disadvantages to many players. Napster and other peer-to-peer music services (along with Apple’s introduction of the iPod in 2001) led to an explosion in music trading by fans that soon disrupted the music industry’s business model and eventually created the new model of streaming music services.

When music fans discovered that some of their favorite artists (such as Metallica) were suing the companies that were making music distribution and sharing so easy and so much fun, a segment of them began learning about copyright law. It was an interesting period in copyright, one of several historical moments when an industry was disrupted and changed irrevocably as a result of technology, and rapid fan adoption of that technology, that did an end run around an industry’s monopolistic practices to the delight of consumers. Steve Jobs and Apple had the insight to see where this was all going, and made billions, whereas the music industry itself frantically tried to use copyright law to squelch these innovations before belatedly admitting defeat and joining the party.

Whether the changes were good or bad for artists, as opposed to record companies and rights-holding entities, has been the subject of much debate over the years. But, while the music industry—and more recently the film and television businesses—were forced to abandon old business models in favor of adopting the new technologies their end users preferred, that conversation about copyright was ultimately one of the big losers of the controversy. Gone today are all of the hopeful new takes on the future of copyright, and the thoughtful and expansive new framings, like Creative Commons, which still exists, are little talked about outside of the narrower channels of discourse these intellectual property arcana have always inhabited.

Instead, the public’s understanding of copyright, which was expanding creatively in the early aughts, has been corralled into the narrow definitions preferred by media corporations and rights clearinghouses. It is in the interests of corporations—like Disney, which has famously lobbied for, and won, extensions to copyright law every time Mickey Mouse was in danger of reverting to the Public Domain—to lock up their copyrighted creations in impenetrable vaults and vigorously attack everyone who seeks to breach those defenses, even, say, daycare centers and elementary schools. Those who hoped to inspire the public to work on legislators to correct some of the egregious cultural problems that emerge from modern IP laws lost resoundingly. We all lost.

Even rich artists lost. Every year there are outrageous examples of artists suing artists over perceived copyright violations. It makes little difference if these lawsuits have any actual relationship to the spirit of the law, or even the letter, because much of copyright and other IP law is caselaw, meaning it’s almost impenetrable to the public and lawyers are left to duke it out. This means settlement after settlement, and terrible precedent after terrible precedent. A couple of examples have recently come to light regarding one of my favorite pop artists, Taylor Swift. Yeah, I admit it. I’m a diehard Swiftie. Check this out.

Pitchfork has been following the cases; here’s a recent example. Here are the two current cases in a nutshell.

The now defunct music group (or the rights holders for) 3LW has sued Taylor Swift over her 2014 mega-hit, Shake It Off, alleging that it violates their copyright established in their 2001 song, Playas Gon’ Play. 3LW claims to have originated the concept that appeared in their lyrics “Playas, they gonna play/And haters, they gonna hate” in that song. Famously, Swift’s song includes the lyrics “'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”

In other words, the 3LW songwriters are claiming to have invented the concept of “playas playing” and “haters hating,” which is patently absurd. Even if they, in fact, had originated this phrasing—which is absurd—they appear to be arguing that they own all subsequent formulations of this extremely well known slang, which is an argument only a copyright lawyer could love. A judge has already ruled against them, but that ruling was overturned (see linked article) in a decision that will send the case to a jury—because the public are well known to be experts in copyright law, obviously.

The only good that can come of this is the sure-to-be-entertaining testimony of experts who will attest to the long-running concept of “player hating,” which Biggie Smalls talked about, before he died in 1997. This is an egregiously frivolous lawsuit.

And here’s another one, also referenced in the Pitchfork article. Taylor Swift released a book with a deluxe version of her 2019 album, Lover. She’s being sued by a poet named Teresa La Dart, who released a poetry collection of the same name in 2010, and you can see why when you compare the covers of each book, in this image from a different Pitchfork article:

Pitchfork’s Nina Corcoran wrote, The parts of La Dart’s book that she claims Swift copied include the same title, covers that use “pastel pinks and blues,” and images of the author “photographed in a downward pose.” La Dart alleges that Swift also copied the book’s “format” of “a recollection of past years memorialized in a combination of written and pictorial components” as well as the inner design being made up of “interspersed photographs and writings.

So, the word “lover” used as a title, pastel colors and the posture of a photo subject. And mixing personal memories in text with images. Sure, why the fuck not.

Haters gonna hate.

A Pirate's Life For Me

I had an interesting experience the other day with Amazon Prime. It could have been any of the several streaming services to which I subscribe. In addition to Amazon, we have Netflix, Disney+, Criterion Channel, Apple TV, Peacock, Hulu, HBO Max and Shudder and, who knows, probably some other ones. (Which reminds me: that’s ridiculous and I need to cancel half of them.)

I googled “stream evil dead 2013,” which is still how I try to figure out how and where to watch things. There are several websites and services that meta-search the streamers; I don’t know whether Google uses one of those or does its own, but it works as well or better. None of them are perfect.

I had never watched the remake of Sam Raimi’s horror classic—which is now referred to as the 4th film in the Evil Dead “franchise” although it’s not a continuation of anything. In other news, it’s absolutely brutal and drowning in gore, so pretty generically satisfying.

I watched the first hour during my exercise bike ride on August 31, streaming on Amazon Prime. Then, I planned to finish the rest in the morning. That was September 1. When I went to resume my movie, it was no longer available on Prime—I could rent it for $4, to watch the last 30 minutes, or buy it.

It was playing on one of the ad-supported streaming services—Pluto TV, I think—but in order to jump forward to an hour into the movie I would have had to first watch all of the ad breaks from the first hour. I declined to do that.

So I torrented the movie. I never feel less than justified doing this. The mysterious lack of availability of the thing you want to watch is a frequent problem, and I don’t owe these corporations my obedience to whichever business model they use or licensing agreements they’ve made. I am a huge movie consumer; I own more than a thousand disks and, obviously, my streaming availability is out of control. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so justified torrenting as this time.

Streaming is convenient, often, but it remains particularly unfriendly to its paid customers for this kind of bullshit.

Hollywood Ending

I spent part of the month reading Ken Auletta’s devastating, deeply reported Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, published earlier in the summer. Not a fun, but a fascinating, book depicting a true crime Jekyll & Hyde story. On the one hand, Harvey Weinstein was a dynamo of independent film, bulling his way into the business by sheer force of will and overwhelming personality to become one of the most important Hollywood players in the 90s and 2000s. On the other hand, he was a physically repulsive, world-class professional bully, serial rapist and abuser. The eventual poster boy for the #MeToo movement, he will almost certainly die in prison after convictions on charges in New York; other criminal and civil cases against him are continuing to move forward. He’s currently been extradited to a Los Angeles prison, where he awaits his second major trial.

The sexual abuse of women (and men) has been endemic in the film business since its founding in the early twentieth century. Much of that abuse has been among the worst kept industry secrets for a hundred years. Finally, the culture is changing. While it’s true that sex scandals could harm or even end careers in the past, those cases were few and far between. The “casting couch” of legend, meaning the trading of sexual favors for jobs in the movies, has always been a real thing; it still is. The business is built on power, sex appeal and sudden, capricious changes in fortune. It’s hard to imagine this ever changing, although the penalties for crossing lines may also be more pronounced. This is at the highest levels of course; the people who actually make everything and do everything are the thousands upon thousands of anonymous skilled workers “below the line.”

But the industry is cutthroat from top top bottom. It’s not that everyone behaves that way, but the culture is one of relentless climbing, instability, stress and compartmentalization. If you don’t have the ability to at least consider stabbing people in the back, you won’t get very far without stupefying luck. Moving up can be difficult; moving laterally nearly impossible. Auletta devotes plenty of space in the book to the support structure that allowed Weinstein to commit his crimes for decades and he names plenty of names.

Abused people can find it incredibly difficult to challenge their abusers, a well-documented phenomena in psychology. In Weinstein’s story, only a handful of people ever managed to challenge him on his behavior, even some of the most powerful people to ever lead the industry. Michael Eisner failed to find a way to challenge Weinstein’s staggering fiscal irresponsibility, incompetence and waste as CEO of Disney (which purchased the Weinsteins’ Miramax company in the early 1990s; Pulp Fiction was actually a Disney movie in corporate terms). When the brothers later spun off The Weinstein Company, their toothless, enabling board watched helplessly as Harvey lost hundreds of millions of dollars. (Meanwhile, Bob Weinstein’s division, Dimension Films, raked in money on highly profitable horror and comedy franchises, money Harvey could then blow on ten thousand dollar hotel suites, private jets and secret payouts to women.)

But the lower level assistants, legions of them, who passed through Miramax on their way to their own independent producer careers, via years or therapy, or flamed out due to Harvey’s relentless bullying and abuse, enabled his bad behavior for many years. Some of them escorted young models and actresses to his hotel rooms, in some cases, physically trapping the women with a predatory Harvey who attacked, assaulted and even raped them. That many of these women continued to maintain relationships with him is part of the complicated psychology of abuse victims, many of whom calculated the risk of coming forward as being too high.

Less understandable is the complicity and enabling of his staff, those he merely verbally abused, threatened and belittled relentlessly. The truth is, that while a subset of human beings will not stand for such things, unfortunately a majority will simply opt for personal survival. They wanted careers in the movie business, they devoted enough time that it would be difficult to leave for greener pastures, or Harvey would poison the well if they left. And the rewards could be intoxicating—flying in private jets to Europe, attending celebrity parties at Cannes, getting their own deals down the line. It’s perhaps the trickiest aspect in some of these stories to process—all of the people who allowed him to get away with what he did to other people, when they knew but wouldn’t admit it to themselves.

Back to School

Today school started again for most of the local kiddos. One of my sons began today, the other will begin Wednesday. It feels great. I’m excited to be able to have my schedule back. I have writing to do, a lot of writing to do, and the summer is such a bad time for getting anything done for me.

Apart from the daily slow-motion disintegration of our democracy, it was a decent summer. Our plan is to leave California at the end of this school year, and move to Boulder, CO. So this “last summer in CA” was, predictably, a letdown. The truth is, “doing things” is largely meant for younger people without children. Most of what I did this summer involved my children, whether here in Alameda or in other places like Montana, Texas and different parts of California. I require a structured day, generally like the ones before it, and then I have discovered I can be quite productive. With the uncertainty of travel, visiting family and simply the kids’ constantly changing summer schedules, it’s been much harder to focus and feel I’ve made progress.

My novel is still underway, of course. This week I will get back to it, after a couple of weeks, with the goal of completing my draft by Christmas. I have recently blown passed one hundred thousand words which, according to a word count chart I printed out and taped to my door, means I am approaching Russian novel territory. Oh, well. I have accepted that this first-ever novel attempt, which has been immensely interesting, amusing and challenging, after the first draft, will continue on for some time before I can show it to anyone or consider attempting to publish it. I have plans to revisit a shorter work in the spring—but also aiming for a novel—which I can hopefully keep narrower of scope than the sprawl I am contending with now.

I submitted one short story for publication, so far. I assume that it will not be published, of course, but there has to be a first one. Today I’m reviewing my other work to see if I have something I could submit for a contest for new writers I heard about on Reddit. Editing feels very tiresome, but once I actually look at work with my editorial hat on, it feels less so, more obvious.

I have written one story this summer—in addition to the novel work—and I look forward to having time, or taking time, to get back to that form, which is quite satisfying. Also, I simply need shorter work if I am going to submit more stories to various publications. The contest, for example, is wide open content-wise, although they use the term “literary fiction” which usually means they despise genre much like snot-nosed Stanford grads despise the San Francisco homeless, but I don’t really care. I’ve got what I’ve got; I love genre; I don’t really know or much care what is considered “literary.” My problem is length. The contest specifies a 6000 word limit, which is honestly quite generous compared to a lot of what I’ve seen in my research. But, still, maybe only half or fewer of the things I have written so far are actually under 6K. So, editing time.

It’s a tough call in some cases, though. For example, I want to do something with a scifi satire I wrote. If I chopped off the last two-thirds of it, I’d have a decent submission on its own. But it’s still 7K plus. And then, I like a lot of the stuff that comes after that stopping point, although the scope of the story changes dramatically. I wouldn’t throw it away, of course, and I could probably judiciously cut a thousand words from the first section and submit it, but it feels like a different thing than what it is. Another story, which is almost right at 6K and could easily be tightened up by a thousand words, I daresay, is more of a first chapter of a long-planned novel than a story in its own right.

Then there’s the scandalous satire I wrote last month about Amy Coney Barrett. That fits the word count, but I feel like it might not be the right sort of thing for the contest. It’s hugely sarcastic and on-the-nose. And probably offensive to many.

So there are many decisions to make.

r/Atheism

I was permanently banned from r/Atheism today. I wasn’t a member, but I am an atheist. Here’s why I was banned—I think it’s pretty funny.

Someone posted: “In honor of today’s Supreme Court ruling, I just want to say Fuck Christianity.”

I replied: “I don't blame you, but not all Christians. It's a big religion.”

And that was that. I was permanently banned. I submitted an appeal, in the form of a brief polite message asking why I had been banned. In reply, the mods sent (or auto-sent) a request that I read many, many pages of documents of their detailed rules. They would not, of course, say why I had been banned. The basic rules offered no insight. And I declined to read the rest.

But they included some kind of gotcha text in the documents so they would know if I didn’t read them, and so there are no more options for me. I requested they ban me until the heat death of the universe.

I like Reddit. But, admittedly, I don’t post too often. This is why.

Supreme

Roe v. Wade was overturned today. I have not gone back on Twitter; I did waste a little time on Reddit, but it’s not nearly as satisfying on a day like this when the whole point is screaming into the void and insulting assholes.

There’s little to be said that hasn’t been said. Elections have consequences. Hillary lost because people wondered whether she was trustworthy.

As for his part, Trump has been quoted today saying he thinks the decision will be bad for Republicans. In other words, just to be clear, he never gave a shit about this issue in the first place. But we knew that.

Clarence Thomas said in his concurrence that contraceptives, gay marriage and gay sex should be next. (Not mix-race marriage, however.) But we knew that, too.

So, congratulations Christofascists. You did it!

Jim Cummings is some kind of genius

A few years back, when I was always searching for short films to share with my students, I found Thunder Road, Jim Cummings’ Sundance-winning short film. He later turned it into a Sundance-winning feature film, which I will watch soon—I can’t believe I haven’t already, but I guess I was scared it wouldn’t come close to the brilliance of the short.

This week I remembered about him and decided to watch his other films. I watched The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020) and The Beta Test (2021) and I feel like I just discovered my new favorite band. These movies are not perfect and they will not please everyone, but his sensibility is one of the closest I’ve ever found to my own—to the way of telling stories I want to do, or the films I would want to make. His movies are comedies—because they’re very funny—but they are also dramas and satires and genre films. The line he walks so sublimely in Thunder Road as an actor/writer/director is a great distillation of his sensibility and style. (Although the one-take aspect is not something he overuses elsewhere—in fact, he tends to use Edgar-Wright-style fast editing more often.)

Few artists can balance the kinds of tonal changes and wild swings Cummings goes for, and this is part of what makes him a tough watch for some viewers; it’s what for me makes him such an exhilarating watch. Is he really going to almost make me cry at the hilariously cringey stress breakdown of the local sheriff in a werewolf movie? Apparently, yes.

I was trying to think yesterday of the triple-threats in film history—people like Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Woody Allen and others—who have written, directed and starred in their own films. It’s rare; it doesn’t always go well for everyone who tries it.

God give me the courage...

…to let my Twitter accounts be permanently deleted. I deactivated them both today. It takes, like, a month.

One of them had only just been released from Twitter jail. (I called a right wing ideologue a cunt and might have vaguely cast doubt on whether she should remain alive. Guess that was bad or something.)

And, on my main account, I spent much of today fighting with people who think I’m an unreconstructed Old Soviet-style communist because I don’t think we should allow anyone to become a billionaire; and that I’m a CIA agent because I’m in favor of a gun registry.

I mean, that’s all very amusing, and there’s absolutely no limit to how stupid people are, but I am wasting far too much time on this bullshit. I know that’s true, I believe it, I think it’s pointless, useless, stupid; yet the odds are very good that I will undeactivate my account before it’s gone. Why?

I think the answer is Because I have undiagnosed ADHD and Twitter, as Facebook once did, to the detriment of nearly every relationship I’ve ever had, stomps on my buttons like a guitar god on their pedals, sending a squall of distortion into my gut, insisting, demanding—ordering me—to scream back into the void. I don’t want to do it anymore.

My family, because we have an employment connection to Twitter, has benefitted financially from the company’s existence. But it could have been any company. Twitter doesn’t work for me; it’s unhealthy for me; and I think I’d rather be completely cut off from “the conversation,” forever, than spend one more second there.

So I hope I do, I hope I make it out. One day, perhaps, I’ll come back to the site in an author’s guise. And I’ll write pithy, meaningless, useless, time-wasting “content” that won’t do anything for anyone again.

COVID blues

I tested positive for the virus Thursday; Kim tested positive today. I’ve been isolating in my office. My symptoms have been fairly mild. We are all fully vaccinated and boosted, of course. I’ve been watching movies and shows, reading—and even writing. I got close to my weekly word count goal this week, even with the test hitting at the end of the week.

I hope to test out of isolation tomorrow; my symptoms started a little over a week ago.

It’s been strange, lonely, and also relaxing just sitting here and resting. I’ve spent far too much time on Twitter arguing with fuckholes. That can easily turn into a vocation and it’s so pointless, it actually kills brain cells and shortens your life. One of these days, I’m just going to finally quit Twitter.

I’ve been thinking about something one of my grad school professors said to me. I did a film project that caused conflict between me and members of the theater program, who were a part of it. And also with an insane property owner who had agreed to let me use his property. Shit happens. But I remember that, when the professor called me to her office to get my side of the story, I was irritated because I felt that a lot had been said about me unfairly, and I defended myself.

The prof, though, wasn’t too concerned with the complaints—she understood that sometimes shit happens. But she did seem to think I didn’t need to worry about defending myself either. “You seem to have an over-developed sense of justice,” she told me, meaning that it was less important than I might have thought for me to be right. Like, there are disagreements, it’s fine, let it go.

The comment has stuck with me for years. I’ve been thinking about it recently because I’m finally starting to realize it’s one of my defining traits. If I have something like undiagnosed ADHD or, at least, many of the symptoms of those who are so diagnosed, this is very likely one of them. Injustices are something that have been seen to be particularly vexing for people with ADHD; it has to do with emotional regulation and expression.

Now, “injustices” can be personal or they can be more more universal. I have always been sensitive to the feeling that people have misjudged me—misunderstood what I’ve said, for example—and have always felt the need to offer more explanation so I can be better understood. I find it almost never works in that way—I may be articulate in some ways, but I very rarely feel that I have been understood, no matter how much I explain my views.

But then there’s my self-righteous sense of social justice and belief that my own political positions make the most sense. This is why Twitter is damnable for people like me. It’s an injustice and grievance magnification and promotion program. I go on there and there is always available outrage—so it feeds both my need for the mental stimulation of fighting and my overdeveloped sense of justice. I can’t help but respond to the incredibly, eye-gouging-out stupidity on there, the lazy, self-justifying, illiberal hemorrhage of it all.

I think I do actually want to stop forever, just leave the cess pool. But, like an addict, I keep returning.

But if you’re stuck in isolation and angry, well, have at it!