Douglas Coupland All The Way Down

Sometimes, it isn’t just about the movie itself:

Yesterday, I went there, to the Red Hook Lyceum, and saw Argo. I’ll grant you that this little cinema paradise sounds like a second run theatre, but, amazingly, it manages to keep up with the times. Ben Affleck’s movie was only playing because it was nominated for a couple of Oscars. That a few of last year’s movies come back around again at this season is one of its few redeeming features. Anyway, Argo is definitely deserving of those nominations; although it fits somewhere between “thriller” and “based on a true story” in the very scientific categories of film criticism, it’s a movie that’s both very anxiety-inducing and clever. Affleck’s direction only really slips once– the movement that marks the film’s most important moment is literally eye rolling– and elsewhere he stretches the story, nice and taught, over a very small frame. Argo doesn’t ask you to take to logical leaps, leaving you only with the responsibility of holding your breath. It is, in other words, very well done, backed as it is by good acting from Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin and John Goodman, and by an unobjectionable performance from the director himself.  What really makes the film work, though, is its attention to the menial, to the forging, the assembling, the watching of a movie at home, the work of actually getting stuff done, the work of sitting around with no stuff to do. It pays attention to detail, to the little things. And it’s that attention towards the small that differentiates the successful thrillers from the great ones.

Six Records I Wished I Spent More Time With In TwentyTwelve

In some ways, this list is much more interesting than the one it follows. Twelve Albums for TwentyTwelve wasn’t a list of the albums that were best or most important or anything like that. Instead, it was a list of albums that I cared about, for one reason or another. A few of them, Swing Lo Magellan, Tramp, Visions, Local Business—  probably are album of the year material, but I’m not so foolish to try and make a list like that. I don’t listen to music that way anymore, although, don’t get me wrong, I would like to; “Be More Intentional About Your Cultural Consumption” is probably going to top my list of New Years Resolutions.

This list, then, is of the records that I would have liked to have gotten closer to over the last year. It enumerates what I want rather than what I have, and I think that wanting is always more telling than owning. Without further Adieu 

• Kendrick Lamar — Good Kid m.a.a.d City
• The XX — Coexist
• La Sera — Sees the Light
• Father John Misty — Fear Fun
• Frankie Rose — Interstellar 
• Tame Impala — Lonerism

Over at the Arendt Center blog, I have a piece up about R. Jay Magill’s book Sincerity:

Still, while what makes the sincerity of Frith (who was burned at the stake) or Wycliffe (whose body was exhumed a half century after his death so that it, too, could be burned) compelling is the turn inwards, it is Rousseau’s substitution of the turn back for that turn inward that appears to interest Magill, who decries “the Enlightenment understanding of the world” that “would entirely dominate the West, relegating Rousseau to that breed of reactionary artististic and political minds who stood against the progress of technology, commerce, and modernization and pined for utopia.”

The whole point is moot; Rousseau was himself a hypocrite, often either unable or unwilling to enact the principles he set out in his writings. As Magill moves forward, though, it becomes clear the he values the turn back as a manifestation of sincerity, as a sort of expressing oneself honestly. The last few hundred years in the development of sincerity, it seems, are finding new iterations of the past in the self. He writes that the Romantics, a group he seems to favor as more sincere than most, “harbored a desire to escape a desire to escape forward-moving, rational civilization by worshipping nature, emotion, love, the nostalgic past, the bucolic idyll, violence, the grotesque, the mystical, the outcast and, failing these, suicide.” In turn, in his last chapter, Magill writes that hipster culture serves a vital cultural purpose: its “sincere remembrance of things past, however commodified or cheesy or kitschy or campy or embarrassing, remains real and small and beautiful because otherwise these old things are about to be discarded by a culture that bulldozes content once it has its economic utility.”

Searching for Sugar Man is a fabulous story about a man, humble and obscure in America, who made transcendent music that got discovered by South Africa. If you need proof that Greil Marcus was right about myth and history, you should look no further. 

My review of Iron Man #1, in which I do my best to defend Greg Land, is now up at The Long and Shortbox of It!

Uncanny Avengers #1 is not a very good comic book, but it’s worth checking out, if only because, and thank the Watcher for this, John Cassaday is back.

I go on about Go On.