Monthly Top Ten: February 2022

1. spacecamp tumblr (https://spacecamp1.tumblr.com/). My favorite art tumblr conveys a coherent sensibility all the more indelible for how difficult it is to pin down, a brazen mix of op art, psychedelic text/yearbook designs, catalogues of biodiversity from public domain primers on Archive.org, new agey oils, sci-fi covers in search of a book, and good ole-fashioned abstraction.

2. The Black Forager (Alexis Nikole Nelson) on TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@alexisnikole). In between instructive videos about leaching tannins from acorns and makings a jello dessert from seaweed, Nelson's reclamation project also touches on the political economy of food including how trespass laws in the 1800s prevented black people from foraging and how foraging gets you to think about who is responsible for getting food on your plate.  

3. Half-sour pickles. The upside? They go down way easier than full sour. The downside? They go down way easier than full sour. A jar lasts about 48 hours chez mon frigo.

4. White noise machines. I crank the tone/bass in Soothe mode on my Homedics model to ameliorate the effects of living with tinnitus and loud-ass neighbors. The future is now.

5. Carrie Coon in The Gilded Age (created by Julian Fellowes) (HBO Max). Upstairs Downstairs/Downton Abbey Version 3.0, this time in 1880s New York City. At charity luncheons and hallowed concert halls, old money clings to its hegemony with tales of ancestors coming over on the Mayflower (the way so many hippies would claim Native American ancestry in the 1960s). Meanwhile, new money enters in the form of Mrs. Russell, wife of a railroad magnate with more money than them all but left out of the luncheons due to her millions deriving from industry. Fresh from her dynamite performance in The Nest (Sean Durkin, 2020), which could serve as a useful cross-reference for The Gilded Age, Carrie Coon plays Mrs. Russell in a flat, affectless voice that bespeaks Nowhere, i.e., a deracinated America with varying rates of mobility. Tonight's episode: old money Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski at her snooty best) finally walks across the street at 61st and 5th Ave to confront Mrs. Russell!

6. Station Eleven (created by Patrick Somerville) (HBO Max). Based on Emily St. John Mandel's novel, this post-apocalyptic miniseries about the fragile earnestness of collective living features the number one characteristic of excellent serial television - a final episode that inevitably disappoints since we want the show to go on forever.

7. Match Your Mood (Jam Handy, 1968) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_d2-G9_INM). A six-and-a-half-minute promotional film for Westinghouse's new line of wallpaper-like decals for your refrigerator. Seen on Turner Classic Movies whose programmers know that suburban psychedelia will go down well with their demographic. Best decal: the Campbell's Soup one, duh.

8. Emily J. Lordi, Donny Hathaway Live (33 1/3). Deaf to Hathaway's music for years, I can now thank Lordi for another way in as she focuses on how his live album (and so much soul music besides) "is as much as about the synergy between the artists and the audience as it is about the music itself" (2).

9. Maria By Callas (Tom Volf, 2017). Sometimes I don't feel gay enough. Consider a recent viewing of this hypnotic documentary my due penance in this matter.

10. Yoko Ono: Onobox (Rykodisc, 1992). Happy 30th birthday to one of the precious few box sets I still own, not only for the music but for the story in Robert Palmer's liner notes when, at one of many laidback meetings at the Dakota, he has to confess that he's never heard Ono's music. John and Yoko joyfully run around trying to secure copies for Palmer. "John, I found a copy of Fly!"

Three 2021 Oscary films

The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021)

King Richard (Reinaldo Marcus Green, 2021)

Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

It's difficult to determine what Coen thought he was adding to the Shakespeare warhorse by subtracting so much. His Macbeth takes place in severely minimal Los Angeles sound stages...the better to highlight the words (or, more precisely, the screenplay by Coen based on Shakespeare's words)? If that's the case, then why make a film? My ancient Signet Classic edition does the trick quite nicely. And why did he choose Shakespeare at all as his first project without the input of his brother Ethan? Is it some postmodern acknowledgement of the vexed nature of authorship and individualism? 

 To be blunt, I don't have the emotional energy to answer such questions. I've wasted so much time trying to determine whether or not the Coen Brothers were making fun of me for choking up during, oh, Raising Arizona that I skipped many, many of their titles. I won't say which because I cannot bear the thought of someone telling me that I just gotta see Miller's Crossing (oops). I will tell you that I loathed No Country for Old Men (aka Halloween in middlebrow Oscar-baiting drag) with a purple passion. So I'll just deem this outing as Masterpiece Theatre-adjacent with good performances (if you care about such stuff) and a hot Ross in Alex Hassell and move on with my life.

I have less to say about the other two films despite preferring them both. I expected to hate King Richard and have trouble figuring out why I ridiculed Belfast but have affection for this biopic about Richard Williams, the father and recalcitrant coach of tennis icons Serena and Venus Williams. I certainly couldn't care less about tennis (or any sports ever). Maybe it's unconscious (but now conscious?) American chauvinism that endears me to it. But it's essentially an exhibit for Will Smith as the titular patriarch in an intermittently comedic role perfectly tailored to his talents. He's my pick to win the Best Actor Oscar next month. 

I also expected to hate del Toro's remake of Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947), based on William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel which I hear I need to read stat, assuming del Toro's penchant for fantastic imagery would overwhelm a rather unwieldy story. But the dreary third act I was promised never materialized. This is a solid piece of filmmaking in the classical tradition and its 150 minutes rushed by me and my better half. In fact, it may come off as a bit too classical since it's lost buckets of money, occasioning Martin Scorsese to pen a curious entreaty in the Los Angeles Times to stimulate box office. No masterpiece but, yo, neither was the original. 

The Tragedy of Macbeth: B

King Richard: B+

Nightmare Alley: A-minus

Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965); Over the Top (Menahem Golan, 1987)

I assume I'm strawmanning here. But what Oscar contenders are supposed to have over art cinema and the avant-garde is expert storytelling. So where is that in the Zhivago? The train ride out of Moscow is indelible and it's difficult not to be impressed by the epic sway of the thing. But the central romance between Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and Lara Antipova (Julie Christie) is shoddily telegraphed. In fact, if your attention flagged during the scene where Yuri moons over Lara as she's ironing, you might miss that they ever were in love at all before the typically truncated second act. (If these limitations are present in Boris Pasternak's 1957 novel, which I'll likely never read, that's of no concern here; I'm writing about the film.) And with three-plus hours to play with, it's not as if Lean had no time to develop the romance a bit more. Like so many directors in this era of tumescent prestige pics, Lean doesn't know when to cut. Weighed down with Quality, his camera in an early scene lingers on young Yuri's face staring at a balalaika. We know it's Yuri's Rosebud. But Lean stays on the face for such a preposterous amount of time that I honestly thought I hit pause on the player. Dude, we get it. Cut! P. S. People telling me I should see it on the big screen to the rear.

Over the Top is a dumb Sylvester Stallone vehicle that shockingly lost money. Arm wrestling, trucks, and Rocky/Rambo seemed like such a surefire recipe in 1987. But until the screenplay gives up on the story after Stallone wins the climactic arm wrestling match (and, really, who cares about anything else at that point?), it tells a damn tight story. So tight, it's true, that you'll forget it in a week or so. But its bite-sized fun was a tonic after the longueurs of the Zhivago. Best line came not from the film but from the Mr. when I asked about the fairness of one of the wrestling moves: "Why are you asking me about penalty rules in late-1980s arm wrestling contests?!?"

Doctor Zhivago: B

Over the Top: B