MUBI

Mediocre egg roll

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When I spend such a vast amount of time reading – losing track even of how many hours pass with my nose in a virtual book – of course I see connections. Most often these are thematic connections that crochet together, however loosely, disparate books and ideas from different parts of the world.

Sometimes though there are just coincidental mentions that seem strange – for instance, choosing randomly to read a Philip Roth (Goodbye Columbus) in which he mentions egg rolls, only to be followed immediately by a Joan Didion (Play It as It Lays), which also mentions egg rolls.

It has no significance. But why is that the one connection… and the one thing I remember? (I do recall my last trip to Iceland when my dear Jane brought over egg rolls and had somehow ordered two orders of them rather than just two egg rolls, and it was actually the best thing about the meal – they were quite good!)

Overdosing on reading, I took a little break Friday evening to watch a “triple feature” of Jaime Rosales’s understated, slice-of-life, ultra-realistic films (on MUBI, of course). And what do they show other than the tedium and brevity of life, punctuated as it is by bits of bad news, manipulative people and occasional dramatic events that upend our lives and sometimes disturb our very souls. And yet the backdrop remains the same: the humdrum, the mundane and the mediocre. And this is a place where the small, almost imperceptible happinesses reside: where a character meets a waitress who comments on how cute her baby son is, where a character can enjoy how much light comes into her flat, where characters at dinner can comment at length on how simple and good the meal turned out, where a character can move little by little past the individual and collective tragedies. We don’t get to see this “striving for normal life” much, certainly not in mainstream films, and certainly not in films that exceed two hours in length (as Solitary Fragments/La Soledad was) or which are essentially without dialogue (Bullet in the Head/Tiro en la Cabeza).

The films were there for me to watch at exactly the right time. After reading an article about the desire for a mediocre life, which unexpectedly struck chords with many of my friends, and thinking about how the simplicity and calm of an average and non-dramatic life is exceptionally fulfilling, the normal and mediocre nature of life as portrayed in these films was illustrative and almost life-affirming. And the things in life that often give us the most are the things that are the most unassuming, the least glamorous. These things, as a 2016 University of Otago study concluded, are small, daily creative pursuits that foster feelings of “flourishing” and make us want to do more. For me, it has often been baking (everyone knows that once I start, it’s hard to stop because I feel productive joy from this simple act and giving the results to others); for others, it is long-distance running; for others, like my mother, it’s knitting. Things that don’t necessarily require excessive resources or expensive equipment, exciting or exotic locations or anything particularly demanding.

Especially after being hit Friday evening with a brief wave of deep sadness and a feeling of loss that sprang up seemingly from nowhere to choke me as I waited in a long, endless Friday evening line at the store.

By the end of the night the feeling had completely washed away, soothed by returning to reading (The Things They Carried and I Do Not Come to You By Chance) and some always-restorative words from a fellow, in his words, “misanthropic mugwump”.

Photo (c) 2011 Annie used under Creative Commons license.

The ego – at length

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Almost all the French men who populated my intimate life only a few years ago (five to ten years?) have come to be like entirely other people in the ensuing years. All men who vowed they would never have children now have unplanned but very welcome infants and toddlers running around. All men who claimed they would be ‘terrible fathers’ are now the most doting and madly-in-love parents of all. All men who are older, and avoided young parenthood, completely contradict the assertions of their youth and middle years. Did they really change; were they suppressing their true selves and desires or did they simply adapt to circumstances mostly beyond their control?

I am reminded of this as I finish up the wearisome and dully pretentious novel, L’égoïste romantique by Frédéric Beigbeder. I’d never have grabbed this book myself, but one of these aforementioned French men gave it to me back before he had his daughter, when he probably imagined himself (or even fashioned himself) a bit like the antihero of this book – a sex-obsessed, louche writer – a bit self-important, a bit navel-gazing (to use a term others use but I don’t. I never saw a reason until I sat down and read this).

I keep picking up books that are 800+ pages long, and feel a bit disappointed in myself for starting them. I am building up my tolerance and attention span for that kind of heft after years of not reading much of anything. But even the mental toil and time that those books require does not compare to the mind-numbing feeling of reading this tedious book – made all the more annoying by the fact that it’s not in my native language. It’s light reading, not lengthy, not profound in any way. But it’s still an effort, which I only decided to make because I had read about a quarter of it years ago and never finished (obviously because it was boring, eye-roll worthy) and because it had been a gift, so I feel obligated, despite receiving it so many years ago and not even being in touch with the giver any longer.

Reading statements like, “Les femmes veulent transformer leurs amants en maris, ce qui revient à les castrer”, I roll my eyes and think, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Is this really a profound or even a cool observation/thought? Was it worth the paper it was printed on? Still, in the interest of equality, it continues, “Les hommes ne sont pas meilleurs: ils métamorphosent leurs maîtresses en femmes de ménage, et les vamps en mères de famille.”

Or “Je stagne sentimentalement.
En Amérique, ceux qui sont dans ma situation disent:
-I am in a transitional stage.”

Funny that something very brief can ignite an outsized reaction – at lunch yesterday I read Borges’s “The Aleph” – so short but infinitely more rewarding than these rambling epics and masturbatory drivel I’ve otherwise been reading. Is it effortless complexity and casual passion – all these contradictions – in Borges that stir the brain and make curiosity and questioning bubble to the surface? While the sense of “when will this end?” returns again and again with these other efforts.

It is perhaps this same brevity that so alarms us, wakes us up, in life experiences as well. Brief but intense.

Book: L’égoïste romantique – Frédéric Beigbeder and “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges
Film: La Belle Personne (via MUBI)
TV: Both Underground and Hap & Leonard are back!
Soundtrack du jour: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Fractions

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As soon as you learn about fractions as a kid you (should) realize that life is short.

At what point does the perception shift? I had written in a blog post two years ago about how, when I was 4, I thought 30 seemed like a reasonable, elderly age to die. By the time I was 8 or 9, or as soon as we started studying fractions in school, I realized clearly that if I were to die at 30, my life was already almost one-third finished. The shortness of it all hit me suddenly, and early, meaning that I was never like the kids and even young adults who looked at slightly older adults and thought of them as “old”. It was one of my first steps toward looking at people and seeing much more depth and a bigger story than I could guess or perceive on the surface.

This ‘seeing a bigger story’ thing has two sides. Of course it makes me more compassionate – I don’t join into making fun of people, their appearances, foibles or misfortunes. I try to see the whole person, his/her history and issues, what got him/her to where s/he is. On the other hand, this also means that I know that what I see and receive on the surface is just the surface – maybe even an act (intentional or otherwise). And no one is immune from this because, again, there are two sides: there is the person one tries to present and the person the other party perceives.

Still I could save myself a lot of trouble if I could just apply the caution of this wisdom: In the beginning it is all an act. I was thinking about MDL, ex-boyfriend, who was all sweetness and light and listening and generosity and compliments. Intentionally he misled because he took great delight in intentionally tearing a person down brick by brick (I later saw that he repeated this pattern in every single relationship he subsequently had). In the sum total of the thing, he was the ‘perfect guy’ for less than one-third of an already brief, blip-on-the-radar relationship that felt like it dragged on for an eternity – or at least a huge chunk of my youth. It was not at all a huge chunk, but it seemed like “prime time” during which I missed so many other opportunities because I was so busy trying to reclaim the false perfection of the beginning.

What I took away from it, and need to Always Remember: It is all an act in the beginning. Maybe not everything, and maybe not as overtly as it was for him, but in most cases, people (all of us; again – no one is immune) are either donning their Sunday best or wheeling out best behavior or best-case-scenario versions of themselves. Or they are in the middle of some kind of an episode, and you get caught up in their madness until you inevitably realize, as it all winds down, that oh, none of that was real. Ooops. Or you know right from minute one they are not at all who they claim but for various reasons you let it all happen, perhaps repeatedly, because it feels good, whether on its own or because it’s the opposite of whatever you’ve just been through or because of the strength of their conviction and decisiveness in knowing who they are and taking what they want – that stuff is magnetic, if fleeting. Or it’s all a complete accident without intent – somehow it’s still all an act.

Because of the rule of fractions and life-is-short admonishments, you kind of hope that this rule about everything being an act will prove false one of these days.

Crying wolf
I keep thinking I will stop writing blog posts, but then ideas pop into my head, and I feel I must cast them out and put them somewhere. Often my threats are true, but it happens that the random things must come out one way or another. As someone said to me the other day, describing his semi-imaginary personification of me upon first acquaintance, trying to skip over all the ‘in the beginning it was all an act’ machinations and guessing games, “I made you inconsistent, difficult to please, playful, fearsomely intelligent and very autonomous.” Thus, if I am so inconsistent, it will come as no surprise that one day, I claim I will quit writing blog posts and the next, I’m writing them.

Other nonsense
Films: Somers Town (on MUBI)
Books: The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Soundtrack du jour: “Less Young but as Dumb” – Dougie Poole

Barbaric

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Okay, so I thought the film Catch Me Daddy was disturbing, but hey – what do you know? MUBI offered up a film that is even more disturbing: Trance,  a film about human trafficking! A Russian woman leaves St Petersburg with the aim of making money, and gets kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery and humiliation. It meanders along for over two hours and makes me feel like someone is rubbing a cheese grater against my skin. One review, with which I agree, concluded:

“But at a two-hour-plus running time, only the most stout-hearted fans of cold-blooded art cinema will stick around to find out how much misery awaits the unwary and not too bright heroine”

…Otherwise, I finally got to 80% read in Infinite Jest. I will be pleased to move on to some other reading material once this ends.

shot in the back-shot in the arm

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Not quite an Alpine vista, the world of rural western Sweden in mid-March was this time mostly sun-filled, a shot in the arm for getting things done. Pleasurable things. Okay, maybe hauling recyclables to the recycle station doesn’t count. Must be done, and there is some pleasure to be found in accomplishing the must-do stuff, too.

Conversation (so much laughing). Walking. Writing. Films, thanks to MUBI (Fogo – what a weird accent these islanders have, such breathtaking scenery; I’m All Yours – an unusual French film that had the makings of a really good story but was not sure what it wanted to be and suffered from trying to clumsily weave too many narrative threads into it; Catch Me Daddy – quite a grim and disturbing picture, mostly filmed in West Yorkshire with a bunch of foul-mouthed Scots in the mix). Music (mostly Elena Frolova – various things from her, inspired by digging out my CD of Frolova setting Marina Tsvetaeva poetry to music, but also Nippon Girls volumes 1 and 2).

Reading (First, I quickly devoured a basic and silly book on developing ‘psychic abilities’. Not because I think it will work or because I want to develop clairvoyance. I thought it might give more insight into developing deeper intuition.

The rest of my reading time was devoured – and I mean devoured; time is devoured by the book, not the other way around – by David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest. I’m still only halfway through. For a month I sat at about 2% completion, according to my Kindle, but in the last two days, I managed to chip away at it to reach the halfway mark. (It is, after all, well over 1,000 pages.) I don’t necessarily like it, but I marvel at it. I really like select parts of it, and others I can take or leave. I suppose this is symptomatic of the ‘bigger is better’ credo that seems to have propelled the book forward, which  Michiko Kakutani referred to in her original review:

“Perfect, however, “Infinite Jest” is not: this 1,079-page novel is a “loose baggy monster,” to use Henry James’s words, a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace’s mind.”

“The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.”

Sometimes that “encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace’s mind” is fascinating; sometimes it’s pages of mind-numbing, sleep-inducing quicksand. As a whole, the concept is fascinating but digging into the details isn’t always.

The language – both its volume and particular use – can be overwhelming – the breadth, depth, randomness – lack of narrative or plot-driven clarity while still somehow offering some other kind of clarity – is not something I can really explain or describe or review. It is exactly what it is unapologetically, with its sudden, pages-long description of the terror of suddenly moving from aural telephone to videophony or little statements like, “Son, you’re ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you’re almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak.” Haha. You never know whether to laugh, cry, be puzzled. Less story or narrative than a radical transformation of language and form that feels that it inadvertently (though this is quite deliberate) ends up telling many stories anyway.

It’s just so much, so complex, so full of digressions, but the kind you can get engrossed in, not distracted by. Random but not.

Long passages about addiction and AA “sobriety in Boston is regarded as less a gift than a sort of cosmic loan. You can’t pay the loan back but you can pay it forward, by spreading the message that despite all appearances AA works…” “The only way to hang onto sobriety is to give it away and even just 24 hours of sobriety is worth doing anything for, a sober day being nothing short of a daily miracle if you’ve got the Disease like he’s got the Disease…”.

Relatable, but at the same time so far out there, it’s not. You have to sit and wonder about the writer with the kind of mind who produced this tome much more than the content of the final product itself in some ways (and he was clearly tortured enough to take his own life).)

MUBI: Curated platform for unique films

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A few weeks ago, I finally got around to signing up for MUBI after to meaning to for the last… five years or so. When I first read about it, it was basically a streaming video-on-demand service that focused on foreign/indie/arthouse films, some quite rare, and has since become a highly curated platform where only 30 films are available at one time. In a way, of course, I would love to have more selection but at the same time, this limited selection makes me watch things I might not otherwise choose for myself and eliminates the often oppressive and crippling feeling of having too much choice. In some ways I like that it is not just a repository the way Netflix is; when a film disappears from the site, who knows when or if it will become available again? MUBI has also negotiated a few exclusivity arrangements with partners and distributors so is likely to be the only, or one of the only, platforms where you will be able to see some of these films.

So far I’ve watched about five films (I have to be in the right mood and have real focus since most films are in languages I don’t know; therefore, I must read subtitles). I love it so far, although if I were still engaging in my normal “binge” habits, I would have raced through all 30 available films in a few days and been left without content, other than the new film put up on the site each day.

I know it’s not going to be the right choice for everyone – most of my friends and family are not really into the kinds of films that typify the MUBI stream. If you’re hungry for the independent and unusual, though, it’s a great place to start and find unusual films from the world over – effortlessly.