changes

This review may contain spoilers.

Can’t stop thinking about ghosts in the basement and cockroaches scurrying under the furniture. And how maybe children’s fears should be taken seriously. This is a metaphoric spoiler.

(First posted on letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jdwhiting/film/parasite-2019/)

Is it weird that I started subscribing to the weekly showtime updates for the Salt Lake Film Society / Broadway Centre Theater almost a year ago but am just now finally attending a movie there on a random Monday night? Probably.

Standalone post link: I Watched Parasite, 2019

I posted a review of The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of Hip-Hop, by Carole Boston Weatherford and Frank Morrison, on Goodreads, and I’m expanding on it slightly below.

I was excited about this book and assumed I would love it because of the subject matter, but I guess I’m a little disappointed and feel the need to talk about it.

For readers who don’t already know much of this history (which I assume is going to be most children who encounter this book, including those who are fans of contemporary rap and hip hop)¹ the text moves so quickly and resorts to so much listing and name-checking without context that they will likely need to go to some other sources if they want to actually make any sense out of it. (Like maybe the book should come with a link to a YouTube playlist or something? At least a bibliography or discography.) There are moments in which it gives off a vibe that you should just already know these things, and if you don’t you should be a little embarrassed to raise your hand and ask, which in my opinion isn’t a great vibe for a children’s book.

On the other hand, for older readers and actual hip hop heads that do know, the illustrations will be perfect but I think the text reads kind of corny, while the back matter is extremely dry. Maybe I’m overthinking this or expecting too much, and the main point of this book is actually just for kids to flip through and look at the awesome pictures. And if they are interested in hip hop it works fine for that. It is just slightly frustrating when there are so many great stories that could be shared from the history of hip hop, but this book hardly gives readers a single hook into learning or exploring more about any of it. It also makes me wish that some actual rappers would write some children’s books about rap (and about everything else, for that matter.)

For better context, pair this with When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop (a great example of a specific engaging story from the early days of Hip Hop) or the Hip Hop Family Tree graphic novels (although I can’t remember whether those are particularly kid-friendly) to give a peak into some of those stories. And if you want to hear the actual music, since the book doesn’t reference any kind of playlist, these yearly History of Hip Hop mixes are one great resource.

Standalone post link: Book Review - The Roots of Rap

I think she might be the most hilarious actor I’ve ever watched.

I watched La Strada, 1954, on February 14, 2020.

I watched Nights of Cabiria, 1957, on February 16, 2020.

I came to watch La Strada and Nights of Cabiria because Fellini was the next topic for an old film challenge that I’m still working my way through, but more than anything I came away from them a huge Giulietta Masina fan. I think she might be the most hilarious actor I’ve ever watched. Just her facial expressions and movements made me laugh out loud numerous times. She imbued both of these films, which on paper would be total slogs or unbearable tragedies, with so much humor and life. It seems almost unbelievable that Zampanò and the other characters in the films didn’t see this charisma and feeling themselves, and make her as much of a star as they could in their worlds. I guess that speaks all the more to the tragedy underlying these tales, our failure to see the wonder and value in our fellow humans.

I guess if nothing else the genius of Fellini is that he married Giulietta Masina and made these films for her to act in. Now I’m not entirely sure if I will even like a Fellini movie that doesn’t have Masina in it. He probably has genius beyond this too, but we will see.

Watched for the Film School Drop Outs - 2018 Challenge: Week 33 - Revision (2017) - Auteurs - Federico Fellini

Standalone post link: Giulietta Masina - first and second impressions, while I was supposed to be regarding the genius of Fellini*

I feel like every moment of my life going forward could be another scene of this film.

This morning I woke up and went out on my back porch to appease our dog’s boredom with a game of fetch. It was a quiet, not-quite-spring Sunday morning; the only sounds beyond my dog’s running and occasional barks were some squirrels jumping between bare tree branches and at one point some unseen geese calling as they flew overhead. Snow began to fall, but was not sticking to the yellow grass and concrete. I didn’t really want to go out there but it ended up being low-key beautiful. I felt like I was in another scene of this film.

I kind of want to get out an actual deck of cards and play solitaire today, something I haven’t done in at least 15 years. I’m not sure I quite even remember the rules.

My grandma taught me and my cousins how to play rummy. I spent a lot of time at my grandma’s house as a kid and teenager playing rummy at the kitchen table. Sometimes the tv or radio would be turned onto something random and blaring, because my grandma was hard of hearing. There was an instrumental flute version of “Bllie Jean” that often played on the easy listening radio station she liked. When no one else was there I think she spent a lot of time playing solitaire.

Watched this last night and thought it was funny and well done. Didn’t like it quite as much as Paterson (a personal favorite and my only Jarmusch film watched to this point), but it had a simplicity and purity which was undeniable.

I feel like every moment of my life going forward could be another scene of this film.

Watched this for my old Film School Drop Outs Challenge: Week 34 - Revision (2017) - Movement - No Wave (1976-1985).

(First posted on letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jdwhiting/film/stranger-than-paradise/)

Standalone post link: I Watched Stranger Than Paradise, 1984

It’s actually kind of inspiring how bad this film is.

I watched this in scattered 15-20 minute increments over the course of four or five days, due to either getting bored or falling asleep at each attempt to continue. I nevertheless kept coming back out of some stubborn need to see it through. When I found myself inexplicably awake at 5:30 this Saturday morning after having fallen asleep to it yet again the night before, I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I loaded it up and re-watched the last few minutes of it.

I’m convinced now there is a purposefulness and assuredness to its badness, a kind of punk obstinacy against making a good or entertaining film. It also seems a possibility that the whole film exists simply as an extended setup to tell the sick and clever “Doppler Effect” joke. And to just try out a lot of different things cinematically. Now that I think more on the film, there are many other jokes or situations that potentially could have been really humorous, but did not strike me as humorous as I was watching. Perhaps the bad acting and awkwardness serves the same disorienting purpose that noise/feedback/atonality serve in no wave, punk, and other experimental music?

The reason this film’s badness inspires me, or I should say gives me hope, is for my own creative life and for other creators: it is perhaps the best example I have encountered lately that one can make a thing that might be objectively awful, but come out from it having learned and grown, and proceed to make much stronger work in the future. Everything I saw and loved in Jarmusch’s later films (the humor, the obsession with music, the poetry, the awkwardly long, quiet, intimate takes) is already here in this film, but obscured. It is as if for his subsequent films he just had to learn to adjust and recalibrate settings to allow the humor and emotion to come into clearer focus. Or maybe he just needed a better lead actor, to be honest.

In the end I’m quite glad that I persisted in watching this seemingly terrible film and took some moments to think and write about it.

Watched in part for the Film School Drop Outs Challenge of 2017-2018 that I am still slowly, stubbornly, thoroughly working my way through in 2020. Week 34 - Revision (2017) - Movement - No Wave (1976-1985)

(First posted on letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jdwhiting/film/permanent-vacation/)

Standalone post link: I Watched Permanent Vacation, 1980

Annotated detail from my snapshot of a quote on the wall of the Niko Krivanek: dear sally, love mom photography exhibit in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Saturday, October 23, 2021.

Text in image:

As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family-and, often, is all that remains of it. As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

-Susan Sontag, On Photography

Replace “photography” with “Facebook

Standalone post link: Replace 'photography' with 'Facebook'

Started reading Bewilderment by Richard Powers today - library book copy on my back porch. 📚

Boxed-text in picture:

I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where

each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. Then I wanted to punch him. I suppose there’s a name for that, too

…

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.

My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

— Richard Powers, Bewilderment, p. 5

Standalone post link: Reading: Bewilderment

Teen Librarians are not Pornographers and Other Things You Should Know About the People Who Have Dedicated Their Lives to Serving Youth in Your Community

by Karen Jensen of Teen Librian Toolbox

Loved this blog post that I happened upon today – being on School Library Journal’s network she’s kind of preaching to the choir, so I don’t know if this will convince or speak to anyone outside of libraries, but it’s honest and heartfelt and made me personally feel just a little bit better about my life.

These issues hit close to home but I’ve been avoiding social media and the news about them, which I think has been personally healthy but perhaps professionally a little irresponsible? There is always a fine line with news…

Standalone post link: Reading Link: Teen Librarians Are Not Pornographers

Writing the Great American Email

(Published this new ‘longer thing’ in the Features / Longer Things area of this website.)

Standalone post link: New Longer Thing: Writing the Great American Email

I Made the World’s Blandest Facebook Profile, Just to See What Happens

by Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic

It seems like not many people are talking about this aspect of why Facebook is so horrible because it is also horrible in so many other ways. This is actually one of the main reasons I finally deleted my Facebook account, though.

I didn’t have a ton of “friends” (230ish, which I’m sure is below average for someone on Facebook for over a decade) and most of them didn’t share much that was real (or if they did, the algorithm didn’t see fit to share it with me), so my feed was filled with so much inanity and corporate stuff, and I still just scrolled through it compulsively, hoping something interesting would happen.

You can see this article had a different headline when I first encountered it in the Apple News app (another demonic time suck if you aren’t mindful and deliberate about finding quality content there - you have to dig to find things like articles from The Atlantic.)

After this I did find one more person talking about this, again via The Atlantic, but this time one of their new newsletter authors, Charlie Warzel in his Galaxy Brain:

What might the Facebook conversation look like if it more readily acknowledged Facebook for what it is: a vast algorithmic wasteland? Infinite channels, but nothing on.

Facebook’s Vast Wasteland

by Charlie Warzel

Standalone post link: Reading Link: Facebook Sent Me Down a Centrist Rabbit Hole