Alex Howe

Big Ups

[blunderbussmag]

We came to think we knew them like family - if a family was something always unsettling, held together by habit and fear and desperate wishful thinking. The comforting familiarity of a well-loved television presence became, in James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, a play of beguiling masks luring us only deeper into indeterminacy. To be charmed by him (he made it easy) was to be conned, with a good chance he was equally duped by his own devices. Possibly he meant it wholeheartedly when he told Dr Melfi: “I’m a good guy basically… I love my family.” By the time we got to the end we had seen a thousand Tonys - sheepish, serpentine, commanding, calculating, lecherous, self-pitying, savagely sarcastic, tenderly paternal, fatuously self-pleased, teary-eyed over an old radio hit, racked by paranoid mistrust, exploding in feral rage - and seen one switch to another in an instant. Guileless self-revelation was not a possibility, least of all in a psychiatrist’s office. He had so many of him to choose from.

Geoffrey O’Brien (via blunderbussmag)

[blunderbussmag]

Here is how it happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace — whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call ‘me,’ trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things. In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot *force* them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they *will* be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation — but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I’ll do it again.

Roger Ebert (1942-2013), from his 2008 review of Synecdoche, New York (via blunderbussmag)

[alexhow-blog]

1. This morning I read Marie Calloway's "Adrien Brody" for the first time.

2. I'd been aware of her and vaguely aware of that story for what seems like a long time.

3. I rarely read fiction; I read ~90% of "Adrien Brody" with uninterrupted focus. I was not on Adderall. (Maybe her style is "what it takes" to keep people off Twitter long enough to read fiction; maybe that "isn't for me to decide.")

4. Thought, "This alt lit shit is like an internal monologue virus. I can't stop thinking like this now." Thought, "If I write about this, should I change 'this alt lit shit' to 'Tao Lin and his ilk'?"

5. Thought, "Thought, 'We are never ever getting back together.'"

6. Googled. Learned the "identity" of "Adrien Brody." Thought, "Oh my god." 7. Mentally compared, despite near-complete ignorance, the initial critical response to Hemingway to that of Calloway.

8. Worried more about what people think of Calloway. Tentatively decided that "literature is doing what painting did," but in reverse: moving from heightened/imaginative to "as 'realistic' as possible."

9. Thought, "This is a genie that will not go back in the bottle."

10. Wondered whether I was mentally composing tweets or a Thought Catalog essay.

11. Got on the train to work. Getting out of the L at Union Square, I immediately smelled blood. People were gawking at a hurt woman. She was sitting on the ground crosslegged with her head down, a few feet from a pool of blood. A couple of people were beginning to help her. The smell of blood was so strong and iron-y; thought, "My nose evolved for this." Wondered whether her injury would make news blogs; felt conflicted about that thought.

12. Saw a friendcquaintance on the train. Felt incredulous that so many unusual things were happening on a morning that my "mental camera" had been turned on by Calloway. Told the acquaintance about the blood and we talked about subway danger. Told her about a bet I lost last weekend about how many people are killed by sharks. She got off the train and I realized I had talked for ~85% of the interaction. Decided that Calloway had helped me realize the importance of the feelings/experiences "outside the edges" of what is usually depicted in art.

13. Thought about my friend at the New School who made me realize how ridiculous men sound when they call an album or book "important." (It seems to always be men.) 14. I feel strongly that Marie Calloway is important.

[alexhow-blog]

Mario Chalmers = Donette from The Wire.

Even moreso, the Celtics' Pietrus = Jay Electronica.

Go Celtics tonight, y'all

[alexhow-blog]

Last week I was in New York for the first time since 'Girls' started, and I've been surprised by how many of my friends there don't like it--or, maybe more commonly, preemptively dislike the idea of it. Then I had a very clarifying conversation/debate with Travis. THOUGHTS ABOUT THOUGHTS ABOUT 'GIRLS':

1. Dunham's parents are artists. Not industrialists. Artist-parents producing artist-offspring is something to celebrate! Jeez Louise. 

2. 'Girls' is a TERRIBLE spark for finally having a collective conversation of any length about nepotism. Because Dunham is a woman? Yes!!

3. But! Talking about who is allowed to produce mass culture is super valuable/overdue, no matter how it started.

4. "But!", the Sequel: More and more, it seems like women I know don't like this show. I don't know what that means (if anything)!

5. Obviously, I want to believe that I would love an HBO show dramatizing the lives of the underclass. That said, I don't think 'Girls' is ANY more "hooray money" than a 'Seinfeld'--just more explicit about its characters' privilege. The poor don't usually get to make art; as a brutally honest show about a lucky young woman seizing her chance to be an artist, 'Girls' has profound potential. 

6. Our great entertainments don't tackle reality. 'The Wire' is the triumphant exception that proves the rule. 'The Sopranos', for example, exempted itself from this entire wrenching conversation by being set in Scorsese-land.

7. As best said here, the world is better off with 'Girls' in it for the sex scenes alone.

[alexhow-blog]

Instead of this entanglement of self with self, why can’t I just relax into my place inside the natural order, be a thing within the solid scheme of things, a Dane in Denmark? How can fantasies, unreal by definition, show me what I am, and know? How can the poetry of possibilities dissolve the prose of facts? My little life sustains me while it can, and that’s enough. It may be all contingent, but it’s real, and when catastrophes occur, as they inevitably do, I’d rather they occur to me, instead of writing them away, or redefining happiness or sorrow or tranquility as alterations of some abstract point of view that points at nothing. Inescapable illusions must be real, or might as well be real, no matter where reflection on them leads; and if accepting them means taking things on faith, that’s fine. Who wants to be a posit, or a site of possibilities? Who wants to walk out and evaporate into this green spring day? Who wants to have sex with a wraith?

Selected from "Like Gods" by John Koethe.

I need to read more prose poetry. It can be nice, not having line breaks to worry about.

[alexhow-blog]

I rewatched Mean Streets the other day; the vitality of this exchange remains startling. I was almost afraid to find out if it really was improvised. Scorsese:

There's a big scene at the beginning of Mean Streets with Keitel and De Niro in the back room of the bar. De Niro makes up this whole speech — it's really a bravura performance — and it's all improvised. That scene made the picture.

Part of me found De Niro's accent distracting, but then I reminded myself this was 1973--I've absorbed decades of watered-down riffing, but this performance is a primary source.

[alexhow-blog]

From a spirited email I received after writing a BI post about The Donald's antics with gold bullion.

[alexhow-blog]

Record-low giving of fucks projected for Krugman's next quarter.