Dom Schwab’s 2019 Favs: Books, Music, Film, Television, Stage
Dom Schwab’s 2019 Favs: Books, Music, Film, Television, Stage
Now that we are nearly a third of the way through 2020, I felt a Year-In-Review of 2019 was sort of obsolete, but the astute “herocious” brought to my attention that a list/piece such as this may yet be of value. Namely, with so many people in Quarantine due to the Novel Coronavirus, this list of works I enjoyed during 2019 might inspire some people to ingest new works of art that they may not…
TEXT / MUSIC / IMAGE: Review of dom’s 2017 dom’s Lists (first Categorical, then Chronological) of the Art-Works he Consumed thru/o 2017: TEXT The books and stories I read thru/o 2017. Catch-22 (1961, novel) – Joseph Heller (began Nov. 2016; finished March 2017) A Book of Days for the Literary Year (1984, anthology of literary trivia) – ed. Neal T. Jones, publisher: Thames and Hudson Inc.…
Ciao! Miami – Fawzy Zablah :: a review by dom schwab
Today on TheOpenEnd: @domschwab reviews "Ciao! Miami", a short story collection by @fawzy_zablah
Self-published under the moniker Little Havana Press in 2006, Fawzy Zablah’s collection of stories, Ciao! Miami, is a thrilling, inspiring book, one which explodes passionately from page one with a zeal for life. Regardless of length, each story unfolds its complexities at stiltedly strange but intuitively correct intervals. The resulting narrative structures, perhaps best described as smoothly…
Stephanie Valente’s hotel ghostis a chapbook informed by love, specifically the in-between realm of ‘need’ and ‘want’. But Valente’s poetry is also informed by mythology and astrology, both of which provide a deep richness that is often lacking in contemporary/internet love poetry. It’s not that one cannot find examples, but the running motifs of legendary feminine creatures and allusions to…
Available from independent publisher C.A. Mullins’ Bottlecap Press, the poems in Trevor L. Sensor’s chapbook sing a lamentation of unrequited love in the 21st Century. Sensor’s Manic Pixie Dream Poems, a chapbook filled with the kind of love that keeps you up at night, is dour, morose, pensive. But there is a depth in Sensor’s poems; there is reflection and contemplation, albeit of a honed-in…
Dom Schwab reviews "A Loss and Gain of Comfort" by Ian Macks
C.A. Mullins is the founder of Bottlecap Press, an indie publisher responsible for the release of some very interesting and beautiful chapbooks. One such chapbook is Ian Macks’ A Loss and Gain of Comfort, a work devoted to examining the space between being a good person for the sake of love and, in becoming a good person, failing to attain that love. Such instances of cosmic irony permeate the…
Paul Thomas Anderson’s artistic careerhas morphed and changed over the decades. From the youthful, ever-popular Boogie Nights to the stoic and criticallyacclaimed There Will Be Blood, Anderson has been known to push boundaries in storytelling, genre, audience expectation, and his own filmmaking. His latest, Inherent Vice, manages to uphold and move beyond these artistic givens. An adaptation seemingly more straightforward than There Will Be Blood and The Master (see: Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! and elements of author John Steinbeck’s real life, respectively), the source material for Anderson’s film is Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, Inherent Vice. Pynchon, well regarded within the academic literary world for his postmodern, metafictitious novels, is the famed author of Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, among others. Famed also for living an extremely private, anti-public life, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is widely regarded as one of his most accessible works, a fact which ought to bode well for Anderson’s film, considering the unenthusiastic reception of his previous effort, The Master. Complex reputations of both artists aside, Inherent Vice, both the film and, presumably, the novel, is warmer and more crowd-pleasing than both artists’ prior works. That doesn’t mean, however, that Anderson’s film is just another silly stoner flick to fan away like exhaled smoke from Harold and Kumar’s lungs; on the contrary, while the film is light, humorous, and does involve a great deal of hippy-era pot smoking, there’s a depth to Anderson’s Inherent Vice for those who can keep up with the smoky-blurred storyline(s).
Said story involves Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, feat. mutton chops), a lovelorn, pot-smoking hippy employed as a private investigator in 1970s California, just after the Manson Family murders had come to light. The action begins when Doc’s ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), requests that he help her find, and possibly save, her current love-interest: a rich, married man who’s gone missing. Will Doc help? Of course he will: he’s still in love, maybe; you know, it’s hard to tell when you’re high all the time… But it is interesting to note that the ever-stoned Doc is a highly observant private investigator, which is highly reminiscent (probably intentionally on Pynchon’s part) of Sir A. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who himself is known to recreationally shoot up cocaine. Shrouded within an ever-present smokescreen, Doc’s hippy lifestyle hazes the clarity of the film’s story arch and plotlines, an artistic storytelling technique meant to portray Doc’s consciousness under the influence. Like the effects of pot on the mind of a first-time smoker, this storytelling technique could be disorienting, but for Doc, it’s his average, day-to-day experience. Indeed, his skills in observation and deduction are seemingly heightened by his marijuana use, for he does in fact possess a keen sense of observation. A score composed and a soundtrack of songs selected by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood intensifies this “stoned” storytelling technique, successfully due, perhaps, to the fact that Anderson and Greenwood have worked together in the past, the latter scoring the former’s two previous films. Visually, the best scene that captures this form of storytelling is when Doc first meets Coy (Owen Wilson), a missing-in-action saxophone player, out on a dock or pier, the two of them shrouded by thick, heavy fog in the darkness of night. The atmosphere of this scene conveys the effects of marijuana on the mind, particularly Doc’s, and, thus, the way in which the film unfolds.
Also of note during this scene is Joanna Newsom’s narration toward the end of it, where she poetically conveys the experience of the stoned pot smoker. But then, who is Joanna Newsom in Inherent Vice? Her character seems to be sort of like a narrator, at times providing background information on Doc and Shasta’s past, as well as other information. But unlike most narrators, Sortilege is at times seen, personified as Joanna Newsom, like a muse, during which times she converses with Doc, typically encouraging him onward. According to the film’s credits, Joanna Newsom is listed as portraying “Sortilege,” which, according to dictionaries, is the process of casting lots in order to divine the future. Due to the interconnectedness of her name’s meaning and her duo-role presence throughout the film (i.e. as both a narrator to the audience and almost like a spirit guide or guardian angel to Doc personally), it is not surprising that Sortilege often explains and interprets events and occurrences through the lens(es) of astrology, Fate, and Karma. Thus, Sortilege is aptly named because, like all narrators and spirit guides, she knows what has happened, what is currently happening, and can hint at what will come to pass, all of which provide Doc with insights into the mysteries of his pot-fueled caper. Furthermore, Doc often shortens Sortilege to ‘Lege, which is reminiscent of “liege,” a lord or sovereign to whom allegiance is due; and rightly so, since Doc ought to be loyal to someone so ethereal as to provide him with guidance and clues. Therefore, Joanna Newsom’s Sortilege serves two purposes: 1) she is the audience’s Narrator of the film, and 2) she is Doc’s spiritual muse, guiding him onward, not with definitive answers, but with advice, hints, encouragements.
(But then also: Why Joanna Newsom, a singer/songwriter famous for writing harp-driven folk songs? Well, quite honestly, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson has always had these muse-like, intellectual(-and-sometimes-real) love-affairs with artistic, creative female folk singer/songwriters. For example, Anderson had a small, though courtly, obsession with 80s-new-wave/90s-&-beyond-folk singer/songwriter Aimee Mann, whose music features prominently and integrally in his third film, Magnolia. And of course, Anderson had a real-life relationship with emotion-wielding songstress Fiona Apple, whose third album, Extraordinary Machine, features emotional break-up songs, some of which are almost certainly about Anderson. But his fondness for and connections to these inspiring artists has always manifested themselves in his films, an artistic motif which, like his style of filmmaking, has changed and evolved throughout the years. So considering his prior work, the casting of Joanna Newsom as the film’s narrator and Doc’s muse is both a pleasant surprise and another artistic given, albeit a rather “meta” one.)
Speaking of muses, it is no accident that Sortilege is a woman, since the setting of Inherent Vice is California, 1970, both a time and a place commonly synonymous with terms like “The Sexual Revolution” and “Third Wave Feminism,” but also a time and place framed by the highly publicized Manson Family murders, which, in the story, has the police on high alert. Regarding the police, Doc often meets with Det. Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a straight-laced, tightly-wound, and lawful counterpart to Doc’s hippy ways. Although he assists Doc begrudgingly, Bigfoot works solo since the death of his original partner on the force, a past event that still weighs heavily upon his subconscious mind, Doc notices, considering Bigfoot’s preferred snack of choice. Disregarding the ethereal Sortilege, the above noted timeframe of 1970 California also calls to mind an era when young women openly embraced the idea of being sexually free individuals, evidenced in the film by the numerous sexual suggestions and innuendoes Doc receives and observes, most of which occur either too suddenly or too subtly to be labeled “over-the-top.” Some of these sexual suggestions are overt performances meant to attract attention and entice, such as the behavior of Luz, the housekeeper of the wife of the missing rich man. Doc does, in fact, occasionally have casual sex with Deputy DA Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon), who, like Bjornsen, is a professional officer of the law and can, therefore, also begrudgingly provide crime-solving assistance.
But despite these sexual predicaments, no one has ever captured Doc’s heart quite like Shasta Fey Hepworth. Still longing for her from times past, Shasta never seems to leave Doc’s consciousness, nor the film’s. Since setting the story in motion and then driving off at the start of the film, Shasta tantalizes Doc elusively in the guise of clues and hearsays. And when Shasta suddenly returns, she does so boldly nude, a fittingly physical juxtaposition to the film’s primary concerns over Doc’s observations and intuitions, the ethereal Sortilege and her guidance and astrological knowledge, and the film’s pot-hazy plot structure and storytelling. Their scene is shot in an unflinching, single take, thereby heightening the intensity of their reunion, which is distinctly less carefree than the aforementioned subtleties. Regardless, Doc and Shasta’s sex scene is both intimately alluring and unsettlingly raw, their foreplay and subsequent lovemaking shaded with a reconciliatory hue.
Despite their assertion that, although they did just have sex, they aren’t necessarily getting back together, Doc and Shasta’s reunion more or less signals the end of the rich man’s story arch, especially since Doc had, in fact, found the rich man at a rehab center that was run by his wife and her lover just prior to reuniting with Shasta. But along the way, other people were met and other troubling issues brought to light, many of which need cleaning up. With the guidance of Sortilege, Doc sets out to seek conclusions, during which Anderson only just begins to hint at some interesting commentary on the distribution of wealth in our society. There are clues of this anti-1% theme scattered throughout the film, but it is toward the end that these scatterings begin to gather momentum. This interesting touch of Marxist-theory proves that Inherent Vice was crafted with just as much care and attention-to-detail as is to be expected from a Paul Thomas Anderson picture. Although much lighter in tone than There Will Be Blood and The Master, Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a period piece filled with mystery and intrigue, humor and sex, all of which is quietly toned by a shroud of marijuana smoke.
Being dead is like(, i hope,) seeing kaleidoscopic blue squiggles forever, the kind you see when pressing the heels of your palms onto your lidded eyes or when you were little and stared at the light fixtures in church, then moved your wild eyes about, blinking up little blue squiggles… But there will be trillions of them in death, moving & squirming around & atop each other forever, vacillating effortlessly into patterns and chaos forever. i want death to be forever.
