Return of the Counterforce

Back in April, a screaming came across the sky, the announcement of a new Thomas Pynchon novel, to be published in October, entitled Shadow Ticket. This marks a literary event, an unforeseen comet spark in the darkness. Pynchon is arguably the greatest living novelist on the strength of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) alone, but the reclusive 88-year-old had not published any new books since 2013's Bleeding Edge, so his fans might've been forgiven for thinking his days of writing new stuff might be over. There had been no word of any upcoming new work, until this big announcement dropped. This signal from the Counterforce emerges at an especially dark time in the world when it seems everything decent is under siege, the war machine rages on, books are being banned, free speech attacked, democracy crumbling, history rewritten, reality itself overstretched and worn out. We needed to hear from Pynchon at this moment. 

His works have always had a prescience to them that has helped to inform the present moment, possibly because his novels often focus on an era in the past thru the lens of Pynchon's deep history, paranoiac descrying, and comic relief. I'm thinking of how Gravity's Rainbow is a novel from the early 1970s but is set in Europe at the end of World War II, following the ridiculous misadventures of a wandering lieutenant and his cohort of castoffs aka "The Counterforce" and their attempts to jam the gears of power and thwart  the military-industrial complex seeking to consolidate power out of the ashes of post-war Europe. I'm thinking also of Bleeding Edge, the 2013 novel that deals with the tech underground, hackers and cyberwars, although it takes place at the end of the 90s dot-com boom in NYC, with its narrative punctuated by the 9/11 attacks. And then there's also Against the Day, which is my favorite Pynchon book, it came out in the mid-2000s, a work of historical fiction focused on years at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, weaving world-building narratives across decades with a global setting featuring elements of espionage, steampunk, sci-fi fantasy, and anarchist westerns, while examining and educating the reader on some of the factors that led to the First World War. (See my longer write-ups about Gravity's Rainbow here, Bleeding Edge here, and Against the Day here.)

We don't know much about the new novel, Shadow Ticket, at this point except for the one paragraph description provided by Pynchon himself. His synopsis places the story in 1932, focusing on a private eye in Wisconsin, Hicks McTaggart, who somehow gets dragged into "bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering" and ends up in Europe getting "entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them." The elements of a private detective, caught up in the crossfire of counterespionage, in the period leading up to a major war, these are all familiar in the Pynchon universe. The internet has been buzzing with Pynchon news ever since, with some readers having received review copies of the upcoming book.

Amplifying the vibes of the Pynchon renaissance, of course, is the new film from director Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another, to appear in theaters next month September 26th, supposedly a loose adaptation of Pynchon's novel Vineland (1990). There were rumors for years that PTA was interested in making a movie of Vineland after the solid work he did adapting Inherent Vice, also a Pynchon novel, back in 2014. Leonardo DiCaprio stars in the new movie, in a lead role seemingly similar to that of Zoyd Wheeler from Vineland. Here's the trailer:

One Battle After Another (2025, trailer)

Vineland (1990) was Pynchon's first book following an extended silent period after Gravity's Rainbow (1973). It had a reputation for being Pynchon lite, a more approachable and even optimistic story than his previous works, although for all its lightness and humor, it's also a novel of political grief, forecasting the escalating authoritarian police state in the United States. Vineland takes place in the year 1984 in a fictional equivalent of Humboldt County, in northern California, during the heightened Reagan-era drug war. The story mainly follows a father's attempts to protect his daughter from the blowback of her parents' revolutionary activities in the 1960s. The new film looks to be a loose adaptation that places the period closer to the present day, ostensibly with the parents' acts of resistance having to do with freeing immigrants locked in ICE prisons. 

I first read Vineland back in 2017 during the first Trump regime in America. A few years later, I read a great book by Peter Coviello called Vineland Reread (2020) which revisited Vineland in light of the presently unfolding descent of the US into a fascist police state. Coviello is an incisive scholar, his book is dense for a slim volume, I learned a lot from it, as he examines the nuances and political depths of Pynchon's most approachable and light-hearted novel as amounting to a story of resistance against authoritarianism and the carceral state. Consider it recommended reading. 

Around the time of his Vineland Reread book, Coviello wrote an article with some of the main points from his book, you can read that piece here, it's called "Vineland and the Coming Police State" where he writes of Pynchon's 1990 novel:

It hasn’t become less sad, and certainly not less funny. But read it today, in the midst of our own fever dream of penal sociality, and you are liable to be taken aback by the clarity of its insistence that a style of carceral fanaticism—a making over of everyday life into the image of perpetual security crisis—is no less a signature of the thing we call neoliberalism than are manic privatization, oligarchic dominion, and the total absorption of public life into market imperatives. Uproarious and joy-propounding as it is, Vineland is a novel of acute political grief—a thing as near to us as it has ever been, and likely to get nearer.

Can't help but be struck by how some of these phrases resonate with today, like "carceral fanaticism" in a time where the regime promotes something they're calling "Alligator Alcatraz"; and "a making over of everyday life into the image of perpetual security crisis" when the senile scoundrel occupying the presidency has manufactured crises in order to send the military to occupy American cities. 

Another book I was reading around that time was Occupy Pynchon: Politics After Gravity's Rainbow (2017) by Sean Carswell. It’s an academic study, this one looking at the novels Pynchon published after Gravity's Rainbow and examining their politics in light of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. The novels from Vineland thru Bleeding Edge seem to model a resistance that is non-hierarchical, horizontal, fragmentary, harder to detect and crush. But even beyond any kind of organized community resistance, Pynchon also celebrates the individual's enduring refusal to comply with authoritarian control. Small acts of kindness, simple gestures of affection, or the creation of good art, anything to emphasize our humanity, to preserve culture and oppose the continued authoritarian efforts to rot our brains with stress and frighten us into submission. Just like Peter Coviello's Vineland Reread book mentioned above, Carswell's study adds new depths to Pynchon's lighter, slimmer novels like Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, while highlighting the shift in attitude and vibes after the dark paranoia of Gravity's Rainbow, moving to a brighter, more humane, optimistic sort of pleasurable resistance. 

*   *   *

What is the counterforce? That's never made exactly clear. It's a subtle, unofficial, intangible, loose shifting entity that is named in Gravity's Rainbow, but which is present across all of Pynchon's novels in some way, always with a vague, imperceptible quality to it. A book by J.M. Tyree about the counterforce as it relates to Inherent Vice considers it to be an antidote to all orthodoxies, an outlook that recognizes that despite recent history suggesting "the low likelihood of the present and the future turning out any differently […] we still must care for one another as the tragedy unfolds." To quote from an article written by a biologist in a scientific publication, the counterforce could be seen as more of "an organizing principle" than an entity:

...in the last section of Gravity's Rainbow, there is a “counterforce”, an organizing principle that runs counter to the tendency towards maximum entropy, at least in some instances. His metaphor for the organizing force is the period immediately after the fall of Nazi Germany, when competing interests — national, commercial, and individual — scurried about to carve order out of the rubble. Pynchon ascribes almost mythical character to the counterforce, which he also refers to as the “green uprising” or the “Titans of the Earth.” He suggests that there is a general principle, as fundamental as the second law of thermodynamics, but running in the opposite direction, that allows daisies to grow out of the ashes.   

This fundamental law of the universe, a counter-entropy, allowing daisies to grow out of the ashes, reminds me of a recurring theme in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, captured in a quote Joyce took from historian Edgar Quinet, of abundant flowers growing out of the rubble of clashing civilizations throughout history's cycles of wars. All of this stuff also makes me think of the work done by artists, scholars, authors, monks throughout history trying to preserve and encapsulate the treasures of culture, buried underground or otherwise fortified to endure through the chaos and destruction of the siege, to plant seeds for the future. 

Another version of a fundamental law of the universe captured in a quote is used by Pynchon in Vineland where a character has memorized a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson having discovered it "in a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James," which goes:

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil. 

[- Ralph Waldo Emerson] (from Vineland, Pynchon, p. 369)

I'm glad to see in the summer of 2025, Thomas Pynchon is now having a moment. It means great literature is having a moment. A new book from such a legendary writer is some of the best news of this year. I've been seeing copies of Vineland stacked forefront in bookstores across the country in the past year. A new movie inspired by Vineland is about to drop, with Benicio del Toro and DiCaprio. And then we get Shadow Ticket. Something like the counterforce is returning.

A few other things to check out: the Biblioklept blog gave annotations to The Guardian's recent ranking of Pynchon's novels. LitHub also wrote about why Vineland is the novel we need right now. And some reading groups dedicated to Vineland started up, including this one at the RAWillumination.net blog. 

The Sacrifice

"Had to sacrifice all to earn favor" 

            - Ka, "Eye of a Needle"

One night back in March of this year, I was struck by a vision about sacrifice. I was laying in a hammock in my backyard, looking up at the stars. Soaking in the pleasures and privileges of my existence, appreciating my comforts yet realizing that I was not at all satisfied with my life, I was aching for something new. 

At that point, I had accumulated everything I could have ever wanted in life---I owned a house on a nice big piece of property, with a canopy provided by a dozen oak trees, the property peppered with colorful flowers and paddle cactus plants, succulents, and a big vegetable garden. The backyard was renovated, spacious, peaceful, comfortable. Inside the house I had a library full of books, walls covered with art, comfy couches to sit and read on, a fireplace to sit next to with my dog, and a desk to do my writing. I had a big, playful puppy, a pittie-German shepherd mix who always kept me feeling safe, whose energy always brought me joy. And I had a woman who I'd been with for many years, been to hell and back with. I had all of that and yet I felt completely unsatisfied with this life, felt myself becoming obsessed with a new craving for adventure and exploring the unknown. I was feeling like the creative energies in my life had become dulled and dormant. Felt like my life and whatever youth I had left, was slipping away day by day. I'd been depressed for a while after three of my friends passed away unexpectedly during the pandemic lockdown. Then that night in March, I started thinking about Tarkovsky's 1986 movie The Sacrifice. 

I had seen The Sacrifice a couple years prior when a friend, who's a devoted scholar of Tarkovsky, brought me to a screening at the Austin Film Society. I remember being totally awed by the film's visionary qualities, impacted by the scenes of the house rattling from warplanes overhead, the scenes of stillness and nature and especially the famous scene of the burning house. But after seeing the film I didn't have much of any appreciation for what it meant, what it was conveying. That is, until that night back in March when I was overwhelmed with thoughts about the meaning and importance of sacrifice. I started replaying scenes from the film in my head and I read synopses online and I realized that the main character was stricken by a feeling that the world was out of joint, that he needed to sacrifice everything he loved in order to restore peace. I started dwelling on the meaning of sacrifice---as in, a sacrifice to God or to the gods or to the universe, in order to earn favor and fortune and restore creative energies. To bring balance to the universe. The more I dwelled on it, the more it made literal sense to me. The notion of sacrificing what you love, renouncing possessions, giving up what makes you feel secure and comfortable in order to, in some symbolic way, feed the creative fires of the universe---this mythical, primitive idea suddenly made sense to me on a deeply personal level. The meaning of sacrifice felt real. 

That night I realized the only way I could fix my aching depression and dissatisfaction with life was to dismantle and demolish the life I had built, to sacrifice it all and plunge into the unknown with the faith that things would all work out for the better, that the creative energies of my universe would be restored by my sacrifice and guide me to a new, more fulfilling life. This was a terrifying realization because it meant I would need to give up everything that made me feel secure and comfortable. I would have to endure the suffering of separation from what I had become attached to, which was a feeling of security. For ten years I'd been living in tiny apartments until finally I'd been able to buy a nice big house, then over several years we invested so much work and energy into the house to make it comfortable. Then we added the big puppy dog into the mix and the house became his home too. And now I had reached the realization with certainty that I needed to give all that up to go seek happiness in the unknown. I knew then that to restore balance in my life I needed to sacrifice everything that made me feel secure to instead go off alone, in Joyce's phrase "wandering among the snares of the world." I had to destroy the life I had built so I could eventually rebuild my life in a better way. 

*   *   *

"As soon as I emerged from a self-made prison

My own ambitions made way for the decision of a lifetime, of a lifetime

It ain't sit right with me that I might die

No, I can't go, I got work to do

The never-ending life cycle, how a circle do

This is personal

This is personal"

        

              - Navy Blue, "Light"

During the peak of the pandemic lockdown, some of my friends died unexpectedly. I wrote about this earlier this year. Adding to the pain of those sudden losses was being unable to process their deaths properly with any sort of wake or gathering to memorialize them. The shock of those deaths made an impact on me that eventually changed my life. I found it especially difficult to process the death of my old friend and coworker Scott who was the same age as me and had been in good health, only to be found dead in his apartment one night in late October 2020. After that I began to develop a craving to get out and see the world, to go try and fulfill my dreams and dream big, to no longer defer any of my ambitions into the future but to try and live life now since it had become abundantly clear to me that I could die at any moment. Scott was a deep philosophical thinker, a passionate mind with a love for literature. We often talked about life and death, he loved getting into heavy discussions. Feeling a bit of guilt over his sudden death, I also developed an ambition to live big and embark on exciting adventures in his honor. He (along with many other friends of mine) had insisted for years that I go visit Ireland because of my love of James Joyce's art and because Scott had been there once before and felt it was a special place. So, when I was at the beginning of my recent overseas adventure and found myself getting drunk on whiskey while hanging inside a stone tower built in 1804 on the coast of Dublin, I was toasting to Scott and communing with his spirit. 

A recent NYRB article about Dostoyevsky discusses how the Russian novelist was sentenced to a Siberian prison camp as a political prisoner and while he was there, was the victim of a "mock execution." He and the other prisoners were condemned to death, given their last rites, taken outside to face a firing squad, and at the very last possible moment the execution was called off. Some of his fellow prisoners went insane in reaction to this and never recovered while Dostoyevsky went on to compose some of the most profound novels ever written. One of his biographers posits that the experience of the mock execution left Dostoyevsky "with a completely different view of time and ethics, which Frank calls 'eschatological [apocalyptic] apprehension.' Dostoevsky concluded, he says, that 'every instant takes on a supreme value,' and 'each moment of the present is when a decisive choice has to be made.'" Although I did not experience anything nearly as harrowing as Dostoyevsky, the death of some people close to me left me with a similar feeling about the importance of each instant. I became increasingly uneasy about wasting time. I felt whatever youth I had left was being wasted in the exceedingly comfortable yet quiet existence I was living at my nice house with my ex-girlfriend and my dog. I was consumed by an urgent need to get out and experience the world. 

So I made the decision to give up everything I had, to downsize my existence, donate or sell off most of my things and place all my books into storage, pack up a couple suitcases and go off into the world. Originally I planned to drive around the United States visiting everyone I know in different states, but once I was out of the house and away from my dog I found it too painful to be anywhere near my old place, so I decided to go faraway and flew overseas to Ireland. There I was blessed to meet a Brazilian girl, a lawyer and a deep, passionate thinker who I connected with on a level that made it seem like she'd known me for a long time. Eventually she brought me to meet some of her extended family in the South of France and it became one of the most incredible adventures of my life. When I was dismantling my previous existence, moving out of the house and putting all my stuff into storage, I felt a strong sense all of that, even though it was painful and difficult, was just a preparation for a future more exciting than anything I'd previously conceived of. Months later, when I was zooming around the Mediterranean Sea in a boat with Brazilians, diving off the boat into pristine waters off the coast of a small town near Marseilles, floating in the sea, drinking lots of champagne, staying in a penthouse in Cannes, visiting the Picasso Museum in a 14th century castle in Antibes, driving through the mountains of southern France, drinking the best wine in the world and eating like a king at a restaurant in a small French town on some Anthony Bourdain shit, I knew then that my earlier visions and realizations about sacrifice were meaningful and important. I knew that my premonitions about taking a daring leap into the unknown had manifested, my determination had paid off. My new future was being constructed and it was indeed more incredible than anything I'd ever imagined. 

While the process has already been rewarding, none of this has been easy. I'm having to figure things out week to week. As I write this, my latest European adventure has recently concluded, I went to six countries in a span of eight weeks and had enough amazing experiences to write about and talk about for the rest of my life. But now I'm back in Staten Island, NY, staying at the house I grew up in, sleeping in the same bedroom I was in since I was an infant. Maybe in some way I'm connecting with my inner child and healing some old wounds. Above all I'm trying to recompose myself and plot a new future while continuing to heal from past loss. I know the pandemic era has been difficult for many people and that my deconstructing of my life to build something new is part of a larger pattern in which many people are quitting their jobs or getting divorced and going off into something new. For anyone who's suffering, I hope you can feel inspired to hold on and to be brave and to grasp at your dreams. 

Al Pacino & Robert DeNiro in Epic Conversation

Two of the all-time greats sit down to discuss their friendship and careers. I had no idea they both grew up in Manhattan and their acting careers essentially began in the coffee shops and bars of Beat-era Greenwich Village. Incredible how much artistic talent arose from that neighborhood during that period.

Whenever I hear about Greenwich Village in those days I think of one of my favorite authors, David Markson, who was a fixture of the Village during that time. Markson shared some colorful stories about his experiences during that era in an interview here.

(Video) RZA Shares the Wu-Tang Secrets, Takes Us Thru the Martial Arts Film Chamber

Thank you for this, RZA. Thank you, Vanity Fair. Thank you to everyone who made this video happen. One of the coolest Wu-Tang clips you'll ever see.

The Sudden Relevance of Children of Men

Poster by Mondo.

One day last year, I sat down and wracked my brain to come up with a ranking of my favorite films of all time. After much deliberation, I determined my top film ever is Children of Men, the dystopic masterpiece from director Alfonso Cuarón, released on Christmas Day 2005.

I can remember seeing it for the first time. I was in San Diego visiting my brother and his wife. We all went to see it together. When it was over, I felt stuck to the chair, unable to move. The emotional impact of the film felt like a spear had impaled me, pierced my chest and nailed me to the theater seat in wide-eyed shock. It was an experience I'll never forget.

Despite the premise being a distant future---the year 2027 in which humans have lost the ability to reproduce leading to anarchy and rampant terrorism all around the world---everything about the film felt relevant to the current moment. I can remember being viscerally stunned at the force of the filmmaker's message, it felt like a desperate plea, trying to re-awaken our sense of humanity through art. Now, a little more than 10 years later, this sci-fi dystopian display of theatrical imagination feels more realistic than ever, loaded with xenophobic nationalistic politics conveyed through news media, ever present armored police militants, and extreme anti-immigrant, anti-refugee policies leading to frequent terrorist attacks.

Lately Children of Men, which was a box office flop when first released, has been gaining more and more attention due to its sudden allegorical relevance in our alarming contemporary situation. Abraham Reisman of Vulture recently summoned director Alfonso Cuarón to discuss the film as framed in the context of Brexit, the Trumpacolypse, etc, leading to an in-depth feature piece entitled "Future Shock" positing that Children of Men "might be the most relevant film of 2016."

In the feature, Cuarón describes the conception and execution of the film's most famous cinematic feats, its long uncut shots with the masterful cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezski. I enjoyed this bit about working with him:

He recruited his longtime friend and frequent partner Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki to be his cinematographer. Together, they hit on the idea of loading up the background with information — graffiti, placards, newscasts — and thus limiting the kind of expository dialogue that often plagues dystopian stories. Cuarón recalls Lubezki declaring, “We cannot allow one single frame of this film to go without a comment on the state of things."

And Cuarón expresses his view of our current wayward moment in history:

The gap between our world and that of Children of Men is closing rapidly, but he refuses to give up his faith in our wayward species. There are dark days ahead, to be sure, but perhaps they will also be days of transformation. “Look, I’m absolutely pessimistic about the present,” Cuarón says. “But I’m very optimistic about the future.”

Following the feature, Vulture also published an expanded interview with Cuarón where they go into more detailed depth on the making of the film, what he felt it was really about ("it was more about spiritual infertility"), and the filmmaker's enduring hope for the future.

On the same note, YouTube film analyst Nerdwriter created this fantastic, enlightening glimpse of the symbology within the film's loaded frames, "Do Not Ignore the Background":



^
To the excellent observation that the shot of pregnant Kee in the barn echoes the posture of Botticelli's Venus, I want to add that the scene is also literally overflowing with symbols. Kee, the key symbol of the film, the future of the human race in the form of a young pregnant mother from Africa, stands surrounded by cattle, symbols of fertility from time immemorial, with their mother's milk being extracted. Fertility, fecundity, pregnancy are the story's most important symbols. Note the year is 2027, and it's been 18 years since the last child birth. 27 and 18 are both divisible by 9, the number of gestation. I could go on forever about this movie.

Here's hoping we as humanity get through our current bleakness and continue to produce beautiful art like Children of Men. 

Some Thoughts on Chess and Artists Who Love Chess

Portrait of Chess Players - Marcel Duchamp (1911)

Recently, a new employee started working at my job, a Turkish guy, and in his introductory email he noted that he plays chess competitively. As someone who's long been fascinated by chess, played sporadically for many years, and desires to improve, I of course sought him out to play some games during lunch breaks and try to learn something from him.

The Turkish chess master has now beaten me 21 straight times.

While I have a great interest for the game, I'm a subpar player prone to boneheaded mistakes. He's a pro who plays in tournaments for financial prizes. Once he told me that his chess teacher can play something like 50 games on different boards simultaneously while blindfolded, and win most of them. He confidently asserts that he can beat me blindfolded. I don't doubt it.

Playing chess, talking chess, and getting my butt whooped in chess has rekindled my passion for the game and I've played at least a game or two each day since. Occasionally I'll watch some chess instructional videos or do tactics puzzles. One day I hung around after work and the Turkish chess master (whose first name, Baris, recalls another Turk from an earlier chapter in my life, the manager of a restaurant I worked at in lower Manhattan---we shared a birthday, yet always clashed) provided me a couple hours worth of lessons. My rating skyrocketed from there and I've been playing much better ever since. For some reason I'd always had trouble staying above the 900 level consistently; since that one lesson I've been around 1300. It's much more fun to play when you don't suck.

*   *   *  

I can't remember exactly when I learned to play chess. Sometime around 11 or 12, I think. My mom claims it was when I was punished one day, forbidden from watching TV or playing video games, so I somehow taught myself how to play chess.

What I do remember is playing chess games at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan (the very same spot where the Occupy Wall Street movement would later spring up) during lunch breaks when I was 14, working my first summer job in '99 as a messenger in that area, under the shadow of the World Trade Center. There'd be folding tables set up and games going on there a couple days a week. The park players were aggressive, talked plenty of smack, and required anyone who sits down to play to put up money. Serious players only. Many of these dudes were impoverished, homeless, likely just hustling chess games in the park all day for cash. I used to get my ass whooped, often in front of crowds of lunching onlookers (and, this being New York, commentators). Didn't care. I love those Manhattan park chess players. That whole scene, with crowds gathering around active tables of chess games in city parks, feels like a relic. A civil gathering of scores of diverse people to compete and match wits.

After 9/11, Zuccotti was pretty banged up, then used as storage for years before eventually being rebuilt and reopened. By the time the new and improved Zuccotti Park was unveiled I was a senior in college at Pace University nearby, disappointed that I'd soon be done with school, finally done with downtown Manhattan, and wouldn't get to enjoy the fresh new version of Zuccotti which now had marble slab tables with chess boards built into them.

Nevertheless, I don't think they play a whole lot of chess over there. It's a relatively tiny park, occupying essentially one city block. Washington Square Park, by comparison, is huge. That's where the real New York City park chess scene takes place. My sister lives down the street from there now. Last Christmas I was staying at her place, snapped a pic of some chess players in the park one afternoon while walking through.

*   *   *

As with other elements of my life, my chess interest originally sprang from my love of the Wu-Tang Clan, particularly the group's most devoted chess players, RZA, GZA, and Masta Killa. They've talked about the game often, rhymed about it frequently, filmed chess-inspired music videos, the cover of the Liquid Swords LP is a bloody Marvel comic scene of a chess board battle, GZA did a whole chess-themed record with DJ Muggs called Grandmasters. Chess even gets its own chapter/chamber in RZA's Wu-Tang Manual---suffice to say, it's an integral part of the Wu-Tang mythology. So as a dedicated Wu head from Staten Island, I felt as a kid that I must learn the game. The more I got into it, I realized being in the habit of playing chess, thinking about chess moves, enhanced my focus in life and helped with decision-making. It's a mindfulness practice. My mind felt better organized during periods when I was playing chess. Not unlike listening to heavily lyrical hip hop, it's a type of mental exercise. And it's addictive.

RZA has been an outspoken advocate of chess for years and even created a Hip Hop Chess Federation to educate children. Their slogan is: "Fusing logic and the arts to unite minds and hearts."

That fusion of logic and arts that chess embodies is what has fascinated me most about it recently.

So many prominent artists were also chess enthusiasts.

Among these, the most notable must be legendary 20th century artist Marcel Duchamp, who was such a chess junkie that at one point during the height of his career he basically gave up on creating art to pursue playing chess full time. I've written once before about this, he eventually slowed down his obsessive chess playing and returned to the arts, but maintained his interest by becoming a chess journalist and blessing us with some insightful, eloquent commentary on the game.

"I have come to the conclusion that while all artists are not chess players,   

all chess players are artists." - Duchamp

Here's a video of Duchamp discussing chess, which he likens to an addictive drug, while standing in front of the Chess Players piece I shared above.

And here is a famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess against a nude Eve Babitz [oh and NSFW? but it's art goddammit!].

Behind them lies Duchamp's masterpiece, the extraordinary glass pane entitled The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. (You can read the full story behind that photo in this detailed Vanity Fair piece.)

The combination of chess and lust invoked by the image reminds me of a memorable scene in an old Seinfeld episode. Jerry is dating a woman who disgusts and irritates him but she's irresistibly attractive physically, likening his conundrum to a chess game between his brain and his penis.

*   *   *

As I mentioned, RZA has long been a proselytizer of chess and there's a slew of random RZA chess videos around the internet to prove it. He plays against a New York Times chess editor, he plays against a young grandmaster, he freestyles in a cypher after a chess tournament, lectures at a chess symposium, there's even footage of a live concert that begins with RZA and Yoko Ono playing chess on stage:

You can imagine what a thrill it was for me when I explained to the Turkish chess master coworker that my chess interest stems from the influence of The RZA and Wu-Tang and he responded that he'd actually played a couple games against RZA once when The Abbott had visited his chess club in Los Angeles years back. He showed me a pic. So the guy I've been playing chess with has actually played against the artist who sparked my interest in the game in the first place. I find that incredible.

*   *   *

During this recent period where my interest in chess has fired up again, I've simultaneously developed a new interest in the life and work of author Vladimir Nabokov. I'd been stumbling upon Nabokov biographies in bookstores, thumbing through them and learning more about him, developing a fascination for this esteemed and controversial scribe. Picked up a thick collection of his short stories and have found them to be about as pleasurable to read as any stories I've ever encountered. They're exquisite.

Nabokov was an interesting dude, extremely prolific, a writer so productive he puts most others to shame. He wrote tons of short stories, dozens of novels, books of poetry, books of literary criticism, and somehow was also a respected lepidopterist who published scientific articles on the study of butterflies. He did all this while trying to survive on income from, variously, working as a tennis instructor, boxing instructor, language teacher, and eventually literature professor at Cornell. With all that going on, he was also an ardent chess enthusiast.

He wrote a chess novel called The Defense and spent ample time composing chess problems about which he wrote: "The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one's consciousness." He felt that chess problems "demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity and splendid insincerity."

Nabokov had a very involved, collaborative relationship with his wife, Vera. He read every story and novel to her as he was writing them, then she'd type them all out for him. She was also an avid chess player and they played each other every day. There are some charming photos of the Nabokovs playing chess together like this one.

The Nabokovs enjoying a game of chess.

*   *   *

The filmmaker who adapted Nabokov's most famous novel Lolita to the screen, Stanley Kubrick, was also an avid chess player. While growing up in New York City, Kubrick honed his game partaking in the chess battles of Washington Square Park and was part of a chess club nearby. In the Wu-Tang Manual, RZA comments on Kubrick's habit of always keeping a chessboard on set during the shooting of all his films, challenging any and all takers. The game appears in many of his films and he was even a member of the United States Chess Federation. A short piece in The New York Review of Books entitled "Playing Chess with Kubrick" details physicist Jeremy Bernstein's experience of befriending Kubrick and getting beat in chess over and over again.

Since Nabokov wrote the screenplay for Kubrick's Lolita film, I wonder if the two geniuses ever actually sat down for a chess game... I can't find any documentation of it, but surely they must have. What a fascinating battle of the minds that would've been.

To conclude, here is an awesome video essay on "What Chess Taught Kubrick About Filmmaking" that goes into much further detail about Kubrick's love of chess and how it factors into his films:

Some Things I Did in 2015

Looking back on 2015, it was a pivotal year in my life. I moved on from a job where I was unhappy to a new job where I'm happier than ever. My first car finally fell apart after 12 years of lugging me and my crap around from one part of the country to another leading to my acquiring a brand new car. I turned 30 years old, officially bringing an end to the promise of my 20s. I closely followed and rooted for the New York Mets on a thrilling ride to their first pennant in 15 years. Wrote a few pieces I think are pretty solid. Started writing my first book, finished the first part of it. And, most significantly, I participated in and completed an enjoyable, challenging, collaborative creative project whose finished product I'm very proud of.

Here's a quick rundown of some of the significant things I wrote, read, watched, or listened to in 2015.

Some Things I Wrote in 2015 on Literature/History:

The Allure of Gravity's Rainbow and Its Mysterious Author

Gravity's Rainbow (Japanese cover)

A consideration of author Thomas Pynchon and his most famous novel, the intrigue of which enthralled me throughout the winter of 2014-2015. This piece was one half of a collaborative project with fellow blogger The OG from The Overweening Generalist focusing on the topic of Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow. Part "Guide to Pynchon" part examination of Timothy Leary's love for the 20th century author's most famous novel, this was my favorite piece to write this year and the one I'm most proud of.

The Colossus of Staten Island and Other Historical Detritus

My trip back to the homeland of Staten Island, NY during the 2014 holidays inspired this discussion of a few hidden gems in SI's history. Chief among these:

In the early decades of the 20th century, there were plans to commemorate the island's rich history and recognize America's original inhabitants with a giant national monument featuring a Native American giving the peace sign, overlooking the entrance into New York Harbor. This monument was to rival the Statue of Liberty. The National Native American Memorial would have been the Colossus of Staten Island, greeting ships as they enter into New York from the Atlantic. Except it never happened.

For Bloomsday 2015

I finally got to write something about the sole extant recording of James Joyce reading from Ulysses in this short piece. More importantly, I actually got up in front of people and delivered an introductory talk on the book and did some readings from Ulysses for a pretty well attended and fun Bloomsday event at Malvern Books here in Austin last June.

FinWake ATX visits the Ransom Center
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin that I organize had the special privilege to visit the treasure trove archives of the Harry Ransom Center this past summer for an exclusive showing of some of their most prized Joyce-related objects. It was an exciting educational experience. I wrote about some of the items we saw here.

Anastomosis
A brief meditation on the fascinating word "anastomosis," its many meanings and applications and its central importance in the message of Finnegans Wake. 


"dotter of his eyes": The Mystery of Lucia Joyce and Finnegans Wake
Examining the controversial history of Joyce's daughter Lucia and her purported influence and involvement in the creation of Finnegans Wake.

What is Finnegans Wake? A Simulacrum of the Globe (Part 1)
Taking a glimpse at the vision presented, quite convincingly, by one Joyce scholar who argues that Joyce constructed Finnegans Wake to mimic the form of our globe. This idea includes a new insight into the placement of the dozens and dozens of world languages included in the text. (Also: wait til you read Part 2, coming soon...)

Also worth mentioning here: Back in March I officially began composing what will be my first book, a monograph about Salvador Dali and James Joyce. The first part (there are three parts planned) was completed about a month ago and I'm excited with how it came out. My goal is to finish off the rest of it in 2016.

Most Significant Accomplishment of 2015:
3-Hour Musical Audiobook Adaptation of Finnegans Wake III.3 "Yawn Under Inquest" by (Peter) Quadrino (Jake) Reading (Evan) James
[recorded at Casa de Feelgood, Jan-March 2015]

I'll be lucky to ever accomplish anything remotely close to this scale again. As part of the bold experimental project to create a musical audiobook adaptation of Finnegans Wake, a group effort of people from around the world arranged by Derek Pyle called Waywords and Meansigns, I collaborated with two friends to record the 15th chapter, "reading alawd, with two ecolites" (FW 490), which amounted to a three-hour audiobook chapter with a wide array of music and effects mixed into the background. This project took three months to complete and was an extremely challenging yet thrilling enterprise, unlike anything I've ever done before or may ever do again. I've always hated the sound of my own voice, yet I find this shockingly fun and absorbing to listen to. The final product is extremely well done, a true audio experience, and I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my brilliant trio of co-creators Jake Reading, Evan James, and Melba Martinez for their efforts.

-You can hear the project by listening to Track 15 HERE.
-Read my story on the experience of creating this recording here.
-Check out an interview I did (along with the great Dutch psychonaut Steve Fly Pratt) discussing the project for RAWillumination.net. Here's a snippet:

PQ: The recording process (which took almost 3 months) confirmed a few things I'd experienced when I read the book a few years ago. For one, immersion in the text brings about a proliferation of synchronicities. It's as if the text responds to the environment. All of our names popped up in some form (there was a whole page of PQs), the text occasionally echoed something we'd talked about that night, and when we tested certain songs alongside the reading there were often extraordinary harmonies and resonances in timing and tone. The experience certainly confirmed the text's inherent musical rhythms, it really comes to life when read aloud. And last but not least, it's often said Finnegans Wake is a book for the ear but it's also a book for the mouth. You'll never utter anything like it.

(On the synchronicity tip as well: the uncanny combo of surnames in its trio of creators, "Quadrino Reading James.")

The Movies I Saw in 2014

It’s been a long year. I can’t recall a point this year when it felt like things were moving along quickly. Time slowed down in 2014. While I was more busy than ever, the months never seemed to zoom by.

This was actually my first full year span spent working full-time. Gradually my distaste for this obligation has faded as I’ve learned to accept its inevitability. It’s also a very good situation to be in, relatively speaking. In a notoriously traffic-clogged city, my commute is 15 minutes, with no highway travel. The office environment is mostly relaxed, my coworkers are cool people, it’s extremely rare that I work more than 40 hours, and it’s a gig that pays the bills. Plus, the nagging 9-to-5 didn’t hold me back from traveling to Europe for two weeks, finding and moving into a new apartment with my girlfriend, playing in a hockey league, playing in tennis leagues, writing dozens of blog posts, socializing, watching a ridiculous amount of baseball, leading a bi-monthly Finnegans Wake Reading Group, lounging aplenty, and indulging all the other luxuries a working class person tends to afford. 

More importantly for the purposes of this blog, I consumed many, many movies, read a bunch of books, and absorbed a handful of new hip hop albums. Here I would like to present a little rundown of each of those, starting with film.

In the year 2014 I attended more movies than any other year of my life. My girlfriend and I live in an apartment that's within easy walking distance of two high-quality, meal-serving cinemas so it was something we did almost every other week. Four years ago, as I mostly documented on this blog at the time, I lived within walking distance of Petco Park in San Diego and got to attend something like 20 baseball games that year (when the Padres were a surprise contender all year). This current situation feels sort of like that. World class entertainment is only a short trek away, so I may as well take advantage while I can.

Here are the films I watched in 2014...

Interstellar
Saw it twice in theaters and would love to see it again. While it’s received a pretty broad range of reviews, I tend to side with those who consider it one of the best movies of the 21st century. The deep themes resonate, the suspense consumes you, the intricately designed plot invites analysis (and I don’t mean the “here’s what Christopher Nolan got wrong” kind), the soundtrack mesmerizes, and the father-daughter relationship at the heart of the film rattles your emotions. I think it’s Christopher Nolan’s best work, an admirable homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film you must see in theaters, and a movie I know I'll still be talking about ten years from now.

Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
As I’ve written before, when it comes to art, style rules. With its narrative-threading jazz drums, unbelievably long takes, snappy dialogue, and extraordinary usage of special effects, Birdman has a style all its own. A fast-moving, impressively shot, unique masterpiece from Alejandro González Iñárritu that thumbs its nose at the outlandish explosion of comic book films, this was my second favorite film of the year behind Interstellar.

Gone Girl
A film I'd like to see again. One of the premier pop auteurs of our era, David Fincher renders this thriller novel in gripping, tense, confounding fashion. It had me on the edge of my seat throughout and, as with most of Fincher's films, I sensed a smorgasbord of subtextual themes. So much going on in this film, I'd love to see Rob Ager take a crack at analyzing it.

Whiplash
A special film from young director Damien Chazelle, Whiplash is so extremely intense that I was sweating by the end of it. An ambitious drummer in a prestigious music school clashes with an abusive, sadistic and unfortunately powerful teacher/composer. They both strive for musical greatness at the expense of everything else in life, and their showdown is viscerally entertaining.

Falling Down the Kubrick Rabbit Hole

Since first hearing about the documentary Room 237 about a year and a half ago, I've become increasingly interested in the artform of Stanley Kubrick and the internet's rich array of exploration into his work. At this point, it's become a minor obsession of mine.

Much like James Joyce, Kubrick was an artist capable of building layer upon layer of meaning and reference into his work. His movies amount to moving-picture puzzles that invite the viewer to dive into them and try to uncode their messages according to their own perspective. When asked to explain the meaning of any of his movies, Kubrick was always deceptively vague and wouldn't offer much, preferring to let the films stand for themselves as works of art to be interpreted. Asked about the symbolic meanings contained in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick once said:

"They are the areas I prefer not to discuss because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded."

Personally, I haven't really gotten much enjoyment out of any of Kubrick's movies, haven't even seen any of them more than once. They strike me as too dark. Although I do recall that upon seeing A Clockwork Orange for the first time, knowing virtually nothing about it or its director, I declared to my friends that whoever made this movie is an absolute genius.

But it's the world of Kubrick analysis and interpretation I've found to be endlessly fascinating, much the way my fascination with Joyce's work began long before I'd read any of his books. The medium of film seems much more ripe for such deep analysis, though. Great as Finnegans Wake or Ulysses are, there's only so much you can squeeze into a sentence or paragraph, whereas a master filmmaker can insert a staggering amount of material into one shot and this is exactly what Kubrick---a true visual artist who was a renowned photographer prior to getting into film---specializes in.

Picasso's Guernica

I recently re-watched one of my favorite films of all time, Children of Men, and the appearance of Picasso's Guernica caught my eye. (In the film we see the original 20 ft x 10 ft masterpiece serving as a mural in a character's dining room.) I've since been reading up on this painting a bit and watching documentaries about it.

Inspired by the despicable bombing of a civilian Spanish village by German and Italian planes in 1937, the shattered, sharp, and screeching imagery gives a unique, haunting depiction of the horrors of war. With the recent stream of bullshit pouring out of American media and government concerning the desire of the United States to drop bombs on Syria (drop bombs on who?), I've thought about this painting a lot.

A tapestry of Guernica hangs inside the United Nations building and in 2003, while Colin Powell and American military officials gave a press conference detailing the urgent need to invade Iraq (in the name of "freedom" and "peace" of course), the tapestry was covered up by a large blue curtain so as not to appear in the background. Don't want to give people mixed signals, I guess.

From Wikipedia:

Guernica has become a universal and powerful symbol warning humanity against the suffering and devastation of war. Moreover, the fact that there are no obvious references to the specific attack has contributed to making its message universal and timeless.

Further Bloomsday 2013 Thoughts, Part One

Marilyn reading the famous final chapter of Ulysses, the Molly Bloom soliloquy.

Last Wednesday (a few days before Bloomsday), at the invitation of the Austin Film Society, I attended a screening of the documentary "In Bed with Ulysses" which tells the story of James Joyce writing and publishing Ulysses. While it was refreshing and often entertaining to witness the story of Joyce creating his epic and rising to fame (and notoriety) conveyed through cinema, I found the film lacking in many respects.

Retracing Recent Ramifications of Thought, Part 2 (Room 237 and beyond)

"What do we know about what we put into anything? Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong? Do any of us know what we are creating?" - James Joyce

I've been remiss not to have mentioned Room 237 on this blog yet. I first learned of this film last October when Chuck Klosterman wrote a review for it at Grantland and began: "I just saw a documentary that obliterated my cranium. It's the best nonfiction film I've seen all year." From there I was compelled to read every Room 237 review I could find, then searched desperately for a way to see it (unsuccessfully until just a few weeks ago), and have frequently been bringing up the film as a conversation piece with friends.

Room 237 quickly turned into a mini obsession for me because the premise of the film---creative interpretation of art---aligned exactly with what I've been pursuing for a couple years now. It is a documentary by Rodney Ascher exploring alternate interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining through the voices of five people outlining their own unique theories. Their analysis, through which they verify a specific subjective interpretation by pointing out numerous correspondences throughout The Shining, is exactly what Salvador Dali referred to as "paranoiac critical analysis," a critical approach I've written about here and in my monograph on Dali and James Joyce.

As the ultimate auteur who carefully pieced together every single element that appears on screen, Kubrick's artistic style lends itself perfectly to this type of deep analysis. Microscopic scrutiny of minute elements reveals a wealth of possible meanings. Hence, the cans of Calumet baking powder displayed in some kitchen scenes hints at an underlying theme of Native American genocide, or so argues Bill Blakemore. Frequent occurrences of the number 42 allude to the Jewish Holocaust since Auschwitz opened in 1942 says Geoffrey Cocks, a noted scholar on Nazi Germany who sees the film through those goggles.

Juli Kearns, with a New England accent sounding a lot like Doris Kearns Goodwin (of Ken Burns Baseball documentary fame) graphically outlines inconsistencies in the architectural arrangement of The Shining's Overlook Hotel, indicating a spooky morphology in the building itself. Colorful Kubrick obsessor John Fell Ryan chuckles through his discussion of minor continuity errors which are, he argues, edited that way intentionally to add a further element of eeriness and subtly shock the viewer's unconscious. The most compelling (and initially ridiculous) argument in the film is made by Jay Weidner who posits that The Shining is Kubrick's confession that he helped the American government fake the Apollo 11 moon landing.*

*Though he makes it clear he is not stating the moon landing didn't occur, only that the footage was faked. Here's my take, for what it's worth: I had heard this Kubrick moon landing conspiracy theory prior to seeing the film and brought it up in a late night outdoor discussion under a full moon with some folks. They knew all about it already. A Houston native told me the story of growing up attending high school with the children of NASA employees, they told him the moon landing footage was indeed faked but we absolutely did go to the moon. The real footage was burned up in the Earth's atmosphere upon return, they said. That Kubrick was working closely with NASA on 2001: A Space Odyssey (a film featuring plenty of moon surface scenes) all throughout the 1960s adds to the intrigue of this whacky idea. True or not, it has to be the coolest conspiracy theory I've ever heard.

The entire documentary is presented through a cut-up of scenes from The Shining and various other film clips with voiceovers of the analysts detailing their stories and ideas. We don't see any of the usual documentary-style scenes of sedentary people talking and there's no narration aside from the interviewees telling their stories and theories. This immersion into the worlds of the obsessed observers actually brings the film some humor as the speakers occasionally go off the edge in their theories (most memorably when it is asserted that the face of Kubrick appears airbrushed into the clouds during the opening sequence).

Tarantino on Charlie Rose

The art of film has occupied my mind a good deal as of late and the luminous scenes of Quentin Tarantino's latest flick have me digging for more analysis and appreciation of his work in particular.

I've seen a lot of the interviews he's done recently in promoting Django Unchained but none that came close to his interview with Charlie Rose. Here he gets very candid in passionately explaining his artistic craft, especially the writing aspect of it, about which he emphasizes how important it is to remember his movies all start with a pen and paper. He also reveals that he's written book-length unpublished pieces of "subtextual film criticism" which sounds absolutely fucking awesome and only fans the flames on the "subtextual criticism" or interpretations I've been working on for a couple years now for a few different modes of art (if you read this blog at all, you'll know what I'm talking about).

Anyway, it's a lengthy interview (48 minutes) but uninterrupted by commercials and filled with legitimately great stuff from a masterful artist discussing his craft. Highly recommended.

(Video after the jump)

Reflections on Django Unchained

(Last night I got to see the new Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained for the second time in five days and so I've got many thoughts about it swirling around in my head which I'll attempt to elucidate here. Django's awesome theme song also continues to waltz in my head.)

The summer during which I turned 14 in 1999 was among the most memorable of my life. That summer I had my first job ever, working as a messenger for my mom's business in downtown Manhattan traveling around on foot picking up and delivering documents and paperwork, taking many breaks in between to explore what the city had to offer. Throughout that same year, members of the Wu-Tang Clan released their second round of solo albums and, as a devout Wu fan, I became a regular customer at the Sam Goody store located in the mall directly underneath the World Trade Center.

When the summer ended and I stopped working to begin my freshmen year of high school in Staten Island, I still had a bunch of soon-to-be-released Wu-Tang records reserved and paid for (at a discounted price) at that World Trade Center Sam Goody store. When each album was eventually released, I got a notification that it was waiting for me, and asked my mom to pick it up. Sometimes she'd have the regular messenger, a tall and very funny black man named Phil Jackson who had originally shown me the ropes, pick up the new CDs for me during his travels.

In September, Ol' Dirty Bastard's newest album was released entitled N***a Please. My parents were always giving me a hard time about my musical tastes anyway and now, as a 14-year-old white kid, I had to somehow defend this new CD I'd pre-purchased which had the words "Ol' Dirty Bastard" and "N*gga Please" scrawled in sloppy crayon across its cover. Phil Jackson was also less than pleased with the package he retrieved.

Flickerings of Film

Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali

Went to see Midnight in Paris last night and enjoyed it very much. I had heard a lot of good things about it from people and it certainly lived up to expectations. Getting to see some of the past greats like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot and everyone else in a modern film was certainly a treat. I was especially impressed with Adrien Brody's portrayal of Salvador Dali. As you can tell if you've read this blog much at all (or even looked at my previous post), I've been involved in closely studying Dali's life and work for a little while and so I was glad to see him get such a nice portrayal in the film, especially from a big actor like Brody. In all honesty, I can be a harsh critic with this kind of stuff, especially when it deals with something I've spent so much time being involved with, and I genuinely really enjoyed Brody as Dali. In fact, he may have been the best character in the entire movie (though Ernest Hemingway was certainly really good and the laughs in the theater certainly attested to that).

The one thing that bothered me, of course, was the absence of James Joyce. His name was mentioned in an anecdote very early in the film but through all the adventures the main character had with the big figures of 1920s Paris, we never got to meet Joyce. This was really disappointing because I know his character would've stolen the show, just as the real Joyce did within that rich artistic environment. The Joyce of the 20s was also perhaps the one best suited for big screen portrayal; he had the eye patch at that time, the great fame from having just published Ulysses, and was in the midst of his greatest (and most baffling) work of all, Finnegans Wake. And the biographical books are certainly filled with his wild carousing with the likes of Hemingway who had a relatively huge role in the movie. I wonder if there were Joyce scenes that were cut out that might be included in a future DVD set. I'm really interested to find out because I thought Woody Allen handled all these old famous figures extremely well.

While my girlfriend and I were getting ready to go see the movie, I reflected on how for decades and decades couples were in that same spot, getting dressed for a night at the movies to see "a Woody Allen film." It struck me for a reason I can't quite elucidate (eternal recurrence through the ages, perhaps). I've never had any real interest in Allen's films before and, really, I can't name a film of his that I particularly enjoyed. I know of Annie Hall but haven't seen it, and the last time I started to watch a Woody Allen movie I found the whiny arguments so grating I had to turn it off (admittedly, Whatever Works starring Larry David was not bad). This movie was completely different and, really, there wasn't much indication that it was a "Woody Allen" film. The director managed to stay out of his work, as in Joyce's description of the dramatic art form: "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

*   *   *

Speaking of directors, God, and creation, I have to say a few things about Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. As I wrote a few months back, the trailer for this movie captivated me and the scope seemed to perfectly fit my current mindstate. I dragged my uninterested girlfriend to a packed theater on the first night it was playing here in Austin and after nearly three hours of completely unconventional cinema, I was left in a daze. She absolutely hated the film and it doesn't surprise me that it has evoked similarly strong reactions from the public on each side of the pole.

To put it bluntly, the style of the film does not make for a palatable cinematic experience. One has essentially no idea what they are watching from beginning to end. The dialogue is minimal and most of the talking we hear is in hushed whispers. What we encounter is a collage of memories, moments, seemingly personal explorations of the unconscious. Whose unconscious it is, we're never really sure, but it seems to be that of Sean Penn's character as he goes about his work day and experiences a sort of crisis within himself.

The style was unlike anything I've experienced from a movie, it was perhaps a bit more like a (lame) amusement park ride. There is a constant pattering upon the senses of a variety of sounds, gleams of sunlight, and, if it were somehow possible, smells. (A recent piece in Salon magazine likened it to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man where we also experience the character's developing senses.) I think it is a film that speaks very clearly to our unconscious but is quite difficult for our conscious minds to ascertain. From the trailer, I expected it to be a monumental epic that would hit my emotions and provide that feeling of aesthetic arrest but it was only during one brief scene that I could feel the depths of my own memories get a bit rattled. It was a simple scene within the family kitchen on a bright afternoon and it unearthed a dusty old cave somewhere in my mind that brought about visions of my upbringing and made me a little nostalgic for Staten Island (or, at least, the innocent Staten Island of my childhood).*

I had expected the scenes showing the Big Bang and the creation of the universe to be special and indeed they were. My problem with it is that they seemed to leave something out, as we didn't get any kind of transition from all of that to the small-town Texas family. It was just a bunch of cosmic creation, formation of planets, life, etc and then a cut back to the family scene. While the point ("we are walking manifestations of the history of the universe") seems clear enough, I don't think the delivery of it was well executed. Nevertheless, an extremely admirable and ambitious idea.

I don't want to offer a firm judgment on the overall quality of the movie because I've only seen the film once and really didn't connect with it the way I expected to. That doesn't mean I think it sucked, it certainly left me in a blank daze for a while afterwards, but that may have just been due to the aforementioned tender onslaught of sights and sounds which can be hypnotizing in a way. I think I'd like to give it a look one more time and then decide how I feel about it. It's certainly sending some of our cinema scribes into a state of spiritual serenity.

*Interestingly enough, the final scene (trust me, this won't ruin it for you) is a view of Staten Island from across the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn. In the context of the film, I don't have the slightest clue why this appeared but it certainly hit me personally as that bridge holds an important place in my heart for many reasons (one of which is that it allowed my parents, from Brooklyn and Staten Island respectively, to join together.)

*   *   *

Lately, I've come to think that the movie trailer is, itself, a new medium. I can think of many examples of films that had awesome trailers while the actual film was disappointing (my favorite example is probably Revolutionary Road which had a stirring Nina Simone song). The crafting of movie trailers has gotten so good that we often relish the opportunity to watch previews just as much as the actual movie itself when we go to the theater. I certainly do, at least, and I'm always open for that next big potentiality to light up my eyes and expectations. Well, a new one of those hit me yesterday and it's called Take Shelter. Here's the trailer:



With my recent studies on paranoia (and my own occasional feelings of impending doom within this crumbling American Empire) this one seems right up my alley. Plus those are some pretty strong endorsements included within the trailer.

The Tree of Life (Expectation)

Though it was first released to the public three months ago, I have only just recently had a chance to see the trailer for the upcoming film The Tree of Life. It looks pretty special, the trailer had my soul buzzing. Check it out:



Here is how writer/director Terrence Malick describes the film:

We trace the evolution of an eleven-year-old boy in the Midwest, Jack, one of three brothers. At first all seems marvelous to the child. He sees as his mother does with the eyes of his soul. She represents the way of love and mercy, where the father tries to teach his son the world’s way of putting oneself first. Each parent contends for his allegiance, and Jack must reconcile their claims. The picture darkens as he has his first glimpses of sickness, suffering and death. The world, once a thing of glory, becomes a labyrinth.

From this story is that of adult Jack, a lost soul in a modern world, seeking to discover amid the changing scenes of time that which does not change: the eternal scheme of which we are a part. When he sees all that has gone into our world’s preparation, each thing appears a miracle—precious, incomparable. Jack, with his new understanding, is able to forgive his father and take his first steps on the path of life.

The story ends in hope, acknowledging the beauty and joy in all things, in the everyday and above all in the family—our first school—the only place that most of us learn the truth about the world and ourselves, or discover life’s single most important lesson, of unselfish love.

From the looks of it, with its scenes of everyday life growing up, as well as the visual splendors of the planets, the cosmos, inner and outer space, this will probably be one of those extraordinary films that produces a feeling of the sublime; the static feeling of "aesthetic arrest" as described by James Joyce in his first novel. I'm definitely looking forward to it.

*   *   *

When looking up information about the movie, every site emphasizes that the director/writer, Malick, has kept the details about the film under tight wrap for years now, not letting anything leak out into the public sphere. This reminded me of another famous work of art with the same name: a magnificent, elaborate marble frieze entitled The Tree of Life by Viennese painter Gustav Klimt. Klimt worked on his Tree of Life for about six years, collaborating with many artists and artisans who he instructed to keep the work a secret. The final piece is one of Klimt's most famous images.

The two main motifs are (from left to right) Expectation and The Embrace. I have a print of this painting (hard to call it just a "painting" because the real work is etched into a marble wall) hung on the wall right behind me as I write this, the curling branches seemingly bursting out of my head.

And my Expectation is through the roof for this new film of the same name.