Mental 📸: Bladerunner, Algren, Tarantino, Decline of W Civ.

Awesome mural of The Lighthouse, right? I saw this on one of my walks the other day

I really don’t like social media. Part of that is a matter of temperament, and part of that is more principled—while I recognize the ways that social media can be valuable, a very real part of me thinks it’s not particularly healthy for either individual users or society at large.

Still, if you’re going to be an online freelancer (as I am), then having an online presence is sort of essential. There are ways to get around it, but having a few Instagram posts up definitely makes things a little easier when working with new clients. I learned that the hard way when I kept getting messages trying to trick me into admitting that I am not the person I claim to be online (for the record—I am. If I were going to fabricate my CV, it would look a lot more impressive).

So, last July or so I relaunched my professional social media accounts (which I’ve since started neglecting again). One strategy I’ve come up with to establish a barrier between myself and the workplace hazards associated with Threads is to put up a weekly post documenting what I’ve read or watched that week.

Unsurprisingly, people don’t exactly wait with bated breath for my next update, and I probably don’t have much of a future in social media marketing (for some reason, my post from 9/12 that I had revisited Susan Sontag’s essays didn’t go viral). Still, I think they do a decent enough job of giving people a sense of my interests and tastes.

I format them as “Mental 📸” (mental snapshot) followed by a breakdown of where my head is/has been.  It’s usually a list of what I’m reading or watching that week, but it can also just be what I’ve been thinking about.

Yesterday I had the idea of moving some of that content over to the blog. I try to post at least once a week on here, and even that feels rushed to me. But there’s still a lot I watch and read that I don’t have time to turn into a full post. Sometimes I plan to get back to that stuff, but it usually ends up getting lost in the shuffle, which both seems like a shame and contributes to my stress.

So, let’s give it a whirl:

📼 Blade Runner 2049: I’d originally watched this at The Brattle when it first came out in 2017, but I couldn’t remember anything about it. I think that’s fairly common: the film doesn’t have the memorable characters or poetic dialogue of the 1982 original. At the same time, it’s a neat tribute to the masterpiece. I thought Harrison Ford’s depiction of an older Decker was spot-on, and the subplot with Ryan Gosling’s hologram girlfriend was nicely rendered (except for the character’s demise, which felt unearned). It was visually stunning. It can’t touch the original, but I saw it as more like high-budget fan art anyway.

FYI: Did you know the name “Blade Runner” originally came from William Burrough’s Naked Lunch? Crazy, right—NLis like a counterculture Talmud that turns up everywhere.

📼Decline of Western Civilization (1-3): I was thrilled when I saw that they’d added this to Kanopy. I somehow managed to make it through the ‘90s without seeing the first volume (I did see the director Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia though, after first mistakenly renting Linklater’s SubUrbia, which turned out to be the better of the two; I miss the way physical media facilitated those serendipitous mistakes).

The first volume is an undisputed classic and the second was quite powerful (both sad and hilarious), but I had no idea they’d made a third. Its approach is clever in choosing to focus more on the homeless gutter punk fans than the artists. It’s also genuinely moving. The kids’ stories can be rough to hear. I believe Spheeris ended up marrying one of them, and the affection and empathy she has for the kids really comes through. It was weird seeing it as a middle-aged man. They shot it during my era (mid/late ‘90s), and I felt a sense of identification with the kids’ tribe as well as a weird paternal instinct of wanting to parent them. Maybe that split consciousness is part of what it is to get old.

📚I’m about halfway through Algren’s Man with the Golden Arm. Thank God I finally got around to this one! Of course I’d heard Hemingway’s praise, and I knew something of the relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, but I had no idea how fantastic this was going to be. The writing is spectacular (the dialogue in particular), and it’s as ethnographically rich as Street Corner Society without losing artistic weight. A Stunning achievement. I’ve watched a few documentaries (Algrenand Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, The Road is All) this week to enrich my appreciation of it.

📚Quentin Tarantino’s Film Speculations: I didn’t particularly care when I saw that this came out, but I’d heard enough good things about it that I finally got around to reading it. It’s so much better than I ever could have imagined! Not only are the reflections on film staggering in their depth and creativity, but the book itself is quirky and creative in its construction—the extended appendix on the middle-aged hustler who briefly lived with Tarantino and his single mom in the ‘70s, along with QT’s choice to republish an entire essay on Bela Lugosi by an obscure actor who died decades ago and didn’t live long enough to be in more than a few films stand out (FYI: the essay on Lugosi is good). Definitely a gem worth revisiting.