01/20

Fine-grained appraisals of a few Joe Pesci roles. Don't know about the films themselves, but Violet Lucca makes a good case for Pesci's work in them.

Utterly fantastic analysis of the feminist movement in Saudi Arabia. As the authors note, the situation is unique for a number of reasons. Islamophobes frequently point to genuinely terrible conditions in Saudi Arabia as proof of Western superiority, but this critique is not made in good faith, instead advancing imperial feminism in a way that continues the erasure of women's agency. The response must not be cultural reductionism -- viewing Saudi Arabia as a uniformly oppressive nation due to Islamic fundamentalism -- or dismissive universality -- ignoring the particulars of life for Saudi Arabian women to blur "all women" into an oppressed totality. The authors prove their point and then some by examining the contradictions, progressions, reversals, and ongoing struggles of Saudi Arabian womanhood.

And another characteristically excellent Viewpoint piece (I had a free day at work recently, so I spent it reading): context to Etienne Balibar's focus on immigration in the difficult years après May '68. This is more than just a deep-dive into one historical moment, worthwhile as such an endeavor might be. The author persuasively argues that Balibar recognized revolutionary energy was alive and well in immigrant worker movements of this transitional period. Though attempts were made at articulating a cross-sectional worker-led movement, old specters of French nationalism came back to haunt the movement, precipitating Mitterand-era austerity and weakened severely as a result. In talk of May '68, the student movement always enjoys pride of place, but I wonder if perhaps this has always been a mistake, if the burnout experienced by protesting students was not characteristic of the left uprising on the whole, as evidenced by impassioned worker struggles continuing well after that legendary anti-climax. It's a suggestive way to re-conceptualize established wisdom about "inevitable" revolutionary failures; I'd be interested to see what turns up in pursuing this angle further.

Japanese names will be written surname-first from now (and some context + history on why they haven't always been).

I've written before about how much I hate our Democrat-approved Republican Governor, but my bottomless hatred has somehow entered new depths. Pareene is right: Hogan is a fairly ordinary Republican whose overt corruption is most likely legal (our many horrible Democrats have happily led our state to national pre-eminence in that regard!). His theft of money designated for Baltimore's planned Red Line transit system was reprehensible enough already. And yet, somehow, it always gets worse.

A sad study about something very important: black boys' reactions to the deaths of their friends. I feel this is especially needed in a city like Baltimore, still dealing with the gun influx driven by the Baltimore Police Department's corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. Grief is complex and long-lasting. The full extent is rarely visible, as the ripple effects can spread widely and subtly. Definitely work worth a careful read.

I quite liked this brief glimpse backward by Dennis Lim at the now-gone 2010s, especially his noting the shift from elegies for capital-C cinema toward the heterogeneous, fragmentary, and overstimulating. Or, put somewhat differently, cinema to post-cinema.

The USA, unlike Iran, has no heroes. An incredibly perceptive generalization that, of course, isn't altogether true. I'd nominate Angela Davis as a living hero, at the very least, but she's the exception that proves the rule, in that most US Americans don't know who she is or, if they do know her, don't value her as a hero. Someone like Bernie Sanders could be described as enjoying widely-agreed hero status, yet even he could never unify this country behind him. The United States is a nation-state in eternal self-destruction, its heroes only ever speaking to the oppressed, often despised the oppressors, never recognized for their efforts in life -- and maybe not even in death, either.

I've been keenly interested in Spanish politics ever since that extraordinary Bue Rubner essay I've probably linked more than once here, so I was very eager to learn more about Spain's first left coalition in over 80 years. The linked essay points out several caveats: the Catalonia issue still festers, with left and right feeling slighted in this arrangement; the radical right, particularly incensed over this result, has been gaining in numbers for years now; and, really, as much as this is a good thing, it is also rather bad, in that Spain is basically catching up 40 years late to the social-democratic system once dominant throughout Europe. It's a moment of promise, but one that could easily be sabotaged from a number of directions, as the case seems lately to be in Spain.

My mind is reeling from this (uncharacteristically?) rigorous, astonishing Jacobin essay about the American labor movement's complicity with imperialism. It's far too comprehensive for me to really summarize, but there are so many people, political events, national histories that need serious scrutiny once you see how intertwined the AFL-CIO and other labor organizations have been with USAID, the CIA, and the US government generally. For now, all I can say is dive deep into what's unearthed here, and I'll look to do the same when I come back to it.

Isaac Asimov, serial sexual harrasser.

The cruel optimism of Star Trek -- and, really, fandom in general.

Really expressive UNCUT GEMS review from Brandon Soderberg, contrasting that film's web of oppression with the exceptionalism touted by oppressors.

Not sure about 50% of what gets said here but there's some things worth digging into, especially the subsumption of production into consumption. Maybe I got the wrong impression, but I thought normcore was coined by Fiona Alison Duncan? For K-hole, sure, but specifically by her? That was my first exposure to it at least. Maybe the linked dossier is the real originating source.

Feel like Jakarta will soon be one of the world's worst climate change disasters.

Definitely found things that correspond with my experience in Adam Kotsko's dismantling of Christmas falsehood. Also liked his account of status anxiety over tenure, which takes on many nuanced forms likely invisible to outsiders (such as myself).

August Wilson's Jitney, and the suggestive idea that fiction can be a better cognitive map of economics than mathematical models. (I really liked Denzel Washington's adaptation of FENCES, so this is just another reminder that I need to give Wilson a serious look.)

My only familiarity with Elizabeth Wurtzel is watching PROZAC NATION once a long time ago, maybe before I even knew I was depressed, but I did like what she wrote in this essay. RIP, an early death stings the most. (And chilling especially because she discovers here that the cancer gene which would take her life comes from the man she never knew was her father.)

Guy Debord's on my 2020 reading list, and a real encounter with Situationism feels like it's drawing closer every day.

Hard agree on Brody's preamble (less so some of his choices). Now that I've begun volunteering for my local video store, I actually have the joy of feeling like I'm doing something to counteract the torrential stream of anti-aesthetic non-art.

Rogue konbini!! Best of luck Mr. Matsumoto!

Africa's wealthiest man may fundamentally reshape Nigeria's economy in the 2020s.

A convincing argument from Adam Kotsko on why we should wish eternal damnation on our oppressors -- however, my counter-point would be that this wish still relies on an arbiter of justice who may well not exist, and that we shouldn't risk the chance that the powerful will get off scot-free. It is the inverse of finding hope in salvation; the possibility of damnation blunts one's justifiable moral outrage in the present, deferring proportionate punishment to some unspecified time after death, which may yet be the final deadline for justice being served. Do we really want to run it down to the wire like that? Shouldn't we mete out consequences now in the time we're given, just in case?

Very nice takedown of FALC by Gavin Mueller. I've cooled on it a lot since the heady Williams and Srnicek days, and I'll have to see if I can remember to link that critique of accelerationism + xenofeminism I read this summer. But in short: workers stand to lose the most in utopian left projects (quite ironic for an allegedly Marxist strategy). It's not so much that there can be no move past the nuts and bolts of labor, rather that things like FALC-adjacent innovation will always meet their match in employer exploitation, as Mueller argues above. A return to the Communist Manifesto helps: only a total worker-led overthrow of capitalism will generate truly liberatory conditions -- at which point we can mechanize whatever we so choose.

Bernie Sanders and his organizing tactics. I usually refrain from commenting too much on US electoral politics because I think their importance is over-emphasized, to the detriment of more urgent political struggles happening elsewhere (i.e. the Global South, but even within the US itself outside the changing fortunes of career politicians). Yet there are a few reasons I did want to check this out. Chief among them is the author whose Twitter account brought me to it, Ryan Grim, whose talk I went to see at the Radical Bookfair a few months back. I was skeptical, again, of the centrality of US electoral politics (he was presenting on his book charting the course from Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but I figured at least I could pick up some background knowledge on past progressive struggles. To my surprise, Grim's argument was compelling and persuasive, highlighting the strokes of luck that had shaped the US neoliberal consensus. Two key examples: the legendary Reagan Revolution was far weaker than it's assumed to be, with most of the states that voted red only doing so by slim margins; and Bill Clinton's victory too was far from totalizing, languishing in the mid-40s due to Ross Perot splitting the Republican vote. For reference, that's around the percentage by which John McCain lost to Obama in 2008.

So if we begin shedding the conventional wisdom of Reagan and Clinton as two figureheads of a unified movement with mass appeal, instead recognizing widespread discontent with neoliberalism and a hunger for alternatives, what other possibilities might emerge? I gather that's the larger thrust of Grim's argument, but since I haven't read the book, I'll settle for what this lengthy essay puts forth. My major complaint with it is one I heard aired a while back -- maybe even from Gavin Mueller -- that left-wing organizing in the US will always face the danger of being instrumentalized for the purpose of electing Democrats. That's very much the case with Bernie, a non-traditional politician yet a nominal Democrat all the same, and there are glimpses of the harm this can cause in Grim's account of the Our Revolution ordeal, in which idealistic young organizers were put to work securing dark-money and billionaire donations. To his credit, Bernie shifted away from that model and towards the bottom-up one headed by the person whose efforts structure this essay, organizer Claire Sandberg. The results of such a paradigm shift should be apparent soon.

I do think there's value in uniting people involved in various movements under one cause, but when that cause's ultimate horizon is a single night's election, energy can dissipate quickly afterward, most of all when the endeavor fails. The recent example provided by Corbynism will be interesting to triangulate with Bernie's attempted revolution, whether it succeeds or not. For now, I want to shift focus downward and outward, following a link from Grim's essay onto a profile of an organizer from Lancaster County, my longtime home in PA. She's spearheaded progressive efforts elsewhere since leaving PA, but she was also involved with an effort to turn Lancaster blue, despite folk wisdom proclaiming Lancaster's eternal conservatism. It's in these smaller stories that the big successes of later years follow, as was the case when Bernie's national emergence spurred Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run her own campaign and become a progressive symbol for many young people. I personally may not need their example to motivate me now, but I know from experience how involving electoral politics can be, so even though I want to direct my efforts and attention elsewhere, I know that Bernie, AOC, and others yet unknown will be galvanizing forces for left-wing movement-building in the US, best observed in the organizing experience their political campaigns offer.

Excellent discussion of Nobuhiko Obayashi by Evan Morgan. I await the day Obayashi is perceived as more than a wacky Orientalized one-hit wonder, when his filmography is made widely available and given the respect it undoubtedly deserves.

Kentucky Route Zero nearing conclusion. I haven't played the game, and I gather it may be over-generating its own hype, but Walker's exploration of it sure makes it sound worthwhile.

Some sharp points about liberalism's inability to perceive its own failures, especially during the End of History that was meant to be its coronation. I've seen Malcolm Harris beat up on the Gopnik book too; it must be an especially symptomatic case.

Very nice writeups on some of the 2010s' best films, in particular Matt on #1's THE TREE OF LIFE. I would say I've seen a plurality of these, but as always, retrospectives like this help nudge me in the direction of catching up on absences (i.e. ALMAYER'S FOLLY, which I'm dying to see).

I never trusted cop shows, especially the cutesy ones like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and this Color of Change examination gives good details on the exact ways TV crime shows launder copaganda through narrative sleights of hand.

Andrew Yang and the USA's New Money men, modeled after yesteryear's British Tories. Another unusually sharp view of a trend I otherwise wouldn't care to investigate.

Something that interests me about Mohammed bin Salman's hack of Bezos' phone is that it almost seems to suggest Bezos has strategic importance equivalent to any other head-of-state, as if he's a hostile foreign power that Saudi Arabia needs to directly target as a form of geopolitics. Like Amazon is its own sovereign nation. Eerie in a rather Gibsonesque way.

The writer of this 2009 story on Peter Thiel sabotaging ACORN recently spoke up on its predictive value -- and he was right. Thanks in no small part to Democrat cowardice, ACORN's death was just one early success. After 10 years and some change, Thiel is still hard at work entrenching conservatism and undermining left power. Hindsight's 20/20 and all (hah), but this is clearly a warning that should've been heeded, much to our current detriment.

Charles Mudede on the how socialism can be corrupted by racism, exemplified by Hitler's National Socialism. An argument prone to bad-faith weaponization by the disingenuous ("Aha! Socialism IS the pathway to fascism!!"), but in Mudede's careful elaboration, a lucid clarification of what went wrong in the past, and how we might avoid those mistakes in the future.

Last: the indispensible Chuang supplies yet another definitive account of China's place in the world, this time by addressing the Hong Kong crisis. It's a towering work of cognitive mapping that conceives of a late capitalism in bloody turmoil beyond anyone's control, ceaselessly tearing itself apart and regenerating, a process to which Hong Kong is only peripheral now that China no longer relies on its long-time Special Administrative Region to access foreign capital. This doesn't mean Hong Kong doesn't "matter," that its turbulence is of little importance, but just that China's newfound autonomy and fusion with the US economic system has marginalized Hong Kong. The dynamic is reminiscient of the remora feeding off a shark's underside, and wherever a shark goes, the remora goes too. Hong Kong's people will, of course, resist their own subjugation, as they have done most impressively for almost half a year, yet in Chuang's analysis, the way forward is one of intense struggle and no guarantees of success, because such a situation is altogether without precedent. Again, I intend no disrespect to Hong Kong or its people in fixating on their difficulties. I love this city-state with a bottomless passion, and I will watch closely, in enduring solidarity, as the growing crisis articulates itself across the 2020s.

(Okay, P.P.S. with Chuang: the introduction on China's transition from socialism to capitalism. A superb primer that will surely be matched by equal excellence whenever I follow up with Part 1...)

Favorite, Best, Most Influential/Personally Affecting Books

Number one is the respectable one I default to whenever I'm asked what my favorite book is, but the point of this list is to explode the notion that any one book reigns supreme over the others, because all of these have shaped me in some way, and I'm thankful that each of them has come my way:

1. The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
2. Cities of the Interior, by Anaïs Nin
3. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
5. No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism, by Steven Shaviro
6. The Prince of this World, by Adam Kotsko
7. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, by Mark Fisher
8. Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, by Robin James
9. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek
10. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
11. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
12. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
13. Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
14. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
15. Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace*
16. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
17. The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace
18. Girl with Curious Hair, by David Foster Wallace
19. The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir
20. Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy
21. God's Bits of Wood, by Ousmane Sembène
22. Red Sorghum: A Novel of China, by Mo Yan
23. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, by Elizabeth Hinton
24. The Informant!, by Kurt Eichenwald**
25. The collected works of William Shakespeare***
26. Eskiboy, by Wiley
27. Anti-Semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre
28. Blindsight, by Peter Watts
29. The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir
30. Post-Cinematic Affect, by Steven Shaviro
31. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, by Shulamith Firestone****
32. The Border Trilogy, by Cormac McCarthy
33. Platform Capitalism, by Nick Srnicek
34. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
35. Hell is Round the Corner, by Tricky
36. Pale View of the Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro
37. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
38. Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo
39. The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene
40. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
41. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
42. Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, by Adam Kotsko
43. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, by David Bordwell*****
44. Confessions of a Mask, by Yukio Mishima
45. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau
46. The Shining, by Stephen King
47. The Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek
48. Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina García
49. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, by Hiroki Azuma
50. General Intellects: Twenty-Five Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, by McKenzie Wark
51. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
52. Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
53. A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburō Ōe
54. Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto
55. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
56. Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis
57. Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Life in the 21st Century, by Gayle Kaufman
58. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
59. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber
60. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
61. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, by Mark Fisher
62. Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro
63. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
64. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
65. Awkwardness, by Adam Kotsko
66. The Burden of Sympathy: How Families Cope With Mental Illness, by David A. Karp
67. Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, by Malcolm Harris
68. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, by Arlie Russell Hochschild
69. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, by Murat Kurnaz
70. The Communist Manifesto, by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

Some honorable mentions:
1. Justify My Love: Sex, Subversion, and Music Videos, by Ryann Donnelly
2. Falling Man, by Don DeLillo
3. Homo Zapiens, by Victor Pelevin
4. The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, by James K. Galbraith
5. The Parent App: Understanding Families in the Digital Age, by Lynn Schofield Clark

*I've soured on David Foster Wallace over the years, largely due to his grotesque behavior toward women. I chose to include him, though, because the books I've listed are foundational to me, in fact some of the first "adult literature" I took on and felt changed by reading. His imprint still marks me, but I don't think I'll be returning to his books (or reading any new ones) for quite a while.

**This guy's a real weirdo, and I don't even know (or want to know) what went down with that whole hentai thing. I Followed him on Twitter for a well before his conspiratorial rants and bizarre style of abbreviation made me give up and Unfollow him. But The Informant! remains on this list because its mix of surveillance, corporate evil-doing, and individual eccentricity is truly mind-boggling. I bought this in a Thailand airport in 2010 to prep for Soderbergh's adaptation, and the week I spent at my uncle's home in Texas reading this over winter break 2011 has stayed with me quite vividly.

***I know this looks laughably pretentious, and it is, but hear me out. As a college freshman I had no understanding of credits or course levels. I saw a 400-level course on Shakespeare with no real pre-requisites, and I thought to myself, why not dive right into the bibliography of this world-famous playwright? So I did, reading play after play usually in the span of a week and keeping pace with the advanced-level class surprisingly well (it wasn't a challenging year otherwise). By the end I found I quite enjoyed Shakespeare, but it's a full ten years later now, and that time has dissolved into wisps of memory. I can't rightly say which works I prefer to others -- or even which ones I read and which I didn't -- so I'm just listing them all generally as a way of saying I liked almost everything I read and would be happy to re-familiarize myself with any of them.

****I absolutely adored this book when I read it and probably still would, yet I feel compelled to mention Angela Davis' disapproval of Firestone and her sexualized understanding of race. It's a very valid point, and a reminder that I'm well past due to seriously read Davis myself. Again, this is book is fantastic, but I can't recommend it wholeheartedly without paying respect to Davis' critique.

*****I've seen this book criticized for being glib and condescending at times toward the cinema it claims to love, and I agree, that bothered me quite a bit too during my reading. Bordwell's a sharp intellect, but he can be very obnoxious. Still, there's enough salvageable material to mount serious challenges to Eurocentric conceptions of film and art, so I consider it a personal favorite despite my grievances.

Quick summary I guess....this list is all more a reflection of where I've been than where I'll end up going. I see a lot of old favorites, cult authors, and Western hierarchical standards of important literature. I want to read more poetry, more short stories, more critical theory, more work of all kind from women, LGBTQIA2S authors, and the Global South overall. This isn't really a disclaimer or admission of guilt or anything like that, just a gesture in the direction of where I want this list to go as I update it and keep on reading.