Wednesday Digest

A relatively quiet week around these parts. One of the housemates is off at a camp for a few days, the other is back, working and beginning to sort things out for a return to college life.

Which, God willing and the Covid don’t rise, looks like it’s happening. Our state stayed off the college-state’s travel quarantine list again for this fortnight. Our numbers do seem to be sloping downward a bit while college state’s numbers are….not. Unfortunately for them and all the sick. But what it means is that the proportion of Our Bad to Their Bad continues to float at either the same level or in our favor.

Everyone’s ready. Time to get this thing really going, and not online, either.

As I keep saying, I have many thoughts on education and the present moment. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some of them down in this space soon. But then everything will change the next day, so really, why bother?

Anyway, let’s digest.

Writing: Hitting a good pace on the current project. Get up, write 2-3 thousand words, let it sit until the next morning. Get up, revise what I wrote the previous day, and then start the next chunk.

Not much else getting done besides that because something momentous happened yesterday…

Reading:  Yes, one of our library branches actually re-opened. As in, letting people in to walk around inside, instead of just driving by for curbside pickup. There have been a few branches out in rural areas that have been open for a few weeks, but none of our major branches here in town have. This was the first one, and of course, it’s strict. Open only from 10-2, only 30 permitted in a time, children’s play areas closed and unavailable, chairs and computers blocked off – no hanging out, just look for books and get yourself outa there.

As I released my huge sigh of delight and relief at finally being able to browse library shelves again, I couldn’t help but think…yeah…they could have been open on these terms the whole time. There was no reason to shut the public libraries down except for curbside pickup for four months. None.

So anyway, I came away with a stack, a mix of nonfiction and fiction and some travel guides (Yellowstone coming up!), and yeah, yeah. I do own plenty of books. There have been open bookstores in this town for a while. I could order real books online. I know. But I’m a library rat. I adore libraries – they are the space in which I first felt like a grown-up, really.

So first up, for no particular reason except that it was on the shelf, I liked the cover and the concept intrigued me: Chanel’s Riviera: Glamour, Decadence, and Survival in Peace and War, 1930-1944. 

Now, I did not waste the few hours over the past day I spent reading this book, but neither can I recommend it. It’s kind of a mess – a good idea that clearly didn’t quite result in enough material for a book, and that had to be padded a bit.

The 3-star reviews on Goodreads capture the problems:it’s disjointed and strays a great deal from the stated subject matter. It’s almost as if it’s at least two distinct books: one featuring the exploits and scandals of the wealthy and cultured on the Riviera between the wars – and then a more general history of Vichy France. The threads do come together in a bit more focused final section which details the course of the last part of the war in the Riviera – most interesting to me was the fact that in areas and times in which Italians occupied, Jews could rest easy and live freely, in contrast to the increasingly horrific treatment by the Vichy regime.

There are, indeed, books about French intellectuals and artists during the German occupation. It’s not as if it hasn’t been examined. But as I read this, what I wanted, and never got, was a clearer and more intimate point of view. This gave me a decent survey, but the title really isn’t accurate. Coco Chanel plays a minor role here. She looms large in the first part of the book, as we trace her rise and get to know her strong personality – and the sources of that – but once the decamps to Paris for the duration of the war, there isn’t a lot to say, other than, “She was one of the privileged whose life didn’t actually change much because of her social connections and her connections to the German occupiers. And maybe she was a collaborator? I won’t commit to that, though.”

I did learn a lot, though, and had some good reminders. How screwy artists are and the strange places art of all kinds emerges from – good, brilliant and mediocre. What oppression, war and hatred look like and how quickly it can explode and how tempting it is to hide or even cooperate. How spoiled so many of us are. How adaptable and resilient human beings are – after all, following years of privation, war and fear, what happened on the Riviera in 1946, barely two years after Jews were being rounded up off the streets and anyone left along the coast was scrounging for food because almost everything was sent to Germany? The first Cannes Film Festival, that’s what.

It’s not a cheery story, though, this story of resilience. At least to me, it’s not. It’s a persistent tragedy, this human cycle of self-delusion, chasing pleasure and then being slammed back into the earth, bloodied and stricken – or watching from our room in the Paris Ritz, champagne glass in hand, as others, down below are rounded up and driven away to the east.

 

Watching: 

Three movies this week w/the 19-year old, since 15-year old is gone into the woods.

Hail Caesar! Which I’d seen before and liked a lot. I find the Coen brothers fascinating artists. These very Jewish brothers have some of the clearest insight into Christian spiritual perspectives than any other filmmakers. The scene where the religious leaders are brought in to vet the big Biblical epic is just spot-on, and, at a deeper level, the whole theme of the film – which is, first, about vocation and the value of trying to fix things and make things right and good, and secondly, on a deeper level, about religion, reality, revelation and film. This post does a great job unpacking it. 

As Mannix takes on the sins of the world, or in this case, the studio backlot, he is tempted three times by a satanic aerospace company man, offering him worldly power (the power to destroy the world) and cigarettes, though like Christ in the desert, Mannix does not eat anything at the deep red-colored Chinese restaurant where the meetings takes place. As he goes about his day he shows compassion for fallen women (a young ingénue taking cheesecake pictures, a starlet pregnant out of wedlock) and even resurrects the (almost) dead, in the form of a film editor, inside a tomblike editing suite, whose scarf is caught in between the reels of her splicer.

That this same resurrection scene serves as a cameo for Joel Coen’s wife Frances McDormand, a commentary on the subservient status of women in Hollywood, a way to advance one of the many subplots, and a macabre sight gag makes it that much clearer just how many levels the Coens are working on at once.

One blogger writes “I might be mistaken, but I believe this is the first time the brothers have dipped their toes into New Testament waters.” Indeed he is mistaken. The Coens love the New Testament as only secular Jews can.

Logan Lucky, which son had seen, but I had not. I liked it – it’s the kind of shaggy piece set in a familiar place (the South) with loads of great actors I enjoy spending time with. But – perhaps because I’d just watched Hail Caesar – I wished for a slightly sharper, darker Coenesque edge.

And then, that same night, even though it was late, what the heck. We watched Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Ended at 1:30 am, so perhaps my reaction was a little shaped by fatigue, but I’m glad I saw it, and I found it so almost unbearably sad.

When I first heard about the movie, I got fairly angry and resolved to never watch it. Not a Tarantino fan anyway. No loss. Why was I angry? Because it struck me as an exploitation of the real suffering of real human beings – let me play around with the murder of real people, including a child in the womb,  for my slick counterfactual. I couldn’t see the point, I couldn’t see the use, the whole concept struck me as just wrong.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I won’t say I loved it. I found much of it, on the pop culture level, very enjoyable only the way someone raised on 60’s television could. And I’m still not completely sold on the idea, and I’m not sure I really do understand Tarantino’s purpose. Is it about the shift in popular culture brought on by the countculture and the 60’s? About masculinity and manhood? About loyalty?

I suppose it’s about all of those things. But as I watched that final scene, with the cheerful, still pregnant, still alive Sharon Tate, so delighted with her life, there in her driveway with her friends greeting her neighbor who’d just helped blow away those, who, in reality, brutally and randomly murdered all of them, I just wanted to grieve. Hard.  Not grieve for some magical lost time, which 1969 wasn’t – nor was 1959 or 1259….but for us. All of us. Perhaps it’s because  I was just off writing about Genesis, perhaps it because I was in the midst of reading about genocidal murderers and those who winked at them. Perhaps it’s because of all of that, but all I could think of was simply Why why why are we so fucked up? Why can’t we just be good? God. Help. Us.