→ March 19, 2019
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My Uncle Napoleon.

My Uncle Napoleon, written by Iraj Pezeshkzad, is an Iranian novel written in the 1970s and later banned by the theocrats who took power in the 1979 revolution, likely for indecency, as the book is really a comic romp set during World War II in Iran. Based loosely on some of the author’s own experiences in childhood, the book follows the narrator as he falls in love with his cousin Layli and watches his father, his Uncle Napoleon, and another uncle squabble over trial things and plot against each other, often with unexpected consequences, as they all live in attached houses owned by the titular blowhard.

He’s usually called Dear Uncle in the book itself, however, and he is its Ignatius J. Reilly, a bombastic, self-important tyrant, trying to rule his house but finding himself thwarted by his brothers and often other members of the household. He’s assisted by his butler, Mash Qasem, who prefaces nearly every statement with “Why should I lie … to the grave it’s ah, ah … !” The two have concocted an elaborate fantasy of fighting for independence against Britain and in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, and Dear Uncle is convinced that the English are still out to get him, something the narrator’s father frequently uses to his advantage. The narrator’s mischievous, philandering uncle Asadollah Mirza often helps in various schemes or tries to prevent them from getting out of hand, all the while speaking of sex in code, referring to it as “going to San Francisco” (and later referring to other sex acts as other cities). Dustali Khan shows up thinking his wife is trying to cut off his “noble member,” and maybe he deserves it, although she is quick to fly off the handle and scream bloody murder. Other eccentric relatives and neighbors wander in and out of the story, which doesn’t have a real narrative arc to it other than the loose background story of the narrator’s pursuit of Layli, who is promised to another cousin, the feckless wimp Puri.

Although some of the humor in the book is rooted in Persian culture, most of it feels very universal – this could just as easily be a comedy of manners set on some English lord’s estate, a Downtown Abbey with more yelling and backstabbing and at least talk of sex, although characters in this book talk about San Francisco a lot more often than they actually go there. It’s a different picture of Iran than anything we’ve had in the media since the Islamic Revolution brought the Ayatollahs to power; the news gives us Iranian leaders screaming death to the U.S. and to Israel, cooking up anti-Semitic conspiracies, and funding terror groups around the region, while Iranian film has given us pictures of a society in a sort of arrested development, a country that could be an economic and cultural powerhouse if it were a liberal democracy. These characters feel universal, even with names that are less familiar to western minds – I didn’t realize that the Khan in Dustali Khan was an honorific, not a surname – and some historical allusions that sent me to Wikipedia.

Like A Confederacy of Dunces, My Uncle Napoleon is also very funny. There’s a slapstick element of physical comedy throughout the book, with characters waving knives and guns around, falling over each other, and, once, kicking another right in the noble member, hard enough that any plans to go to San Francisco must be put off for some time. There’s some very clever wordplay throughout the dialogue, especially when Asadollah is involved. (The narrator is the obvious stand-in for Pezeshkzad, but I did wonder if Asadollah was his own adult self arriving in the novel to comment on the goings-on.) On top of the lower-brow humor is a thick coating of farce, mocking the Iranian habit of blaming the English for various problems in the wake of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, while also taking aim at all dictators through the orotund title character, whose sound and fury generally signifies nothing, yet whose lack of rank or history of valor don’t stop him from proclaiming himself a great hero and trying to keep all of the relatives staying in his compound under his thumb. He’s constantly trying to exile various people around him, or have them arrested, or to have this one pose confess to a murder that didn’t happen just to save the family’s honor and avoid a public embarrassment. Near the beginning of the novel, there’s a family gathering when someone passes wind loudly enough to interrupt Dear Uncle, which leads to an enormous family row that the narrator’s father enjoys far too much. It’s absurd, and funny, and also a symbol of the kind of family quarrels we’ve all had or seen start from nothing and blow up into more than they ever should have become.

Whether the story goes anywhere is probably beside the point, since the journey itself is entertaining, but if you’re looking for a neatly tied bow around the book’s conclusion, you won’t really get it. The story ends abruptly, and there’s a brief epilogue, but we don’t get a traditional big finish. It didn’t matter to me at all – I don’t really remember what Ignatius J. Reilly did at the end of his book either, and that never stopped me from recommending it, as I would this one.

Next up: I’m a few books behind now but just finished Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room and Karin Boye’s Kallocain.

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→ March 6, 2019
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Leaving Neverland.

Leaving Neverland, the new, four-hour documentary airing exclusively on HBO, is a difficult watch. Two men who say that Michael Jackson sexually molested them repeatedly over a period of many years repeat those claims on camera in unsparing detail, which in and of itself would be a painful and infuriating scene to see and hear, but that’s only a small part of what makes this film both powerful and very uncomfortable. It’s far more than a new indictment of Jackson, whose status as a serial sexual abuser is beyond doubt (and beyond remedy) at this point, but serves more as a portrait of the spiraling, exponential damage wrought on their victims and their families years after the abuse has stopped.

Wade Robson and James Safechuck both say in Leaving Neverland that Jackson began abusing them when they were very young – Robson from age 7, Safechuck around the same age – and that it continued for many years, accompanied by all of the behavior we now associate with serial abusers: grooming, co-opting, and above all threatening. Robson says many times that Jackson convinced him that they would both go to jail if they were caught. Both Robson’s and Safechuck’s mothers appear in the documentary as well, as both were there when Jackson met the boys and fell under the singer’s spell, becoming unwitting accomplices to the abuse, agreeing to let their sons spend many nights sleeping at Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and accepting their sons’ answers at the time that no abuse was taking place.

While the documentary tells the history of the abuse and the public accusations of Jackson while the singer was still alive, including the 1993 accusation by Jordy Chandler, settled out of court for $23 million, and the 2003-04 accusations by Gavin Arvizo, which led to a criminal trial and an acquittal on all charges, it’s far more about the victims here than the pedophile at its center. (That said, there are some shocking moments from historical footage, including one of Jackson’s lawyers standing before the media in 2003, threatening to ruin the lives of anyone who might come forward to accuse Jackson of further crimes.) Robson was born in Brisbane, and won a dance contest that allowed him to meet Jackson, who thoroughly bamboozled Robson’s mother to the point that she left Australia and her husband, taking Wade and his sister Chantal to California in the belief that Jackson would help develop her son’s career as a dancer. Safechuck, who was the boy in the dressing room in that famous Pepsi commercial with Jackson (if you’re old enough, you almost certainly remember it), is an only child, but Jackson’s ‘interest’ in him led his mother to similarly turn their lives upside down to try to further James’ career, driving a wedge between her and his father that persists today. (His father doesn’t appear in the film.)

There’s too much commentary out there already about the mothers’ culpability in allowing the abuse to begin and continue, as well as a comment from one of the jurors in the 2003 trial that Gavin’s parents were idiots for letting the boy sleep with Jackson, but Leaving Neverland documents how well-meaning, loving parents can be hoodwinked by a sociopathic, determined pedophile who has the means to assuage any doubts or, unfortunately, buy them away. He showered the families with gifts, flew them places first-class, gave the boys unforgettable experiences on stage, while also presenting himself to the families as a lonely, misunderstood adult whose childhood was stolen from him by the pressures of global stardom. The way that the victims and their families describe the early stages of Jackson’s grooming of the boys, you can see how someone in the moment might have felt sorry for the singer, whose childhood was obviously difficult and who said he was beaten by his father, but it also becomes clear that Jackson used his past as a wedge he could drive between his victims and their parents – and that he did so with the help of enabling assistants who probably should have long ago been called to account for their actions.

Part one of the documentary delivers a lot of prologue, explaining how the two boys met Jackson and ended up victims, but part two is where the point of the story lies, as we hear, in their own words and those of family members, about the permanent damage wreaked upon them all by Jackson’s abuse. Both men speak of mental health issues, never saying PTSD but clearly suffering from it, and are still coping with their effects, while their relationships with family members are all fractured, some likely beyond any repair. Both mothers are themselves wracked with guilt that will never fade, because the damage cannot be undone, to their sons and to their families, and to other victims who might have been spared had anyone picked up on the signs of abuse and put a stop to Jackson’s ‘sleepovers’ sooner.

Both men describe the molestation in specific terms, which is a potential trigger for some viewers and worth bearing in mind before you watch Leaving Neverland. I was not personally triggered by that, but the part of the documentary – and the online response – I’ve found profoundly unsettling is the support for the abusive pedophile at the heart of the story. We see scenes of supporters outside the courthouse with signs proclaiming Jackson’s innocence (really, how could you know?), including some dingbat releasing white doves when the not guilty charges come through. We see videos of people attacking Robson online from when he went public with his abuse story, contradicting testimony he’d given in the 2003 trial that Jackson had never molested him. And if you’ve been on Twitter at all the last few nights and clicked on the #LeavingNeverland hashtag or searched for names involved in the documentary, you’ve seen all manner of support for the singer, saying he was innocent and attacking the victims and their families. You have to be deeply deluded to think that all four of the accusers we know about have lied about everything, even though these two men tell stories that are highly specific and show a pattern of behavior, to still think Jackson is the real victim here.

Director Dan Reed largely stays out of the way of the story here – aside from some drone shots of LA that don’t add much except some running time – but there is also a clear subtext to Leaving Neverland about the allure of celebrity, and how Jackson used it to seduce the families of both boys, and then to seduce the boys themselves. Both mothers, interviewed very extensively on camera, speak of Jackson’s interest in their sons’ careers and in their families as immensely flattering, and the combination of power and money led them to choose to upend their personal lives and helped blind them to what, in hindsight, should have been blindingly obvious.

Robson’s sister and Safechuck both say that they’re not asking people to forget Jackson’s artistry, but to remember the whole person – that this incredibly talented human was also a pedophile and sexual predator. I don’t see how we can continue to separate the art from the artist in this case, not now that I’ve seen the movie. You can’t simply “cancel” a musician of his importance and influence; we can stop playing Jackson’s music, and certainly Capital One should stop playing its commercial with “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” now, but Jackson has directly and indirectly influenced multiple generations of pop musicians since “I Want You Back” was their first hit in 1969. There is no erasure here, only a time for an overdue reckoning with his legacy as a talented person who did unspeakable things and ruined many lives. Leaving Neverland won’t convince people who don’t want to hear it, but it is a devastating portrait of grooming, sexual abuse, and the cascading ramifications that come years after it ends.

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→ February 22, 2019
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Innovation and Its Enemies.

The late Calestous Juma died shortly after the publication of his last book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, which may be why the book is still so little-known despite its obvious relevance to our fast-changing, tech-driven economy. Juma was a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School with a longtime focus on international development, especially the application of new technology to developing countries and to boosting sustainable development. While the prose is a bit on the academic side, Juma uses very well-known technologies and even other inventions that you might not think of as ‘technologies’ but that still drove massive cultural and economic changes that led to substantial societal, religious, or political opposition.

Juma’s main thesis is that there will always be forces that oppose any new technology or invention that offers the potential for change, and he tries to categorize the reasons for and the types of opposition that any innovation might face. Some of the case studies he covers are ones you’d expect, like the printing press, refrigeration, and genetically modified crops, but he also covers less-expected ones like margarine and coffee. Margarine was invented in the mid-1800s and faced a torrent of opposition from dairy farmers, leading to the development of dairy associations that lobbied Congress and state legislatures for absurd laws that restrained or prohibited trade in butter alternatives, from requiring labeling designed to scare consumers to requiring the stuff to be dyed pink to make it less appetizing. To this day there are still regulations that overtly favor dairy butter that date from decades ago, although the discovery that the trans fats in traditional margarine are deleterious to heart health has made such laws anachronisms.

Coffee might be the most fascinating story in the book because it appeared and spread like a new technology, even though we don’t think of it as one. Coffee originated in east Africa, notably Ethiopia, and spread across the Red Sea to Yemen, from which it began to permeate Arab societies and faced its first wave of opposition from Muslim authorities who feared its stimulant effects (with some imams ruling it haram) and from secular authorities who feared the culture of coffeehouse would give rise to organized political groups. The same two forces applied when the drink spread to Europe, where it also faced a new group campaigning against its spread: producers of beer and wine, who feared the drink would replace theirs – in part because all three were safer than drinking well water at the time – and employed every trick they could find, including getting “doctors” (such as there were in the pre-science era) to claim that coffee was harmful to one’s health. While there are still some religious proscriptions on coffee, the drink’s spread was eventually helped by its own popularity and by the split among many authorities on its beneficence and value, with monarchs and even the Pope coming out in favor of the drink.

The two chapters that look at the ongoing controversy, most or all of it fabricated, over transgenic crops is probably the most directly relevant to our current political discourse, as genetically modified organisms are probably required if we’re going to feed the planet. Juma shows how GMOs suffered because regulatory authorities were consistently behind the technology and had to react to changes after they happened, and then often did so without sufficient guidance from technology experts. No example is more appalling than that of a genetically modified salmon called the AquAdvantage salmon that grows to maturity in about half the time required for wild salmon, and that thus has the potential to reduce overfishing while providing a reliable protein source that also has less impact on the environment than protein from mammals or poultry. The U.S. government was totally unprepared for the arrival of a genetically modified animal designed for human consumption, which also gave opponents, from Alaskan legislators (including Don Young, who openly promised to kill the company behind AquAdvantage) to fearmongering anti-GM advocates (look at the “Concerns” section on the Wikipedia entry for the fish), time to maneuver around it, blocking it through legislation and excessive regulatory obstacles.

Where Innovation and Its Enemies could have used more help was in how Juma organizes his conclusions. There are common themes across all of his examples, from the natural human fear (especially those of adults over age 30) of change to concerns over job loss to questions about environmental impact, but the choice to organize the book’s narrative around specific case studies means that the conclusions are dispersed throughout the book, and he doesn’t write enough to bring them together. A book like this one could be extremely valuable for policymakers looking to create an environment that encourages innovation and facilitates adoption of new technologies while providing sufficient regulatory structure to protect the public interest and foster trust. It has all of the information such a reader would need, but it’s scattered enough that a stronger concluding chapter would have gone a long way.

Next up: Mikael Niemi’s Popular Music from Vittula.

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→ February 11, 2019
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Morels app.

Morels was the first game I reviewed for Paste, over four years ago, and crossed my radar because it was a brand-new, purely two-player game with some positive early press. It’s a great, quick-to-learn set-collection game that was only the second title I’d come across to use the now-popular rolling market mechanic, where you can take the first card or few cards in the display for free, while taking cards further from the start of the queue costs you something. There’s also a push-your-luck element to choosing which sets to collect and which to discard for twigs, the game’s currency, as well as trying to deduce what your opponent might be collecting and deciding whether it’s worth using a turn to grab something they need. It’s been on every iteration of my all-time board game rankings and my top two-player games rankings since I first reviewed it.

Late last year, an app version of Morels appeared for iOS and Android devices, using the original artwork and featuring strong AI opponents – at least, I think they’re pretty strong, since I can’t beat the hard level more than about half the time – for a very strong app experience. If you’ve been looking for a new two-player game and want to try Morels before buying the physical game, or just want a new game app that plays well as a solo vs AI experience, I strongly recommend this.

Morels is a game of mushroom collection, which means a few of my closest friends are already predisposed to hate this game. The deck includes cards of nine different mushroom types, each with a different point value and value in twigs. You can ‘cook’ any set of at least three mushrooms of one type to gain the points shown on those cards by turning in the mushroom cards with a skillet card; if you turn in four, you can boost the value by 3 with a butter card, and if you turn in five, you can boost the value by 5 with a cider card. Basket cards increase your hand limit. You can turn in two cards of any mushroom type to gain twigs, which you then use to grab cards from the market that are beyond the first two (free) spots. The market moves one space to the right on every turn, and if the rightmost card wasn’t taken, it falls into a pile just off the market that can hold up to four cards, which you can also take for free; if that pile reaches four and no one has taken the stack, they’re all discarded for the remainder of the game.

Morels app screenshot

There are two special card types in the deck. Destroying Angel cards are deadly, of course, and if you take one your hand limit is cut in half for several turns. Night cards show the same mushroom types as the regular (day) cards, with the exception of the most valuable cards, the morels, and Night cards are worth two cards of the displayed type – so you can turn in one Night card for twigs, or you can cook one Night card and one Day card of the same mushroom type for points. The catch is that Night cards show up face down, so you take one without knowing which mushroom type you’re getting (there’s one Night card for each non-morel mushroom). Game play continues until the deck is exhausted.

Decisions in the game are quick, but they’re not always simple; you’re working against the constraints of your hand limit, the finite supply of skillet cards, and the hard end to the game – you don’t get a last shot to cook once the deck is finished. I learned more strategy from playing against the AI than from playing against anyone in person, since the AI player nearly always does what it can to grab Night cards, even if it means using all of its twigs, and will generally try to stop me from collecting enough high-value mushrooms – particularly morels and chanterelles – to cook. The hard AI also seems to have good deck awareness, knowing what’s left and also managing end game well enough that I found I had to change how I played to keep up.

I’ve played the app dozens of times with just occasional glitches, and no complaints about game play or the AI. I wish it kept track of total wins/losses against each AI level, but that’s a minor quibble. The graphics are bright and clear, and you don’t really need to be able to read the mushroom titles to play it as a result. Everything you need to know to play the game well is on the main screen, and the challenge is more one of keeping track of things in your head (or I guess on paper, if you want) rather than one of the app making this information harder to find. At $4.99 for iOS or Android it’s an easy recommendation for me.

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→ February 10, 2019
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Eighth Grade.

Comedian Bo Burnham made his screenwriting debut with 2018’s Eighth Grade, a cute coming-of-age story with newbie Elsie Fisher in the lead role of Kayla. It will compete with itself between making you laugh and making you want to crawl out of your own skin, because I’m guessing just about everyone who sees this will relate to something that happens to Kayla as we follow her through the last few weeks of eighth grade and see her navigate social anxieties and prepare for high school. The film is free now on amazon prime.

Kayla is a shy, awkward teenager – watch how Fisher walks, as if she’s trying to make herself smaller – who posts ‘advice’ vlogs that, as we see, no one watches, but also worries that she’s giving advice she doesn’t even take herself. Nothing extraordinary happens to her for most of the film; she gets invited to a pool party, wins the dubious honor of being named quietest in her class, spends a lot of time on Instagram and Snapchat (as we’re told, nobody uses Facebook any more), has a crush, hears about sex, and eventually has a day where she shadows a perky, outgoing high school senior named Olivia (Emily Robinson, who has fantastic hair). We get a school-shooting drill, impossibly uncool teachers and school administrators – really, a principal tries to dab, and I’ve never been so embarrassed to be over the age of 20 – and, eventually, one bad thing happens that triggers the big scene you might have caught in the trailer where Kayla and her dad (Josh Hamilton) have an emotional conversation around a fire pit.

Eighth Grade is by far at its best when Kayla is on the screen and at the center of whatever’s happening. She gives a description of anxiety, without naming it as such, that’s about as good a depiction of the physical aspects of the disorder that I have heard anywhere in fiction. Fisher’s bright eyes and blond hair would seem to make her a standout, but she plays Kayla as so unsure and vulnerable that she ends up seeming younger than her classmates and that much more sympathetic. And Eighth Grade should be viewed through her lens from start to finish; even the worst thing that happens to her works better because she’s always at the focus of the narrative and the camera. There’s a joke around a banana that is such picture-perfect physical comedy that I can only assume Fisher actually hates the fruit in real life – or else she deserved a Best Actress nod for that scene alone.

Where Burnham lost me and cost himself some momentum is when he went for cheap laughs, like making the adults not just uncool but sort of assertively uncool, like the dabbing principal or the teacher in the sex education video who says “it’s gonna be lit!” To a teenager, parents and adults are just generally not cool, but Burnham goes twice as far as he needs to go so he can hammer that point home. A few of the gags hit, but more miss or just seem out of place because they take the focus away from Kayla’s journey – and her story is the heart of the film in every sense of the term.

Other than Fisher’s performance, the biggest reason Eighth Grade works, even with its inconsistencies, is that Burnham has managed to hit so many universal emotions and experiences with just a handful of anecdotes over the course of about 90 minutes. While there’s nothing here that specifically happened to me as a kid, the sensations and emotions were entirely familiar – none more so than that sense that you’re the one person in the room everyone is looking at, the one person everyone else has identified as the oddball. A few of the anecdotes are rooted in modernity; all the kids are constantly on their phones, talking to each other through DMs, snaps, and instagram comments. You can generalize almost everything in this film that Kayla experiences to match something you remember feeling as a kid. And I got to feel this film on two levels, since I’m also the father of a girl just a year younger than Kayla is, so eighth grade for us is just around the corner. (I’ve already forbidden her from using Snapchat though.) So while the script is inconsistent and has some gags that don’t land, the story is so authentic to the experience of growing up as a suburban teenager that the film eventually works and resonates without resorting to cheap manipulation or big twists.

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→ January 28, 2019
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FYRE.

My prospects ranking package began its rollout this morning for ESPN+ subscribers with the list of 15 guys who just missed the top 100.

—

By now there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen FYRE, the Netflix documentary on the ill-fated music festival to be held in the Bahamas in the spring of 2017 that turned out to be a giant con run by its founder Billy McFarland and musician Ja Rule. (There is a competing Hulu documentary on the festival that I have not seen.) Netflix chose to release this briefly in theaters, which will qualify it for awards consideration in the next cycle, and for sheer entertainment value it’s among the top documentaries I’ve ever seen.

I love a good con in fiction, but this con happened in real life, and the most amazing theme of FYRE is how so many people working on the festival saw the con happening in real time and did nothing to stop it. Fyre itself was originally an app that would allow people to book celebrities for events, streamlining a process that was opaque even to people with the money to do this but not the access. At some point, McFarland – and we’ll get to him in a moment – had the idea to create a music festival to promote the app, and then plowed ahead with the concept, despite lacking any experience in running festivals, and then hired a bunch of people he knew to try to run the event, half of whom didn’t know what they were doing and half knew what they were doing but couldn’t execute given the constraints of time, money, and location. Many of these folks appear on camera and voice their concerns that it was never going to work, but as far as I can tell, none of them actually quit the organization – one was fired for raising these issues – or did much beyond say that they thought the plans were in trouble.

McFarland appears here only in footage from the planning meetings, because it turns out they pretty much filmed everything as they were trying to make this festival happen, but isn’t interviewed directly; he does answer questions in the Hulu documentary, the producers of which paid him to do so. What FYRE does give us, however, is a sense of just what a grifter McFarland really is: he’d previously come up with Magnises, a members-only club with a credit card-like passport that would give members access to exclusive events, an actual club to visit in Manhattan, and discounts on hard-to-get tickets to concerts and shows. While it delivered on some of its promises, eventually the company started overpromising and underdelivering, or just not delivering at all, leading to a surge in complaints and cancellations just as McFarland was bragging about massive membership growth – and also turning his attention to Fyre.

His ability to get Magnises off the ground and even build some kind of customer base set up the Fyre fiasco in two ways: It became clear that he was very good at getting publicity, and he started a pattern of trying to separate wealthy or high-income millennials from their money. The Fyre Festival wasn’t just poorly run, but poorly funded, and the company took money from would-be concert goers for things that didn’t exist, like housing on or near the beach, and eventually came up with the idea of wristbands that attendees would use to pay for “extra” events like jetskiing but that was just a scam to get working capital so the concert wouldn’t go under before it started.

Of course, the most entertaining parts of Fyre come down to the depths of the scam, and how McFarland appears to be so privileged that he can’t understand the word ‘no.’ I won’t spoil it for people who haven’t seen the film, but the Evian water story has quickly become a meme, with good reason. People did get to what was supposed to be the concert site, only to find it wasn’t ready for anybody, with just some hurricane tents propped up on the beach and inadequate supplies or housing for the people who did show up, with the concert cancelled just hours before the event was supposed to begin, and no plans to get all these people back home after they were flown to the site on a chartered plane. McFarland appears to have tried to just keep a half-step ahead of the people while stealing their money, and I think the most shocking part (other than the Evian bit) is that he is eventually arrested over this scam, gets out on bail, and immediately sets out to begin another grift, this one even more blatant than the previous ones.

Nobody feels sorry for the well-heeled Fyre Festival customers who were willing to fly to the Bahamas for what was essentially billed as a luxury version of Coachella and kept handing over cash without doing much to see if the people taking their money were reliable. I can’t say I felt a lot of sympathy for them either, but that schadenfreude was not a major part of FYRE‘s message to me. I can’t get over how many people worked on this project, knew it was a dumpster fire on a flatbed rail car that was slowly going off the tracks into a ravine, and stuck around – even when they weren’t getting paid. One person, never identified, did leak details to a site that called Fyre Festival a scam and probably contributed to its downfall (or at least to the rise of skeptical media coverage of it), but everyone we see here except for the one who was fired kept working here until the event was cancelled. (The guy who was fired – the one real voice of reason here – is the same guy who brags that he learned to fly by playing Flight Simulator.)

This event never gets off the ground were it not for a clever social media campaign that made heavy use of ‘influencers,’ notably those on Instagram, who were promised compensation if they would simply talk about the festival and post its image of a blank orange square. (I don’t know why either.) The documentary skirts the subject too much for my liking, because ultimately, influencer culture is itself a fraud. Yes, if you have a large social media following, you can direct people to buy certain products and services, just by nature of the volume of eyeballs on your content. That absolves the influencer of any responsibility for what they appear to recommend, which was later codified by the FTC into guidelines requiring influencers to disclose “material connections” to brands they recommend, and to do so in a way that will be clear to most users. I have a large Twitter following and modest audiences on Facebook and Instagram (the latter of which I’m using more, mostly just for fun or silly posts), and so I am offered a lot of stuff in the hopes that I’ll recommend it – sometimes things just show up at the house. I have a simple policy: I won’t recommend anything I don’t like or use myself. I have told publishers not to send items. I declined a gift card to a restaurant chain (no, not Olive Garden) because there was a quid pro quo attached to it. Granted, I am not an “influencer” using it as my primary source of income – but maybe that’s not the most ethical way to make a living, either.

As for the Hulu version, I’ll probably watch it because I have a couple of close friends who’ve urged me to do so, even just so we can discuss it, although the consensus seems to be that FYRE is better. And it is wonderfully bonkers at so many points. Ja Rule has a quote near the end that is a jawdropper. The Evian story and McFarland’s third scam, while out on bail, are both are-you-fucking-serious moments. The Lord of the Flies (Lord of the Fyres?) scenes on the beach and later at the airport are both enough to make you screw up your faces in disbelief, although those beach scenes made me a little uncomfortable as these well-off young adults complained over conditions that probably a billion people in the world experience as their normal. It’s shocking in so many ways, none more so than the grifter Billy himself, who must be some sort of sociopath for the ease with which he lies to people and to cameras while gleefully helping himself to others’ cash.

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→ January 24, 2019
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Cold War.

Pawel Pawlikowski won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015 for his movie Ida, and returned this year with the critically acclaimed Cold War, distributed by amazon studios, which just earned three Oscar nominations this week for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, and, in one of the biggest surprises of the nominations, Best Director. The taut 85-minute, black-and-white drama sets a doomed romance against the backdrop of the Cold War itself, with its two main characters moving back and forth across the Iron Curtain as the political climate tears them apart and their animal magnetism pulls them back together.

Based heavily on the story of Pawlikowski’s own parents, who were musicians in Poland after World War II and split up multiple times before Pawe? was born, Cold War stars Joanna Kulig as Zula and Tomasz Kot as Wiktor, who first meet when Wiktor helps put together a music ensemble to play and honor traditional Polish folk music under the Communist government. Zula has singing talent but lies about her background and experience to con her way into the group, and Wiktor feels an immediate attraction to her that she recognizes and exploits to secure her place at the makeshift academy. This eventually explodes into a passionate affair that leads Wiktor to plan for their defection while their company tours Berlin, only to have Zula choose to stay behind at the last moment, setting in motion a series of meetings and partings over the next fifteen years between Paris, Yugoslavia, and Warsaw, with Zula becoming a jazz singer, Wiktor ending up a political prisoner, and the two absorbing increasing costs to leave each other and come together again.

The pain of parting may be nothing to the joy of meeting again, but Zula and Wiktor are unable to maintain that joy for very long, and begin to tear each other apart – especially Wiktor, who seems to often treat Zula like a prize to be won, or an object to be possessed, as opposed to an independent woman with her own agency. Kulig and Kot have absurd on-screen chemistry that allows Pawlikowski to show virtually nothing while making the desperate passion between the two characters palpable: There’s one love scene where the camera and the actors pause, and we only see Zula’s face, and in the span of under ten seconds the viewer can feel the intensity of this relationship while still understanding that it can never end well.

The decision to shoot the film in black and white appears to have resonated with Academy voters, as both this and Roma landed cinematography nods; Pawlikowski said that color didn’t work when they tried it, as he wanted to replicate the gray bleakness of Poland in the aftermath of the war and the communist takeover. It gives the Polish scenes that depressing air, although it works against the portions of the movie in the nightclubs and salons and ateliers of Paris, where the sense of life is muted … or perhaps that was Pawlikowski’s point, that Zula and Wiktor, as products of the war and the communist regime, can’t fully appreciate or embrace the artistic and personal freedom of the west after their experiences?

Kulig smolders as Zula, moving deftly from ingenue to partner to free spirit to an independent woman who can be petulant and indignant as Wiktor begins to treat her worse the more they’re together. Kot, looking like a slightly older, more rakish Michael Fassbender, drifts more abruptly from dark remove to desperation, as Wiktor’s ability to take Zula for granted once she’s there is completely mystifying, while his single-minded focus on finding her when they’re apart is palpable and easier to understand.

Cold War is short – it’s less than half the length of fellow nominee Never Look Away, which clocks in at 188 minutes – and it zips along once Zula enters the picture, sometimes a little too quickly for some of the tension between the two characters to develop naturally. The film’s ending is problematic, although the last line and shot are both beautiful, in a way I can’t discuss without a huge spoiler; I’ll just say I don’t think it’s adequately set up by the 80 minutes that come before. That puts it behind my big 3 of foreign films from 2018 (Burning, Roma, Shoplifters), but the first 95% of this movie is so good and such a gripping depiction of the familiar story of star-crossed lovers that it’s still a success and worth seeking out.

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→ January 20, 2019
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The Guilty.

The Danish film The Guilty earned one of the nine spots on the shortlist for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with an English-language remake coming at some point with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role. That Oscar category is loaded enough this year that I’d be surprised if it landed one of the five nominations, but The Guilty is a tremendous thriller, one that grabs you by the throat early on and never lets go, while also providing an insightful character study into the only significant person to appear on screen. It’s available to rent right now on amazon or Vudu for $7.

Asger Holm is a police officer who’s been accused of an unspecified violation on the job, the details of which appear much later in the story, and demoted to desk duty where he takes 112 (the Danish equivalent of 911) calls and doesn’t seem to take the job very seriously. After a few relatively minor calls, including one from a man who was robbed by a sex worker and doesn’t want to admit that that’s what happened, Asger takes a call from a woman, Iben, who manages to communicate that she’s been kidnapped by someone she knows and is being taken somewhere outside of Copenhagen in a moving car. She pretends she’s talking to her daughter, Mathilde, who is now home alone with her baby brother Oliver, while Asger navigates a conversation to try to get details on where Iben is – and then later gets a call from Mathilde as well. The film never leaves the call center and Asger is in every shot, just moving between two rooms, as he tries to figure out who took Iben and where she’s going, raging against his powerlessness in the situation while eventually confronting his own misdeeds that put him on desk duty in the first place.

The Guilty clocks in at just 85 minutes, and there’s no fat on this story: there’s the main plotline around Iben’s kidnapping and the subplot around Asger’s demotion and a court hearing the following day that will determine his fate and that involves his partner Rashid. The Iben thread twists and turns multiple times, with the tension ratcheted up by dropped calls, her kidnapper asking to speak to her daughter, and eventually Asger getting the kidnapper on the phone. Asger’s own frustrations, both over this case and over his career and personal life as well, boil over into his calls, especially as he feels like the dispatchers he calls aren’t taking the incident seriously enough – and again, he finds himself powerless to do what he’d ordinarily do if he were out in the field, but has been emasculated by his suspension from that role and can only work through others. Eventually, he makes a mistake, as any human would, and has to face the consequences in real-time as the kidnapping is still in progress.

Asger’s character is the only one of any significance to the viewer – Iben is there, on the phone, but we only see of her what Asger hears, and while he learns more about her as the story progresses, it remains superficial throughout. He seems unsympathetic at the start, sneering through his headset at the people who call for help because they’re stupid or did something while drunk, but his interest in Iben, and willingness to break rules and potentially endanger his own career for her shows depth to his character and makes him more sympathetic … but there are still layers beneath that one that will add to our understanding. He’s the hero, but a flawed one, and is flawed in a realistic, human way that informs his words and actions to form a coherent, three-dimensional rendering. Without that depiction, and the strong, restrained performance by Jakob Cedergren, the film simply would not work.

The Guilty has been highly acclaimed in Europe, earning Bodil Prize (the Danish Oscars) nominations for best film, best director, and best actor for Cedergren. I’m guessing, having seen three of the other eight nominees and read reviews and background information on the others, that this film won’t make the final five; Roma and Burning feel like locks, Cold War and Shoplifters bring incredible reviews and accolades from elsewhere, Capernaum is highly topical, and Never Look Away comes from the director of the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others. Of the four shortlisted films I’ve seen, though, it’s the easiest to recommend by far, because it’s the most straightforward and the most purely entertaining: this is a smart, concise thriller that sets out one goal and puts everything in its script towards achieving it. Because it’s so lean, the narrative never flags, and director/co-writer Gustav Möller instead conveys Asger’s frustration by only letting us see Asger and through the use of long pauses in most of the phone conversations. The story here is solid, boosted by a couple of twists, but it’s the way Möller tells the story and Cedergren portrays it that makes The Guilty such a great watch, even if you can sort of figure out where this is headed. I wouldn’t put it above the three other foreign films I’ve seen from the shortlist, but it’s easily the most accessible of the four, and does so without sacrificing its integrity or insulting the viewer’s intelligence to do so.

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→ January 18, 2019
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An Unkindness of Ghosts.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts bears a blatant stylistic similarity to the writing of N.K. Jemisin in her Broken Earth trilogy, from prose to characterization to both writers use of old-time religions in futuristic settings. And both writers put young women right at the heart of their respective stories, with Solomon giving us Aster, a young adult on a ‘generation ship’ that has, over centuries of drifting in space to an unknown and possibly nonexistent destination, devolved into a caste system by ship deck that incorporates skin color into its stratification, resulting in something that looks a good bit like American slavery.

Aster is a self-made scientist and doctor’s helper, often working with the Surgeon General, Theo, as well as tending plants in her botanarium, even though she’s a low-decker on the ship Matilda. That vessel has been in space at least 300 years, and thoughts of its Golden Land destination are more remote and have become tied up in a sort of doomsday religion that most of the ship practices – or, perhaps, that the upper-deck castes use to control those on the lower decks. Aster is neurodivergent, although Solomon never identifies her difference in any specific way, and for reasons that are only somewhat revealed by the end of the book, she’s marked for especially cruel treatment by the Lieutenant, a sadistic leader who is poised to take control if the Sovereign in charge dies. (You can guess whether that comes to pass.) Lune, Aster’s mother, took her own life the day Aster was born, but left behind cryptic clues in a series of notebooks that Aster and her bunk mate Giselle start to decipher when they realize its code may contain clues about the ship, as well as a potential way off of it.

There is, as we say on Twitter, a lot to unpack here, as Solomon has written a tight 350-page novel that incorporates race, religion, class, sex/gender, sexual harassment and assault, how people (mostly men) use and retain power, and a healthy dose of science fiction. There are women in the upper castes, but every authority figure we see is male. Women and girls on lower decks have darker skin, and are also used, to put it bluntly, for breeding, so the ship will have an ongoing supply of workers. Officials and guards have the tacit authority to rape or abuse women as they please, and it’s implied they do so with boys as well. One scene where Aster mouths off (with justification) to an upper-class twit woman lays bare the societal strictures that hold the barriers between upper and lower decks in place, backed by the force of the guard.

Unlike so many science fiction authors, good and bad, Solomon doesn’t spend a ton of time building the world in An Unkindness of Ghosts, giving the readers just what they need to understand what’s happening in the story, or where the characters might be in the architecture of the ship, but nothing extraneous. (Somehow there is meat on the ship, quite a bit of it, and I’m not sure how that one would work unless it’s supposed to be lab-grown.) The result is that the characters are extraordinarily well-developed for the genre – Aster, Theo, even Giselle and the caretaker known as Ainy or Melusine, whose importance grows as the book progresses. Solomon also defies many plot conventions by, again to be blunt, having smart characters still make stupid mistakes, especially Aster, who often acts without foresight because of her youth or how her brain works. She’s the hero, without question, but she’s flawed in a different way than your typical flawed hero. She’s flawed because she was born that way, and her successes come both in spite of that and often because of it, because she makes the best out of who she is, and can thus do things neurotypical people probably couldn’t. All of this, and other aspects of her character including some unspoken history of abuse and her unusual connection to Theo, make her one of the most interesting protagonists I’ve come across in a long time.

Solomon can get caught up in some clumsy prose, another similarity to Jemisin’s writing, such as when they start trying to describe the physics of space travel in their universe, especially the discovery Lune made that changes everything for Aster and her comrades, or in the description of Baby, the ship’s main power source. Yet they also display facility with creating language, giving each deck its own dialect, much the way slaves in different parts of the South would blend their native tongues with English and create new patois, such as the Gulla dialect still spoken today off the coast of South Carolina. The culture and economy of Matilda feel impossibly rich for a book this short; even when I wasn’t gripped by the plot, I was enveloped in Solomon’s world. The book starts slow, but stay with it; the last hundred pages are a barnburner and the ending is satisfying without becoming sentimental or obvious.

Next up: Still reading Camus’ The Plague.

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→ January 17, 2019
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Milkman.

Anna Burns became the first Northern Irish writer to win the Man Booker Prize when her third novel, Milkman, took the honor in 2018. It’s an experimental novel, atypical for Booker winners, that reads like a more accessible Faulkner, and combines a story of the Troubles with the staunchly feminist narrative of its 18-year-old narrator for a result that is unlike anything I’ve read before.

Characters in Milkman go without names, including the narrator, a young woman who walks around with her head in a book and is literally and figuratively oblivious to the internecine warfare occurring around her, as well as the titular milkman – well, both milkmen. The milkman of the title isn’t actually a milkman, but rides around in a white van as if he were one. He’s in his 40s, associated with a local paramilitary group, and stalks the narrator while ensuring that everyone in their tightknit, gossip-ridden community knows that she is his, to the point where others, including her own mother, assume that she’s indeed having an affair with this dangerous, older man. There’s also a real milkman, whose role becomes apparent as the novel progresses; ‘maybe boyfriend,’ whom the narrator has been seeing for a year, who’s obsessed with cars, and whose life may be endangered by not-really Milkman; Tablets girl, who runs around poisoning people, including her own sister and eventually the narrator, but everyone seems to just take it as part of life; the boy the narrator calls Somebody McSomebody, who also tries to threaten the narrator into becoming his girl, which ends rather poorly for him in one of the novel’s few scenes of actual violence; and far more.

Burns layers a story of personal terror inside a story of the societal terror that affected Northern Ireland for decades. The narrator’s life is turned upside down by this unwanted attention from a man she barely even knows, but whose reputation in the community is enough to scare her and to convince everyone else she’s submitted to him willingly (even though she never submits to him at all). When the Milkman stalks her, he also inducts her, against her will, into a theater of the absurd that mirrors reality from that time and place, where violence split Catholics and Protestants, where any official authority was seen as essentially Ours or Theirs, where an act that shouldn’t merit a second thought, like going to the hospital, would be fraught with political and social implications. She’s suddenly seen to have taken sides, and even finds herself the unwitting beneficiary of the fear others have of the paramilitaries, which further underlines for her how potent the impact of this one man’s attentions towards her are.

Burns also surrounds her narrator with families who’ve been hurt by the violence in the community, directly or indirectly, including the one mother who, by the end of the novel, seems to have lost her husband and every one of her children to direct violence, related accidents, or suicide. The narrator’s father is dead when the novel opens, while her mother is a tragicomic figure who is convinced her daughter is a sinner, who believes every rumor she hears about her daughter (some from ‘first brother-in-law,’ who is both a gossip-monger and a creep), and who goes into hysterics over every bit of innuendo, which the narrator never wants to even acknowledge because it merely prolongs the agony.

Milkman is still quite funny and even hopeful in parts among the litter of tragedies and the ever-present specter of the stalker, although we do learn at the start of the novel that he’ll die before it’s over. The narrator’s third brother-in-law, while a peculiar man himself, takes on a protector role over his young sister-in-law, as does Real Milkman, whose interest in her is a side effect of his romantic interest in her mother. There are also signs of intelligent life amidst the gossips and harridans, including the “issue women,” a group of seven residents who embrace feminism when one hears of it in town and starts up a local women’s group in the backyard shed of one of the members (because her husband wouldn’t allow it in the house).

Of course, this is all set against the ever-present backdrop of the Troubles and you don’t need to know much at all about that conflict to appreciate Burns’ depiction of the effects of the sectarian violence on this particular neighborhood. Burns draws and redraws the picture of this time and place with swirling, inventive prose, in paragraphs that go on for days, often putting unlikely vocabulary in the mouths of her characters – esoteric or archaic words, or even words she’s just made up – to provide further much to the narrative. It’s not as difficult as Faulkner or Proust, but shows the influence of those early 20th century writers at the same time, both in a technical aspect and in how Burns uses her experimental sentence structure and vocabulary to contribute the reader’s sense of unease.

I’ve only read a few of the contenders for this year’s Booker but can at least understand why this novel won. It also feels like the third straight year where the prize has gone to a novel that does something different, as opposed to the prize’s history of going to literary works that still adhere to the traditional form and intentions of the novel. I could imagine this novel seeming abstruse to readers outside of the UK, given its setting during the Troubles, but that’s merely the backdrop for a rich, textured story that is as relevant today (with its #MeToo similarities) as it would be to a reader of that time and place.

Next up: A little light reading, Albert Camus’ The Plague.

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