January Grab Bag
A vaguely organized reflection of what I've been doing with myself lately
What I’m Watching
Not much! The beginning of Spring semester, the long-delayed completion of my Annual Review materials and traveling with two tiny people has sucked up a lot of time this month, and I’ve been dedicating what little free time I’ve had to reading (more on that below). Though with Oscar nominations hitting this Tuesday, I’ll start diving deep into everything I need to catch up on (which seems like it will be less than one would think given how little free time I’ve had this past year). This also means I’ll pick up my Best Picture catch-up, where I go back and continue my mission to watch all the winners I haven’t yet seen. I’d like to at least get through the 40s this year, which means that my line-up would be:
1935 - Mutiny on the Bounty
1937 - The Life of Emile Zola
1938 - You Can’t Take it With You
1941 - How Green Was My Valley
1942 - Mrs. Miniver
1946 - The Best Years of Our Lives
1947 - Gentleman’s Agreement
1948 - Hamlet
1949 - All the King’s Men
Now that I’ve typed all of that out, that’s a lot more than I thought. And there are some bricks in there. So, we’ll see! I also have Indy Spirit screeners to catch up on before I vote for those.
(ED. NOTE: This went to press right as we were settling in for a much-needed lazy Saturday of doing nothing but eating various iterations of cooked cheese and catching up on movies. We started working through my screener pile and watched American Fiction [newly-appointed Drip King Jeffrey Wright giving one of the great performances of last year; billed primarily as a satire of the literary world it functions even better as a family drama/character study], May December [modern day Bergman in the way it slowly picks each character’s psychological scabs to reveal the tender, sometimes icky humanity underneath – it even takes place on an island!], and about half of Oppenheimer [Tiff fell in and out of sleep during the latter]. More on each later, perhaps.)
What I’m Reading
I’m more apt to read for half an hour or so before bed than watch something these days, so I’ve been able to get through quite a bit in the last few weeks - mostly finishing things I started towards the end of last year. Currently I’m reading through The Wasteland and Other Poems by TS Eliot. I started with The Wasteland, which I came back to through the Upanishads, since Eliot’s poem references those so heavily (one of the reasons I’m trying to write about what I’m watching/reading/listening to more often is to track the way these things connect, bounce off, and lead into each other). I first read it in high school - or was it college? Either way, I was not in a place to receive it and have since then filed it away as something cold and impenetrable and thus of little interest. I was kind of stunned by how much it resonated with me on this re-read - maybe it’s the accumulation of more years behind me, maybe it’s because I’m less of an idiot than I was as a younger man. Whatever the reason, I was staggered anew by it and so decided to go back and read some of the rest (I’ve always cherished Prufrock for its depiction of the weight and tragedy of indecision and malaise).
This is also part of a longer, not-too-organized endeavor I’ve taken up over the course of the last decade or so of re-reading things I was unimpressed with back at an age at which I didn’t appreciate them. Sometimes I was right in my initial assessment, but it’s been a pleasure to see the numerous times in which I was not.
Some of my favorite TS Eliot facts:
I suppose it’s well-enough known by now that he wrote what became the basis for the Broadway musical Cats. This is incredible enough on its own merits - the highest of high culture meeting something that became a perpetual tourist-trap punchline - but it gives me no little amount of perverse joy to know that as a result he has an IMDb credit for this:
Perhaps less well-known is that he was pen pals with Groucho Marx. I first stumbled upon this when reading The Groucho Letters years ago - their relationship seems to have been instigated by Eliot writing the comic requesting an autographed photo. There is then some back-and-forth over the fact that Groucho’s countenance in the picture is unrecognizable sans make-up and cigar, and so he sends a second while Eliot sends him an oil painting of himself. They then talk a lot about their various ailments, both men being advanced in years at this point, and try to arrange a dinner date that keeps getting cancelled and rescheduled. Celebrities – they’re just like us!
In addition, I read Batman 89 - how’s that for range! - the graphic novel collection of issues that serve as a continuance of the Tim Burton continuity written by the co-writer of that original ’89 film. It’s an interesting endeavor, though it feels like it’s taking on more than it can cover in only six issues – especially its attempts at addressing social justice and the racial climate of modern America, which feels completely at odds with the heightened Gothicism of that original cinematic world. I imagine this was unavoidable as two of the abandoned threads getting picked up are black versions of both Two Face and Robin (Billy Dee Williams of course played Dent in the original film – largely under the pretext that he would eventually become Two Face – and Marlon Wayans got close enough to playing Robin in an early version of Batman Returns that he still got paid once that never came to fruition). It’s interesting to realize that this level of diversity is baked into a property that was developed over 30 years ago, even as the attempts to modernize it don’t always work.
I’ve also gone back to American Prometheus. I started it after seeing Oppenheimer, and while it’s quite an enjoyable read it’s also a door-stopper and at a certain point I got distracted by other things. Now that the movie is starting to win everything under the sun it felt like a good time to dive back in. What I find fascinating is how the book both deepens and lessens Nolan’s film in that it adds a lot of additional context and fills in some of its dramatic gaps but also makes me wish different things had been emphasized or expanded upon. When I re-watched the movie late last year, I realized that some of the things I had attributed to it I had grafted from the text within the swamp of my memories.
In picking the book back up, I’ve also been playing the internal game I usually do when reading historical accounts by trying to imagine where I would have fit in. I think for some reason that I identify most strongly with Niels Bohr. Is it his brilliance? His moral conviction? The fact that he had a comically large head and almost got assassinated by his own allies because he couldn’t ever shut the fuck up? Who can say?
It is great fun, though, to see that the extent to which the usually sex-averse Nolan steps firmly into those waters in his latest is something that was unavoidable given how clear the book makes it that Oppenheimer was an absolute hound. I imagine Nolan nervously flipping through its pages looking for an out before sighing and resignedly scribbling into a notebook, “This man rather fucks, I’m afraid…”
What I’m Listening To
Lots of Beatles, as that’s Sammy’s current favorite. His most amenable obsession thus far, for sure. He can even recognize which of his favorite songs are on which albums (“The Octopuses Garden One” is Abbey Road and Revolver is “Ahh Look at All the Lonely People”). Though he’s transitioning to There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, and one specific version - and ONLY that version - to boot.
Speaking of Sammy, I have a regular playlist of bedtime songs that I play for him each night. I’ve referred to it often enough as “setting a vibe” that he’s started saying it too, and sometimes curating the playlist when he’s particularly resistant to sleep - “Not the gray set a vibe!” he sometimes says when he sees this pop up:
A couple of the regular entries are from Johan Johansson’s Orphée, and so I finally dug into that in its entirety for myself.
I’ve also been listening to The Rite of Spring quite a bit. I always knew of this as a momentous work of modernist composition, a revolutionary piece that changed music forever, and my response to that fact has always been, “The Fantasia thing?” I had never listened to it on its own merits until recently. Funny enough, I also came to this through Oppenheimer as a copy of it is briefly glimpsed on a phonograph during that fantastic early montage that juxtaposes Oppie’s exploration of modernist art with his discovery of quantum physics. The version I’ve been listening to is the Bernstein version, so there’s another connection - though I still have yet to see Maestro (I’m looking forward to it, I suppose, but while I quite like Bradley Cooper every clip I’ve seen from it has struck me as deeply embarrassing).
A Vignette
Sammy spent a great deal of time on our trip to San Antonio playing with his older cousin Grayson and one of his friends. During a fish fry gathering on that Sunday afternoon, the three bounced and chased balloons within a small vestibular entrance to the clubhouse we had taken over. As I caught glimpses of this play, I found myself both incredibly moved and joyful, while also having that unavoidable tinge of fear I get every time he plays with older kids (please don’t let him get hurt, please don’t let them get tired of or exclude him when he’s so excited to be accepted by them).
Later in the day I followed Sammy, balloon in hand, to this same vestibule, upon which he looked around for his earlier playmates – who were at that moment occupied elsewhere – and said, “Nobody can play with me.” As my heart shattered into a thousand shards I responded, “I can play with you,” upon which he lit up and said “Really?!” and we began to bounce the balloon around between ourselves.
These days it can be difficult to tell, when Sammy is saying something, whether it is springing from his own thoughts or if it’s being recalled from one of his favorite shows/videos/books. I’m not sure if he was re-enacting a pre-existing scene here, but regardless the volley of emotions was somewhat overpowering. The crushing sadness I felt at his first acknowledgement, the joy in his excitement when I offered my companionship, the anxiety of knowing that someday soon he’ll be too cool for me, uninterested in hanging out with dad, and that strange worry that if I spend too much time with him it will ill-prepare him for interaction with the greater world coupled with the knowledge that I need to grab onto these individual moments as often as I can.
A rush of complimentary and conflicting fears and emotions, all occupying a moment that’s over before you’ve had a chance to reconcile or process them. That is, in large part, what parenthood is.
-cs