The Paradox of the People who want Us to Buy Their Stuff so that We Will Be HAPPY

I'm still reading 'Darling', the spiritual autobiography by Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez, and am beginning to feel the pre-emptive regret that sets in when you know something wonderful is about to end. I don't want this book to stop.  The wisdom that Rodriguez unveils in 'Darling' - why women will lead the future of humane religion, the use and misuse and underuse of newspapers to define cities, the interplay and collisions between sexuality, sacrament and the internet, and most especially the question of how, in the age of superficial connection, we might both retain and renew ourselves as embodied souls - is of the kind that causes me to scrunch up my nose and smile with gentle awe. Rodriguez understands that good writing - or at least original writing - depends on (in fact, may consist in) taking two things that aren't already understood to belong together and out of them creating one new thing.  And so, this, tucked into his argument ('Final Edition') that the death of newspapers may mean the death of cities, and launched from a riff on the epidemic of disembodiment our age has embraced and regretted at the same time:

'Something funny I have noticed - perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Dovos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? they want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can clock your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a cafe table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the 'New Establishment' issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London; they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortgage and Do Not Disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (ADD TO SHOPPING CART), they will do it.'

Wily, Rodriguez anticipates the reader's question (what must be done, etc.) with 'An obituary does not propose a solution.' He's right - lament and renewal are not the same thing. They can happen at the same time, however, or pretty close to it, and, of course, the tools of disembodiment are not inevitably so: I'm writing this on one of them. But I'm feeling more and more drawn to consider the degree to which I am an embodied person with access to technological tools that, when stewarded thoughtfully, can promote the common good (and mine), held in tension with the degree to which every day I am being invited to surrender my will to a machine in order that I might become more like one.

 

Philip Seymour Hoffman: The Master

Image Thinking about Philip Seymour Hoffman, and specifically his lovely performance in David Mamet's STATE AND MAIN. There's a scene in that charming contrivance that seems to build on Mamet's earlier genius idea, spoken by Gene Hackman in HEIST: 'I'm not that smart; I just try to think of what someone smarter than me would do and then I do that.' The STATE AND MAIN scene involves PSH's character being invited to search his conscience and choose between integrity and commerce. He makes a fascinating choice; and what happens next is enormously comforting to those of us who frequently make mistakes...

Meanwhile, in memory of PSH, my thoughts on his greatest screen performance.

There are many key moments in 'The Master', Paul Thomas Anderson's stomach-punching, fingernails-down-a-chalkboard psychological thriller loosely based on the founding of Scientology, but more deeply understood as a tale of two egos.  We witness a titanic battle for self-control by a man who knows nothing of it (Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell), or to distinguish imagination from delusion by a man whose simmering rage emanates perhaps from the terror that the truth he has found may not be enough (Philip Seymour Hoffman's L Ron Hubbard surrogate, Lancaster Dodd).  Neither of them know how to love; both are desperate to be loved; they find in each other a conversation partner, a patient, an unrequited lover.  They are two of the most human characters the movies have brought us; their power trips are terrifying, because they may remind us of our own.  There are many key moments - the first meeting between the war veteran and new religious leader, the dictator bonding with his subject over mutual substance abuse; when the master holds court in New York society, first offering tender words of potential healing to a grand dame, then exploding at a guest who dares question the source of his 'knowledge'; when the protege is experimented with, commanded to walk up and down between a wall and a window until he is both capable of imagining unbridled freedom, and driven nearly mad in the process; a science fiction-esque digging of buried treasure on an Arizona flat bed that could pass for Mars.

Striking moments, but the one that remains most resonant in my memory after two viewings is still the most ambiguous.  After Freddie and Dodd first meet, the new father invites the new son (the relationship, and the failings of relationship, between fathers and sons is where this film really aches) to attend his daughter's wedding.  The invitation is accompanied either by a warning, or an invocation: Dodd tells him either 'Your memories aren't welcome' or 'Your memories are welcome'.  Two viewings leaves it unclear - and I could check, but it doesn't really matter; for each is a blessing.  You don't have to carry your trauma always and everywhere, or at least it doesn't always have to weigh as much; or you can join this community and still be fully yourself.  It's a mark of the moral complexity of 'The Master' that it can critique the damage done by demonic religion while here honoring the best hopes of its angelic shades.  The movie's not really about Scientology per se, but power and love.  Like 'Andrei Rublev' it's too big a film to be interpreted in a review.  It needs to be seen; deserves to be studied; and invites a response in life as well as words.

A Tipping Point for Homophobia in Ireland?

What is on my mind is my homeland, where one of the state-subsidized broadcasters just paid a massive amount of money to two powerful people who campaign to prevent LGBTQ equality because they were offended at being publicly characterized as inheritors of the tradition of homophobia. What is more on my mind is that the person who made the entirely reasonable, in fact incontrovertible assertion in the first place, has subsequently given a speech that will be remembered long after the laws that tell any of us that our lives are worth less than the dominant culture have disappeared from the books, long after the time when people (inadvertently or otherwise) dedicated to humiliating some of us and suffocating our hope have either seen the error of their ways or backed down quietly or in the best of all worlds been liberated into the rainbow of possibility that they are denying within themselves by seeking to control love. This speech is the future. The death-dealing ways of the kind of religion that seeks to treat the human as if we were machines dedicated only to the promotion of patriarchy and puritanism are the past.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXayhUzWnl0

 

The Tyranny of American Optimism

Image "If you would understand the tension between Mexico and the United States that is playing out along our mutual border, you must understand the psychic tension between Mexican stoicism - if that is a rich enough word for it - and American optimism. On the one side, the Mexican side, Mexican peasants are tantalized by the American possibility of change. On the other side, the American side, the tyranny of American optimism has driven Americans to neurosis and depression, when the dream is elusive or less meaningful than the myth promised. This constitutes the great irony of the Mexican-American border: American sadness has transformed the drug lords of Mexico into billionaires, even as the peasants of Mexico scramble through the darkness to find the American dream." - From Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Richard Rodriguez, an amazing book that ultimately evokes the dream that won't disappoint or kill: that of mutual, interdependent love. This is the most compelling memoir, with the most beautiful language, and I don't want it to end.