mizzpinkiewrites

[mizzpinkiewrites]

Some quotes from Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Anybody who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It’s a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you’ve got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it’ll take for that to happen?”

"Barbara is on what is called the woman’s trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than $10 or $20 a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. “Doing something that shows your love that way,” she says, “is just about the most beautiful thing I know.” Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara."

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ggm just be saying anything and i love it

Francisco the Man,called that because he had once defeated the devil in a duel of improvisation, and whose real name no one knew, disappeared from Macondo during the insomnia plague and one night he reappeared suddenly in Catarino's store. The whole town went to listen to him to find out what had happened in the world.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (trans. Gregory Rabassa).

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One Hundred Years of Solitude, Illustrated by Luisa Rivera

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“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

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“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically, it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.” - Franz Kafka

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This is for the kids who die,

Black and white,

For kids will die certainly.

The old and rich will live on awhile,

As always,

Eating blood and gold,

Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi

Organizing sharecroppers

Kids will die in the streets of Chicago

Organizing workers

Kids will die in the orange groves of California

Telling others to get together

Whites and Filipinos,

Negroes and Mexicans,

All kinds of kids will die

Who don't believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment

And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned

Who pen editorials in the papers,

And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names

White and black,

Who make surveys and write books

Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,

And the sleazy courts,

And the bribe-reaching police,

And the blood-loving generals,

And the money-loving preachers

Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,

Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets

To frighten the people—

For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—

And the old and rich don't want the people

To taste the iron of the kids who die,

Don't want the people to get wise to their own power,

To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

Listen, kids who die—

Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you

Except in our hearts

Maybe your bodies'll be lost in a swamp

Or a prison grave, or the potter's field,

Or the rivers where you're drowned like Leibknecht

But the day will come—

You are sure yourselves that it is coming—

When the marching feet of the masses

Will raise for you a living monument of love,

And joy, and laughter,

And black hands and white hands clasped as one,

And a song that reaches the sky—

The song of the life triumphant

Through the kids who die.

--- Langston Hughes, Kids Who Die, 1938

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"It wasn't anything I had planned on. But at the age of 22, after dropping out of my second college and traveling across the country a few times, I found myself back in Raleigh living in my parents' basement. After six months spent waking at noon, getting high and listening to the same Joni Mitchell record over and over again, I was called by my father into his den and told to get out. He was sitting very formally in a big, comfortable chair behind his desk, and I felt as though he was firing me from the job of being his son. I'd been expecting this to happen, and it honestly didn't bother me all that much. The way I saw it, being kicked out of the house was just what I needed if I was ever going to get back on my feet. `Fine,' I said. `I'll go. But one day you'll be sorry.' I had no idea what I meant by this. It just seemed like the sort of thing a person should say when he was being told to leave.

My sister, Lisa, had an apartment over by the university and said I could come stay with her as long as I didn't bring my Joni Mitchell record. My mother offered to drive me over, and after a few bong hits, I took her up on it. It was a 15-minute trip across town, and on the way we listened to the rebroadcast of a radio call-in show in which people phoned the host to describe the various birds gathered around their backyard feeders. Normally the show came on in the morning, and it seemed strange to listen to it at night. The birds in question had gone to bed hours ago and probably had no idea they were still being talked about. I chewed this over and wondered if anyone back at the house was talking about me. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever tried to imitate my voice or describe the shape of my head. And it was depressing that I went unnoticed while a great many people seemed willing to drop everything for a cardinal.

My mother pulled up in front of my sister's apartment building, and when I opened the car door, she started to cry, which worried me as she normally didn't do things like that. It wasn't one of those `I'm going to miss you' things but something sadder and more desperate than that. I wouldn't know it until months later, but my father had kicked me out of the house not because I was a bum but because I was gay. Our little talk was supposed to be one of those defining moments that shape a person's adult life, but he'd been so uncomfortable with the most important word that he'd left it out completely saying only, `I think we both know why I'm doing this.' I guess I could have pinned him down; I just hadn't seen the point. `Is it because I'm a failure, a drug addict, a sponge? Come on, Dad, just give me one good reason.' Who wants to say that? My mother assumed that I knew the truth, and it tore her apart.

Here was yet another defining moment, and again I missed it entirely. She cried until it sounded as if she were choking. `I'm sorry,' she said. `I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.' I figured that within a few weeks I'd have a job and some crummy little apartment. It didn't seem unsurmountable, but my mother's tears made me worry that finding these things might be a little harder than I thought. Did she honestly think I was that much of a loser? `Really,' I said, `I'll be fine.' The car light was on, and I wondered what the passing drivers thought as they watched my mother sob. What kind of people did they think we were? Did they think she was one of those crybaby moms who fell apart every time someone chipped a coffee cup? Did they assume I'd said something to hurt her? Did they see us as just another crying mother and her stoned, gay son sitting in a station wagon and listening to a call-in show about birds? Or did they imagine for just one moment that we might be special?"

— David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

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Solondz deep dive/Welcome to the Dollhouse Pt 1.

the first shot in Welcome to the Dollhouse is the Weiner family portrait, in this image the father seems to be the most prominent subject. He is looming over the photograph and domineering while his wife and children surround him. I think this image of a patriarchal household really sets this movie up perfectly, particularly because Mr.Weiner is rarely present throughout the film. This is what feels like the only time we viewers really get a good look at the guy. Even when he is present he sort of blends into the background, staying out of conflict and keeping his head down exactly as he tells dawn to do later when Dawn and Mrs. Weiner have an argument, "be smart. make it easy on yourself."

The film continues on to show Dawn Wiener, the middle child, as she attends Benjamin Franklin junior high aka hell on earth. One of the best parts of this film- and what makes it so popular (90% on rotten tomatoes, huge at the box office) is that the world is constantly out to get dawn. It seems as if everyone in this movie (and in other Solondz films) has the worst intentions always. This movie operates from the understanding that at the core of every character, there is ill intent, often at an extreme level, a notion that Solondz seems to be obsessed with and that his viewers are captivated by. We want to see the scummy side, the rotten core of all suburbia turned up to its highest level to the point of parody but also as ridiculous and anxiety-inducing as real life, especially in junior high. One thing to note is that unlike most media about pre-teens and teens presently, dawn is played by (and looks like) a real child, which makes the things that occur in this movie all the more disturbing and real. I have super conflicting feelings about this but that's a wholleeee bag of worms (see The Rehearsal for complicated feelings about child acting.) So dawn survives the day despite relentless bullying, including from her would-be ally Lolita (which idk why she is named this I feel like it's trying to say something but I'm not sure what). This portrayal of bullying though extreme feels very accurate, especially the Foucauldian power-is-from-everywhere element, where everyone bullies each other and no true allyship is reliable.

She returns home to her older brother and his "band" practicing in the garage, sounding off tune and off beat, her angelic baby sister Missy, permanently clad in a ballerina outfit, dances about the driveway. Dawn lounges drinking a soda on the couch and watching TV, missy interrupts and in usual sibling, style threatens to tell on dawn for drinking soda on the couch. Dawn, in turn, calls missy a "lesbo", and naturally is tattled on and punished. Missy is the most often the subject of dawns rage, dawn even considers smashing her head in, and later she's responsible for missy's kidnapping. Dawn simply cannot stand her annoying sister, but especially resents the life of ease Missy has and will always have (and honestly she's valid). Missy is lucky and perfect, dawn is cursed. Missy is a reflection of the born-to-be popular girls and we, the rejects from birth, resent them.

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Joan Didion writes, in On Keeping a Notebook, that the purpose of keeping a notebook, or a journal for that matter, isn’t because you simply want keep a personal record of things; but because you want to remember the person you were at that specific moment. we write things down on our notebook/journal/diary (whichever one of those you keep) because we want to remember. we want to remember what specific people meant to us on a particular day or hour. or minute. we want to remember our first impression of something (or of doing that something), possibly of someone, too. sometimes we think we’ll “always remember” important events: “I’ll make a mental note of that” etc etc. but in reality everything is fleeting. so Didion says write it down. keep a journal. that way, people, places, and certain events will always be there in case you ever want to come back to them sometime in the future. but also so that they don’t ever haunt you.

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“Unhappy marriages so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one. There may or may not have been trouble on Guam, where Cork and Lucille Miller lived while he finished his Army duty. There may or may not have been problems in the small Oregon town where he first set up private practice. There appears to have been some disappointment-about their move to California: Cork Miller had told friends that he wanted to become a doctor, that he was unhappy as a dentist and planned to enter the Seventh-Day Adventist College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda, a few miles south of San Bernardino. Instead he bought a dental practice in the west end of San Bernardino County, and the family settled there, In a modest house on the kind of street where there are always tricycles and revolving credit and dreams about bigger houses, better streets. That was 1957. By the summer of 1964 they had achieved -the bigger house on the better street and the familiar accouterments of a family on its way up: the $30,000 a year, the three children for the Christmas card, the picture window, the family room, the newspaper photographs that showed "Mrs. Gordon Miller, Ontario Heart Fund Chairman." They were paying the familiar price for it. And they had reached the familiar season of divorce.

It might have been anyone’s bad summer, anyone's siege of heat and nerves and migraine and money worries, but this one began particularly early and particularly badly. On April 24 an old friend, Elaine Hayton, died suddenly; Lucille Miller had seen her only the night before. During the month of May, Cork Miller was hospitalized briefly with a bleeding ulcer, and his usual reserve deepened into depression. He told his accountant that he was "sick of looking at open mouths” and threatened suicide. By July 8, the conventional tensions of love and money had reached the conventional impasse in the new house on the acre lot at 8488 Bella Vista, and Lucille Miller filed for divorce. Within a month, however, the Millers seemed reconciled. They saw a marriage counselor. They talked about a fourth child. It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.

But the Millers' season of trouble was not to end that easily. October 7 began as a commonplace enough day, one of those days that sets the teeth on edge with its tedium, its small frustrations. The temperature reached 102 degrees in San Bernardino that afternoon, and the Miller children were home from school because of Teachers' Institute. There was ironing to be dropped off. There was a trip to pick up a prescription for Nembutal, a trip to a self-service dry cleaner. In the early evening, an unpleasant accident with the Volkswagen: Cork Miller hit and killed a German shepherd, and afterward said that his head felt “like it had a Mack truck on it.” It was something he often said. As of that evening Cork Miller was $630,479 in debt, including the $29,637 mortgage on the new house, a debt load which seemed oppressive to him. He was a man who wore his responsibilities uneasily, and complained of migraine headaches almost constantly.”

- Joan Didion, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream

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my Solondz deep dive/

While listening to Selma Blair's autobiography yesterday, she briefly mentioned Storytelling (2001), reminding me how much I love that movie and of the existence of its controversial (but highly esteemed) director Todd Solondz.

I decided to look at his other movies, of which I'd read detailed Wikipedia descriptions in high school, but never had the stomach to attempt screening. Starting with his beloved 1995 classic, Welcome to the Dollhouse. After devouring the first film I dove straight into Happiness, and promptly vomited at the 30-minute mark. I needed to take a long shower before I felt clean enough to continue.

My feelings on Happiness were so strong that I needed to pour through reviews, many of which praised the director as a visionary and called the movie laugh-out-loud funny- a guilty pleasure, so bad its good, etc... I wasn't shocked at this because honestly, most movies in the white/ hipster/ male/ manic pixie film canon have quite a bit of subject matter that I've been immediately horrified/repulsed by, but Solondz had me feeling conflicted. There's a feeling that because he's calling the bullshit out, he's not a part of it. Is he blameless in the culture he depicts? What are the consequences of the discourse he creates? Is it..funny? are these even comedies? A self-fulfilling prophecy? Where is the line? Why would you make this movie/ what is the urge to create... this? Does it serve a purpose? Does this reflect the violent culture of this era later to be marked by the themes that his films predict, or does it instruct them? I also am perplexed by these feelings of guilty pleasure many of us find in these movies, the urge to peek through our fingers and watch, to take a shower and try again, to experience and enjoy the trainwreck.

This era of films is marked so distinctly by the way children are used to display violence, perversion, corruption and overall plain evil to drive home a message about suburbia, internet culture(sometimes), and banality. Though played out by kids of the millennium, the messages are the gospel of Gen X, cynical and ironic to a fault, playing upon their own experiences growing up, but also blending with anxieties for the generation they were watching arrive. These movies say something about "late" capitalistic trends and the depravity of white suburbia, the dream sprung from colonial acts of violence, but also seem to intend to reveal something inherent in mankind itself.

It is with these thoughts and questions that I intend to work through a deep dive into Solondz's works. Or at least the reasonably accessible ones, if my brain can stand it.