Get It Where You Can

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a big old-fashioned summer movie overstuffed and draggy in many aspects, but also strangely exhilarating in others.  It tries really hard to be what it is, and trying so hard gets to places inside your head you don't think it could.

Case in point, a scene involving the evil military overlord of a project in which dinosaurs from the gutted, lava-drenched amusement park have been Noah's-Arked to a secluded mansion basement in order to be auctioned off to rich oligarchs and others, for military and other eveeeel purposes.  Above is a photo from the scene.  Ladies and gentleman, a dinosaur specifically and genetically designed as a "killing machine" devouring, literally, piece by camouflaged piece, that tough-talking military-industrial-complex 4-star General.  It is breathtaking, the CGI butchery, and the setup is Dream Fulfillment 101.  The general is a one-note villain without any redeeming qualities (he even drops a "nasty woman" comment in there somewhere).  He is a stand-in for MAGA-ites all across this Great Nation, and until I saw this scene unfold I really did not understand the visceral wear-and-tear all of this Donald Tweetstorm crap causes.  I like to not think about it actually.  I have a tendency to shut it out, to joke it away, to do whatever I can to work through it.  Resistance is futile a lot of the time.  I was in that cage with that dinosaur, applauding its savagery.  Dream come true.

It's kind of pathetic to admit, and maybe it's just what it is, but this whole era, this whole ordeal takes its toll in ways that can get conjured without a lot of provocation or even reason, without thought.  Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a beautiful and stupid thing, but in that moment I was having a spiritual/feral connection to something far sadder and deeper, the anger and resentment caused by a dictator and his me-first fixations, his stupidity, greed and cross-eyed dedication to whatever he sees fit to say and do and cancel and revise.  And also all his minions and fans out there spreading his gospel and spleen.

That jazzed-up dinosaur feast was a sort of pledge to allegiance re-calibrated for these stupidly horrific times. 

False Teeth

An original drawing by Antonio Adams.

Election Night 2016 I got sick of the whole damn thing and made a carrot cake.  It was soothing, to tune out all of it and crack some eggs and make something sweet.  It was a box cake, with a little container of icing, so it wasn't like I was the Barefoot Contessa or anything, but still doing one stupid thing like that made a lot of crap go away at least momentarily.  I wasn't scared of what was going down.  It was more like I was apocalyptically disappointed.  I haven't really bumped into that kind of instant depression in a long time, but there it was:  the monster winning, everything I thought decent and kind just poof, gone.  And then the monster's idiot parade continues on, all the way into history and power and the Whitehouse.  And so on so forth.

It is what it is.  You can't predict what he's going to do because he lies all the time anyway, and he'd probably tell you that just to get your vote.  But one thing is for sure:  it's pretty set in stone that he will keep on kissing the asses of the people who shout how great he is and desperately need someone to help them blame somebody else for how rotten their situation is. Monday morning quarterbacks are talking about how that's the real tragedy here:  no one was listening to the Rural Working Class and boy oh boy now they are getting their revenge.  Well I got news for you:  I am from that stock, and still circulate within its circles at times, and the RWC does need help but it's the kind of help that's truthful and sober and quiet, as in TPP or no you're still shit out of luck if you think "your way of life" will return just like it was before. Monumental cultural/economic shifts have happened that have disconnected the RWC manufacturing base from the global market, and no amount of screaming at the top of your lungs to lock somebody up will alter that.  No amount of shifty dealings and heavyhanded negotiations can change that situation.  China does not care about you, nor does it give a shit about you-know-who and all his wonderful businessman skills.  The RWC is going to have to change how it sees the world, how it deals with what the world taketh away, and then move forward accordingly, as in:  there are no saviors.  Just strategies.  Plans.  Hope comes out of that kind of pushing forward.  It does not come from standing around with signs that say somebody is a "cunt" and by the way all lives matter.

Poverty and lack of opportunity is the one universal for a lot of people, of all races, nationalities, religions, sexualities. And uniting to combat those circumstances might be a wonderful start to a Utopia, but somehow uniting around changing the system to redistribute the wealth and chances always gets enmeshed in identity politics so sordid and flat-out wrong it makes you want to make another carrot cake.  All sides on that one too:  from thousands of whiny-assed RWCs jumping up and down wanting to make America great again to posh universities filled with safe-spaces just in case of micro-aggressions.  No priorities just pontifications and victimizations and posing and bitching so on so forth.

I really never loved Hillary, to be honest.  I understand the distaste for her shrillness, for her need to seek power and then turn it into a public display of phony tenderness.  I get it.  But you know what?  I voted for her because I knew all of the things I don't like about her are the things that make shit work in government, as in steely reserve, automaton-hippie smile, and above all else a greedy need to be seen as a problem-solver so craven and self-serving that it makes you actually get things done.  Of course I voted for her also because I don't think she will unleash a new phase of orgiastic fascism.

Anyway, after making the cake, after realizing for sure it was all the way over, after witnessing the pundits on every network looking shocked and pale and disappointed at their own impotence and stupidity, I went to bed and it just so happened that I was on the last few pages of As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.  I reread this book every few years.  I've probably read it 15 or 16 times now.  It has velocity, sorrow, grotesque humor, soul-stirring poetry, floods and fires and broken legs.  It is about a family of rural working class nobodies whose mother Addie is dying and her oldest son builds her a casket while she watches.  All her other children are in their own little moments of lunacy, despair and tragedy.  They end up taking her corpse across the country in a vain attempt at burying her where she wanted to be buried, but by the time they get there, well, she sort of smells bad and there are buzzards following their every move.  Not funny-weird, not-funny-haha, just goddamned funny the way life is.

But it's her husband, Anse, who closes out the book in the most hilarious and human manner. Basically his quest to bury his wife reveals parallel, multi-tasking motives:  he also wants to get false-teeth so he can eat victuals the way God intended him to.  And then also,  just through serendipity, while borrowing a shovel with which to dig his wife's grave from a lady he's never met he falls in love and asks her to marry him right there on the spot.  Right after he puts his dead wife's stinky remains in the ground.  Tah-dah.

Happy ending for sure.  When I finished the book I just thought to myself:  thank God for books like this that take you away from grand concerns and worries and terrors and allow you to relax into situations so complicated and stupid and vexing as to make you feel alive and somehow sympathetic beyond words and beyond even maybe consciousness.  The people Faulkner writes about in As I Lay Dying are pure white-trash, poor, crazy, stupid, pissed off, petty, and lost.  Yet they all feel so alive and beautifully rendered you want them never to leave you, even while buzzards flutter above them, even while they are setting fire to your barn.

That's the spirit I am going to live in and on.  Not love or hate or whatever, but I think a version of good old-fashioned wonder.  Not the joyful kind, but the kind that allows you a poetic and distant understanding of how the world actually works, and maybe even how it will fix itself by getting new false teeth when all is said and done.

Size Matters

"Put any of MoMA’s art in that building and it will die. And certainly contemporary art does not work there. Even granting that the Williams-Tsien facade is singular (I once compared it to a Kleenex box), the proponents of this building love it as an abstract ideal of a space for art, a platonic thing apart, a fetish," Jerry Saltz has written about the razing of the American Folk Art Museum. 

Originally unveiled in 2001, the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien designed the American Folk Museum as a sort of paean to folk art.  That's probably what is killing it now.  Although there is a lot of debate and hand-wringing happening about the whole incident,  Saltz seems to be the spokesperson here for institutional truth: the reason the building needs to go is because it kills contemporary art.  The backstory is pretty simple:  MoMA bought the building in 2011, around the time the AFAM was running into major trouble as an institution.  AFAM almost folded last year, but is now back to where it started in a lobby somewhere.  And now MoMA wants to demolish the building in favor of more "big" space.

It's almost like a comeuppance, this tragedy, for any of us who ever had the unmitigated gall of taking something so small and insignificant as "folk art" seriously.  After all, Saltz is letting us know in his piece that "folk art" is not "contemporary art."  Saltz loathes Williams and Tsien's creation because it evokes the strange smallness and unnerving disjuncture that a lot of folk/outsider/visionary/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it art elicits.  He does not know how to categorize something unless it is categorical, defined by tradition, and I guess great big.

Comparing the bronze, beaten, carefully obtuse facade to a "Kleenex box" and then the whole building to a "fetish" is probably the way he sees most of the art that used to be, and would have been, showcased inside the thing.  Something is missing, Saltz is letting us know:  size.  Bigness rules.  Saltz, and the MoMA and its legions, are doing Gordon-Gecko drag here.  Those big MoMA works of art ("big" both literally and figuratively and historically) can't be housed within that itty-bitty Joseph-Cornell shitbox called a "folk art museum."

It's really kind of sad the disrespect not only the arcitecture is getting in this whole weird battle to destroy a "Kleenox box," but also the art that once was celebrated within it.  A lot of folk artists work small, with weird, inarchivable materials, in strange and platonic ways that look dinky and silly, I'm sure, to Saltz' eye, especially when compared to actual "contemporary art." 

If folk art is the Rodney Dangerfield of the artworld, then Saltz' "contemporary art" is the Donald Trump, and the Donald right now is saying, "You're fired" to art that doesn't take up a lot of space literally but that can expand in your head if you give it half a chance.  Same goes for Williams and Tsien's intricate, origami-lush little building. 

"You're fired, Mr. Kleenex Box."