LOS CEREZOS

On Moonrise Kingdom (and failure)

Moonrise Kingdom opens with everything in its right place. Orchestral overtures fuzz from a light-blue turntable, the credits roll in a precisely-picked gold script typeface, and books crowd along with blank faces, small gestures that elicit slight odd turns of the head. The scene blends easily into a set of purples and reds and pinks and pale yellow—shabby chic, touch of country. From off the frame you hear the roosting weathervane squeak irony on the roof.

Wes Anderson shots tend to move with photographic perfection, a certain swell of color and composition. One gets the sense that everything has been exactly planned, down to the most random shots of comedic attention, the phrases that leave the characters’ mouths and the situations they plan themselves into. And it is, by sheer fact that it is a film. But something in his work prevents me from believing the authenticity of even that writing.

The palette is soft enough, the themes chosen resonant enough. There are always children, their dreams, and adults who have found themselves in failure. The adventures are as ridiculous as they are believable, as if we all cache some distant fantasy basking in the same warm tones with battery-powered record players. All these are noble themes. Each phrase is planned and should be.

Anderson glorifies the absurdity of children, the monotony of adulthood. He picks up the fear of failure and cradles it, runs it through filters of one witticism here and there, fabricated, that want to justify the underlying brokenness. The childrens’ dreams fulfill only with the accompaniment of their worst nightmares—that the search and arrival of the Moonrise Kingdom comes with its fair share of resentment and attack from other children and adults alike.

Yet I continue to come back to the question of failure: does Anderson urge to surmount it, or genuflect before it? Do his films provide hope, or an excuse to fail with techniques that achieve romantic grace so long the color, the costumes, and the phrases are in place? One might argue that rather he works to bring out the fantastic-ness embedded in mediocrity and the ordinary, but this doesn’t explain the focus on unconventionality and quirk. The ordinary details serve as the foiled backdrop, and even they are somewhat exaggerated.

Anderson glorifies one failure by creating another: the boogeyman of repeated employment that fades fast into monotony and insignificance at its highest. Failure to fabricate the poignancy of one’s own inner life, of bursting life at its seams with significance that can only be your fantasy to create. One must most precisely pick out the preset scenes and personalities to live out, so that no second is wasted, no moments missed.

Yet to create that fantasy one must go completely into oneself, live exclusively in a world in which everything and everyone is potentially a prop in one’s play. We begin to collect friends instead of make them; decorate our lives with fashionable motions of living and be always vigilant for the future of more dreams and plans. One learns not to focus on the present, for at any moment when that occurs the dream will stop itself, the self no longer the director nor the center, but rather a passing player in simply more others’ plays, a distant detail with some vibrant color that will snuff out as easily as it came in the credits. Moonrise Kingdom teaches well on how to fear one’s life; it does nothing to realize how to fear one’s self.

With its children and colors and always wonderful music, I want to call it a film of hope, but despite the colors and matching corduroy, it is not a hopeful film. At best it covers the ailments of another generation greyed to passive roles in someone else’s arrangement. Instead, each of us should define our own fantasies, live only in a future of navel-gazing dreams that are authentic because we call them so, with enough colors and quirkiness to paint it so, only exacerbating a new type of failure by framing it as success. It proclaims that we should unlearn empathy, excoriate scheduled lives for scheduled spontaneity, and at every instance of the present be fabricating a future known only to oneself, for which one’s dreams deserve to be the sole receiver of the world; its maker and sole inhabitant until one disappears, until no one will be left to know or care.

To the Lighthouse, deux

Just finished it once again. This book brought me, definitely, back into writing two years ago, with the help of a very good instructor; mentor; friend. But I am indebted to this hard and unyielding prose most of all.

You read differently when you know the passages where you’ll be rapt already. I have two copies of this book but I read my first copy—the one filled with my annotations and thinly torn post-its from two years ago. The latter have since been replaced with new, neat markings, yet the similarities between what I mark now compared to then is just enough the same. Some underlinings I glide over; new sentences come to my attention. Suddenly I am much more conscious of her prose-poetry, more careful as I encounter them to hear the words blend less, to pick up that none of these long descriptions are as skimmable as they once seemed to be.

The characters feel different to me. I no longer hold any of them in high esteem, yet I have grown to feel a great deal more sympathy for all of them. Perhaps time has shown me how to idealize less and see more. A little uncanny, at times, how differently I read the same passages.

I don’t think I understood why is book was so important to me then: all I knew was how loudly it hummed my own findings of the world; that I felt compelled by its message that I only partially grasped, because I thought then that I saw everything. Now, I feel so vividly how deeply I cannot see yet. Woolf is such a familiar voice, comforting more than the other voices I have come across. She writes what is completely ordinary—like others—but does so without intention to glorify and despair. She writes with hope not explicitly, but through the very act of writing, she inquires, makes out the painting as Lily does. And it is far from perfect, but the best that could have been done, so that perhaps the next writers and painters and people could pick it up, and continue to search for what she hoped to give.

Quick thoughts on James Schamus talk

Between the private and public self is the commonality of performance—and the implications for what you perform depends wholly on where you perform them (private or public space). What is more, there is the perception of performance between private/public space; that is, there is a clear divide between what we culturally consider to be a private/public space and what is actually a private/public space.

Moving back. Do we define something public when the performance is created for someone other than oneself—does that hold any water when we construct frameworks for relationships (romantic, for example) that imply full exposure of two people to each other. Going further back—does private life even exist? If consciousness comes from self-perception, and technology of language works in the mechanics of culture beyond oneself? Can there be a true self? Is identity simply a performance; a narrative; a story of what we want to be at all times? 

Facebook comes to mind the most—the myth of private life homespun. Thinking constantly of the future; personal documentation, willful strolls in surveillance fields. And why do we do it? Is it a cultural zeitgeist, a collective want for ease rather over privacy? Does it say something that we don’t value privacy in the way that we used to? Privacy against the law implies concealment; activities that are unwatched, uncontrolled—the public life lends itself to another power, or power creates the public life. The private individual has opinions that are her own. The public individual?

Perhaps this is something: that power creates the public self? The public self is pre-programmed to public behaviors. Public performance, free speech, implies acceptance of something? More thinking on this, obviously. 

[i carry your spatula with me(i carry it in]

by eat eat cookies
(adapted lovingly from the original; for js by yl)

i carry your spatula with me(i carry it in
my mixing bowl)i am never without it(anywhere
i go your cravings go,my dear;and whatever is baked
by only me is your baking,my darling)
i fear
no cocoa(for you are my cocoa,my sweet)i want
no MOF certification(for beautiful you are my medal,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a mooncake has always meant
and whatever a crust will always crunch is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the chip of the chip and the tastebud of the tastebud
and the spice of the spice of a cabinet called life;which grows
higher than kitchen can hope or cupboard can hide)
and this is the waxpaper that’s keeping the dough apart

i carry your spatula(i carry it in my mixing bowl)