Strength is what I want. Strength not to endure —I have that and it has made me weak— but strength to act.
- Susan Sontag
Welcome back to the end-of-month newsletter for thinkers and over-thinkers everywhere. November was bizarre and fast, and I’m here after midnight (NZT!), after a long work day. A lot of endurance lately, but also finding more of Sontag’s strength to act! Time, this month, to think about some films:
Mister Organ
Mister Organ charts journalist David Farrier’s attempt to understand the character of Michael Organ, a man that first crosses the filmmaker’s radar when he starts clamping cars and demanding release fees outside Bashford Antiques in Auckland’s Ponsonby. “Five years ago I started writing what I thought would be a very simple, quirky story, but here I am half a decade later still trying to make sense of it all.” Was David Farrier himself engaging in the same family of baiting behaviour he claimed of his subject? It felt less like an investigation and more a libidinous contest of wills - a frisson of challenge, who dares keep the eye contact the longest. The two were in and out of each other’s orbits: everywhere Farrier went, Organ made sure to go. But everywhere Organ had dwelled was fodder for Farrier to follow up on, too - via interviews with countless forlorn and damaged ex-flatmates, the door-knocking of cagey family members, the footage collected at the mental hospital turned flats that Organ had occupied at Kingseat. A film to make you marvel at the chutzpa required for the journalistic enterprise: the suspension of eye-lowering propriety, the dogged refusal of polite bystanderism. But it also left me wondering if this subject was really worth the effort. “You pay a soul tax for every minute you spend with him.” Yes, quite.
Emily the Criminal
Aubrey Plaza is having a moment in The White Lotus Season 2. I haven’t watched that series yet, but I have seen Plaza recently in Emily the Criminal. Living in Los Angeles, our protagonist Emily is in a deep hole of student debt, is trying to get by as a food delivery worker, and has a police record that’s getting in her way. From the beginning of the film we see Emily’s delightfully short fuse and lack of desire to fully wear the nicey-nice mask of professionalism and its mannered buzz words - the promise of doing all the right things and thriving inside this world has proven hollow. In one interview Emily talks back to a prospective boss who is only prepared to grant her an unpaid internship, naming the exploitation for what it is. The boss in turn calls Emily “spoiled” for her unwillingness to work full hours on an unpaid basis. While this search for employment and stability in the professional world is going on, Emily also becomes involved, at first by accident, in a dummy shopping scheme, buying electronics from big box stores on fake credit cards then on-selling the goods for cash. Crime affords her more agency than the life of student loans and unpaid internships. Director John Patton Ford has made sure this is not a tragic turn; the camera is nonjudgmental. Hot sun concrete bloodied noses - a film that makes rage good again.
Stutz
There was a moment there, about a third of the way through, where I wasn’t sure about Stutz - Jonah Hill’s film made with and about his therapist Phil Stutz. It felt like a wannabe Nathan Fielder moment, where the reality turned out to be a rehearsal, or re-enactment of the original therapeutic relationship and setting. The greenscreen became the setting. The project of making the film became as much the subject of the film as the planned subject of the film, the therapist. But then the moment of doubt passed. It turned out to be a true net positive for a film about learning to live with our essential crumminess to integrate its findings into its making. Pain, uncertainty, constant work. That’s what we can expect as defaults when it comes to living a human life on planet earth. At one point I closed my eyes and went along with Stutz’s instructions to imagine the thing you most fear losing, imagine yourself losing it, then imagine yourself falling - peacefully! - into the sun. I’ll treasure it always, or maybe just at the worst times, when I really need it. Watch this film if you love to watch two warm and open men talk to each other in a warm and open way.
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Eulogies for Twitter
There was a weird day mid-month when everyone decided that it might be our last [on Twitter]. The next day some kind of normal programming resumed (at least for now), but for that one day everyone hushed their niche interests and paused to pay their respects to the text-based social media platform (I’d rather my book tank than have to promote it via TikToks or reels, cried some authors). The threat of its cessation at the hands of a billionaire private owner proved to be the ideal prompt for a Twitter meta-reflection festival. If it’s our digital public square, shouldn’t it be considered public infrastructure? Or should we be secretly feeling glad that the horrible free-falling experience of the Twitter scroll might soon be over?
The thing is, though, that the very context collapse that makes it horrible is probably also the thing that makes it great: so many worlds and perspectives and tones and communities openly kaleidoscoping and allowing for the knowledge that different ways of being exist, even if you don’t want to know about them. Twitter has very likely saved a lot of lives. Not only because of the sense of community and kinship that staves off isolation and helps people organise to overthrow oppressors, but through concrete information dissemination. It’s the place where public health experts could speak directly about the need for masks at a time when the World Health Organisation’s official line was that we didn’t need them. Twitter provides a way for disabled people to share space with non-disabled people - these spaces aren’t possible in real life for many. A sourcing tool and a place for voracious appetites. The platform has never tried to make itself a nice comfortable experience, to our downfall and delight.
Experiments in sobriety
This month marked three months of no drinking. I don’t know that I am a better or worse or more or less depressed person as a result of this, but it was hard-won, so that alone is worth something. I do enjoy waking up in the morning with no ounce of grogginess that can’t be attributed to the time I went to sleep. I do miss the first sip. I do not miss the other sips. I do feel glad not to have that particular stress-relieving crutch. I do now have other crutches that I didn’t have before the experiment in sobriety. We’ll see. I’m treating it all lightly. I liked this Harpers Podcast conversation where writer Zachary Siegel and host Violet Lucca discussed, among other things, the shortcomings of abstinence-only approaches.
Links
A sweet cookbook with favourite café recipes and community profiles from Auckland’s Coffee Pen, photographed by James Lowe, illustrated by Fumi Hisai, designed by Nicole Miller-Wong, edited by me. Pre-orders open until December 4th.
Dialogues on Disability, a conversation between Shelley Tremain and Robert Chapman: “I think that class and neurodivergent disability are intimately intertwined. For me, autism and my other forms of neurodivergence are disabilities. By contrast, I have often noticed that people with more money, people who have had a lot of money and support growing up, are more likely to see their neurodivergence as a “superpower.””
Influential People, from The Gauntlet, a newsletter by Julia Doubleday: “Today we remember ACT UP activists for their rage and their beauty in the face of the AIDS crisis. I believe tomorrow we’ll remember those who gave everything to disturb the false peace we’re basking in. Anger is beautiful when it is righteous and in service to justice; smiles are ugly when they paper over mass death.”
Mike Davis’s Specificities, Gabriel Winant: “Davis’s materialism compelled him to master new knowledge—climatology, epidemiology, global urbanism. Yet unlike other omniscient Marxist historians (a real if disappearing social type), Davis’s combination of scope and depth never made his work clinical. His books vibrate with commitment and rage.”
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Until next month may you find more pockets of action than endurance,
H x
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Awesome recommendations, thank u!