Author: chrisbarsanti

A freelancer like those of yore, I write and edit for cold hard cash from the highest bidder in the land -- or just the occasional kind word. You can find links to my scrivenings at http://chrisbarsanti.net/.

Screening Room: ‘Joy’ at the Venice Film Festival

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JOY-Photo1_986

Sudabeh Mortezai’s Joy, which screened at this year’s Venice Film Festival, is a harrowing story about a Nigerian woman trapped in a cycle of dependency as a sex worker in Austria.

My review is at The Playlist:

At the start of Sudadeh Mortezai’s downbeat trafficking tragedy “Joy” there’s some reason to think that one is about to see a story of power and independence. A young Nigerian woman sits in the hut of a juju man while he wrings the blood from a chicken’s slashed neck over an altar and leads her in the recitation of charms. “Protect her from the living and the dead,” he says about her upcoming trip to Europe. “No man will harm me!” He has her shout like a young warrior heading off to battle…

You can check out the trailer here.

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Be Self-Conscious

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In Dorothea Brande’s classic 1934 guide, Becoming a Writer, she identified four of the key roadblocks afflicting most scriveners. Among the most serious was learning how to get out of your own way:

Sometimes it is self-consciousness that stems the flow. Often it is the result of misapprehensions about writing, or it arises from an embarrassment of scruples; the beginner may be waiting for the divine fire which he has heard to glow unmistakably, and may believe that it can only be lighted by a fortuitous spark from above. The particular point to be noted just here is that this difficulty is anterior to any problems about story structure or plot building, and that unless the writer can be helped past it there is very likely to be no need for technical instruction at all…

You have to keep your audience in mind at all times, of course. But if you don’t listen to your own voice first, there won’t be any audience for you to worry about.

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Worry About Art

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Bill Hader wrote in the Hollywood Reporter that before he was on SNL he had a very specific and romantic idea of what a writer’s life was like:

My high school girlfriend gave me a copy of Jill Krementz’s The Writer’s Desk — this collection of her beautiful portraits of writers — and that’s how I wanted to live. Wake up, get your coffee, look outside, ruminate and sit down at your mahogany desk like Philip Roth. That’s fucking rad. That’s the life…

Many of us can relate. We know that dream.

But then we also come to discover that, well, it’s a dream:

In reality, there’s no mahogany desk. There’s only a conference room table, and you’re lying on the floor underneath it, scrawling something in mangled Italian on the back of an old lunch order for the Vinny Vedecci sketch. You can’t sit there and wait for inspiration. You think on the fly. You get the work done. You spend every day, every hour you have, trying to make the thing better…

Sometimes, as on-the-fly and unattractive as real writing is, it can be more satisfying in the end.

But a mahogany desk would still be nice.

Screening Room: ‘The Oslo Diaries’

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The Oslo Diaries, a new Israeli documentary about the secret peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO that started in Norway in 1992 while the intifada raged back home, will be premiering on HBO September 13. It is getting a limited theatrical release as well.

My review is at Film Journal International:

The story of the Oslo Accords remains one of the great tales of modern diplomacy and statesmanship. Starting in 1992, Yossi Beilin, Shimon Peres’ deputy minister of foreign affairs, opened up an incredibly risky, unsanctioned secret back channel of negotiations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). To maximize deniability, Beilin sent no diplomats but a pair of professors to meet with three Palestinians from Tunis at a remote villa in the forests outside Oslo…

The trailer is here:

Writer’s Desk: Stay Curious About Everything

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There are writers—some, but certainly not all—whose eyes will glaze over at the mere mention of topics like “science.” (See also: “401K,” “Retirement Planning,” “Job Security,” and “Deadlines” for other unpopular topics.) But stay with me with for this.

A couple weeks back, the great George Will turned away from deftly skewering members of his former party for bowing and scraping before the president and turned to the topic of curiosity. In “America is Sacrificing the Future,” Will talks about a 1939 essay by Abraham Flexner with the glorious title “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.” Will approvingly highlights Flexner’s thesis, which is that many of the greatest inventions sprang not from diligent and targeted effort, but rather the application of discoveries made in the process of research for research’s sake.

Will uses Flexner to buttress his central argument that the administration’s push to cut general research budgets is a phenomenally short-sighted endeavor, not uncommon in these STEM-obsessed times: “America is eating its seed corn.”

But the point goes beyond that. Per Will:

It has been said that the great moments in science occur not when a scientist exclaims ‘Eureka!’ but when he or she murmurs ‘That’s strange.’ Flexner thought the most fertile discoveries come from scientists ‘driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.’

Writing is not that different. Of course, when working on that novel about the blind detective from Johannesburg, you better make sure you figure out a few things first (what’s Afrikaans for “You’re under arrest”?).

But writers, like scientists, should never stop following the urge to satisfy their often random-seeming curiosities. You never know what you might come across.

Nota Bene: The New Canon

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The Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday has just addressed an obvious lacuna in movie criticism by declaring first that not only has the Great Movie Canon remained stubbornly fixed for too long (Vertigo, Citizen Kane) but that there are many movies post-2000 that stand up alongside all the greats of yesteryear.

Hornaday’s article “The New Canon” is an absolute must-read. She also selected a fairly unassailable list, excepting maybe Spike Lee’s adventurous but uneven 25th Hour and Kenneth Lonergan’s solid but somewhat unremarkable You Can Count on Me. Her list is here but it’s best reading her arguments are each of them as well:

  • Children of Men
  • 25th Hour
  • The Hurt Locker
  • Michael Clayton
  • Pan’s Labyrinth
  • There Will Be Blood
  • Boyhood
  • 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
  • Old Joy
  • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
  • Hunger
  • You Can Count on Me
  • No Country for Old Men
  • I’m Not There
  • Minority Report
  • Dunkirk
  • Mudbound
  • Spotlight
  • Son of Saul
  • Stories We Tell
  • The Fog of War
  • The Royal Tenenbaums
  • Spirited Away

Screening Room: ‘Do You Trust This Computer?’

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doyoutrust1 ‘Do You Trust This Computer?’ (Papercut Films)

The new documentary from Chris Paine (Who Killed the Electric Car?) takes on a far more mistrusting topic of technology, namely: What’s artificial intelligence going to do to us as a species?

Do You Trust This Computer? is playing now. My review is at Film Journal International:

The delicious danger of malevolent machines has been an attractive science-fiction standby ever since R.U.R., Karel Capel’s 1920 play about a robot rebellion. There are a couple of problems with that statement, both of which are obliquely referenced in Chris Paine’s stylistically monotonous but occasionally thought-provoking documentary Do You Trust This Computer?…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: How About Oranges?

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In 1965, New Yorker writer John McPhee met with the magazine’s famously hard-to-please editor William Shawn to discuss his next story idea. According to Wyatt Williams’ Oxford American essay:

The writer would suggest subject after subject only to be told that the idea had already been reserved for another writer or that Shawn wasn’t interested in it. This is the moment, as the story goes, when John McPhee finally just said, “Oranges.”

That was it. That’s all it took:

According to the version he told in an interview with the Paris Review decades later, “That’s all I said—oranges. I didn’t mention juice, I didn’t mention trees, I didn’t mention the tropics. Just—oranges. Oh yes! Oh yes! [Shawn] says. That’s very good. The next thing I knew I was in Florida talking to orange growers.”

McPhee came back with 40,000 words on oranges for the magazine. He later turned it into a book. Title? Oranges.

All from a one-word pitch.

Reader’s Corner: Defend Your Bookstore

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I hate London Nazis.

This past weekend was business as usual at Bookmarks, Britain’s “largest socialist bookshop.” Then the fascists showed up.

According to The Guardian, “the store was attacked by far-right protesters wearing masks who wrecked displays and ripped up books and magazines.”

Also:

The campaign group Stand Up To Racism, speaking on behalf of Bookmarks, said some of the attackers carried placards reading “British Bolshevik Cult” and that one of those involved wore a Donald Trump mask.

Nobody was hurt. This time.

Per Shelf Awareness, “The store will host a free, open-to-the-public ‘solidarity event’ next Saturday, with several authors slated to appear.” Anybody who is in or nearby London, loves books and free discourse, and hates Nazis would be well-served to stop by and show support.

Writer’s Desk: Write the Book You’re Supposed to Write

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When Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn was trying to write her very great, very creepy novel Dark Places, she was having trouble with the heroine, who she initially wanted to seem different than her earlier protagonists. According to this article from Fast Company, Flynn showed some pages to her husband. He read them, poured her some wine, and said, “you can tell you don’t like her, and you don’t like writing her.”

Per Flynn:

It was a very good lesson, which is: don’t let the outside voices tell you what you should be writing. You’ve got to write the book that you’re supposed to be writing, not write the book that you think people will want to read or the book that will sell better or the book that the critics will like more.

Nota Bene: Film Forum Reopens

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August is here and, just in time, Film Forum has reopened after a long-overdue renovation. The place is almost a half-century old. “Not bad” (as their website notes) “for a scrappy non-profit that started with 50 folding chairs and a 16mm projector the size of a breadbox.”

More than just another arthouse, Film Forum is one of the last standing temples of American cinephilia, the sort of place that can mix obscure spaghetti westerns and avant-garde documentaries with an Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective and the latest in Iranian or South Korean cinema without missing a beat. Plus, the popcorn is amazing, even sans butter.

The Times published some recollections about Film Forum, from filmmakers like John Turturro to Christopher Nolan. Ramin Bahrani (99 Homes) speaks for many cinephiles’ aching backsides:

Their renovations sound wonderful, because, yes, we all know, their seats were a little uncomfortable and the sightlines were not ideal — but their programming was so impeccable that we went anyway.

Writer’s Desk: Random It, Like Bowie

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‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’

One of the more eye-opening bits at the just-closed David Bowie Is exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum—besides that clip from Labyrinth, his tattered Union Jack coat, and all the cultural ephemera that inspired him—is the part focusing on his recurring fascination with automatic and cut-up writing.

The technique wasn’t new by the time Bowie started using it in the 1970s. The likes of William S. Burroughs had already been randomly cutting up strips of words and threading them together to create curious curlicues of randomized verbiage. Inspiration out of chaos.

According to music CD-ROM developer Ty Robert, Bowie’s method was strictly analog:

Roberts described Bowie as taking multiple word sources, from the newspaper to hand-written words, cutting them up, throwing them into a hat and then arranging the fragments on pieces of paper. He’d then cross out material that didn’t fit to create lines of lyrics.

Roberts had an idea for a computer program that could help speed up the process. The result was a Mac program called The Verbasizer:

It allowed for different input methods including simply typing in words and then arranged them in columns which could be restricted to nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Each column could be weighted and have multiple words if desired. With a push of a button lyrics would then be created.

Per Motherboard, Bowie said:

So what you end up with is a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topic and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other.

This approach isn’t exactly a killer app for writing. But if you’re stuck for inspiration and feel you need a little kickstart, try randomizing things. If you can’t immediately see a method to the madness, go looking for it.

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Get Pushed Around

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Fran Lebowitz (Christopher Macsurak)

Back when New York had a downtown art scene to be proud of, Fran Lebowitz was one of its singular denizens and chroniclers. When she started branching out from writing on movies or what have you for Andy Warhol’s Interview, she ran into some difficulties. But she didn’t let that stop her.

Take this anecdote from an interview she gave to Interview (say it five times fast) about the piece on AIDS she wrote for the New York Times in 1987:

It was ’87. I remember it because when I started publishing, I got offers to write for big magazines. Interview, at the time, six people read it, believe me. But I would always say, “Well, it’s not that I don’t want to write for these big magazines, but you can’t edit it.” And they would always say, “What are you talking about?” And then they would name thousands of geniuses who willingly submitted to being edited. And I said, “Well, I don’t really care. You can’t do it.”

This isn’t to sat that we don’t need editors. Pretty much all of us do. But there are times in every writer’s life when they need to stand their ground and just say, No. Even if that means the piece gets canned.

Sometimes not being published is worth it

Reader’s Corner: Social Justice at Comic-Con

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Though it will probably spur a backlash from the troll-ier corners of fanboy world, this year’s San Diego Comic-Con—the ever-more-massive pop culture lollapalooza currently taking over a good part of the city’s downtown—features a broad focus on diversity and social justice issues.

Per the San Diego Union-Tribune, here’s a few of the events being highlighted:

  • Panel: “Radical Activism in Comics”
  • Panel: “What Rebellions are Built On: Popular Culture, Radical Culture, and Politically Engaged Geeks”
  • Voter registration drive led by Indivisible and Black Mask Studios

Also, Black Mask Studios is releasing a special convention issue of their Trump-versus-California comic Calexit, with all proceeds going to help immigrants and their families in the San Diego area.