Lon

I recently graduated from the California State University Northridge school of Cinema and Television Arts with an emphasis in film production. Currently I'm working for an online jazz station; McQsJazz.com and it's pretty cool. On the side I'm working on breaking into the industry. One step at a time.

Filmmaker Finds An Unlikely Underwater Friend In ‘My Octopus Teacher’

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by Sam Briger

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A few years ago, South African documentary filmmaker Craig Foster felt burnt out from years of working on arduous nature films. Needing a reset, he returned to the underwater kelp forests off the southwest tip of Cape Town.

“My earliest memories, my deepest and most powerful memories were of this incredible coast and diving in what I call ‘my magical childhood forest,’ ” Foster says. “It is one of the greatest ecosystems on this planet.”

Foster vowed to dive — without a wetsuit or oxygen tank — every day for a year into the chilly waters near where he grew up. The ocean was sometimes as cold as 46 degrees, but his body gradually adapted.

“Day after day, I slowly started to get my energy back and realized that there was this whole new way of looking at this underwater forest. And I started to come alive again,” he says.

The waters were teeming with sea creatures, but Foster says his encounters with one particular octopus stood out. Over a series of dives, the octopus began coming out of her den to hunt or explore while Foster watched.

“That’s when I realized: This animal trusts me. She no longer sees me as a threat, and her fear changes to curiosity,” he says. “That’s when the real excitement comes and you think, ‘Oh, my goodness, I’m being let into the secret world of this wild animal’ — and that’s when you feel on fire.”

Foster chronicles his underwater encounters in the kelp forest in the new Netflix film, My Octopus Teacher, and the book, Sea Change.

Interview highlights 

On the dangers of diving off the western cape of South Africa

It’s called the “Cape of Storms” for a good reason — enormous waves and some of the biggest surfing waves in the world. And people are scared of sharks and big animals and that kind of thing, which aren’t actually really a danger at all. But the one thing that is very dangerous are these enormous seas. And I have come very close a few times to losing my life and I’ve been sucked into underwater caves. … So if you’re dedicated to diving every day, especially, you have to be very, very careful and try to read the weather very well, try to read the currents and then don’t venture into those very dangerous places during those times. There’s always some little place you can find to get in, which is relatively safe, but it took a while to learn exactly how to do that.

On why he chooses to free dive — without a wetsuit or oxygen — in these extremely cold waters

You feel alive, you feel awake, you feel stimulated. But because you can feel that water on your skin, you can feel the slight temperature differences, you feel much closer to nature. You feel more amphibious, in a way. I like to ponder on the amphibious nature of our humanness and diving in this way, with this method, brings out that amphibious nature.

At first, it took me quite a long time [to get used to the cold]. … I remember shivering for about a year, every day. And then one day, I just stopped shivering and I was like, “Wow, my body is getting used to this. I can thermoregulate.” And I slowly started to figure out how to keep comfortable and keep warm. And of course, your body adapts. But the interesting thing is, if I’ve had a bad day or I haven’t slept well or I’ve had an injury, I go in the water and it’s very difficult for me to thermoregulate. If I’ve had a great day, I’ve slept well, I’m feeling strong, I can stay in for a very long time, up to two hours. But if I’m compromised mentally, I can sometimes be cold within 20 minutes. … I’ve noticed exactly the same with other people. The cold is a kind of a mirror to how you are feeling mentally.

On what it’s like diving inside the underwater kelp forest 

It’s truly like being in an underwater forest. … It’s like being in this magical other world that is very different to any world that you might have seen on land, and [there are] animals living in all different levels of the forest. A coral reef is two dimensional in comparison in many ways, and there’s tremendous biodiversity and very exotic animals. And because there’s so many predators, many of these animals are very, very cryptic. So you can easily dive in a forest … and not see an animal that’s been watching you almost every day.

The excitement for me has been to slowly uncover the secret lives of many of these cryptic animals. My incredible octopus teacher, she helped me in many ways to uncover many of those lives, because she’s in the middle of this food web. And to know her, you have to know so many animals that she preys on, and of course her predators as well, and then all the scavengers that come to her den. She’s this amazing teacher in many ways for the other lives of the animals in the forest.

On the octopus “armoring” by covering herself in rocks 

What I found is that octopus, they’ve got all sorts of ways of dealing with predators. And of course, you’d have known about the inking, you know about the whole camouflage and everything. But one of the last resorts that they do, if they’re in the right kind of environment, they will suddenly, very, very quickly pick up up to 70 shells and stones and sometimes even bits of algae and cover their whole body with them by turning their arms over their head because the head is the very sensitive part of an octopus anatomy. And if a predator bites or interferes with the head, there’s often a really big problem. So with the suckers, they pick up all these pieces and then in a very short space of time — in seconds — they cover themselves and they’re suddenly armored.

On what octopus suckers feel like on your skin 

You’d be surprised how incredibly powerful the suction is, and they are covered in a kind of octopus slime that makes it adhere more strongly, but they are very, very strong. I mean, if you try and pull directly back when that animal is holding you, it’s really very, very difficult and you’d have to force it. So you have to gently twist and turn if you need to go up to have a breath of air, because you don’t want to pull too hard on that animal. So you have to kind of curl and twist to break that incredibly powerful suction.

On watching the octopus begin to decline 

It was obviously difficult. You get close to an animal like this and I was certainly dreading [her death]. But at the same time, I guess in some ways it’s better than a human death, because it’s quite merciful. It’s quite short. … When she gets to the end of her life, she becomes senescent, senile. So her brain starts to not work so well. So she’s not fully aware of what’s going on, and that brought some comfort.

On still visiting the octopus’ den after her death and feeling her presence 

She had a few dens but her main den, where she spent most of the time, I went to visit that den today, this morning. It’s a great feeling to go there. I just dive down and kind of silently thank her for this incredible teaching that she’s given me.

What happens is once she moves out of the den, it soon fills up completely with sand. So it’s basically just a rock edge. But what’s so interesting is that other octopuses seem to be able to somehow sense exactly where she’s denned and they have made a den in exactly that same place. I’ve seen this at other sites as well. … Maybe they [have] some incredible ability to smell, because then they have to excavate and dig the whole den up; there’s no sign of it having been there. I’m sure in a few weeks or a month I will find another octopus in exactly that same place.

Lauren Krenzel and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.

What Happens When TikTok Looks To The Avant-Garde For A Challenge?

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by Meaghan Garvey

Around the beginning of lockdown this spring, alone in my apartment, I developed a little nightly routine. It involved heavy pours from a jug of Carlo Rossi and repeated spins of The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, the 2011 breakthrough from a cult favorite English musician otherwise known as Leyland James Kirby. Arranged from edits of Jazz Age ballroom tunes found on forgotten 78s in dollar bins worldwide, the record is as dreamy as it is unsettling; to listen is to be stuck within the locked groove of someone else’s distant memories. Kirby re-works these dusty samples to crackle and fade and loop indiscriminately, occasionally repeating themselves or abruptly changing course. Tracks are titled things like “The sublime is disappointingly elusive,” or “I feel as if I might be vanishing.” It seemed like the right soundtrack for the vertigo of the moment, that feeling of existing in a present outside of time – when I put it on and swayed around my living room, I’d sometimes pretend I had died long ago.

Kirby’s been an underground fixture since the mid-’90s, and to call his output prolific is an understatement on the level of referring to the past year as “these uncertain times.” There are the early provocations as V/Vm, where he’d mutilate chart-pop and perform in a pig mask; the 20-hour compilations of f****d-up, blown-out rave tunes; the sprawling threnodies for a dying world, released under his own name. But it’s his music as The Caretaker that’s resonated most. Named for Jack Torrance-by-way-of-Nicholson’s slowly unraveling hotel groundskeeper in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the project debuted with 1999’s Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom, glitchy waltzes to echo through an empty Gold Room.

Plenty of Caretaker records followed, but An Empty Bliss was clearly the masterpiece. It was Kirby’s attempt at conceptualizing his studies of Alzheimer’s disease, including some that suggested playing patients the music of their youth might help lost memories resurface. Perhaps that premise seems loaded beyond the capacities of a 40-some-minute ambient record, and Kirby must have agreed; by 2016, he’d announced that the project of The Caretaker was to slip into dementia itself, as “documented” across a mind-bending six-and-a-half hour project he called Everywhere at the end of time. Over the next three years, Kirby released the work in six installments, each meant to reflect specific stages of Alzheimer’s advancement. By the halfway point, upon which we’ve reached the “post-awareness” stages, the wistful melodies that drifted through the first three sections have been buried in barely penetrable noise, and with last year’s release of the final installment, The Caretaker was put to rest for good.

Not exactly the kind of project one expects to inspire the latest viral stunt on TikTok, the video-sharing app and present obsession of Zoomers worldwide. I naturally assumed I was being trolled upon catching word last week of a “Caretaker challenge” that was making the rounds, the kind of joke you can picture an aging Discogs nerd tweeting out for a dozen likes. And yet, in recent weeks, Everywhere at the end of time has indeed been gathering steam on the app, as what appears to be an endurance exercise in terror, with users recording increasingly harrowed reactions to their six-plus-hour listening marathons. “Everybody think they gangster until u reach stage 4,” reads the caption on one video, hashtagged #thecaretaker, over a wide-eyed girl’s laptop-lit face. And another: “If ion have a mental breakdown by the end of this imma sue all y’all.” 

In the purest sense, this is all very funny, the kind of simulation-glitch absurdity that 2020 continues to deliver, and I find it rather heartening that so many people are engaging with the music of The Caretaker (which is pointedly absent from Spotify and its competitors) under any circumstance at all. To enlist hoards of Gen Z’ers to hunker down with six hours of weird ambient music, motives aside, seems like a clear-cut win — the kind of world-expanding encounter with challenging art that feels increasingly hard to stumble upon at random, as what’s left of the underground grows ever more precarious.

@ledzeppelin_

♬ everywhere at the end of time – sam j

Though, of course, there is already a minor backlash. Search the hashtag and you’ll find allegations that the “Caretaker challenge” can gravely affect one’s mental health, that listening to the album could even cause you to experience symptoms of amnesia yourself. “Lots of people on here are really messed up from listening to it,” reads one TikTok upload. Others are appended with all-caps trigger warnings. It isn’t the first time this music has presented as a creepypasta-style urban legend, either. In a video viewed more than a million times since June, a YouTuber called A Bucket of Jake calls Everywhere “the darkest album I have ever heard,” with a thumbnail image that reads, “THIS ALBUM WILL BREAK YOU.” Overdramatic but seemingly sincere, these reactions are not so surprising, as far as introductions to experimental music go; I can still remember the day a friend played me a Nurse With Wound record and I imagined myself to be trapped in hell. 

Far be it from me, then, to dismiss any earnest response to what is admittedly some heavy s***. (Though for what it’s worth, much of Everywhere at the end of time is formally quite lovely.) But I’m not sure it does the project of The Caretaker much justice to present it as a psychology experiment, much less a scary meme. As much as the work is “about” dementia, you might also say it’s about the collective amnesia of the 21st century, wherein the internet becomes a proxy for memory, the imperatives of capitalism render days as repeating loops, and the bits of culture we “consume” are so often forgotten. You might even say that, on some level, it’s about the increasing unsustainability of life as a working artist. What slips away and what remains, as tech billionaires monopolize the way we hear music? Presented with seemingly limitless options, why does it feel like so little is possible? Could someone like Kirby make something like Everywhere these days, built of lost records sourced from stores now likely shuttered? Is this the future we imagined? What does “the future” even mean anymore?

Mostly, I wish Mark Fisher was here to witness this whole thing. A post-punk philosopher, professor and reliably great writer, Fisher’s K-Punk blog was considered hallowed ground in the format’s early aughts heyday, back when being a nerd on the internet did not have such diminishing returns as today. For more than a decade, and until his death in 2017, Fisher wrote searchingly about Joy Division, Stanley Kubrick, late-stage capitalism, Burial, depression, Drake. If there was a unifying thread, it was a simultaneous mourning and yearning for, or urging towards, a future that wasn’t to come. (Or as one of Kirby’s more poetic album titles put it, Sadly, the future is no longer what it was.) His writing articulated a 21st-century sense of inertia, a dull and uncanny sensation he describes in his 2014 book Ghosts Of My Life, where “life continues, but time has somehow stopped.” 

Fisher often wrote about the music of The Caretaker, too. For the liner notes of Kirby’s 2006 album Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, he wrote: “The theme was once homesickness for the past. Now, it is the impossibility of the present.” I’d like to think Fisher would find the Caretaker’s sudden trendiness funny, and maybe even fascinating: a bizarro collective grappling with ideas of broken time and lost futures, in a year that has made us question our grasp on reality at just about every turn. And I’d bet that beyond the supposed shock value of the whole thing, he’d no doubt zero in on the empathy built into the exercise of surrendering yourself to someone else’s mind, a weird bit of tenderness at the end of the world.

Real-World Experience Gives ‘The Nightworkers’ Its Punch

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By Gabino Iglesias

Brian Selfon’s The Nightworkers is a dark slice of Brooklyn noir with a family drama at its core. Noir is frequently about people caught in bad situation,s and tends to focus on the actions they take to cope or to escape; Selfon has altered that equation and turned the focus inward to explore the psychological effects of stress and fear. Here, crime is often the result of circumstances that have nothing to do with evil.

Shecky Keenan lives in Brooklyn with his niece Kerasha and nephew Henry. Together they run money bags and make deposits for a growing list of sleazy clients. On the surface, they’re getting along, coping with the hands they’ve been dealt — but when your work is all about hiding and secrets, trust is fragile and things can go wrong at any moment. When one of the runners Henry was training, someone he got too close to, goes missing while moving a bag with $250,000 of dirty money, the family structure threatens to collapse. Shecky, Kerasha, and Henry end up facing possible consequences, an encroaching investigation, and the ghosts of their pasts.

The Nightworkers is a literary crime novel that’s all about the details. Descriptions of events, people, feeling, and places abound, and they do a marvelous job of placing the reader in the story and ramping up the tension. The quarter million dollars, the death and questions surrounding that money are at the center of the narrative, but Selfon also focuses the inner lives of his characters, and the world they live in.

The story kicks off with a deconstruction of how the money-laundering business. Selfon, who has worked in criminal justice for almost two decades and was the chief investigative analyst for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, understands the hustle well:

It takes a lot to make a NYC noir feel fresh, and this one does. Selfon understands that criminals are frequently good people forced to do bad things to survive — and that’s more important than his knowledge of the crimes themselves.

While it might not lead to empathy, Selfon’s understanding of how psychogeography shapes criminals is what drives the development of those characters — and the characters are what turn The Nightworkers into a great novel. Kerasha is an ex-con who reads constantly, stalks her psychologist, and is an artist at breaking, entering, and stealing — even from cops. But she got her start in the world of crime from growing up with a mother who was hooked on heroin.

Just like Kerasha, Henry and Shecky also come from backgrounds that play a huge role in who they are today. And Selfon never uses their circumstances as an excuse. These people know what they’re doing and willingly participate in it, but who they are and where they came from help readers understand how they ended up where they are.

Besides superb character development, attention to detail and the presence of art set this novel apart from a lot of what’s happening in contemporary crime fiction. (There is a lot of talk about art and literature.) However, it all eventually become too much in a narrative that juggles three main characters with rich backstories and a host of possibilities, fears, secret agendas, and subplots.

Selfon wrote a commanding debut in The Nightworkers, but then he overwrote it a bit. The philosophical morsels, like Henry learning how the death of a loved one works in multiple tenses (“Present: your special someone is gone. Future: they’re never coming back. Past: you never knew them in the first place.”) are superb. Also, the conversations about art and the multilayered nature of every character are outstanding on their own, but together they can lead the reader off onto tangents that draw attention away from what’s actually going on.

The Nightworkers is complex and possesses great rhythm, accentuated by chapters that range from several pages to just two. Selfon’s prose is elegant, but he clearly understands how much noir relies on detail and economy of language to deliver tension, surprise, and violence. This is a thriller about missing money — those that lost it and those that come looking for it, but it’s also a novel about family, loyalty and the effects of addiction and poverty – and the arrival of a promising voice.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

‘American Utopia’: David Byrne’s Coming To My House, Via HBO

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by Glen Weldon, Chris Klimek, and Soraya Nadia McDonald

David Byrne and Spike Lee. Two artists with very defined, very distinct, and yet very different, sensibilities — but when you put them together, it works. The theatrical concert film David Byrne’s American Utopia, now streaming on HBO Max, is a career-spanning celebration of Byrne’s music, both with Talking Heads and his solo work. Director Spike Lee shoots the stage of Broadway’s Hudson Theater from a host of angles to capture the exuberant, rollicking — yet rigorously choreographed energy — of Byrne and his fellow barefoot, silver-gray-suited performers.

The audio was produced by Mike Katzif and edited by Jessica Reedy.

Kevin Young Named Director Of National Museum Of African American History And Culture

Arts

by Elizabeth Blair

Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African American History and Culture Architectural Photrography

The Smithsonian Institution has announced that poet Kevin Young will be the next director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. With more than 37,000 objects, the NMAAHC in Washington, D.C., is the largest center dedicated to the African American experience in the country. Young succeeds the museum’s founding director, Lonnie G. Bunch III, who was named secretary of the Smithsonian in 2019.

Young is currently director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, where he has overseen such high profile acquisitions as the Harlem-based archives of Harry Belafonte, James Baldwin, Ruby Dee and Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite. Among Young’s published works are 11 books of poetry including Jelly Roll: A Blues, which was a National Book Award finalist. He is currently the poetry editor at The New Yorker.

Opening the Smithsonian’s first national museum devoted to African American history and culture was a gargantuan, multiyear endeavor. Under Bunch’s leadership the museum raised $453 million and, since its opening in September 2016, it has attracted more than 5.5 million visitors.

So can a poet handle that kind of dedication to donor courtship, not to mention administrative bureaucracy? According to the Smithsonian, in Young’s four years at the Schomburg Center, he raised $10 million in grants and donations and raised attendance by 40%.

“Kevin will bring an exciting mix of scholarship, technological savvy and bold vision that builds on the foundational work of the many people who built the museum,” Secretary Bunch said in a statement. “As a poet, he understands how the museum fulfilled the dreams of many Americans, and under his leadership the museum will shape the hopes of future generations.”

The artifacts in NMAAHC’s vast collection span several generations of African American history and culture: a cabin that housed enslaved people on Edisto Island, S.C.; Harriet Tubman’s shawl and hymnal; Emmett Till’s casket; and costumes from the Broadway musical The Wiz. 

The artifacts in NMAAHC’s vast collection span several generations of African American history and culture: a cabin that housed enslaved people on Edisto Island, S.C.; Harriet Tubman’s shawl and hymnal; Emmett Till’s casket; and costumes from the Broadway musical The Wiz. 

In a statement, Young said he looks forward to leading the museum: “Having visited the museum myself with my family, I know what a powerful place it is, transforming visitors both in-person and online, and revealing the centrality of African American culture to the American experience. I am eager to engage further directions in the museum’s mission, embracing our digital present and future while furthering conversations around Black history, art, liberation and joy.”

Lies, Money And Cheating: The Deeper Story Of The College Admissions Scandal

Food For Thought, ,

by Elissa Nadworny and Marco A. Treviño

The college admissions process has long been sold as a system of merit: Do well in school, write a killer essay, score well on the SAT, and you’ll get in. Yet the recent nationwide scandal, dubbed Operation Varsity Blues, laid bare just how much money, instead of aptitude, often drives admissions at elite colleges. 

In March of 2019, federal prosecutors charged 50 people with participating in a scheme to cheat the college admissions system at select colleges nationwide. The investigation into widespread cheating and corruption included Hollywood celebrities, Division I college coaches and wealthy parents who conspired to cheat the process. At its center was a college counselor named Rick Singer, who made millions by bribing coaches at major universities to admit his clients’ children as athletes for sports they often didn’t play, and by rigging SAT and ACT test scores. 

In the new book Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit, & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal  journalists Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz , who covered Operation Varsity Blues for the Wall Street Journal, give life to the largest college admissions scandal ever prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The interview was edited for brevity.

What did you find most interesting about Operation Varsity Blues?

Melissa Korn: I found the complexity of the scheme to be the most interesting part. This wasn’t just one corrupt guy helping a crooked parent. Each prong of the operation, both testing and bribery/fake athletes, involved multiple players working together, or sometimes being kept separate from one another as best suited the end game. It could have fallen apart in so many ways, at so many different stages.

The [initial criminal] complaint is 204 pages and could be published as a book alone. It’s so detailed that it leaves you with so many interesting questions. It moves beyond a juicy news story because there is something close to home for many people. If you’re a parent or anybody who has a loved one, you want to do what’s best for them. You want to help your loved one succeed. Some people just went a little too far.

As you were reporting, the case was still underway, and you were reporting and writing in real time. What were some of the challenges you faced because of that?

Jennifer Levitz: The biggest challenge was getting people to speak with us. This case was still a criminal case, so a lot of people were reluctant to speak. It can be tough to break into circles where you have people surrounded by teams of lawyers and PR consultants. We had to get very creative in telling these stories and I think the writing was hard, but the reporting was where the real sweat came in.

I also found that the door knocking aspect of it was different. I’ve generally been a reporter driving ’round, knocking on doors and talking to neighbors. Well, it’s really hard to do that when people live in communities where nobody is walking down the street, and everyone’s behind a gate with alarm systems. You just cannot physically run into anybody.

I’m a big believer in getting to people directly. It’s an art to work with people whose job is to protect this person while keeping you at bay. I wasn’t confident that our messages were even getting to people. So, I wanted to get to people directly and at least give them a chance. 

One of the big “gets” in the book is your interview with one of the students involved in the scandal, Matteo Sloane. His father, Devin Sloane, was sentenced to four months in prison for paying to have Matteo admitted to the University of Southern California. How did that interview come to be?

Levitz: I reached Matteo Sloane through Facebook Messenger, saying, “Hey, we would love to talk with you.” A couple months go by. Then he wrote back wanting to tell his side of the story. We went ahead and spoke with him, and he was just so honest. 

Then I remember going the next day to confirm a couple of things with the people representing that family. They were like, “You did what? You talked to him?” Had we gone through them, that wouldn’t have happened.

[In the book] we went beyond the headlines, and our own Wall Street Journalcoverage, to connect the dots between all the players and to tell the stories of the individuals involved. It’s not sympathy for them, but we do make them actual people — flawed, complex people — rather than just names in a tabloid or court document.

As you mentioned earlier, this case brings up issues about meritocracy, equity and access. How has Unacceptable shaped your current work or view on higher ed? 

Korn: So I have been covering general U.S. higher ed for almost six years now. I love the beat, and I have always approached it somewhat cynically. This project made me question what I’m hearing from schools more than I already did. As schools are talking about their devotion to diversity, equity and access, I am saying, “OK, let me see that,” because schools put out these great press releases or talk about their percent of Pell Grant students. But then they were involved with this, or their coaches did this, or they gave preference to these types of students.

This has helped me cement in my mind the need for that cynicism or the “prove it” attitude that I might take right now. I try to describe how the [higher education] system works, where there are fault lines, and where it’s a little bit broken. I also highlight what’s working and who’s improving it and how people are reforming it, if they are.

Levitz: We still have a long way to go before the playing field in college admissions is truly leveled. This scandal wasn’t born in a vacuum. Unacceptable provides context about how the admissions system for selective colleges was already quite broken and extremely unfair. We note that some in the admissions world refer to it as a “blood sport,” and that’s all too apt in some of these fiercely competitive communities. An acceptance letter to a particular school isn’t a prize to be won or a badge showing one kid’s parents are somehow better than another’s. 

Marco A. Treviño is an intern on NPR’s Education Desk.

‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’ Is Fast, Funny, Multi-Faceted And No Small Feat

Film

by Justin Chang

THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD VERSION: RADHA BLANK (WRITER, DIRECTOR) as RADHA. Cr. JEONG PARK/NETFLIX ©2020

While the American film industry still has a long way to go in nurturing movies made by women and people of color, the Sundance Film Festival has long provided an important platform for marginalized voices. This is the festival that recently introduced us to pictures like The Farewell, from Lulu Wang, and Clemency, from Chinonye Chukwu. Eight years ago, Ava DuVernay premiered her film Middle of Nowhere at Sundance and became the first Black woman in the festival’s history to win best director for an American drama.

This year, Radha Blank became the second Black woman to earn that prize for her first feature, The Forty-Year-Old Version. It was a worthy winner, not just because it’s a terrific movie, but also because it’s specifically about the challenges of making meaningful, personal art from an underrepresented perspective. 

Blank’s artistry has many facets: She has a sharp ear for comic dialogue and an exquisite eye, having shot this movie on gorgeous black-and-white 35-millimeter film. She also gives a very fine performance as a fictionalized version of herself, also named Radha Blank — a struggling artist from Harlem, who was hailed years earlier as a promising playwright.

Now, just a few months shy of her 40th birthday, she has little to show for that promise besides a play that she’s been working on for ages. She pays the bills by teaching drama at a local high school and spends a lot of time commiserating with her talent agent and longtime buddy Archie, played by Korean American actor Peter Kim in a sly riff on the gay-best-friend trope. 

Archie urges Radha to seize any and every opportunity, even if it may require some compromise. At a party one night, he steers her toward J. Whitman, a powerful theater producer played with delicious smarminess by Tony Award-winner Reed Birney. After some tussling, Whitman eventually agrees to produce Radha’s play, which follows a Black couple in a fast-gentrifying Harlem. But he demands numerous changes, including the introduction of a white co-lead in order to show the face of gentrification itself and, of course, draw a larger audience.

Blank clearly delights in skewering the tone-deaf condescension of white men who fancy themselves cultural gatekeepers. But one of the reasons The Forty-Year-Old Version is so disarming is that Blank saves the toughest criticism for herself. She lets us see her character grapple with deep insecurities about her talent, her calling and her future — sometimes with tears, but more often with a well-timed, self-deprecating jab.

At one point, Radha decides to abandon theater and reinvent herself as a rapper, seizing upon a long-ago passion that she hopes will tie her more closely to a strong community of Black artists. And so begins a wide-ranging tour of New York’s hip-hop scene, from a boxing ring in the Bronx where female rappers go ferociously head-to-head, to a Brooklyn club where Radha does some recordings with a gruff but sensitive DJ, played by Oswin Benjamin. Radha’s talent in this arena is more than apparent, even if her nerves sometimes get the better of her — like when she freezes onstage in front of an audience that includes several of her high-school students.

If you cringe for Radha in that moment, as I did, consider it proof of how deeply Blank has secured your emotional investment in her journey. That’s no small feat, considering all the crowd-pleasing underdog-drama clichés the story could have stumbled into but somehow avoids. 

A more obvious telling of this story might have ended with Radha discovering her true calling as a rapper, or figuring out how to put on a successful version of her play that stays true to her creative vision. But Blank seems less interested in clear resolutions than in examining how these two distinct worlds, theater and hip-hop, have shaped her complex identity as an artist. She doesn’t feel entirely at home in either space. And yet her work, at its best, becomes a bold synthesis of both.

As fast and funny as much of it is, The Forty-Year-Old Version also has a rich vein of melancholy. There’s an elegiac quality to the black-and-white images, which might bring to mind vintage New York pictures like Manhattan, Shadows and She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee‘s equally auspicious 1986 debut. As it happens, She’s Gotta Have It recently spawned a TV series for which Blank wrote a few episodes. But it would be a mistake to squeeze her into any kind of mold based on her influences. Radha Blank already has a voice that is gloriously her own, whichever version of it we hear next.

As Burning Man Goes Virtual, Organizers Try To Capture The Communal Aspect

Food For Thought,

by Elizabeth Blair

Burning Man — the dazzling, days-long, annual arts and lovefest drawing 70,000 to the dusty Nevada desert — was cancelled this year. But organizers are trying to capture the quintessential, communal arts experience online.

For this year’s theme, Multiverse, teams have created 2D and 3D virtual experiences. The program runs Aug. 30-Sept. 6.

The chaos and creativity of Burning Man usually involves thousands of artists and volunteers trekking to the vast, windy, barren desert to build enormous, eye-popping, often whimsical sculptures. This year, you can turn on your webcam or virtual-reality headset to attend an art class or DJ dance party — or even join a virtual group hug.

In the desert, the Burning Man Temple is typically a place spacious enough for people to walk into and reflect, grieve or leave an offering. This year, you can sort of do that at the Ethereal Empyrean Experience with a mobile device, desktop, or VR headset.

Ed Cooke, one of the creators of SparkleVerse, says that to recreate the desert experience, burners — as attendees are called — have set up tents in their living rooms and dressed up in costumes.

“Getting up and dancing in front of your screen, bothering to put on a costume, jumping around, these things are extraordinarily powerful in terms of taking you into new realms of experience,” he says. “Radical self-expression” is one of Burning Man’s 10 Principles.

Cooke admits that online he doesn’t experience “the sense of awe of the scale of things” he experiences in the desert, but he’s convinced the kind of joyful, communal experience he’s had there in the past can be achieved virtually.

Other burners are having none of it. “It’s not the same thing,” says Douglas Wolk, who’s been going to Burning Man for 20 years.

Wolk says he keeps going back to Burning Man because he believes in its principles such as no advertising and immediacy, which organizers describe as seeking “to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers.”

Wolk says, when everyone is off the grid together, the relationships are unlike anything else. “All kinds of people meet in this difficult, sometimes frustrating environment and they’re pretty much all there to help each other,” he says. “It’s really not the same thing to be sitting in front of your computer.”

Longtime Burning Man artist Jennifer Lewin has mixed feelings about this year’s virtual festival. While she thinks it’s “a very interesting experiment,” she misses the opportunity to “test the limits” of her large, interactive, public sculptures.

With the dust, heat, wind and thousands of people ready to play, “Burning Man is the best place possible for me to go to test interactive sculptures, says Lewin. “If your work can survive Burning Man, it can survive anywhere.”

Computer images of Lewin’s work Cosmos, now on display in Tokyo, are in the DustyMultiverse this year. Lewin says, while they are “perfect conceptualizations” of the work, they don’t face any “real world problems.”

Burning Man curators know they can’t fully replicate the uniquely communal and physical experience of Black Rock City. Kim Cook, director of creative initiatives at Burning Man Project, says the goal this year is “connection and creativity and sharing experiences.” With some 90 events taking place around the world, she says “the ethos of Burning Man is not restricted to one location.”

The culmination of the festival is the burning of the giant sculpture of the Burning Man. This year organizers will stream videos of people doing burns in their backyards, fire dancing, or even just lighting candles.

In ‘I’m Thinking Of Ending Things,’ A Couple Gets Stuck In A Dreamlike Limbo

Film,

by Glen Weldon

Im Thinking Of Ending Things. Jessie Buckley as Young Woman, Jesse Plemons as Jake in Im Thinking Of Ending Things. Cr. Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX © 2020

After finishing writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s latest film, which hurls so many things at you as you watch it you find yourself bobbing and weaving just to keep up, I longed to talk it over with other people. It’s that kind of movie, wrapped in a thick shroud of fully intentional ambiguity that always threatens to thin to mere vagueness, and it benefits from the kind of unpacking that grows out of discussion. But as the film wasn’t out yet, I tentatively clicked on a few advance reviews.

There, to my surprise and no small amount of dismay, I found … just a whole metric ton of spoilers.

To be fair: This is the kind of movie it is almost impossible to write or talk about without revealing What’s Really Going On, unless one sticks to the barest bones of the plot.

So let’s do that. A young couple who’ve only recently gotten together (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemmons) take a long car trip during a snowstorm to have dinner with the guy’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) at their farmhouse. They have dinner. Things get awkward; weird stuff happens. The couple drives back to the city. The snow gets worse. Things grow more awkward. Weirder stuff happens.

That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t begin to convey what sets I’m Thinking of Ending Things apart, or what makes it so recognizably and indelibly a film only Kaufman can or would make. I will endeavor to do so here, without spoiling What’s Really Going On, by striving to keep things ambiguous, though we might have to settle for vague.

This is not, to be clear, a movie that harbors a Big Twist that must be protected at all costs. It’s not a puzzle that, once solved, surrenders everything that made it interesting in the first place. For one thing, you know that things are hinky from the jump — Buckley’s interior monologue seems strangely stilted, and keeps getting interrupted by Plemmons’ halting, unwieldy conversational gambits. These two people aren’t on the same wavelength, though one of them clearly wants them, aches for them, to be. So things between them, and around them, subtly shift, and keep shifting.

On the surface, the critique Kaufman seems to want the film to make — the one he keeps shoving into the mouths of this couple over and over again, particularly in the two long car drives that make up the film’s first and third acts — goes something like this: We humans subsist on false, manufactured, derivative narratives and inauthentic emotions to distract us from what is True and Original and Real.

But let’s be real, or, you know, Real: That whole notion, especially as it’s presented here, is a facile, boring one — the kind of pseudo-intellectual, solipsistic nugget of received, pre-digested “wisdom” you might remember getting spouted by the most tendentious, arrogant mansplainer in your college dorm, that one time at a party when he put down his acoustic guitar long enough to corner you over by the Funyons and demand you read Bukowski.

And that, it seems to me at least, is What’s Really Going On, here.

Kaufman’s true target isn’t anything so abstract and anodyne as “modern life,” or the way it encourages us to fall into intellectual laziness and disingenuously parrot thoughts, take up positions and form identities we’ve cribbed from things we’ve read or watched or heard. No, he’s directing his mocking derision at the people (let’s face it: the men, overwhelmingly) who lie to themselves about their own gifts, who too-eagerly embrace the need to be seen as the smartest, the cleverest, the most special, and who resolutely fail to connect with others because of it.

This being a Charlie Kaufman joint, we are reasonably safe in assuming that he’s calling out himself, and others like him.

Over the course of the film, we see memories of past slights — and a lifetime of outright humiliations — mix with a desperate longing to be, and to have always been, accepted, embraced, validated. To have one’s every pat, received notion about life, and visual art, and film, and the essays of David Foster Wallace (come on, that’s a tell) vigorously agreed with, and eagerly shared, by someone, anyone, else: Eternal Sunshine of the Incel Mind.

That’s a lot of conceptual work to lay upon the shoulders of your actors, especially when you keep buffeting them with continuous, mysterious shifts in mood, motivation, characterization, backstory and, not for nothing, wardrobe that would seem to deny them the bedrock emotional grounding that the craft of acting requires.

But Buckley is terrific, modulating her performance to accommodate whatever way Kaufman’s wind is blowing, from scene to scene. Plemmons is low-key terrifying in the way he eases from surly and resentful to pleading and pitiable to stoic and unreadable. Thewlis is by turns creepy and heartbreaking, and Collette’s is a performance you find yourself watching with open-mouthed incredulity and awe. Say this much: She adds yet another wildly uncomfortable family dinner scene to an IMDB profile already studded with them.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things may be downbeat — and hoo boy, is it — yet it avoids the dour misanthropy of much of Kaufman’s work. Only just, though. Your mileage may vary of course, but I found a moment, late in the film, when a character seems to forgive themselves for living an empty, emotionally stunted life quietly breathtaking, because knowing his stuff, I never expected Kaufman to permit himself or his characters (who are we kidding: himself) even the possibility of grace.

It’s not a sentiment I was prepared to extend to the character in question, nor do I think Kaufman expects the audience to. But it was nice to see Kaufman letting up on himself — or at least, the self he sees in the mirror — for even a second, given that he’s spent so much of his career flagellating himself for our amusement.

‘Mulan’: A Beloved Disney Classic Reimagined As Martial Arts Epic

Film, ,

by Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, Mallory Yu, and Kathy Tu

The biggest movie so far to be bumped from theaters to home viewing during the pandemic is Disney’s Mulan. The live-action reimagining of the 1998 animated musical doesn’t have songs or a cartoon dragon. But the story still finds young Mulan disguising herself as a man so she can fight in her father’s place.

Show Notes:

The audio was produced and edited by Mike Katzif and Jessica Reedy.