Brittany Shoot

These Here Are Crazy Times 2

farhana — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Every so often, I’ll be on the phone with my ninety-one-year-old grandma and she’ll reveal a tidbit I’ve never heard before. The most recent revelation—admittedly several years ago now—was about her only serious boyfriend before meeting my grandpa. He hadn’t been interested in religion, and my gram just couldn’t envision a future with such a man, much as she loved him.

My grandpa, a theology professor who fit the spiritual bill, has been gone for a decade, but while I’m always working to pry memories from Gram’s Alzheimer’s infected brain, I’ve got a nice little book full of grandpa’s handwritten notes about every major event of his life. The once-blank journal contains 365 questions about childhood, marriage, children, and aging; always an educator, he filled it out like a homework assignment and gave it to me before he died.

Most people aren’t lucky enough to have such compendiums of information about our loved ones after they’re gone. Even fewer would know what to do with it. Sarah May’s zine, These Here Are Crazy Times 2, about her late grandmother, Martha Luzier Birdsall, is filled with stories about working in a coal mine, getting married in the Methodist church, and losing a brother in WWII, many of which bear resemblance to my own family history. Several years before her death, Sarah May’s grandma gave each of her grandchildren a folder full of poetry and family history, but it wasn’t until years after she’d been gone that Sarah May started poring over her grandma’s personal stories about losing everything but a yard full of turkeys and a big vegetable garden during the Great Depression and dating an enlisted guy who showed her his incomplete divorce paperwork as an afterthought.

Some people have a knack for storytelling, and it’s clear that Sarah May inherited hers from her grandmother. Pick up this small booklet for stories about how things have changed—and how, when it comes to some things like dismissive doctors and broken hearts, they haven’t changed at all.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 18th 2011

Possible Lives (Las Vidas Posibles)

mandy — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Sandra Gugliotta

Global Film Initiative

As a geologist, Clara’s husband Luciano often travels to Patagonia for work. After calling Clara from the road, he stops answering his cell phone. Once she’s confirmed that he failed to check into his hotel, Clara leaves a note and sets out to find him. Thousands of miles from home, she checks into the room herself. She meets with a police inspector and asks for help finding her husband. “When the weather improves,” he assures her, noting that in such inclement conditions, there are many accidents.

While biding her time in the middle of nowhere, Clara meets a real estate agent who bears a striking resemblance to her missing spouse. She feigns interest in buying property to spend time with him, despite the fact that he has a wife. She prowls around his house at night. She asks awkward questions about his personal life and, eventually, she even ignores information from the police about her husband’s actual disappearance.

Possible Lives, a sleepy eighty-minute film in Spanish with English subtitles, is an interesting concept but lacks suspense. Though pretty, it isn’t terribly eventful. Without much time to learn about the characters’ relationships, it’s difficult to feel connected to their problems, to Clara’s fright and grief; yet it’s always quite easy to discern what is happening in what could be an elegant mystery about losing one’s mind and losing one’s partner. It’s a perfectly fine film to catch along with a series of other during a festival showcase, but you shouldn’t rent it expecting a riotously entertaining drama.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, January 23rd 2011

Freedom

brittany — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Jonathan Franzen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Brittany: I’m one of those lit geeks who has long loved Jonathan Franzen. I read How To Be Alone on a solo trip to Japan when I was twenty, and it particularly spoke to me as an introverted writer. The better part of a decade later, I’m still so infatuated with that particular collection—though I’ve also read Franzen’s three previous novels, memoir, numerous pieces in The New Yorker, and his longtime partner Kathryn Chetkovich’s Granta essay “Envy” before it was so publicly associated with Franzen—that it was no stretch to know I’d like Freedom. I’ve also read a lot about Franzen’s process as a writer, and frankly, it seems few people have the commitment to churn out the type of work he produces. That doesn’t mean I think it’s above critique; it’s just that I admire his work ethic and generally, the end result.

Mandy: Given that I frequently read The New York Times Book Review and listen to pop culture pundits on NPR, I’m quite familiar with Franzen’s status as a literary darling; however, I had never read his work until Freedom. This past July, I listened to a compelling New Yorker podcast in which Franzen discussed the prevalence of songbird killings for food in the Mediterranean, and I decided it was time I join the ranks and give this guy a shot. When Freedom was released, I dutifully attempted to avoid its reviews, so as to not taint my experience of the nearly 600-page tome. But that effort yielded little success; once the media got a hold of the book, glowing reviews were ubiquitous, and thus my hopes were high.

Brittany: Freedom ended up being much of what I expected, and months after putting it back on the shelf, I’m still relatively satisfied with the long nights it took me to finish it off. Five main characters (six if you count the underdeveloped daughter) weave in and out of one another’s lives, most tragically and painfully, and nearly all of them are deeply flawed, rather screwed up people.

For reasons I still haven’t quite figured out, I identified both with philandering tortured artist Richard Katz and college athlete cum miserable housewife Patty Berglund. In part, I think this is because Franzen has gotten rather good at not overstating who his characters are, allowing readers to put a bit of our own experience onto the story of each key player. That said, as is nearly always the case when a critic loves a mainstream work, I like to pretend that the reflection I seek in this sort of fiction isn’t shared by anyone else. I don’t want to think about who else identifies with a woman like Patty, because in the end, while I might have felt for her, having sympathy for her character is also very much a statement of how I see myself opposed to her. I’m not a miserable housewife, nor am I an adulterer (even if I do sometimes act like a tormented creative type). Being able to both identify as something and not as something both hold value for me; in this case, simultaneously.

Without giving too much away, I think the book is about having compassion, and I suspect that I liked it because I tried to have a lot of it for all of the characters. Except for Joey Berglund. I think he has a personality disorder.

Mandy: While I understand why Franzen is being showered with praise, I was pretty disappointed in Freedom. To my mind, fiction should facilitate a temporary transportation into the world the author has created, and my main criticism of Freedom is that I was entirely aware through the duration of the book that a) I was reading, b) I was reading something someone made up, and c) I was experiencing characters through the lens of the author (read: they didn't come off as authentic selves). It also was clear to me that Franzen himself really identifies with Walter Berglund; therefore all the characters felt like they were presented through Walter's point of view, even when they were in first person narration.

Many critics have lauded Franzen for having the ability to write realistically from a woman’s perspective, a notion that itches my anti-essentialist thinking and one with which I don’t entirely agree. Even though most of Freedom is written is from Patty's perspective, the novel really revolves around her husband, Walter. For that reason, it makes sense that Franzen chose to write a lot of Patty's self-reflection in third person, particularly since one can argue that women’s lives tend to revolve around men’s (instead of their being agents of self-determination), a viewpoint to which I give some credence. But the question is one of intentionality on the part of the author, and I don't think Franzen was ever really able to get inside Patty’s character in a way where she enveloped him; it was always the other way around, with Walter being the focal point. The same is true for Richard Katz, the two kids, and Lalitha. In fact, the only character I even slightly identified with—and believe me, it was only slight—was Jessica. But she barely got any face-time, and may have been the least developed of all the characters.

It probably didn't help Franzen’s case that I recently read Zadie Smith's On Beauty, a novel which is thematically similar to Freedom (in that it also has a filial cast of rather unlikable characters who represent middle class liberal America’s hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies) that also had the benefit of an immensely skilled author whose linguistic craftsmanship and character development outshines Franzen’s, in my humble opinion. Smith’s characters are messy and lack self-awareness or self-control that might prevent their ample mistakes while Franzen’s characters see the forest for the trees and still insist on bumbles. In that light, On Beauty contained happy and unhappy surprises that felt genuine. With Freedom, I had the jump on the trajectory of each storyline from beginning to end, and the failure of the writing itself to captivate had me using the strength of self-persuasion to avoid skipping pages. In short, enjoying Freedom required too much effort for my liking.

Brittany: The last two pages of the book were simply magical for me and made the whole thing worth it because I'm not good enough yet at predicting endings to have seen any of that coming. I tend to think ninety percent of fictional or fictionalized stories—films, books—end horribly, and this didn't. I may like to think I’m above a happy ending, that I can somehow stomach that life so rarely grants them, but for me personally right now, I was just sort of relieved that even made-up people could have one.

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, Brittany Shoot, January 6th 2011

Spooner

andrea — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Pete Dexter

Grand Central Publishing

Warren Spooner is an underachiever in a remarkable family. As a child, he sneaks around town peeing in people’s shoes and watching things burn in the city incinerator. As an adult, he first becomes a major league baseball player and then a writer, seemingly destined for early demise as he eagerly enters into questionable situations with his boxer pal Stanley Faint. After a string of surgeries, he has enough metal in his body to warrant concern about the weight of his coffin when he eventually dies. There has never been a lovable black sheep quite like Spooner.

His step-father Calmer, a quiet, contemplative ex-naval commander turned teacher, is a constant source of support as Spooner gets older but doesn’t quite grow up. Graciously married to Spooner’s long-suffering mother Lilly, Calmer dutifully arrives in the principal’s office, in Spooner’s hospital room, and eventually spends his dying days defending his adoptive son’s property and sanity in ways perhaps forever unknown to the then-middle aged family man. If Spooner is on an epic journey that spans five decades of difficulty, unemployment, heartbreak, and redemption, then Calmer is his near-constant companion, even when they’re separated by distance and time. The depth of their emotional journeys and the lengths taken to save one another are impossible to sum up in a review of any length.

With a reading group guide included, Spooner is clearly more popular than I realized. It’s no surprise; I happily and confidently place it on a list of the best books of the naughts. A riotously funny, deeply moving instant classic, it will be given as a gift to more than one angsty pal with the hope that Spooner and Calmer’s respective stories of confusion and eventual redemption will resonate in the myriad ways they did for me. Most compelling of all are the similarities between Spooner’s experiences and that of National Book Award-winning author Pete Dexter. My suggestion is to read the book before you research Dexter; otherwise, much will be prematurely revealed.

If you empathize with issues related to family dysfunction, young adult angst, unspoken affection between male family members, and an inability to ever fully mature into a socially functional grown-up, you should not miss this epic journey.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, January 5th 2011

Please Don’t Bomb The Suburbs: A Midterm Report on My Generation and the Future of Our Super Movement

payal — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By William Upski Wimsatt

Akashic

Depending on your age and your social/political circle, you may not know the name William Upski Wimsatt. In his youth, Wimsatt was the youngest Utne Reader “Visionary” award winner. In the last two decades, he’s written several books about the suburbs, the prison industrial complex, white urban subculture, hip-hop, and graffiti. These days, he’s mostly known for political organizing and working with and supporting groups like Generational Alliance and Resource Generation.

Following up his 1994 book Bomb the Suburbs, which garnered him a bit of a cultish progressive following, Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs is Wimsatt’s older (if not much wiser) take on adulthood, organizing, and personal politics. The book’s basic premise is this: Get power, get corporate power, use it for good. If you don’t agree with that message from the jump—or you’re not already a fan of Wimsatt’s grandstanding and youth minister-esque appeal—you may not get a whole hell of a lot out of Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs.

From the jump, Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs is a bit confusing for folks new to the activist’s work. Written as one man’s account of what has been important in the last thirty years of American progressive organizing, it’s anything but comprehensive or objective. Mixing storytelling and action plans in a somewhat haphazard fashion and at times reading like a who’s who of modern progressive activism, Wimsatt shamelessly name-drops seemingly everyone he’s ever known or worked with, from Van Jones to Adrienne Marie Brown. While that’s not inherently bad, it’s terribly insular and not very interesting—especially to the outsider, non-activists Wimsatt claims to want to reach.

Wimsatt writes that his audience for the book is two groups: seasoned forty-two-year-old businesspeople and curious seventeen-year-olds just learning about progressive movements. That said, he also wants desperately to identify with people across this entire spectrum of age and experience. By Wimsatt’s definition, he and I share a generation—he claims both Gen X and Gen Y as “his”—even though he’s more than ten years older than me, and I’m one of the oldest in the Millennial club. This sort of confusing, broad, and aimless reaching to include people is the ultimate weakness of the book, when it was no doubt intended to be its strength.

Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs isn’t an analytical dissection of movements and organizing. If anything, it’s one man’s self-congratulatory journey through youthful transgressions to his late thirties, when he realized, as he writes in the book, “Adulthood hits you like whoa.” That same tone, carried throughout, makes the book feel more like a blog than an actual literary accomplishment. I’m sadly not post-print enough to think that turning blog-like ramblings into a bound publication is a good idea; nevermind whether I agree that adulthood “hits you like whoa.”

Wimsatt covers a lot of topics without nuance. He praises the work of non-profits without addressing the non-profit industrial complex. He warns of how overpopulation is pushing humanity to the brink of disaster, and on the same page, questions whether or not he’ll have children. Wimsatt blindly embraces new media, excited about the potential for change using online tools, without considering the drawbacks and legitimate reasons why Facebook is not part of a truly progressive revolution.

It’s incredibly difficult to write a book that appeals to a thirty-eight-year-old suburban homeowner with nephews and a sixteen-year-old urban blogger who’s just learning about environmentalism. It’s also difficult to explore nuance and history when you believe your own experiences and your own self-selected version of history takes precedent. As much as I’d like to believe in the collectivism of a movement necessary for the generation- and experience-breaking organizing that Wimsatt tries to hawk in Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs, this conversational plea to remain relevant didn’t sell me on anything.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, December 22nd 2010

Scam: The First Four Issues!

payal — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Erick Lyle

Microcosm Publishing

Is it punk to drink when you’re flat broke? Is selling plasma or sniffing glue revolutionary? Is throwing shit off a Macy’s rooftop ever cool? Nearly twenty years after his zine was released in a series of diatribes about scamming the system and living on the edge of society, Erick Lyle’s writings as zinester Iggy Scam have been edited and bound for the masses. His collected works, Scam: The First Four Issues!, makes you question the very idea of “punk” and who gets to decide exactly what that means.

The best parts of Scam are the little things you don’t expect. Reviews of Beverly Hills, 90210; specific books, and generalized analyses—“Cars aren’t very punk. Roller skates are punk.”—are wickedly funny, provided you’re not taking Lyle seriously. Interviews with hardcore band Born Against’s Sam McPheeters or writer William Upski Wimsatt appropriately date the anthology and offer a window into the media Lyle was consuming in the mid-1990s. Pranks like Xeroxing 1,200 Starbucks coupons and handing them out are amusing, if only because you know Lyle didn’t get caught.

Much like Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book, Scam is full of ways to rip off companies and The Man—most outdated and some more obvious than others. To get free unlimited copies at Kinko’s, swipe a paper clip in the copy machine credit card slot. To let loose free sodas and a bucket full of change, spray salt water into a vending machine dollar bill slot. Need new tunes? Sign up for introductory offers from now-defunct services like BMG Music. Hungry? Buy a soda at Wendy’s and hit the salad bar for free when no one is looking. Ask for a student discount any chance you get—whether or not you are one. Some of those little tricks were and are useful, if also deployed by not-so-punk suburban kids like me.

Some of Lyle’s exploits are awesome: house shows, hanging out at Food Not Bombs, and even protests are hallmarks of a youthful punk lifestyle. Running a pirate radio station and stealing electricity from street lamps can even be viewed as radical acts. Other aspects of Lyle’s so-called punk existence are markedly less glamorous, sometimes outright questionable, and littered with unquestioned privilege.

Take one of Lyle’s hitchhiking experiences, when the guy giving him a ride masturbated in front of him. Unhurt and not assaulted, Lyle walked away from the incident with a laugh—hardly what might happen if he were anything other than a young, white, straight male who thought it was more funny than frightening. In the same way, eating out of dumpsters, while arguably a way to reclaim perfectly fine discarded food, is also an act reserved for those not afraid of being harassed by law enforcement or arrested, as well as those who are well enough to risk food poisoning for a bit of free grub.

Some of Lyle’s stances, like his hatred for straightedge, are never explained. On several occasions, he advocates violence like smashing windows without particular purpose, seemingly because he understands violent acts to be related to anarchy, and thus punk. Granted, I’d never want anyone dissecting stuff I wrote when I was eighteen, but at times, it’s tough to read Lyle’s work as more than chaotic adolescent rants about how to destroy shit rather than effect change.

If nothing else, Scam is an interesting historical document from a time when eighteen-year-olds were listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio and watching the Gulf War on TV. If you can make out the scrawled handwriting, comics about graffiti and postage fraud, and care to read about hustling free condoms from STD studies at university hospitals, you’d do well to pick up Scam.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, December 18th 2010

Living in the End Times

barbara — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Slavoj Žižek

Verso

Reading Slavoj Žižek for the first time is not unlike being stuck on a bar stool next to a slightly inebriated, repentant MBA who just read a Karl Marx biography and thinks he has the world figured out. An aside about the deeper meaning of 3:10 to Yuma, a diatribe against Slovenia’s failure as a communist state, and praise of the five stages of grief seem like disconnected nonsense unless taken as a larger, comprehensive analysis of the failure of global capitalism. After a while, you’re either also drunk or so bewildered by the onslaught of information that you begin to see the reason behind this grizzled young man’s ramblings. Now just imagine that this is one of the most gifted living intellectuals.

Žižek—one of the world’s leading contemporary academic thinkers—is at once obscure and brilliant. In Living in the End Times, he pulls together themes from several smaller works and dozens of speeches and papers from the past several years to illuminate the apocalyptic zero-point for which the world is headed. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are approaching—ecological crisis, explosive social divisions and exclusions, consequences of the biogenetic revolution, and systemic imbalances (struggles over raw materials, food, and water; as well as more abstract battles over issues like intellectual property)—and our textbook-diagnosed reactions show that the end is nigh.

Using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ model, he categorizes our reactions to modern economic, social, and ecological crises as stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While many believe Kübler-Ross’ framework to be somewhat flawed, it does provide a handy way of determining one’s own stage of grieving the collapse of society. How else to make sense of our apathy in the face of the simultaneous rise of extreme religious fundamentalism, crumbling banking systems, and expansive, violent political repression? What other way to explain away the near-psychotic binaries in wealth and poverty in places like Kuwait and Dubai, oil-dependent towering desert empires built by thousands of slave-wage immigrants and ruled by a frighteningly wealthy upper class—and the ways with which we turn the other cheek?

If you believe the state of the global economy, social hierarchy, and legal affairs to be as dramatically desperate as Žižek, you’ll not be surprised that he beckons us to prepare for famine, plague, global warfare, and ultimate death. If you have little faith in humanity, you’ll find good company in the bright if troubled theorist. If you believe in our eventual recovery, you’ll also find nuggets of helpful wisdom between his dismal predictions.

You may not be able to keep up the apocalyptic philosopher, but you’d be better off for trying.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 23rd 2010

The Social Network

mandy — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by David Fincher

Columbia Pictures

Every day, my partner gets up and goes to work with two other guys who live next door to us. Along with a handful of monied investors, some super dedicated programmers who regularly work nights and weekends, and a few risk enthusiast entrepreneur types who jet around Europe seeking out investment deals, the group makes software they believe will change the way people work. No one’s making a lot of money (yet)—but someday we expect they will.

The world of technology start-ups is not one that very many social justice folks visit, let alone inhabit. Sure, there are people who label themselves “netroots social entrepreneurs” or “crowd-sourcing cyberactivist evangelists,” but most progressives I know don’t play in this so-called boys club—and it shows. The lefty films reviews I’ve read of The Social Network—in which reviewers lament class, race, and gender privilege—miss the point entirely. (The mainstream reviews don’t necessarily have insight into the scene either.) While a socially homogenous character set and stereotypical story arc may seem theoretically offensive, at least it’s relatively honest.

The Social Network is a film about the unlikely, and yet entirely predictable, ways tech start-ups succeed. When small and scrappy basement-, garage- or dorm-dwelling companies emerge to take on the world from a high-rise perch, the story is almost always a compelling case study in grueling work hours, personal sacrifice, and ultimately financial reward. In telling the story of Facebook, the social networking site that has forced the very concept of privacy to be reconsidered by a generation, the film’s creators arguably play up what small amount of partying happened on the way to success.

Did Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg really get a blow job in a pub restroom from a tech groupie? Was a Palo Alto party once busted when Napster founder and early Facebook investor Sean Parker emerged with cocaine on his hands? Aside from these not terribly scandalous scenes, The Social Network isn’t that sexy or controversial. It just shows a lot of anxiety, work, and isolation—with no vacation and no relief. It’s actually par for the course, if you ask this resident start-up wife.

Zuckerberg is portrayed as an insecure Harvard freshman scrambling for success (by stealing and lying his way to the top), and anyone already familiar with the young hacker’s story knows that some version of this narrative is true. Conveniently mentioned as an afterthought is that Zuckerberg was courted by Microsoft in high school. He’s not a down-and-out loser who got lucky, even if he did swipe his billion-dollar idea from someone else; he was already a fairly accomplished programmer with an entitlement chip on his shoulder.

As he works towards social media domination, Zuckerberg obsesses over a former college flame who dumped him, essentially, for being a jackass. Revenge for a geeky broken heart is the path to success for both Zuckerberg and Parker, and while the plot device was no doubt inflated for the film, why is that so awful or difficult to comprehend? Would we prefer Zuckerberg simply be portrayed as an out-and-out sociopath? People always say living well is the best revenge, and being the world’s youngest billionaire—albeit a seemingly friendless one—is one way to live, well, better.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has responded to complaints about women’s marginal, support-the-geek role in the film by saying that, in fact, Facebook (and no doubt its social media cousins) was created by a “very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people.” While distressing, some alternative manifestations of misogyny could include becoming a Girls Gone Wild producer, an abusive partner, or a serial rapist. Creating a massive online connection space is hardly the worst thing a woman-hating, idea-stealing nerd could do. As such, much of The Social Network centers around Zuckerberg’s legal battles (which have since been settled) with far less attention paid to his non-existent social life. Misogyny shouldn’t be a given, but sometimes there’s just no getting around how it instructs a narrative.

While critics adore this film with good reason, audiences are torn. To me, this is because people are unaware of the controversies that have long surrounded the ubiquitous platform. Laypeople don’t seem to care about issues of privacy, company diversity, or ad targeting; they just want to join the cool, free, virtual realm. If they did spend time considering the terms of service, why uploading is donating personal data to a corporation to use as they please, or how status updates can be used for hiring, firing, and to set legal precedents, they probably wouldn’t use Facebook with such reckless abandon to digitize their personal lives or call it a revolution for activism.

Facebook may be used for those things, but it’s also a money-making product run by egocentric, rich, White guys whose profits come solely from the fact that you—yes, you—share your personal information with the world. Even if even a large percentage of the 500 million users leave Facebook after seeing the film—which never even touches on the myriad ethical privacy violations the company has shrugged off—it won’t be a successful exercise in flipping the bird to The Man. It’d still be too late.

From a production standpoint, The Social Network couldn’t be more expertly made. Not skimping on details, the crew actually filmed in Cambridge, a highlight for any fans of Boston-made movies. (That’d be me.) David Fincher (Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac) is a phenomenal director—one of my personal favorites—whose films are always the perfect mix of suspense and beauty. Aaron Sorkin’s (A Few Good Men, The West Wing) trademark dialogue makes you feel that you’re physically standing in between two characters at all times, being punched in the face from opposing sides with the full force of their acting ability used as verbal fists. With unsettling ambient sounds, and music composed by the perfectly suited Atticus Ross/Trent Reznor duo (the latter of whom collaborated with Fincher on music videos early in both of their respective careers), the film couldn’t be more tightly stitched together.

If you know anything about the service you’re likely addicted to, then you know the ending of the film. My guy, who should be used to watching the venture capitalist crowd do their thing, was visibly unsettled as the cinema lights came up. “That was so uncomfortable to watch,” he said. “They’re all such bad people; not a single redeeming character in the mix.” I was mostly uncomfortable because the film reflected his and my reality: that when two people are tied to a start-up and self-employed as a full-time freelancer, they pretty much never take a vacation, no matter how much they need or want it.

Mark Zuckerberg might be my generation’s biggest asshole, a fact that propelled both my partner and me to see the film in the first place. Zuckerberg might be a vengeful misogynist or an unhappy nerd. He’s likely both of those things.

No matter how wealthy, influential, or polarizing you are, it's a little fucked up to have your own biopic made when you're only twenty-six years old. But it might also be the only way to send the message that privacy isn’t obsolete—or rather, it didn’t have to be—and that you can’t always buy your way out of this new norm that Zuckerberg created. Don’t want your fictionalized life story shown on the big screen? Some of us don’t even want ours on the small one of our own—and everyone else's—home computers.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 17th 2010

Apple Core

mandy — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Kendl Winter

K Records

So much folksy lady rock, so little time. Add Kendl Winter’s Apple Core to the ever-lengthening list of guitar-loving, country-inspired singer-songwriters with a flair for bluegrass. It may not be terribly original, but Winter makes a fine effort on her fourth solo album. At times, her work is hauntingly beautiful; at others, it’s frustratingly cliché.

“Everyone’s so avant garde,” Winter sings on “Made It Through the Yellow,” perhaps referring to the sudden rise in folk hipster chic that makes committed musicians cringe. Should there be more beards and flannel on stage or in the crowd? On “Waiting for the Taker,” a would-be somber track about death with a jaunty guitar riff, she reminisces about apple pies, loyal dogs, and droopy-eyed cowboys.

A tribute to the late abortion provider, “Dr. Tiller” is clearly a lovely sentiment, if not the most enchanting song. Descriptive lyrics about the doctor’s murder feel more appropriate for some sort of spoken word tribute. In a song, phrases like “I’m walking through a mob of pro-lifers just to get a pap smear” feel awkwardly earnest and self-referential without any possibility of reaching people unfamiliar with the story or less than sympathetic about George Tiller’s fate.

Winter is a great talent. It isn’t her fault that so many artists in the last few years have grabbed washboards and banjos and sound oh-so-similar in their nature-themed crooning. While I’m perfectly content listening to Apple Core, if I’m looking for folksy jams, I’ll admittedly seek out albums by Mountain Men, Fleet Foxes, or even some old Wilco first.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 16th 2010

The Air is on Fire, David Lynch (9/24/2010)

mandy — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Gl. Strand

Copenhagen, Denmark

A couple of years ago, David Lynch spoke at my graduate school. At one of the top communication colleges in the country, he refused to take media questions and would only talk about transcendental meditation. Flanked by men in suits who sat in high-backed chairs behind him on the stage, Lynch urged us each to dive into the reflecting pool of our soul. One woman stood at a mic in the auditorium aisle and said, “I meditate, and I understand your films.”

It seems like every encounter with the artist is like this: mildly amusing, somewhat bewildering, and much more surreal than one ever anticipates, even if you know the ground rules going in. Speaking to a crowd of assembled journalists and photographers at Copenhagen’s Gl. Strand in late September, Lynch spoke of the distinctive nature of the elements for which his showcase is named. “Air is very beautiful. When it moves, it makes a sound called wind. Fire: what a magical thing fire is... It’s always changing. It makes heat. It’s so incredible; it makes you dream, and it’s so different than water. Water is such an incredible thing. Fish go in it, you can drink it, and it’s wet.”

Before he became a film director best known for Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, Lynch studied expressionist painting at the Pennsylvania Academia of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Not unlike his films, his work in other mediums is loosely tied to unsettling themes such as sexualized violence and insect infestation.

For his second exhibition showing, following a debut showcase of the same name in Paris, the newly renovated Danish contemporary art museum turned three floors into a Lynchian gallery of paintings, lithographs, short films, and sketches on scraps of paper, from the 1960s to present. Entire binders of his work had been disassembled and displayed on glass wall cases. With heavy bass sound installation throughout, the entire experience was not unlike an episode of Twin Peaks, with spookily dramatic, vibrating music causing an uneasy sense of dread that might nevertheless turn out to be for nothing. Indeed, among the sketches displayed as a drawing of the infamous Twin Peaks fish on the cover of the show’s first screenplay.

Lynch’s non-filmic artistic work displayed in The Air is on Fire exhibition proved to be as memorable as his directorial features. Many of his painting featured guns and vaginas and often had literal titles: “This Man Was Shot Seconds Ago,” “Rock with Seven Eyes,” “Insect Bites Woman.” One entire room was filled with untitled prints. Complex architectural drawings were just as likely to have phone numbers scrawled in the margins as they were to be on stationary from The Claremont Resort, Hotel and Tennis Club. Several sculptures like “Component #3 for Night Fishing,” were made in Copenhagen, specifically for the Gl. Strand exhibition.

Exiting through the back, an enormous story-high neon sign of the artist’s name—of which I’d seen a drawing inside—hit me in the face with its purple glow. As I unlocked my bike and headed home, I thought about the magical nature of the wind that made it difficult to peddle.

The Air is on Fire runs through January 16, 2011.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 12th 2010

Old Punch Card

beth — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Sam Prekop

Thrill Jockey

Over the past few years, Chicago-based singer, songwriter, photographer, and painter Sam Prekop has dabbled in all sorts of music. He’s collaborated with Broken Social Scene, Prefuse 73, and even had his work sampled in a toilet paper commercial. Most well known as frontman for The Sea and Cake, he set out to make a brand new kind of record, in no way resembling anything he’s ever done. On that count, he succeeds.

When I put on Old Punch Card, I expected an album filled with pop rock tunes about nostalgia. What I got was a record that literally sounds like an old punch card machine: whirring, screeching, and clunking as it choked on a metaphorical train ticket. My partner glanced over and said, “Was the download corrupted?” “This is electronic avant garde,” I deadpanned. He waited for me to call bullshit.

Prekop himself explains, “I've left the confines of ‘song’ structure.” Created in his home studio, the album of only synthesizer music—none of Prekop’s mellow, pop vocals are heard; no lyrics written, no words uttered—composed in mostly winter months. The chilling effect is present and reminds us all that autumn is coming but winter will fiercely follow. I live up north; it’s August and I’m already wearing sweaters and wool socks. I dread the official season change.

“The Silhouettes,” the first official single from the album, is one of the more pleasant mixes. It fades in and out, just pop enough to bring to mind Dntel. “Knitting Needles” sounds like the soundtrack to an indie film interlude. Others, I found difficult, near unlistenable.

An artistic offering from a man of many mediums, the album covers are hand painted. I hope Prekop returns to what he does best and leaves the experimental noise for people with less enjoyable vocal stylings.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 1st 2010

Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories

mandy — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Cynthia Morrison Phoel

Southern Methodist University Press

There is hardly anything more satisfying to read than well-crafted short stories. Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s debut collection of tales from Bulgaria intertwines the stories of several families living in fictional Old Mountain, many sharing a concrete post-Communist apartment building, neighbors in crumbling plaster houses; and often, surviving similar struggles in their attempts to find love and meaning in life and to escape the poverty they have always known.

In Cold Snap, we meet unhappy couples who argue, then don’t speak because there’s nowhere to go, no way to leave the other person and the tiny space they have carved out together. An underemployed husband spends his summer earnings on a satellite dish; soon, his friends have filled the apartment, pushing out any space for reconciliation with his migraine suffering wife. Their son begins to fail his English class, where his teacher gives lessons on contextual words like heartbreak, forsaken, hanky, and drunk—words that feel funny to learn and nevertheless described abysmal realities and people at whom you should not laugh.

The beauty of these narratives is that they’re told across stories, in nonlinear ways. A young mathematician graduates and faces an uninspiring future. One woman compulsively knits extraordinarily beautiful sweaters, the kind that her friends joke could only be worn on shows like Dallas. Upon completion, she abandons them by the dozen in her cellar. The only woman who has made it out comes home for a visit, but leaves again for Japan before she is ensnared by her old life. The community dentist is busiest in cold months—the only time she is truly swamped—when the townspeople flock to the only place where they can sit in a well-heated room for several hours at a time. In the final story, after which the book is named, every character makes one final appearance as the entire village waits for the central heat to come on in the dead of winter with one powerful yet simple flick of a switch.

Phoel worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria, and it shows. She writes the way only a cultural insider can, with compassion and humor and insight into the lives of her characters and their unique struggles. Yet her forced distance is the best part of her work. Through her, we peer into the lives of others without ever fully inhabiting them. The balance is perfect.

Reading about the street dog affectionately called “Cucumber” because of his protruding rib cage—who shows up in every one of the book’s stories—I cried so hard one evening that I woke my sleeping partner. For a long time, we were both unable to sleep. Even the less overtly sad of these bleakly charming stories kept me up at night, entranced, and haunted me still weeks later. If only everyone could translate the experiences from their time abroad into such compelling fiction.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, September 25th 2010

The Other City

beth — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

Directed by Susan Koch

Cabin Films

Most cities are comprised of at least two distinct sub-cities, so to speak. It’s particularly appalling that Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital and symbolic of the triumph of democracy, has a higher HIV/AIDS rate than Port au Prince, Haiti or Dakar, Senegal. A one percent infection rate of a city’s population is considered an epidemic; D.C.'s can be estimated between three and five percent. While one part of the District’s population goes about the business of running the country, another goes about the business of trying to stay alive.

More than one million people in the United States are currently infected with HIV/AIDS; of those infected, one in five do not know they are infected. It is the leading cause of death for black women ages twenty-five to thirty-four. The epidemic rages on, though goes largely unnoticed outside of certain communities. The visible reminders, like public funerals and rallies that were popular in New York City in the 1980s, have largely faded from the public eye and popular discourse.

The epidemic has shifted, however. Once stereotypically attributed to men who sleep with men and drug users, the problem has largely settled over poor communities. In The Other City, the epidemic’s many D.C.-area victims and survivors are shown in a variety of situations and circumstances. Jose’s ex-boyfriend lied about being infected. Donald, who had been living in his parents’ basement, moved into the Joseph’s House hospice and thrived. Still, after more than thirty-five of his friends died, he moved out, saying, “It’s worse than war.”

J’Mia, who is twenty-eight with three kids, worries that because of the myriad legal documents needed to apply for subsidized housing—many of which she struggles to find, spending entire days making phone calls—she’ll end up on the street. If she ends up homeless, she insists that she won’t take her pills and will sleep with whoever will put a roof over her family’s heads. In the housing counseling office, she’s asked demeaning questions like “How many sex partners have you had?” Despite all of this, she speaks with authority about how women are caregivers and take care of others before themselves. Her pride and perseverance is encouraging, a hopeful ray in a dark situation.

While the stories The Other City highlights are critical, the film itself is incredibly frustrating. It shifts between narratives and profiles without helpful transitions, making it seem more like a series of vignettes about living with HIV/AIDS than an actual narrative about the epidemic in the District. Formerly incarcerated men in a support group are shown in a scene next to a hospice where AIDS patients come to die. While the theme technically holds together, the images and stories feel disjointed when presented in such a way. Shot on video, the visuals feel crude and unpolished.

As someone with a family member who has been living with HIV/AIDS since the 1980s, you would think I would be particularly drawn to this film. I was not. I appreciate what the filmmakers—many of them highly acclaimed and well respected in their field—attempted to do in telling the ignored stories of the often faceless victims of the AIDS epidemic, the problems facing needle exchange programs, and the history of mismanagement in combating the domestic epidemic. But whether the filmmakers’ efforts were hindered by class privilege or a lack of true connection to their subjects is unknown. I’m incredibly pleased that films like this one are made, but I wish they were as captivating as the subjects they feature.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, September 22nd 2010

Muzzling a Movement: The Effects of Anti-Terrorism Law, Money, and Politics on Animal Activism

mandy — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Dara Lovitz

Lantern Books

There isn’t another contemporary nonviolent activist movement that is so routinely dismissed as too radical, mocked as too extreme, and so actively condemned and persecuted across the political spectrum as the animal rights movement. If you believe the media bias when reading reports about animal liberation, “victims” are often corporations and research facilities that abuse and slaughter animals, and the “terrorists” are those seeking a peaceful end to our destructive lifestyles and appetites. Those one-sided attitudes are even more prominent within the legal system, which punishes so-called ecoterrorists for thought crimes without much regard for the First Amendment.

When Dara Lovitz set out to write Muzzling A Movement, she had no idea just how thwarted her own efforts would be. Seeking to interview convicted animal rights activists in federal prison, the United States Department of Justice forbade her to conduct interviews with inmates. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, her work—research and interviews with activists convicted under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA; previously known by the less sensationalist named, Animal Enterprise Protection Act, or AEPA)—could and would facilitate criminal activity. A book project about animal rights activism became one about freedom of speech and the ways animal rights activists and their allies are often silenced, even before they speak.

A lawyer with years of experience and a landmark animal rights trial under her belt, Lovitz writes with authority and candor about the history of anti-terrorism laws and the ways international animal rights coalitions have been especially stifled in the United States since 9/11. Muzzling A Movement offers an overview of legal animal persecution and how modern so-called humane slaughter laws fail to protect ninety-eight percent of slaughtered animals—namely, birds and fish. Lovitz delves deeply into both legal and activist history, and readers emerge with a newfound understanding of just how harmful the “green scare” has been to the efforts of non-violent animal rights activists and supporters.

Although there is a long history of animal advocacy around the globe, Lovitz cites 1977 as the year it became widely publicized in the U.S. following the release of several laboratory animals. In the years that followed, animal liberation activities took place across the country; from releases at university laboratories to mink farm liberations, both connected to and unaffiliated with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), animal rights activists began a series of direct actions that gained widespread attention.

Much of the book centers on one case and several key laws, though this is not without warrant given the legal precedence and the (limited) publicity that has been doled out. In November 1999, a group of U.K.-based activists formed a coalition with the goal of closing down Huntingdon Life Sciences, Europe’s largest contract animal testing lab, where an estimated 500 animals died every day at the hands of HLS lab workers. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, or SHAC, spread to a number of countries that outsourced to HLS. Within several years, seven U.S. activists—later known as the SHAC7—were arrested after an aggressive FBI investigation. Six of the original seven were later prosecuted and sentenced to prison time, though their efforts were not in vain; the New York Stock Exchange refused to list HLS on the market in 2004, which the vivisection industry attributed to SHAC’s activism. As of this writing, several of the original SHAC7 remain behind bars.

Despite the book’s small size, Lovitz packs an enormous amount of information onto its pages. I have yet to read another such thorough history of animal rights protection law as it relates to direct action, activism, and government oppression.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, September 7th 2010

Happy Now?

mandy — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Katherine Shonk

Farrar Straus and Giroux

Claire’s husband Jay killed himself on Valentine’s Day by jumping off a balcony at a colleague’s party. He didn’t leave a suicide note; he left a binder with detailed information about life insurance, their cat’s veterinary records, and a short, cryptic note under the tab marked “Claire” that revealed almost nothing about his decision. A long-suffering depressive, Jay had never displayed signs he would end his life… at least, not any Claire or his therapist had noticed.

Happy Now? begins in the days after Jay’s death, during which Claire has temporarily moved into her pregnant sister’s guest house to hide from the world until she’s ready to reemerge. Jay’s sister calls to bitterly remind Claire that “there is enough blame to go around,” and Fang, Jay’s cat, is inconsolable and seemingly also attempts to follow her master into the afterlife by eating a poisonous plant. Claire’s father parks outside her temporary home for fourteen hours at a time and follows her everywhere she goes in a strange mix of protective paternalism and stalker-like behavior. At one point, Claire mistakenly attends the wrong group therapy session and ends up telling off its members. At other times, unable to stop herself when asked, she blurts out “Jay killed himself,” often at the least opportune times.

Happy Now? might be what fellow writer Elaine Beale once called a “quiet” novel. The bulk of the story centers on Claire’s relationship with her family, and with herself, blended with flashbacks to the early days of her relationship and the small warning signs that only appear significant in the aftermath of Jay’s suicide. Claire’s ability to reflect on her relationship in the wake of tragedy was fascinating and raw, and even the most basic logistics of how to put her life back together were mesmerizing—perhaps because the experience is quite removed from my own, and yet familiar enough to feel comfortable.

Even without one major incident to lift the story arc in the novel, I was enthralled by Katherine Shonk’s vivid detail and ability to climb inside the mind of a shocked and grieving abruptly widowed young woman. So captivated by the way the novel focused on the particulars of Claire and Jay’s life—and Claire’s parents’ and sister’s relationships as well—I read the book over the course of a few hectic days, a pre-bed ritual of reprieve from the madness of my own life. If fiction is meant to be a journey and as escape, this book succeeds on both counts.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, September 6th 2010