Administrative Leave
I watch a feature film and two documentaries about distinguished artists. I read some fiction, nonfiction and children's books.
I watched Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 prestige drama Traffic for the first time since it was released. It’s a self-serious societal critique with a cast of some of the best film actors of its era playing characters engaged from various angles with the importation, distribution and consumption of illegal drugs. It’s well-made, sometimes overwritten and stands as one of Hollywood’s Serious Issue movies that aged the quickest as a result of poor timing, arriving unwittingly as Traffic did on the precipice of the jarring birth pangs of a far more unnerving era in American history and governance, making the film seem almost quaint with retrospect. But I’m bound nevertheless to respect it as good, professional moviemaking. Soderbergh is rightly credited for the clever use of color and generally great photography throughout the picture. The all-star awards-bait ensemble is packed with skilled actors who wouldn’t have been able to play their characters so convincingly if they hadn’t been so unerringly well-cast. Each individual character has only a few scenes and chunks of dialogue spaced throughout the entirety of the picture, so to render them plausibly the casting department and actors couldn’t afford and didn’t make a single misstep. In a movie full of good performances, I particularly cite Don Cheadle as an undercover DEA agent, Tomas Milian as a corrupt Mexican general and most especially Benicio del Toro who nearly burns up the screen embodying a shrewd Mexican police officer who is world-weary but not jaded.
One other thing I’ll note is that Don Cheadle’s character Gordon is still on the job at the movie’s end, when in real life I imagine that he would almost certainly have been fired or placed on administrative leave. Over the course of the movie Gordon:
Has an undercover buy-bust disastrously foiled by the sudden intrusion of local police.
In the ensuing chase, discharges a round of disputable necessity into the foot of the pursued drug-dealer, played by Miguel Ferrer, who is hiding in the ball-pit inside a children’s pizzeria. (How could Gordon be certain, for example, that there were no submerged toddlers in the ball-pit?)
Once said drug-dealer is in protective custody and set to testify against his kingpin boss, allows a would-be assassin to get close enough to Ferrer’s character to shoot him in the head, which the assassin doesn’t do only because he (the assassin) is himself assassinated first (by a rival assassin).
Fails to stop his partner from starting a car that Gordon realizes only too late is rigged with a bomb.
Lets the drug-dealer-turned-star-witness die on his watch in a second assassination attempt, which scuttles the federal case against the kingpin.
At this juncture I can only think that someone in charge would have at least confined Gordon to indefinite desk-duty or moved him to another case. At the end of the movie, his responsibilities and prospects don’t appear to have been affected.
After Traffic I watched Julien Temple’s 2020 documentary Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan. I enjoyed Temple’s Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury when it was released in theaters (the same year I went to a theater to see Traffic). I’m a great fan of The Pogues’ first three records and was looking forward to seeing the Shane MacGowan bio-doc because MacGowan is a fascinating performer with a unique voice and brilliant sensibility as a songwriter. The documentary does a good job of explaining his life and career through his own slurred words while he’s interrogated by movie star Johnny Depp, Sinn Féin politician Gerry Adams and MacGowan’s wife Victoria Mary Clarke, who comes off as a graceful and dignified counterweight to his shambolic and foul-mouthed persona.
The documentary was a great way for me to learn a lot of things I didn’t know about MacGowan and The Pogues. But as with a lot of documentaries these days, Temple falls back on animation to depict recollections of events that weren’t recorded on film, a tactic which seems to cheapen a film when it’s not deployed effectively, which it isn’t in Crock of Gold. It’s one thing to use second-rate animation in this way at all, but indicating time period by nakedly mimicking the styles of influential and era-defining artists like R. Crumb and Ralph Steadman is too clever by half.
I also watched Griffin Dunne’s 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold about his aunt, the novelist and journalist Joan Didion. I enjoyed it and I’m glad that I chose to read my first of Didion’s books before engaging with the documentary.
Recently I’ve been reading a Didion novel, five nonfiction books and three children’s books.
How to See from 2019, written by a Zen master named Thich Nhat Hanh and illustrated by Jason DeAntonis. I found this on the shelf at the library and felt it would be good to read some short meditations from a Buddhist mindfulness teacher. Apparently this is one in a series called “Mindfulness Essentials.”
Georgia O’Keeffe from 2018, written by Mª Isabel Sánchez Vegara and illustrated by Erica Salcedo. This is from a series of children’s books called “Little People, Big Dreams,” each one written by Vegara about an important or influential individual. I have read eight of them besides Georgia O’Keeffe, the others being about Jane Goodall, Agatha Christie, Audrey Hepburn, Stephen Hawking, Emmeline Pankhurst, L.M. Montgomery, Anne Frank and Ella Fitzgerald. It’s a lively series of well-designed books about interesting people.
Play It As It Lays from 1970, written by Joan Didion. I figured I should read at least one piece of Didion’s writing before watching the documentary about her life and work. I mostly enjoyed both. The book is set around the time of its writing and is about a young woman in the film business enduring personal difficulties and an emotional crackup.
We Should All Be Feminists from 2014, adapted by the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from her 2012 TEDx talk. The title makes it clear what you’re getting in this incisive book, which is short enough to be read in about fifteen minutes. Adichie writes with an admirable balance of forcefulness and clarity, articulating her reasonable and clear-eyed concepts of the nature and purpose of feminism in the twenty-first century. I wasn’t aware of having read some of Adichie’s words before, but after reading this book I realized that another of her essay-talks had been included in some of the training materials from one of the periods during which I’ve volunteered as an adult literacy instructor for the local public library.
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging from 2016, written by Sebastian Junger. I’ve heard Junger’s name all over the place for years but have never read his work, though I have seen the 2010 film Restrepo that he co-directed. Tribe is a fascinating series of ruminations on the tradeoffs of peace, modernity and civilization, exploring the paradoxical truth that human beings tend to feel far less lonely, anxious and depressed and more purposeful, connected and alive when they find themselves, by accident or design, in circumstances in which they must work communally with others in matters of life and death. He doesn’t mean this in a utopian sense, as the ancient tribal social orders or zones of war and disaster that Junger discusses are not pleasant or physically healthy situations to occupy. But the depth of meaning that they seem to provide to those who experience them raise disconcerting and thought-provoking questions about whether human circumstances of relative freedom, security and wealth are too boring and alienating to be meaningful. To put it in Junger’s fine words, “belonging to society requires sacrifice, and sacrifice gives back way more than it costs.” He goes on to summarize and diagnose the contradictions that his book explores by writing that a “sense of solidarity is at the core of what it means to be human and undoubtedly helped deliver us to this extraordinary moment in our history” and that it “may also be the only thing that allows us to survive it.” Junger’s and Adichie’s books are both old enough to feel prescient but topical enough to feel bracingly, urgently relevant.
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles from 2002, written by Steven Pressfield. I found this in a Little Free Library and read the whole thing in two days. I think a lot about art and human creativity but I don’t go out of my way to read self-books on these topics. I wouldn’t have sought this one out, or probably even heard of it, if I hadn’t come across a copy and been instantly seduced by the musculature and martial efficiency of Pressfield’s prose style. (In addition to apparently being a fairly successful writer of books and films, Pressfield also did a stint in the Marine Corps and spent time living out of his car, which he acknowledges as direct influences on his approach to living the writer’s life. Interesting connections to Junger’s book here.) Pressfield is correct in most of his formulations about what drives and sustains the will to create and articulates his concepts elegantly. I may eventually seek out some of his novels about ancient warfare.
The next two books I read, also Little Free Library finds, were alphabet books by two great children’s book authors. Dr. Seuss’s ABC from 1963 is something I can’t remember ever having read before despite being a life-long Seuss fan, but I was enthused to find that it’s one of his best. Since it’s meant for beginner readers, Seuss forces himself to use a limited array of words while still conforming to a readably Seussian metrical scheme, which gives the text an enjoyably insistent, Beat-poet-like repetitiveness. This book also does some cool things with text scale, open space, page layout and high-contrast color arrangements that grab the eye and show off Dr. Seuss’s sensibility as a graphic designer. Alligators All Around: An Alphabet from 1962 was written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak and is something I first read in 2016 when my mother gave me a box set of four miniature Sendak books as a gift (which I in turn used in the aforementioned volunteer work as an adult literacy tutor).
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man from 2006, written by Christopher Hitchens about Thomas Paine for a series by various authors called “Books That Changed the World.” I thoroughly enjoyed Hitch’s memoir Hitch-22 and his polemic God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and as an admirer of both Hitch and Paine, I was drawn to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man because I sometimes find that reading a clever intellectual’s analysis of a seminal text can be more illuminating and informative than trying to make it through the old-timey original. I’ve quite enjoyed the excerpts of Rights of Man that I’ve read before, but Hitch does a pretty good job of contextualizing the work within several domains — within Paine’s biography, within American and French revolutionary history and as a riposte to Edmund Burke’s famous pamphlet condemning the French Revolution. I learned a number of interesting things from this concise book.