All Occasions

A round of Roulette turns up two children's books and a nonfiction book. I watch a good movie from 2022. I start in on two nonfiction books. I read two children's books by the same author.

Roulette

Just Help! How to Build a Better World by Sonia Sotomayor and illustrated by Angela Dominguez, read in 2022 and already written about in 2023.

Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? by Dr. Seuss, read in 2020. I was going to write about two other Dr. Seuss books for this entry anyway before Fortune plucked this title from the complete reading list for me. I’ve loved Dr. Seuss’s work all of my life but only remember reading this particular title once and it didn’t make much of an impression. I can moo. I just elect not to.

The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell, read in 2021. I wrote about this one for an early entry of this newsletter when I was still hanging around Seattle and working at a shelter for homeless families. After traveling across the country by train and then ending up back in San Francisco, I read and wrote about another, more challenging Sowell book that I found in a Little Free Library.

New Noise in a Newish Movie

Triangle of Sadness, directed by Ruben Östlund, 2022. A nasty-humored farcical satire on a grandiloquent scale, intelligently written, exquisitely composed and meticulously cast. This movie is very good and worth a close look, so please be advised that I’m going to give away certain aspects of the ending. Not to the most minute detail, but enough that it might compromise your enjoyment if you’d prefer to experience this film as it was meant to be seen and let it intrigue and surprise you as it did me.

Triangle of Sadness begins by air-dropping the viewer into the world of high fashion and observing that this is an environment in which women are better paid and more well-respected than men, exploring how this affects gender roles as relating to money and sex between a male model named Carl and a female model named Yaya who are trying to disentangle aesthetic beauty and financial competetiveness from coequal love and respect as they cultivate a serious relationship.

This leads them to embark on an incredibly lavish luxury cruise where they discover that they have more in common with the young and attractive hospitality workers comprising the above-deck crew than with the other passengers, all of whom are older, uglier and vastly more wealthy and powerful. Carl and Yaya are to the modeling industry what the luxury yacht’s crew are to the vapid, superwealthy, head-up-their-asses vacationers — shiny, jewel-like playthings. The couple are literally and figuratively adrift and out of their depth, symbolically positioned between the working crew members who seem to suspect that Carl and Yaya are out of place and their vulgarly rich class superiors who blithely admit to having built fortunes on munitions and fertilizer (literally “shit” in the words of one cynical and tasteless fellow — he is really, really rich from selling shit).

Poor planning on the part of the crew, the absenteeism of a drunken captain played by Woody Harrelson and a seasickness-inducing storm conspire to graphically upend the cruise’s centerpiece dinner and send everyone careening headlong into a tsunami of vomit that becomes a metaphor for a playful and half-sincere clash of views between socialism and capitalism. (This sequence, the turning point that radically redirects the film’s arc and casts everything into uncertainty, is partly set to the excellent song “New Noise” by the Marxist hardcore punk band Refused, whom I’m sure were fairly or perhaps even handsomely compensated for having their song utilized in an award-winning international A-list picture.)

Eventually the wayward ship is beset by even more menacing circumstances that leave a limited number of survivors, including Carl and Yaya, in an isolated and desperate situation in which their societal microcosm gets disordered still further. Östlund already established in the first act that Carl and Yaya exist in an environment where the usual juncture of sex, power and money has been scrambled, but now they and the others are cast into a survival situation in which the masque of social roles have been forcibly stripped away and all that counts is who is the most competent — that is to say, who controls the means of production. Since the only survivor who has the skill to keep everyone alive is a middle-aged Filipina toilet-cleaner from the yacht named Abigail, it is this most unlikely of characters who becomes the capitalist boss of this tiny rebooted market economy. (Abigail’s character, the unforeseen key to the story working effectively, is handled with elan by an actor named Dolly De Leon.)

Sex, money and power have now been thoroughly realigned under the full control of the type of person who had the least of any of them under the complex strictures of the old setup. The frightening, funny, kick-in-the-teeth irony of the film’s conclusion, left ambiguous enough for us to infer the worst for ourselves, suggests that the practicalities of group survival can’t outrun the avarice of those who have managed to seize control of the flow of capital. The film’s parting image finds Carl, played by Harris Dickinson, quite literally running to forestall a descent into brute-force control on the part of Abigail. We are left both shaken and reassured to find that a petite, aging, childless Asian cleaning woman, given the chance, can be just as unscrupulous and heartless a robber baron as any other asshole human.

MAKE UP YOUR MIND

I’m still working my way through the color Sunday strips in my Popeye book; not much to report there. I’ve also finished the scholarly introduction to a paperback copy of Aristotle’s Poetics that I found earlier this year in a box on the street outside a San Francisco bookstore. I’ll start in on the text itself when I feel like it. Here are my promises to you from writer to reader:

• I will read every word of these Poetics.

• I will feel good about myself for notching up an Aristotle book on the complete reading list.

• I will forget approximately eighty to ninety percent of whatever wisdom I glean from this text within several months of having read it.

Also keeping on with the Ellroy. I’ve started re-reading My Dark Places, Ellroy’s memoir about his mother’s unsolved 1958 murder and how it formed him into a lustful and obsessive crime writer and finally impelled him, years after he’d grown into a critically and financially successful novelist, to slice his way down to the root of his own peculiarities and get to the truth of what really happened to her. He’s doing something very interesting here, turning his manly hard-boiled prose style not only to real-life events from across a period of almost four decades but to deeply unpleasant and sometimes frightening parts of himself as an individual, the “dark places” of the title. In so doing he repeatedly flips back and forth from the first-person and third-person narrative voices he cultivated in the L.A. Quartet, deploying an omniscient observer’s voice for events he did not personally witness and his own frankly personal recollections for stuff from his own experiences. Eventually at the book’s end they will converge onto one narrative axis but, as it did in Rampart, closure will remain elusive.

There were two additions to the complete reading list since the last entry and they are both Dr. Seuss books that I plucked nearly at random from the shelves of the children’s section at the library: What Pet Should I Get? from 1957 and Hunches in Bunches from 1982. Curiously enough both of these titles center around a recurrent theme of the protagonists not being able to make up their minds, with What Pet Should I Get? being punctuated by double-page spreads of animals parading huge monoverbal banners imploring the indecisive kid to “MAKE/UP/YOUR/MIND” and Hunches in Bunches being entirely premised around the feeling of not being sure what one feels like doing and being menaced by literal “hunches” who personify irreconcilable possibilities for how to waste or utilize time. Like a fuckin’ Seussian Hamlet soliloquy over here, I tell ya. I guess you don’t get as incomparably successful and phenomenally skilled at what you do as the good Doctor, or for that matter Aristotle or Ellroy, if you are overly indecisive, so I can see why Seuss would express contempt for the wishy-washy in not one but both of his books I happened to pick up.