Goodbye FRIENDZONE

James from FRIENDZONE passed away and recently I'd been meaning to reach out to him and let him know that this was still my favorite song of the decade:



FRIENDZONE made music that helped me through some of the worst days of my adult life and the least I can do is help pass it on.

Report from Sundance 2017

Great Scott!

Bill Evans MOON BEAMS (1962)

Seeing a Nazi clocked unconscious on the nuevo PDX carpet made the day.  Endure.

Thomas Pynchon INHERENT VICE (2009)

Loved the film, loved the book even more, just because there was more of it. Pynchon's sense of humor is relentless and right on my wavelength, and he mixes the conspiracy/investigation of the mysterious Golden Tooth with heavy handfuls of American history, the occult's alternate history, and levitates it with a constant, near equal-parts interest in television, film and music.

I am putting together a college Am Lit curriculum around the PI novel (invented here by Poe) as the truest expression of the American soul on paper, and one that permits examination of prime movers forces without rolled eyes.  Chomsky and Pynchon have similar interests, but where as Chomsky would be viewed as tiresome to most of the population, a fine detective romp is an easily digestible way to get those nutrients.  Stand-out course materials would be CHINATOWN, Raymond Chandler, even True Detective S2 for a study on what goes wrong in this avenue.  

(The audiobook narrator is aces, btw.)  Pynchon is concerned, as a lot of art is, about how the hippie movement lost steam and fizzled out into the ether. Only he has some answers too, that lead to even more intriguing questions.  Hippies, for lack of a better term, were disengaged consumers-and needed to be reprogrammed.  So they had to lose momentum.  Picking off and jailing leaders, introducing harder and harder drugs, etc.  The Golden Tooth is a shorthand for an Iran-Contra type situation, where the feds and 

'concerned citizens' use independent contractors to achieve their ends.  How did we get from the commune to the reign of Reagan within a decade?  Nixon has to be the most important American since FDR, and by force of will turned the cultural waters towards straight-laced suburban life from a dream now so hazy it doesn't seem like it could have been there at all.  

INHERENT VICE captures this with stupefying grace.  The NYT, the New Yorker, et al. reviewed it as a genial, lightly apocalyptic work (detective novels can't be deep!), but it isn't apocalyptic at all.  It is more about how forces keep progress at a bay, how stasis profits and will be fought for, as if capitalism has an immune system, and waves of killer T cells to come after infectious agents.  How do you explain the loss of the biggest counter-cultural movement in the U.S. in the 20th century?  We should at least try.  Mostly it was absorbed back into the superorganism, another wonderful, alternative revenue stream offering a diverse portfolio.  

Twinkie sales may be down, but we're making a killing on yoga pants.

GREEN ROOM dir. James Saulnier (2016)

Perfect weekend to watch a movie about fighting neo-n*zis set in Oregon.  Catch it on amazon prime. Anton Yelchin is terrific (rest in peace) and I finally know what an Imogen Poots is.