Colin Marshall

The wise man

When I started writing on Livejournal in high school, a series of still-inexplicable events led me to re-encounter an old friend from elementary school there: Chris, the Livejournalist formerly known as cobalt999. Through him, I found my way into a more culturally and intellectually stimulating circle than I’d ever experienced before, albeit one in which I didn’t really belong. I found my way into a circle of — not to put too fine a point on it, but — homosexual Livejournaling teenage geeks. Smart, engaged with ideas, skilled with the written word, not contributors to any of my girl-related psychodramas: the ideal peer group!

One other Livejournalist, one of the group’s most well-respected, didn’t seem to fit in: Tom, known as tomcan, and later as cool_moose, a man of fewer words and a much earlier birthdate than everyone else. I admit to looking askance, at first, at that “1937” in his profile. What kind of sixtysomething guy, I thought, talks to gay teen geeks on a blogging platform geared toward 14-year-old Russian girls? Yet nothing he did or said came off at all like the acts or words of a sketchmeister — precisely the opposite, in fact. I had to know: what was Tom’s deal?

We cobble together mental models of people, especially those with whom we rarely communicate, out of conversations, rumors, writings, artifacts — non-contiguous fragments. I’ve built a mental Tom both gloriously storied and seemingly incoherent: he made money doing something with lumber mill control systems in the seventies? And despite coming up in Seattle, he became a Canadian patriot? And he helped paraplegics, including a close friend and former hockey player, restart their lives? And he took in kids whose families had failed them for reasons as petty as their sexual orientation? And he became beloved in South America while working with Chilean dissidents and Bolivian orphans? And he lived through a bout of cancer? (“Cancer died of me,” he insisted.) And he offered a font of wise counsel to young people — including young people I count as friends — whose potential he understood when nobody else seemed to?

I picked up these facts and guesses, extrapolations and interpolations, overstatements and understatements from Tom’s sparse Livejournal posts, answers to my curiosity-driven questions to friends like Chris (who were much, much closer to him), and conversations that sprouted from Tom’s many comments on my own posts. We didn’t agree on much, worldview-wise; half the time, we’d hit philosophical bedrock on some economic issue that he saw in moral terms, but I didn’t. (He liked to respond to my pro-market positions by evoking Pinochet’s death squads.) As much as I wish I could say I’ve come around to Tom’s distinctive brand of left-wing views — views won with superior age and experience — I find myself with less involved with morality than ever. But he indirectly taught me an even more useful lesson: even basic perceptual clashes shouldn’t prevent you from having friendly, fruitful conversations with people. Quite the contrary.

Despite talking to him on the net for nearly a decade, I never could assemble all I knew about Tom — or thought I knew about Tom — into one clear picture. I met him once, in 2008; surely I could have just sat him down and said, “So tell me your life story” — I’ll bet he would have — and proceeded to straighten out all the guesses, gaps, and imaginings in my knowledge of his life. But would I really prefer that? Do I need to assemble Tom into one clear picture? Doesn’t the hazy, adventurous, geographically multifarious, sometimes self-contradictory legend of my distant elder sparring partner — CanLit as rewritten by Borges in a pastiche of a foreign sixties protest song — hold its own kind of fascination?

You’ve surely sensed an elegiac tone here, and indeed, I recently heard from Chris that Tom has passed this mortal coil. I hadn’t communicated much at all with him in the last few years, despite often wondering how he was doing up there in comparatively frozen British Columbia. That I never once actually asked him might cast me in a damning light, or even point to troubling social-psychological issues on my part. But I’ve long thought of it, with woeful resignation, as my normal behavior, albeit one of which I should’ve broken myself long ago. Tom clearly didn’t have the same problem; I’ll add that chapter to his mythos.

Werner Herzog: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

If any movie could finally get me into a pair of 3D glasses, here it is. I admit to groaning a little upon hearing that Werner Herzog had begun production on a 3D movie. Not that I’ve actually seen the likes of Avatar, Thor, The Nutcracker in 3D, or The Last Airbender, but how could he avoid debasing his craft in that company? Broad, CGI-intensive (or CGI-only) spectacles make up most of the current generation of 3D cinema, and the additional expense of the that third dimension at least doubles the bite of the Inverse Cost and Quality Law, which David Foster Wallace defines as follows:

The Inverse Cost and Quality Law [ … ] states very simply that the larger a movie's budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be. The case of [Terminator 2] shows that much of the ICQL's force derives from simple financial logic. A film that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make is going to get financial backing if and only if its investors can be maximally — maximally — sure that at the very least they will get their hundreds of millions of dollars back — i.e. a megabudget movie must not fail (and "failure" here means anything less than a runaway box-office hit) and must thus adhere to certain reliable formulae that have been shown by precedent to maximally ensure a runaway hit.

[ … ]

The point is that head-clutchingly insipid stuff like this puts an ever heavier burden of importance on T2s digital effects, which now must be stunning enough to distract us from the formulaic void at the story's center, which in turn means that even more money and directional attention must be lavished on the film's F/X. [ … ] The more lavish and spectacular a movie's special effects, the shittier that movie is going to be in all non-F/X respects.

And today’s 3D blockbusters, pressured by their even larger budgets to prostrate themselves before the vast and powerful juvenile audience, make Terminator 2 look like The Decalogue. On top of that, we have a serious form-and-substance problem: what sort of material best fits a form like the 3D movie? The Bwana Devils of the world set the precedent that, if your technology mainly offers the advantage of stuff seeming to come out of the screen, then you should probably stick to stories involving spear-throwing or its modern and/or futuristic equivalents. Many filmmakers, to their credit, seem to have learned a valuable cautionary lesson from this, although the footage I’ve seen from even the most acclaimed new 3D movies tends to lean heavily on... stuff going around. Sometimes real fast.

So while Werner Herzog’s name will always draw me to the nearest theater — even, in this case, the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Fiesta Five, or, as I call it, “Big Crappy” — his chosen subject convinced me that he might have momentarily legitimized 3D. As the enormous swirl of press has no doubt let you know, Herzog shot Cave of Forgotten Dreams in Chauvet Cave, whose walls feature the earliest paintings known to man. Already the stuff of an intriguing documentary, to be sure, but it gets a lot more interesting when you introduce the fact that these ancient cave painters made use of the undulation of the rock, strategically choosing the sections of wall canvas to most evocatively enhance their beast imagery. The French government opens the climate-controlled doors to Chauvet rarely enough that the likes of us will never, ever get a chance to enter. Thus we have not just the only documentary material that demands 3D, but the only cinematic material of any kind that demands 3D.

But should we think of this as cinema? I heard Herzog himself, appearing on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s BBC film show, insist that he doesn’t. You often hear spectacle-type films, especially the newer 3D ones, called “rides,” as in, “‘What a ride!’ - Joe Junket, Nowheresville Morning News.” This gets at my objection to most of those films: if you want to go on a ride, do you know what would give you a good ride? A ride. Films, by comparison, can’t provide much of a ride at all. If you don’t want to call effects-laden blockbusters and rides works of art, you still have to call them experiences.

3D film, at least as I know it through Cave of Forgotten Dreams strikes me as just that: a non-cinematic experience. Herzog says he has no plans to work in it again, and unless he wanted to make another cave-painting movie, why would he need to? (But I wouldn’t deny other filmmakers the chance to try their equivalents; perhaps Peter Greenaway could reveal the intrigue hidden in the surface textures of Dutch Golden Age canvasses.) The visual results remain iffy — the illusion of depth combined with a fixed focus pains me — but, even if they perfect it, this sort of thing seems like a fad at worst or an evolutionary branch away from cinema at best. But damn, aren’t those cave paintings impressive?

Christopher Isherwood: A Single Man

Searching for books to include in an article about alternative Los Angeles novels, I sent out a call for suggestions of “adventurous,” “lesser-known,” “experimental” and or “weird” pieces of literature set in or somehow shaped by the city. Not until I’d piled up a few of those did a relatively well-known title occur to me which could head up and offer a “way in” to the list: Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. Despite having drawn currency from Tom Ford’s film adaptation last year, it rarely makes lists of L.A. or even Southern California novels. I suspect Isherwood’s English origins and the book’s status as a work of gay literature (because it couldn’t fall under two headings) have something to do with this, but to my mind, these make it exactly the novel-of-place to read. Seeing that place through a foreign cultural sensibility while flying under a separate literary radar altogether allow it to approach the place more obliquely — more interestingly, in other words.

Isherwood sets the novel in the Los Angeles of the early sixties, a Los Angeles he experienced and one I wish I could’ve. (At least I have internet videos.) Just as Isherwood taught at Los Angeles State College, his protagonist George teaches at the fictional San Tomas State College. Just as Isherwood drove almost all the way across town — if you, like me, use a semi-purist 25-mile-by-25-mile definition of town — from his coastal Santa Monica home to his fairly deep-inland school, George commutes with the Utopian of someone raised on European roads. (“It is one of the marvels and blessings of the Los Angeles freeway system that you can now get from the beach to San Tomas State College in fifty minutes, give or take.”) Isherwood preferred and George prefers the company of men, although, unlike Isherwood, George has lost Jim, the one man he especially prefers, to an auto wreck in distant Ohio.

Breakfast with Jim used to be one of the best times of their day. It was then, while they were drinking their second and third cups of coffee, that they had their best talks. They talked about everything that came into their heads — including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you’re about to die. But now George can’t for the life of him remember what Jim’s views were on this. Such questions a hard to take seriously. They seem so academic.

The novel covers just one day of George’s post-Jim existence. (Perhaps it covers the final day of his existence, period; Isherwood writes an ambiguous ending in which most readers seem to see an absolute, necessary finality that I don’t, quite.) I understand Southern California offered more permissiveness than did most of the United States and much of Europe back then, but stern whispers still float thick enough in the air to keep George — a white, 58-year-old, homeowning college professor, but nonetheless gay! — laboring under a burden of secrecy. He only tells his closest friends about Jim’s death, letting everyone else think he moved back to live with his parents. To most of the bits of society that immediately surround him, George just looks like a culturally refined unmarried man who may or may not contemplate death a lot.

I actually feel more resonance with George than I have with most other literary characters, especially the ones crafted to share my age, nationality, professional interests, time period, or sexual orientation. I can’t quite tell you why, though we may have to chalk at least part of it up to the way Isherwood opens up George’s consciousness on the page and thus universalizes him, or makes him universally connectable. Bear in mind, we’re talking about a character who zones out while driving and fantasizes himself as a Big Brother-like dictatorial figure, clutching the world in his iron fist, brutalizing with extreme prejudice those who would persecute him. Or do we all wallow in own versions of this fantasy?

The population will slowly begin to learn that Uncle George’s will must be obeyed instantly and without question.

But does Uncle George want to be obeyed? Doesn’t he prefer to be defied so he can go on killing and killing and killing — since all these people are just vermin and the more of them that die the better? All are, in the last analysis, responsible for Jim’s death; their words, their thoughts, their whole way of life willed it, even though they never knew he existed. But, when George gets in as deep as this, Jim hardly matters any more. Jim is nothing now but an excuse for hating three quarters of the population of America...

In this particular day, George wakes up; drives to school; lectures on Aldous Huxley; argues with colleagues in the faculty dining room (“My God, you sound like some dreary French intellectual who’s just set food in New York for the first time! That’s exactly the way they talk! Unreal! American motels are unreal!”); visits Doris, a dying woman who once attempted to steal Jim from him; makes an extra, off-regimen visit to the gym; abandons grocery shopping for a dinner at the home of his other ex-pat friend, a divorced middle-aged woman named Charley; rebuffs Charley’s drunken advances; darts off to a favorite bar in the middle of night; goes skinny-dipping with one of his particularly enigmatic students; and does or does not die.

I don’t want to get too thematic about this, but Isherwood repeatedly alludes, throughout the course of George’s day, to the question of what it is to be among the living. George defines himself as one of the living against, obviously, Jim, but also against the fast-on-her-way out Doris. Certain things blow gusts of living-ness right in his face: crossing the entire city on a freeway; throwing himself into an impromptu sit-up contest; plunging into the ocean, drunk, in the wee hours; ogling a couple of tennis players; running laughingly to a bar instead of dutifully returning home. George rides these sudden waves of vivid sense experience into bouts of spontaneity. You don’t see many corpses doing that.

George’s perspective dominates the novel, understandably so, but I think as often about his students now as I think about him. Not any particular student, though Isherwood gives the skinny-dipping Kenny Potter and his mildly sour Japanese girlfriend outsize positions in George’s thoughts. I think about his students as a vast generational mass, albeit not quite so vast a generational mass as the one that immediately followed them. A Single Man takes place in 1962, meaning most of the college students in it were born between 1940 and 1944. I’ve often read that, in terms of economic opportunity and not getting into wars, the best 20th-century year to be born is around 1938. Some part of me desperately wants to have been a part of the Silent Generation. They seem to have pioneered a lot of the types of lives that attract me, and they got to do it without falling into the black hole of 1968-y agitation. I’ll have to make do with the age cohort I’ve got, but something about the way George looks at their cars always gets me wishing I didn’t:

There’s the beat-up, not-so-white Ford coupe belonging to Tom Kugelman, on the back of which he has printed SLOW WHITE. There’s the Chinese-Hawaiian boy’s grime-gray Pontiac, with one of those joke-stickers in the rear window: THE ONLY ISM I BELIEVE IN IS ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. The joke isn’t a joke in this particular case, because he really is an abstract painter. [ … ] And there’s the well-waxed, spotless scarlet MG driven by Buddy Sorensen, the wild watery-eyed albino who is a basketball star and wears a “Ban the Bomb” button. George has caught glimpses of Buddy streaking past on the freeway, laughing to himself as if the absurd little sitzbath of a thing had run away with him and he didn’t care.

Korean cinema diary: The Unforgiven, Poetry, Welcome to Dongmakgol

Korean men have to put in two years in the military by law, so I usually ask the ones I meet if they’ve done theirs yet. Since they’re usually in the States on a university deferment, most of them haven’t, and none of them seem to look forward to it. When I ask if everybody hates it, they usually shrug and ask something along the lines of, “Who could ever like it?” Jong-bin Yun’s The Unforgiven (용서받지 못한 자) expresses more or less the same sentiment. With maximum endurance, the film seems to say, you can hope for little more out of your stint in the Korean military than not having to shine too many of your commanding officer’s boots, not getting beaten up by him too harshly, and not having him grab your wang too often. It follows one young fellow, just enlisted, who finds himself answering to two slightly higher-ranking guys: a friendly old school buddy and a fat, pointlessly demanding thug. This bodes ill for his already unstable psyche.

Yoon shot the movie, his student thesis, with admirable daring. I’ve heard he banged together a screenplay about “military friendship” or somesuch claptrap and presented it to the powers that be, who then granted him permission to shoot in actual barracks. Then he just shot the spectacle of grimness he’d meant to all along. The whole film has this spirit of roughness, which I’d actually like more of in Korean cinema, many of whose most aesthetically impressive pieces still have a misplaced desire for slickness, a desire to “look like a movie.” The Unforgiven looks like only itself — and, for that matter, feels like itself. I’ve seen a bunch of Korean movies that approach the edges of questions about how much you have to deny to fall in line with society, but this one stares straight at them. I’ve undoubtedly missed about a thousand nuances of this by not having grown up in Korea, but hey.

Chang-dong Lee, who directed Secret Sunshine, has a new picture out. I’d resigned myself to having to make an L.A. trip to see it, but — shockingly — it’s playing in Santa Barbara! Just like Secret Sunshine, Poetry (시) builds, out of some of the most melodramatic elements imaginable, something far too clearheaded to call melodrama. Lee’s last last project featured a widow who moves to a small town only to have her son get kidnapped, and this one features Mi-ja, a 66-year-old grandmother struggling to learn poetry while beset with (a) the Viagra-driven advances of the stroke victim for whom she works as a caretaker, (b) a sullen grandson — the son of her absent daughter — accused of membership in the local rape gang, and (c) Alzheimer’s disease.

I don’t know if you’d quite call this “stunt casting,” but Lee wrote the role of Mi-ja for Jeong-hee Yoon, an actress with a ludicrously large filmography between the years 1967 and 1994, somehow managing to draw her out of a 16-year self-imposed exile from acting in Paris. I always like to see an artist make a bold comeback, even when I’m totally unfamiliar with the career to which the artist has ostensibly returned. But wait, there’s more: in the role of Mi-ja’s poetry teacher, Lee cast the real-life famed poet Yong-taek Kim, and in the role of Mi-ja’s employer, Lee cast Hee-ra Kim, another former young idol and an actual stroke survivor to boot, albeit a less damaged one than his character. The movie’s interaction with reality through the lives of its players and its setting deep in the grime-and-tchotchke-class made me appreciate its less realistic — or at least less straightforward — moments, like the final minutes’ simultaneous reveal of Mi-ja’s poem and the girl her grandson and his coterie evidently drove to suicide.

If you’ve ever wanted to watch a live-action Hayao Miyazaki movie, Kwang-hyun Pak’s Welcome to Dongmakgol (웰컴투 동막골) comes as close as anything. I didn’t make this connection from frame one, but add its thematic clash between technology (specifically, iconic midcentury military technology) and the “natural” world to its layers of subtly physics-flouting effects to its Joe Hisaishi score that at first sounds too constant and on-the-nose in a John Williams-y way to be a Joe Hisaishi score to Pak’s identification of Miyazaki as his “number one inspiration,” and you can’t avoid certain conclusions. For me, the real Miyazaki moment came when a group of characters have an extended fight an implacable boar — an abstract ripple of fur, almost — in slow motion.

This happens in 1950, during the Korean War. Three soldiers from the South stumble into the hidden, idyllic village of Dongmakgol just as three soldiers from the North stumble into it from the other side. The six proceed to give each other the stink eye, ready to kill at the first false move, while the villagers wonder what their guns do and whether their grenades are potatoes. The ice between the military men starts to break, Joint Security Area-style, when a stray grenade blows up a hut full of corn, providing the film’s first of several surreal passages when a hail of popcorn falls after the explosion. An American airman complicates things by crash-landing near Dongmakgol, bringing the U.S. military’s wrath of god down on the area in a somewhat implausibly high-impact search of him. For all the deliberate weirdness Pak puts in — and I like those choices more the more I think about them — the film feels most askew when the Americans show up. The western actors’ accents sound fine — a lot of Asian films just throw European randoms onscreen and call it good — but couldn’t they have at least suggested revisions to lines like “You’re driving my patience thin!” or, before launching a group of paratroopers, “May the lord be with you”?

An earnest, expansive, and rigorous discussion of Colin Marshall

Full Stop comes on the scene as the latest force for "an earnest, expansive, and rigorous discussion of literature and literary culture." The site does its bit by focusing on "young writers, works in translation, and books we feel are being neglected by other outlets." Sounds like a site I can get behind! If you read what I write, chances are you can get behind it too. In any case, it's gotten behind me; Full Stop writer Michael Schapira's interview with me just went up on its front page.

Michael does a solid e-mail Q&A. By way of proof, one question and its answer follows:

In a recent interview with C. Max McGee you both acknowledged working from a position outside of the academy (versus, for example, pursuing your interests within an MFA program or school of journalism). Many of your interviewees come from inside the academy, or are able to develop their work in some sort of productive relationship with universities. How you see your work in relation to the university?

I don’t see my work in relation to the university at all; if I’m lucky, I will continue not to see it that way. Some thrive in academia, but I find it brings out the worst of my slothful, autistic, obscurantist tendencies. I care strongly about how people engage with film, literature, and conversation in — forgive me for this term — the “real” world. How people engage with them in some department? Not so much.

Aw, what the hell. Here comes another, in part:

What have you learned from looking in-depth at a diverse set of podcasts over the past several years? Do you see any in particular pushing the medium?

I’ve learned that most podcasts consist of two twenty- or thirty-something white guys (or sometimes) bullshitting about “pop culture.” Some podcasters make an art of this — Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier on SModcast, Vernon Reid and W. Kamau Bell on The Field Negro Guide to Arts and Culture, or, again, Jesse and Jordan Morris on Jordan, Jesse, Go! — but most don’t. The best come from backgrounds other than “podcaster who’s seen some movies and television lately.” They’re comedians, broadcasters, musicians, filmmakers — not just podcasters, in other words, but three-dimensional people with accomplishments outside podcasting.

So thanks for making me think hard about what I do, Michael. It reminds me that, next time I get back on the other side of the interviewing game, I've got to do the same for my own guests. If you seek older interviews with me, you'll find a few on Mark Dykeman's Broadcasting Brain (which I can't seem to Google up at the moment), Tim Grigsby and Pav Aulakh's Radio Causeway, Giovanni Giorgio's G.I.O Get It On podcast, again on G.I.O. Get It On (but I can't find it), and Ben Casnocha's Think Different TV.

PB&J, every damn day

I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that I pop into the studio, interview James Wood or Alain de Botton or Clive James or whomever, and then eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Not just a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich, but perhaps my fifth peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich of the week. Of the many aspects of my life that don’t quite compute together, I tend to fixate on these two. Yet they stand in a sort of of non-causal alignment: I interview luminaries in order to build myself a career that somehow never materializes, and I eat PB&Js to build myself a savings that somehow never materializes.

Do know that I don’t practice absolute PB&J lunch asceticism. Whenever my checking account contains more than a few hundred dollars, my brain decides that I have “lots of money” and I spend freely, going so far as to treat myself to the occasional falafel. But overall, I’ve hewed closer to the PB&J rule than I ever would have expected me to; even the laxest guidelines I set for myself tend to dry up and blow away after a couple months. The mild financial pressures of (a) going to Mexico City soon and (b) moving to L.A. even sooner can probably take the credit for this. So I’m accomplishing the disciplinary mission, even if the actual goal — having some money to show for it — still floats vaguely on the horizon.

Sometimes, while I eat my PB&J — which I do now, as I type this — I remind myself to view my life in its probable entirety. No doubt I’ll eventually call these as “the lean years.” In fact, another luminary I’ve interviewed recently, one who provides me with a model of job-avoidance-as-life, assured me himself that I’ll look back on these days and laugh. Hence my tactic of pre-emptively laughing, aggressive self-deprecation being the apparent final solution (or as final a solution as I can find) to most of my problems. I mean, at least I eat peanut butter and jelly; I remember reading one blogger remember, with what I assume to have been a rueful chuckle, his grad-school stipend that provided just enough of a financial drip feed to keep him in not peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, but peanut butter sandwiches.

But anyway, my MacArthur Fellowship, whenever it comes in, should put an end to all this nonsense. From then on, I’ll eat all kinds of good stuff for lunch: stuff from the Kogi truck, stuff from the grilled cheese truck, stuff from the Ludo truck, stuff from the banh mi truck, stuff from the Bollywood Bites truck, stuff from the Komodo truck, stuff from the Shrimp Pimp truck. Even food not from trucks, I’ll bet. But the committee takes its sweet time, so until they get me my award, you’ll know where to find me: spreading things on bread.

Taste and identity

Reviewing Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, Adam Cadre arrives, by way of a book wherein Jeffrey Steingarten forces himself to eat everything he dislikes to attain “perfect omnivore” status, at an intersection of the ideas of opinions, tastes, and identity that’s occupied my mind lately:

When Steingarten speaks of becoming a "perfect omnivore," what he really means is a "perfect hedonist": his contempt is palpable for those, including his past self, who deprive themselves of pleasure by disliking something. This is an interesting issue for someone like me who doesn't really like a lot of stuff. It also dovetails with a story I read a couple of days ago, "Reasons to Be Cheerful" by Greg Egan, which Elizabeth brought me four months ago but which I didn't get a chance to look at until just this week for reasons I've discussed. It deals with a guy who has the pleasure receptors in his brain burnt out by a virus and then receives an experimental treatment that amounts to receiving grafts of pleasure pathways from four thousand people. The problem is that initially they're all operating at once and so if even one person in four thousand liked something then he likes it too. In short, he now has "the widest possible taste," exactly the condition to which Steingarten aspires — but he's not happy about it. "Should I still be like this?" he asks his doctors in a panic. "Omnivorous?"

Before long he decides that if he's ever going to develop a sense of identity he somehow needs "to break the symmetry, to make some things a greater source of pleasure than others." Now, I can certainly see a case against this view: developing an even more refined sense of identity might be counterproductive if the self is mostly illusory, and developing a list of likes and dislikes might be counterproductive if true happiness comes from escaping craving and aversion.

Recording an interview with filmmaker Aaron Katz the other week, I mentioned my creeping envy for the kind of cinephiles who’ll enjoy, say, a Michael Bay movie as much as a Yasujirō Ozu movie. I could just front like I do, I suppose, but the fact of remains: I’ll enjoy the Ozu movie. Even beyond cinema, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that anything I don’t particularly like represents a grievous hit to my potential joie de vivre. I suppose this gives some sort of identity as a selective appreciator of, oh, films that have stood the test of time or what have you, but I don’t find it very useful, especially in the grander task of trying to keep my identity small.

Should I therefore thrust myself into an ordeal of Nietzschean self-overcoming by watching all the films to which I feel the least attraction — by megadosing debased genres, say? Should I eat superhuman amounts of whatever I fear most? While I feel no pressing need to go that far, I admit that I’ve felt flashes of vast contempt — though only flashes of it — when people write off a swath of cultural experience as not their “thing.” I desperately wish not to return to middle- and high-school days, when we could only build identities out of abstract likes and dislikes. That didn’t work out so well for me, one reason being that it cut me off from too much of the rest of humanity — but then, I’ve already covered this.

The possibility remains that this likes-and-dislikes business actually bears less on my ability to connect with others than I think. Take Adam Cadre’s site. Most of his writeups on film come to the exact opposite evaluative conclusion I would have — Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, Old Joy, The Limey, In the Mood for Love, Paranoid Park, Silent Light, and Woman in the Dunes all score one point out of ten with him — yet I eagerly read everything he posts. Some film bloggers — let’s face it, many film bloggers — hold opinions that nearly replicate my own, but I don’t read them. Oftentimes I don’t read them because of their bad writing, but really, if I want a lionization of Abbas Kiarostami, I’ll write my own. I stand in the choir’s front row; I don’t need the sermon.

In any intellectual area, give me opinions that aren’t mine, as long as their holders express them well. Scratch that: only if their holders express them well; I’d rather not fill my mind with strawman stuffing. Not only does the very act of coming up against differing opinions make the world an interesting place, it makes me less likely to hold opinions of my own, or at least to hold them with quite as much strength as I would have, which reduces the risk that an identity will dumben me. Which, of course, will eventually make it hard to find conflicting opinions to come up against. Which will make the world a less interesting place for me. Oh well!

The particular sadness of Zappos

How could I go to Mexico City this fall without a pair of Mexico 66es? Designed in anticpation of Mexico City's 1968 Summer Olympics by Onitsuka Tiger, they remain available today in a prime example of the aesthetic timelessness — or at least wide-timespan-iness — I so desire in my wear, foot- and otherwise. They belong in my sneaker pantheon alongside the equally venerable Adidas Samba and Puma Turin. You may call me foolish to spend money on this sort of thing instead of saving up to move to Los Angeles, but I see Onitsuka Tigers as more like investments in my aesthetic future. Besides, they represent the meeting of two places, Japan and Mexico, that fascinate me — in shoe form! Could you really expect me to resist?

I bought my pair, along with a pair of Onitsuka Tiger's nearly-as-timeless Ultimate 81s, at Zappos, a site that seems to have made itself synonymous with shoes-on-the-net. I found their prices reasonable; I found their process painless. Indeed, Zappos publicly prides itself on being a service company first and foremost, but one that just happens to sell shoes. Its CEO, Tony Hsieh, has become something of a celebrity on the back of the company's cheerful ethos. (Zappos Family Core Value #5: "Pursue Growth and Learning". Zappos Family Core Value #9: "Be Passionate and Determined".) The man even wrote a book called Delivering Happiness, and I can't call it mistitled. The sight of that chunky, substantial Zappos box on my doorstep did indeed make me happy. Wearing the shoes inside makes me even happier.

And yet, pondering the existence of Zappos, I feel a debilitating wave of sadness. Despite my satisfaction with every stage of my interaction with the company, I can't get over the fact that people get up in the morning and devote eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve hours — the prime of their day! — to an internet shoe store. The very idea thet some of these employees might devote their entire careers — let's face it, means their entire lives — to this cause crumples me under an onrush of nihilism. Third-hand word from business articles tells me that Zappos has happier, more satisfied employees than most comparable firms, too, so why should I feel so sad? Hell, even the very lowest man on the Zappos totem pole makes more money than I do.

Yet even the vast fortune of the highest man on the Zappos totem pole — Hsieh made $214 million in the company's sale to Amazon — could not lure me into the internet shoe industry. This sounds stupid even as I type it. Croesan wealth and the knowledge that I've played a part in making people happy by helping them get boxes full of Mexico 66es? Who could ask for more than that? What could possibly be wrong with me?

These thought crimes lead friends to accuse me of professing belief in capitalism without really believing in capitalism. A real capitalist would watch the invisible hand of the market rush to fill the world's Japanese shoe needs and get all moist-eyed — with joy. A real capitalist wouldn't puss out and wring their hands about the abyss that must a life dedicated to figuring out a better way to sell shoes on the internet must surely be. I understand all this intellectually, but, for some reason, a part of me will always believe that every Silicon Valley multimillionaire harbors a quashed composer of atonal symphonies deep inside.

Freed from time and place, easily

These days, whenever I go to Kinokuniya, I spend nearly all my time with back issues of Free & Easy magazine. Free & Easy, as you can see, falls into the broad periodically category of "men's style," with an emphasis on the elusive concept of "ruggedness." Paragons of ruggedness, according to the editors, include Steve McQueen, Eric Clapton, dozens upon dozens of Japanese creative types I'd like to know more about, and John Malkovich. I don't know much about style magazines, but I do know this: when a style magazine puts John Malkovich on its cover, it becomes the style magazine for me.

You'll find it nearly impossible to achieve Free & Easy's particular brand of ruggedness before reaching 50 years of age. Each issue offers numerous profiles of particularly rugged men, headed by their names, occupations, and ages, e.g., "Hiroyuki Okada, graphic designer, age 51," "Simon Williams, importer, age 64," "Issei Tanizaki, architect, age 60," "John Malkovich, actor, age 57." When the time of the year comes to hand out the awards for "Mr. Rugged Impact" — the ruggedest of the rugged — the magazine actually separates the competition into age-based divisions, to ensure fairness. No matter how adeptly a man in the under-40 division has mastered ruggedness, he cannot compete with rivals in their 50s and 60s.

Alas, for yours truly, this means at least another quarter-century before I can hope for true ruggedness. In the meantime, I can just stare at Free & Easy in my uncomprehending hopefulness, uncomprehending because my Japanese hasn't quite reached the level where I can reliably decipher even style-mag copy. But at least my command of aesthetics — the only international language worth knowing — lets me appreciate both the magazine's design and the ruggedness it showcases.

I'd be lying if I claimed that, standing up at Kinokuniya's magazine racks while methodically scanning issue after issue of Free & Easy, that I couldn't possibly be caught up in a trend. Havent hundreds of men's style blogs sprung from the woodwork in the name of durable old Steve McQueeny-y Americana adapted to the free-for all of 21st-century fashion? Haven't I discussed just these topics in a Marketplace of Ideas interview with Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor of Put This On?

My defense follows. I submit that Free & Easy expresses two of the principles that, in my own life, have become pillars. First, however high a trend wave it might ride, the magazine champions a certain stylistic timelessness. As I've guessed before, the further into the past you could have worn a particular article of clothing, the further into the future you can wear it. The magazine takes this sensibility all the way into the accessories pages, covering road bicycles, aviator sunglasses, and 35-millimeter cameras with as much cool today as they would've had in 1962. If you want to win over a guy like me, you do it with road bikes, aviators, and 35-millimeter cameras, all presented — and here comes the critical hipster prolepsis — presented as unironically as possible.

Second, Free & Easy publishes in Japan only. On a practical level, this means that I have to pay almost $20 an issue, which means that I've never actually bought an issue. On a psychological level, it makes the magazine a sterling example of foreign Americaphilia. Now, I've got no qualms with America. I happen to live there. I grew up there. I feel no especially permanent attachment to the country, but I'm fairly down with it. Thing is, spending 26 years surrounded by America has rendered me unable to look at Americana with fresh eyes. It takes a foreign perspective to make me realize what American stuff I find useful, classy, and/or fascinating. Japanese Americaphilia works well for these purposes.

(I've long considered shooting a documentary called The Americaphiles, which would explore the nature of Americana as seen through a series of Americaphiles from other countries. If you want to give me money for that, go right ahead. Better yet, pass me the contact info of some Americaphiles. I understand the Japanese and French do Americaphilia particularly well.)

It comes down to freedom from the chains of time and place. I don't feel the need to travel back to the early sixties and enjoy its fashions, nor do I revel in the dubious "innovations" of today. I don't long to escape to Paris (or wherever), nor do I drape myself in the American flag. As I quote from Yoko Tawada more and more often every day, "The interesting lies in the in-between." If you want to see America, get the richest view of it through a Japanese lens. If you want to see old-school menswear, get the richest view of it through a modern lens. I can't guarantee that these sorts of techniques control for, moderate, or dampen the particular tics, stiffnesses, and prejudices isolated times and places tend to introduce, but if you've got any better ideas, I'd like to hear them.

Colin Marshall responds to Colin Marshall about the lifestyle of Colin Marshall

Don’t worry; I’m not doing some kind of meta thing. I sometimes e-mail with this one guy, also named Colin Marshall, about Korea (he lives there), cinema, Korean cinema, and the Korean cinema of Sangsoo Hong. He wrote this in response to my post “Two Flavors of Adulthood”, if you remember it, but my blogging platform wouldn’t let him leave it as a compliment. Because I can’t let technological snafus silence the voice of my namesake, here it is:

I don't understand why you insist on forswearing the familial side of "grown-upitude" in so vehement and public a way. Of course, there's nothing wrong with not having a wife and kids, and if you wish to renounce them, that's your choice. But to announce that you are doing so on the back of "cultural responsibilities" seems a bit presumptuous and insulting.

There's also a major paradox at play here: you are frequently ebullient and effusive in your appreciation of art, and perhaps crave to find fellows "for whom any given work of Andrei Tarkovsky trumps even the most deluxe package of holy matrimony and reproduction". But what, about your favourite works of art, do you find moving? I'd hazard a guess that you aren't merely on some death-and-erasure trip, that your favourite works also push some of the buttons that reflect your metaphysical entanglement with love, yearning, fear, community etc., in short, the things that relate to your being a human being LIVING in the world, and the things (along with death) that give art its power.

And yet, you seem to imply that your ideal peer group would comprise people who renounce the same things that you do on the back of a "cultural responsibility". But to what culture, can I ask, would you all duty-bound? Would it be the a culture bound up with the world, or merely one bound up with art? Would you recommend that all serious artists be as martyrs - make these sacrifices so that others could enjoy their efforts? It seems that if all artists thought the same as you do then the only ones fully equipped to enjoy art would be those who had made similar sacrifices. And unless you're thinking in terms of posterity, even this would surely be untenable after a while, because all these serious artists and art appreciators would eventually die out.

I really think it's unhealthy to decide, as a twenty-something, that "cultural responsibility" betokens the renunciation of all the things you mentioned, as it is to wonder where you might find a group of Tarkovsky acolytes who would place even his most minor work above their wife and kids (whom, according to you, they probably shouldn't have anyway). It's not either/or; just look at James Joyce. Not everything is black and white, not all thirty-something dads are semi-bearded Spiderman fans, not all abnegators are artists.

That seems all in order. I don’t know if I find anything particularly “moving” in art, Tarkovskian or otherwise, but certain creators definitely impress the hell out of me on the regular. I shy away from making anything resembling a recommendation to “all serious artists,” or even a recommendation to “artists,” or even a recommendation to “people other than me.” (None of this applies to non-Colin Marshalls — er, non-this-Colin Marshalls.)

Colin’s observation that “it’s not either/or” checks out, though that he makes it tells me that I failed to get across in the original post that I meant to talk about two ends of a spectrum. On the one end, you’ve got the beardo dads (i.e., who take familial responsibilities seriously) who limit the bulk of their cultural experience to those directly descended from Marvel comics (i.e., who cast off cultural responsibilities). But why, in my generation, have I seen so little of the other end?