Culturewatch

Prelude to the Bright and Warm

by

A woman, who had been abused by her father, husband and brother-in-law, tries to starve herself to death while confined to a mental hospital. A college instructor, scarred from eye-to-throat and going blind, meets a poet who has lost the ability to speak. Political protesters, who have been arrested, find themselves starved, waterboarded, beaten with rifle butts, hung from ceilings, left for ants to nibble on their genitals, reduced to pus, piss, saliva, blood, snot, shit, “lumps of rotten meat,” and rendered unable to be touched or feel affection or achieve intimacy.

These people are balding, overweight, insomniac, nightmare-afflicted, worried about the size of their penis. They are “jaundiced” and “sickly looking.” They have been shattered. When they look into mirrors, death hovers behind their face. Marriages have been brief. Children have been lost. They walk until so exhausted they can sleep without recalling their dreams. And when they dream they find themselves alone in cold, dark woods in a barn full of “great blood-red gashes of meat, blood still dripping down,” or with black-red blistered lips bursting with blood and pus, or digging into frozen ground by hand until their nails splinter and their fingers bleed, or on scorched islands surrounded by tens of thousands of dying fish, the tattered sails of wrecked ships, the scattered bones of whales and sharks.

They live in cities once pulverized into dust. They live alone in small rooms, furnished and curtained in black. Through “pitch-black windows,” they look upon “pitch-black” darkness into which they consider throwing themselves. They experience rain and woods as black. They fear being sucked into a wound’s “pitch-black maw.” They have been swallowed by darkness. They feel each moment of life is a step off a cliff. They feel like giant, invisible knives are suspended above them as they lie immobile below. They ask if going on is worth it.

They are bodies “from which all desire had been eliminated.” They are “revolted” by life.” They believe it is man’s fate “to be degraded, damaged, slaughtered.” They wonder “why it is such a bad thing to die.” They believe humans to be “fundamentally cruel,” with “brutality” “imprinted in our genetic code.” They believe that, like sleet, the earth will vanish and take “comfort” in the “impossibility of forever.”

These people populate the novels of Han Kang, a winner of  the International Booker Prize (2016) and Noble Prize for Literature (2024). Five have been translated into English:  The Vegetarian (published in Korean in 2007 and English in 2016); Greek Lessons (2011/2023) Human Acts (2014/2016); White Book (2016/2019); We Do Not Part (2021/2025).

I read them all, periodically interrupting my reading to gasp.

Read more

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Bambi

by

1. There are two types of mothers – alive and dead.

2. In both states, Bambi’s mother is unnamed.

3. My mother told me that Bambi’s mother actually survived.

4. Walt Disney’s daughter was upset that he allowed Bambi’s mother to die, reminding him that he had made other changes to the book.

5. Originally the audience was supposed to see the murder along with a hunter burning to death from the fire he started.

Read more

Big Chicken and Us

by

This is a reprise of a column I wrote three years ago about my favorite chicken on the chicken farm where I lived some 15 years ago.

That’s me some years ago, feeding the chickens on the farm where my family and I lived in Tennessee.

Read more

Beto & The Lotos-Eaters (a movement of mind prompted by the late Benjamin DeMott’s protest against the “let us alone” legacy of a “tonal” prophet)

by

Tim Miller joked that he wanted “therapy” so he brought Beto to The Bulwark podcast, but Miller reflexively resisted Beto’s relentless positivity. He was always cordial, but he seemed like a frenemy when he jabbed his guest by citing James Carville who ‘d once rubbed it in after Beto dropped out of the 2020 presidential race. (Carville wacked Beto as a guy who could hit the hell out of a double A fastball, but couldn’t handle a major league change-up.) Perhaps Carville’s right. It could be that Beto lacks talent. Or maybe his meld of Lincoln (“Public sentiment is everything.”) and punk (“Joe Strummer said, ‘without people you’re nothing.'”) could still change the game.

Read more

Anora’s Golden Ticket

by

The condom in Sean Baker’s Anora (2024) haunts me. Early in the Oscar-minted film, the titular adult entertainer presents a golden packet to Vanya, her callow yet absurdly wealthy young client, in advance of sexual intercourse. “You want to put this on? Or do you want me to put it on for you?” she coos, cleverly offering an illusion of choice while communicating that one way or the other, the condom is going on.

Only it doesn’t go on – ever. Not only because a shot of Mark Eydelshteyn’s genitals would bust through the film’s R rating – the MPA’s sexed bias is well documented – the application of the condom is neither mimed nor further referenced. The scene cuts jarringly to the couple mid-coitus, with Vanya on the brink of orgasm and Ani, of course, doing all the work. Then it cuts again to Ani dressing herself, Vanya’s lap coyly hidden beneath the sheets and the condom presumably discarded. That fleeting glimpse of its shimmery wrapper suggests an omnipresence that the film ultimately has no interest in depicting.

The condom is not only Ani’s golden ticket into Vanya’s lavish world, ushering Anora into an ongoing media trend that lampoons the ultra-wealthy’s heartlessness but too often hangs its critique on titillating wealth-porn. It’s also the means by which she protects herself, even as the thin latex sheath cannot shield her fully from the torrent of exploitation and abandonment to come. It’s a very real boundary she enforces in service of her own health and sexual privacy, a momentary inconvenience rupturing Vanya’s – and let’s be honest, the viewer’s – fantasy of unbarred access to the sex worker’s limitlessly porous body.

For this reason, I do not think the condom could have ceased to be a point of contention between Ani and Vanya. The princeling is accustomed to owning, not renting. He has clearly never been denied his immediate wishes, never been asked to consider the feelings or material conditions of the workers his family employs. His artless fucking makes it clear that Ani is no exception. When he purchases her uninterrupted service for a full week, and especially when the unlikely couple weds in a slapdash Vegas ceremony, are we expected to believe the condom stays on? Why was it ever there in the first place, if the film cannot stand to unwrap it?

Read more

A Wadler Classic: “My Jud Fry Problem” (with an advertisment for herself)

by

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this for a few hours, but my comic novel, “The Satyr in Bungalow D”, comes out today.

My Jud Fry Problem

Laurey, in “Oklahoma!”, telling Jud Fry he’s got to be kidding as he explains sex.

I was watching Oklahoma! on TCM last night and naturally the old question popped up: How could anybody go for a simple-minded twit like Curly when Jud Fry, the alleged bad guy, is so much more attractive?

Yeah, there’s the porn addiction and he’s living in a smokehouse, but I figure he’s got interesting reading material in there: Henry Miller, Kerouac, Hubert Selby. Plus a pin-up of the stripper he messes around with when he’s in Kansas City tacked up on the wall.

Also, Jud, as played by Rod Steiger, is hot.

Read more

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Snow White

by

1.      For centuries, male poets have mourned the transience of female pulchritude.

2.      Their own sags and jowls remain unlamented.

3.      In the original, Snow White is seven years old when she surpasses her stepmother’s beauty.

Read more

Fore!

by

Golf had been his father’s game, so Goshkin never played it. Adolescent rebellion, he supposed. In 1950s Philadelphia, football, baseball, basketball were the only honorable sports.

In recent years, though – 70-some and 3000 miles later – he had come to enjoy golf on TV, while his interest had faded from football, baseball, everything athletic in fact, except the Warriors, who continued to drive his blood pressure up 20-points, and the exercise he deemed necessary to keep his own surgically-enhanced heart pumping.

“What do you think your dad would say,” asked Ruth, his wife, a former therapist, “about your seeing the light?”

Goshkin snorted. Not his story. Left behind with the Liberty Bell.

Read more

Death Facing

by

Recently I was preparing a talk about my experiences as a former heart-surgery patient, who visits people in the hospital who’ve just undergone one. For my talk, I was asked to detail my heart history, its impact on my life, and how it influenced my visiting.

When I am writing or, in this case, preparing a talk, occurrences in my daily life may walk on like a horn player joining an improvisation. In Muriel Spark’s Momento Mori I read, “I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life.” And then in Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, I found the observation that one who faces death at every turn is best able to think about life. Both Kang and Spark were 40-ish when they wrote their sentences. I don’t know that either’d had a health crisis. Imagine, I thought, what an 83-year-old who’s had several could contribute.

He could say, “I don’t recommend open heart surgery, but you can get a lot out of it.”

Read more

Romanticism in Ogallala

by

“You don’t have to die,” Segarra sings, their timbre plaintive and urgent but knowing and confident on “Alibi” – the first track on Hurray for the Riff Raff’s sublime record The Past is Still Alive from last year – open strings ringing on an acoustic guitar over roundy left-hand piano chords. “If you don’t want to die”, the line continues, a lead guitar a little trembly, a pedal-steely organ somewhere back there too, the arrangement solidly Americana but already giving so much more. “You can take it all back / In the nick of time”: the song is giving love by giving time. Giving time by creating it. Creating it for someone. These two have a history – shared secrets, track marks, New York City, “I love you very much / And all that other stuff.”

I started thinking about Keats (after a few dozen listens) in connection to the next line – “Thawing out my heart like meat” – thinking probably, for reasons that didn’t quite make sense at first, about Keats’s “burning forehead” and “parching tongue” in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the “cold pastoral” of the vase cannot thaw like “all breathing human passion” can. Segarra: “Baby, help me understand.”

Read more

Railroad Earth

by

Norah Jones’ duets with Alynda Segarra on YouTube prompted this comment…

Alynda played a major role in changing my entire life for the better. I was an overworked railroader driving freight trains up and down California when I met her and her band “The Dead Man Street Orchestra” at the time. I had just brought my train into Roseville from Oakland, summer of 2005 I believe. I saw her and 5 bandmates playing their instruments under an old oak tree in a dusty field adjacent to the tracks. Once I got off the train I drove my car back to that field and introduced myself. They were a lovely bunch of folks. We ate together and drank “fancy beers” as they called them. The following morning they were aiming to hop a boxcar heading north and they invited me to ride with them.

Read more

Hurray for the Riff Raff!!!

by

I’ve lost my feeling for rock ‘n’ roll plenty of times since, say, Love You Live or The River or Combat Rock — albums by beloveds that seemed like stiffs in the moment. But rock-is-over raps have never deflated me for long. I’ve learned to trust there’s always something coming in the American night. Mathew Borushko steered me to The Past is Still Alive late last year. It’s my favorite CD from 2024. The opener, “Alibi,” got me open but it’s “Hawkmoon” that made me look up and lock in. There’s the melody as well as a signature line: “I’m becoming the kind of girl they warned me about.” Anyone can tell Alynda Segarra is tuned to what it means to do Americana when the country, which you’ve always been ambivalent about, is headed for a fall. But I had no clue about Alive‘s depths until Matthew B. read me into the songs’ back pages. (Bless him and Alynda for hinting sweet Will was the o-riginal rock and roller…

No motion has she now, no force;
…She neither hears nor sees;
…Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,
…With rocks, and stones, and trees.)

Segarra — that Nuyorican devil in a red dress below — has mucho charm. They’re worthy of their home borough (“New York’s most heterogeneous and alive”), the Bronx. Segarra’s range seems pretty astounding (until I recall how many renaissance cats named Richie Torres roam my city). Segarra has rambled from Rican beach to NOLA and all the good aural country in and around. (They like “Heroes” too.) FWIW, the Motherland guitar at the top of the following pre-The Past is Alive Tiny Desk concert is nice as are Van-the-Man strings that kick in in the middle (where this clip starts)…

Read more

Current Cinema: “Rustin,” “No Direction Home” & “Hard Truths”

by

When it comes to bio-pics of 60s heroes, Rustin beats Like a Complete Unknown. Though both flicks suffer from their dependence on simulations of performances that have already been filmed. Rustin builds toward The March on Washington where actors ventriloquize Mahalia Jackson’s gospel and King’s dream. Like a Complete Unknown heads toward a nada take on Dylan at Newport ‘65. (You can hear the real electric thing ((“Let’s Go!…All right!”)) and even watch footage of Bloomfield wailing with Dylan as a Chicago blues all-star rhythm section drives them hard.)[1] Timothy Chalamée has been praised for learning how to play Dylan’s songs, but he can’t put them across. None of his performances touch the indelible scene in Inside Lewelyn Davis where a folkie takes his best shot and fails to move an Albert Grossman type: “I don’t see a lot of money here.”

Read more

Repeat

by

She was like any woman running from sudden rain,
a pretty picture, lifting to her head the cheap bouquet
she’d bought at the corner fruit store perennially
named A & J no matter who owned it. Some protection,
laughed a man running opposite. She wanted to shout
Magritte, but the rain at once came down in a clatter,
face streaming, he sprinted past her, and wit doesn’t matter
when a tree limb springs at your feet, and unable to stop,
she leaped, part of her mind absorbing knobs, green with lichen.

Read more

The Galaxy Revisited

by

I. Coping. Trying. San Francisco

Designed to accommodate living across the country from the New York teams I’ve once again come to love, my aspirational strategy of using sports to insulate myself wasn’t entirely working: I found pockets of untarnished beauty, but not anywhere near a Trump-free zone.

Read more

Perception

by

The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.

The woman sleeps surrounded by her possessions, which, so far as Goshkin can catalog from his seat in the café across the street, consist of a shopping cart, several stuffed large plastic bags, a yellow blanket, a rug depicting a horse on hind legs, an umbrella, two tubes of glittering steel pipe, and a crooked, leafless tree branch as tall as she is. Once she has awakened, the woman begins to move her belongings to the sidewalk.

She arranges them as if assembling a train. What connects the cars of the train is unclear. So is how it will move forward. She takes her time, sometimes removing an item from a shopping bag and adding it to the exterior, sometimes shifting items she has placed in one position to another.

Read more

Bob Dylan and the unfairness of genius

by

Bob Dylan puts on a song like a suit of clothes. He does it when he plays concerts, sings his old hits as if for the first time, frequently confounding his back up band with his changes. Through the magic of YouTube, we can listen to him in the studio, recording “Positively 4th Street” through 12 takes, each different from the other. You’re relieved when he hits the take that’s used on the record, but changing his approach, his tone, the attitude of his singing, doesn’t reveal any more about him than changing from a cashmere sweater into a plaid lumberjack shirt.

You can hear the deliberateness of the different takes. He is, and was, a professional musician, after all. He appeared to be trying to find himself inside the songs he wrote and sang, but maybe that was a put-on, like so much else he said for public consumption. In an interview for Newsweek done in February of 1968, Dylan said, “I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that anymore. There’s myself and there’s my song.”

Read more

How to Mourn a Famous Friend

by

Recoil from the headline’s slap.

Scroll through all the phases of her face.

Dig up your own photographs. Decide the auspicious number means she died without pain.

Place your favorite – arms around each other, grinning like fools – on your body where it aches the most.

Hold her pet name for you under your tongue.

Read more