#22 Inception, Cornelius Sky, and Discord
Hello again. Welcome to August. For me August began with a message on my phone from the storage unit facility where most of my belongings are currently being kept. The message said I needed to contact them ‘right away’ about an ‘urgent matter’. I knew my bill was up to date so this could only be bad news. It turns out that someone got into a few of the storage units and mine happened to be one of them. Luckily I had recently moved my entire DVD and book collection out of the unit, but it still housed most of my comic book collection.
I have been collecting comic books since I was twelve years old. I can give you detailed biographies of any X-Man and most of their villains. I can tell you more about the Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire than most people could tell you about the Roman Empire. I take good care of my comic books. Most of them are bagged and boarded. All of them fit in neat, organized cardboard boxes. And so it was heartbreaking when I opened my unit and found this.
After careful inventory I found that they had managed to make off with at least a box or two of early Uncanny X-Men from the classic Chris Claremont run. Basically X-Men 150-250. They also got New Mutants 87-100. These are issues that include the first appearances of Cable, Domino, Deadpool, Gideon, Shatterstar, Feral, and others. They were probably the most expensive issues I owned.
I saw the movie City Slickers and heard Daniel Stern say how even when he and his Dad hated each other the one thing they could always talk about was baseball. I’ve never been a sports guy so I made the one thing my son and I could talk about comic books. This collection is his inheritance and it got raided. I’m still in the process of dealing with this violation both physically and emotionally.
On the plus side, most of the collection remains intact, though (as you can see in the picture above) some issues were significantly damaged.
Anyway, let’s get on with the newsletter.
What I’m Reading – Cornelius Sky
During my recent virtual residency at Goddard College, Ibrahim Ahmad, lead publisher at Akashic Books did a presentation. He was informative, entertaining, and friendly. During the presentation he mentioned the novel Cornelius Sky by Timothy Brandoff as one of the novels he’s most proud of publishing. This intrigued me so I picked it up.
Cornelius Sky is a short little gem of a novel. It follows the hapless exploits of an alcoholic doorman in 1974 New York City. Thrown out of his home by his wife on the first page, constantly on the verge of being fired, and never anywhere near sober, Cornelius Sky, or Connie as he prefers, is one of literature’s all-time great losers. And yet, one can’t help but hope things work out for him.
For most of the novel I had no idea where it was going and then it all culminates with an epic flameout that plays like a train wreck you can’t look away from.
This is Timothy Brandoff’s first novel, but the writing has such a relaxed flow to it that its raw humanity sneaks up on you. This is an author who knows exactly what he’s doing. In a lot of ways, it reads like a short story. There aren’t too many subplots and the whole thing hinges on a well-meaning failure of epic proportions.
I imagine Connie played by someone like William H. Macy. You can’t help but like him, but you’re under no illusions why some don’t. I can see why Ibrahim was so proud of publishing this book. It was well worth my time.
What I’m Watching – Chris Nolan movies: Inception
After I saw Inception in the theater (remember movie theaters?), I posted on Facebook, “There are only two kinds of people: People who need to see Inception and people who need to see Inception again.” Inception is Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece. It’s the perfect blend of script, cast, special effects, music, filmmaking, and style. At its heart, Inception is heist, but it’s a heist of the mind, making it unlike any heist movie you’ve ever seen.
If you haven’t seen Inception, I don’t want to spoil some of the surprises for you. It’s a movie about people entering the dreams of other people. And like The Prestige, the work of the protagonists is similar to the work of the filmmakers themselves. Both are consumed with creating a believable world for their audience in order to create a convincing illusion.
Like almost all of Nolan’s movies, Inception plays with the perceptions of individuals and the perception of time. Time movies differently in dreams (and even more differently in dreams within dreams).
Inception was Nolan’s first movie after The Dark Knight. At this point in his career, Nolan became one of those filmmakers who pretty much could do whatever he wanted. When a filmmaker has unlimited access to resources they either make a masterpiece like Inception or a disaster like John Carter.
With the reputation and resources at Nolan’s disposal the cast reads like a who’s who of Hollywood. Leonardo DiCaprio leads an ensemble that includes Michael Caine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, and perhaps my favorite femme fatale of the twenty-first century, Marion Cotilard. Hans Zimmer’s music is so iconic that ten years later half the soundtracks out there sound like they’re riffing off of this.
It’s said that Nolan wanted to direct a Bond movie and ended up making this instead. The same was true when Steven Spielberg ended up making Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pro Tip: If your filmmaking career is going well and you feel like making a Bond movie, try something else.
I don’t know if Inception is my favorite Nolan movie, but it’s definitely the one I’ve watched the most. The trailers for Nolan’s next movie, Tenet seem heavily influenced by Inception. In fact, check out this video that argues that Tenet is actually a secret sequel to Inception. If you need something to tide you over until September (or whenever Tenet actually ends up coming out), I highly recommend taking a look (or another look) at Inception.
Next: INTERSTELLAR
What I’m Thinking About
“I get the news I need on the weather report. I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.”
– Simon & Garfunkel, The Only Living Boy In New York
I logged on to Facebook this morning, read the feed for maybe a minute, watched a video that automatically played of a masked cop in riot gear beating on a black man with a club, posted “See you in September” and logged off for the month. Or so I hoped. But of course I was back on it for a dopamine hit after I got my shit stolen (see above).
An unfortunate truth about the world is that terrible things happen all over the world every single day. Some of them we can do something about. Most of them we can’t. And these days everyone has a camera in their pocket in the form of a cellphone. What this means is that no matter how much better we make the world, we’re only going to get more videos of unspeakable violence against people and animals. Thanks to features like auto-play we don’t often even get the choice whether or not we want to watch them. Broadcast television will blur out a middle finger salute, but you can watch a man be killed online just by logging into Facebook or Twitter.
Ask someone today if violent crime or violence in general is going up or down overall and many will say it’s obviously going up. And in certain areas that’s true, but overall crime is dramatically down. Violence isn’t going up, the awareness of violence is going up. This leads to the false impression that things are getting worse when they are getting better. But that doesn’t matter because no amount of statistics are more compelling than a snuff film with cops and an unarmed Black person.
There’s an argument to be made that we should watch these atrocities, that we need to be made uncomfortable especially if we’re white, that refusing to watch such things is a form of white privilege, and that those who engage in that behavior are racist. How dare we turn away from the horror that persons of color have to experience every single day whether they want to or not?
It sounds like a compelling argument until one thinks about it. I’m fully capable of acknowledging systemic racism in all of our institutions and speaking out in favor of significant, sustainable, and realistic reform in those institutions without subjecting myself to watching videos of human beings actually being beaten and killed in the same way that I don’t need to watch child porn to know I’m against pedophilia.
There are a few forces at work here that I feel make for the worst possible online experience. The combination of millions of cameras across the country always connected to the Internet and social media platforms that are engineered to make people more and more outraged and polarized results in users who are filled with rage on a daily basis. It isn’t a good or comfortable way to live. It’s toxic. And it’s getting worse.
The only way out is to not log in. So I’m going to try taking a break. When it comes to social media I can’t tell other people what to post. And I certainly will not be telling Black people not to post videos of violent injustices. All I can do is make my own decisions. And to be honest, I’m still going to want to post about things. So instead, I’m using my own Discord server. You can join up if you like. Here’s a video about what Discord is and here’s a link to my server if you want to join up. It’s basically social media without the ads and algorithms.
The world is becoming increasingly wired. It’s hard to remember sometimes that you have the option to change what you consume online, but it’s well worth doing.
Jack