Black Cloud

The first time I read Juliet Escoria's Black Cloud was just after its release in 2014. At first blush, I was dazzled by Escoria's punky, sexy goth-girl aura. It was as if a Suicide Girl had written a novel(la). Certainly, Escoria's online profile, which featured the author splayed in all manner of suggestive poses, contributed to this vibe. Even more appealing was Escoria's sparse prose tinctured with an almost exultant hurt, not to mention the ease with which she could intersperse disaffected sex scenes in her narratives. Straddling New York and L.A. cityscapes, she conjured (for me, at least) the portrait of a young woman enigmatically capering in bob-cuts and chokers between cosmopolitan mis-en-scenes. She was, in 2014, the kind of girl I wanted to connect with in mutual ennui, and in my first read-through, I felt as if this was happening. In short, Juliet Escoria was a fantasy.

The second time I read Black Cloud by Juliet Escoria (that is, Juliet Scum, for non-Spanish speakers) was just last week. This time around, I saw the book more clearly for what it is: the stark, uncompromising account of an addict and her personal undoing(s). It is not sexy at all. Why would we expect it to be? On the contrary, Black Cloud catalogues a deep lack of fulfillment with relationships on levels sexual, emotional, and existential. It is about being jerked around by fellow addicts, finding only bottomless hollows in boyfriends, girlfriends, family, and everyone in between. "Connecting" with anyone is, as per Escoria's work, all but impossible; sex, drugs and, hell, even wholesome pursuits all lead to dead-ends. 

Juliet Escoria is no fantasy. Her capacity for tracing the emptiness of addiction (and the wider world outside it) is about as real as it gets. Hopefully other readers will get that on their first read-through. I suppose my recent re-reading is inflected with post-#MeToo sensibilities. More palpably, I think it indexes my own growth--or my own giving up--and the solace that comes with it. I don't know if Juliet Escoria has grown up or given up or what, but I hope she's found some kind of solace, too.

I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

I was rooting through the “Spooky Halloween” DVD bin at my local Wal-Mart, tossing aside predictable Casper the Friendly Ghost and Friday the 13th fare, when I came across something unexpected: the 2010 version of I Spit on Your Grave. This is, of course, the remake of the 1978 film of the same name (a.k.a. Day of the Woman) wherein Buster Keaton’s granddaughter plays a progressive, NYC-based writer who has probably read her fair share of Susan Brownmiller. She goes to a rural area to get some solitude, but instead gets the full Brownmiller treatment from four feral local men. After the ordeal, she takes merciless revenge on all four of her assailants. The director of the original, Meir Zarchi, compared his talents to those of Fellini.

The 2010 version recapitulates the 1978 plot, though it expands the rapist count to five. It also adds a few interstitial scenes between the rape and the revenge, allowing for some minimal characterization (i.e. that one of the assaulters has a wife and child) that makes the whole undertaking that much more vexingly ambivalent. The rape scene is even more unnecessarily long than in the original. Afterward, you empathize with the main character, even if you didn’t before. The pert, twenty-something leading actress, Sarah Butler, is not exactly convincing in her portrayal of a writer. Personally, I don’t know many colleagues in the craft with CrossFit bodies befitting of skimpy swimwear, and so, for suspension-of-disbelief purposes, the female lead might have been better framed as “pre-med” or “a scientist” rather than as a “novelist.” The rapists, however, have changed from random local yokels to hard-bitten sons of the soil—that is, expressly redneck—and so the remake leans more heavily on city vs. country tropes than did the original. This makes the female lead even more sympathetic and her protracted, torture-porn revenge more satisfying. The original film messed with the viewer in a deeply problematic way, in that you started to feel minimally sorry for the unwitting rapists as they were systematically brutalized. In the newer version, the revenge feels more eugenic than anything else. In the end, there are five less future Trump voters left standing. As such, you are willing to forgive the implausible, Saw-level complexity of the kills. 

All told, the remake isn’t exactly Fellini, but it is probably a better film than its namesake. Still, there’s something lost between eras. The original, after all, was meant to be viewed in the grainiest of prints in the dingiest of the NYC (or outer-borough) grindhouses, sitting in the dark alongside hustlers, Nam Vets, and other assorted degenerates—the kind of people who cheer during the revenge and the rape. The 2010 version is something you end up watching with your vaguely emo girlfriend while she intermittently massages her iPhone 11. Sure, you’re reminded of the horrific potentialities that perpetually lurk between men and women, even in the twenty-first century, but it’s just not as ghastly this time around. 

Perhaps the real horror is that you can find a rape movie like I Spit on Your Grave stacked atop Casper the Friendly Ghost at your local Wal-Mart. This is another jarring reminder of the amoral aesthetic juxtapositions wrought by late-capitalist sensibilities. Of course, Casper was the ghost of a child, suggesting undertones as dark—or conceivably darker—than the timeless, gendered violence of I Spit on Your Grave in its 2010 or 1978 iterations.

NFR - Lana Del Rey

To this point, the songs constituting the Lana Del Rey oeuvre can be divided into two major categories: the “bangers” and the “stinkers” (as well as third category of unremarkable songs in between). The “bangers” are the signature hits: “Summertime Sadness,” “Cola,” “West Coast,” “High by the Beach,” and the list goes on and on. The “stinkers” are the songs that didn’t work, and they are much less frequent.

Del Rey’s previous record, Lust for Life, had a few true bangers, including “Love" and "White Mustang,” but it also had more than a few stinkers (viz. anything with A$AP Rocky or Shaun Lennon in it). Moreover, Lust for Life was marred by a lawsuit that deemed the song “Get Free” had plagiarized Radiohead’s “Creep.” The plagiarism is debatable; the real travesty of justice is how lifeless British tripe like Radiohead remains relevant.

Del Rey’s latest offering, titled NFR (or Norman Fucking Rockwell in full) is something of a bounce-back record. Or perhaps it is a finale. The songs are darker and longer, the lyrics elegiac and rambling. This is not a negative, however. While there are no real bangers on the album, there aren’t really any stinkers either. The album is eminently listenable from start to finish, even if it isn't built around patent singles. There certainly are some standouts on this album, perhaps most notably "Venice Bitch," a 9-plus minute track premised on a pun paralleling that of LMFAO’s 2008 offering “I’m in Miami Bitch” (although in a considerably maturated iteration). Nonetheless, the album is best appreciated as a single, cohesive whole. Its rambling verses are integral to the artistry, as they read like poetry. 

Quite fittingly, given the nature of the lyrical compositions, there are several Sylvia Plath references. Often, Del Rey speaks in finalizing terms. “The culture is lit, I guess this is it, and I had a ball/I guess that I’m burned out after all,” she offers on “The Greatest,” a resigned, poignant, but ultimately self-satisfied eleventh track that could have aptly closed the album.

Will this be Lana Del Rey's last kick at the Pepsi Cola can? Probably—hopefully—not. This haunting, wandering album leaves us wanting more. It doesn’t feel like an ending, exactly, but rather like the ushering in of a new dispensation—a Lana Del Rey who has fully evolved out of her poppy past, and is now in full-on poet mode, very much like the bearded, pot-bellied Jim Morrison who lends his voice to An American Prayer. With Del Rey, it seems as if it is not going to be about “bangers” and “stinkers” anymore. It’s going to be about poetry and melody over protracted instrumentation.

If it wasn’t obvious before, it's clear in listening to NFR that, apart from her trademark murdered ennui, there is now a palpable frustration in Lana Del Rey. Perhaps she’s feeling a futilitarian exasperation from a career of being variously characterized as a plagiarist, an anti-feminist, and an oversexed Lolita, among other things, when she is not really any of these. Perhaps contemporary critics got so singularly fixated on “getting” and subsequently labelling Lana Del Rey that they missed that she is ineludibly so much more—a poetess of vision so profoundly abysmal that it’s almost ineffable. Had the aesthetics of the era not been so obsessed with commercial popularity and political correctness, Lana Del Rey would be the Cobain or Morrison of her time; instead, incorrigibly poppy divas like Lady Gaga or Beyoncé inexorably occupy those stations. As such, Del Rey has been consigned—or has consigned herself—to the role of a Sylvia Plath: overwrought and underappreciated.

Sylvia Plath deserved a better ending, and so too does Lana Del Rey. Hopefully she will get the appreciative finale that she deserves, but not for decades.

What Philosophy Can Do

The late Gary Gutting used to be the big swinging dick of matters ontological and epistemic. I remember seeing him stand toe-to-toe with Basil van Fraassen, constructive empiricist extraordinaire, in an epic heavyweight dust-up in the pages of Monist back in '82. With his 2015 book What Philosophy Can Do, Gutting has attempted to go mainstream. He argues that philosophy can be useful in, say, potentially polarized political debates, as it can identify the convictions behind (and the limitations within) any given liberal or conservative position. This all smacks of the optimism of the pre-post-Truth era, and that seems to be the dustbin to which Gutting's book has been consigned. Just the other day, I saw more than a few copies marked down to $2 at my local paper peddler. Apparently, philosophy can't do much for anyone anymore. Thorough, well-researched, and well-considered arguments don't fly in this day and age of Trump and trigger-warnings. Nice try, Mr. Gutting, but everybody just goes with their gut now. If psychiatric drugs can't help these people, do you think philosophy has any hope? May peace be upon you, because we certainly won't have it here on earth.