1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 13: 1979

I lived in Missouri in 1996, and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was the album the kids were listening to: two discs of epic pretentiousness. But the album had plenty of good tracks. Pop radio mostly played “1979.” It was one of the Mellon Collie’s quieter songs – and one of its fastest-paced.

Rock critic Amy Hanson writes:

Light, bright and just slightly off-kilter, “1979” was a somewhat surprising hit for the Smashing Pumpkins in February 1996. With James Iha’s guitars conjuring up just a hint of down-tuned drone à la My Bloody Valentine, and [Billy] Corgan winding a clear vocal through a mid-tempo melody with nary a shout or wrenching outburst in sight, the song was the perfect winter wonder. Disaster was lurking around the edges though, as a key portion of the accompanying video was lost when a production crew associate left the only copy on top of his car like the proverbial cup of coffee, or wallet, or important files, and drove away, effectively driving the images into nowhere. Never recovered, a frustrated band managed to recreate the moment, and duly dispatched it to MTV, where it became a heavy hitter. Although this wobble would become one of the earliest in a string of disasters that would eventually unhinge the band, before hindsight shook out its mane, the beauty and tenderness of “1979,” with the pure poetry in lyrics like “You and I should meet / Junebug skipping like a stone,” did more to erase the angst and anger of a generation of X-ers with its nostalgia tripping than just about anything else.

(I’ve changed some of Hanson’s punctuation and spelling.)

The video nails the jauntier aspects of what it was like to be a white teen in the mid-1990s. (If the 1950s and early 1960s are the “heads” of white teen culture, the 1990s are the “tails,” the muddier side of the coin.) As the video begins, the camera is caught inside a rolling tire. The perspective is intelligible and disorienting and reckless, all at once, and destined to be repeated in endless circularity, like Boethius’s wheel. So is the behavior of the idle teens in the video, who drive donuts and throw toilet paper rolls and wreak havoc in convenience stores. The cops arrive. The video highlights donuts of a different sort: more circularity (truly, nothing is new). The teens go to a party at someone’s house. They make out in the pool. They drive around some more. Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins’ lead vocalist, sits in the car’s back seat, surveying the chaos, and gently smiles and sings.

Many of these scenes would be repeated in a couple other grungy teen/twentysomething movies of the same year – William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann, and SubUrbia, directed by Richard Linklater – and in other movies of the 1990s and 2000s. The content and style and moral tenor aren’t quite original in the “1979” video, however. One notable predecessor is Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). But in just four minutes, the music video conveys nearly everything the full-length movies do, only much more cheerfully, though not optimistically: “Faster than we thought we’d go / Beneath the sound of hope” (my italics). Yes, that is how those years were: despairing. But that doesn’t mean the kids didn’t have a good time.

Forever

Tonight: a romantic, homemade music video shared by my friend Jaime, a taxi driver who lives in Durán.

The song, “Siempre,” is by Salsa Kids.

I told you I wouldn’t have a lot of time for blogging.

Diploma

It’s been reported that the iconic Chilean cartoon strip, Condorito, begun in 1949, will no longer be printed.

This is big news. Condorito is the Peanuts of Latin America.

I could single out many great jokes from this comic, but I’ll recount just one: “Diploma.”

A traveler drives through Andean farm country. He stops his car and gets out to stretch his legs.

He asks a farmer for a drink of water. (The farmer is Condorito.)

A little boy is helping the farmer out in the field. The farmer tells him, “Diploma, fetch this traveler a glass of water.” The little boy goes. Presently, he returns with some water.

The farmer says, “Thank you, Diploma.”

The traveler slowly drinks his cold water. Then he turns to the farmer and makes conversation: “I couldn’t help but notice that the little boy is called ‘Diploma.’ A curious name! What is the reason for it?”

The farmer ruffles the boy’s hair. “Several years ago,” he says, “his mother went off to the city to attend the university. She told everyone that she wouldn’t return until she had a diploma. And here he is.”

The traveler goes ¡Plop!

When I was very little, I used to go around telling people this joke, not really understanding it. They would give me funny looks.

But it seems to me that this joke has somehow become one of the great themes of my life.

The little prince

Netflix has released a sixty-minute documentary, Antoine Griezmann: The Making of a Legend – an appropriate title since its depiction of that player’s World Cup triumph is dishonest.

Recounting Griezmann’s “Man of the Match” performance in the World Cup final, the movie focuses on his successful penalty kick, which gave France a 2–1 lead over Croatia. The movie completely ignores how, earlier in the game, Griezmann fooled the ref into calling a nonexistent foul for him. His ensuing free kick resulted in France’s first goal. (For brief commentary on that “foul,” look here and here.)

Griezmann is a wonderful player to watch. He succeeds because of brains, not strength or speed. Despite not caring about the French team, I rooted for him all through Euro 2016.

But his is no “underdog” story (even if, when he was a youngster, the French scouts overlooked his quality and he had to go learn his trade in Spain). As the movie makes clear, he was given sufficient opportunity. He certainly wasn’t shy to seize it.

The movie shows him weeping after France’s defeat of Belgium in the semifinal. “That’s when I knew we’d be world champions,” he says. “There was one match to go, but I thought, ‘It’s okay, it’s mine.’”

The Belgians comment: “We lost to a team with no real game.”

To which Griezmann replies: “If it came from the other team, I’m pleased. It’s what I want, for our game to get to them, nobody able to find a solution.”

But I was a neutral viewer, and I agree with the Belgians. France had loads of talent but no real game.

In this world, you can win a lot without having any real game. You need a sense of entitlement, which the Belgians lacked against their larger neighbor. That is what Griezmann has in spades.

Three billboards about “Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”

March’s poems

… are astronomically themed.

(To make each image bigger, click on it to go into picture-viewing mode; then, right-click on the image and select the option to open it in a new tab; and, finally, in that new tab, click on the image again to magnify it.)

First, “Mars” by Patrick White:

(Image credit: Poetry, Dec. 1976, p. 134)

Next, “El Caracol” by Brian Klimkowsky:

(Image credit: Poetry, Dec. 1976, p. 136)

And my favorite, “Galileo” by Amy Grant:

(Image typeset with Google Docs)

The locked room

It’s the middle of my spring break.

The pace at which I’ve been writing isn’t bad.

But, oh! To keep up this pace through the end of March! And, if necessary, the beginning of April!

[Sigh.]

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m also nearing the end of The Locked Room by Sjöwall & Wahlöö, which is about a “locked room” murder and a bank robbery. (I already finished The Locked Room by Paul Auster. How different Auster’s solitary existentialists from the social pawns of Sjöwall & Wahlöö!)

Sjöwall & Wahlöö are laying out their hippie credentials even more nakedly than before. Their protagonist, Chief Detective Inspector Martin Beck, is about to have a love affair with a hippie woman.

Their Sweden, meanwhile, continues to be a capitalist hell-hole with a socialist veneer. Landlords and factory owners ascend ever higher upon the backs of laborers. Bureaucrats run the social services so as to inflate unimportant statistics, while their rank-and-file workers, ill-treated and underpaid, quit the service professions and are replaced by nitwits – the only people that those professions have become able to recruit. (This is in the early 1970s.)

The series is getting a little preachy. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong.

It’s all grimly humorous. And there’s a great little joke about how a group of police, armed with guns, tear gas, and an attack dog, burst into an unlocked room.

Our church membership class, pt. 2

This’ll be my week of spring break – “do or die” time, as far as my dissertating is concerned. I’ve already had so many “do or die” weeks, I can’t count them, but this one really is the “do or die” week.

Don’t expect great things on the blogging front.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

We looked at the Missionary Church’s constitution in today’s membership class. We spent much of the time discussing whether it was constitutionally all right for members to drink alcohol. I thought Article of Practice 7 was pretty clear:

The Scriptures clearly command that believers are not to be conformed to the worldview and lifestyle of the world of which they are a part, but, on the contrary, are to function as salt to prevent the spread of moral corruption and as light to dispel spiritual darkness. It is therefore imperative that they set high standards for their personal and collective life including the following: …

[That] their bodies be treated as temples of the Holy Spirit thus making it inconsistent with both Christian testimony and sound principles of health to injure their influence or bodies by the use of tobacco, intoxicating beverages, narcotics and other harmful products.

[Pages 10–11]

But no. Apparently, various pastors in the denomination have decided that there’s some interpretive wiggle-room. They claim that as long as members stop short of drunkenness, they may drink away.

To which I reply: Article of Practice 7 condemns injury through the mere use of intoxicating beverages, whether or not intoxication is achieved. So the drinking had better not kill any brain cells.

I didn’t spell all of this out during the class itself, but I did go so far as to say that the constitution tells believers not to eat fried chicken (another “harmful product”).

The reaction to this was a collective Huh. Then the pastor said that our congregation was going to interpret the constitution so as to allow anything that the Bible permits. So drinking is allowed, but drunkenness is not.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Tonight, Karin & I used Hulu to watch the very last episode of Detectorists. What a lovely show. I’ll leave it to you to find out whether the metal detectorists find their gold.

There’s nothing more satisfying to watch than when these detectorists put up their detectors after a long day of detecting and head off to the pub for a friendly pint of beer.

Our church membership class

Karin & I have begun a three-week Sunday School class to become official members of our church.

The first session dealt with the church’s history, which was recounted by one of our oldest congregants.

Some tidbits:

(1) Long ago, it was disputed whether to call our congregation a “Community Church” or a “Missionary Church.” The latter name was chosen because it referred to our denomination, and, at the time, the congregants were keen to distinguish themselves from Baptists, Mennonites, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.

(The other people in our membership class agreed that nowadays, churchgoers don’t care about those distinctions.)

(2) Also, the church used to be called “Faith Chapel.” But “chapel” made the church seem too small, and “faith” was dropped because one of the main donors, whose name was Faith, didn’t want people to think the church was named for her.

(3) The church used to have a parsonage. But then an especially long-tenured pastor decided to live elsewhere – his family had grown too large for that house, someone recalled – and so the parsonage was rented out and, later, sold.

This week, our “homework” is to watch this video about our denomination:

God in the rainforest

Newly released by Oxford University Press is Kathryn Long’s history of “Operation Auca” and its aftermath:

God in the Rainforest: A Tale of Martyrdom & Redemption in Amazonian Ecuador

Though the story has been told many times, it hasn’t been treated with such scholarly thoroughness and perspectival nuance as in this book.

Or such is the expectation.

I’m delighted to have received a free copy from my Uncle Tim, who’s credited in the acknowledgments as a draft reader.

I probably won’t have time to read the book until next month. (My dissertation is due the first week in April.) Until then, I merely note that the typesetting rightly avails itself of the Qu ligature with the long-tailed “Q”:

This is the biggest missionary story that I grew up hearing about. I’m related to some of its peripheral figures.

Perhaps my own interest in it has been weaker than it should have been.

The Waorani are, of course, a small tribe, and if they’d had their way, they would’ve remained even more isolated from the Ecuadorian mainstream than history has allowed them to do. (In contrast, while my own hometown, Esmeraldas, also has been slow to integrate into the national mainstream, at least it has contributed many of the country’s top soccer players.)

Today, the Waorani are considered to be of vital interest to Ecuador – or, at least, their land is. For underneath their land is oil, the extraction of which is necessary for improving Ecuadorians’ lives and for paying governmental debts.

It’s complicated now to take this land from the Waorani. Indigenous Ecuadorians have formed coalitions and gained political power. Their land rights, while not always respected, are increasingly acknowledged.

There’s a tension in how the country wishes to operate. It wishes to respect the special rights of its various peoples – while lifting millions up from poverty. And the Waorani are at the heart of that tension.

A cursory examination shows that the book touches on these matters better than previous books have done. The book connects the Waorani’s story to that of broader Ecuadorian society – and not just through gringo intermediaries (missionaries, oil workers, or anthropologists).

Of course, the Waorani would be worth learning about even if they’d remained as isolated as, say, the Sentinelese. Every people is worth learning about.

And so is every missionary, whether or not he is my kinsman.