Mangled tines, destabilizing grossness, scramble of signal, both private and exhibitionist
What I’m liking.
—Succession Season 4. I drifted away from the series early on because I wasn’t in the headspace for it, was burned out on the yaaassqueenification of rich assholes, even “satirized” ones. And I’m still burned out to a large degree, but I can certainly enjoy good writing and dramaturgy and Kendall Roy looking sad memes while treading carefully to avoid the aspirational aspects of fandom. That said, this season has some exceptionally sharp scenes on how emotional detachment and muddled feelings intersect with the realities of death and grief, how those storied cycles spin through the moment like a dozen waterlogged socks, how the struggle when you’re stunned silent to say the right thing or anything at all can just leave you perseverating the few words that surface into your consciousness, and all in the flash before you’re expected to handle the ugly business of it. And it’s “Succession,” so ugly business is forever imminent. Opportunities arise to be better or worse people, but as in life, forks in the road tend to get run over and become mangled tines, and the long-now project of your spiritual growth coexists with the part of you that can. never. stop. being who you are.
—Léa Mysius’s The Five Devils and Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, both in theaters right now. 2023’s best French bisexual interracial paranormal kitchen-sink melodrama (with karaoke scene), and 2023’s best post–Andrei Rublev narrative feature about the intimacy of craft (but also an unsentimental look at the depressive, spacy, often barely functional people in various strata of the creative life). The title of The Five Devils (Fr: Les Cinq Diables) is a metaphor for our senses, in particular the heightened sense of smell of 8-year-old Vicky (Sally Dramé) and perhaps the ability her visiting aunt Julia (Swala Emati) has to see apparitions. It’s a beautiful piece of modern magical realism, in spots a witchy child-world take on La Jetée, in spots a Mike Leigh downer about class and cruelty. Showing Up grafts that kitchen sink onto Portland, and it’s a tableau of a Rose City that’s often kind of materially shitty, from the destabilizing grossness of never having hot water to the troubled brother who sits around eating struggle-meal spaghetti with the lights off. Is the Showing Up cinematic universe an incubator space for the precious-wecious or a limbo for the lost? Reichardt never says definitively, but I suspect it’s a little from column A and a little from column B.
—The Chryssa & New York show at Dia Chelsea. There’s a great exhibit on now from the Dia Foundation and Houston’s Menil Collection, showcasing the midcentury New York years of the late Greek-American neon artist, metalworker, sculptor, abstractionist, and assemblagist Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali. It’s Chryssa’s first major U.S. show since 1982, and it’s very clever, sly, tricksy stuff, moving between bold clear universals (text, memetic symbols) and a scramble of signal where the quotidian, functional churn of printed language disappears into the overwhelm of its own clutter. She’s referential in ways that are hauntologically associative but not wholly obvious, where you have to look at a piece for three minutes before going, “That cursive letter G that’s a minor aspect of what’s going on here reminds me of the General Mills logo.” Chryssa & New York is up until July; go see it. See it now while you wait for the big new Peter Halley Neo-Geo extravaganza to open, and while you’re at it: go listen to Neo Geo, the 1987 album by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
—And speaking of Sakamoto, I’ve been gravitating massively lately (once again) toward his frequent collaborators David Sylvian and Sylvian’s old group Japan, and the solo and hired-hand records of Japan bass player Mick Karn, and a bit of the Jansen-Barbieri axis (surely Kate Bush had the last two minutes of “Sleepers Awake” in mind as groundwork for the closing track on “Aerial”). A collective corpus that’s impenetrable, seductive, glam, progressive, both private and exhibitionist, an idiomatic spasm rising with ’70s Montreux fusioneers and Jon Hassell fourth world and settling with Scott Walker’s Climate of Hunter.
