Number 171
The Other World
An Introduction:
Hello again, dear reader. I have spent a most enjoyable couple of weeks, which were capped off Saturday with a party out in Brandywine for the derby. I spent more time dancing than I’d expected, which will come as news to my friends in New York. Yesterday I played golf for the first time in a month. I played like an ape but it was a fun time at a very cool course in Delaware. Oh yeah, I guess I went to a different fundraiser last week too. Tis the season, I suppose.
Anyhow, dear reader, I have been able to do a few things in between all the bloody maries and mint juleps, so now let’s get down to business. Be blessed.
Things I’ve Consumed:
The Safety Net:
Heinrich Böll was one of the great writers of the 20th century, but nobody seems to talk about him. He didn’t write flashy novels with thrilling plots and quotable lines. I don’t think they ever inspired anybody to go on a trip through Spain or start throwing bombs. Perhaps that’s it. Böll centered his practice rather more around an exposition of the quotidian—usually undertaken in effort to unravel the contradictions and traumas in post-war German society. Here the idea is similar: in a small German town somewhere near Cologne Fritz Tolm has just been elected president of some sort of corporate organization—a promotion which comes with the assignment of a “security” detail so strict that he and his family are forced basically to never go out and never speak freely due to the fact that they are being listened to constantly by the detail. Like Böll’s recently reviewed End of a Mission, The Safety Net flickers between the book’s various characters, eventually unravelling a story that is difficult at first to parse. And what becomes of this final unravelling is a grand novel of a people looking for any straw to grasp in effort to make sense of a world that is becoming unrecognizable before their eyes. Formidable.
Blossoms Shanghai:
This is a 30 episode TV show by Wong Kar Wai, whose awful films like In The Mood For Love and Happy Together are all the rage among a certain set of people who watch movies simply to post stills on their Instagrams. But here Wong, freed from the necessity of managing longer-form time, produces a very compelling, somewhat over-dramatic story of young Chinese hustling to make it in a 1980s-1990s China opening up to the world after Deng Xiaoping saw reason. Blossoms follows Ah Bao, a slick customer in his late 30s-early 40s who made a fortune in the early iterations of Shanghai’s stock exchange, and who now operates more in the clothing business. He must navigate the temptations of Li Li, siren and restaurant madame, as well as the minefield of his Shenzhen competitors who want to bring him down.
Blossoms succeeds where Wong’s films fail because television allows his framing and bright colors to operate for their own sake. Film, as we all know from Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, puts precedence on maintaining a temporal tension, and this Wong has never been able to achieve in his movies. But his pretty pictures and musical cues which tell the audience what the mood of the scene is aren’t too gimmicky for TV—in fact they keep the show moving.
Anyhow, dear reader, Blossoms is found exclusively on Criterion, and I recommend it highly. Also, it makes one gain great respect for the Chinese as a people willing to work impossibly hard to make it in the world, while still maintaining loyalty to their friends. Good show.
From Third World to First:
This is a fascinating memoir by Lee Kuan Yew, who transformed Singapore in his thirty years serving as prime minister from 1959-1990. He spends here the first 200 or so pages recounting how he and his fellow leaders built the Southeast Asian city-state “from third world to first” and spends the final 400 or so pages covering the countries and leaders with whom he interacted—charting their development over his time as a world leader. There is too much to say about this book to mention here, but I have been telling everyone about it for the last two weeks and I believe that you, dear reader, should buy it immediately. Essential reading.
Some Songs:
Some Photos:
