Halle Butler, 'Jillian' (2015), Part II

Halle Butler, Jillian. Chicago: Curbside Splendor, 2015.

Most often, we see things from the perspective of Jillian and Megan, but we also catch fleeting glimpses of consciousness from other characters, mostly people but also a dog (Crispy), raccoons, trees and a bird. I love this!  Also, it reminds me of Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), in which we briefly see things from the perspective of an alligator and an iguana and hear separate musings about the dreams of a pet fish.

Jillian: Characters central and peripheral. Jillian Bradley, her son Adam and dog Crispy. Elena, Susie, Carol -- church ladies. Julie, Tessa, Emma -- Adam's childhood frenemies at day care. Barb - day care teacher. 

Emily (dog seller). 

Dr. Billings, Dr. Schraeder -- at the gastroenterologist office where Jillian works with Megan. 

Randy - Megan's live-in paramour, often thinking privately about breaking up with her. 

Unnamed cop -- pulls Jillian over and orders her car impounded, inspiring Jillian to concoct a story about hitting a deer, requiring imaginary auto repairs and real pain killers. 

Mike Johnson -- County Clerk's office.

Drug representative with dolly cart -- Jillian and Megan's office.

Carrie, Janet, Jessica, Steve, Bill, Annie, Amanda, David, Will, James, Sarah, Albert, Kelly, Anthea -- various and sundry acquaintances and frenemies, objects of jealousy and competition. 

Loud Jim and unnamed guy on bus -- provide outside perspectives. 

Raccoons, trees, unnamed bird -- provide outside perspectives, sort of Zen, sort of Shinto. 

Not to worry: no deer is injured in the novel. Jillian does acquire TYLENOL® T3 with Codeine for her "accident," though. 

Megan immediately responds to Jillian's not showing up at work: "Her absence was intriguing." (page 102). This is exactly the same way I respond when someone doesn't show up at work, so I can't help but laugh every time I read this -- as with so much else in the novel.

Off the charts: a section on "Memory Palaces" and, earlier, Megan going to a fancy grocery: "That day she thought, 'F**k it,' and went to the smaller grocery store. The store was for rich people, but f**k it, right? There were delights there." 

(page [109]. "F**k" is spelled out in the original, but as I'm not sure what the censorship policies are for blog posts, here I've added asterisks to protect the eyes of delicate readers and keep Puritans at bay).

Jillian's snack choices (and her life choices in general) also inspire knowing laughs -- read and weep!

I'm truly looking forward to Halle Butler's The New Me: A Novel (Penguin Books, 2019) and wish I could read it immediately: "because life just keeps grinding on, right?" (Jillian, page [109]).

Today's Rune: Initiation. 

Halle Butler, 'Jillian' (2015), Part I

Halle Butler, Jillian. Chicago: Curbside Splendor, 2015.

I read this twice in a row, first to see what happens and secondly, to see how things happen. 

Musing on Butler's style and substance, I had a vision of Diablo Cody (Juno, Young Adult, Tully) working with Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bad Lieutenant) to create a variation on Charles Schulz's Peanuts. It's wacky, sad and right on.

The setting is not overplayed, but there are clues that the location is Chicago (North Side, Far North Side, Northwest Side, Palatine or thereabouts), and the time is the 21st century, with lingering vestiges of the 20th (an office fax machine, for instance).

If you approach the main characters with the Dalai Lama's discussion of Compassion in mind, you will truly empathize with them. "To be genuine, compassion must be based on respect for the other, and on the realization that others have the right to be happy and overcome suffering, just as much as you. On this basis, since you can see that others are suffering, you develop a genuine sense of concern for them." (The Essential Dalai Lama: His Important Teachings, edited by Rajiv Mehrotra, New York: Penguin, 2005, p. 22).

Jillian Bradley is, on the surface, recklessly optimistic, while her office co-worker and foil Megan is heedlessly cynical. Both are unmoored, lost, nearly alone (socially alienated, trapped in their own minds) as they deal with contemporary life, complete with its endless economic constrictions, demands and expectations. The raucous humor of Butler's approach underscores the daunting realities of their lives. It's a bit like Ulysses through the scrim of two 21st century adult female workers who must deal with the indignities, absurdities and possibilities of daily life. 

Another post will delve into additional details, but the main things to keep in mind for now are that Jillian has a young son, Adam, and she adds a dog, Crispy, to the volatile mix of her household economy; while Megan, depressed and cutting -- wickedly so, at times -- has a dubious paramour, Randy, and even more dubious frenemies to contend with. It is through their interconnecting social -- and socio-economic -- relations that Jillian and Megan must operate, and with which many readers will undoubtedly relate. 

Today's Rune: Harvest. 

'Reality Bites' (1994)

Based on Helen Childress's initial ideas and multiple evolving scripts, Ben Stiller's Reality Bites (1994) takes place near the end of both the twentieth century and the analog era. Released twenty-four years ago, it now looks like an entirely different realm of the senses. Only Michael Grates, the goofy Ben Stiller character, lives as if in the twenty-first century: he's the only one with a mobile phone and a lucrative job - producing "In Your Face TV." 

The actors are fun. In addition to Stiller, there's Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawk, Janeane Garofalo and Steven Zahn, among others - Generation X, the all-Anglo version.  

Certain aspects of the film give it some gravitas: Vickie Miner (Garofalo) having to get an AIDS test; Sammy Gray (Steve Zahn) coming out; Lelaina Pierce (Ryder) having to look for a job; Troy Dyer (Hawke) having no social safety net, though he's reading Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit / Being and Time (and incidentally, I read the exact same book in 1991, while working a temp job for a non-profit called AIDSTECH).

Technology. Video recording, videotapes: Lelaina is making a documentary about her Generation X friends called Reality Bites. (Blockbuster, RIP). 

Telephony. Landlines, payphones are used by everyone except Michael and his preferred cellphones, one a clunky car phone and the other a smaller Star Trek style device. Lelaina runs up a long distance bill in no time. The scarcity of wireless and digital technology allow several suspenseful plot points that would be harder to pull off in the twenty-first century.  

Coffee and beer seem to be the preferred drinks. Set mostly in Houston, not much is drawn out of the place to distinguish it from any other large American city of the early 1990s, aside from a few cowboy hats. There's a formal yellow taxi -- no Uber, no Lyft. Lelaina's Dad's gas card covers the extra food expenses. Twenty-four years later, Reality Bites still. Only in the digital age, it's all gooder, man!

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Philadelphia in Transit to Amsterdam, June 2017

Philadelphia's Chinatown at Friendship Gate, 10th and Arch Street. About the size of Greektown in Detroit, there's been an Asian core magnet here for something like 150 years. This is close to the Reading Market and the Convention Center. 

Moriarty's Irish Pub & Restaurant, 1116 Walnut Street (at Quince, from which point this side shot was taken). The building is 187 years old (built in 1830). Incidentally, Moriarty is one of my ancestral names. 

Sometime after I moved from my tiny 12th and Spruce garret apartment, Amy Winehouse ducked into Moriarty's for a drink. That would have been something to behold! 

1218 Spruce Street, built in or around 1840. Now the Philadelphia Bridal Company, in the 1990s this was Nga Mai's Café Diva. I lived across the street at 1225 Spruce, drank a lot of coffee here, and also I occasionally covered for Nga, or played chess. Not sure why there's a large "PODS" unit in front -- an alien sleeping unit, perhaps?

Reflecting pool on the grounds of the Barnes Foundation at 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. This is a stellar art museum. Its holdings were relocated from Lower Merion (a Philadelphia suburb on the Main Line) to here in 2012. 

Note: images taken with a mobile phone, nothing fancy. 

Today's Rune: Initiation.     

Café retrouvé: Patti Smith's 'M Train' (2015)

Patti Smith, M Train. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

A writer's life: Patti Smith's 

Peregrine

Pilgrimage 

Coffee

Dreams

Memory

Air 

Movement 

Stillness

Ink

Rain

Artifact

Time Regained/Le Temps retrouvé

El café veracruzano fue pionero para tener una denominación de origen en México

Inamorato, mother, son. "I made my coffee in her pot and sat and wrote at a card table in the kitchen by the screen door. A photograph of Albert Camus hung next to the light switch . . . My son, seeing him every day, got the idea that Camus was an uncle who lived far away . . . "(pages [71-72]). 

A quarter-mile from the canal house, coffee at the 7-11. The one at 25000 Jefferson Avenue, or the one at 23019 near the Kroger at Nine Mile, both in St. Clair Shores, Michigan? 

Confusingly, Patti Smith mentions the St. Clair River, but I think of it more as Lake St. Clair.  

I remember early morning runs, when it was cold outside, to pick up coffee at both of these 7-11 stores. And, when it was warmer out, an abandoned fish-and-tackle shop just off Jefferson.

"To me it looked like Tangier, though I had never been there. I sat on the ground in the corner surrounded by low white walls, shelving real time, free to rove the smooth bridge connecting past and present. My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted" (page [72]).

I remember all the people I met or knew around there. And social spaces. Steve's Back Room. Fishbones. Golden Chopsticks. Andiamo's. Pat O'Brien's. The public library and to the north, the Blue Goose. To the west, Shores Inn. Cedar Garden. The US Post Office. Hallmark's. El Charro. Grecian Table. The Bowling Alley and Linda's attached. Tim Horton. A connection with Van Morrison's father. Ice on the lake.

Snap! Ding the bell. You don't need to go home, but you can't stay here forever. 

My favorite coffee for some time, Peet's out of San Francisco, celebrates fifty years, or fifty-one this year, of making coffee. There's something about their blend and roasting process that makes me love the taste of their French, House and Major Dickason's Blend in particular.  

The best single coffee I ever tasted was in Italy -- espresso. The worst and weakest, in Pan Handle Texas and in Oklahoma. 

When I was growing up, my parents made coffee often, let's not forget.  On special occasions, a big percolator was set up to keep it flowing. 

Haven't missed a cup of coffee for more than a day since I was seventeen. Something to look forward to every morning, sort of like a little daily miracle of life, resumed. 

Today's Rune: Defense. Veracruz coffee: see El Universal Veracruz (9/9/2011), link here.

Lisboa, Portugal: Lisbon Signs and Wonders

Lisboa / Lisbon is a nifty place. Up on one of the overlooking hills, there's a trading post or small settlement excavation dating to 2,700 years ago. I can dig this kind of history -- puts things in perspective. And, I love architectural detail such as in the above image of a particular street corner.  

Lisboa: Rising from street level, the Elevador de Santa Justa or do Carmo, a mechanical wonder dating to 1902 and earlier. A real beauty -- and quite a strange sight coming around a corner.

The population of Lisbon proper is about 550,000 -- for comparison, somewhere between New Orleans and Detroit. All of Portugal has about ten point five million people. 

Today'S Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Madrid: Day and Night

Energetic chef at Cafetería-Restaurante ~ Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, June 2014.


















Pensive woman drinking coffee.

Cafetería ~ Dixie Bar ~ Restaurante.

Zumos 100% NATURAL. Something seems askew with this image, like a Dutch angle ~ in Spain.

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

Walking Cities: Philadelphia in Snow, Number One

Philadelphia is an excellent walking city, regardless of weather. 

This is the Swann Memorial Fountain completed in the 1920s -- just a decade shy of a century ago. Logan Circle is literally a circle within a much larger square -- Logan Square. 

By the way: happy birthday to Abraham Lincoln! He walked this same space in its earlier incarnation during the American Civil War. 

Here 150 years later, those are Japanese folks to the left checking it all out, and those are statues of river gods to the right, guarding the fountain. In case you were wondering, water flows more freely here in balmier months. 

Benjamin Franklin Parkway on the other side of Logan Circle.  That's the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the far side -- the front steps of which some dude named Rocky ran up. You know, in a certain bicentennial year movie.

Same direction, but from closer to the Swann Fountain. Free Library of Philadelphia (Central Library) to the right. I walked the whole area recently in sub-freezing temps with great joy.  

Today's Rune: Journey. 

Wong Kar-Wai: Chungking Express (Take II)

Wong Kar-Wai's 重慶森林  / Chungking Express (1994) has, I can see now, the same elements as many of his later films. There's a keen sense of space and time and opportunity, missed, found or brushing lightly. Everything depends on velocity, or state of mind. Two ships pass at night, sending signals. Or, one ship signals and the other doesn't either receive or understand the messaging until time passes. It's got the stuff of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927). It's got the subversive pizzaz of Jean-Luc Godard. It reminds of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which also came out in 1994, though without the more grotesque elements (i.e. no "bring out the gimp" here). Turns out that Tarantino helped showcase Chungking Express in a video/DVD release. Everything really is connected when it comes down to it.

A month passes; a year passes. How will people communicate down the road? What are tomorrow's possibilities, after yesterday's are finally understood?

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).
    

Wong Kar-Wai: Chungking Express (Take I)

Wong Kar-Wai's 重慶森林 / Chungking Express (1994) tells two obliquely related tales of contemporary Hong Kong. Its style is the quintessence of hip and genuine cool.

Chungking Express stars Brigitte Lynn, Valerie Chow, Takeshi Teneshiro, Faye Wong, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and the Chungking Mansions.    

Every scene in Chungking Express has colorful and memorable imagery.

Today's Rune: Journey. 
   

Personal Vaporizer

Atomizer, personal vaporizer, e-segar: call it what you will, I'm trying it. The stars seem to have aligned, the energies are converging, and so far, it's nifty-fifty. Basically, if you smoke or have smoked, these gadgets provide a non-smoke alternative, with a little shot of nicotine, giving off a slight theatrical vapor that looks like smoke but has no lingering smoke-tale signs, and tastes like whatever you want it to taste like. I'm trying Cuban segar / cigar and pipe tobacco. It's weird, and will change habits considerably, opening up new possibilities and freedoms for time-space usage. So far, so good. A workable alternative to hot-smoke-inhaling, it would appear.



Source: Provapeo Cafe. WikiCommons. They come in a variety of shapes and designs
.

Anyone else out there trying these yet? I wonder what new customs and laws are developing? Can these be used in "non-smoking" areas, for instance?

Today's Rune: Fertility.

In the Port of Amsterdam -- or Copenhagen

If cameras serve as visual "recording angels," here's a mystery along the lines of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup / aka Blow-Up (1966). It imprints the possibilities of a story or some sort of reconstructed memory. 

Resurrecting images from a scanned negative, even though I snapped this picture there's only a twin-trickster memory of such an interior -- Amsterdam and Copenhagen / København. 1980s. An intense examination would yield results -- there's lettering visible in this cropped blowup, for example. But for now, it remains a mystery of sorts. More will be revealed -- or not.

Here the setup looks sort of like the final scene in The Sopranos.

And here we pull back to the beginning image. What is this place?

In corresponding textual memory of Amsterdam and Copenhagen, I remember locales such as the Melkweg / Milky Way, Zorba the Buddha, Musikcaféen and the Texas Saloon, plus certain international hostels. Could this be a small antechamber attached to one of them?  

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.   

Michelangelo Antonioni: The Passenger (Take I)

Another absorbing (and strange) film by Antonioni is The Passenger (1975), starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. In English and in color. Locations are as wide-ranging as in a Bond film, starting with Francophone Chad, the African nation just south of Libya. It's largely about identity, or social contructs if you prefer. And, preconceived notions of what makes people tick. The setup if this: Locke (Nicholson) is a BBC reporter covering Africa; he's made friends out in the field (at a desert inn, to be specific) with Roberston, a man with a heart condition, secret arms dealer by trade. When Locke finds Roberston dead of "natural causes," his immediate instinct is to switch identities. And then off he goes back into the world, leaving his wife in London a "widow." Much happens as a result of this decision.

Usually in movies, such identity swaps are played for laughs, but a similar dramatic switch forms the backdrop for Don Draper (Jon Hamm) in the AMC series Mad Men. 

Today's Rune: Possessions.  

Eve of the Lunar New Year

Early on this eve of the Lunar New Year (Year of the Water Snake) 2013, I journeyed out to Grand Prairie, Texas, at the suggestion of a Vietnamese entrepreneur from Haltom City. He described the basics of what would be going on, and he was completely accurate.

Before arriving at "Asian Time Square," I had to cross through a large chunk of Grand Prairie that is neither grand nor prairie, although in between urban sprawl, a myriad of nondescript warehouses and broken down, overladen roads, you can see from the lay of the land that yes, there once was a big open area of slightly rolling hills. 

Once inside Asian Time Square, a mall-sized socioeconomic space gussied up for the Lunar New Year, I walked around to the sight, sound and aroma of snapping firecrackers, sizzling meats and gao dumplings, neon lights and small games of chance and fortune. Whole foods were on display at the back of a large all-purpose interior supermarket, where catfish swam behind hand-drawn price-per-pound signs and there were frozen dead chickens that actually looked like frozen dead chickens, ready to be thawed, cooked and eaten. Kind of refreshing, keeping it real and not on the "chicken nugget" side of fast food presentation. Yes, Virginia, those nuggets were once alive!

My best find for takeaway was Le Jing G7 Vietnamese coffee "using only the choicest coffee beans from Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam's legendary basaltic region." Also good: handmade bánh mì, a sort of Vietnamese Po' Boy that's delicious. Glad I checked it out.

Today's Rune: Signals.      

Run Like a Villain to the Sugar Bowl!

Given the Super Bowl and its New Orleans setting, here are a few photos snapped during a not-too-distant voltigeur sortie into the Vieux Carré, the French and Spanish old city with its most excellent architecture and landscape design.
























For the record, the Baltimore Ravens defeated the San Francisco 49ers 34-31, barely, after a strange power outage in the third quarter.  

From a cherished courtyard at the Place d'Armes.

Today's Rune: Joy.  

Consider the Fork

Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork:  A History of How We Cook and Eat  (Basic Books, 2012).

Here you get to enjoy a romp through our evolving ways of eating as developed by human beings through time, with chapters whose main headings go like this, albeit in caps in the original:

Pots and Pans
Knife
Fire
Measure
Grind
Eat
Ice
Kitchen

Besides "Eat," what does the modern person tend to do when it comes to food?

Judging from "supermarkets" and "grocery stores" and "convenience stores," a lot of prepackaged meals must be "carted" from store, mostly by "automobile," to "microwave oven," possibly via the "ice box" or "refrigerator/freezer." And then eaten.

Let's not forget "fast food" delivered from a small window in a "drive-through."

From the Perspective of the Eating Past, the Eating Future is Now.  But Our Eating Now Shall Become the Eating Past Soon Enough.

Without electricity and petrol/gasoline from a "service station," we'd be doing something a little different from typically "advanced" 2013 behavior. Hunting and gathering, perhaps. Storing for the winter down in the cellar, in the ice house, foods salted, pickled, maybe jarred or canned. Beef jerky for the long haul. Or, maybe we'd just go through long periods of half-starving. 

As far as the longterm of global eating throughout much of human history, chopsticks are still very practical. I'm pretty deft at using them, but I remember a Thai place in West Philadelphia that had ornate gilded ware, or so it appeared to be, more like "silverware" than anything else. Then there's the food pusher thing that looks like an upside down version of a table scraper. 

Beyond still eating like soldiers out in the field or astronauts out in space using storage techniques from decades ago, what else are we doing nowadays when it comes to food?

Today's Rune: Flow.

In Praise of Baking Soda

I  love baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), especially delivered via New Jersey-based Arm & Hammer products (Arm & Hammer as an institution dates back to just after the American Civil War). 

Baking soda has many culinary, medicinal and cleaning properties that are hard to beat, particularly if you want to avoid toxic industrial alternatives. The widespread use of baking soda goes back to the mid-1800s.

I'm a consistently serious coffee drinker, using ceramic cups and mugs as delivery vessels on a daily basis. Anyone who drinks a lot of coffee or tea knows that these beverages tend to leave pernicious traces of themselves in ceramic kitchenware. Thank God for baking soda! A small amount of this powdery substance combined with hot water and an abrasive sponge or scouring pad will remove up to 100% of all coffee and tea traces. Wonderful!

Baking soda is a natural air freshener -- an open box will suck "bad smells" from refrigerators and elsewhere.

Baking soda is useful as a leavening agent for foods like pancakes and cookies.

Baking soda can be used as a tooth-whitener, and toothepaste (as a supplement or straightup with water).

Baking soda can be used as an antiperspirant. Arm & Hammer produces different types of underarm deodorants that are all excellent and affordable.

Baking soda can be used for laundry purposes, as detergent and fabric softener.

Arm and Hammer covers every aspect of baking soda's uses. I highly recommend their products, and the intelligent use of baking soda for its wide range of uses. For more, here's a link: http://www.armandhammer.com/Index.aspx

Finally, baking soda can be used to treat burns and poison ivy, but for those who haven't tried it, I'd do a little research before attempting these kinds of medicinal treatments.

Today's Rune: Joy.

Czech Stop: West, Texas

Coming at you from Austin, Texas. On the way down, ducked into the Czech Stop in West, Texas, featuring the Little Czech Bakery. It's as superb as ever: Czech food (including kolaches), Czech beer (including the eccentric Czech Rebel pilsner), Czech writing (pivo) -- yes! It's all good -- just like a treasured stop on the great Route 66 or any of the excellent roadside attractions of way back when along various two-lane blacktop routes.

It was quite a little while ago when I first checked this out (pun intended, if lame). In fact, it was nineteen years ago coming through. Yes, Czechs came to Texas before that, and so did Germans.

Tomorrow there'll more interesting stuff to look for in various places. Pictured above: nifty little bakery bags (or sacks, as many in Texas call them). Made in Chicago, by the way.

Happy trails, my friends . . .

P.S. Nineteen years ago today was the final raid on the Branch Davidian compound, the one where many died, including David Koresh, outside of Waco, which I passed just about fifteen minutes after leaving the Czech Stop.

Today's Rune: Defense.