Here’s our Memorial Day installment of things we’ve been enjoying. Modeled on the Slate Culture Gabfest‘s weekly endorsements segment, we recommend things we’ve been reading, watching, listening to, playing, eating, and ultimately enjoying.
Scott
You won’t enjoy this article, but Mac McClelland’s “Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin.” is a really important piece and deserves a larger audience. McClelland uses family stories to frame a wide-ranging discussion of mental health policy in the United States, which she characterizes as a “territory of wild neglect.” The story of how we got here is complicated – and this article is just a brief overview – but McClelland clearly shows how austerity policies (at all levels of government) over the last 5 years have exacerbated an already cruel and irresponsible situation.
One of the most important contributions of the article, though, is its discussion of mental health, violence, and the criminal justice system. The mental health care “system” in the United States generates tragic, violent outcomes on a depressingly regular basis. Most of this violence is aimed at the mentally ill (and is most frequently self-inflicted), but it also spills out into our wider society. Although McClelland does not explicitly make this argument, one implication for me was the deep connection between the sorry state of mental health care and the possibilities of reform for our prison industrial complex. Any efforts to address the injustices of our bloated, irrational prison system must also address the way mental health care has been outsourced to our jails and prisons.
Bonus Companion Endorsement: After McClelland’s piece, an interesting companion reading would be Simon Balto’s very helpful summary of the forthcoming work of Heather Ann Thompson on the evolution of the U.S. criminal justice system.
Tom
I’ve only recently discovered the genius of Louis C.K., whose T.V. show and stand-up routines are both hilarious also spot on (if you haven’t seen his bit on aging, you should). But long before Louis was a household name as a comedian, he was a filmmaker, and a moderately successful one at that. His best known film is probably the Chris Rock vehicle Pootie Tang, which I will probably watch now that I know he directed it, but his best work probably came before that in a series of short films made in the ’90s, many of which garnered awards at film festivals. And thanks to Louis’ own YouTube channel, we have access to them all. These short indie comedies have the aesthetic of early Jim Jarmusch films, but are unmistakably Louis’ in humor and tone. And while they may not as funny as his recent projects, they’re still well worth your time. Here’s a complete list of his shorts: Ice Cream (1993; embedded below), The Letter V (1998), The Legend of Willie Brown (1998), Ugly Revenge (mid-’90s), Highjacker (1998), Hello There (1998), Brunch (1998), Persona Nell ‘Aqua (1999),and Searching for Nixon (2005).
Dave
I think I can truthfully say that no consumer culture product excites me like a new Paul Pope comic book. For nearly half of my life, I have, very irregularly, had the thrill to walk into a comic shop and see a Pope cover. My heart skips a beat every time. While my instant joy comes mainly from Pope’s unparalleled thick-inks-in-motion drawings and terrific lettering (and stories), part of the appeal has got to be how infrequently Pope publishes and the consistent lack of advanced warning. For anyone who loved black and white indy comics during the “renaissance” of the form in the early and mid-90s, late, never-arriving, and never-completed comic stories generated as much appeal (and aggravation) by their irregular intervals as the self-published graphic novellas themselves. A sci-fi comedy about a young girl on Mars and her mechanical guardian, Pope’s THB was a stand-out comic, even among its (friendly) competitors: Rare Bit Fiends, Strangers in Paradise, Cerebus, Bone, Hepcats, Stray Bullets, Strangehaven, etc. Like many in this list, we’ll probably never read the “end” of the THB story. But thanks to the new beautiful and full-color collection by Image Comics, The One Trick Rip-Off + Deep Cuts, Pope fans can revisit Paul Pope’s early career. The title story (originally published in the anthology, Dark Horse Presents) is a fast-paced gangster heist centering on a romance. It’s nice, and the added coloring by Jamie Grant brings dozens to pages to life in a way the 8-page anthology chapters could not (I usually prefer black and white comics and dismiss after-the-fact coloring jobs–not this time). But the real thrills here are the 150 pages of “deep cuts” by Pope while he moved from Columbus, OH to NYC to Tokyo. Something like a band’s “b sides” collection, these include short stories from the universe of THB, lovely illustrated poems, and a few shorts from Pope’s brief stint with the Japanese manga company, Kodansha–stories which I’d heard tell about 15-18 years ago and have never been able to read until now. If you’ve never read Pope, go do it. His work for DC Comics over the last decade, Heavy Liquid and 100%, are landmarks of the medium; his first publication, The Ballad of Dr. Richardson, has aged very well. Pope has been promising the publication of his epic Battling Boy for well over a decade and, though I have no idea if it’ll ever see publication, The One Trick Rip-Off seems a good portent for future work.
Keith
Form And Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940-1990 is an online photograph exhibition put together by William Deverell and Greg Hise in partnership with the Huntington Library and The Getty. It assembles photos under broad themes from the tens of thousands that Southern California Edison donated to the Huntington years ago.
They stretch from the early to the late twentieth century, but are mostly from the middle decades, and in particular the 1950s and 1960s. They are both a general depiction of mid-century modernism and a specific record of the culture, commerce, and built environment of Southern California. Also, they are beautiful and haunting.
Anyone who knows the work of Luc Sante knows that matter-of-fact, archival photography can be just as aesthetically meaningful as artistic photography, if not more so. That’s the case here.
