“Just as a single cocoon contains a thousand yards of silk, I can unreel a thousand miles from my memory of this one misstep….Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, i think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing.” Karen Russell — “Reeling for the Empire”

Unlike my companion, when we walked outside into an uncomfortable drizzle after having basically crouched in something not unlike yoga poses for over two hours, sandwiched into the couchy broken seats at the IFC in a room packed with the kind of cinephiles who know exactly when to chuckle at earnestness, i had not been bored throughout Olivier Assayas’s new film, Something in the Air (Apres Mai). i also wasn’t unsure of whether i’d “liked” it or not. Like all of the other sixty-year-olds in the room, i was happily familiar with the romantic/political texts the film unblushingly cites and the arguments they detonated. Mao, May 1968, Situationism. Gasoline. Theory “vs” Practice. The personal. The political. Sexual liberation. Women as the secretaries of the labor movement. i spent at least a decade smugly hashing out these arguments in classrooms, first as a student and then as a teacher. In one scene, a radical Italian agitprop collective screens an impassioned documentary of some proletarian struggle somewhere to glowing applause until someone in the audience yells to the filmmakers, “Shouldn’t revolutionary film employ revolutionary syntax?” Like flowers archived between sheets of waxed paper or an encaustic painting, the hot, gauzy nostalgic/autobiographical diegetic film world asking the question is something quite other than the binary the question begs, and the director’s knack for embedding perfectly timed meta-bombs such as this one endow its adolescent regrets with lifeshattering relevance.
Do you ever forget about Bowie’s mismatched eyes? He’s such a thorough part of my backpages that i never really pull his albums out anymore, but when i see a photo of him i am still taken aback. A fistfight (over a girl) with his best friend left him with an indelible cosmetic marker: his left pupil remains permanently open. Right? i snuck over to see Elizabeth Peyton’s new paintings before they disappeared last week. The first time i saw her work, it was like striking up a conversation with a total stranger who happens to know some of your favorite but estranged old friends. Sure, she is instantly vetted, but she also reanimates an orbit you were beginning to think you might have imagined. Peyton’s tiny confessionals expose her devotion to a kind of hero i visit my shrink once a week to try to learn how to let go of: other iterations of the characters from Assayas’s film. In color palettes only a lover could summon, Jarvis Cocker, Pete Doherty, David Bowie, Johnny Rotten, Kurt Cobain, Keith Richards are joltingly reflected as if their uncommon, undeniable, unexpected beauties were her own private secrets.

After May. After Feminism. After grad school. After, i don’t know, the Stones and everything that could possibly mean. After Gainesville. After the day you came to get me and i didn’t come. But remember, like a magnetic field, after has at least two poles. After you, yes, but even now, even today, i am still after the charge left by those days, convinced that they are gigantically relevant.

Some of these days, and it wont be long/
Gonna drive back down where you once belonged/
In the back of a dream car twenty foot long/
Don’t cry my sweet, don’t break my heart/
Doing all right, but you gotta get smart/
Wish upon, wish upon, day upon day, I believe oh lord/
I believe all the way/
Come get up my baby/
Run for the shadows, run for the shadows/
Run for the shadows in these golden years