love

5 posts

The BFS Recommends From Scratch (Limited Series)

Rom-coms have a clear formula: the potential love interests meet early on in the story, the potential love interests face obstacles in getting together, the love interests then finally get together (potentially facing more obstacles before they are for real together together). Simple.

Why the rehash of a well-known genre, you ask? Because reviewers and whoever does the posters and promos at Netflix seem to think the limited series From Scratch is a rom-com. Some critics compared it to typical (if “elevated”) fare from Hallmark and Lifetime during the holiday season, and Netflix itself recommends viewers of the limited series to check out Love & Gelato (very much a rom-com) and Emily in Paris, which… I guess they’re related, if you want to watch something where an American goes to live in Europe for awhile?

It’s a frustrating diminishment of a moving drama based on Tembi Locke’s memoir of the same name. Created and partially written by Locke and her sister, Attica, the series follows Zoë Saldaña’s Amy, who meets future husband, Lino (played by Eugenio Mastrandrea) while studying abroad in Florence. The closest the series gets to the rom-com formula is its first episode, but even here one can see the deeper dramatic themes the series exemplifies: beginnings (and endings), beginning after an ending, and the emotions that so often characterize beginnings and endings—grief, love, hope, and regret. The stakes are also much more real than in a rom-com, with their often disposable significant others who are clearly not meant for one of the story’s potential love interests. This difference is made very clear in the first episode when Lino confronts Amy about doing something that has clearly hurt him to the core. Amy, who has mostly been treating her relationship with Lino (and others) like a short-term, just for fun, compartmentalized study-abroad experience, is forced to realize what she’s doing matters to him, and her.

The first episode also sets up another major factor the series will deal with, which are the realities romance must deal with in the real world: towards the end of her time in Florence, Amy is visited by her father (played by the inimitably voiced Keith David) and step-mother. Amy’s father is keen to get her back in law school and away from this art business she’s been studying in Florence. Her step-mother, played with a lovely warmth by Judith Scott, is equally keen to keep the peace.

It’s an experience many can relate to from their teens and twenties (or maybe even later), where conflicts flourish between the generations as the grown-up child begins to conform less and less with what their parents thought they were going to be. But what makes the series particularly lovely is how many years it traces (well over a decade): we see Amy’s relationships with her father, step-mother, and mother all develop, shift, and grow as she and Lino eventually marry, then adopt a child of their own some years later. And we get to see this happen with Lino’s family as well. Cultural misunderstandings abound, but are also worked through in ways that are not quick, easy, or melodramatic—the result feels much more real than the vast majority of dramas out there.

This is all assisted by there being no weak characters in the supporting cast of family and friends, as well as how excellent Saldaña and Mastrandrea are as the series’ leads. Even so, the standout in the familial relationships is Amy’s sister, Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler. As Amy’s older sister, she clearly carried some of the weight for Amy as they both navigated their parents’ divorce, who separated while they were children. Rather than being a one-note supporting role, we see Zora as a fully rounded person. She is sometimes frustrated and annoyed with both Amy and Lino (particularly when they are forced to live with her for an extended period), but when it comes down to it, she is always there for them, no matter what heartbreak may come their way. Seeing such a fierce, loving, and caring person played with such depth is far too rare in storytelling, and Deadwyler’s sheer power and presence in the role makes it clear how important having such a person in your life can be.

It’s rare for stories to take the time to grapple with life so wholly as From Scratch does, and it being a limited series means it won’t be back for more, trying to scrounge up additional drama or character failings like some series have to do when they’re extended. It told the story it wanted to tell, and it actually left me emotionally rocked and in tears more than once—no mean feat, and certainly not something a rom-com is generally able to do (no matter how much I enjoy that genre). From Scratch is a family drama about love, life, and death, and it is not to be missed.

On ‘Opinions, Everybody Got One,” As Opposed to “Us Versus Them”

Musings

(Important, pre-blog post note, as this was drafted three weeks ago: opinions are opinions and not to be confused with facts)

One of my favorite movie lines comes from Platoon and John C. McGinley’s war-weary Sergeant O’Neill: “Excuses are like assholes, Taylor, everybody got one.” A recent article I read in The Atlantic reminded me that you could say much the same for opinions.

In her piece, titled “Singles and Couples Are More Divided Than Ever,” Ginny Hogan describes an added relationship dystopia to the bleakness of our current Covid-19 situation. If one were to believe what she describes, people in relationships are a bunch of arrogant a-holes, flouting social distancing recommendations, pausing their 24/7 lovemaking sessions to proudly tweet that there is no one else they’d rather quarantine with, and rubbing this romantic bliss in their single friend’s faces when they check in to see how they are doing. In a truly baffling passage, Hogan bristles at “coupled” acquaintances and family members asking how she’s doing all alone. “The idea that I need the company or validation of a man so badly[…] is genuinely offensive.”

Hogan walks back some of this straw man hyperbole near the article’s end, yet she still closes her piece with the hope that the rupture between those who are single and those who are in relationships will not persist when the pandemic ends.

The problem with that? Opinions are like butts: everybody got one. Once we’re Covid free, singles aren’t going to stop liking their singlehood for the time being (or for some, wishing and longing they were not single). Relationship holders are not going to stop loving (or pretending to love) their relationship. And meddlesome relatives and friends aren’t going to stop suggesting to the single person they know that the right man/woman/person for them might be just around the corner.

Because why? Let’s check the list, shall we? People have butts. Check. Oh, and yes, they have opinions. Check.

Perhaps I’m taking the article too seriously. Articles gotta articulate, publications gotta publish, and writers gotta write and pay the bills (and have opinions), after all. Just ignore it and move on.

I wish I could, but this is a tribalism–a dichotomy–that I have run into time and again. When I and my then fiancee told people that we did not have an engagement ring, there were choruses of voices, defending the choice to have an engagement ring, and even arguments that Jessica really did want a ring and was just pretending (“Neal,” she said, “I would never play games with you like that”).

And when we decided we were not going to have children? It’s difficult to find a more contentious debate. Opinions among the childfree can range from “we like kids, but don’t want our own,” (an opinion Jessica and I share), to being among the most vociferously hateful I have ever heard, calling those with children “breeders,” (like we’re all stuck in some Mad Max film, lorded over by some neo-gothic warlord in leather pants named Killer McKillerface). On the other side of this divide are those who tell friends and family members considering not having children that “you’ll change your mind some day,” a line of reasoning that builds up to doctors refusing to provide sterilization procedures to adult men and women when they ask for one. And that’s before you even get into the usual grass-is-always-greener argument about who has a happier life with or without kids.

If everybody got opinions, are we condemned then to stand in our wrongness and be wrong and get used to it (no matter how amusing it was when President Bartlett said it on The West Wing)? We could, I guess. We’re kind of trending there more and more, it seems like.

But that’s only if we assume that because we have opinions (and butts), those opinions are also absolutes. Just because Jessica and I didn’t have an engagement ring, and just because we don’t have kids, doesn’t mean we begrudge other people those things. There are elements that are out of control when it comes to engagement rings and weddings, but the ideas at their core are of luminous beauty and nothing to begrudge. Even if I did not find them luminous, it’s a far better world where I allow them to be for others who do find them so.

There are certainly people who would begrudge and not allow, of course, those who would build a wall around those of their own opinion to keep those against them far and away from their vision of how things ought to be, believing that the separation they have created means they will no longer be affected by those they have put on the other side of their fortifications.

What if, instead of focusing on how everybody wants to not be affected by the opinions of other people, we instead realized that we are always affected by other people’s opinions? If we were not already affected by those we call “other,” walls would not be argued for or created. What would the world look like, if we just accepted the reality of everybody around us having opinions–and the requisite differing of those billions of points of view?

There are limits, I know, to humanity’s understanding and capability. But my friends, my friends, we have set up our walls so far short of those limitations.

The BFS Recommends Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

Book Reviews Recommended Reads The BFS Recommends

**Seriously, look at that guy. How can he not make you smile?**

Dance, Dance, Dance is the rare book that makes you completely, thoroughly happy. Not stupid happy, ignoring the sadness and pain life can throw your way, but happily aware: fully cognizant of all the flaws in this world, but still finding it improbably beautiful.

Why does Dance Dance Dance make me so joyful? Well, first, there’s that book cover, which is the edition my local library had, If that doesn’t make you smile a bit, well, umm, what’s wrong with you? It’s a sheep wearing a collared shirt, tie, and plaid sweater vest, for crying out loud.

But in all honesty the thing that makes the book so happy-making is what happens for its unnamed narrator. This is the fourth book he’s been in by Murakami, and in all of them he’s been emotionally withdrawn (something you can immediately feel and appreciate in his character, even if this book is your first encounter with him). In the first book the narrator appears in, Hear the Wind Sing, another character notes that he’s “Very zen.”

It serves him well, in a way, to float along and not be completely overwhelmed by the waves that come his way: he certainly is put through a lot. But it also keeps him emotionally distant, incapable of reaching his potential or really even feeling love. In the third book to feature the narrator, A Wild Sheep Chase, his wife leaves him at the start, most likely because of his emotional unavailability. But here, finally, in Dance Dance Dance, he is able to awaken: winter has fallen away, spring has sprung. You can see it stirring in the narrator as he reaches out and makes new friendships and even goes through the starts and stops of a new relationship with a hotel clerk.

If I could make a comparison, it’s like seeing a sad friend or relative suddenly grow, changing and reaching out, becoming that thing you always knew they could be. Even now it brings an almost inexplicable smile to my face, and that’s something to note in and of itself. Good literature, good art, should help us understand our fellow humans and appreciate their growths and triumphs.

This is made all the more palpable due to the darkness to be found in Dance Dance Dance. Just like its preceding three books, sadness lurks, as does death, Maybe even more than in the previous novels, and they were hardly carefree affairs.

Despite this, however, the book’s title is always at its center. Early on in the book, the narrator finds and has a discussion with the Sheep Man. Yes, there is a character called the Sheep Man (and despite the book cover above, he probably is only a guy in a sheep suit). But in that improbably Murakami way, he is very much real and very much not ridiculous. His otherworldliness is suggested in how all of his sentences consist of no spaces between the words: strange, but understandable.

In this early conversation, the narrator and the Sheep Man are tired. Withdrawn. The Sheep Man himself is feeling old. But he tells the narrator he can make his way back to life. “Yougottadance,” he says (86).

The narrator takes the advice to heart, and so does the book. Weird stuff keeps happening to the narrator, he keeps making friends (or renewing friendships), but then depression and loss also come along, threatening to derail it all. But he’s justgottakeepdancing, His finding a way to do this and encourage others to do so is part of the book’s magic.

An additional piece of magic happened for me with my library book, however. A former reader had co-opted the old checkout tag to leave a note for future readers, in a manner that feels almost trademark Murakami. His narrators are always getting odd messages or stories told to them, and this one is no different. The weird energy of that note is wonderfully sublime and needs sharing with the world.

“This is an incredible book. Don’t read the blurbs, don’t read the publisher’s description, just read the book. It blew me away. Of course you must read “A Wild Sheep Chase,” first. Then this. Both books are compelling as hell. Right on, brothers and sisters. Knock yourselves out.”

As my fellow reader notes, it’s probably worth checking out A Wild Sheep Chase first, if not Wind/Pinball as well. You can appreciate this one without reading them, but it hits all the harder if you have the experience of all the narrator’s previous trials and tribulations.

Wherever you might be, however good or bad life might be going for you now in the moment, you need this book. You need it like a friend you just discovered and really should have known for your entire life.

Right on, my internet brothers and sisters, right on. Whether you do a little shuffle like this big, awkward Swede or something more graceful, we just gotta dance.

Wejustgottadance.

Someone Is Wrong on the Internet: Songs of Experience is the Best U2 Album Since All That You Can’t Leave Behind

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Music Reviews Someone Is Wrong on the Internet

In non-BFS fashion, I’m going out on a limb and making a big statement I haven’t mulled over ad nauseum. In my cautious, middle child way, I like to settle into what I’m thinking and saying, but I felt compelled to make this leap after reading Jon Pareles’s review of U2’s most recent album release, Songs of Experience. Now, this is an article from The New York Times, so I know that the headline may not have been Mr. Pareles’s choice to go with his review. But the commentary in the title, “Cynicism Not Included,” just irks me. It sells this album short.

Does that mean I think the album is cynical? No, it’s more nuanced than that. The best characterization is given by the album’s title itself: it’s experienced. It’s seen how the world works, isn’t entirely happy about it, but has also seen and known hope.

Another limiting statement from the review: “The word ‘love,’ unironic and high-minded, recurs all over [the album].” I actually read this review before listening to the album, and this line made me fear that Bono had gone over the top (and even most fans of U2 can admit he has the tendency). But again, the album digs deeper than this superficial gloss of some of the song titles. Yes, the album opens with “Love Is All We Have Left,” but the tone and music used to go with those words is quiet, even tenuous. Nothing is certain about that statement in this context.

The album accelerates from there to “Lights of Home” (a delightfully bombastic follow-up) to the large, worn on your sleeve emotion of “You’re the Best Thing About Me.” Love is very much at the forefront of this song, but there are so many layers. There’s a bittersweetness to saying, “When the world is ours but the world is not your kind of thing, Full of shooting stars, brighter as they’re vanishing.” And my goodness, for a song so shouted, so anthemic to proclaim “You’re the best thing about me,” in its chorus, the closing lines of “Why am I walking away,” should make anyone pause and wonder. Looked at carefully, these lyrics could embrace love between spouses, friends, parents and children—not to mention much of the world’s response to the recent refugee crisis.

And if it isn’t clear from my description of the first three songs, this album’s music is excellent, U2 doing it right more than I have seen them do in years (and they haven’t been slouching in this department). This is why another part of the review by Pareles gives me pause. “It’s not an album that courts new fans by radically changing U2’s style; instead, it reaffirms the sound that has been filling arenas and stadiums for decades.”

There is some fairness to this, but again, it’s limiting. There are some purposeful callouts to earlier songs (Pareles notes one), but they’re at play with those older, familiar sounds. “Blackout,” the song Pareles notes has an echo of “Mysterious Ways,” promptly goes in a different direction after giving the listener that brief cue, as if a brief nod to long time fans. And the album’s final track, “13 (There Is a Light)” is in clear dialogue with and repeats some lyrics from “Song For Someone,” from their previous release, Songs of Innocence. In other words, it’s not just the band riffing on their greatest hits because they can’t do anything else.

I suppose you could also say there’s the continued, recognizable presence of Bono’s voice and The Edge’s guitar style. Still, criticism on that level can easily get silly, almost seeming to suggest that a band should find a new lead singer, get rid of its iconic guitarist, etc. At some level, a band is going to sound something like its constituent parts.

I’d say the review’s musical criticism is much more fair of U2’s previous release, Songs of Innocence. While I enjoy it and the clear experimentation it often shows (I don’t think Songs of Experience would have been possible without it), there are a few too many clear, in your face “U2 moments.” I love the aforementioned “Song for Someone,” but at the 2:15 mark, we get some crescendoing guitar that is a hallmark of U2’s style and it leaves me disappointed every time: we’ve been there before often enough.

While it’s certainly a U2 album, Songs of Experience simultaneously sounds different from anything else they have done before. The Edge lets his guitar work go places it hasn’t gone before, sometimes becoming more crunchy and rough, and generally avoiding his characteristic “U2 anthem,” approach. Adam Clayton’s always solid bass line often comes to the fore, which makes the mid-album “Summer of Love” an entirely different and memorable experience.

All of these elements, the layered lyrics and music, ebb and flow, carrying through from the start to the end of the album, making me put it among U2’s best. Does it feel a risk for this cautious Swede to say it, after only a few listens through? Yes, it does. But I also can’t escape how each of those listens have left me more excited than I have been by any of their albums since the 2000 release of All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

Suffice to say, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

On the Importance of Learning of Tokyo’s Destruction by Godzilla

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Creative Nonfiction Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

*A small memoir from a trip this fall*

It’s been a long week of teaching classes: you wake up, you do your class prep, you do your teaching, you do your grading, and you go home. At home is nothing in particular. Your wife is living four and a half hours away for her new job; you’ve moved the majority of your things with her. The apartment is strangely empty and strangely full of far too many things you need to pack before you can join her in a couple months.

The wind likes to whistle lonely in the evening.

Today you’re driving home after another day of teaching, but it’s a little different in that you will be picking up your suitcase so you can drive those four and a half hours to see your wife. The first hour is alright as you drive through the forests of northern Minnesota and the setting sun is turning everything golden. Then the trees go stark and two dimensional against the still glowing horizon; the only things with depth are the clouds in the sky. Then there is nothing but the tunnel your headlights carve along the route, a tunnel that is hours and hours long.

Even the waters of Cass Lake offer no comfort when you stop to stretch your legs: the wind blows too cold in your face for you to watch the lights in the water.

About an hour from your destination, still tired, your searching radio finds it, the song that will take you the rest of the way. “Oh, no! There goes Tokyo! Go, go, Godzilla!” Before your mind can think about how improbably wonderful it is to find this song out of nowhere (though is it even a favorite song of yours?), you’re singing, shouting along with the words.

You’re halfway around the earth from Tokyo, you’re in the middle of the flat beginnings of the Great Plains and the tallest thing around here are grain elevators, but what else would Godzilla have left to stomp once Tokyo and the other great cities with skyscrapers are nothing but rubble?

You’re on your way, you’re almost there.