Blood Jump #10: Gratitude Journal
In which we're thankful for: Reevaluation (The Long Goodbye); Porous Identities (May December); Reinvention (André 3000’s New Blue Sun).
Whenever someone is being an asshole on a jam band forum—so, daily—someone will inevitably reply with “hippies are bad people pretending to be good; punks are good people pretending to be bad.” It’s a boardwalk t-shirt disposable platitude I’ve seen attributed to Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye and RasclotHillary420 and one that probably doesn’t hold too much weight. Ram Dass seemed like a decent guy, and enough punks were terrible to warrant Dead Kennedys to do something about it.
Still, the quote strikes enough of a nerve in me to encourage some self-reflection. My taste in art and entertainment skews decidedly toward Crunchy BullshitTM—I’ve been to more Phish concerts than should be legal and typically write with something new-agey playing in the background—but I am a grumpy pessimist to my core. Love and light don’t come naturally to me, and despite my myriad privileges, I live too many days with an oversized chip on my shoulder. For better or worse, decent human practices like gratitude are aspirational, and closing the gap between myself and the ideals of the media I consume takes a sustained and deliberate effort.
So, in this week’s Blood Jump, we’re celebrating Thanksgiving in the most American way I can think of: Ignoring the systemic and violent marginalization of an entire people in favor of trite niceties that should be reflexive. Be grateful! This issue’s subjects come packaged in ideas I’m feeling especially thankful for: Reevaluation (The Long Goodbye); Porous Identities (May December); and Reinvention (André 3000’s New Blue Sun). Let’s begin.
Grateful for… Reevaluation
I am unconditionally endeared toward Robert Altman movies; less so toward detective stories. The late director’s filmography was a balm for me during the pandemic, and I chewed through his work recklessly. He’s probably best known for his sprawling ensemble casts—multitracked with layered audio and often juggling at least a few different conversations at a time—that make watching New Hollywood staples like Nashville and McCabe and Mrs. Miller feel less like sitting through a movie than gaining a seat at the coolest table in a high school cafeteria. Altman movies are timelessly cool and effortlessly surprising, lazy rivers of bourbon and pot smoke that read like freewheeling hangouts until they cut to the quick of an American tragedy. All qualities I assumed couldn’t gel with noir.
The Long Goodbye, a 1973 adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel, was the first Altman film I’d seen that didn’t quite resonate. Elliott Gould plays Chandler’s go-to gumshoe Philip Marlowe, whose Eisenhowerian sentimentality is transposed here into a sort of 70s-aloof chill. Marlowe’s bud Terry shows up at his Hollywood apartment after a scuffle with his old lady and asks for a ride down to Tijuana. With national borders so dreamily porous, Marlowe obliges. When he returns home, the private eye is accosted by the police, who tell him that Terry is under investigation for the murder of his wife, an act to which Marlowe has become a reluctant accessory. The fuzz locks Marlowe up for a few days and releases him when they come to believe Terry has committed suicide—but Marlowe knows it can’t be that simple. While he tries to get to the bottom of things, he takes up the case of one Eileen Wade, whose hard-drinking novelist husband Roger has gone missing. Roger and Terry’s mysteries collide and congeal, splinter and separate, and Marlowe keeps his cool enough to quip his way through it all.
I struggle with crime fiction. It might be a problem of attention (my phone-poisoned brain tends to check out when things get too plotty); maybe it’s just a matter of preference (I fall closer Wes Anderson than David Fincher on the new-millennium film bro alignment chart). Altman’s toe-dip into the genre felt like a betrayal to the loose and character-driven stories I’d grown to love, and while I knew better than to deny that The Long Goodbye was good on my first watch, it felt a few steps removed from the head-friendly vibe fests that made Altman such a comfort. Thank God for second chances.
With my genre hang-ups out of the way, The Long Goodbye bloomed completely on my second watch. I’d first tried to find the Altman around the mystery, sifting through its single-tracked dialogue for traces of what I loved in 3 Women and Short Cuts like kief in shag carpeting. That feels embarrassing to admit, but it’s not without precedent. “Chandler fans will hate my guts,” the director was quoted around the time of Goodbye’s release. “But I don’t give a damn.” Noir was enough of a remove from Altman’s wheelhouse that he and screenwriter Leigh Brackett (who earned Chandler’s trust by penning the adaptation for The Big Sleep) dragged Marlowe into their own hazy world instead of reaching back through time. The effect is one that renders the mystery distinctly Altmanesque, which is to say, it doesn’t matter much whodunit. Beats dissolve as soon as they materialize like bon mots from under Marlowe’s tongue, and if you get a little lost along the way, there’s a good chance that was the point.
Paul Thomas Anderson is the modern torchbearer of Altman’s filmic dogma (PTA served as a “backup director” on A Prairie Home Companion should Altman have croaked on the set of his last film), and The Long Goodbye is the maybe the clearest throughline between both directors’ bodies of work. It of course parallels the roach-clipped paranoia of Inherent Vice’s dime-store labyrinth; it walks with the cocksure swagger of Anderson’s early work in Hard Eight and Boogie Nights; it wears the indelible LA sunburn of Magnolia to Licorice Pizza. But The Long Goodbye’s greatest mark of influence on Anderson might be its elasticity around tragedy and violence. Marlowe sees friends die (by his hands and others), he’s thrown in jail, he loses lovers as quickly as he gains them, but never breaks a sweat—not out of denial or disassociation, but of a Zenlike deference to the Way Things Are. Like dead-beat dads and raining frogs, these are just things that happen.
I can’t be certain why The Long Goodbye didn’t work on my first watch or why it worked especially well on my second. Maybe my tastes have matured, maybe I have a better understanding of Robert Altman’s output, maybe I was just having one in a series of many Weird Days during lockdown. Today, though, I am grateful for opportunities for reevaluation.
Grateful for… Porous Identities
“Two women grow so close in the shadows of psychic trauma that their identities begin to fuse” feels like too specific a trope to be as ubiquitous as it is. More remarkable is how often it works. The microgenre (let’s borrow Susan Sontag’s “doubling” as shorthand) likely began with Ingmar Bergman’s Jungian drama Persona, a landmark shift that helped to push avant-garde cinema into the mainstream and likely remains the most acclaimed and analyzed entry in the doubling canon. Since then, Bergman’s formula has been adopted in movies like the aforementioned 3 Women, Mulholland Dr., Repulsion, Images, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, The Double Life of Veronique, The Duke of Burgandy, L’Appartement, Perfect Blue, Sibyl, Black Swan, Last Night in Soho, Single White Female… So why shouldn’t Todd Haynes take a stab at it, too?
Haynes complicates his pass on doubling with lurid taboo. In May December, Julianne Moore is Gracie Atherton-Yoo, a Savannah housewife doing her best to see her kids off to college with as much normalcy as she can afford. She has good reason to keep her head down: twenty years ago, Gracie was imprisoned for the second-degree rape of a teenage pet-store employee named Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). Gracie gave birth to Joe’s child while incarcerated and doubled down on the affair by marrying Joe when she was released. Joe is now 36, the couple’s youngest kids are graduating high school, and aside from the stray box of S-H-I-T that arrives at her doorstep from obsessives who won’t forget the tabloids, Gracie’s life seems relatively placid. But maybe that’s not what she wants after all: May December starts when Gracie fields a visit from Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), an actor who’s come to study Gracie before playing her in a movie.
Todd Haynes is a notable acolyte of the church of Douglas Sirk, a German director best known for breathing technicolor life into Hollywood melodrama. Sirk’s influence tracks in varying degrees across Haynes’s filmography—most significantly in Far from Heaven’s direct homage—and plays here in full after-school sleaze. Years of salvaging her public image from tabloid battery have made Gracie meticulous and calculated in her presentation, from her makeup routine to her manicured lisp, and that fastidious devotion to idealism is reflected in May December’s soft-glow Vaseline sunshine. Synth-string stabs warp domestic worries into vicious punchlines and the script tears through Gracie’s dignity at a Nightcrawler clip. It amounts to the sticky, salacious anxiety of too much time spent with a gossip rag, and for good reason: May December is interior (and wise) enough to avoid biography, but it’s deliberate in its loose adaptation of the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau, whose own affair with a teenager in the 90s took a wildfire tear through the public eye.
That sense of Enquirer-flavored voyeurism is best preserved through Portman’s Elizabeth, who presses her way into the Atherton-Yoo house with varied doses of empathy and aggression. May December takes a more explicit turn toward doubling than what’s typical of the genre: Elizabeth’s parasitic adoption of Gracie’s persona is both announced and consensual. She begins with a measured and clinical friendliness won through seasoned professionalism; this isn’t her first rodeo, and she knows the drill while shadowing a subject. But Gracie maintains hard boundaries around her personal life—she needs to—and when Elizabeth discovers there are lines she shouldn’t cross, those boundaries become challenges. She devours Gracie’s transgressions and filters them into her own process until the lines between professional research and prurient bacchanalia dissolve. Eventually, Elizabeth’s presence in Savannah functions like a monolith among apes, sending whatever scraps of a typical American life the Atherton-Yoos were able to construct into a tailspin. Gracie’s transgressions are rendered fresh, upsetting Joe’s arrested development and rippling through the family like the affair had occurred only weeks ago.
Schlocky sensationalism is an unprecedented approach to doubling, but it’s such a natural fit in May December that it’s hard not to wonder why melodrama isn’t more prevalent in similar stories. Voyeurism, even on a national scale, demands we disregard the boundary of the other in favor of our own curiosity. A familiar conceit, maybe, but what’s less familiar is when the other mounts its own invasion. Today, I am grateful for porous identities and the fallout of their osmoses.
Grateful for… Reinvention
It’s rare that ambient music has enjoyed a spotlight on the scale of André 3000’s New Blue Sun, his debut album and first proper collection of songs since Outkast’s Idlewild soundtrack. New Blue Sun has been out for less than a week, but it’s been covered thoroughly enough that if you haven’t yet heard the music, you’ve at least heard the details. He’s traded rap for the flute (pending physical editions will be stamped with a “NO BARS” warning, a winking reversal of Tipper Gore’s puritanical dog whistle). Its song titles are outrageously long and range from prescriptive to playful to benign. André 3000 gave unprecedented, lengthy interviews with NPR and GQ in the week between the album’s announcement and its release, but no amount of warning could make a gear shift that sees one of the most successful rappers of all time releasing a minimalist flute album any less beguiling for a fanbase desperate for new verses.
The closest I’ve been to André 3000 was at the Milwaukee stop of Outkast’s 2014 reunion tour. After a rocky start at Coachella, 3 Stacks and Big Boi fine-tuned the run through their catalogue with enough precision to make everything from “B.O.B.” to “Elevators” as viable and exciting as ever. It remains one of the better rap shows I’ve seen, but André’s regretful postmortem interviews took the wind out of the sails—and his unease made sense. To watch an artist who built a platinum legacy sneaking gonzo spirituality into the weirdest raps you could hear over an FM radio retread into a greatest-hits tour felt, retroactively or not, like a concession toward what’s comfortable. Which is ironic for someone like 3000, who vocally opposes the familiar in service of what’s vital, regardless of its commercial viability (even if that viability seems to be something he can’t shake).
So the answer to “Why a flute album?” is as simple as what’s offered via New Blue Sun’s first song title: “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A 'Rap' Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.” The flute is far from the only thing André’s pursued since Outkast’s last venture: he’s appeared in a dozen or so movies, most recently under the direction of arthouse auteurs Claire Denis and Kelly Reichardt; he’s in the process of building his own workwear brand; he’s dropped a handful of show-stealing guest verses on high-profile albums. But it does seem to be the most fertile outlet for 3000’s artistry. He’s been spotted wielding a flute in airports and coffee shops and laundromats, so the idea of a woodwind album isn’t completely unfounded. What’s more surprising is André’s capacity to fade into the texture of his own music. New Blue Sun was born out of a kismet collision of shopping carts between 3000 and LA new-age producer and percussionist Carlos Niño, who connected the multihyphenate to a handful of jazz and ambient performers like Leaving Record’s Matthewdavid, V.C.R., Surya Botofasina, and Nate Mercereau. The resulting collaboration is an understated collection of improvisational searching, a mood board of patient craft as true to ego death as its nods to ayahuasca journeys suggest.
André 3000 waits a few minutes to play a note on New Blue Sun’s first track (“I swear…”), hovering in the shadows while his band searches for its form. When he finally appears, it’s only with a few measured and repeated thrills, a slow build that just barely crests into a bubbly motif. That sets the pace for the better part of both André’s playing and New Blue Sun’s instrumentation at large. It’s only halfway through the album, on the standout “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears a 3000™ Button Down Embroidered,” that the flute ripens into a blistering shriek, and it just as quickly ebbs back among the track’s truncated percussion and synth patches. The band typically starts with the sketch of an idea—a spare bass plod on “Ninety Three ‘Til Infinity and Beyoncé,” a key lick that just slides under the threshold for a Drake beat on “I swear…”—and allows that sketch to blossom into a new phrase or wilt into a deeper sense of spiritual solitude. If the space opens for the flute to soar, great. If not, it’s just as well.
You get the sense that the NBS sessions were friendly affairs; each idea is given full credence to breathe, seashells take up as much real estate as drum skins, chord progressions only swell after full minutes of agreement. There are long stretches of quiet across the album, and though it’s never dull and far from a provocation, it will undoubtedly be a challenge for a generation who’s only seen their (i.e., my) attention span erode since the days of watching the “Hey Ya” video after school on TRL. Even for an ambient record, New Blue Sun is slight in the shadow of its predecessors: it is less ornate than Alice Coltrane, less heady and weighty than Harold Budd or Hiroshi Yoshimura. But it is as spiritually vital as 3000’s most cutting bars, proof that if André has shifted gears since Outkast, he hasn’t lost his edge.
In a recent (and unlikely) interview with Marc Maron, new-age titan Laraaji, whose output is a significant influence of New Blue Sun, spoke to ambient music’s utility as a conduit to spiritual thinking. We often use new age as background music, something to sand over distractions (without becoming a distraction itself) as we work or write or meditate or pray. This might be New Blue Sun’s biggest gift: via André 3000 and Outkast’s star power, hundreds of thousands of listeners were drawn to the same introspective and spiritual frequency, if only for a morning. It remains to be seen if he can repeat the trick, and the returning audience will undoubtably be fewer. But for today, I’m grateful for reinvention.
Sample Draws
It’s been a minute since Blood Jump has covered anything literary. I blame Proust, on whom enough has already been said. Anyway, A Book Issue is on its way.
My film club recently tackled John Sayles’s Appalachian socialist epic Matewan. It is a massive and masterful movie and one that should be mandatory viewing for anyone who’s ever worked for wages.
Film critic Elena Lazic just launched The French Dispatch, a French cinephelia podcast, via the
Substack. Elena is a brilliant writer, and Dispatch is certain to be worth your time and subscription.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again soon for the next issue.
Thank you for the mention! Enjoyed this issue of Blood Jump immensely. Glad you ended up changing your mind a bit about The Long Goodbye.