Blood Jump is an independent and free publication, but writing has value. Solidarity with the WGA and everyone striking.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump! Memorial Day weekend marks a last respite before a busy summer here at Blood Jump HQ, so we’re trying our best to let our days off stretch long and languid. I caught a matinee of Paris, Texas at the Music Box Theatre this morning—isn’t life sweet sometimes? Ry Cooder’s steel-string slide might be the perfect backdrop for a lazy weekend. There’s a moment early in the film in which Dean Stockwell chooses a cigarette and a spinning top for his in-flight entertainment. We used to be a country, happy Memorial Day.
This issue of Blood Jump features art about growing up, growing into yourself, and laying on the charm. Party Girl. Persona 5. Two songs with Tyler, The Creator. Let’s begin.
Crying Reading in the Club
SLC Punk’s ending is heartbreaking. By which I don’t mean its climax, where—spoilers ahead—Matthew Lillard’s Stevo reels over the death of Heroin Bob, a scene that remains one of the most compelling displays of grief in DIY cinema. It’s the movie’s coda that really hurts. Stevo, sans liberty spikes and studded leather, monologues outside of Bob’s funeral about the limits of anarchy and his future in law school, parroting his father’s don’t-sell-out-buy-in aphorisms against which he’d spent the past 90 minutes rebelling. The issue isn’t that Stevo goes straight, an earned an inevitable conclusion to riding a lifestyle off a cliff. It’s that his cleaning up is a surrender: Lillard keeps his edge during his line reads, but Stevo’s turn toward the straight and narrow is rushed and careless, an abbreviated ending that saps the decision of agency and victory. Punk is dead, long live the LSATs.
Shouting “I’m serious about graduate school!” across an underground rave might read like a similar concession, but Party Girl (1995) is not a movie about giving up. In a career-blueprint role, Parker Posey plays Mary, an Extremely-In-Her-Twenties club kid who winds up in jail after she throws an underground rave that gets busted by the cops. She’s bailed out by her godmother, Judy, a librarian who lords over a dank NYPL with von Trappian austerity. Mary takes a job at the library to pay Judy back, launching a fine odd-couple trajectory for Party Girl’s screwball comedy. What gives Party Girl its legs, though, is its refusal to frame Mary’s call toward adulthood with even a whiff of self-sacrifice.
Like SLC Punk, Party Girl’s rom-com qua coming-of-age story is nestled with impressive authenticity within its city and scene. It’s a movie made by and for NYC club kids: Peace Bisquit’s Bill Coleman served as consultant and music supervisor and curated a proto-Renaissance soundtrack that ranges from Tom Tom Club to Felix Da Housecat to Dawn Penn. Its cowriter, Harry Birckmayer, traces roots back to Paris is Burning. It’s peppered with cameos from scene stalwarts like Lady Bunny and the It Twins. It puts Liev Schreiber in a Kangol. The result is a textured effortlessly inclusive look into a period and culture too often defined by the AIDS epidemic and political adversity. It is so fun to watch someone as charming as Parker Posey navigate the 90s NYC party scene, so it’s a relief when Mary’s own development doesn’t leverage that culture as collateral.
Party Girl’s arc doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Throwing illegal raves shows its cracks as a reliable source of income, Mary’s self-destructive tendencies derail a budding romance with street vendor Mustafa (Omar Townsend), and the call to abandon her childish ways beckons ever louder. Fed up with taking shit from Judy and the other librarians, Mary smokes a joint and decides to get her head around the Dewey Decimal System—and she realizes she loves it.
Mastering library catalogues yields for Mary the same sense of order and control as planning and running underground parties; in one inspired scene, she organizes her DJ-roommate Leo (Guillermo Díaz)’s record collection with an amended riff on the DDS that sorts vinyl by beats per minute. Mary steps toward adulthood with as much glamour as she might drop a needle on a Deee-Lite record, eschewing the sense of loss that so often sullies the name of growing up for an exercise in dignity and self-actualization. Finding her calling doesn’t narrow Mary’s world; it lets that world bloom.
Party Girl renders the NYC club scene with so much joy and reverence that to reject it in favor of anything—even self-preservation—would likely read as a betrayal. That the movie ends with Mary dancing the night away after declaring her decision to go to grad school for librarian studies, that she answers the call toward adulthood without sacrificing her identity, speaks to the precision and acuity of writer/director Daisy von Scherler Mayer. So it’s a shame to learn of the hurdles she’s faced in her post–PG career.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a fresh but marginalized director knocks it out of the park with an indie on a shoestring budget. That movie gains said director enough trust with studios to helm bigger projects. One of those projects flops (likely because of studio interference), and said director is stripped of that trust and damned to a career of directing TV. After Party Girl, von Scherler Mayer reached a commercial peak with 1998’s Madeline, whose follow-up, The Guru, would send her to director jail for the remainder of her career. She’s in good company: Cheryl Dunye, Charles Burnett, Amy Heckerling, Julie Dash, Donna Deitch, Robert Townsend, Lizzie Borden, and Tamara Jenkins lead an endless list of undeniable talent sidelined because of studio mismanagement. von Scherler Mayer has pressed on with a successful and prestigious TV career and has said she’s content with Party Girl’s legacy, but it’s hard not to wonder where her filmography might have reached if she was granted the patience afforded to her white male peers.
Party Girl captures a distinct and liminal American moment. “New York has a performative aspect to it, but imagine when it was performative when there were no cameras around,” says Posey of Party Girl’s not-a-phone-in-sight joie de vivre. “Then you get more theater, more expression and people in the moment performing.” Party Girl buzzes with the nervous energy of a culture on the edge of something. It’s a last glimpse of a pre-9/11 New York, of a pre-Internet youth culture. In fact, Party Girl crested a wave that would change film forever: it was the first film to ever stream online, a low-fidelity experiment that the distributers indulged for free promo before a web-dominated screening landscape was a sparkle in a cretin’s eye. Party Girl captures lightning in a bottle: the lightning of history, of scene kids, of Parker Posey, of house music. Never grow up.
You can stream Party Girl on The Criterion Channel, but we here at Blood Jump are champions of physical media. For our fellow discheads, Fun City Editions’ restoration Blu-ray is the way to go.
School Days, Fool Days
[Editor’s note: Far be it from me to pivot from this newsletter’s intended structure in its second issue, but some things are out of my hands. I’m currently in the middle of two books: (1) Slavoj Žižek’s Enjoy Your Symptom, for which I may have missed about five years’ worth of prereq reading, and (2) Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, with which I need to spend more time before I write anything worthwhile. So today, we’re talking Persona 5. Also, video games are books.]
Allow me to be radically vulnerable for a moment: as of this writing, I’ve racked up just under 106 hours playing Persona 5 Royal, which I understand to be “too much time” for a “grown man” to have spent playing video games. Persona makes it easy for the hours to slip away: when you’re not fighting to save the world, the 2020 JRPG takes the shape of everyday life. You go to school, you talk to friends about their problems, you work odd jobs, you brew coffee. There’s a chop-wood-carry-water zen about the little activities that fill your time in P5R; absent of their IRL contexts, our daily rituals and relationships feel significant unto themselves. If only I could learn something from this.
Like Party Girl, Persona 5 Royal sees its protagonist (nameless in the game, but “Ren” in the anime adaptation, which we’ll call him here) budgeting freedom after legal trouble lands him under the tutelage of a stodgy ward. For the uninitiated: Ren intervenes when he witnesses a powerful man assaulting a woman. That man leverages said power to pin the blame on Ren. Ren’s parents send him to live in Tokyo with Sojiro, a grumpy barista and friend of the family. While living in the attic of Sojiro’s coffee shop, Ren starts having strange dreams about the Velvet Room, in which demon/demigod/spooky guy Igor warns him of a ruinous future. Igor grants Ren access to a mobile app—he’s a specter, not a luddite—that allows Ren and his friends access to a metaverse in which they can use their Persona (think some combination of Pokémon, Final Fantasy summons, and online avatars) to battle the psyches and “change the hearts” of the adults that cause material harm to the real world. Confusing? After 100+ hours, yes! Extremely!
There’s a utilitarian sense of wish fulfillment to P5R’s battle of the subconscious. Ren (and presumably, much of Persona’s audience) is in his late teens, a time in which personal responsibilities often eclipse personal freedom. You start to understand how political decisions affect your life and wellbeing but cannot yet vote, you’re pressed with the weight of choosing a career without the means to experience it first, your whole life looms ahead of you while you’re stuck finishing your final exams. That a phone app could grant access to a psychological warzone to fix society’s great evils between classes is undeniably appealing, and it’s no wonder the Persona series boasts such a fervent fanbase.
Three years after its release (and seven after the original Persona 5’s launch), the P5R subreddit sees hourly posts from almost 400,000 members. Persona heads share how-to’s, merch collections, fanfic, soundtrack covers, and thousands upon thousands of fanart drawings, which are often endearing, occasionally repulsive, and almost always horny. Kids are looking down the barrel of an increasingly dystopian future; anti-trans rhetoric has become inexplicably chic, queer teens’ access to healthcare is leveraged and lost like so many poker chips, abortion rights are crumbling, school shootings are a daily occurrence, the climate is fucked. Absent of political power (or, at least, the right to vote), who wouldn’t dream of changing the hearts of the adults so hellbent on ruining the world you’re set to inherit?
A few conservative, spoiler-averse Googles lead me to believe I have about 10–20 hours left with the game. There’s a lot I’ll miss about Persona once it’s done—its characters are layered, nuanced, and surprisingly funny, its fusion-forward soundtrack is undeniable, its battle system is kinetic—but I think its devotion to everyday ritual will be the hardest to give up. It’s almost a privilege to approach chores and routines in a vacuum, to find peace in reading a book on the train or picking up hours at a convenience store. The world is ending, but you can still enjoy a good cup of coffee.
Growing Up Tyler
All this shouting into the abyss of adulthood is calling to mind, of all things, a Tyler, the Creator song. “Rusty,” a track buried deep into 2013’s Wolf, opens with a recording from a conversation with pro-skater and de-facto Odd Future mentor Jason Dill:
I'm saying, you know, like, all I ever told you to do was grow up, don't grow down. You know, like, you know, grow up, don't grow down, grow out. You go from being a kid, just doing your thing, hanging out with friends. Months later, you're world famous. You're a gay rights activist, and you don't even know it. You know what? I don't wanna say it to you no more, Tyler. Fuck you, Tyler!
Wolf was an inflection point for Tyler. It came at the zenith of Odd Future’s runaway hype train: Earl was Free. Frank was Out. Tyler’s talent was cemented and earned him big-name features from childhood idols. Bigger budgets sanded (for better and worse) the rougher sonic edges of Bastard and Goblin. Tyler had begun to outgrow the horrorcore antics that had broken early Odd Future cuts out of the Tumblr-sphere but hadn’t yet settled into the self-assurance that finds him shooting sweatless threes on albums like Flower Boy and Call Me if You Get Lost. Ten years later, Dill’s “Rusty” missive reads like a promise that Tyler has since fulfilled ten times over.
I was 20 when Tyler uploaded Bastard to DatPiff, just young enough to be swept into the OF frenzy without raising too many eyebrows. Tyler’s music was as subversive and exciting and stupid as the first Jackass movie, a perfect outlet for the discomfort of being told it’s time to grow up. The early days of Odd Future made the collective accessible—Tyler and friends would readily respond to fans online, meet-and-greets and pop-up Golf Wang stores were regular staples before live shows—and OF’s rising fame felt personal, as much a win for their fans as it was themselves. Countless artists have proven how easy it is to drop the ball in the decade and a half since Odd Future first posted, so to see Tyler grow into himself—he’s become one of rap’s great producers, he’s come out as bisexual, he’s ditched dirty Vans for his own couture line—is as much as a reward as his music.
“Heaven to Me,” a track bundled in an extended rerelease of 2021’s Call Me If You Get Lost, answers the call Jason Dill set forward on “Rusty.” Over an I-Miss-The-Old-Kanye John Legend sample, Tyler continues CMIYGL’s ode to a border-hopping sweet life and sets his sights on a happy, healthy future before waxing nostalgic about the early days of Odd Future. “Me and Jasper spending last bucks on the city bus/Wayne tapes and Vice mags and Portishead drops,” he raps of his Bastard-era hunger. It’s a tear-jerker of a verse, and it’s impossible not to smile as Tyler revisits his early artistry with the mamma-I-made-it bravado that’s categorized his recent output. Tyler, the Creator has finally won, and if you’ve been with him from the beginning, it’s easy to feel like you’re winning right alongside him.
Sample Draws
I saw Jacqueline Novak run her new show (called Get on Your Knees) at The Den Theatre in preparation for a taping in June. Novak might be a genius; she’s carrying the Philip Roth torch of literary precision and Jungian dread. I can’t think of another artist who can weave William Carlos Williams references into blowjob jokes.
I’m a bit late to this party, but holy shit, Kelly Reichardt’s new movie is GOOD. Showing Up is a beautiful and very funny meditation on art and process and control. Here’s to Michelle Williams and Judd Hirsch collabs—seems to be a winning formula.
Tim Heidecker’s Office Hours featured Brazilian songwriter Tim Bernardes as a musical guest the other week, and I’ve kept his new album, Mil Coisas Invisíveis, on repeat ever since. It’s the kind of record that feels like an oasis, a nylon-stringed rendering of orchestral pop shooting with the caliber of Randy Newman and Tobias Jesso Jr.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again on Monday, June 12, for the next issue.