In Which We Dislike Geographical Distances

Of Eros

by SUMEJA TULIC

I hate geographical distances and maybe that is why I am fond of photographs of celebrities catching flights on several different airports in one week. There is something in defying distance, something almost blasphemous or at least exciting in changing the scenery of her destiny every now and then.

At home we didn’t own a globe or a map of any kind. In my dad’s office there was one showing the former Yugoslavia’s topography. I never found it to be sufficient. My fingers would wonder outside of its borders sometimes to Italy, sometimes south, across the Mediterranean Sea, back to the place I was.

I often remember these finger travels when I’m at airports or at bus stations; also I still do these travels. I close my eyes and randomly place my finger somewhere. Before I do so, I make sure I’m far from the center, where Europe is, and that I’m not pointing very low or very high, so I’m at a safe distance from both poles. Now, very often, selfishly, I miss my self around some people who are far away, and then, I look up a stash of photographs in messy and unnamed folders.

One of those people is Raphael. We met at the opening of an exhibition of broken relationships. Among everyday items and quirky and sophisticated commemorative objects of past love stories, stood the only black man in the room. Over the curse of one very hectic week in August, I got to know this tall, Dutch student of English and literature. My initial drive was to tell him all the “interesting” things I learned from my high school librarian who occasionally taught postmodern literature. I’m pretty sure I followed my initial drive, because it is the only explanation for me defining love to him as "the creative energy of Eros." Of course, I was the one who asked that question in first place.

I didn’t stop speaking or being endlessly happy to have met him. At points it looked like an infatuation, and maybe it was. We didn’t explore that option, because among other things, he had infectious mononucleosis, commonly known as the kissing disease. Unlike the sleeping beauty, Raphael could not have been woken. On the contrary, he could have passed his sickness with one. If I was to be infected with fatigue and fever, I wish it would have been because of someone like Raphael.

I try not to think about it when he drives me on his bike in Amsterdam, when I’m leaning on his back, trying to be cool about it, and about the bare windows of homes of Amsterdammers implying unrestrained comfort; the river, the screaming tourists, the fact that it is so beautiful all together.

I don’t wish I had met Raphael when he was a teen for a simple reason, between playing basketball and playing a text based supernerdy multiplayer online game, he and his crowd were into coining nicknames. I bet I would have been nicknamed something similar to what they called the Christian girl: "Vaginus Innocentius." Also, Raphael was in love and could barely eat because of Tanya, a girl he remembers like “stunning natural beauty who I never dared to hit on.” With Tanya and later Charlotte on his mind, we could have never talked about anything or more enjoyably sat together in silence like we sometimes do.

If we forget Deny the dog, Selma is the only child. By all definitions and expectations, she should be a loner, self-centered and selfish. Yes, she is a loner, and she may seem at times self-centered, but she is never selfish. When I got to know Selma, I realized these trades are also chosen ways in which she deals with intrusions of the world, how she ignores the screaming brutalities of our war-torn country.

Selma and I were two cocky idiots who shared the same concerns. Our concerns were so frivolous, but we were two seventeen year olds who thought their observations are beyond their primer object of interest. We would often silently stand next to each other on the bus, observing people. Selma would notice the leftovers of hair gel on schoolboys’ ears; I would nod with a smile.

I will forever remember when I knew she was someone with whom I could share my secrets. We were at a school trip in a beach resort in Turkey. The loud pop music, the enormous sun and the sweet taste of food and drinks were making me dizzy most of the time. When I was with Selma, sharing our dizziness while walking hand in hand, the dizziness would slowly fade away. I guess, if each of us got an equally dizzy or sick companion, we would no longer feel any of it. Our platonic lesbian parade distracted the hormone-raging men of the beach resort. I’m not sure if we knew the full meaning of patriarchy then, but we surely felt like we were beating it in the stomach.

Selma lived outside of Sarajevo, in the suburbs of a smaller town. She would drive her bike around her idyllic neighborhood covered with apple and oak trees. She loved Alanis Morisette, Radiohead and Björk. Recently I have disclosed to Selma that I actually can’t stand Björk. Her squishy and at the same time screaming voice puts me at unease. “Unlike you, the eternal tranquilizing human pill,” I told her. Selma smiled back from a Skype window chat. She is in Japan now. Just recently she learned how to ignore the sounds of Tokyo and to appreciate when she senses that there are thousands of humans less out there.

The first thing that Selma and Helena have in common is their appreciation of Miranda July. Both of them lent or gave me something of her work. Selma lent me the DVD of Me and You and Everyone We Know, Helena lent me No One Belongs Here More Than You. She spotted the yellow cover of the books on a gas pump in middle of nowhere in Germany. It would have been exceptionally great if Helena found another book by July there, among love novels, porn and gossip publications.

Unlike most of us teenagers of the Scully and Mulder era, Helena never thought of dinosaurs or NLO. Like now, when alone, she read in her bed and wrote “really embarrassing poems” and made “faux-sad drawings.” Helena was born to be loved and listen to. I love her eyes and her expressions when she tells me a story or retells what happened to her since last we met. Helena’s charm is in the comfortable way she bridges the maturity of her soul and the unexpected desires of her young self. She never stops to be wise, understanding or compassionate. Not even when she breaks hearts.

I could easily picture her 16-year-old self deciding to become “more of a girl." She would put lots of make up, borrow sexy dresses, and drink purple and green drinks. I bet, even then, she would single out from all the smoke, glitter, sounds of the clubs she is been to a beautiful lyrical scene to share with the diary or her friends.

Last time I saw Helena, she cooked a dinner for my sister and me in her home in Amsterdam. We sat around the table, a bunch of soon to be adults, concerned about everything, caring actually for nothing. I wish I was there when Helena’s first childrens' play premiered. After the show a mesmerized eight-year old asked Helena if the story was somewhere in a book so he could read it again.

I met Luka on Valentine's Day in a cinema, at an Ingmar Bergman screening. Most people would in defining Luka use the sentence “unlike anyone I have met” for reasons most limited to his calm and yogi like posture, and the fact that he wears things previously worn by his late dad or other male figures from his life. Luka is like nobody I have met because he is never angry, anxious or upset because of the weather or out of boredom. His discontents are short and mostly results of quarrels with his lovely Nona over groceries bought in the supermarket instead of farmer's market, and over “the extensive” usage of chemicals in cleaning.

I love walking with Luka. Few months ago, on one of our strolls, we stopped by the Memorial for children killed during the siege of Sarajevo. Luka casually flipped the rolls engraved with the names of the killed children only to stop it suddenly and say, “So here you have been.” Apparently, he has reconnected with most of his kindergarten and elementary school friends on Facebook, with few exceptions, among which is the girl whose name he just found. She and few other classmates’ faces were untagged on random class photos that every now and then someone would post.

I stood next to him, watching his calmness transform into something even more beautiful - a silent non-imposing grief. That is Luka; my warm friend who loves the mornings and is never ashamed to recommend a film by saying “I cried while watching it.” Luka spends the little free time he has during the week traveling through Google street view. Although we live in the same city, his profound sense of life and joy makes him, sometimes, unreachable and far away. I come with my daily worries and discontents and Luka hugs me and I feel war never happened, everybody is fine and we are still young enough not to be responsible for anything.

Now at home we have dad’s University Atlas from 1977. Geopolitically, the world has changed since the year of publication. Russia is no longer in a great Soviet Union, there is only one Germany, and Djibouti is an independent country. Last time I opened the University Atlas, my finger pointed somewhere in Pakistan. Wonderful.

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Sarajevo. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about somebody else. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"That Was Only Wasting Time" - Kissed Her Little Sister (mp3

"I Ain't Got a Friend" - Kissed Her Little Sister (mp3)

In Which We Turn And Face The Strange

Heart of Chambers

by DAYNA EVANS

The Future
dir. Miranda July
91 min

Staring at Miranda July's pleading, childlike face for an hour and a half can be a daunting task. There's something about it — much like those Sarah McLachlan ASPCA advertisements — that elicits unnatural levels of sympathy within my cold, cynical heart. I want to give her hand-crocheted tea cozies, make her a key lime pie, or just tell her it's okay, everything's going to be okay. July is all sweetness, humility, and youthful confusion, but without an obnoxious giggle or noted affectation. Her earnestness seems to breed only further earnestness, which has caused many to repel her work.

The host of haters claim that lines like, “Hi, person” spoken between girlfriend and boyfriend are unrealistic and contrived. They take issue with dancing pink shoes in her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, with her title choices and her outfits and that doe-eyed, bashful face. Despite how polarizing July can be, she feels authentic even if you're the kind of person who can't stand her.

The Future is a film about two mid-30s creative-types Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) who are waiting for their big moment, but are having trouble enabling it to happen. They want stability and familiarity (which leads them to adopting a cat), but they aren't certain for how long (the cat is dying). Matching MacBooks, gauzey curtains, and flea-market kitsch overrun their apartment.

The pair use the countdown to adopting their new cat as a time to shut off their internet, begin new projects (Sophie a series of dance videos, Jason a foray in environmental solicitation), and, to Jason's dismay, experiment with infidelity. While Sophie starts an affair with a wealthy suburban dad, Jason learns he can make time stand still and has conversations with old men and the moon (yes, the moon).

Paw-Paw the gray cat narrates the story, touching sagely on the range of warmth, possession, and loss we see the couple experience. Sophie moves in with her new boyfriend (David Warshofsky). She admires the 1,000 thread count sheets, walks around in a nightie, and abandons dancing. After her boyfriend’s daughter buries herself to the neck in their backyard with the plan to sleep, Sophie puts her in the bath. It is then that we see Sophie’s face betray what we’ve already concluded: there is suffocation in the comfort of luxury.

Not much later, she returns to Jason, who is cold but accepting. In their time apart, they have both unsuccessfully tried to pick up the cat — the cat has been euthanized because they were a day late in retrieving him, and everything about it is a poignantly written tragedy. The film closes as it began: two mid-30s creative-types in pajamas, quietly absorbed in their own thoughts. But they are absorbed together.

The Future isn't Away We Go, it isn't The Squid and the Whale. Unlike the many Grizzly Bear-soundtracked films that sound similar, this is not a compendium of white people problems and whining — it's a film of generous sentimentality and melancholy. It resonates so deeply that an ethereal yet honest mood exists, a mood that is only enhanced by the wonderful score of Jon Brion. The music creates caverns in which Sophie and Jason’s loneliness can nestle. At once warm and wide, Brion’s soundtrack is also disconsolate in its use of droney keyboards, which makes the score feel like a constant tribute to the film’s theme, “Master of None” by Beach House. The choice to use “Master of None” as a thread throughout the film could not have been more deliberate — it is exact in its replication of what we feel through The Future: hollow, somber, but not alone. The vast richness of The Future is in its ability to ask us what we look for at a certain age, and it does so without making generalizations and conclusions on our behalf. 

Movies like The Future merely present quandaries its intended audience already recognizes: variations of the “Where do we go/what do we do?” myth of young adulthood. Unfortunately, it is too easy to absorb-then-ignore these impasses as we watch them played out in independent films while the flood of thoughts about how we're going to be the next Basquiat, next DeLillo, or next July never ceases. It’s apparently what we do as part of a generation bound to narcissism. Sophie characterizes this self-involvement astutely when she says she'd like to start reading the news but because she's already so far behind, why should she bother?

The movie begins to feel like reality TV — a reflection of what people in their 20s and 30s go through — and it plays out like a fable without a moral. This creates disquiet in the theater. Can one take comfort or glean knowledge from a film that glimmers like a mirror? Due in full to July's astounding technique for writing human emotion in all its complicated forms, The Future shines in its use of what people can find insufferable about Miranda July's work: portraying sullen, adult truths through a lens of childlike surrealism.

Why would an adult woman call up a perfect stranger whose number is written on the back of a drawing and ask him where he lives? Why would her boyfriend have sandwiches with an old man who writes filthy limericks and then imagine the man was the voice of the moon? Who talks like that? Who dresses like that? Who makes a movie with a three-minute dance scene in which a woman writhes about completely enrobed in a T-shirt that moves on its own? Without context, all of this can appear juvenile and inchoate.

When these elements are strung together a deeper and much darker film emerges. And even if it didn’t, heaven forbid film or writing be intimate and uninhibited, for self-exposure as ripe as July's is considered shameful, perhaps even veers on appearing too feminine.

What detractors fail to identify is the overwhelming maturity in July's insistence on submitting to a tender, childlike sensibility in her work. In The Future, Sophie and Jason struggle with moving forward and becoming real people, but their recognition and gentle understanding of this problem is actually quite adult. Although a talking cat named Paw-Paw may be a hindrance for Werner Herzog disciples, perhaps it's time to find the gravity in lightness.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about coming to America.

"Galaxy Plateau" - Twin Sister (mp3)

"All Around And Away We Go" - Twin Sister (mp3)

"The Other Side of Your Face" - Twin Sister (mp3)

In Which Catfish Swim Around The Internet

Everyone We Don't Know

by SARAH ZHANG

The most indelible cinematic image of Internet "romance" may be an emoticon: ))<>((. “You poop into my butt hole and I poop into your butt hole…back and forth…forever,” types Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) to a chatroom acquaintance in Miranda July’s 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know. Out of context, this quote seems to embody the muckiest corners of the web, where our basest desires make it into the pixilated light. But Robby is only a six year-old boy – the age when kids are most fascinated with poop – and he’s all innocence and just in way over his head. The tired adage goes that nobody knows you’re a dog on the Internet, but there is Robby, a puppy really, and then there is Catfish, an entirely different beast.

The documentary Catfish chronicles the relationship between Nev Schulman, a New York City photographer and Megan Faccio, whom he meets on Facebook. Abby, Megan’s eight-year-old sister, is a talented painter, and it is her paintings of Nev’s photographs that forges the first connections between Nev and her family, headed up by the mother Angela Pierce. Soon enough Nev finds himself regularly calling, texting, gchatting his “Facebook family.”

The story’s other characters are the filmmakers, Nev’s brother Ari Schulman and friend Henry Joost, who jump on the promising storyline of Nev’s relationship. It is the not-so-secret hope of all documentarians and nonfiction writers that a story gets juicier as it unfolds, and Schulman and Joost have stumbled into a gushing fount of drama. The camera often feels uncomfortably exploitative, especially when a reluctant Nev wants to stop baring his emotional life on screen or when the sad truth of Megan's family is revealed. Although Catfish too involves a child, the exploitations it’s embedded are no child’s play.

Catfish takes perverse pleasure in pacing, especially in doling out the lies. The first half is the slow burn of flirtation between Nev and Megan. It is not only Megan, but a whole web of her family and friends, whom Ned befriends. Facebook photos of these very attractive people, scrutinized so closely by the camera that white space becomes pixilated, flash across the screen. But as anyone with the slightest cynical impulse has probably already intuited: the photographs are lies, Megan is a lie.

It begins to unravel when she sends Nev her own cover of a song that turns out, like all the other songs she has posted on her Facebook page, to be rips of YouTube videos. Nev confronts her over gchat. Instant messaging is not especially cinematic – text on a screen conveys none of the tone or facial expressions that actors are trained to mimic – but Nev’s reaction says enough for them both. He wants to quit the documentary, yet his brother and Joost egg him on. This simple documentary about a guy and a girl becomes a quest for the truth.

So off they to go Ishpeming, Michigan to meet the family. Each time a lie is peeled away, the scab of a new lie takes its place. Angela turns out to be a frumpy middle-aged woman, not the lithe blonde of her Facebook. Abby does not paint; it is actually Angela who does. Megan is not there. First Angela says she is institutionalized. Then she admits Megan is not real, but the photos on Facebook are of a family friend. The photos are actually of a model and photographer living in Vancouver. The real Angela lives with her husband Vince and her two severely disabled stepsons. Whereas the Facebook family was a band of artistic bohemians, the real one seems to befit a Southern Gothic novel. Angela is living not a double life, but multiple lives of all the family members and friends of Megan that she has created.

In an age of consent forms, why would Angela allow all of her lies to play out across America’s screens? A one sentence plot summary – mocking New York types film a documentary about a sadsack family in the Midwest – smacks of exploitation, maybe even of revenge for being fooled in the first place. Schulman and Joost’s camera is actually much more sympathetic, giving credence to Angela’s hardships and space for her thwarted aspirations to be aired. Still, some part feels like the New Yorkers have persuaded a poor woman who actually is in love with Nev into something to further their own artistic careers. “All art is exploitation” according to Sherman Alexie, especially art that co-opts the true lives of other people.

But Angela is a consummate artist too, if not exactly type the type she wanted to be. “A lot of the personalities that came out were just fragments of myself,” admits Angela. The dreams that she harbored of being a dancer and artist came to fruition with the creation of Megan and her artistic family. The false identities created by Angela are a type of art and a type of exploitation too. In a reversal of roles, it is Angela who stands the most to gain from Catfish. Nev, Ari, and Henry were already fairly successful artists in New York, whereas Angela goes from a lonely woman in Michigan to a minor celebrity.

It is hard to see her as guileless because she has proven herself so casually manipulative, going so far as to fake cancer to engender sympathy when the first holes in her story are blown. Since the documentary was filmed, she has set up her own websites to further the sale of her paintings and photographs.

In Me and You and Everyone We Know, the woman with whom Robby is chatting turns out to be an uptight curator for the contemporary art museum. At the end of the film, the camera pans across a banner announcing a new exhibit at the museum called "WARM: 3-D and TOUCH in the DIGITAL AGE." I wonder if Angela’s vast web of lies – a kind of performance art that perfectly demonstrates the continued need for human warmth and touch – would be considered in such an exhibit.

The representative image of this documentary is the catfish, which carries all of the foul and none of the innocent connotations of poop. It comes from a final monologue by Angela’s husband, Vince. The story goes like this: catfish were kept with tanks of cod to keep the cod nimble and on edge. Otherwise, their flesh would turn to mush. We need catfish in our lives, says Vince, people who will keep on our toes. As part of the film’s viral marketing campaign, Universal has been drawing chalk catfish all over the streets of Harvard Square. Near one row of chalk catfish, someone drew a giant barracuda devouring the catfish. Angela is no catfish. She is a barracuda. 

Sarah Zhang is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Cambridge. This is her first appearance on these pages. She tumbls here.

"Polygons" - Magic Man (mp3)

"Monster" - Magic Man (mp3)

"Daughter" - Magic Man (mp3)