Books:
Disoriental by Negar Djavadi
This book is a memoir disguised as fiction about a woman and her family who flee Iran in the late ‘70s and move to a highly racist Paris and what happens to them. I’m conflicted about this book. On the one hand, I struggled throughout with a stylistic choice the author made to jump around narratively and tell a lot of backstories of secondary characters instead of focusing on the one main story, perhaps because she had a million things to say but couldn’t figure out a way to say them through one narrative so just meted it all out to various minor characters; on the other, I thought the writing was strong. I mean I connected with the deeply personal and intense nature of the story itself, but I struggled with the way it was told because, while I understood that all the side character stories were there to kind of enrich the main narrative, for me they mostly served to pull me out of the main narrative, like I’m into the story then the story I’m into vanishes for some chunk of time for some other story - which is perfectly finely written but really not linked in a narrative way to the main story - then repeat. I found the arena to be somewhat interesting (Iran in the ‘70s with the main character the youngest daughter of politically activist parents) but what it really felt like was that was that the author was writing this for herself not for an audience, i.e. since the youngest daughter (read: the author (I assume)) was around 10 when the family fled to Paris, she doesn’t have a ton of memories of that time and her experience of that culture so she gathered a bunch of family stories about relatives and whatnot to fill in gaps in her own cultural backstory and to flesh out different experiences of racism and cultural adaptation as experienced by immigrants like the rest of her family vs. someone too young to remember much of it let alone have perspective on it. So I don’t know. The author can write and I can’t say the book is categorically bad, but it’s fragments not a cohesive story and because of that I found it somewhat of a chore to read even though I understood I was reading something with some quality.
TV/Streaming:
American Song Contest (Season 1):
This is an atrocity in like 5000 different ways the primary one being, given that it's a SONG CONTEST, it has possibly some of the worst songs ever written in the history of broadcast media and I’m including as songs noises used primarily for distance communication by ancient cultures like digeridoos, Navajo groaning sticks, or, come to think of it, just plain shouting which has more musical quality and interest than literally one single song written for this show. "Worst" in this case doesn't mean incoherent or non-melodic or something (honestly, if only) but rather it means the most generically imitative of other stuff you've heard. If derivative is what you're into, well you have 55 original (which in this case means right at the edge of copyright infringement because they’re so exactly the same as a million other things you’ve heard) songs completely overproduced and performed by mostly blah singers. Weirdly, 4 known successful singers perform (three of which I'd actually heard of which was a miracle) and - and I can't believe I'm saying this and the only possible justification I can make maybe is that the hair changed which perhaps forced me to reconsider my long-held prior opinion or maybe relative to all the other awfulness I understood that what I once considered to be the dead awful center of boring "next"-inducing mediocrity, the kind that spoke (not well I might add) to the character of the people who bought and listened to this shit is actually kind of tough to pull off - Michael Bolton was really pretty good. The other known performers - I won't spoiler whether or not they make it to the finale though that presupposes you'll be awake for the finale - are Jewel (beyond awful), Sisqo (Thong Song), and someone I'd never heard of but I guess is a middle-aged Youtube star who sounds a lot like Jamiroquai (no I refuse to Google to check my spelling) who (which?) in turn had a Steve Wonderish kind of vocal tone. The structure of the show is 11 songs per episode (50 states plus DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and, ummmmmm, another American territory I'm forgetting (and if you’re feeling WTF about America and its strangely broad territorialism (like military bases on foreign soil and do you see any foreign military bases on American soil?), How to Hide an Empire is a pretty interesting book on the topic)) with some offscreen music industry jurors ranking them with the top pick going through immediately and America voting for the rest of the songs that move on. So there's 20 in the semifinal then 10 in the final. And you know what that means? You get to hear the same shitty-ass song either 1, 2, or 3 times depending on how far the person makes it all of which are 1, 2, or 3 times too many. The hosts are Kelly Clarkson and Snoop and in some ways they're the sole entertaining part of the show and in others you can see how they've been squashed - well Snoop at least - into some '50s network conception of family-friendly which, btw, is why no one is watching network anymore because network caters to advertisers who seem convinced that everyone is locked in the '50s and thus anything of this ilk paid for by advertisers - and really who else would pay because this show would basically guarantee cancelled subscriptions on any other platform - has this weird, cult-like positivity to it in which everyone is an amazing individual celebrating their heritage no matter how shitty the song is. Though all this did allow for the kind of entertaining part of Kelly Clarkson which was that she was clearly raised by Southerners as not one thing that came out of her mouth was anything less than completely OTT supportive combined with her overstating her compliment then moving on to something else as if it had never happened, which was sort of riveting to watch like this, "That was amazing song, man that lyric really hit home and such a catchy hook, what an incredible singer now let's check the scores." It was pretty impressive because she had to do that in slightly different ways like around 85 times total since that's around how many songs were performed and hat’s off, Kelly, I can see why you have a daytime talk show I’ll never be watching. Sadly, though not unexpectedly, they genereicized Snoop as well. I mean yeah there were stoner references, but mostly it was atrociously-written quote unquote jokes by what felt like a computer-generated writing squad that had been trained solely on a combination of lip-reading post-WWII ba-dum-dum standup comics and the intros/outros of game show hosts, like he had the rhythm of jokes but the text of ensuring things moved along enough so the crew wouldn't go into overtime. Now where was I? Yeah, well, really only watch if you're desperate and like hearing the same boring song repeated multiple times which you can do on Spotify so I’m not really sure why you’d bother let alone why I did.
Her Mother's Killer:
You know what? I know this show - a big Colombian revenge drama about a political operative getting back at the evil guy now running for President who - spoiler in the title! - murdered her mother when she was a kid - is contrived and dumb and scored by someone randomly moving one hand on a Casio keyboard while playing Wordle with the other - a future American Song Contest Colombia Edition winner no doubt - but I didn't care! It's ridiculous, but in the fun satisfying way that '80s non-Casio-scored primetime soaps were ridiculous. There are secrets within secrets, crazy behavior, insane dialogue, impossible character choices, and plot contrivances out the yin-yang, all of which makes for some extremely easy-to-digest entertainment. Oh did I mention the vengeful political operative is going under a hidden identity so the bad guy won't know who she is (due to a spoilerable plot point)? So '80s! I'm not going into plot at all because there are a billion spoilers, but if you don't care about the stupidity and are looking for something that goes down easy with some eye candy and another oh did I mention it's 58 episodes (around 45 mins each), well you could really do worse. I like these sorts of shows for the same reason I like Turkish soap operas (though this is a miniseries compared to Turkish soap operas which run between, oh, 150-300 episodes) which is that they're the viewing equivalent of beach reads - there's romance, there's mystery, but because they're kind of dumb you know that nothing really too terrible will happen in the end and the leads will assuredly wind up getting together and the length is actually part of the appeal because, as with daytime soap operas, the familiarity and knowing this bit of silliness is gonna be around your viewing life for a while is sometimes exactly what you need. And if you have that need and, far from being bothered by the plot absurdities necessary to drag a story out for so many episodes, are instead delighted to have something you'll be able to zone out to for a while, then I'd say go for this.
Movies:
The White Tiger - This is kind of a Trojan Horse movie in that it's a deeply strange social power dynamics black-comedy in this guise of a somewhat cliche bouncy film about an impoverished Indian's economic rise. So basically it's about a poor but smart kid whose life choices are so constrained by India's caste system (these days essentially poor/disposable vs rich which is kind of the caste system planetwide) that he doesn't even realize he has choices which leads to his dawning realization about the inequity of this situation and a decision of what to do about it. The plot of the movie - though really it's not all that plot-driven - is that the lead becomes a driver for the son of the mafioso who runs his village and in some ways, other than the last say fifteen minutes, that's the entire plot. I guess this movie was based on a novel and in fact there was a weird filmic device where scenes would randomly cut to black, which perhaps was a chapter break or something though really it felt like maybe this was originally a TV series somewhere and they glued all the episodes together and called it a movie. I don't think that's the case btw; rather I think the story is episodic and the screenwriter didn't know how to deal with that in film form so just took episodes and put them back-to-back. That being said, the movie wasn't bad, especially the last half. Here's why. The first half really felt a lot like a bajillion movies of this ilk, some Indian some other cultures, that we've seen where the poor guy is trying to wedge his way out of the constraints of his impoverishment by sucking up to the rich guy. In this case - and I believe this was to make a cultural point though honestly as you can tell from my "I believe" if so I wouldn't say it was a resounding success - the rich guy is the mafioso son who's just returned from spending years in NYC along with his Indian-American wife. I believe the culture point was something along the lines of a tug between Indian-Indian and Indian-American perspectives but that didn't really play exactly for me. Like I knew it was there but I wasn't getting the fine points. So our lead becomes the driver and there's a whole thing where, because one's American and the other’s spent time in the U.S., they don't want to treat him like dirt the way all the other servants are treated though of course they kind of do. And then there's a plot point I won't spoiler that results in him really being treated like dirt though maintaining his fake can-do attitude the entire time. And that was more or less the first half of the film.
The second half - his awakening and then plot to turn on his oppressors (in some ways starting with himself for buying into the system that's keeping him down) - was much weirder and darker and ultimately more interesting for me. The weirdness, which was a positive in my mind, was this kind of series of dark thoughts about his life and his circumstances and a plot point I won't spoiler driving him to think about what to do about it all set against a lot of bouncy music and some really strange character choices - for example when he's struggling with what to do and is in some dumpy part of town and sees what I think was a crazy person squatting, our lead takes his pants off and squats and laughs hysterically along with the crazy person and we sit in that moment for a bit. Strange right? I liked this part a lot more because it was saying something and, because of the way Indian society is structured (at least in the film), was backing the character into either staying down or making a very expensive and consequential choice both morally and in his reality to make a move up - I'm sure this all worked better in the book because it's very much about the transformation of a state of mind rather than plot. That being said, the film made me think, I liked where it pulled the character, I understood the dilemma and choices and while, yeah, the beginning wasn't super great, I was okay with it all in the end because it had a bit of an "oh, wow, you went there" feel to the final choices that I ended up enjoying. It's not that the first half is bad, just kind of sluggish and seeming to have no point beyond the one you can already infer about poverty vs wealth in a corrupt society, but it ends up going somewhere interesting so in the end it definitely wasn't a waste of time.