{"id":2286,"date":"2019-01-02T18:38:25","date_gmt":"2019-01-02T18:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2286"},"modified":"2019-08-12T18:40:41","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T18:40:41","slug":"my-own-private-top-ten-of-2018-the-paradigms-do-shift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2286","title":{"rendered":"My Own Private Top-Ten of 2018: The Paradigms Do Shift"},"content":{"rendered":"

2018 was, as I\u2019ve recently written elsewhere<\/a>, a year of boundary-busting black achievement in the arts and\u00a0 much of what follows below will re-emphasize this point. But it was also a year when you needed<\/em> black storytellers to step up, lean in and heave grenades at whatever retro-reactionary politics are throwing their weight around the country.<\/p>\n

And you also needed these stories to reinforce something you wont hear on Meet the Press<\/em> or anywhere else on daytime TV: whatever the \u201calt-right\u201d or its enablers believe they\u2019re trying to defeat has already triumphed. We have become, in pop-cultural terms, so diverse, multi-ethnic and blended together that even using the \u201cmulticultural\u201d term so despised by Fox News and its minions is redundant and likely no longer the point. I\u2019m aware that stuff keeps happening to innocent, unarmed people-of-color that mitigates this impact. But whether anybody in positions of power cares to acknowledge it or not, the \u201cculture wars\u201d they\u2019ve been fretting about since at least before the century started have been all but won \u2013 and those of us on the winning side should start acting like it no matter what the legacy news organizations say.<\/p>\n

It\u2019ll take more time for this news to sink in \u2013 and part of acknowledging victory is accepting the fact that there will always be a hard, prickly core of humanity that will never accept the results. But what James Baldwin published sixty-five years ago is truer now \u2013 and, for many, harder to accept: \u201cThe world is white no longer and it will never be white again.\u201d<\/p>\n

My totally subjective, utterly random list of whatever moved or grooved me in 2018 is not totally white or black or pink or yellow. I\u2019m not sure where on the prism it is and I like it that way. As usual \u2013 and I cannot stress this enough \u2013 these are all in no particular order:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Killing Eve<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 The wiggiest British TV spy series since a fat white blob immobilized Patrick McGoohan a half-century ago was also the year\u2019s most irresistible dish of nuts: eat one and all the rest are instant history. Nutty is the ideal word to characterize this continent-spanning cat-and-mouse game between a frowsy, doggedly inquisitive MI-5 analyst (Sandra Oh) and a button-cute sociopath (Jodie Comer) who can\u2019t help showing off when she\u2019s murdering people in secret. The story, awash in sultry inference and disorienting menace, carries more double- and triple-crosses per episode than a John Le Carr\u00e9 novel. And creator-producer Phoebe Waller-Bridge\u2019s variations on Luke Jennings\u2019 \u201cVillanelle\u201d series of short-form thrillers are jolting and darkly witty enough to make you feel throughout as though you\u2019re watching Patricia Highsmith convulse on laughing gas. Among the show\u2019s myriad satisfactions is seeing Oh thrive in the deep-dish central role her brilliant career has merited and in beholding the relatively lesser-known Comer, a hoot-and-a-half as an angel-of-death who is as good at her work as she is poignantly flawed. We await a second season with these damaged souls wondering how they and their respective handlers, enablers and hangers-on can possibly continue, much less surpass, the craziness they \u2013 and we \u2013 have already undergone.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lorraine Hansbury: Sighted Eyes\/Feeling Heart<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 The year was so crowded with turmoil and exasperation on a day-to-day basis that it was easy to forget that Tracy Heather Strain\u2019s illuminating documentary had aired way back in January on PBS\u2019s American Masters<\/em> series. Remembering it now renews one\u2019s profound gratitude for not only restoring the author of A Raisin in the Sun<\/em> to contemporary consciousness, but in bringing forth the complete person in all her complexities, contradictions and, above all, courage, whether in living out her precociously uncompromising radical politics, confronting Bobby Kennedy over his brother\u2019s foot-drag on civil rights and coping with love and life as a closeted lesbian. It felt bracing and, above all, timely to have her back among us, even if her most significant work of art never went away.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 If you abhor comic-book movies, I\u2019m not going to judge, or dismiss your qualms about seeing this one. As much as I loved Marvel Comics in my protracted adolescence, I now find in the whole superhero movie corpus a distressingly anti-democratic strain that implicitly encourages its devotees to abandon their individual agency and submit to those with greater, higher powers. (It remains my principal misgiving towards Black Panther<\/em> and the accompanying \u201cWakanda Forever\u201d phenomenon, however much I enjoyed the movie and endorsed its salutary impact on global movie markets.) But the giddily \u201cmeta\u201d nature of this iteration of the web-slinging wonder both opens up the genre to fresh appreciation and brings its inflated pretenses and aspirations for personal transcendence to something resembling ground-level; actually more like street-level in the case of Miles Morales, brown-skinned schoolboy prodigy resisting the isolation of his nascent genius as he finds himself bitten by the same radioactive spider that juiced Peter Parker\u2019s metabolism to near-invincibility. The Peter Parker in Miles\u2019 world has been killed, but a tear in the cosmos caused by\u2026oh, never mind\u2026results in a riot of multiverses from which a handful of other similarly bitten boys, girls, men, women and even cartoon pigs spill into Miles\u2019 Brooklyn all capable of walking on walls, shooting out web fluid and pounding evildoers three times their respective sizes. The narrative is persistently clever and the animation is surprisingly evocative. Which brings me to another of my biases towards comic-book movies: that a pair of feature-length animated Batman movies are far better realized than all their live-action counterparts and that no Superman movie, not even those with the late, lamented Christopher Reeve resides as deeply in my devotion as the Fleischer animated shorts of the 1940s. The lesson being that maybe, just maybe, the best comic book movies are those that look most like a damn comic book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 Don\u2019t get me wrong. I\u2019m as charmed by The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel<\/em>\u2019s second season as I was with its predecessor. And yet, as was the case last year, the show\u2019s sheer momentum threatens to exhaust me before I\u2019m halfway through its run. It seems to start from a point way above my head and just keeps rocketing skyward on hyper-thrusts of spritz. More often than not, I kept wondering whether Rachel Brosnahan walks that fast in real life and if so, how much carbo-loading does it take for her to get through an average day. It\u2019s only when Luke Kirby\u2019s Lenny Bruce materializes from the shadows that Mrs. Maisel<\/em> takes a knee, along with a deep breath, to retrieve its bearings<\/a>. At first Kirby\u2019s dead-solid rendering of Bruce\u2019s mannerisms, vocal tics and stage swagger seemed little more than a plot device, a sharkskin Jiminy Cricket, or Obi-Wan Kenobi in thin lapels popping up to remind Midge of Her One True Way. This season, there was something more haunting and maybe a shade more ominous in Lenny\u2019s once-insouciant temperament; faint traces, even as far back as 1960, of blue meanies closing in on his incendiary shtick. Back then, as some of us are old enough to remember, the straights went after Lenny for speaking the unspeakable. It\u2019s a good thing we\u2019ve evolved to the free-and-open cultural dialogue of our own time, isn\u2019t it? That little qualifier at the end should make watching Kirby\u2019s Lenny an even more unsettling interlude to the wacky-pack chronicles of Miriam Maisel\u2019s midcentury coming-of-age.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Brian Tyree Henry as Everyman<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 I\u2019m not alone in believing that the second \u201crobbin\u2019\u201d season of Donald Glover\u2019s masterly Atlanta<\/em> saw the ascension of Alfred \u201cPaper Boi\u201d Miles to the series\u2019 center stage.<\/a> As the eternally grumpy, enigma-wrapped-in-a-riddle rap-star-in-the-making, Brian Tyree Henry himself became a rising star as he made his working-class-stoner persona bend and react to the narrative\u2019s quasi-surrealist tropes and to the increasingly dubious rewards of Paper Boi\u2019s cult stardom. Henry\u2019s own presence has, like Al\u2019s, been spreading throughout the cultural mainstream from a vocal role in the aforementioned Spider-Verse<\/em> to a Tony-nominated performance in Kenneth Lonergan\u2019s Lobby Hero<\/em> to a wide range of movie roles, including the political kingpin in Widows<\/em> and an ex-convict in If Beale Street Could Talk.<\/em> Though he isn\u2019t in the latter movie for very long, Henry\u2019s presence during a sad, tense conversation with the movie\u2019s star-crossed lovers (Stephan James and KiKi Layne) crystalizes the legal system\u2019s devastation upon black men\u2019s lives and the oblivion that swallows their dreams. At that moment, Beale Street<\/em> becomes something larger and more all encompassing than even the intense love story at its core and Brian Tyree Henry is transformed into every friend we ever had whose life was unjustly ruined by casual systemic racism.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Sisters Brothers<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 The year\u2019s most talked-about western movie was the Coen Brothers\u2019 cheeky, rusty-dusty Netflix pastiche The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.<\/em> I liked it, too (most of it anyway). But I very much preferred Jacques Audiard\u2019s statelier, more traditionally mounted genre piece that was unfairly gunned down in cold blood at the box office. It was in its way as quirky as the Coens\u2019 mash-up, but its satisfactions were deeper, more redolent of what those of us who grew up with westerns (like, say, me and Audiard) remembered best; their measured pacing, ritualized stoicism and gritty characters. Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly as the eponymous outlaw brothers offered familiar personality contrasts with Phoenix, not surprisingly, throwing off wayward sparks and Reilly, maybe more surprisingly, evoking enough gravitas to carry the movie\u2019s moral core. That some critics dismissed the story\u2019s rambling manner said less about the movie\u2019s shortcomings than the collective amnesia of contemporary audiences towards the kind of discursive storytelling that moviegoers took for granted in the days when Ford, Hawks, Mann, Boetticher and Peckinpah rode directors\u2019 chairs on desert sound stages.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Heads of the Colored People<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 Among the auspicious debut story collections published in 2018 by African American writers, this one remains my favorite for the stealthy wit and acerbic observation sustained in a variety of settings. \u201cBelles Lettres,\u201d for instance, is presented in the form of increasingly snarky notes planted by black \u201cbourgie\u201d moms in their daughters\u2019 backpacks. The title story is a darkly comic and ultimately tragic tale of an encounter outside a comic book convention between a \u201ccos\u201d-wearing fan and a street entrepreneur. Then there\u2019s the inventive and similarly harrowing\/funny \u201cSuicide, Watch\u201d [sic] in which a young woman uses social media to determine how, or if, she should do away with herself. Nafissa Thompson-Spires has a talent large enough to propel her towards a novel, and I can\u2019t wait to see what she does. An honest-to-goodness African American variation on Catcher in the Rye<\/em>? It\u2019s certainly within her grasp, but I dunno: I really like what she does within the tighter corners of the short story<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Equalizer 2<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 What throws you a little when watching Antoine Fuqua\u2019s pared-to-the-bone franchise sequel isn\u2019t how much Denzel Washington has aged. (His character is called \u201cPops\u201d by one of the preppie predators he\u2019s about to break into several gratifying pieces.) It\u2019s how beautiful he remains to watch in stillness, even though his eyes at times betray a compound of world-weariness and cumulative horror over what his sixty-something vigilante-bibliophile has witnessed in a gloomy, bloody life. Washington has achieved more than a veteran\u2019s smooth grace in front of the cameras. He\u2019s made watchfulness into a movie star trademark and is carrying this stripped-down persona into what promises to be a golden age of elder statesman roles, only without the implied stiffness and solemnity. Artist-craftsmen who casually wear their gifts are easily taken for granted; a mistake that has not and should never be made in Denzel Washington\u2019s case.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Random Acts of Flyness<\/strong> <\/em>— \u201cRACE IS A SYNONYM FOR WHITE SUPREMACY\u201d is one of the flash cards whizzing by in the fifth and penultimate episode of this HBO series which along with
\nSorry To Bother You<\/em> was the year’s most emphatic and adventurous expression of black-bohemian-futurist consciousness. I\u2019ve already had my say about Boots Riley\u2019s impudent phantasm of a feature film.<\/a> But I\u2019m still sorting through my reactions to Terence Nance\u2019s mash-up of sketch comedy, animated shorts, ideological infomercial and time-warped romance. It\u2019s been called \u201cKey & Peele on Acid\u201d and \u201cMonty Python for Woke People,\u201d though I think the whole notion of \u201cwoke\u201d-ness is among the many present-day rhetorical motifs Nance and his collective of artists, actors and insurgents are interrogating. In that same episode (to my mind the best and most intensely realized), the \u201cwoke\u201d concept is countered with the idea that sometimes sleep may be good for you and I\u2019m still not sure, after many weeks of \u201csleeping\u201d on this show that it\u2019s being in any way sarcastic; it even implies that sleep, or at least, rest (e.g. contemplation) isn\u2019t an evasion or a denial of \u201cwoke\u201d-ness, but a means of protecting one\u2019s own autonomy over one\u2019s \u2013 whadyacall? \u2013 soul? If that drive-by notion can plunge the unwary into a deep, broad pool of thought, you can imagine how the myriad content of the other five episodes seeps into your head; \u201cimagining \u201cbeing both the method and the meaning behind Flyness<\/em> \u2013 which has been given at least another season to snap at your comfort levels.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965-2016<\/em> <\/strong>\u2013 It has all come down, or risen up to this: The largest, most expansive exhibit the Museum of Modern Art has ever staged for a living artist. For the first half of 2018, MoMa\u2019s whole sixth floor was occupied with drawings, photographs, videos, cards, signage and whole rooms of Piper\u2019s variegated output over six decades as performance artist, minimalist, creator of \u201chappenings\u201d and insurgent Kantian philosopher. The sheer heft and breadth of her oeuvre\u00a0 taunt anyone\u2019s efforts to express its essence, but Thomas Chatterton Williams, in an New York Times Magazine article as illuminating and frustratingly complex as his subject,<\/a> came as close as anybody could when he wrote that Piper \u201chas been quietly conducting, from that vexed and ever-expanding blot on the American fabric where white and black bleed into each other, one of the smartest, funniest and most profound interrogations of the racial madness that governs and stifles our national life that I had ever encountered.\u201d Whether it\u2019s a \u201chumming room\u201d whose guards encourage everybody entering it to hum a melody, any melody; or the mercurial self-portraits that play approach-avoidance games with her African American heritage; the \u201cspace-time-infinity\u201d pieces tearing and nibbling at the perceptions of useable space on a geometric plane; the famous, or infamous calling cards that tweak unsuspecting strangers for casual or unwitting racism and sexism\u2026All of it breathtaking, intimidating and provocative at once. Piper now lives a near-monastic existence in Germany and has, as of four years before, \u201cretired\u201d from being black, issuing this announcement in yet another irony-infused self-portrait in which she darkened her pale brown skin. All this and she can still dance her ass off.<\/a> I remember wandering from the exhibit dazed, bemused and utterly refreshed. (Two words flashed in my frontal lobes: Trickster Goddess.) The last century didn\u2019t quite know what to make of her. Maybe this one will..<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2018 was, as I\u2019ve recently written elsewhere, a year of boundary-busting black achievement in the arts and\u00a0 much of what follows below will re-emphasize this point. But it was also a year when you needed black storytellers to step up, lean in and heave grenades at whatever retro-reactionary politics are throwing their weight around the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124,185,812,368],"tags":[962,965,658,964,959,960,961,963],"class_list":["post-2286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-on-writing-lit-and-unlit","category-politics-other-disappointments","category-tv-reviews","tag-adrian-piper","tag-brian-tyree-henry","tag-denzel-washington","tag-into-the-spider-verse","tag-killing-eve","tag-lorraine-hansbury","tag-nafissa-thompson-spires","tag-random-acts-of-flyness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2286"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2435,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions\/2435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}