Summertime and the living is easy. The kids on my block are out of school, loud as fuck and have claimed bottle-breaking as their newfound pastime. I have a feeling that people in my building and in the building across the street are just waiting for someone to yell “Shut the fuck up!” to these kids after 2am in order to feel encouraged themselves, freed up to follow suit. Nobody wants to call the cops, as evidenced by the fact that you’ll occasionally hear people mutter, “I don’t wanna call the cops” to someone on the phone or walking through the building during the daytime. At night some folks walk by, exasperatedly trying to tell the kids that they’re gonna bring the cops if they keep acting like fools. “Y’all are making this block hot,” etcetera.

Somebody’s smacking a stop sign, over and over again. The metal keeps reverberating. Now they've stopped; we’ll see for how long. My roommates call the bottle-breaking, ‘YO!’ shouting, ‘Fuck’ spitting kids outside the Junior Mafia. Frustration mounts.

I bring this up because some of the people in my building held an impromptu meeting a couple weeks ago after someone smashed up our main door. I did not go (though I should have) because I was making dinner, getting ready for the NBA Finals Game 6 and generally being a lazy bastard. Now there’s a sign in the hallway directing the uninvolved among us to fill out a checklist for the management company, expressing what’s wrong with our units and the building and the security.

Someone was mugged in the building earlier this year, and there has been some concern about it among the residents. At least I’m aware of that because of other signs taped up to the front door. I don’t discuss this situation with anyone other than my roommates. I really only know some of the other people that live in my building by sight, and that’s something that embarrasses me.

In any case, it seems likely that one of my nervous neighbors will have had enough soon and start calling the cops on a regular basis to ‘do something’ about these kids. Well, I wonder which will come first, the permission-giving “Shut the Fuck Up!” or the steady woop-woop. So far, the cops have come more than the community has cursed.

For the last few months it has been cost-prohibitive for me to go see films in the theaters. Therefore I have no thoughts on nearly any of the summer releases, from movies I would actually like to see (Reprise, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, Encounters at the End of The World) to movies I would see because I see almost everything (Incredible Hulk, The Happening, The Fall). I only recently got my library card after living within walking distance of the Brooklyn Central Library for more than three years and have been renting DVDs by the bagful. Oh, sorry, did I mention I’m out of work and broke as a joke? Or, ‘between things,’ as I’ve been told to say.

So I’m up till 5am most nights, watching Tanner ’88 or Bob&Carol&Ted&Alice or Shock Corridor or something else. I see people in the buildings across the way glance out at the street for some clue or reason beyond "stupid kids being stupid kids" and finding nothing of value. Some lady asked them to step away from our building’s steps and I heard “Biiiiiitch! Biiiiiitch!” in singsong for a couple of minutes.

Because I haven’t really been up on the newer releases for shit the last five to six months, much of the film writing at The House Next Door and GreenCine Daily have been somewhat meaningless for me. It used to annoy me if I went more than a day or two without checking those sites, but now I have to say it doesn’t really affect me one way or another.

Of course, when I do check in, I get super pissed off. I was going to link out to several really aggravating, short-sighted and specious essays, but really, what’s the point? If you’ve managed to avoid Glen Kenny’s Fox News-worthy suggestion that Jean-Luc Godard is anti-Semitic, all the better. Or some random attack against or defense of a Susan Sontag theory on film interpretation. The problem, as I see it, is someone always trying to replace one form of authority with another.

And it’s not just online criticism: Nathan Lee is a fourth-stringer at the NY Times. Behind Manohla Dargis and AO Scott, both of whom simply suck. Watch for AO Scott’s newest essay on the state of mainstream film criticism, and Manohla Dargis’s newest essay on the lack of Women Directors in Hollywood. Both will be really eye-opening and insightful, if you are my parents’ dog. Sample line from the Dargis essay: “No Country For Old Men…try no country for women!” Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

In Tanner ’88 someone mentions that a politician could be shamed if you just asked him to come within fifty cents of the price of a gallon of milk or a carton of eggs. Ask Dargis to name the actress who plays Josh Brolin’s wife in No Country without the help of IMDb, and you could accomplish the same feat.

Also, here’s Dargis on Samantha Morton: “With her high forehead and saucer eyes, Ms. Morton tends to look (and very often act) as if she had recently drifted in from a nearby galaxy and has yet to grow fully acclimated to planet Earth. Though her performances are sometimes disappointingly one note, her otherworldly quality can work wonderfully well in the right movie (Minority Report, for instance).” Now, if you’ve spent the time watching movies that Dargis has spent shoving her head up her ass, you know that Samantha Morton’s got a bit of a better track record than “alien woman from that Spielberg movie.”

But you can see how off-track I can get if given half the chance. Dargis’ superficial analysis and advocacy is in service of…exactly whom? She can’t even find the value in the women she sees on-screen.

Once, we were getting high in the apartment when the cops came and started rousting a few guys on the street below. I’m not sure what the incitement for their approach was, but once in front of our building, the cops definitely gave the group shit with, “It smells like weed around here; you been smoking?”

So what can you do if you don’t like the framework of an argument? Engage in it as it stands? Try to create a new framework? And how can you be sure you’re not as absolutely full of shit as the people you’re reacting to?

For a few years I’ve been meaning to read James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and I’m currently making my way through it. Here’s an Agee passage I think you’ll like:

"The momentary suspension of disbelief is perhaps (and perhaps not) all very well for literature and art: but it leaves literature and art, and it leaves an attempt such as this, in a bad hole. It means that anything set forth within an art form, ‘true’ as it may be in art terms, is hermetically sealed away from identification with everyday ‘reality.’ No matter how strong and vivid it may be, its strength and vividness are not of that order which, in the open air of our actual, personal living, we draw in every time we breathe. Even at its very best it is make believe, requiring the killing insult of ‘suspension of disbelief,’ because it is art. This is in some degree true even of the most ‘real’ writing I know. It is simply impossible for anyone, no matter how high he may place it, to do art the simple but total honor of accepting and believing it in the terms in which he accepts and honors breathing, lovemaking, the look of a newspaper, the street he walks through. If you think of that a little while, and have any respect for art and for what it is or should be capable of if it is to be held worthy of its own existence, that is a crucially serious matter." (p240. ed.1988)

Agee has some amazing earlier passages that advocate against treating his book as a work of art. In that sense he tries to change the framework of the argument before he really even begins. But you can see Agee’s deep ambivalence about his ultimate efficacy throughout the book. It’s no surprise that David Simon, creator of “The Wire”, is a big fan.

Part of the problem in relating to the (art)World is that antagonism and advocacy each have their merits, but each is lacking. The perfect balance between the two is anyone’s guess.

So just call the cops or grow a pair of balls and yell “Shut The Fuck Up!” I don’t think I could reason with the Junior Mafia. I’m not some kind of idealistic idiot. “Shut The Fuck Up!” might be some kind of bizarre, fanciful, Lumet-inspired concept of how New Yorkers are supposed to handle conflict. And two weeks from now, when the freedom of summer has dissipated into steady boredom, the Junior Mafia might settle into a dull routine like the rest of us, conflict dissipating of its own accord. Or rather; everyone, responding to a confluence of factors that exist well beyond my frame of reference and deep-set ignorance, will move onto some other battle.

At least that’s how these recycling ideological arguments I get into tend to work. And of course, the frustration lingers.

I’m reading Agee, but I have Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations sitting in the bathroom. He’s another writer I’ve been meaning to check out since my college days. I’ll leave you with this little charmer of a passage on authority and rigged arguments:

Hence Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries—a simulation of scandal to regenerative ends. This is embodied by the character called “Deep Throat”, who was said to be a Republican grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order to get rid of Nixon—and why not? All hypotheses are possible, although this one is superfluous: the work of the Right is done very well, and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naďve to see an embittered good conscience at work here. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left. All hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another, where there is no longer any active or passive. It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. (p30-31. ed.1983)