i dream in super eight

Sunday morning, I caught the last 10 minutes of “Like It Is,” a locally-produced, African-American community affairs program that barely registers on the WABC-7 web site when you search for it. It’s often pre-empted for sports and seems perennially in danger of being cancelled, apparently because it’s good. By the time I tuned in, host Gil Noble and his guests — Les Payne of Newsday, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, and investigative reporter Greg Palast — were discussing journalism, its failures and its future. The fairly high level of discourse was one of those reminders that public discourse can still have, you know, levels. Noble, in closing, thanked his guests for a “nutritious conversation” and somehow it carried none of the self-congratulatory overtones you get on NPR.

Towards the end of program, Noble asked the roundtable what advice they would give to young journalists. While the Internet was optimistically praised as a medium for voices that would otherwise be silenced, not surprisingly, the outlook for journalism as a profession — as a public service you can perform for a living wage — wasn’t rosy. The message: Get a degree in economics or medicine or some other field and then write from that base of knowledge and experience. You’re gonna need some way to financially support yourself in order to avoid the kind of careerism that produces complacent, press-release rewriting. Which is, to a great extent, all there’s a market for at a time when the media is largely funded by and beholden to corporate interests.

Journalism has probably always been a compromised profession. (Read Dawn Powell’s satirical novel “A Time to Be Born,” published in 1942, for a damning/fun look at the cynicism and hypocrisy driving the media back then). As much as the press has been democracy’s conscience, sensationalism and sheer omission have always trumped efforts to speak truth to power. It’s hard to believe, though, that it hasn’t gotten worse. And I haven’t even watched the Wire’s final-season treatment of the subject. All right, I’m going to stop now because this post is starting to make me feel like one of those white people who like stuff.

Watched Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman last weekend and loved it for being one of those movies that sets a tone and a mood you want to live in for a while.

Mazursky, here at least, is a director who likes people — both the characters in his movie and the audience watching it. He trusts them to be complex, intelligent creatures who can feel conflicting things and hold more than one idea in their heads at a time. He gives us a movie that’s adult in its comprehension of the world and its take on relationships, in the way it’s both light and serious, clear-eyed but still hopeful. Frankly, it makes the neurotic highs and lows of Annie Hall (an obvious peer and a movie I like because of its sentimentality) look stunted and limited in emotional scope.

Phrases like “groundbreaking when it came out” — in the Netflix summary — make it sound dated and I figured I might be watching it mostly for shots of pre-retailed Soho and cool seventies clothes. While it’s satisfying on both these counts (Jill Clayburgh, I’ll take your winter coat and boots!), the only noticeably dated aspect seemed to be the score. Okay, so maybe it’s not realistic that Jill Clayburgh’s divorcee would meet Alan Bates’s available artist as she does. But watching them get together feels real and also refreshing. Especially these days, when the message of so much of the crap that passes for a cultural conversation about women and love is that the key to everything is to find a husband before your sell-by date. (I think what I find almost more offensive and dumb than likening a woman to a carton of milk and idealizing marriage as a cure-all is the assumption that there is, in fact, a key to everything).

Roger Ebert in 1978 wrote:

An Unmarried Woman is such a good picture not because it states vast truths about men and women but because it finds that there are none; its heroine and, maybe the rest of us, are in a muddle most of the time, and depend more than we’d want to admit on old friendships, white wine, and quiet desperation to get us through. Having established that point, Mazursky then goes on to provide hope—or Alan Bates, anyway. And he does it in a movie so firmly in control of its language, its body movement, its personal interplays, its most fleeting facial expressions (remember the daughter’s dubious little sniff?) that we’re touched by real human sensibilities here.

Next up in the queue is Blume in Love. Mazursky-mania!