Rachel Kushner: Better Than Good

Only a select few can write books one delays eating and sleeping for. Rachel Kushner is another familiar name I’m just catching up with and I’m pleased to close out 2022 with a book of hers I found quite difficult to pull myself away from, a collection of essays from across her publishing career, which form a sort of fragmented memoir, called The Hard Crowd (2021).  

She covers a lot of ground, within her best essays and from one to the next. And not as someone on assignment, formal and impersonal, but with the energy and freedom granted by going wherever curiosity or memory leads, combined with the intimacy of the I-voice. The first is about an exceptional experience: Kushner's life in San Francisco, CA as a motorcycle enthusiast and an illegal race she participates in that could have killed her but thankfully only tore her up. It’s far-reaching yet compressed personal history. It’s an adventure tale. It’s an insider’s account that gripped me even though I’m almost hostile to the subject (dangerous to more than just the motorcyclist, especially the way her friends rode). And it’s a tribute to the dead.  

The second essay is also about an exceptional, though very different, experience: life among the second-class citizens of Israel, the Palestinians, in the Shuafat Refugee Camp of East Jerusalem. Years have passed and Kushner is now a writer. She doesn’t know much about the intractable conflict, so she tours the area alongside a good man with a good name, Baha Nababta. Her presence is novel and the kids love Nababta, a community organizer who’s dedicated his life to improving the camp however he can. They begin to gather around and shadow the pair, turning the tour into a little parade. “Hello America!” one kid shouts. In a barbershop, another kid flexes his arm for Kushner. His muscle is described as a “baby potato.” Such heartwarming scenes are followed by devastating scenes that are routine for them, in a place neglected by the authorities unless they need to inflict pain, a place without access to health care or education, without safe roads or housing, turned lawless.  

One, two: Thrills at 130 mph and funereal pace. Danger by choice and danger (and misery) one is born into, with hardly a chance to escape. Both a tribute to the dead, in different registers. 

She had me. I’d bet that most anyone who reads those two pieces, “Girl on a Bike” and “We Are Orphans Here,” unless you’re a self-pitying ex-boyfriend with a cringeworthy pet phrase in the former case, or barred by hate and ignorance in the latter, will have to read the book until the end. And from there I began to ask myself if she could meet the standard set by the best essayists. For instance: Does she have the power to make anything she wants to talk about interesting?  

Not quite. Kushner has the style. She isn’t flashy, she isn’t remarkably playful or weird. She’s never less than limpid and dexterous, knows the value of a splash of color rather than a torrent. I can count on one hand how many verbal missteps I found in the entire book, all minor, no need to say another word about them. Every essay has sentences to savor, a beguiling rhythm to get into. But it isn’t enough to overcome the jargon and esoteric information in certain spots. I’ve found it’s one of the most difficult balancing acts: The expert, or someone writing about an obsession, doesn’t necessarily want to stop and explain for anyone who doesn't know what he or she does. It interrupts the flow and, over time, it could get tiresome for the writer, as though one is permanently stuck in an introductory mode. Avoid it, however, and the general reader may find it inaccessible, no matter how nice the presentation. Now the essay is only for other stamp collectors. When Kushner writes at length about cars, she brings me down, because I don’t particularly care about cars and the essay doesn’t give me enough of a reason to care. This is a series of sentences as they appear in “Flying Cars”: 

There’s a 1965 Mercury Marauder. I always like those. Even if the lines are a little square, the fastback makes up for it, but it’s a car that has to have sport rims or forget it.  

Why is 1965 the chicane through which all American car design went from curvy to boxy? 

Nineteen sixty-eight was another chicane, which led to puffy quarter panels, and even outright blimpage. 

Same as when she writes about Jeff Koons, which is her at her most dry, removed, and slightly pedantic. After reading it, I formed no opinion about his work whatsoever. (And I know I’m capable of taking an interest in the visual arts: Peter Schjeldahl, for example, can guide me into his obsessions and convince me to care and without necessarily writing as though for someone who’s never stepped foot in a gallery.) Read individually, this could be a problem. Kushner gets away with some expert-level pieces because, again, those sentences, and they’re tucked in the middle. In any case, as she explains in her closing essay, she doesn’t mind being bored by your story. From which I gather: she’s willing to risk boring you.  

In one memorable instance, Kushner demonstrates that she can write a good introductory piece if she so chooses. “Is Prison Necessary?” profiles Ruth Wilson Gilmore, an activist and professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in what would surely be a widely controversial subject if more people knew about it: prison abolition. I arrived with some prior reading experience and interest in the prison system. Kushner walks the reader through the subject, heated reactions, and responses to those (inevitable) reactions. What if the prison system, for all the cost, for all the suffering and environmental damage it causes, doesn’t make us any safer? The piece asks readers to consider an alternative. (And it points out that prison originally was the reform. Doesn’t mean society has exhausted its options and can’t keep evolving.) I wasn’t entirely swayed – Gilmore wrote an acclaimed book on her work that’s too complex to summarize – but it managed to make me usefully embarrassed at times. She challenges misconceptions about the number of low-level drug offenders that are locked up in the US and the exaggerated problem of for-profit prisons, and I realize some of my opinions on the matter have been received. I will cease to spread them and locate Gilmore’s book. 

I don’t have a copy handy but I believe it’s in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound that a stranger insists on helping Zuckerman with his health issues as thanks for his depiction of New Jersey. Now I understand the impulse when I think about Kushner’s essays on San Francisco. In “Not with the Band,” she recounts her experiences working as a bartender in the city’s most famous music venues. This writer on work and music: no risk of boring me. A couple of things about it. I must mention the best opening to a set I’ve heard of. It happens at the Fillmore. A great band requests to have Barry White’s “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little Bit More Baby” play just before coming on. (I can practically hear my brother Miguel in the crowd say: “oh shiiit!”) If you don’t know this song, and you’re cool enough to enjoy sexy 70s grooves, play it. First the drummer comes onstage. He sits behind the kit and starts tapping his hi-hat to the song’s beat. “One by one the musicians came onstage and joined in. In a sharkskin suit and white shoes, Nick Cave took the microphone, and the transition from Barry White to the Bad Seeds was complete.” Can't be topped. Second: Kushner is invited to a bar that hosts PJ Harvey. Even though she’s just played a sold-out show at the Warfield, the musician takes the stage and proceeds to play for the whole night. “This impressed me. The message I took from it was: to be truly good at something is the very highest joy. And by inference, I understood this: to merely witness greatness is a distant cousin, or even not related at all.” Afterward she leaves and begins her life in pursuit of a career in writing. End of essay. I was surprised, surprised at my surprise, and vaguely disappointed. Considering the passel of depressive great artists throughout history (not to mention “good” artists), “joy” in one’s skill or talent, if it is indeed a wonderful feeling, must be thought of only in a narrow and possibly ephemeral sense. But, fine, I don’t see the use of arguing with such a personal belief. That second part, though: Isn’t witnessing greatness a legitimate precondition to developing a standard for it? Kushner presents PJ Harvey as an image. Where’s the appreciation of the music? One’s own greatness need not be paramount. In fact, become too consumed with it and one risks missing out – and worse, no closer to greatness, in any sense. Freud says that for some, aesthetic experience is comparable to erotic experience. As I write this, I listen to Isaac Hayes’s “Joy, Pt 1.” 

Rachel Kushner is better than good. And her appreciation is expressed elsewhere, such as in pieces on other writers: Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector. (I’ll give the last another try.) One reason I’ll be buying The Hard Crowd and revisiting it is an essay about her breakthrough novel The Flamethrowers, once I’m through reading it. And for those of you who, like me, consider Kushner a writer to watch: She has two more on the way.

Studies in Ridonculousness: Evel Knievel is Jesus, Apparently

My studies in ridonculousness continue with Viva Knievel! (1977), a film starring a man once famed for daring motorcycle feats and sustaining severe injuries when they went awry. Watching movies like this is also daring, in a way. Not all terrible movies are good. Some are bad: baffling, inept, and, crucially, no fun, making them a complete waste of time. And some are just as baffling and inept but less than no fun, more bizarre, disturbing, and, depending on how long one cares to endure them, insanemaking. All fans of the ridonculous movie experience have a moment of crisis in which, holding their heads, they ask themselves: What am I doing with my life? I don’t want to waste my time. And I’d prefer not to lobotomize myself sitting through every minute of the absolute worst of the worst movies ever made. But it’s not always easy to tell which route the terrible movie will take from the start. My answer is to spend less of my life watching, imposing a time limit. Five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. If I’m bored or frightened, if I’m feeling pain in the forehead region I didn’t have when I started it, I shut it off and try my best to forget. Minutes are an acceptable loss! for the chance of discovering properly ridonculous cinema. 

A note on the word “ridonculous.” You won’t find it in Merriam-Webster's dictionary. Yet. For now I look to a website I don’t visit often, the Urban Dictionary, which relies on postings by users and a voting system. The posting with the most votes is from 2004 by 755coop3: “Functionally similar to the word ‘ridiculous,’ this word is often used in its place for extra emphasis. Example: There's a ridonculous amount of cheddar cheese stuck in the printer.” (Not a secret posting of mine.) But no provenance or noun form is provided. Scroll further down and doof0000, in another entry, informs readers that Roald Dahl uses the word “redunculus” in a children’s book called The BFG, published in 1982. I’m not sure where I picked it up from. A family friend? I didn’t realize the term went back as far as 1982, well before I started using it and meditating upon it (and before I was born). No joke, I thought it was my neologism! Anyway, ridonculousness, as a concept, is mutant ridiculousness: Take a rainbow afro wig. A banana hammock. A bazooka. Several blocks of cheddar cheese. Throw them into a vat of toxic waste. Season with a pinch or brick of cocaine, if you like. And stand back. Ridonculous. One can imagine or casually observe or trip on the sidewalk and into the ridiculous any day of the week. The ridonculous is unimaginable until someone (usually unwittingly) creates it or becomes it. In the former case, it’s an action movie based around a fusion of gymnastics and martial arts no one asked for called Gymkata. In the latter, it’s the living embodiment of ridonculousness, Vanilla Ice.  (Who also starred in one movie: Cool as Ice. In a word: Ridonculous.) 

Well, I finished Viva Knievel! And it didn’t even take five minutes to determine that I would. The movie shows promise from scene one: Knievel, in the leather jumpsuit-clad, winged haircut role of himself, sneaks into an orphanage at night to deliver toys to children. His presence causes one kid to throw off his crutches and walk unassisted. As the movie progresses, Knievel is never once found to do wrong. (From the Viva Knievel! theme song: “He’s a motorcycle bird/who is never coming down.”) He lives cleanly. He’s loyal to a fault. He won’t be cheated in business. He’s passionately anti-drug, turning the movie into half-PSA. So wholesome. During a dramatic scene, he’s accused by one character, almost incoherently, of having a flaw: caring too much for a vulnerable child. Viva Knievel! is feature-length promotion for Evel Knievel, modern day Jesus.

 

He has his enemies. The plot involves career sabotage, drug smuggling, murder, and blah, let’s discuss some satisfying absurdities. 

A photojournalist arrives to take pictures of Knievel in the event of a crash. She insists on being addressed not as miss but ms. [mizz]. Knievel rancorously says: “Oh, you’re one of them.” He means a feminist. After the label further defines her as antagonistic and shrill, her political views are never mentioned again. Once she’s done with her assignment, she plans on heading to South America to document a revolution. “Aw, they’re always having revolutions down there!” says Knievel. But the feminist gets caught up in Knievel’s exploits and, by the end, the movie simply assumes she’s fallen in love (and perhaps given up her career, renounced feminism, and converted to the Knievel religion).   

One of Knievel’s main acolytes in the movie is a child, the son of his assistant. I mock his lines thusly: Gee, Mr. Knievel! You’re the best, Mr. Knievel! Golly, Mr. Knievel! And with a pouty face for awards consideration: Say it ain’t so, Mr. Knievel. (Sowwy, “Evel.”) 

After Knievel is injured in a crash (and drama is abruptly and fleetingly introduced with the sudden announcement of his retirement), he’s taken to the hospital, where he lies in bed. This scene best sums up the quality of his acting: he can’t even lie in bed resting convincingly.

  

In a movie with much to do about drugs, there had to be a drug freakout. It’s performed by a name I recognize from movies I can’t stand: Gene Kelly.  

The dullest aspect of the movie by far, ironically, is the reason it exists in the first place: the messiah’s stunts. Since he’s limited to jumping over things, the filmmakers include a lot more buildup than (meager) payoff. The movie ends with Knievel finally sticking the landing. Unwittingly true. 

With fairly catchy theme song: “Viva, Viva Knievel/Viva, Viva K-nie-vel!”