Netflix all Fyre-d up to ill chill

We all know Netflix and chill. Now let’s talk Netflix and ill. That’s when you’re sick, as I recently was — and not with something formidable like the flu or strep (“But my glands are swollen! Swab again please!”) but with a lame viral cold that gives you no cred or good medicine — and you need some streaming therapy.

What you don’t want when you’re puny, tired and pitiful is watching other people thriving and winning.

It’s not the time to witness chef and food writer Samin Nosrat of Salt Fat Acid Heat traveling all over the globe and experiencing delicious cuisine when you can barely journey to the kitchen for a lousy can of soup you won’t be able to taste.

Tidying Up With Marie Kondo is absolutely the last thing to view when you don’t have the energy to sit up, let alone clean up and when the only thing you’re capable of sparking is not joy but — cough! Sneeze! Wheeze! — germs.

You want to engage in a bit of sick-day schadenfreude and watch people who, like yourself, are experiencing trying times and temporarily losing at life.

I’ve got two newish suggestions for you: Abducted in Plain Sight and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. Both are documentaries released by Netflix this year, though Abducted was first released in 2017.

Note: Both feature strong language and mature/sexual situations, so don’t watch if those things offend you, and don’t get all Fyred up at me if you watch anyway despite this warning.

ABDUCTED IN PLAIN SIGHT

It doesn’t take the viewer long to realize why this true crime documentary is called Abducted in Plain Sight.

Because it’s about kidnapping. And because the title Clueless was already taken.

If you have ever questioned your people-reading or parenting skills, watch Abducted and expect to feel completely absolved.

The documentary follows the story of Robert and Mary Ann Broberg, a Midwestern Mormon couple living a happy, wholesome existence with their three young daughters in Idaho in the 1970s — until they’re manipulated by

you see the cat? Or the figure in the window?

... Genitempo, who grew up in Katy, Texas, which is near Houston, took photography classes in high school, but didn’t get serious about it until he was in college.

Jasper, his first black-andwhite project, began when he was a graduate student at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. It was a nonresidential program, which allowed him to roam. Students and their instructor would meet every few months at different locations to go over their work. Jasper became his thesis for his master of fine arts degree.

Genitempo was living in Austin, Texas, and started photographing the nearby Lost Pines Forest near Bastrop, Texas.

“It’s in this pine archipelago that connects to east Texas and goes into the Ozarks. There were people out there that I met who were living in the forest and I thought that was fascinating,” he says from Marfa, Texas, where he now lives.

His experiences making photos in the Lost Pines inspired him to explore the Ozarks in 2016. He had also fallen under the influence of Frank Stanford, the Fayetteville land surveyor and poet who committed suicide in 1978.

“I was reading a bunch of Frank Stanford at the time. I was going through this spell with his work and all signs were pointing toward the Ozarks. I had been through there maybe once before, and I had been to Little Rock a couple of times, but I just wanted to get to the Ozarks and see what I could find.”

He spent a few fruitless days in Fayetteville before discovering Jasper.

“I met the right people, and I told them what I was after, that I was interested in people living in the forest and one thing led to another. I left there more confused than when I showed up, but I kept thinking about it and kept returning to that area.”

The photos he was making were good, he thought, and something about the project felt right.

“I knew I was interested in the Ozarks, Frank Stanford and people who lived in the forest, but I didn’t know a lot about what I was doing until I made 15-20 trips. I made pictures and they were really working. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was saying, but I was not going to question it or intellectualize it too much.”

. ..

He approached his subjects in various ways — knocking on doors, picking up hitchhikers.

“It’s a process of just letting your guard down, going with the flow and being carried from one moment to the next and accepting things how they come.”

Response was mixed. “Some people were confused,” he says.

At times, though, his camera helped break the ice.

Genitempo uses a view camera, a big, old-timey looking camera on a tripod where the photographer is under a cloth.

“It takes 15-20 minutes to set up the view camera. You’re under the dark cloth, you spend a lot of time with your subject before you make your photograph. People see how much dedication it takes and I think they feel a respect for that when you make their portrait. I feel the view camera puts a lot of people at ease, it’s a symbol that everybody understands.”

Some people thought he was a surveyor, another Stanford connection. And, as pointed out in The New Yorker, Genitempo would later realize that his picture of a man cleaning his nails with a pocketknife perfectly illustrated Stanford’s poem “Blue Yodel of the Desperado.”

There is one woman among the people photographed, the rest are men.

. . . Genitempo built a trust with some of his subjects, like Copper Heel, a Newton County man so-named for surviving a copperhead bite without medical assistance.

“I’d heard about him for a while and I hiked a good two miles to find him,” Genitempo says. “I showed up and his dog was barking and he was confused at first, but when I told him what I was doing he was more than happy to show me around. He brews his own beer and we had a beer together.”

One of the most striking images in the book is of Copper Heel sitting on a bucket, writing in a notebook in the cluttered lean-to beneath a rock that is his home.

“The book is about my fascination with removing myself from the everyday, my fascination with escapism and the romanticism and the reality of what that looks like,” Genitempo says. “The book is a balance of that. There are a lot of romantic photographs in the book, but there are also many that show the harsh reality of what a life removed from the everyday looks like.” While he admits that he remains fascinated by the prospect living off the grid, he’s not planning on doing it himself.

“I do still travel a lot and make pictures, but I think I got a lot of my interest in escapism out of my system with Jasper.”