Andy Nicastro

Alice Munro

2010-03-09T07:19:00.000-08:00

I find it hard to say anything original about Alice Munro's latest outstanding short story collection, Too Much Happiness - except that it is excellent and that you should immediately go out and read it. Anything more than this is likely to sound like those tiresome critical cliches which always seem to get thrown around when Munro is the topic. Yes, as a short story writer she's up there with Chekhov and Henry James. Yes, her short stories are as powerful, dense and memorable as novels. And yes, she deals with the big themes - death, marriage, love, adultery, etc. I just don't have anything big, fresh or important to say about her writing. I liked her book. I liked it a lot. But I got nothing. Some writers don't really give one a lot of opportunities for scintillating critical activity. I have the same problem with Guy de Maupassant. I once had to write an essay on one of his short stories and, for the life of me, I couldn't come up with a single interesting thing to say about it. It was so true to life, so realistic and seemingly transparent, that there was nothing I felt that I could add to it. And I seem to be in a similar predicament now with Munro. So since I can't seem to come up with fascinating and insightful things to say about her book, here are some random thoughts concerning it.

- There are a lot of killers in this collection. Three of the ten stories involve murder or attempted murder. In "Dimensions" a woman's three young children are murdered by her insane husband. An elderly women deftly manages to evade being murdered in "Free Radicals." And in "Child's Play" two young girls drown a special ed girl who won't leave them alone.

- Many of these stories are about the power of story-telling. Often the characters are transformed by the process of telling a story. In the aforementioned "Free Radicals" the old lady evades being murdered by convincing her would-be killer that she is herself a murderess. In "Fiction" a woman recognizes that her life has served as basis for a novel by an old acquaintance's daughter.

- Munro is no sentimentalist. Like Dawn Powell, her view of family relationships is clear-eyed and free of hokum. In real life, parents and children don't necessarily like - let alone love - each other. In "Deep-Holes," for instance, a young man's accident early in life sets him on a path which leads to poverty, mental illness and homelessness. When he finally reconnects with his mother many years later their meeting leaves both of them disappointed and vaguely angry at each other.

- A word should be said about Munro's writing style. It is very flat. She is a great literary craftsman but not a great literary stylist. If you're looking for flowery prose which charms the reader you won't find it here. She is, in this regard, the opposite of a writer like Haruki Murakami who can change literary styles as easily as the rest of us change shirts. I once read a reviewer who described Munro's prose as "luminous." No, it is not luminous. It is precise and exact. If her stories are as dense as novels it's because there is a quiet starkness in her language - every word, every idea counts.

In "Child's Play," for instance, the narrator and her friend Charlene are young girls on a Summer camp outing. All the girls have been taken to a public beach, including Verna a harmless mentally retarded girl who has taken a liking to the narrator, Marlene. Marlene and Charlene, though, regard Verna with hate and dread - her very presence, though completely innocent, is perceived by the two girls as menacing. One day, as all the girls in the camp are frollicking away in the water at a local beach events come to a head. Marlene and Charlene are playing together in the water when Verna begins to make her way towards them. Suddenly a speed boat passes and sets off big waves which sets all the girls tumbling. Marlene and Charlene seize the opportunity.

At the moment we tumbled, Verna had pitched towards us. When we came up, with our faces streaming, arms flailing, she was spread out under the surface of the water. There was a tumult of screaming and shouting all around, and this increased as the lesser waves arrived and people who had somehow missed the first attack pretended to be knocked over by the second. Verna's head did not break the surface, though now she was not inert, but turning in a leisurely way, light as a jellyfish in the water. Charlene and I had our hands on her, on her rubber cap.

This could have been an accident. As if we, in trying to get our balance, grabbed on to this nearby large rubbery object, hardly realizing what it was or what we were doing. I have thought it all out. I think we would have been forgiven. Young children. Terrified.

Yes, yes. Hardly know what they were doing.

Is this in any way true? It is true in the sense that we did not decide anything, in the beginning. We did not look at each other and decide to do what we subsequently and consciously did. Consciously, because our eyes did meet as the head of Verna tried to rise up to the surface of the water. Her head was determined to rise, like a dumpling in a stew. The rest of her was making misguided feeble movements down in the water, but the head knew what it should do.

This is masterful writing, subtle and revealing. Not a word or a phrase is wasted. From the narrator's ellipses and evasions ("It is true in a sense that..." - can you tell the narrator grows up to become an academic?) to the chilling description of Verna as little more than a head struggle to rise ("like a dumpling in a stew") it's obvious we're dealing with a writer whose control of her craft is total.

Ben-Hur and Reality

2009-12-20T21:39:00.000-08:00

Just watched Ben-Hur on TCM. My God, what a piece of crap!

I can’t believe I actually used to like this film. Admittedly, the last time I saw it I was a teenager but still – even then I should have known better…I really should have…

But the main thing that caught my eye watching it this time around was just how freakin’ awesome that chariot race was. It's an amazing scene. And in an odd way I think my appreciation of that scene now is enhanced by the fact that there are no cgi (computer generated images) involved in it. By now I'm so used to cgi in movies that when I see something like the chariot race in Ben-Hur the sheer reality of it sticks out. It turns out that computer generated special effects don’t improve current movies, they actually improve older ones. In Ben-Hur those are real horses and real drivers. Those are real people cheering in the arena (which is itself a huge set built on 18 acres outside Rome). When one of the chariots crashes, it’s a real stunt man taking a real tumble off it. Hell, somebody could’ve gotten killed.

I was recently watching Apocalypse Now and got a similar feeling of the power of the real. It was the scene of the helicopters taking off before they attack the village in the “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence. Nowdays a filmmaker would use cgi helicopters instead of real ones. But cgi helicopters would never stir up so much dust. (Think of the errily air-free atmosphere of Manhattan that Tobey Maguire swings through in the Spiderman movies.) And the way in which the choppers lumber into the air with their noses slightly down, like groggy animals rousing themselves to attack - these are details which would escape the eye of a computer programmer.

Don't get me wrong - I love what cgi can do in movies and some movies (The Lord of the Rings, Independence Day, etc.) are unthinkable without it. But the overuse of it has had the effect of cheapening the "specialness" of special effects and, even more perversely, created a situation in which the most impressive special effect may, in the end, turn out to be reality.

Britain's Post-Imperial Malaise

2009-12-11T07:14:00.000-08:00

The Economist on the domestic legacy of British Imperialism:

When Britons remember their dead empire, they tend to concentrate, with pride or shame, on its impact on the former colonies. The consequences for their own country are mostly thought of as so much pompous bric-a-brac and nostalgic trivia: honours and baubles with imperial names, archaic ceremonies, statues of forgotten heroes, a smattering of exotic vocabulary, curry and distressingly proficient rival cricket teams. This way of thinking about empire is mistaken. In important ways Britain is still--even, perhaps, increasingly--trapped by its imperial past.

The question that hovers above the Iraq inquiry is--since the evidence on Saddam Hussein’s weaponry was so flaky and the post-war planning so atrocious--why on earth Tony Blair did it. One theory, albeit not the one likely to be offered by Mr Blair himself, is that his militarism and messianism, the mix of responsibility and entitlement that he evinced, are part of the inheritance of all post-imperial British leaders. Mr Blair was not the first to yearn for an influence bigger than Britain’s now-diminished status justifies, and he is unlikely to be the last: David Cameron says reflexively that he wants Britain to "punch above its weight". For all their disillusionment over Mr Blair’s wars, lots of Britons want and expect serious international clout too.

The historian Linda Colley sees such imperial longing behind Britain’s devotion to the "special relationship". "Playing Boy Wonder to America’s Batman", as she puts it, is British politicians’ only chance of maintaining a global role--as if the American Revolution could somehow be cancelled and the two nations confront the world as one. On the other hand, a yen for independent greatness may lie behind the fear of emasculation by America that afflicts some Britons as well…

It is hard to think of another country so keen to magnify its accomplishments (everything must be "the best in the world"), yet also to wallow in its failings; so deluded and yet so morbidly disappointed. Every recent prime minister has struggled to overcome this sense of thwartedness and decline, and to come up with a notion of Britishness to replace the defunct imperial version. Mr Blair tried "Cool Britannia". It flopped. The gloom may be almost as acute now as it was in the late 1950s or 1970s.

It is arrogant to suppose that where other powers--Germany, say, or France--were traumatised by their losses, Britain could have lost an empire on which the sun never set, give or take a few tax havens, without side effects. It didn’t: looked at in a certain light, much of its recent history--military, political and economic--can be seen as a kind of post-imperial malaise.

The Motivation of Great Men

2009-04-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

From "Fiction in History" (1973) by the British historian A.J.P. Taylor.

We [historians] manufacture heros simply because they occupy great postions. We forget that most of these heros were mainly concerned to show off and enjoy themselves - hunting, running after mistresses, building palaces, collecting works of art, or merely eating and drinking. If they carry this too far, we rebuke our heros for neglecting what we regard as their true historical duty of ruling. In my own opinion, most great men of the past were only there for the beer - the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with power.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2009-03-16T07:26:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks I’ve come across literary examples of each:

The Ugly

Finding myself recently laid off, I figured now was as good a time as any to leap into a book such as Zygmunt Bauman’s The Art of Life. What a promising title. How upbeat! Well, before Bauman tries to tell us anything about the art of life he should perhaps learn something about the art of writing. He is one of the worst writers you will ever come across. His book an exercise in academic turgidity. Here, for instance, he is attempting to explain the fact that a rise in a nation’s gross domestic product doesn’t always translate into an increase of human happiness:

The sole common denominator of the otherwise variegated products of human bodily and mental labor being the market price they command, the statistics of the ‘gross national product’ aimed at grasping the growth or decline of the products’ availability record the amount of money changing hand in the course of buying and selling transactions.

In plain English, “The GDP only measures economic activity.” At another point he refers to the happiness people get from “gathering around a table laid with food that has been jointly cooked with its sharing in mind,” by which he means a meal with family or friends (two groups which are themselves referred to as “person-who-count to one’s intimate thoughts.”)

Oy vey.

The Bad

No one would doubt that unlike Bauman, Norman Mailer was a very good writer. It was in the art of thinking, though, that he sometimes encountered problems. The New York Review of Books has been publishing some of his letters and the following one, a 1965 missive about Saul Bellow’s Herzog, is a good example of Mailerian imbecility:

What I meant when I said Bellow has no ideas was not that there were no ideas in Herzog to be pondered, but rather that these ideas were not Bellow’s own theses, but rather ideas he had picked up in his reading. His mind is very intelligent, very cultured, very cultivated. He’s read a million books and remembered them, but he is not an original thinker. It’s not that I’m that sure about anything, it’s that I go with the animal part of my brain when I’m encountering an idea I have not met before, and none of the ideas in Herzog were in that sense the least bit fresh.

Well, on that basis, none of us have any original or fresh ideas, least of all Norman Mailer - who, as this letter reveals, is solidly enslaved to the modernist cult of originality (picked up from some book, no doubt). If getting ideas from other people or from books is grounds for dismissing a writer then we might as well throw out Shakespeare, Dante, the ancient Greeks, Milton, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Mann, Balzac – well, everyone actually.

And besides what does it mean to “go with the animal part of your brain” when you encounter new ideas? Does the “animal part” even have the ability to understand “new ideas,” in the sense Mailer means? And how would Mailer have put this into practice? If some scientist was explaining a new and original idea to him (and nowdays only scientists have genuinely new and original ideas) how would the author of Marilyn evaluate it. Would the animal part of his brain tell him to eat the scientist, like a bear’s would? Or would he be like a cat and start purring and rubbing himself against the scientist’s legs?

The Good

Victor Serge’s 1946 novel The Long Dusk is set in Paris in the 1930s. A participant in the Russian Revolution, Serge was an anarchist and novelist who left us excellent accounts of both the nightmare of Stalinism (The Murder of Comrade Tulayev) and the nightmare of the 20th-century in general (Unforgiving Years). His view is apocalyptic; his characters caught in political upheavals which they cannot control or even comprehend. We don’t live under the volcano, Serge seems to say, the volcano is under us – and it is erupting.

How, then, to establish the right tone for the novel? Here are the two opening sentences:

The whole world doesn’t collapse at once. A few little corners of the crumbled ant-hill remain almost intact; and in these corners the ants may think that their peaceful world is still with them.

How beautiful. It immediately sets the tone of foreboding and doom. It also established a certain distance – not a cold or callous one, mind you, but rather a jaded yet sympathetic one. Serge is like an Edward Gibbon who has seen too much. Both men write as dispassionate observers because the scope of their subject requires it but Serge seems to know that there is no safety or comfort in that stance. Both are men of irony – cynics, even - but Serge knows that irony, in the end, will not help you.

As a Man Grows Older...

2009-02-23T08:10:00.000-08:00

I recently turned 45 and I’ve noticed that as I get older women are becoming more attractive to me in new and often unique – even idiosyncratic - ways. I don’t know why this is so. But I’m starting to find as I age that their little personality traits and quirks can be completely enchanting.

For example, a few weeks ago, I was going through an art gallery in Pioneer Square, taking notes and hoping to get a blog posting out of the show (I didn't). One of the girls working in the gallery saw me scribbling away in my notepad and came up to talk to me. She asked me what I thought of the art. She was cute. Mid-twenties. A little chunky, but not too much. Fun to talk to. Pleasant to the eyes. Especially pleasant to the eyes was her large cleavage, which her low cut top accentuated. I made it clear to her that I wasn't a collector but nonetheless we continued to chat about the paintings in the show and about art in general. She was a good talker – open, lively. She immediately noticed my New Jersey accent. Even though she was Northwest born and bred, her parents were both from the East Coast so she was familiar with the accent and the attitude. We talked about differences between coasts. All very routine. Engaging in these sorts of casual, quasi-flirtatious interactions with women is one of the nice things about being single. Yet despite both the good time I was having with her, and her enticing chest (just don't look at them, I kept telling myself, just keep your eyes locked with hers!), I wasn’t about to ask her out. She’s too young for me. It’s totally inappropriate, I told myself. Better luck next time, Grandpa.

Then it happened. I mentioned Dale Chihuly. Suddenly a disdainful smirk lit up her face. "Tch!" she said and contemptuously dismissed him with a wide wave of her hand. It was charming, spontaneous, sassy. I was a goner. Fuck the age difference! I have got to ask this girl out! She’s fun. She's exactly what I need in my life - someone who can call bullshit on things and do it with style! Something in the pure insouciance of her gesture won me over. It shows a great strength of character to be able to work in the Seattle art world and still have enough sense of yourself to dismiss the values of that world if they conflict with yours.

Now, at 24 that gesture would scarcely have registered with me. All I would be thinking is: nice boobs, cute, single – gimme. But by 45, though, one begins to realize that all women’s boobs (or butts or legs or whatever) are basically the same, it’s all variations on a theme. And with enough exposure, even the most amazing theme becomes tedious. New things begin to catch your eye, your tastes begin to grow. In my forties I find myself just as attracted to the intangible qualities of a woman’s character as I am to her body. It’s not that the physical diminishes; it’s that the psychological or personal qualities of the woman, the things that set her apart from everyone else, start to make her even more desirable. They give her a new luster.

So, what happened with the girl at the art gallery? Well, I hit on her, of course. I told her that the best and most little known art collection in Seattle is the one at the University of Washington Medical Center (which is true). Since I worked in the building at the time I told her that if she was interested she come by and I would give her a tour. Then I gave her my phone number and we parted. But – alas - she never called. Oh, well.

Noir City

2009-02-20T05:30:00.000-08:00

SIFF is holding their annual “Noir City” film festival February 13 – 19 at the Seattle Center. This year the theme is “Newspaper Noir” with most of the movies set in the world of tough, gritty urban newsrooms of the 40s and 50s. How appropriate, how “ripped from today’s headlines”, as it were. I don’t know if you could make a believable crime film set in a contemporary newsroom. Unless boring your readers and destroying circulation are crimes, it’s hard to imagine most modern reporters being capable of something like murder. It’s just beyond them. But the newsrooms of the 40s and 50s – or their mystique, at least – are a different matter entirely. They crackle with noir potential. There’s some sort of connection between noir and the newspaper world of that time – urban, nocturnal, full of desperate and shady characters. Somehow press-themed pulp titles with cheesy taglines immediately spring to mind (Cub Reporter - “He buried more than the lead!” or Copy Girl – “There wasn’t a guy in the newsroom who hadn’t put her to bed, too!”).

I’m going to try to see as many of these films as possible and report back on them. I probably won’t see them all (the laundry doesn’t do itself, you know), but it’s hard to resist any kind of series featuring the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Howard Duff (three times), Vincent Price, Ida Lupino, Dana Andrews, Claude Rains, Tony Curtis, Raymond Burr, Ray Milland (twice), Charles Laughton, Alan Ladd, Donna Reed (twice), Dan Duryea, Broderick Crawford, and Shelly Winters. On the directorial front the festival has films by Fritz Lang, Richard Brooks, Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz, Anthony Mann and a host of lesser known but quintessential film noir directors such as Phil Karlson and John Farrow. Heck, even Samuel Fuller manages to make his presence felt (see below). Another attraction of this festival is the introduction of each film by host Eddie Muller (whose name itself sounds like that of a character from one of the movies). He gives some background on each film, tells us what makes it unique (and often how rare the print is), situates it within the tradition of noir, and – yes, I admit it – is the source of just about all the fascinating film trivia which you’ll pick up from this post. He is an excellent host.

Friday, February 13

Deadline USA (1952)
This film is a gem. Clearly, it’s the Citizen Kane of the newsroom/crime genre. Humphrey Bogart is Ed Hutcheson, the editor of New York Day, which has just been sold to its competitor and is being closed down. With pink slips issued and the clock ticking, Bogie tries to save the paper by solving a murder and nabbing the city’s leading mobster Thomas Rienzi (played with Gandolfini-esque smolder by Martin Gabel).

The film’s attitude towards the press is just this side of worshipful. How worshipful, you ask? Well, every time Bogart starts talking about how closing down newspapers undermines freedom and endangers democracy “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” plays in the background. (That this entire festival is being co-sponsored by the doomed Seattle Post-Intelligencer added much irony to his speeches.) Meanwhile, Bogart’s newsroom of tough, cynical, hard-drinking, wise-cracking reporters (Jim Backus is one of them) follow every lead to bust the bad guys. In the end, Bogart’s in the room with the printing presses ready to run off the last paper, the edition which will indict Rienzi. The mobster calls him there and starts threatening him. Bogart’s response? He gives the order to turn on the presses. When Rienzi asks what all that noise is, Bogie shouts into the phone “That’s the press, baby! The press! And there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing!”

The performances in this film are all outstanding and the dialogue has the fantastic 40s-style crackle. When one of the paper’s photographers makes a cheap crack about a murder victim, Bogart fires him on the spot. “That was your mistake,” he tells him. “But I’ve been working here four years,” the man protests. “That was my mistake,” Bogart replies. Later, he playfully suggest to the septuagenarian Ethel Barrymore (who resembles an elderly Gore Vidal in drag) that they get romantically involved. She eyes him icily, smiles, raises her scotch to her lips and mutters, “You’re too old.” (Oh, Christ! It is Gore Vidal!)

Scandal Sheet (1953)

Based on the novel The Dark Page by Samuel Fuller, Broderick Crawford stars as the unscrupulous editor of a sleazy New York tabloid. When his estranged wife shows up and threatens to blackmail him, he kills her and tries to cover it up. Soon his own scandal-mongering reporters, led by John Derek (yes, that John Derek), are trying to solve the crime, drawing the net ever tighter around Crawford. Meanwhile, circulation skyrockets.

This is an outstanding film - tight and gripping. But the main appeal of it is Broderick Crawford. Large and loud, he dominates the screen and my only complaint with this film is that once he commits the murder he doesn’t do much more than sit at his desk and sweat a lot while the second bananas start to get more screen time. John Derek and Donna Reed (the love interest) are very good but they can’t compete with him. In the intro to the film Muller commented that actors like Crawford and Bogart would have trouble getting work today. I’m not so sure I agree with that. After all, if Crawford resembles anyone it’s…well, James Gandolfini (again) – both are big, fleshy, domineering men. Except Gandolfini can project a malevolence that would never have been acceptable in old Hollywood. Nonetheless, Crawford was an inspired pick for this role, which was originally supposed to go to Humphrey Bogart (with Howard Hawks directing). Crawford was a better choice. He's tougher, more threatening, rougher around the edges and utterly lacking in any elegance or charm. Perfect.

Saturday, February 14

The Unsuspected (1947)

Frankly, the story of this film makes absolutely no sense. Suffice to say that radio announcer Claude Rains is up to no good. The main appeal of this movie, though, is its visual style; this is Hollywood “high noir” at its most lush and moody. Director Michael Curtiz really knows how to deliver a visual punch (that final shot in Mildred Pierce is unforgettable) and this film has plenty of them. So don’t even try to pay attention to the story, just relax and soak up the ambiance…

Desperate (1947)
Standard “B” film fare. An innocent man (Steve Brodie) gets caught up inadvertently taking part in a robbery and has to go on the lam to protect himself and his wife. If the cops don’t get him, the bad guys - led by Raymond Burr - will. Not much in this about the press, but it was a solid enough outing, directed by Anthony Mann in his “B” phase. According to Muller, this is the first film to ever use the swinging overhead light for dramatic impact. Hitchcock later adopted it for the end of Psycho and Jean-Pierre Melville took it from Hitchcock and used in Le Doulos. Do these geniuses ever stop ripping off other people's ideas?

Sunday, February 15

Ace in the Hole (1951)

Missed this one.

Cry of the Hunted (1953)

Oh, boy, missed this one, too.

Monday, February 16

The Big Clock (1948)

Excellent adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s classic 1946 novel. Ray Milland plays the editor of a crime magazine published by press titan (and tyrant) Earl Janoth. When Janoth’s mistress is murdered, Milland is assigned to investigate but soon begins to realize that all the evidence is pointing at his innocent self. Charles Laughton is magnificent as Earl Janoth, you hate him from the first moment he steps off the elevator til the final moment he…well, gets back on the elevator. You hate him from the soles of his shoes to ends of his little mustache, which he doesn’t quite curl, but rather gently touches and strokes with his pinkie finger, as if it was a small animal he wanted to calm before eating. As an added bonus, this film has a second heavy, the scarred and saurian George Macready, who plays Janoth’s lawyer and right hand man. They are the best bad guys in the festival so far.

Strange Triangle (1946)
No film noir festival is complete without at least one femme fatale and Swedish screen siren Signe Hasso plays her in this taut “B” thriller about bank embezzlement and a scheming housewife. Hasso was billed as “the next Garbo” when she made her first Hollywood film in 1943 (the original Garbo had retired two years earlier) – but it was not to be. And you can see why from this film. She’s good, but not that good. She’s not beautiful or compelling enough to be a believable femme fatale (think Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner). Still, she and the rest of the cast give it their best in this 65 minute “B” feature. It’s pleasant enough.

Tuesday, February 17

Chicago Deadline (1949)

No one can mutter “Get me some coffee, will you, baby?” and make it sound so damn cool as Alan Ladd can. In Chicago Deadline he’s a reporter who stumbles across a dead body in a sleazy boarding house. That body belongs to fallen woman Donna Reed – that’s right, Donna Reed. As he begins to investigate the life of this good girl gone bad, the windy city’s seamy underbelly comes to light. This film is a true rarity, there’s only one known print in existence. And it’s a good film, too, whose only weak point, to my mind, was Donna Reed. I never quite believe that she’s a fallen woman. And I don’t think she believes it either. She’s too sunny, too serene, her idea of fallenness is simply to stop smiling and look very serious. Still, it’s always important for actors to try to play against type from time to time so it’s worth seeing for that reason alone. It’s also worth seeing for Alan Ladd, who never played against type at all. He’s a kick to watch, though – cool, smooth, and delivering his tough guy lines with a gusto untainted by the knowledge that many decades later some in the audience might regard them as borderline kitsch.

Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949)

And no one can mutter “So long, copper” quite the way Dan Duryea can (below). In this beaut, he’s a gangster released to Federal Agent Howard Duff to help him bust open a drug smuggling ring. That is, if sexy Shelly Winters doesn’t get in the way! This film was fantastic. Everything in it works. The acting is good, the plot has many twists and turns, think of it as a “B+” film. Heck, even the title is outstanding. Festival host Eddie Muller and some audience members played a quick round of “Name That ‘Johnny’ Movie”: Johnny Angel, Johnny Guitar, Johnny Trouble, Johnny Gunman, etc. Well, hands down, this is the best “Johnny” themed movie title ever. This film was originally called “Cocaine” but the production code of the time wouldn’t allow that. In fact, all through the film it’s not really clear exactly what the drug being smuggled actually is. Cocaine? Heroin? Sudafed? We’re never told. And it really doesn’t matter. It’s a dynamite film nonetheless. It even features a very young Tony Curtis (listed as Anthony Curtis in the titles) playing a mute killer – which means you’ll never have to worry about him saying “I love you, Spartacus.” It can’t get any better than that.

Wednesday, February 18

While the City Sleeps (1956)

This film is pretty bad. Despite its amazing cast, which includes Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, George Sanders, Howard Duff and a mink-bedecked Ida Lupino, it never seems to rouse itself out of its (drink induced?) stupor. It is very slow paced. In fact, it should have been called While the Audience Sleeps or maybe While the Cast Sleeps It Off. It is also just plain weird at times. For instance, at one moment Ida Lupino, for no discernable reason, begins to click her lower teeth against the rim of a champagne glass she’s just drunk from. Huh? The story concerns a psycho killer who’s picking off pretty women in New York City but most of film is about the office politics of a news conglomerate headed by Vincent Price. The two stories never quite connect and we don’t really care about either. Director Fritz Lang can't seem to bring any of the elements of this tale together in a satisfying way. And when even Fritz Lang can’t effectively tell the story of psychopathic killer, we’re all in a bad way

Shakedown (1950)

Another gem. Howard Duff plays a “Weegee”-style newspaper photographer whose ruthless ambition gets him into trouble with the wrong kind of people. Duff puts in a magnificent performance: he’s callous, ambitious, manipulative, and criminal. It was based on a short story entitled “The Magnificent Heel”, and that’s an accurate description of the main character. And it’s a testament to Duff’s talent that he can still make us care about this repulsive character. Despite all the sleazy things he does, we never really want to see him destroyed. Like the other characters in the film, we want to see him reform. He’s not really such a bad guy underneath it all. Right? This is Duff’s film. You can’t take your eyes off him. And he plays this role for all it’s worth – shouting, strutting through the newsroom, at one point even pirouetting. He’s a ball of energy, a man on the make, full of moxie and chutzpah, and unencumbered by ethics of any sort. And if his fate is unfortunate, we also know that he would be the last person on earth to expect our sympathy or pity.

Thursday, February 19

Alias Nick Beale (1949)

In this noir-influenced retelling of the Faust legend Thomas Mitchell plays a politician who sells his soul to the devil (played by Ray Milland) in exchange for a governor’s seat. Darkness, deep shadows, dramatic lighting, fog – director John Farrow uses every device of “high noir” style to create a feeling of menace and dread. And he pulls it off, even eliciting screams of surprise at one of Ray Milland’s many creepy sudden appearances. The performances are all good and it’s a testament to Farrow’s talent that the deep religiosity of the film (in the end the Bible wins – like you doubted that) never becomes preachy or obnoxious. Many of the films in this series are new prints and this is one of them. According to host Eddie Muller this particular print had only ever been show one before. Well, it was gorgeous. I’ve never seen fog so luminous.

Night Editor (1946)

A cop (William Gargan) and his beautiful married girlfriend (Janis Carter) have a rendezvous on the beach. There they witness the brutal murder of a young girl. He’s horrified. She’s turned on. Thus begins one of the cheesiest, raunchiest, tawdriest, most over-the-top (and, hence, most enjoyable) “B” films of the 40s. This film is unbelievably kitsch. And it’s all thanks to Janis Carter. She is a magnificent femme fatale: rich, beautiful, icy, immoral, sexually degenerate and totally irresistible. The screen comes alive every time she’s on it. And the breathless ur-pulp dialogue between her and Gargan has to be heard to be believed; if you merely read it on the page, you would assume it was a parody of noir – and a very good one at that. This film was delicious. And a perfect way to end the festival.

So if you've enjoyed this posting (or enjoyed any of the movies in this festival) check out the organization responsible for rescuing and restoring America's Noir heritage - the Film Noir Foundation.

Acres of Clams

2009-02-10T07:08:00.000-08:00

Pugetopolis
By Knute Berger

It’s hard to take this book seriously. There’s something about Knute Berger that invites derision and mockery. It’s not just his physical appearance (short, rotund, bearded – sort of like the Comic Book Store Guy from The Simpsons, but nicer and furrier); it’s something about the writer’s persona he’s adopted that I find ludicrous and faintly contemptible. He fancies himself a mossback, a “curmudgeon with a conscience”, an earthy, contentious smart-ass (but with a big heart) who’s always on the look out what’s authentic and what’s fake here in Puget Sound.

Actually, he is nothing of the sort. He is, to vary a phrase of Orwell’s, “a licensed curmudgeon” – someone who criticizes but only within the limits set by those in power. He presents no real challenge to the people who count. He is harmless. If he wishes to posture as someone outside the system “telling it like it is”, the powerful will gladly grant him that boon and even play along. He’s sort of like the employee who shows up for work on time everyday, never slacks off, but reads Bakunin during his lunch hour.

Take, for instance, “Paul Allen’s Kool-Aid”, one of the few good pieces in this dreary little book. In it, Berger goes to the sales showroom of Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate company, which owns thousand of acres of property on South Lake Union that it wants to develop (with city financing, of course). There Berger sees a full-blown depiction (with dioramas!) of what the area will look like if Allen gets his way. Berger isn’t buying any of this and is rightly contemptuous of Allen’s plans. He watches a promotional film about what life could be like in Seattle in 2010:

It’s a rosy future: bars, coffeehouses, REI yuppies, trolleys – nothing like we have today, of course. An upbeat newscast from 2010…casually refers to the Seattle Mariners being in the hunt for their second consecutive world title, just to remind you this is fantasy.

Now, Berger is concerned that developers and the so-called needs of the market place tend to ride roughshod over local communities. They often trample on the environment and undermine Seattle's unique quality of life. I completely agree. So he’s against Paul Allen, right? Think again. The piece ends with praise of Allen

But you have to give Paul Allen credit, for while his vision is less bold, it is rendered most tangibly. He has realized that the race to the future will be won by a two-pronged campaign fought in the trenches and in the stars [“in the stars”? What does that even mean?] His staff is fighting for South Lake Union in the streets – lobbying, planning, organizing, co-opting, cajoling, selling. Yet they’re also investing in getting their vision out there in three dimensions. No one else has articulated a more compelling alternative that the public can see, feel, and imagine.

So the diorama really worked for you, eh, Knute? One little three dimensional display and his principles went right out the window. Now that’s journalistic integrity for you. No, despite his posturing, at the end of the day, Berger is as gung-ho as any Seattle Chamber of Commerce hack. EMP? He loves it! The Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park? It’s brilliant! Peter Steinbreuck? Heck of a guy! Berger writes of the city’s chaotic political process:

It may look like chaos – it may even be chaotic at times – but it hasn’t stopped growth or progress or prosperity. Our process, such as it is, has resulted in one of the most loved, most cherished, most desirable, most habitable metropolitan regions in the country.

Please, don’t get the wrong idea about this book, though. Before we arrive at these oases of provincial boosterism, we have to slog through miles and miles of whining and complaint. Berger is a world-class crank. And a tedious one, at that. If this book feels like a rehash, that’s because it is, being composed entirely of pieces Berger has previously written for publications like Seattle Weekly, Eastsideweek, and the website Crosscut (which has such a geriatric contributor base that it should be called Cheesecut).

Why does Knute Berger write? If it is to inform us, he doesn’t do a very good job. The Seattle reader will not learn anything new from this book; and if you’re new to Seattle the lack of background information will render it largely impenetrable to you. The historical information he provides rarely rises above the level of antiquarian trivia.

Does Berger hope to motivate us? And if so, to do what? He doesn’t seem to feel that there’s anything we can really do about any of the myriad of things he hates. He has that Scandanavian/Calvinist sense of helplessness. Developers suck – but the politicians who would limit them can’t be trusted. Boeing sucks – but all the politicians are in their pocket, so what can we do. Politicians suck, too – but they just reflect the will of the stupid, stupid populace. As for the people: “The people are incorrigible.”

Berger seems to feel that what we all need to do is embrace the authentic mossback values expressed in restaurateur/folksinger Ivar Haglund’s song – and later, ad jingle - “Acres of Clams”:

No longer a slave to ambition
I laugh at the world and its shams,
As I think of my present condition
Surrounded by acres of clams.

And now that I’m used to the climate,
I think that if ever man found
A spot to live easy and happy,
That Eden is on Puget Sound.

Well, that happy, easy-living man on the banks of Puget Sound is clearly not Knute Berger. And, neither, alas, will it be the readers of this book.

Quick Shots

2009-02-03T06:20:00.000-08:00

Opera & Death

The heroine of Philippe Boesmans’s surreal and absurdist new opera Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy (which had it’s triumphant premiere in Paris last month) doesn’t sing at all and in the end dies by choking on a fishbone. So, I guess we’ll have to amend the saying “It isn’t over til the fat lady sings” to “It isn’t over til the fat lady chokes on her food” which, if you’ve ridden the bus lately, is kind of true.

Also, there’s no death like an opera death (poor Yvonne notwithstanding). People die in movies, TV shows, novels and on stage. But only in opera do they kick the bucket with so much style, with such orgasmic exhilaration. Take a great TV death like the killing of Sal (“Big Pussy”) Bompensiero from The Sopranos. How dull by contrast to the average opera. Some fat goombah in a jogging suit gets shot on a boat. Whoop-dee-freakin’-doo. How does that compare to the death of Don Giovanni - who’s dragged down into Hell by a chorus of demons? Not even close.

Movies, too, can’t keep up with opera in the amazing death department. Probably the best movie death is James Cagney’s from White Heat (below). (His death in The Roaring Twenties is also considered a classic even though I prefer Humphrey Bogart’s death from the same movie). The shootout which ends The Wild Bunch is still amazing after 40 years; and Don Corleone’s last jaunt through the tomato patch (sorry, no clip) is unforgettable. But still, none of these can compare to the finale of Wagner’s Götterdammerung in which Brünnhilde (on horseback, no less!) leaps onto her husband’s burning funeral pyre while flames engulf the globe, destroying the Gods and purifying the world. Yikes. And the crazy thing is that that’s a happy ending. In most movies the destruction of the world is generally considered a bad thing, only in opera would it be regarded as spiritually uplifting.

Beautiful Words

The 100 most beautiful English words. Alas, “larvae” is not one of them. “Crepuscular” also didn’t make the list. Oh, well. As a bonus, here are the 100 funniest English words.

WaPo's Book World RIP

There’s been a lot of on-line hand wringing over the news that The Washington Post will no longer publish Book World, it’s stand-alone book review supplement to it’s Sunday edition. Terry Teachout rightly thinks the fuss is unwarranted:

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: it is the destiny of serious arts journalism to migrate to the Web. This includes newspaper arts journalism. Most younger readers--as well as a considerable number of older ones, myself among them--have already made that leap.

Rock & Roll Awesomeness

Meat Loaf will appear with a cartoon dog in a children’s show to help encourage kids to read more. In his episode he will read (and I’m not making this up) "The Lamb Who Came to Dinner."

New York City vs. Seattle

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross writes about how inexpensive it can be to hear much of the best music available in New York City. He attends the Metropolitan Opera (where the cheapest seats are fifteen dollars), the New York Philharmonic (a rehearsal ticket for sixteen dollars), and eight other events over the course of seven days. Total expenditures: eighty-one dollars.

Reading this I couldn’t help but compare it to how expensive the arts are here in Seattle. Good luck getting into the Seattle Opera for fifteen dollars. Let’s face it – we are not an arts friendly city. Seattle Opera, the Seattle Symphony, SAM – all of them get massive financial support from the city and the state and yet give very little back. I recently bought a pair of tickets to see a play at the Seattle Rep; mine was thirty-five dollars, the one for my senior-citizen mother: thirty-five dollars. Seattle has always had an inferiority-complex regarding New York City. Well, when it come to making the arts available to its citizens that sense of inferiority is well-deserved.

LUCO at Meany Hall

2009-01-26T06:40:00.000-08:00

It’s always a thrill to watch a group of artists rise to the occasion. The artists I’m thinking of here are the Lake Union Civic Orchestra and the occasion was their concert on Saturday night at the University of Washington’s Meany Hall. This was the first time they had performed at Meany, which is a larger auditorium than their usual venue in Town Hall. And at first the larger space seemed to be presenting them with some problems. The all-German program opened with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and the strings seemed to have difficulty filling the concert hall. They seemed a little weak, watery. They needed to project more. However, since most of the heavy lifting in Ride of the Valkyries is done by the brass and percussion, this wasn’t too much of a problem. The piece came off with a bang, even though it struck me that the strings hadn’t quite found their groove.

However, when baritone Clayton Brainerd came out to sing Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music the groove was found. Brainerd is a mountain of man – well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, big-bellied, a line-backer with a voice to match. He has presence. One pities the actors who have to play mere giants opposite him in Das Rheingod. Now, Brainerd had no problem projecting into the auditorium. And whether it was his example or the power of the music or the excellent conducting of Christophe Chagnard, the strings finally sang, easily filling the hall to match Brainerd’s beautiful performance.

Mahler’s First Symphony made up the second half of the evening and that, too, was outstanding: fresh, engaging, rousing when it needed to be and at times beautifully meditative. Of course, if you don’t believe me, you should at least believe the behavior of the two or three dozen children in the audience, none of whom started whining or crying to leave during the concert. (Even though I did see one or two tots jolt awake suddenly when the final movement’s fortissimo hit them.) By the end of the evening there was no doubt that this ensemble was capable of playing larger venues.

LUCO is a non-profit orchestra whose performers are almost all volunteers. And part of the charm of the concert was the cozy ambiance between the musicians and the audience, many of whom are family members or friends (full disclosure – I know no one in LUCO.). During the intermission many of the musicians could be seen socializing in the lobby with the rest of us. These are people who love their art. They are passionate about music.

Hopefully, if they ever again decide they want to just let loose and kick out the jams, mofos, (note to Jimmy Page: Wagner is the hammer of the Gods!) they will return to Meany Hall. Till then, you can find them at their regular home at Town Hall where they will be performing two more concerts for the season, one on April 17th, the other on June 19th.

Go.

I Yawn, Therefore I Am

2009-01-23T06:02:00.000-08:00

Now, there are few lives as devoid of drama as that of the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, and Roberto Rossellini’s 1974 film Cartesius proves this. It strains at holding the viewer’s interest. After all, a life of study and scholarly contemplation doesn’t present a lot of opportunities for dramatic action. It suffers from a general shortage of dramatic tension. Will Descartes write that treatise he keeps promising everyone? Will he more faithfully maintain his correspondence with his friends to tell them his ideas? Will he stay in Holland or return to Paris? Has he found the peace and serenity he so dearly needs for his work? There’s not a lot here for Rossellini to build on. See Descartes cogitate. Cogitate, Descartes, cogitate.

This film is as dry and stiff as the algebra which its subject matter helped create. At 2 hours and 40 minutes, it is monotonous. Rossellini’s visual style, normally austere, is here pared down completely. Every scene seems to have the same rhythm. We begin with a wide shot of a group of people, usually in a large brightly lit room (tavern, lecture hall, salon). As the characters talk and talk and talk, sometimes the camera will slowly zoom in to a medium shot. Then the camera slowly zooms out. Close-ups are rare. Reaction shots are almost nonexistent (I counted only one). From time to time, Mario Nascimbene’s dreary atonal music (composed of orchestra, harpsichord, and bells) will surge in the background. It is all very off-putting and alienating. This film is so cold it makes Kubrick look warm and fuzzy.

Ugo Cardea does the best he can playing Descartes. He is reserved and aloof. Dressed in a large hat, a black outfit with a long cape, shiny boots and a sword always at his side, he resembles (as he struts around, pontificating, with arms akimbo) nothing less than a somber one of the Three Musketeers. The rest of the cast are forgettable since they only serve as intellectual strait-men for Descartes to philosophize with (or at, to be precise.) This film is not entirely devoid of interest. It contains one of the creepiest looking automatons you’ll ever see. And the white bird-like masks which people have to wear when the plague breaks out are hauntingly surreal.

Still, this film is a dud. Although it does a tolerably good job of explaining Descartes's philosophy and his importance to science, a more traditional documentary, rather than this so-called docudrama, would have been better. Drama can be an excellent vehicle to discuss ideas – as the works of George Bernard Shaw and Tom Stoppard show – but it has to be done with a light hand. And Roberto Rossellini has many talents but deftness of touch is not one of them. He is going to educate us for our own good whether we like it or not. Subsequently, the dialogue in Cartesius is bookish, ponderous and slightly ludicrous. For instance, here is Descartes expounding his ideas in an elegant salon surrounded by listeners:

Descartes: …In my treatise, I also prove, with absolute clarity, the existence in me and in the world of a thinking substance distinct from the corporeal, but which of these two is the nature of God? I shall prove that God can certainly not be a composite of two substances: the corporeal and the thinking, because the mixture would be a sign of imperfection.

Fancily-Dressed Lady: Dear René, you speak of the existence of the soul and of God in a very unusual way. You have moved me.

First Gentleman: Your design is very bold and terribly shrewd.

Second Gentleman: But your division of reality into corporeal substance and thinking substance will raise many objections.

Descartes: I shall answer them all. Meanwhile, I must publish my treatise as soon as possible.

Cartesius was originally made for Italian television. Back in the early 60s Rossellini held a press conference and announced that movies were a dead art form. Why he would adopt such a petulant attitude is beyond me. After all, when you’re a famous Italian film director who also gets to bang Ingrid Bergman on a regular basis I think it’s safe to say that the movies have been very, very good to you. Stranger still, he felt that television (and Italian television, at that) was the art form of the future. Fired by this educational zeal, he began to crank out dramas based on the lives of important historical figures. Three of them have recently been assembled in a box set by The Criterion Collection as part of their no-frills Eclipse series. Cartesius is one, the other two are about Pascal and the Medicis (now that one could be good - lots of stabbing and poisoning). Separately, Criterion has also released Rossellini’s The Taking of Power by Louis XIV. How these films fare in comparison to Cartesius, I have yet to discover (and I will let you know when I do) but if Cartesius proves anything it is that an artist can sell out his talent to his own worst pedagogical ambitions just as readily (and ruinously) as he can sell out to political or commercial ones.

Fred Astaire

2009-01-11T19:11:00.000-08:00

Fred Astaire
by Joseph Epstein

If I had to list the one video clip I watch most on YouTube there would be many contenders. But the winner would not be the amazing ending of Lost in Translation or the awesome confrontation between Gandalf and the Witch-King of Angmar which was deleted from the theatrical version of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Nor would it be clips of the comic genius of Alec Baldwin or the comic genius of Sam Kinison. It wouldn’t even be clips of large-breasted Japanese girls cavorting in bikinis. Oh, no. The winner would this (from Swing Time):

This book on Fred Astaire is so bad I loved it. I couldn’t put it down. Joe Epstein is an exceptionally good bad writer. In the future I will purchase any book he writes for the pure joy of watching the amazing – and unintentionally hilarious – things he can do with (to?) our language. He is a linguistic car-wreck, and yet a delight to read for that very reason. This is a rare talent. Most bad writers are boring or repetitive or simply lack any feel for words. Not so with Joe. He is fresh and original. He writes flowingly, is opinionated and moves things along briskly. He has a feel for our language. And that feel is wrong. Words, grammar, metaphors, syntax – scarcely a single part of the English language doesn’t get tripped up, run over and mangled in these 191 pages.

Epstein writes in a jaunty, conversational tone which at times degenerates into showbiz clichés: “This was it, Broadway, the big time.” “Whatever the magical ingredients that made for movie charm, [Astaire] possessed them. He lit up the joint – any joint he may have been in – turning the silver screen quite golden.” In comparison to the refined and elegant Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers “was more in the mode of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of girl. But what you were likely to get wasn’t bad at all; it was pretty damn fine, in fact.” He even does sound effects: bang! poof!

Some of his metaphors are laughable. After returning from their triumphal dancing tour of England, Fred and his older sister Adele “were leading the good life, the high life, a fine breeze stirring them gently on their way in the fast lane.” Later he tells us: “The young [film producer] Pandro S. Berman saw that the Astaire-Rogers coupling was the white donkey upon which he and RKO could ride into Jerusalem. Like Astaire, Berman soon acquired a ten percent share in the gross of those movies, and so perhaps rode into Jerusalem instead in a Rolls-Royce.”

Beginning a sentence about how Astaire looks better on screen in black and white than in color, Epstein adopts a distinctly unusual syntax: “Something there is inherently glamorous about the combination of black and white…” Yes, there is, Master Yoda, yes, there is.

Here he seems to think that parts of speech are interchangeable. “No one has ever been able to explain the clustering of talent that shows up at certain points in history: [for instance] the genius composers who arrived in Austria and Germany…”

Most assessments of the Astaire-Rogers duo have treated the latter as a lesser talent. Epstein tries to praise her and the results are hilarious:

Despite all the talk of Fred Astaire bringing “class” to the partnership, it might be closer to the truth to say that it was Ginger Rogers who brought class – specifically something of the lower middle or maybe even the working class. In pursuing Ginger Rogers in the movies they did together, Astaire may have been going a bit down-market, in the way that Charles Swann goes after Odette de Crecy, the cocotte of Marcel Proust’s great novel.

And also:

In a great many stills of the two dancing, one notes Astaire’s large hands around Rogers’s waist, rather like a short but firm leash, always in place lest she wander too far.

And then there’s this one:

[Rogers’s] kittenish sexiness, with a strong aroma of the witty behind it [WTF!], is what Fred Astaire needed to play against to show himself to greatest advantage…Ginger, as the name suggests, provided the perfect seasoning.

So, if I’ve got this right, Epstein’s idea of praising Ginger Rogers is to compare her to, by turns, a whore, a dog and a condiment.

This book is light and fluffy, and Epstein often struggles to come up with something profound to say about his subject. If, like me, you don’t know much about Fred Astaire, you’ll pick up some interesting information about him. I learned, for instance, that Astaire wore a toupé, that his shoe size was 8½, and that he was no shorter than 5’ 7” but no taller than 5’ 10” (it turns our that his exact height is in dispute (and I didn’t know that either!)). I learned that when George Gershwin died the last word he uttered was: “Astaire.” (Are they sure it wasn’t: “Despair”?)

I also learned about Astaire’s early years when he and Adele were a famous dance team. She’s quite a character: coarse, foul-mouthed, beautiful and sexually precocious. At seventeen she admitted “I’ve already got quite used to people grabbing my fanny backstage – that is, when they weren’t all homos.” When she caught someone looking up her dress she asked him whether he saw “the ace of spades.” “Why the fuck shouldn’t I say what I feel?” she once replied when the prim Fred apologized for her behavior. In her mid-thirties she left the stage and married into the English aristocracy. But her spirit was undimmed: she once made a needlepoint cushion for Fred and his wife: one side depicted flowers, the other read simply “Fuck Off.”

This book, like most encomiums of movie stars, contains insight and idiocy in pretty equal measure (and I’ve given examples of the later) – but it does, nonetheless, contain insight. For example, Epstein makes some perceptive comments about the difference between Astaire’s charm and that of William Powell:

Contrast Fred Astaire with William Powell, whose suavity helped make the Thin Man movies so delightful. Powell in his movie persona is sophisticated in a way Astaire in his movie persona is distinctly not. Powell’s character is world-weary, properly cynical, looking forward only to another of his perfectly confected cocktails. Astaire breaks out the champagne from time to time, and in one of his movies (The Sky’s the Limit) he actually gets drunk, but his drunkenness turn out to be no more than an excuse to do a dance atop the bar. Like Astaire, Powell is always handsomely tailored, lives in starkly white plush apartments, drives flashy cars. But the good life, one might say, is all that is left to him, since he has previously seen the rest of life for what it really is. Powell’s lack of enthusiasm, his witty cynicism, are among the chief marks of his sophistication; Astaire, urbane yet not entirely sophisticated, retains his enthusiasm, for the girl, for the song, above all for the dance.

This pleasant little wisp of a book (published as part of the Icon series by Yale University Press) will make for a few hours of very entertaining reading. I only wish that it had been more lavishly illustrated, we only get two rather measly photographs. As for the text, I wouldn’t have them change one crazy word.

The Worst Album Covers of 2008

2009-01-08T06:59:00.000-08:00

Pitchfork Media has it here (with snark, of course).

The Books I Read & The Movies I Saw in 2008

2008-12-31T18:01:00.000-08:00

Books

Fiction

Cousin Bette – Honore Balzac
Modeste Mignon – Honore Balzac
The Unknown Masterpiece & Gambara – Honore Balzac
Room for Murder – Thomas B. Dewey
My Fantoms – Theophile Gautier
The Tragic Comedians – George Meredith
To Siberia – Per Petterson
Come Back to Sorrento – Dawn Powell
Equal Danger – Leonardo Sciascia
The Middle of the Journey – Lionel Trilling
Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
Burr – Gore Vidal

Non-Fiction

Energies of Art – Jacques Barzun
The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy and the Hundred Years’ War Over the American Dollar – H.W. Brands
Landscape Into Art – Kenneth Clark
The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
Complete Works: Middle Years, Volume 10 – John Dewey
Bound to Please – Michael Dirda
Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents – Mikal Gilmore
English Hours – Henry James
Wellsprings – Mario Vargas Llosa
Edwardians: London Life and Letters, 1901-1914 – John Paterson
The Rest in Noise: Listening to the 20th Century – Alex Ross
Defeat: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign – Philippe-Paul de Ségur
Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays – William Styron
The Liberal Imagination – Lionel Trilling
Picked-Up Pieces – John Updike
Ending in Earnest – Rebecca West
A Piece of My Mind – Edmund Wilson

And here are a few (very few) of the books I never got around to finishing.

Movies

Army of Shadows
Audition
Badlands
The Big Lie
Black Peter
Boy Meets Girl
Caesar and Cleopatra
Le Cercle Rouge
Claire’s Knee
Comrade X
Crime School
The Crowd Roars
The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 2
Le Deuxieme Souffle
Don’t Knock the Rock
Le Doulos
Fifth Avenue Girl
The Firemen’s Ball
Hard Boiled
Holiday
Honky Tonk
Judge Dredd
Kid Galahad
The King of Kong
The Lady Killer
Late Autumn
Little Miss Sunshine
The Lovers
Loves of a Blonde
Mademoiselle Fifi
Manhattan Melodrama
Michael Clayton
My Blueberry Nights
My Night at Maud’s
The Night of the Hunter
Notes on a Scandal
Office Space
Pickup on South Street
Prime Cut
The Prime Minister
Road House
Sawdust and Tinsel
Searchers 2.0
Shine A Light
The Simpsons Movie
Sleeper
Stargate
Straight to Hell
Strangers with Candy
Taking Off
Talk to Me
The Tender Trap
There Will Be Blood
They All Kissed the Bride
They Call It Sin
2 Days in Paris
Two Lane Blacktop
The Weather Underground
Wild Man Blues
Withnail & I
You Can’t Get Away With Murder

Rock & Roll Death Trip

2008-12-22T19:31:00.000-08:00

Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents
by Mikal Gilmore.

There is not much to like about this book, which is unfortunate. I wanted to like it. I greatly enjoyed Gilmore’s earlier book Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll and would highly recommend it. Stories Done, though, is a let-down.

To start with, the book is a bit of a rip-off. Almost a quarter of it is composed of pieces already published in Night Beat but reprinted in this volume for reasons, Gilmore tells us, of “context.” Even though the “context” of writers recycling their old material is usually that they have nothing new to say. And actually, it’s an overall lack of freshness in either subject matter or ideas which is the overriding problem with this book.

Frankly, this book feels like a morgue. Most of the pieces were written as memoria for recently dead figures from the 60s: Ken Kesey, George Harrison, Johnny Cash, Hunter S. Thompson, Syd Barrett. Throw in some other pieces about the dead Jim Morrison, the dead Bob Marley and a commemoration of the 35th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon; then drag in the corpses from the earlier book (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Gregg Allman, and Jerry Garcia) and you’ve basically got The Rock-n-Roll Book of The Dead, only without the optimism of the Egyptian original. It’s so bad that the last section of the book is actually entitled “The Living.” The living being, in this case, the 67-year-old Bob Dylan and the 74-year-old Leonard Cohen (perhaps that section should have been called “The Barely Living”).

On top of this, Gilmore doesn’t have anything very original or interesting to say about his figures; he merely dishes up the accepted narratives. When he does diverge from those tired (and tiresome) mythologies the book comes alive. For instance, he makes the strong argument that it was Paul McCartney rather than John Lennon who was the more intellectually profound and adventurous of the Beatles. It was McCartney, after all, who was the guiding force behind Sgt. Pepper as well as the suite of songs which ends Abbey Road. While Lennon was mired in personal problems, McCartney was soaking in the works of avant-garde composers like Stockhausen and John Cage, and attending concerts by bands like Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine. Writing about Jim Morrison’s singing on L.A. Woman (an album he rightly calls “a fascinating portrayal of dissolusion”), Gilmore observes:

Whereas The Doors and Strange Days were largely albums about fear and loss, L.A. Woman actually seemed to live within those states of mind…In songs like the title track, you hear Morrison’s voice push apart and fray and gain a new credibility as it actually struggles not to fall apart. Morrison had always claimed that his biggest vocal influence was Frank Sinatra, and L.A. Woman, for once, demonstrated that influence, in Morrison’s determination to sing as if it were the latest hours of the night and he was sharing a few final words with sympathetic friends.

Another problem with this book is that it completely ignores anything that has to do with Blacks, Women, or Gays. It’s purview is almost entirely white, male and heterosexual. Now, as a white, male heterosexual I don’t necessarily mind that, but since the 60s was about the struggles of non-whites, non-males and non-heterosexuals for greater freedom their invisibility in Gilmore’s narrative is a major problem. Certainly, instead of Night Beat’s retreads, Gilmore could have cranked out a few original pieces about, say, what Black Americans were doing in music during the 60s. And since many of these Blacks are now comfortably dead (Jimi, Marvin, Ray) that shouldn’t be a problem for Gilmore. And, surely, he could find a place for Janis’s casket in this cultural funeral parlor.

As if all these problems weren’t enough, yet another one pops its head up; namely, Gilmore’s assessments of his subjects. He likes to gush. He has a tendency to engage in the grossest overstatement about someone’s importance, but often completely misses that person’s true significance. For instance, he says of Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

He was a considerable cultural force who helped transform modern history as much through how he lived his life as through the words that he wrote…Whether we like it or not, we are still living in Ken Kesey’s America. Chances are, it will be a long time before the effects of his life settle enough to be fully measured or easily forgotten.

What nonsense. First off, Kesey did not “transform modern history”; very few individuals do (currently only Mikhail Gorbachev and Osama bin Laden are on that list). Kesey did, though, help to change American society for the better but that was through his writings, not through his life, and certainly not through the ridiculous and embarrassing antics of the drug-addled Merry Pranksters which Gilmore so admires. Thanks to the writings of Ken Kesey – as well as the those of Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing, and Michel Foucault (and many others) – laws were changed in this country and now people can no longer be forcibly incarcerated in mental institutions against their will. Thanks to Ken Kesey (at least in part), millions of American will live freer lives. And that’s quite an accomplishment. Gilmore, though, never mentions it.

It’s a shame that this book is so disappointing. Gilmore is one of the best writers about Rock & Roll that we have. He is, hands down, among the best interviewers in journalism. The interview with Leonard Cohen which ends Stories Done is masterful; he creates a portrait of the man. It’s a genuine work of art. (His interviews with Jagger and Reed in Night Beat were also exceptionally good.)

Despite its many flaws, there are some touching and beautiful moments in this book. Gilmore describes getting a call from Johnny Cash in 1976 after his brother, Gary Gilmore, had been put to death for murder. Cash had spoken to Gary the night of his execution and had called Mikal simply to offer support and some measure of comfort:

I don’t know that I ever found the peace Cash wished me that day, but I know that in those moments that he took the time to speak with me, I found something that made as much difference as anything might on that impossible day: I heard a voice – from a man who had always represented courage and dignity in my family’s mind – offer a stranger understanding and kindness, without any judgments. That was more grace than I expected or perhaps deserved from somebody who wasn’t a friend in those hours, and I have always been grateful for it.

Cash didn’t have to talk to me that day. He didn’t have to talk to any of us in America about those forces or impulses that hurt and bewildered us. But he chose to anyway, and he did it not because doing so made him a better person, but rather because he wasn’t always a better person, and he knew he had to understand the meaning of that truth at least as much as the meanings of faith or piety.

For me the most effecting part of the book was in the "Acknowledgements and Memoriam" section where Gilmore tells about the gradual disintegration and death of fellow music critic Paul Nelson. The brief portrait is very powerful, made more so by the fact that Gilmore can’t load Nelson and his death with a lot of overblown significance; it’s the stark and simple recollection about a friend who went into a downward spiral and never came out.

Gilmore has always understood that the best Rock & Roll, like the best Blues, comes out of personal confusion, pain and loss as well as from the transcendence and exhilaration of overcoming them through the act of creation. It’s only fitting that the best parts of Stories Done also come from that same place. Yet I can’t help but feel that by sticking to the conventional stories of the conventional figures told in the conventional ways he is, in some way, attempting to insulate himself from this truth.

"He Was Enormous With a Woman"

2008-12-15T05:16:00.000-08:00

I've recently purchased a bunch of classic pulps from a local second-hand bookstore near me and I figured that now was as good a time as any to share the covers with my readers:

This one is so over-the-top that I've included the back cover and first page as well:

And here is my collection of Wade Miller originals:

Not a pulp, but still an essential for any library:

Music and Movie Blog Round-Up

2008-12-11T06:37:00.000-08:00

I've been too lazy this week to actually write something myself, so instead I'm going to parasitically refer over to various other art-related blogs that caught my interest:

The Bioscope has an interesting post about George Bernard Shaw’s opinions about movies as well as his career in them.

Self-Styled Siren lists 10 things she loves about old movies. I would add two more things: 1) adorable country cottages you could stay at when life in the city got too tough; and 2) fast-talking dames.

And in case you had any doubts about just how damn good Chinatown really was, check out PilgrimAkimbo’s analysis of John Alonzo’s masterful cinematography and the rule of thirds.

And finally, Michael Monroe muses on the similarity between the music of Anton Webern and that of – I shit you not – The Andy Griffith Show.

To Siberia

2008-12-06T08:32:00.000-08:00

Per Petterson’s newly released novel To Siberia (first published in 1996 but only now available in the US) is something of a disappointment. The first half is very good. The story is about a brother and sister growing up in Denmark in the 1930s and 40s. They have a tough, hard scrabble existence. Their father is a carpenter who “works his way downward”, as his daughter puts it. Their mother a religious eccentric who bangs away at the piano singing hymns of her own composition. Grandpa is an abusive alcoholic given to fits of rage. Suicide takes him out of the novel early. Not surprisingly, the children dream of escape. Jesper, the son, of going to Morocco and the daughter (who narrates the book yet never gives her name – her brother refers to her as “Sistermine”) of boarding the Tran-Siberian Railway and moving to Siberia.

I had read about it, seen pictures in a book, and decided that no matter when and how life would turn out, one day I would travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on that train, and I practiced saying the names: Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, they were difficult to pronounce with all their hard consonants, but ever since the trip to Skagen, every journey I made by train was a potential departure on my own great journey.

I liked the early sections of the book best. Petterson is at his best depicting the family: the cold and brutal father, the love between the brother and sister. The novel is apparently based on the life of Petterson’s mother and it has that feel of easy intimacy that one gets in a well-told family story. Petterson can sketch a character’s whole life in a few details. Here Sistermine tells us about what happened when her grandfather hanged himself in the barn:

When they cut Grandfather down they found a scrap of paper in his jacket pocket. He was wearing a white shirt and his best suit with watch chain and waistcoat, his thick hair was brushed back like shining fur, and there was no gray in it, because he had eaten bones and gristle all his life.

“Bones and gristle” is a nice touch. Even better is the reference to the Grandfather’s hair as “shining fur” as if he was just another well-groomed animal in the barn.

The Nazis invade, and the novel goes downhill. (Ah, what doesn’t go downhill when Nazis show up?) Jesper, by this point a Socialist, joins the underground resistance and goes into hiding. Sistermine weathers out the occupation as best she can. The gripping family drama is replaced by accounts of ugly encounters between the Dutch and their German occupiers. Accurate? Sure. But not very interesting. Without the relationship of Jesper and Sistermine at the center of the novel, the story becomes disjointed – it loses its soul.

After the war, the brother and sister begin to grow more separate lives. She eventually leaves Denmark and travels to Sweden where she gets pregnant. Jesper makes it to Morocco. We never find out if she makes it to Siberia.

Despite its excellent beginning the novel peters out in the end. I really didn’t care about any of the new characters who show up in the last half of the novel and if you abandon it when the Third Reich arrives you won’t be missing much.

Still, this novel is ultimately worth reading. When Petterson is good he is very good. The early chapters involving the family are vivid and masterful. Twenty years from now I’ll still be able to remember them. (The later chapters were forgotten as soon as I closed the book.) At its best Petterson’s prose is like an enforced hush. Here, for instance, is the young Sistermine ruminating about how she will adapt to the Siberian cold:

…I don’t think the cold will bother me. They have different clothes in Siberia that I can learn to wear instead of now when I have only my thin coat against the wind that comes in from the sea between Denmark and Sweden and blows straight through everything. They have caps made of wolfskin and big jackets and fur-lines boots, and lots of the people who live there look like Eskimos. I might pass as one of them if I cut my hair short. And besides I shall sit in the train and look out of the window and talk to people, and they will tell me what their lives are like and what their thoughts are and ask me why I have come all the long way from Denmark. Then I will answer them:

“I have read about you in a book.” And then we’ll drink hot tea from the samovar and be quiet together just looking.

To Siberia is not a great novel. But Petterson is, nonetheless, a great writer.

Dinner With Henry

2008-11-26T06:41:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what it would be like to have dinner with Henry Miller? If so, then here is a 30-minute documentary in which the 88-year old author of Tropic of Cancer has a meal while talking about the Nobel prize, Blaise Cendrars, why he hates "fucking American workers", and why the chicken is too dry. Oy vey. Well, you can always be thankful that you won't be sitting next to him at your Thanksgiving dinner.

Hopper and Haydn

2008-11-20T05:36:00.000-08:00

I’ve spent the past week racking my brains trying to come up with something interesting and profound to say about the Edward Hopper show at the Seattle Art Museum. I got nothing. I think I had a higher opinion of Hopper before the show than after it. There was something paltry about the exhibit. There were just enough paintings to show you his limitations but not enough to impress you with his overall talent.

SAM does this all the time – put together an exhibition which undermines its subject. The earlier show of Impressionists made all the impressionists look bad. Before that the show of Roman sculpture from the Louvre had works so full of 18th and 19th century “restorations” that only maybe a quarter of what was on display was actually Roman. SAM is perfect for Seattle – its art exhibitions are completely passive-aggressive.

Equally annoying is the ad campaign they’re using for the show. It features the painting “Automat” (above) and says “This woman is not a prostitute” (Really? How do you know?), the last word in a large, bold font. A blurb then tells us that Hopper’s paintings depict the changing roles of women in society. Oh, please. Spare me the amateur sociology. I hate it when people try to tell me an artist is significant for sociological/political reasons rather than artistic ones, as if art is there merely to document some other more important issue. It belittles and demeans the artist. Hopper’s painting have value as art, not as political statements. That's no way to advertise an art exhibit. That would be like having a Bruegel show and saying “These people are not receiving adequate health care.”

The highlight of my week – arts-wise, that is – was a production of Il Mondo della Luna at the UW. It’s a little-known opera written by Joseph Haydn in 1777. Two young men want to marry two sisters whose boorish father refuses to grant his permission. The impish lads concoct a scheme in which they drug the old man and convince him, when he awakes, that he has been transported to the world of the moon. Hijinks ensue. In the end, the lovers are united, foolish Dads are put in their place and everyone lives happily ever after - once they get that big, fat dowry.

Sound charming? Oh, you better believe it.

Violins, Kafka & Poorly Behaved Children

2008-11-13T06:46:00.000-08:00

From around the Web:

In The London Times Kate Muir found that her life was transformed by merely carrying around her daughter's violin case. The change begins as soon as she walks out of the music shop.

The violin is in a huge red case with hiking straps. “Wear it on your back and everyone will think you’re a professional,” say the Dots [the music store] staff, and I wonder why. But as I head into the bank to sort a financial glitch…the under-manager’s eyes light up. He speeds me through the queue, commandeers an office and asks me about my musical career. I respond vaguely. He waxes nostalgically about his own classical music past. My finances are suddenly all in harmony.

In the coffee shop queue, people immediately strike up conversations: “Is that a violin or a viola in there?” And when I go to buy a weird Goth hoodie for my goddaughter in Camden Market, the stallholder asks me if I want to try it on. “It’s a present,” I sniff, and add inwardly, “Can’t you see I’m a nagging, ancient mother-of-three on an errand?” But of course it’s the violin: it is code for a different sort of person – artistic, freethinking, single. A wearer of Goth tops, not a person with lice shampoo in her handbag. “Where are you playing tonight?” asks the stallholder, smiling.

I now feel all single women should carry an empty violin case if it has this effect. For a single man, a puppy has a similarly safe conversation-opening effect in the park.

***

Princeton University Press has just published Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. According to the press release, the book

brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

… These documents include articles on workmen's compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit. In adjudicating disputes, promoting legislative programs, and investigating workplace sites, Kafka's writings teem with details about the bureaucracy and technology of his day, such as spa elevators in Marienbad, the challenge of the automobile, and the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk.

***

Last but not least – if your pesky children are driving you crazy, calm down, help is on the way. Erasmus of Rotterdam’s 1530 treatise “A Handbook on Good Manners for Children” has finally been translated and published in English. An immediate bestseller when it first appeared (and I’m sure the competition was stiff), the book was the first instruction manual for children ever written in the West. Although originally composed in Latin for one of Erasmus’s 11-year old students, it’s full of good advice. Here’s a sample:

Some people, no sooner than they’ve sat down, immediately stick their hands into the dishes of food. This is the manner of wolves.

Making a raucous noise or shrieking intentionally when you sneeze, or showing off by carrying on sneezing on purpose, is very ill-mannered.

To fidget around in your seat, and to settle first on one buttock and then the next, gives the impression that you are repeatedly farting, or trying to fart.

To Moscow

2008-11-09T18:20:00.000-08:00

As we enter the final months of the Bush Administration I have to wonder if W. has any additional foreign policy surprises up his sleeve to unleash on us before he goes away. Parting gifts, as it were; fresh disasters for us to remember him by. If so, then to judge by the quality of his earlier foreign policy decisions, I think it will most likely be the immediate invasion of Russia just in time for winter. That’s the only international fiasco he and his neo-con pals seem to have avoided. In which case, the recent republication of Defeat: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign by Philippe-Paul de Ségur will be required reading.

Ségur (1780-1873) was a French aristocrat who served as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp and witnessed the French Emperor’s doomed invasion of Russia first-hand. His account, published in 1824, is fascinating and brilliant, an accomplishment of the highest literary quality. So high, in fact, that Tolstoy took whole sections of the book and put them into War and Peace. Ségur is a fantastic author. I earlier posted about books I couldn’t finish, this is a book I had trouble putting down. Here is the opening paragraph of Ségur’s book:

Napoleon had moved his troops in Poland and East Prussia from Koenigsberg to Gumbinnem. At the close of the spring of 1812 he reviewed several of his armies. He spoke to the soldiers in a jovial, bluff, often brusque manner, fully aware that by these simple, war-hardened men bluntness was looked upon as sincerity; rudeness as strength; haughtiness as true nobility; while the refinement and elegance that certain of the officers brought with them from the Paris salons were considered signs of weakness and faint-heartedness. Gentle speech was like a foreign language which they did not understand, and whose tones struck them as ridiculous.

It’s been a long time since I’ve come across a book with so strong and vivid an opening. We immediately get a sense of the type of man Napoleon is - intelligent, commanding, willing to put on an act but never losing a certain lordly air (he’s “brusque” and “bluff” but also “jovial” – like Jove), a master of self-command and self-consciousness. We see the class gulf that separates the soldiers from their officers. A whole society and a whole drama are sketched out before us.

And what a drama it is. In August 1812, Napoleon crosses the Russian border with 600,000 troops. As he advances, the Russians retreat, never giving battle and destroying every town, farm and settlement along his path. By the time Napoleon gets to Moscow he has only 130,000 troops left – most of them killed by disease, hunger and heat. Moscow is deserted; Russian arsonist begin to burn the city. By the end of October Napoleon has to retreat. The Russian winter sets in. Temperatures plunge to 20 below zero. With no food, no horses and eventually no weapons the remnants of the army trudge on through a frozen tundra of death and horror while the Russian army picks them off piecemeal. In early December Napoleon abandons his troops and rushes back to Paris. A month later only 40,000 of them make it across the border into Poland.

Ségur brings the whole spectacle to life. He has a remarkable ability to depict a scene. Early in the campaign the French reach the city of Smolensk where they hope to engage the Russian army in battle. Instead they find the city empty and still burning from fires set by the departed inhabitants. Ségur writes:

As soon as Smolensk had been reconnoitered and the gateways cleared of debris, our army marched in. We passed through the smoking ruins in military formation, with our martial music and customary pomp, triumphant over this desolation, but with no other witness to our glory than ourselves. Spectacle without spectators, victory almost without fruits, bloody triumph, of which the smoke that hung heavy around us was a symbol only too clear!

Napoleon had hoped that the Russian serfs would rise up against their masters as he approached. They didn’t. (Of course, if Napoleon had promised to abolish serfdom – which he refused to do – he might have gotten a better reaction.) Instead, the serfs burned their homes and their crops to destroy a man they regarded as literally the anti-Christ. The gravity of the situation starts to sink in to him. Ségur, again:

The Emperor by now was fully aware of the enormity of his undertaking. The farther he advanced, the greater it grew. So long as he had encountered only kings, their defeat had been child’s play. But all the kings were beaten, and now he had to deal with the people.

I like how deftly (and eloquently) Ségur moves from Napoleon’s psychology to the broader causes of his defeat. At the battle of Valoutina the story begins to take on a surreal and comically nightmarish tone. After a day of battle (which killed or wounded 18,000 French and Russian soldiers) Napoleon decided to review his troops. His ranks gather

on top of Russian and French corpses, in the midst of mutilated trees. The earth was beaten hard by the feet of the combatants, plowed by cannon balls, and littered with broken weapons, torn clothing, military equipment, overturned wagons and human limbs…The Emperor was unable to pass before them without stepping over or walking on corpses and bayonets twisted by the violence of the encounter.

Napoleon decides to buck up his troops with a speech, telling them “This battle has been the most brilliant exploit in our military history. You soldiers who are listening to me are men with whom one could conquer the world. The dead here have earned immortal names for themselves.” (Can you name a single one? Even Ségur doesn’t.) He then begins handing out promotions. One regiment is given an eagle standard to carry. Ségur is transported by enthusiasm. “Everything about [Napoleon] was admirable; there was nothing to criticize. Never has a field of victory presented a more exalting spectacle.” As for the soldiers present “their names would be famous over the whole world, especially among their fellow townsmen and families.”

During the retreat from Moscow, hunger and the freezing cold take their toll. “The day following the departure of the Emperor,” Ségur notes, “the sky became still more terrible. The air was filled with infinitesimal ice crystals; birds fell to the earth frozen stiff.” Under such circumstances the army starts to fall apart.

An immensity of woe stretched out before us. We were going to have to march forty days more…Some of the men, already overburdened with present miseries, were completely overwhelmed by the dreaded prospect. Others rebelled against their fate; no longer counting on anyone but themselves they resolved to live at all costs. From that time on, the strong plundered the weak, stealing from their dying companions, by force of by stealth, their food, their clothing, or the gold with which they had filled their knapsacks instead of provisions.

A body of French reinforcements manages to meet them and are shocked at what they see.

When…instead of the expected column of splendid warriors, conquerors of Moscow, they saw in Napoleon’s wake a mob of tattered ghosts draped in women’s cloaks, odd pieces of carpet, or greatcoats burned full of holes, their feet wrapped in all sorts of rags, they were struck with consternation. They stared in horror as those skeletons of soldiers went by, their gaunt, grey faces covered with disfiguring beards, without weapons, shameless, marching out of step, with lowered heads, eyes on the ground, in absolute silence, like a gang of convicts.

On a somewhat lighter note (and, let’s face it, almost all other notes are lighter) I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that even in the midst of such carnage and human misery the committed booklover will still be ruled by his mania. For instance, while the French are occupying Moscow, Baron Paul de Bourgoing billets himself in the abandoned palace of Count Rostopchin, the Governor of Moscow. He spends hours browsing through the library and when he discovers a copy of a book written by his father he writes on the flyleaf: “It is with real pleasure that the son of the author has found one of his father’s books so far from his fatherland. He only regrets that it should be war that brought him here.” Even the chaos of the retreat couldn’t stop the true booklover. Sergeant Adrien Bourgogne recalled:

The road was strewn with precious objects, such as paintings, candlesticks and many books, and for the best part of an hour I would pick up books which I would look through and which I threw away in turn, to be picked up by others who in their turn threw them away.

Melville

2008-10-30T06:20:00.000-07:00

The Criterion Collection has recently released two outstanding gangster films by Jean-Pierre Melville, Le Doulos (1963) and Le Deuxième Souffle (1966).

Le Doulos is the better of the two. It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo (below) as Silien, a gangster who may or may not be a police informer – a “hat”, or doulos in French argot. He may or may not have squealed on fellow gangster Maurice, played by Serge Reggiani. Betrayal and suspicion (along with trench coats, fedoras and Melvillian noir cool) abound.

In Le Deuxième Souffle, master criminal Gu Minda, played by Lino Ventura, breaks out of prison and joins a successful platinum heist organized by Paul Ricci. Afterwards, Police Inspector Blot (the cynical Paul Maurisse) tricks Gu into betraying his accomplices. Paul and Gu are taken in and tortured by the police. Gu breaks out. He sets out to clear his name and expose police corruption, which he does with surprising ease. Then he settles the score with Jo Ricci, Paul’s brother, who’s been shooting and threatening Gu’s accomplices since the start of the film and who, we are led to believe – although it’s not really clear - has turned on Jo as well. Mayhem ensues.

Although I liked both films, I preferred Le Doulos. It’s tighter and more engaging. Once the story begins it moves inexorably to its tragic end. Le Deuxième Souffle, as you can tell even from the summary above, is more cluttered; the story doesn’t flow naturally. Additionally, in Le Doulos we care about the characters. Reggiani, for instance, has the sad face of the two-time (no, make that three-time) loser. You just know anything he does will end in disaster. Despite all his toughness he seems to be very vulnerable, not least of all to his own stupidity – rather like Harvey Keitel in Resevoir Dogs (Tarantino, not surprisingly, is big Melville fan). One has no such reservations, though, about Lino Ventura in Le Deuxième Souffle. He is as hard and tough as the Hollywood film gangsters whom Melville adored. One senses that being roughed up by the police would scarcely faze him.

The shootouts in these films have an interesting rhythm. In traditional Hollywood gangster films the shooting occurs in the course of the dramatic action. Characters face off but will often be moving at the same time; and the shooting is spontaneous, like an emotional outburst. “I said get away from that door! you rotten, double-crossing..!!” BANG! BANG! BANG! Hunch and drop. But Melville’s shootouts are quite different. They are quiet and static. A character pulls a gun, everyone freezes and stasis reigns. Characters talk or even whisper, plot ends are tied together. Then a gun goes off and chaos erupts, leaving most of the characters dead on the floor. It’s almost as though Melville has taken the rhythm of the Hollywood western (the slow ritualized shootout in the center of town) and transferred it to the gangster film. That just about every film-maker follows Melville’s lead is a sign of his influence.

For instance, there's a great moment in the shootout that ends Le Deuxième Souffle. I could not, unfortunately, find a clip on-line so stills and description will have to do. In the picture below Gu, (the one with the guns) has cornered Jo and his henchmen. He shoots Jo (the guy closest to us). Then Antoine (in the white fedora in the back) drops down, pulls out a gun and shoots Gu in the hip. Gu falls to the ground but not before shooting Pascal (the guy at the back in the dark fedora).

Then the camera follows Antoine as he runs across the table to keep shooting the fallen Gu.

From Antoine's point of view the camera follows Gu as he rolls onto his back, raises both guns and fires them directly into the camera...

...sending Antoine (now seen from Gu's point of view) against the back wall, dead.

It's pure John Woo. ("Melville is my God" - John Woo)

With the rerelease of Melville’s films as well as the republication of the tough roman dur crime novels by the Belgian Georges Simenon, we Americans are finally getting a sense of how well the French have taken to the gangster genre, especially in its noir form. I find it intriguing that we and the French have developed a noir style of mystery whereas the British have not. For some reason they are still wedded to the traditional Agatha-Christie-style whodunit. I think the reason for this is class and the nature of crime. Criminals, after all, are very much like businessmen. They both like to accumulate money. They both take risks and will stake all they have on a single venture. They need to be cunning and energetic to succeed. They’re willing to lie and cheat and steal to accomplish their goals. Now, the psychological toll for people living in that kind of society can be pathological in the extreme; they can wind up distrustful, scheming, violent, depressed, paranoid, suicidal, etc., in other words, the perfect noir hero. There is a natural sympathy between the criminal and the businessmen which noir reveals. Here, for instance, is a passage from Gil Brewer’s classic pulp novel The Vengeful Virgin (1958 - and recently reissued from HardCase Crime) in which the narrator, a TV repairman in Florida, ruminates on the prospects that even a small job can present:

You’ve got to whittle every stick you get your hands on, if you expect to be big. Your business has to be the biggest and the best, if you expect it to pay off. That’s how it was going to be with me…I was plenty in debt. But if you’re smart enough to find all the angles and ride them down, you won’t drown. In the beginning, you’ve got to scramble and you’ve got to ride those angles hard, every damned one of them. You don’t let any of them throw you, not even the measliest, because every buck adds up. Either that, or you make it big and fast some way, and quit cold. I had learned the hard way, misfiring across a lot of lousy years, that I would have to slug for it – slug everybody in sight.

Somehow, I can’t picture Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot saying that. But I can imagine Edward G. Robinson or Humphrey Bogart saying it. And on the Gallic side of things, Melville’s characters may not say it but they live it - as, too, do the businessmen and criminals of Balzac and Zola and the peasants of de Maupassant.

Americans have always loved their merchants and after the Civil War the industrial powers completely took over and haven’t let up since. In France the rising business class broke the power of the aristocracy in 1789 but not without massive bloodshed. However, in Britain the newly arrived entrepreneurial class didn’t guillotine the aristocracy; they married into them. Or they bought peerages. Or in some way accommodated themselves to the existing aristocracy, who were not destroyed as in France, but rather domesticated. The newly risen English businessman imagined that with enough money he could buy a country house, join the right clubs and maybe even get a seat in Parliament; they had the expectation (not entirely unfounded) that they could become little aristocrats themselves and leave the grubby and shameful world of the tradesman behind.

In the US and France such Trollopian illusions could never take ground. The businessmen run the show; and there’s no aristocratic refuge, no point at which you can let your guard down. Even if you make it to the top you still have to watch your back. There is no escape, as the trapped heros of noir will tell you. You always have to be ready to “slug everybody in sight.”

Unfinished Books

2008-10-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

At some point every serious reader has to ponder the question “How much more of this awful book do I have to read?” Personally, I’ve never been able to figure out exactly when I can abandon a book with a good conscience. There are simply too many very long and very bad books for me to finish every one I start, and each hour trapped with a bad book is an hour not spent enjoying a good one. So a line has to be drawn somewhere. But where? After the first 50 pages? After the first 10% of the book? Or should I give it 25%. I don’t know. On some level I feel that I should finish every book I start regardless of whether I like it or not. After all, sometimes when I stick with a book I wind up enjoying it in the end. That’s especially true with novels. I was about 300 pages into Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady before I realized how brilliant it (and he (and, yes, she)) was. I had a similar experience with The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes. Only about two-thirds of the way through it did I begin to understand and appreciate what Fuentes was doing. This can also work to a book’s detriment, too. I just read Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination and was liking it just fine until, in the last 10 pages, I came across a passage so inane, foolish, and flat-out wrong that I had no choice but to reject the previous 294 pages I’d read as pure, undiluted crapola. But these instances are the exceptions. Most of the times I can tell within the first 50 pages whether or not I’m going to like a book. Which books we don’t finish and why can tell us as much about the reading experience (and the reader) as knowing which ones they do finish. Here, then, are some of the recent books I have started and then abandoned – together with how much of them I read and my assessment of the likelihood that I will ever return to them.

The History of the Thirteen by Honoré de Balzac. Christ, what a slog. I’ve been reading a lot of Balzac this year. Maybe too much. This novel is actually composed of three short novellas, all of which tangentially touch on the dark and nefarious doings of a secret, powerful group called The Thirteen. I made it through “Ferragus”, the first one, without a problem, but it was in the second part, “The Duchesse of Langeais”, that I lost it. Suddenly it was page after page of Balzac’s theorizings on the decline of the French aristocracy or the psychology of women or the sacred mysteries of organ music or some other equally irrelevant topic of which he knows nothing. It was very annoying. Just shut up and tell your story, Balzac, or better yet, shut up, just shut up. Abandoned on page 218 out of 391. Chance of return: medium (well, it is Balzac).

Credit and Blame by Charles Tilley. Tilley is an eminent American sociologist and this book examines the social processes by which blame and credit are apportioned out. Sure sounds interesting. And it was interesting up to a point. I liked Tilley’s observation that giving credit presupposes similar values between the credit-giver and the credited; whereas blame often involves differing moral views between the person being blamed and the one blaming; there’s a deeper, more cognitive dimension to blame. This brief book is well-written; it’s clear and jargon free. Tilley’s examples extended from the founding fathers to African witchcraft to Joan Crawford’s efforts to win the Oscar for Mildred Pierce. This book has a lot going for it. Why I couldn’t get into it, I don’t know. I think I might have stuck with this book if it was more difficult. When I picked it up I was looking for something tough and analytical and scientific and almost Germanic in its unappealing thoroughness. Tilley’s loose, essayistic approach was the opposite of what I was looking for. Abandoned on page 30 out of 190 pages. Chance of return: low.

The Art of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec by Mary Ellen Miller. What the hell? Why did I even buy this book? Abandoned by page 42 of 247. Chance of return: Zero.

In Hazard by Richard Hughes. Every now and then I try to read one of those sea-faring adventure novels but it never works out. This novel by Hughes (first published in 1938) is the latest casualty in that personal tradition; earlier ones include Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Typhoon as well as the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brien. The problem is always the same: I get bogged down looking up all the nautical terms (aft, port, stern, mizzen mast, winches, fore-deck, stretching-screw, mast-stay, etc.) and eventually I’m pawing through the dictionary for hours while my actual reading comes to a crawl. I hate that. It’s frustrating. I like novels – and especially adventure novels – to move briskly. Nonetheless, if you like that whole ship-in-a-storm genre, this book is for you. It’s the story (based on a true incident) of a British cargo ship which gets caught in what seems to be the worst hurricane ever (winds of 200+ mph) in the Caribbean during the 1920s. The characters are well-drawn and Hughes is masterful at building up suspense. The air of the book is ominous; we sense from the start that everything that can go wrong will. Hughes also adds some surreal touches to the story. For instance, Mr. Buxton, the ship’s Chief Officer, has a pet lemur named Thomas who has free run of the ship.

This little Thomas slept all day, and he was not very energetic even at night. But he had one prejudice. He liked the human eye, and he did not approve of it being shut, ever. If he came into Mr. Buxton’s cabin while his master was asleep he would jump carefully on to the edge of the bunk, and then with anxious and delicate movements of his long fingers he would lift the sleeping man’s eyelids till the ball was fully exposed. This he would do to other deck officers too, if he found them (to his distress) with their eyes shut at night upon any excuse whatever.

Abandoned on page 83 out of 239 pages. Chance of return: low.

Seeing Red

2008-10-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

Oswald Iten at Colorful Animation Expressions examines the skillful use of the color red in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Searchers 2.0

2008-10-06T06:31:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, film director Alex Cox came to Seattle for the local premiere of his latest film, Searchers 2.0, at the Grand Illusion Cinema. It is the tale of Mel and Fred, two middle-age bit actors in Los Angeles who both appeared together as children in a cheesy western written by legendary screenwriter Fritz Frobisher who so terrified and brutalized them on the set that each man swore revenge. When they learn that he will be appearing at a special screening of the film in Monument Valley (where John Ford shot The Searchers) their path is clear. They will travel there, find Fritz Frobisher, and kick his ass. Since neither man has a car, though, they rope in Mel’s daughter, Delilah, to drive them. And so off they go through the American Southwest in Alex Cox’s thoughtful, funny and engaging meditation on movies, revenge, forgiveness, cars, the Iraq war, John Wayne, Sergio Leone and other topics.

This movie is a lot of fun. The conversations among the three main characters are hilarious. (You can get a sample of them in the clip below.) Now, “charming” (as opposed to, say, “sardonic” or “anarchic”) is not a word I would normally use to describe the films of Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Walker) but in this case it fits, largely due to the chemistry among this three leads: Del Zamora as Mel, Ed Pansullo as Fred and Jaclyn Jonet as Delilah. Pansullo was especially good, capturing the eccentric and nerdy intensity of a devoted film fan (as in fanatic).

Searchers 2.0 is solid proof that the most important part of any movie is the writing and acting. In the Q & A after the screening Cox (who also wrote the screenplay) mentioned that he wanted to see how quickly and cheaply he could make it. It was shot on digital video in two weeks on a budget of about $200,000. And it’s far superior to most Hollywood movies. In fact, it’s far superior to most independent movies. It’s full of great touches that only talent – yes, that’s right, talent – can provide. For instance, when Fred starts talking about John Wayne’s performance in The Searchers (watch the clip) notice how the light increases on him. If that effect had been done too forcefully then Fred would be reduced to an object of ridicule; we would laugh at him rather than recognize both the awe in which he holds Wayne’s performance and the fact that, on some level, he is seeking the same redemption that he’s describing. The film also shows the makeshift memorials set up in these small Southwest towns to the local kids who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

My only disappointment with this movie was that it falls apart at the end. Cox’s films fall into two categories: the punk (Repo Man, Walker, Straight to Hell), which are exuberant, tongue-in-cheek, satirical, etc. and the realistic (Sid and Nancy – his masterpiece). This film begins as realistic – with whimsical elements hovering around the edges – but then goes into Cox’s anarchic punk mode which, while entertaining, I found ultimately something of a letdown. These characters are very engaging on a human level, you care about what happens to them. And while the resolution of the story makes sense dramatically, Cox abandons the human element at the tend and lards up the film with a tedious Sergio Leone parody.

Robots, Yes! Agit-Prop, No!

2008-10-01T06:18:00.000-07:00

What’s not to like about Pop Surrealism? It’s fresh. It’s funny. It’s unpretentious. It’s composed of the visual language which surrounds us – comic books, cartoons, tattoos, advertising, etc. - yet it twists these images around in strange, haunting and sometimes frightening ways. It often shows more intelligence and technical skill (many of the artists are self-taught) than so-called mainstream art. And its appeal is immediate and visceral.

What I enjoy most about it is the supreme confidence of the artists. They really don’t care what you think of them. I get the impression that they paint only for themselves and their like-minded friends. Walk into any mainstream gallery and you are surrounded by paintings and sculptures which practically scream for the approval of the artist’s teachers or of her granting authorities or corporate purchasers or of the critics or of pseudo-intellectual hangers-on, etc. There is no sense of the playfulness that, one assumes, first made this person want to become an artist. But walk into a Pop Surrealism gallery and you see work which, in its playfulness and sense of fun, testifies to the artists’ whole-hearted commitment and engagement in their work. And there's something very invigorating in that.

Like all art, though, it can be done well or it can be done poorly; and a current exhibit at Roq la Rue has specimens of both. Brian Despain does it very well; Victor Castillo does not.

Castillo’s subject seems to be the hollowness of contemporary, mainly American, culture. His paintings feature children with cartoonish faces, empty eyes (to symbolize “blindness, insanity and dehumanization” we are told in the program notes) and bright red hot-dog-shaped noses (to symbolize “cannibalism” ?!). Malevolent grinning figures, often from pop culture – Goofy, Santa Claus (in “Lie to Me”, right), etc. – menace them. It is all very overwrought, full of bitterness and self-righteous sarcasm. Castillo is from Chile and so it is understandable, given the US’s murderous political meddling in that country, that he would find evil and nightmare in the symbols of American pop culture. But this political anger, however justified, cripples his art. In fact, I get the impression that Castillo really hates pop culture. It’s a lie, in his opinion, a grinning happy face which masks the jack-booted thug beneath. So why he has chosen to paint in the style of Pop Surrealism (which in his case should be called Agit-Prop Surrealism) is beyond me. The combination of his message and the style with which he chooses to express it will always prove unhappy.

Brian Despain, on the other hand, knows exactly what he’s doing. His small mini-show contains portraits of robots. These paintings are quite beautiful. Each robot is delicately rendered and the colors (mostly browns, yellows and silvers) are dark and lush. The robots even seem to have their own personalities. I especially liked "Ghosts" (below). The central figure leaves a strong impression of pride and even defiance. If he’s on, that is. The plug dangling from his left hand makes us unsure. Is he unplugged and dreaming of being automated like the wind-up robots circling his head or is he still on (after all, his eyes are lit up) but now free from his reliance on a power source? And if so, is that a good thing? And the background isn’t very reassuring, is it? Often Despain’s robots are standing in fields with dark clouds gathering behind them, creating a powerful feeling of foreboding and even melancholy. For some reason, robots are often depicted as figures of sadness. On many sci-fi novel covers they stare off wistfully and forlornly into the distance. I’m not sure why this is so. It is true that we depict them as soulless killers, too, but that ambivalence just makes our relationship to them more interesting. Clearly, we can’t stand the idea that a robot would be as uninteresting as most humans. We simply will not accept hum-drum robots. We can imagine them as time-traveling killing machines, but never as bores or dullards or snobs or that drip from the office who tells you endless stories about his latest trip to Thailand.

Cut to...

2008-09-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

David Boardwell has some very insightful thoughts on the use and power of the reaction shot.

The Early Films of Miloś Forman

2008-09-22T06:25:00.000-07:00

The Northwest Film Forum is currently running a retrospective of Czech director Miloś Forman’s early films. There is not a single dud in the lot. Except for Taking Off (1971), his first American film (which I have not yet seen and hence will remain silent on) I can say that they are all excellent films – funny, insightful, well-crafted and still as fresh as the day the footage came back from the lab.

Forman’s directorial debut, Audition (1963), is the weakest film of them all, though. It’s a combination of two documentaries about musicians. The first, If There Was No Music, shows two brass bands rehearsing for a competition. In the second, Audition, a bunch of young singers go on a round of auditions in hip Czechoslovakia; think of it as Czech Idol, circa 1963 – lots of cute girls with beehive hairdos and guys in dark coats looking moody in a Jean-Paul Belmondo way. This is one of those films that looks better - and cooler - in black and white than it ever would in color. Still, watching an hour’s worth of footage crammed with people belting out 45 year-old Czeck pop tunes gets dull after a while.

However, Black Peter (1963), Forman’s first fictional film, is not dull at all. It has no real plot. We see the young and churlish Peter start his new job - spying on customers at the local supermarket to catch shoplifters. We see him berated at home by his father. We watch him go out a few times with his girlfriend. He attends a dance and meets some friends there. One of them gets drunk. All very mundane, and yet compelling. In fact, with its handheld camerawork and grainy look, this films feels more like a documentary than a fictional film. And that’s intentional. At the time, Czech films were made under the rubric of “socialist realism” which basically meant upbeat Communist propaganda. To grab a camera and film your friends and family members (Forman was notorious for using mostly non-professional actors) was not just an artistic choice but a political one, too. The actors in Black Peter are all very good. Ladislav Jakim (above), who plays Peter, is perfect in the role. His casual adolescent truculence is charming if you’re under forty, infuriating if you’re over. Jan Vostrčil is excellent as Peter’s father, pacing back and forth in their tiny apartment, his thumbs looped in his suspenders, endlessly hectoring his son to grow up or warning him to beware of the wiles of women. Vostrčil is a pleasure to watch and it’s no surprise that Forman put him in all his Czech movies.

Loves of a Blonde (1965) tells the story of a young girl in a small town who falls in love with a musician performing in a band at the local dancehall one weekend. After their 2-day fling he returns to Prague and she goes back to working her dreary job at the shoe factory. She misses him and soon shows up on the doorsteps of his parent’s home in Prague. They don’t like her at all. When the son shows up the next morning it become obvious that he doesn’t really like her much either. She returns home and to her life in the factory. It sounds more grim than it is. The film has a light touch and a sense of humor which keep it from becoming a downer. And Hana Brejchová is very good in the lead. She conveys a strength and vulnerability that keep her sympathetic but never pitiful. In the clip below we watch her as she tries on her sleeping lover’s overcoat. This film was a big international hit, both commercially and critically, and it’s easy to see why. It is quite funny. The dance hall scenes are especially good as middle-aged soldiers try to score with the young and uninterested factory girls in town. One trio of soldiers is particularly pathetic. One of them takes off his wedding ring and puts it in his pocket. It promptly falls out of the leg of his pants and rolls across the dance floor, right under the table of the women he’s flirting with.

In The Fireman’s Ball (1967) a group of firemen in a small Czeck town hold a big dance (how Forman loves a dance) in which, not surprisingly, everything goes wrong. The raffle gifts keep getting stolen by the guests. The firemen decide to hold an impromptu beauty contest but can’t find enough attractive women in the hall despite making one contestant strip down to her bathing suit in the back room while they breathlessly oogle (below). When a house catches fire they’re unable to put it out so instead they set up the bar and simply watch the place burn down. They even, at one point, almost set their own hall on fire. They are, in short, that old standby of Eastern European and Russia literature, the ridiculous bureaucrat. Dostoyevsky and Gogol mined the same territory. And Forman’s fellow Czecks Jaroslav Haśek (in The Good Soldier Švejk) and Franz Kafka (in…well, everything) show the various responses of people trapped in the bureaucratic machine. We English-speakers brag about Dickens’ Office of Circumlocution Office and Melville’s Bartleby but to really appreciate the nightmare of officialdom you must go to writers east of the Elbe.

But Fireman’s Ball is more than that. It is also a very funny satire about communism. It’s soon apparent that this gaggle of middle-aged, paunchy, bungling firefighters is supposed to represent the leadership of the Communist Party, either Czech or Russian. As I sat watching Fireman’s Ball I couldn’t help but remember the attempted coup against Soviet leader and reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. The “hard-line Communist coup”, as the US press immediately called it (was there ever a “soft-line” Communist coup?), soon fell apart and the plotters began hurrying to get out of the country. I’ll never forget the TV footage of them scrambling to board a plane leaving Moscow. It was hilarious - a handful of fat, middle-aged men (very much like our Czech firemen) pushing, pulling, shoving and slapping each other out of the way to enter the airplane door. They looked ridiculous, like The Three Stooges or the Keystone Cops. “What’s next?” I thought “‛Hard-Line Communist Coup Meets The Mummy’?” The judgment of history could scarcely be more devastating or cruel than that footage. The project of Soviet Marxism had been reduced to comedy - a crude, slapstick routine performed on an airport tarmac by doomed clowns. Honestly, shooting the plotters would have endowed them with more dignity.

Like most American filmgoers I tend to think of Forman’s movies (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, Ragtime) as being bleak and depressing so it came as a pleasant surprise to discover that his earlier work was humorous, intimate, and, at times, even light-hearted.

"She learned to say 'No' - the hard way"

2008-09-17T07:19:00.000-07:00

Caustic Cover Critic has a great collection of pulp and trash novel covers. Here's a sample:

See them all here.

Styron's Latest

2008-09-15T05:53:00.000-07:00

What is it about William Styron that makes me dislike him so? I certainly haven’t read enough of his work to build up a good, healthy, invigorating hate of the man as a writer. In fact, aside from Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness I haven’t read him at all. I’ve managed to avoid his two most successful novels The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice (although I did see the movie version of the latter) and I have no doubt that if I go to my grave never having read either of them my life will not have been diminished one jot.

However, it was while reading Havanas in Camelot, a posthumous collection of Styron’s essays, that I finally understood exactly why I find him so unappealing. The insight came while reading “A Case of the Great Pox”, Styron’s account of the treatment he received after contracting a dose of syphilis while serving in the Marines during WWII. He’s sent off to the naval hospital on Parris Island and put under the care of the stern and judgmental Dr. B. Klotz. The protocol for venereal disease patients in the 1940s is chilling to modern ears. They were put in their own separate ward. Their robes were marked with a large, yellow V. The mess hall and the bathrooms had specially designated tables or toilets for them to use. When allowed to attend movies at the base, they are cordoned off from the other men behind a yellow ribbon. Even worse were the meetings with the vindictive Dr. Klotz who never misses an opportunity to fill Styron with despair and guilt. As the days pass and his test results keep showing high levels of spirochetes in his blood Styron gives in to “self-lacerating reveries”:

Days passed in a kind of suspended monotony of fear. Meanwhile, the weight of hopelessness, bearing down on my shoulders with almost tactile gravity – I thought of a yoke in the animal, burdened-down sense – had become a daily presence; I felt a suffocating discomfort in my brain. Sitting on a camp stool next to my bed, remote from the other marines, I began to withdraw into the cocoon of myself.

When his gums start bleeding the dentist at the base diagnoses him with Vincent’s disease, a type of trench mouth. Styron starts swabbing his gums with gentian violet and the disease goes away. And so too does the syphilis. It turns out that Vincent’s disease is caused by a different spirochete, one which, in rare cases, can appear in blood tests as a false positive for syphilis. Klotz had ignored that possibility and it was only when he went on leave and his replacement, a genial Southerner named Moss, ran the appropriate tests that the truth is discovered. He never had syphilis. Styron complains to Moss about Klotz: “What this means is that Dr. Klotz could have told me there was a possibility of a false positive. A possibility. But he didn’t do that…He could have spared me a lot of misery. He could have given me some hope.” Moss replies “He was punishin’ you, boy, punishin’ you.”

Now, what annoys me in this whole incident is that Styron never gets mad at Klotz. Where’s his anger? He get abused by this odious little man and his main response is depression and despair. Reading this essay I kept wanting to cry out, “God dammit, Bill, get mad! Get pissed off! Stand up for yourself!” Imagine how Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski or Gore Vidal or Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller would have treated this incident. They certainly wouldn’t have compared themselves to burdened-down animals. In the end, one either likes the personality of the author or one doesn’t and, despite all his talent and accomplishments, I doubt I will ever warm to Styron’s emotional passivity.

Still, if you’re a fan of Styron’s you’ll like this book. The essays are all of a personal nature. He smokes cigars (the “havanas” of the title) with Jack Kennedy. He attends Francoise Mitterand’s inauguration. He writes of his friendship with Truman Capote and James Baldwin. He travels cross-country with Terry Southern. Short pieces deal with censorship, movies, and his family’s slave-owning past. He’s dismissive of the list of the 100 best English-language books compiled by the Modern Library, even though he contributed to it. “I was a little shocked at what the ten of us had wrought, not only in respect to the list’s glaring omissions…but in respect to its generally oppressive stodginess.”

And to end on a note of praise, let me say that his description of first reading Truman Capote is spot-on:

The first story of his that I read was, I believe, published in Mademoiselle. After I finished it, I remember feeling stupefied by the talent in those pages. I thought myself a pretty good hand with words for a young fellow, but here was a writer whose gifts took my breath away. Here was an artist of my age who could make words dance and sing, change color mysteriously, perform feats of magic, provoke laughter, send a chill up the back, touch the heart – a full-fledged master of the language before he was old enough to vote.

An Arts Grab Bag

2008-09-08T05:45:00.000-07:00

Music

Modern Guilt by Beck. Immediately my mind free associates – Modern Love by David Bowie. Is there a connection? No, not really. Beck’s album is
a collection of 10 tight, well-crafted songs. They’re dense and multilayered, drawing on a wide range of influences, from surf music (“Gamma Ray”) to electronica to rock ‘n’ roll (“Soul of a Man” - my favorite). It’s a pleasant enough album and it’s all over in about 35 minutes, but it doesn’t amount to much lyrically or emotionally. It feels slight. One misses the depth and power evidenced on his 2002 release Sea Change.

Visual Arts

The Foster/White Gallery in Rainier Square is as good a place as any to see the strengths and weaknesses of Seattle’s art scene.

Among the best pieces in the gallery are Jamie Evrard’s still lifes of fruit. I like the quick and energetic brushstrokes; it's almost as if the painter was hungry and wanted to finish off the painting so she could eat the fruit. The colors are bright and the paint is often thick, giving the work a sensual appeal. I find that her work is best on a small scale, though. Her large canvases often turn into little more than a chaotic hodgepodge – an impression aggravated by her tendency to let the paint on the lower part of the canvas streak down to the bottom. Why she does this, I have no idea. But her smaller paintings are very good. I especially liked the ones in which Evrard adds a black bar to the painting to additionally frame the fruit (such as in Italia - Four Mandarins, seen above). It adds a concentration and intelligence to the piece.

Dale Lindman’s large abstracts (like Fire and Ice, left) were my favorites. I could lose myself for hours in these paintings. The colors and patterns pull me right in. These paintings feel industrial and yet organic at the same time. Lindman's work evokes the textures of steel, rust, dry and cracked earth, even the channels formed by running water.

Some of the pieces in the gallery were funny - intentionally so, I hope. Judging by Pink Swink (below, right) - which also would be the name of good fruit drink - Bratsa Bonifacho seems to have found inspiration for his art from the blocks of letters used in traditional typesetting as well as from the symbols menu in MS Word (check out the Wingdings set and you’ll see what I mean).

This being Seattle, there is a great deal of glasswork in the gallery – some of it is good, much of it mediocre (a.k.a. by Dale Chihuly).

John de Wit’s surreal glasswork either clicks with you or it doesn’t. His sculptures have the quality of an obsession, like a haunting set of images which the artist just can’t shake. It has the feeling of compulsion, which is good. However, if you don’t happen to share his visual hang-ups and quirks then his work may bore and baffle rather than engage you. In the first category, for me, was his series of what I can best describe as large hot-water bottles wearing crowns (oh, yeah, that's what they look like); whereas his series of sea-polyp/sponge-like sculptures (such as Snappy, left) belonged in the later group. Why did I like one but not the other? Who knows?

Emily Wood’s new paintings, at The Lisa Harris Gallery, are all landscapes of the Idaho and Montana countryside. Although she can do a good job of rendering light and sky these paintings fall short when it comes to capturing the beauty and grandeur of the American West. There’s no doubt she loves this terrain; she just can’t seem to convey that love to the viewer. I think this is due to her fondness for cluttering up her canvas with too many trees and shrubs. Everywhere you look there’s an unnecessary glob of foliage. A more stripped down, abstract approach would suit her better and play to her strengths. For instance, in Hawthorne in Fall (below) simply remove the tree in the center and the painting immediately opens up – suddenly the power of the landscape comes through. Less is more, Emily, less is more.

Theater/Video

And finally, the opening scene of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame performed by animated legos.

Very entertaining - even though I would get rid of the music. Honestly, is there any medium Beckett isn't good in?

The Unloved

2008-09-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

My Fantoms is a collection of short stories by Théophile Gautier (1811-1872). His name may sound familiar to you (or it may not); he belongs to that second tier of 19th-century French writers who always seem to be hovering in the literary background while figures like Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Zola fill the center stage. You come across his name in the introductions and prefaces to their works – “…as Flaubert wrote to Théophile Gautier in a letter dated May 12, 1852…” or “Hugo’s poetry would later inspire the masterpieces of Théophile Gautier” or “...(Théophile Gautier’s novel Spirite would explore a similar theme)…”, that sort of thing. Aside from his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, the average reader has been hard put to find other works by this author, whom Baudelaire called “one of the masters of writing, not only in France but also in Europe.”

Fortunately, this volume from New York Review Books helps to remedy that situation. It contains seven stories spanning the length of Gautier’s career. All but one – a reminiscence of his childhood friend Gérard de Nerval – are gothic tales of horror and the supernatural. However, these tales are very different from the kind of ghost stories which English readers are accustomed to. They are spiced with a level of eroticism which readers of Poe and Lovecraft may find surprising. While the reader wanders among the typical paraphernalia of ghost stories (crypts, gusts of wind bursting open casement windows, characters with cat’s eyes, excessive use of the word “drear”) suddenly the plot veers suggestively, but unmistakably, into subjects like necrophilia, voyeurism and masturbation. Gautier yokes together the erotic and the horrifying.

The “fantoms” in this book’s title are all women. Some of them are real, some are fantasy, some are statues or figures in tapestries come to life, some are spirits long dead, and at least one (my favorite) is a vampire. They are beautiful, of course, and their beauty mesmerizes, haunts, and occasionally destroys the stories’ heroes. But this is not merely a gallery of femmes fatales; Gautier’s women also deeply love the men whom they enthrall. They are not only providers of sex but of the deepest love imaginable; they are their soulmates. And the horror in these tales, as well as their emotional power, comes from the destruction of that love due to malice, accident, or madness. Like James in the “The Beast in the Jungle” Gautier understands that the most terrifying prospect for people is not the undead or ghosts or demons or other such trumpery but rather the prospect of losing those we love and who love us back and the turning of one’s life into a long prospect of loneliness and regret. “No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved,” one of Gautier’s fantoms says and that sentence is rightly used by translator Richard Hughes as the motto of this collection.

Gautier was a one of France’s greatest Romantic poets and wrote with a gripping visual power. A brief sample will give a taste of it. The most powerful story in the book is “The Priest” (“La Morte amoureuse” in French), a tale in which the newly ordained Romuald falls in love with the beautiful but degenerate Clarimonde – who also happens to be a vampire. Although they never speak, she becomes an obsession to him. He is sent away to a distant parish. Years later he hears that Clarimonde is dead (she perishes after an eight day orgy, we are told) but she starts appearing in his dreams. Soon the priest is leading a double life; by day, as it were, Clarimonde is dead but by night she lives in his dreams where the two of them lead a life of love and debauchery in Venice. Soon Romuald cannot tell which life is real and which is the dream/nightmare. At one point Clarimonde is lying deathly ill on her bed in Venice. Romauld narrates:

I was sitting beside her bed one morning, and taking my lunch from a little table so as not to leave her alone for a single minute. While slicing a piece of fruit, I chanced to cut my finger rather deeply. Streams of scarlet blood immediately began to pump from the flesh, and a few drops splashed over Clarimonde. Her eyes lit up and she took on a wild and savage expression of delight that I had never seen before on her face. She sprang from the bed with an animal agility, the agility of a cat or a monkey, and threw herself upon the wound and began to suck it with unspeakable sensuality. She drank at it in little sips, slowly and appreciatively, like a connoisseur savoring a vintage wine from Jerez or Syracuse. Her green eyes were half closed, and the black pupils lost their roundness and took on a narrow almond shape. Every few moments she broke off to kiss my hand, and then once more pressed her lips against the lips of the parted wound to bring forth a few more drops of red. When she saw that the blood would run no more, she stood up with glistening, brilliant eyes.

It was a stroke of genius on Gautier’s part to make a priest the victim, and a willing one at that, of a vampire. After all, in Christian mythology a vampire would be the inverse of Christ. Christ gives his blood to the believer so that they can gain eternal life, he dies so they can live. The vampire, though, takes the blood of his victims so that only he will live; they will die or become vampires (the undead) themselves. Also remarkable in the passage above (and there’s a lot of remarkable in the passage above) is his comparison of Romuald’s blood to wine – once again, an inversion of Christian, or in this case Catholic, imagery since it is wine which is drunk in the Mass to symbolize (or not) Christ’s blood. And by the end of this story Gautier has so blurred the lines between good and evil, waking and dreaming, and the sacred and the blasphemous that the most malevolent and hateful character is not Clarimonde but rather the Abbot who “saves” Romauld.

These tales contain more than just eroticism and horror, though, they can also be fantastic and surreal, even, at times, hilarious. In “The Opium Smoker” the narrator, dreaming that he is at a friend’s house, notices that the ceiling, previously black, has now been painted a dark, inky blue. The friend denies that any re-painting has occurred:

“Well, my ceiling obviously found it too tedious to remain black. So it changed to blue. Apart from women, I know nothing so capricious as a ceiling. What you have there, is simply a ceiling’s caprice. Perfectly ordinary occurrence.”

Lewis Carroll could scarcely have put it better. As the painter Onuphrius Wphly (in “The Painter”) sinks into madness he imagines that his reflection steps out of the mirror and slices off the top of his skull, “like someone lifting the crust of a pie.” Out pour all the ideal women he had ever imagined, all the heroines of novels he wanted to write, all the figures he would ever sketch, etc. Finding his apartment crowded, he decides to go out and attend a party. His unexpected lobotomy is no hindrance to his social life; rather the reverse:

Ironically, being less than his usual self, he was more adapted to the others. In consequence he was considered to be particularly delightful company and much wittier than normal that evening.

My only complaint about this book is that I wish it contained more than just Gautier’s fantastical tales. He was after all a poet, dramatist, travel writer, journalist, and for thirty years one of the most important critics of literature, theater, and art in France. A more comprehensive selection of pieces by this underappreciated writer would have been better. But who knows, hopefully, My Fantoms will spark a new interest in him, and his works will suddenly be, like the heroines of these stories, revived.

Poor Impressions

2008-08-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

I was reluctant to see Inspiring Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the Past at the Seattle Art Museum. I’m not a big fan of Impressionism and the idea behind the exhibit – putting works of Impressionists side by side with works by the old masters (mostly 16th and 17th-century Spanish and Dutch artists) who inspired and influenced them - seemed a little pat, a little too earnest and educational, like a college art course assignment – compare and contrast. But after having seen the exhibition I’m glad I went. It was very educational, although not necessarily in the way the exhibit’s organizers may have hoped.

What came through most forcibly from this exhibition is the sheer superiority of the older artists. While it is true that none of the Impressionists’ masterpieces is included in this show, neither, for that matter, does this show include any masterpieces from the earlier artists. Goya’s Still Life with Golden Bream (above) is no Clothed Maya and yet it carries far more power than Sisley’s tepid rendition of the same subject (below). Now the reason for this is simple: Goya was a genius and Sisley was not. And no amount of study or inspiration can undo the fact that Goya can turn a heap of dead fish into a meditation on death and brutality in a dark, indifferent universe (or at least in the dark and somewhat crazy imagination of Francisco Goya) whereas Sisley renders us nothing more than a pretty painting of dead fish accompanied by some unnecessary elements from a still life (towel, vase, parsley sprig!). Sisley’s painting has a charm to it, yes, but Goya’s is better.

All through the exhibit I kept getting this feeling– old painting, good; new painting, meh. Titian beats Renoir. Raphael sends Degas back to school. Chardin trumps Renoir. Velázquez defeats Morissot. The only Impressionist who can hold his own against the past is Édouard Manet. Velázquez bests him, but to my mind he bests Frans Hals and ties El Greco.

Overall one comes away from this show feeling that the impressionists were a sad and disappointing lot and that perhaps the exhibit should have been called “Uninspiring Impressionism” (OK, that’s a cheap shot, I admit it) – which is unfair to these artists. In fact, it strikes me the whole conceit of this show is bound to diminish the unfortunate artists subjected to it. What artist, in the end, doesn’t pale in comparison to his or her influences? Picasso? Probably not. Da Vinci? I doubt it. Maybe only Michaelangelo or Rembrandt could live up to that criteria. Maybe. And falling short of one’s cultural heritage is not merely restricted to artists. How many of us have lived up to the sum total of all the books and movies and music and plays and paintings and ideas and other cultural bric-a-brac we’ve been exposed to over the years? I think I’ll leave that question unanswered.

* * *

Search and Destroy, at the Balagan Theater, tells the tale of Martin Mirkheim, a low-level entertainment promoter (think Smurfs on Ice) who finds himself owing the state of Florida $37,000 in back taxes. He decides to dig himself out of this hole by turning a novel written by a self-help guru into a movie. The problem, of course, is buying the film rights and the rest of the play shows Martin’s increasingly desperate and dangerous efforts to do so.

Set in the 1980s and first produced in 1990, Search and Destroy is meant to be a depiction - “a withering indictment” to put it in blurbspeak – of the twisted values of the Reagan era. Denouncing the 80s, by the way, was very popular in plays written in the 80s; that’s how one proved one was a serious playwright. And on that count, playwright Howard Korder has done a good job. His characters are motivated by, in no particular order: greed, fear, cocaine, and an insatiable hunger for psychobabble. Korder can be very funny and is at his best in lighter moments. One character at a party tells Martin that his financial advisor suggests that he invest in fear; the 90s, he says, will be “the fear decade.” In the play’s most hilarious moment, one character describes the climax of a slasher film she’s written which involves aliens, chainsaws, and penises with lobster claw heads.

The problem with Search and Destroy is that it comes across more as a pastiche of popular plays from the 80s than an accurate or insightful account of that decade. It takes a little from Hurlyburly (the film industry), a little from Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (over-the-top cokeheads), a little from True West (unexpected killings-and the film industry, again), and a little from Speed the Plow (weird secretaries). The biggest influence, oddly enough, was clearly Martin Scorsese’s 1982 film The King of Comedy (Scorsese would produce the film version of Search and Destroy in 1995). The protagonists’ name even have a similar rhythm: Martin Mirkheim, Rupert Pupkin.

But it’s the clichés and shortage of originality which harm Search and Destroy. The first half of the play is entertaining, if derivative, but by the second half Korder has fallen back on the dreariest of clichés: southern bounty hunters, New Jersey cokeheads who says “Fugget it”, even gun-wielding Honduran drug dealers angrily shouting “Choo tink I’m fonny?!” If only, Howard, if only.

Despite this play’s shortcomings, though, the Balagan Theater has put on an excellent production. Among the performers Lucy Shelby as the gore-loving secretary Marie and Bert Matias as self-help guru Dr. Waxling were especially good. Ashley Bagwell and Sharon Barto were compelling to watch in their numerous small roles. As Martin, Gabe Franken acquits himself well, although his mustache and shaggy hair seem more suited to the 70s than the 80s. Once a scene ends and the lights dim for a scenery change he starts leaping around the stage, wildly playing air guitar in the semi-darkness while 80s-era heavy metal blasts from the speakers. (Actually, I think that’s how I spent most of the 80s myself.) Director Curtis Eastwood has done a good job playing to the strengths of the play and deftly managing it’s flaws; once we know where the story is going he wraps it up briskly and effectively. Well done.

Cathedral vs. Bathroom

2008-08-21T06:41:00.000-07:00

From A Piece of My Mind (1956) by Edmund Wilson:

A certain kind of European overrates the comparative importance, in the present age of the world, of a good deal of his cultural tradition, and often of his own real interest in it. For myself, as an American, I have not the least doubt that I have derived a good deal more benefit of the civilizing as well as of the inspirational kind from the admirable American bathroom than I have from the cathedrals of Europe. I do not, of course, deny the impressiveness or the many varied beauties of these monuments, nor their usefulness to the people in their time; I have enjoyed their delightful coolness and their shade from the glare of the sun on broiling days in France and Italy – though in cold weather they are likely to be unbearable. But I have had a good many more uplifting thoughts, creative and expansive visions – while soaking in comfortable baths or drying myself after bracing showers – in well-equipped American bathrooms than I have ever had in any cathedral. Here the body purges itself, and along with the body, the spirit. Here the mind becomes free to ruminate, to plan ambitious projects. The cathedrals, with their distant domes, their long aisles and their high groinings, do add stature to human strivings; their chapels do give privacy for prayer. But the bathroom, too, shelters the spirit, it tranquillizes and reassures, in surroundings of a celestial whiteness, where the pipes and faucets gleam and the mirror makes another liquid surface, which will render you, shaved, rubbed and brushed, a nobler and more winning appearance. Here, too, you may sing, recite, refresh yourself with brief readings, just as you do in church; and the fact that you do it without a priest and not as a member of a congregation is, from my point of view, an advantage. It encourages self-dependence and prepares one to face the world, fortified, firm on one’s feet, serene and with a mind like a diamond.

Au Revoir, 2007!

2007-12-31T22:42:00.000-08:00

Here's wishing all my readers the best 2008 ever.

The Year's Books

2007-12-30T20:12:00.000-08:00

Here’s a list of all the books I read this year, arranged alphabetically by author's last name. By the way, I actually read more books than these - only the ones I finished get counted, though.

Non-Fiction
1. Dante: Poet of the Secular World – Erich Auerbach
2. Failed States – Noam Chomsky
3. A Time to Keep Silence – Patrick Leigh Fermor
4. Return to Yesterday – Ford Maddox Ford
5. The Divided West – Jurgen Habermas
6. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962 – Alistair Horne
7. The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (selections)
8. The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French 20th Century – Tony Judt
9. The Tomb in Seville – Norman Lewis
10. Facing the Night: A Diary (1999-2006) and Musical Writings – Ned Rorem
11. Freud and the Non-European – Edward Said
12. On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory – Brian Tamanaha
13. Conversations with Gore Vidal – R. Peabody & L. Ebersole (Eds.)
14. Point to Point Navigation – Gore Vidal
15. The Bit Between My Teeth – Edmund Wilson
16. The Shores of Light – Edmund Wilson
17. Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March – Adam Zamoysky

Fiction
1. Saturn – Ben Bova
2. Grifter’s Game – Lawrence Block
3. The Vengeful Virgin – Gil Brewer
4. Mrs. Bridge – Evan S. Connell
5. Falling Man – Don DeLillo
6. The Dud Avocado – Elaine Dundy
7. Crabwalk – Gunter Grass
8. The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton
9. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
10. The Farthest Shore – Ursula LeGuin
11. Dance Night – Dawn Powell
12. The Engagement – George Simenon
13. The Strangers in the House – Georges Simenon
14. The Enchanted Garden – Elizabeth von Arnim
15. Butcher’s Crossing – John Williams

Strangely Compelling...Yet Utterly Hilarious

2007-12-07T14:55:00.000-08:00

Dead Vonnegut vs. Dead Mailer

2007-11-19T06:42:00.000-08:00

The AP reports that even in death Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is more popular than Norman Mailer (or the recently deceased William Styron, too):

No writer was more competitive, or ambitious, than Mailer, author of such epics as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song," and critics would likely hand him the prize for his generation. But if sales are the measure of the public's mind, then honors clearly belong to Vonnegut...

While Vonnegut's passing last April led to a significant jump in sales for his books, the change was far smaller for the works of Mailer and Styron, both of whom, unlike Vonnegut, won Pulitzer Prizes...

[Vonnegut’s] "Cat's Cradle" has sold nearly 130,000 copies since 2006, according to Nielsen BookScan, and "Breakfast of Champions" totals 74,000. Meanwhile, Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner," winner of the Pulitzer in 1968, has sold less than 2,000 since 2006, while Mailer's "The Armies of the Night," a Pulitzer winner in 1969, sold just 3,000.

How Not to Get Laid

2007-11-18T18:51:00.000-08:00

Last night I went out barhopping in Seattle with some friends. First we went to Purr, a trendy gay bar, to meet up with some people. After an hour there, we shot off to ever-fashionable Belltown where we ended up at Amber, a hip and happening bar for people trying to hook up. A bit of a meat market - for ages ranging from early twenties to late thirties. Being in my early forties I was clearly out of my element. Nonetheless we hung out there and enjoyed watching all the guys and gals on the make. The dress was casual but nice. The girls showing abundant cleavage and the guys wearing dress shirts in various states of unbuttonedness.

As we were leaving, though, I saw something very unusual. We went past a man in his thirties sitting alone at a table and who, to judge by the pained look on his face, was having a horrible time. This was not surprising for a number of reasons. First, he was completely overdressed, wearing a tie and business slacks. But the main reason his evening was bombing out was that the guy had actually brought a book with him. That’s right, a book. And a thick one, at that. As we walked past his table I glanced over and immediately recognized the book by its cover. It was Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, an 870-page epic Russian novel about the siege of Stalingrad.

Oh yeah, dude, that's going to work for you. Nothing gets a girl on her back faster than the campaigns of the Red Army. Hell, just whisper in her ear those sweet, sweet words - Stalin, Molotov, Yeremenko, Krylov – and she'll melt faster than a pad of butter in the hot Crimean sun. Good thinking.

The Ideal Book

2007-11-16T05:55:00.000-08:00

Ford Madox Ford, in a 1914 review of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, pretty much nails it:

But I seem to want something fresher, something brighter, something sharper than the Myshkin Christ. For Myshkin is the same thing all over again. But if you ask me what I want…ah, there! that again is not my job. And indeed I don’t know. If I did I should try to do it myself. The only thing that I can imagine as an ideal is a book so quiet in tone, so clearly and unobtrusively worded, that it should give the effect of a long monologue spoken by a lover at a little distance from his mistress’s ear – a book about the invisible relationships between man and man; about the values of life; about the nature of God – the sort of book that nowadays one could read in as one used to do when one was a child, pressed against a tall window-pane for hours and hours, utterly oblivious of oneself, in the twilight.

Ask Andy!

2007-11-09T06:10:00.000-08:00

Here’s an article from yesterday’s New York Times about Allison Storr, a 39-year-old New Yorker who has a rather unusual job:

Looking for someone to curate your life? Need a personal concierge whose expertise is not picking up dry-cleaning but helping chose your wardrobe, your tastes, your friends? Ms. Storr calls herself a personal manager, but her duties go far beyond that. Her clients, all of them men, pay monthly fees of $4,000 to $10,000 to have her be their personal decider in nearly all things lifestyle-related.

Calling on assistants including a stylist and a caterer, Ms. Storr helps people figure out their tastes. If they are single, she enhances their social profile (though she insists she is not a matchmaker).

The article shows her leading a couple through Chelsea art galleries, a tour “that was intended as a primer for cocktail party chatter, not collecting.” Or, apparently, art. Later, she throws a party for the couple so they can meet other people, people who one day may become their friends. The couple is very happy with Allison. “Brad will ask me a question like, ‘Where should I get a haircut?’ ”, one of them chirps, “and I’ll say, ‘Ask Allison!’ ”

One of her clients, a high-powered lawyer who wouldn’t give his name (oh, you’ll see why), has especially high praise for Allison. He even referred to her as his “outsourced wife,” then added:

“The nice thing is that when I ask her to do something, she gets it done and there’s no negative feelings.”

Ah, yes, that’s so much better than having to deal with a pesky real-life wife and her bothersome negative feelings.

Now, this is the line of work I need to go into. The only problem is that I wouldn’t last long, not because I’d be bad at it, but because I’d be so good. For example, here’s how I would instruct my clients to learn cocktail party small talk.

1. Buy a copy of The New York Times and read the article about the pathetic people who pay thousands a month to learn how to make cocktail party small talk.

2. Go to cocktail party.

3. Say “Hey, did you see that article in the Times about those pathetic people who pay thousands a month to learn how to make cocktail party small talk?”

Let the small talk begin.

Any questions?

President Leghorn

2007-06-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

I don’t think Fred Thompson is ever going to be President of the United States. Not with a wife who looks like that (below - and check out here, too). It’s not just her seeming hotness per se, but their age difference. Here’s Thompson – some saggy old man – lolling around with some fluffy, starry-eyed blonde who looks young enough to be his grand-daughter. Ewww! It’s kind of creepy. He should be married to some dreary, old bag, not some zestful little breastful (as S.J. Perelman once put it). It just ain’t right. I don’t think America is ready yet for a Tobacco Road kind of President.

If I was advising Thompson I would tell him that the only way to overcome this creep-out factor would be to go so overboard with weird that he’ll just look like a charming eccentric rather than a horny, old, Southern goat with a thing for girls half(?) his age. He needs to play this totally over the top, become hardcore "southern gothic." Go around dressed in a white suit, wearing a panama hat and having everyone call him “Big Daddy.” Sit on porches and drink mint juleps. The whole Burl Ives thing.

And who knows? It might even catch on. Maybe America does want “Night of the Iguana” for President. I can see it now. Thompson could select Zell Miller as his running mate and they could tour the country with Fred doing his Foghorn Leghorn act and Zell going around challenging people to duels. And Mrs. Thompson can be part of it, too. She could be on the campaign poster, her busty figure squeezed into a skimpy Daisy Mae outfit. And under that, the campaign slogan: “More than the South will rise again!”

Heck, I reckon it just might work.

The Wrath of McCain

2007-05-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

The funniest and most revealing moment in Thursday night’s Republican candidate debate came when Senator John McCain said of Osama bin Ladin:

We will catch him. We will bring him to justice and I’ll follow him to the gates of hell.

Actually, John, he’s in Pakistan now; so you really don’t need to go all the way to the gates of hell. But thanks for offering.

And thanks, too, for the tough guy talk. It seems as though that’s all we American have left. We’ve lost in Iraq. We’re losing in Afghanistan. North Korea has bested us. We’re powerless to stop Iran from developing an A-bomb. But we can always count on our leaders to step up to the mic and talk like they’re characters from a cheesy ‘80s action movie. In fact, I think the only place the US wins anymore is in the movies, so it’s not surprising that someone running for President would speak like he’s playing the President in one. And as if this hall-of-mirrors isn’t strange enough, watching McCain that night from the audience was a real ‘80s action movie star, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger – who could probably win the Presidency if only the Constitution would let him.

But still, that whole “gates of hell” nonsense was a little over the top. A tad overwrought, as it were. Not that it won’t play well. In our current moment few things say “I’m presidential” as effectively as issuing impotent threats against people who are unafraid of you. Nonetheless, the phrase seemed to be a little too much. Until it occurred to me that McCain’s talk is actually in the classic American strain, specifically its Herman Melville mode. He’s clearly, if unconsciously, echoing Ahab at the end of that most over the top and overwrought of novels, Moby Dick:

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.

(For a truly delicious rendering of those lines check out Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, the cheesiest – perhaps even the extra cheesiest - of all ‘80s action films.)

An Amusing Literary Anecdote

2007-04-13T06:33:00.000-07:00

From Ford Maddox Ford’s book of literary reminiscences, Return to Yesterday (1931):

I had a singular encounter with Mr. Page [that’s Walter Hines Page, vice-president of the publishing house Doubleday, Page & Co. and the good looking fellow below]. I had published a historical novel in which one of the characters said – in order to indicate extreme rarity: “You will find a chaste whore as soon as that.”

Mr. Page told me that his firm certainly could not publish such a phrase. I said:

“Oh, well, Mr. Page, make it ‘a chaste dash’…‘You will find a chaste — as soon as that.’”

Mr. Page said:

“We certainly could not print the word ‘chaste.’ It is too suggestive.”

We Are the Future!

2007-01-08T06:48:00.000-08:00

It sounds so cultivated, so refined: Pages from the Goncourt Journals. I especially like the use of the word “pages.” “Selections” would be too prosaic. “Extracts” too mechanical (as if each entry was a rotten tooth needing to be removed). But “pages” strikes just the right note – as if the reader was so sensitive that she wouldn’t want to read it too fast, not more than a few pages at a time or the experience will be spoiled. “Quiet, children, please – I’m trying to savor pages from the Goncourt Journals!”

So who were the Goncourts? They were Edmond and Jules (born in 1822 and 1830, respectively), two French brothers who pursued a literary career in the 19th century. Together they wrote novels, plays and journalism. In 1851 they began keeping a journal. After Jules death nineteen years later, Edmond decided to continue writing it alone which he did until his own death in 1896. They knew just about everyone worth knowing in French literary circles during this time and they recorded every nasty bit of gossip, slander and insult that they could.

Refined, these journals are not.

The entry for April 14, 1875 is a dramatic, though not atypical, example:

Dinner at the Café Riche with Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev and Alphonse Daudet. A dinner of men of talent who have a high opinion of each other’s work, and one which we hope to make a monthly occasion in the winters to come.

We began with a long discussion on the special aptitudes of writers suffering from constipation and diarrhea…

Spanning over forty years, these journals provide an unvarnished look at life in late 19th century France – the dinners, the receptions, the theatres, the salons, the court, the political coups, the barricades, and, of course, the brothels, always the brothels. The brothers held little back and their candid if brutal assessments of their contemporaries are one of the chief pleasures of this dish fest. Ah, and what a list of contemporaries is served up to us: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola (“what a whiner that fat, pot-bellied young fellow is”) Turgenev, Napoleon III, Anatole France, Oscar Wilde (“this individual of doubtful sex”) as well as other lesser known figures such as Sainte-Beuve and Theophile Gautier who at one point admits that he prefers his whores to be pre-menstrual so that he never has to worry about unwanted pregnancies. Unfortunately, no American authors appear in these pages. It would have been interesting to get the brothers opinion of Henry James (And, oh, what he could have contributed to a discussion of writers with constipation!).

This was a sordid little beau monde, a world in which the French Empress could complain about being socially upstaged in public by prominent courtesans. Not that those at the top were any better. Take, for instance, the Duc de Morny, Napoleon III’s brother and President of the Legislative Body. After his death in 1865 the Goncourts note:

The dead man’s friends were extremely worried over the disappearance of a little casket which Morny always kept on his bedside table, a casket containing portraits of all his conquests in all strata of society, photographed naked – usually with flowers decorating their privy parts. They are afraid that his personal valet has stolen it with the intention of blackmailing the ladies involved.

Not surprisingly, syphilis is, in effect, a major character in the journals. It was, after all, the little corkscrews (left) which killed Jules and the pages in which Edmond records his brother’s final dementia and death are stark and powerful. They will move you to tears.

Despite the gossip and dirt there’s no denying that the Goncourts are simply great writers. Edmond certainly knew these journals were masterpieces and in 1886 he began publishing an expurgated version of them. (A full unexpurgated version wouldn’t appear in France until 1958.) Whether describing Paris during the Commune or recreating heated literary arguments or just recording the events and thoughts for the day they write with an immediacy which is gripping. They took a seemingly ephemeral literary form (the journal) and turned it into an art. I’m almost tempted to call them “the first bloggers” except that honor would probably have to go to their predecessors in turning the mundane into the sublime – namely, Madame de Sévigné and Voltaire, both of whom turned the letter into great literature.

Once during a literary argument in a restaurant Edmond shouted out at the other guests: “We are the future!”

One can only hope.

Costa Del Bill

2007-01-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

I admit it – I’m a big fan of Fox News Channel. Honestly, I am. If I get a chance to watch TV news I’ll almost always tune them in. And I’m not alone – they have the highest rated news shows on cable TV. And why are they so successful? Simple – they’re entertaining. They’re fun to watch. Like a circus. Or a freak show.

Now, the trick to watching Fox News is to not take it too seriously. After all, if you want real news read The New York Times. But if you want a good laugh Fox News Channel is probably the most entertaining network on TV, aside from Comedy Central. And it doesn’t surprise me at all that the best shows on the two networks (The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes on Fox; The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central) have developed a strange symbiosis – echoing and mocking each other.

I admit that Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity can be annoying to watch but whenever they start to irritate me I play this sort of game with them. When they start to fulminate about immigration or Hillary Clinton or the French or whatever the outrage du jour is, I begin to picture them not as sitting behind the desk in some fancy, state-of-the-art TV studio but rather sitting on the beat-up old sofa in the basement of their Mom’s house (where they live). Instead of a nice suit, a baseball cap (Mets, probably) and a ratty T-shirt (with maybe a mustard stain on it) and crappy Bermuda shorts and so on. You get the picture. And what’s amazing about this "transformation" is that it really fits these guys. It’s a match. You can try this game on other TV news broadcasters, too, but it doesn’t always work. For instance, if you do it to Jim Lehrer of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer it’s just not believable. You start to think “Wow, he’s so smart. Why is he still living in his Mom’s basement?” And don’t even think of trying it on people like George Will or Bill Kristol or Fareed Zakaria.

Personally I find O’Reilly far more entertaining that Hannity. The latter is little more than a partisan hack dutifully reciting RNC talking points, but O’Reilly is a genuine showman – even his divaesque behavior is engaging. To put it in terms of offensive ethnic stereotypes: O’Reilly is the classic Irishman with the gift of gab, whereas Hannity is the classic Irishman happy carrying water for The Big House.

Now the best part of O’Reilly’s show is the end, which always follows a certain pattern. First, he reads the mail and comments on it. Then he plugs the latest O’Reilly-themed crap you can buy on his website. Finally, he looks into the camera, smiles, and addresses the viewer directly, “Thank you for watching The Factor and, remember, the spin stops here...(big smile)….because we’re looking out for you.” Looking out for me? That is so creepy. I don’t want you looking out for me. I’ll look out for myself, thank you very much. He really should drop that last line. It blows his whole normal-guy-from-Long-Island act. There are few things less inspiring of trust than some slimy, grinning political propagandist saying he’s “looking out for you.”

But after watching O’Reilly for years, it’s become clear to me that a certain sliminess is an integral, and even appealing, part of his persona. In fact, now that I think of it there is only one other person whom O’Reilly resembles with that winning combination of charm, cleverness and sleaze - Lex Luthor, as played by Gene Hackman in the Superman movies. Think about it. They’re both unctuous, devious, ego-centric, somewhat seedy and up to no good. They’re both warm to the idea of bombing the west coast. Heck, they even look similar (sort-of):

(So if O’Reilly is Lex Luthor, then John Gibson would have to be Otis. And Miss Teschmacher would have to be Ann Coulter…or Michelle Malkin…or Laura Ingraham…)

Thou Shalt Have No Other Soft Drinks Before Me!

2005-06-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down two different decisions (here and here) regarding the ability of state or county officials to display the Ten Commandments in public. No doubt the closely split decisions will fuel the on-going debate about the role of religion in politics. However, to my mind a far more interesting debate, and one which you’re not likely to hear in public, is how any seemingly rational person could believe that the Ten Commandments could form the legal basis for any kind of good society at all. In fact, I believe that the Supreme Court should have thrown the Ten Commandments off of government property on the simple and common sense grounds that any government which claims these ridiculous rules as its legal origin doesn’t deserve the respect or loyalty of its own citizens (or, at least, of the non-retarded ones).

Face it, some of those Ten Commandments are pretty silly. And the belief that they are the perfect creation of some all-powerful, all-knowing infinitely benevolent God is laughable once you begin to look at them in detail. You would think a Supreme Being could do better. I bet that if you were to randomly pull twelve people off a bus they could come up with a better code.

Now, some of the commandments do make a lot of sense: don’t kill, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal and don’t lie. Those are good. Any functioning society requires them. But they certainly don’t need a divine source – a society of atheists would require them as much as a society of religious people would. Then there are some that are good advice but I’m not sure about their elevation to the level of divine commandments. For instance, “Honor your mother and you father.” OK, yes, you should respect you parents. But what about the commandment to not covet your neighbor’s house or ox or wife? Does envy really deserve to be on the same level as murder? But hell, let’s be generous and say that these six rules are beneficial and necessary to creating a good society.

Now we get to some commandments that are just plain stupid and that any society could do without and be none the worse and perhaps even better. For instance, the first one: “I am the Lord thy God…Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Talk about self-serving tripe. Think about it. If Pepsi was writing the Ten Commandments, the first would be: “Drink Pepsi!” On the same basis we can discard “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” (a.k.a. “Don’t slam Pepsi!”). So, too, with the commandment to observe the Sabbath (“Take the time to enjoy Pepsi!”). As a society we can chuck out all of these and we’re no worse off. The final commandment to consider is the prohibition against idolatry/graven images. Once again, this rule is completely arbitrary and unnecessary. And the irony, of course, is that those who support putting the Ten Commandments in every courthouse and classroom are themselves guilty of engaging in idolatry. So this commandment doesn’t even work on the people who claim to believe in it.

So in the end we have six good commandments and four which are, to put it mildly, crap. But it’s worse than that.

Now it’s pretty obvious that certain very important things are missing from these allegedly perfect commandments. For instance, where is “You shall not rape”? Where is “You shall not commit genocide”? These would have been far more helpful that some jackass rule against engraving. (Of course, there’s no Biblical prohibition against genocide because the Bible is a pro-genocide book. See Exodus 17:8-16; Num. 21:33-35, 24:20; Deut. 7:1-2; Joshua 6:21, 8:24-26, 10:28-4; 1 Sam. 15:2-7.) Where is “You will help the unfortunate”? Or “You will be compassionate.”?

No, legally, the Ten Commandments have nothing to offer us. An important historical document? Yes. But that's all they are. To display them publically as a source of on-going inspiration and guidance in public affairs is to do nothing more than to openly advertise your own stupidity.

Book Nazis

2005-03-05T22:02:00.000-08:00

Friday’s Wall Street Journal contained a fascinating article about the growth of elite book clubs across the nation.

Nearly every city has one: the book club you can’t get into. Much like clubs that screen members for social connections and Ivy League degrees, they require applicant interviews, references and take pride in their rejection rate. And now, the most elect of these groups are spawning a wave of copycats.

With so many people trying to get into these clubs, the people who run them can impose pretty much any sort of rules they wish. It gets strange fast. One club has a paid moderator. Another has “no discussion of the book before dinner, but during dinner only discussion of the book.” Another club brags that it won’t admit any new members who “can’t say where they were when JFK was shot” (cute). Another club reads only non-Oprah-approved fiction of under 350 pages (sorry Tolstoy); to join this club – I shit you not – you must submit an essay. Another requires three letters of recommendation just to be put on the waiting list.

Obviously, these reading groups are about social status, not literature. One elite club in Washington, DC is headed by Helene Safire, wife of former New York Times columnist and comb-over king William Safire. Its members include Kate Lehrer (wife of Jim Lehrer) and Ruth Boorstin (wife of the late Daniel Boorstin); I suppose to join this club you must be able to say where you were when McKinley was shot. In California, Education Secretary Richard Riordan hosts a book club whose members include Michael York, Alan Alda and Michael Milken (count your silverware).

Still, you don't need to be famous to be a book nazi. Sarah Milks, a New York legal assistant has a book club which rejected about 200 new applicants last year. This club is particularly pretentious:

While the young financial and artistic types who make up the group pride themselves on their literary standards – their reading list includes William Faulkner and Aldous Huxley – most of the applicants have been “young girls who have just moved to the city,” says Ms. Milks. “They’re like, ‘Oh I love to read Candace Bushnell,” a reference to the “Sex and the City” author. “And I’m, like, no.”

Yes, those kind of girls would never understand “As I Lay, Like, Dying” or “Brave New, Like, World”

I find it amazing that people would put up with this sort of abuse. Especially over books. When I read a book all that counts is what I think of it. The opinion (let alone, approval) of Tom Brokaw’s wife or Basil Exposition means nothing to me. If the people in this Wall Street Journal article are book club snobs (a snob being someone who’s haughty to their inferiors and groveling to their superiors) then I and my friends are book aristocrats – confident, independent, interested in the opinions of other aristocrats, to be sure, but ultimately masters of our own judgment. We don’t do clubs.