Rodney Welch: The Blog

A classic restored

2012-02-28T08:03:00.000-05:00

The first time I saw Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise -- many years ago, can't remember when -- was at the Nickelodeon Theatre, and it was at the time a typically enthralling and frustrating experience. It's a big, beautiful, moving story of life in the theater, and I loved watching it, but it was an old print, and the subtitles were just awful: white letters completely lost against a white background of any kind. I particularly remember shots of the actor Marcel Herrand, whose dialogue faded into his cumberbund. (This was a constant problem with all foreign films back then, even relatively recent ones. It took years before anyone figured out how to make readable subtitles, either through boxing them in a dark background or using a different font style.)

I've since seen this movie several times, but this sepia-toned trailer looks like a real revelation. I hope I get a chance to see it on the big screen again.

What's THAT about? What's THAT about? My Year in Music, 2011

2011-12-31T14:26:00.003-05:00

Unflagging: Rebecca Cole (keyboards, backing vocals), Carrie Brownstein (vocals, guitar), Mary Timony (vocals, guitar), and Janet Weiss (drums, backing vocals), the women behind Wild Flag.

This year belonged to women and Girls -- and no, I do not mean Adele and Lady Gaga. Actually I spent rather little time listening to those two; there seemed no need, half the country was doing it for me. Nonetheless, as I compiled my list of the best new records I heard over the last year, the bulk were made by women.

I wonder what the late rock critic Paul Nelson, the subject of what the New York Times calls a "quirky pastiche of biography and anthology" by Kevin Avery, would make of this state of affairs. To quote from the Sunday review by David Hadju:

He subscribed, both in his writing and in his life, to the macho outcast myths of noir movies and pulp fiction, and he seemed blind to the importance of the great female artists nearly absent in his writing, like Joni Mitchell and Aretha Franklin. Nelson loathed the music of Patti Smith.

Unfortunate.

Anyway. I'm a sucker for annual wrap-ups of any kind, especially where music is concerned, because there's so much content and so little consensus. In any given year, there are a handful of artists that will appear scattered throughout the best-ofs from mainstream publications such as Rolling Stone and Spin, The New York Times, the guys from Sound Opinions or Bob Boilen and His Earnest Band of Granola-Eaters at NPR, but generally they all seem to be fishing in different ponds. (As is true for most music outlets.)

Nonetheless, I've either bought, burned or heard a lot of albums from these sources, and been both pleased and disappointed.

Here's what I listened to the most this year.

1. Wild Flag. A "debut effort," but only in the most literal sense of the word. It would be closer to the truth to call this the first album by a supergroup of seasoned professionals, or at least it would if the very word "supergroup" didn't usually suggest a huge ego contest between a lot of cock-rockers, each striving to be Dominant Male Monkey. By contrast, Wild Flag, made up of the remnants of Sleater-Kinney and a handful of other bands, meld together with near seamless perfection. There's no jockeying for position; everyone does their job and everyone shines. You can tell how easy and free they feel in each other's presence. If there's a theme here, it's about how four women found a near perfect groove, because this album throbs from first track to last. When Carrie Brownstein sings "Sound is the blood between me and you" on the opening cut, "Romance," she could be addressing her bandmates or listeners or both. Their sound is simply more durable than anything I've heard this year. I haven't tired of them yet. I'm listening to them as I write this. Great band.

2. tune-yArDs, whokill. "What's THAT about? What's THAT about?" Merrill Garbus asks on this wonderfully crazy record, and to date no one's really been able to provide a good answer. Garbus, the ukelele shredder with the drum machine and the two guys on saxophone and one on bass, created a uniquely odd, off-kilter sound that draws in rock, hip-hop, scratching, tape loops, African rhythms and lots of other strange audio techniques I don't know the names for. Reminded me of Beck's Odelay in some spots, and Public Enemy in others. I got this record for free and liked it so much I bought the earlier ones, Bird-Brains and Bird Droppings, and was overjoyed to find that I had downloaded a SXSW performance as well. A record that sounds like nothing else; a barbaric yawp that is anything but barbaric to hear.

3. P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake. She's never made a bad album: just great and good ones. I'm inclined to say this is a great album, although I'm really not sure. God knows I played it enough, and while it doesn't immediately feel as revealing as one of those records that came from deep within her, the way you hear on masterpieces like Dry, Four-Track Demos or Uh Huh Her, it's still compelling after dozens of listens. She's trying to broaden her range, eschewing the personal (usually a perfectly bottomless well of inspiration) for the classically political, historical, important, dare I say classical: in this song-cycle steeped in WWI Britain and 21st Century Iraq she seems to be channeling the ghosts of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. She writes and sings eloquently of young men charging headlong into battle -- splashing in the "fountain of death" -- of war orphans, of a destroyed landscape; she makes Goya-esque sketches of dismembered bodies. In a way, it's not that much of a departure, because she's always had a natural fascination for violence and physical (and often sexual) destruction. Here, the failing, plundered woman's body seems to be England; she's watching it being destroyed from within.

4. Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What. There's life in the old man yet, and he came back in a strong way with this record, which recalls the spiritual intensity of his earlier records. It's all about fate and faith. Songs reflect on the past and the future, and whether there's a happy ending up ahead. Is faith a delusion or a comfort? Angels, prayers, the afterlife, blessings, sacred light; there's a lot here for a secular humanist Jew to chew upon. Simon, never one for obviousness, polishes the irony down to a faint shadow. There's a tension to it. Everyone in it seems to be on the verge of something -- waiting for Christmas Day, waiting to see God, waiting perhaps for medical results. Is the title a question, or a categorization of the mysteries of living?

5. St. Vincent -- Strange Mercy Annie Clark of St. Vincent is a soft, sweet and beautiful woman you absolutely do not want to fuck with. On Marry Me and Actor, she established her persona: a woman equal parts defiant and self-defeating, unwilling to put up with a man's bullshit but at the same time a little leery of her own toughness. She has no use for illusions, yours or hers, and she shoots them down with a weird, deadpan humor. ("Marry me, John, you won't know that I'm gone.") The woman (or shall I say the woman in her songs) has issues, and you can feel it in the tension between her sweet, calm, rational voice and the sudden angry swoops of her guitar. There's this very subtle sense of danger to the persona in her songs. It seems a little unstable. Like P.J. Harvey, this year she delivered a record rather different from its predecessors: more electronic, sonic and strange. She raises the stakes, and the record gains in drama and personality what it loses in, say, easy accessibility.

6.Dum Dum Girls – He Gets Me High and Only in Dreams. This was a good year for these romantic retro hipsters, whom I've been mad about ever since their 2010 debut I Will Be. This year they delivered a first class EP -- which offers a stunning take on the Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" -- and on their ambitious long-awaited (I waited a long time, anyway) second full-length record they delivered a dreamy record that was almost as good as their first. They also delivered the sweetest rock ballad of the year: "Coming Down." I got to see them in Charlotte over the spring at the Milestone; they were great, although I suspect I was the biggest fan there. They deserve to be huge. Go-Gos huge. Gaga huge.

7. Art Brut – Brilliant! Tragic!. There just isn't that much humor in rock and roll, is there? It's a genre that encourages self-examination and revolt and rage, but not self-effacement, not poking fun at yourself. That's why the fourth and best album by Art Brut was such a happy relief. It punctures the pomposities of players and listeners, lovers and losers, and it's never really mean so much as it is poignantly witty. There's one song called "Clever Clever Jazz" about a guy who likes to believe his lousy little band is, actually, over people's heads. There's another about a heavy metal kid whose idol is Axl Rose. In another, a singer can't quite make out why he's lost his girlfriend to someone who is less funny than he is. This song ("Bad Comedian") includes the one line I heard this year that made me laugh out loud: "How can you bear to hold his hand?/ I bet he signs his name in comic sans." And there are a lot more lines just as good.

8. Girls -- Father Son and Holy Ghost. Girls is two guys,Christopher Owens and Chet White, and girls, mostly, is their subject, although they aren't afraid to indulge their spiritual side either. There's lots of wanting and not getting, or getting and losing. It's all very sincere stuff -- baby-this and baby-that -- but it's rarely awkward. There's lots of high-school diary hoping and moping that might come off as just corny if the music wasn't so varied from song to song (and often within songs). There's something almost retro about it; it's heavy on hooks and refrains, and seems to draw from the Kinks, the Beach Boys, Neil Young (especially on "Vomit") and lots of radio-friendly hits from the 1970s -- a rich blend of nostalgic irony and wistful, heart-on-the-sleeve melancholy.

9. Gillian Welch, The Harrow and the Harvest Gillian Welch's voice is as clear and direct as her songs, all of which on this record bring to mind some woodcuts from the Middle Ages on the brevity of life and the certainly of death. The stories she tells are sad but not saddening: they are rich, evocative slices of life.

10. Kurt Vile, Smoke Rings Round My Halo.First of all, what's with the name? Was he born with it, or is it an homage to the great German composer of The Threepenny Opera, Kurt Weill, whose name in his native country is pronounced KÜRT VĪL? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this guy, but I like him immensely. He's a witty folkie, sort of what The Tallest Man on Earth might be if he didn't take himself so seriously. I haven't, as they say at the grad school, completely unpacked this album, but I liked it so much I got one of his earlier ones, too. Yes, these are lame comments to end my list with, but the fact is I like Kurt Vile's records and I just haven't paid that much attention to his lyrics.

Big, huge, loving, warm and probably inappropriate consoling hugs to these more-than-honorable mentions: Yuck; Wilco, The Whole Love; Washed Out, Within and Without; The Black Keys, El Camino; Thurston Moore, Demolished Thoughts.

Thanks for the sounds: Explosions in the Sky, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care; Sonic Youth, Simon Werner a Disparu

Bones to Pick:

Fucked Up, David Comes to Life. I heard this monster largely on the advice of assorted critics, who were swept up and away by its sheer zen arcadian chutzpah: it's a rock opera, a fervent dramatic monologue, a dirge, a jeremiad, an epic novel not so much sung as screamed, and an unstoppable hurly-burly that rolls over you like a Sherman tank. If you can bear to follow the lyrics, at the center is a story of working-class anomie, love, death, leftism, bomb-making and postmodern storytelling, but you may be more concerned with whether lead vocalist Damian Abraham will fall over from exhaustion, as all the overwrought romantic keening takes its toll on his wrecked rasping voice. Ambitious, tuneful, forceful, overbearing, wearisome. But at least I stayed awake, which is more than I can say for the following.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver. What do people see in this record? In list after list after list, it hovers threateningly at or near the top slot, which I suppose I should regard as a reassuring suggestion that the national attention span is not as limited as I thought. Maybe it's my attention span that needs work, because by track 3 I've usually been bored into a coma. But, in all honesty, For Emma and Blood Bank have never been at the top of my playlist either. I don't get him.

The Decemberists, The King is Dead. Shake me, wake me, when it's over.

Radiohead, The King of Limbs. Tried. Failed.

Still Not Quite Getting It: Deer Tick, Divine Providence; Death Cab for Cutie, Codes and Keys; My Morning Jacket, Circuital.

The Best Books I Read in 2011

2011-12-27T22:59:00.003-05:00

Boy, did I ever not read that much fiction this year!

Most of what I read this year was what I reviewed for a variety of different publications, and those books for whatever reason just happened to be non-fiction.

I did read a massive, ambitious novel by John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun, but it wasn't all that good. By way of reviewing Kenneth Slawenski's okay biography, I re-read J.D. Salinger, which holds up well, but that doesn't count. Also, there were the collected English translations of Vladimir Sorokin, of which the best was The Day of the Oprichnik, a fine dystopian ass-kicking toward any country that would elect Vladimir Putin.

Anyway, here's my Top Ten, so to speak, heavily skewed toward non-fiction, with links to my original reviews.

The Golden Bowl by Henry James. James in his later years is a famously hard nut to crack; the prose gets denser, the sentences get longer, the thoughts thornier -- and the payoff is richer, more symphonic. It's a different artist who wrote this book than the one who wrote Washington Square; still a great storyteller, but one more attentive to acute psychological details, with an abiding sense of the big picture and how everyone fits in it. I don't agree with William James. I don't want the old Henry back.

Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin. This has to be one of the most purely entertaining, page-turning biographies I've ever read -- a perfect marriage between a brilliant writer and a literary genius who gave her an awful lot to write about. Dickens was the total opposite of a writer who spends all day at his desk (although to be sure he parked there for many long stretches.) Dickens from a young age was one of the most famous men of his day, and as lively a character as anyone he ever invented, not to mention a busy one: besides being the greatest novelist of the 19th Century, he was a magazine editor, actor, caring philanthropist -- one of the best parts is when he opens a home for reformed prostitutes -- and a man who always took care of his friends. He also had a bit of a nasty, bitter side, which came out when he divorced his faithful wife for a young actress. Tomalin writes beautifully and elegantly. I cannot imagine her great subject being in any way disappointed.

Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Another great biography that pulls off that trick that defeats so many: marshaling a wealth of research into the service of the story. The book is nearly 1,000 pages (with so many footnotes that it required its own website) but it brought to mind other great examples, like Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Ellman's James Joyce -- books where, at the end, you feel you know the subject personally, or at least as well as you can. Criticized in some quarters for being too tough on it's subject; I on the other hand found it, if anything, a little too defensive at times, a little too protective. Captures Van Gogh in all of his madness, genius, and genuinely moving despair.

Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts. No, six Depression-era books told entirely in images aren't exactly what we normally think of as novels, but they are perfectly riveting stories and social documents by a great American artist.

Lights Out in Wonderland. The best novel DBC Pierre has ever written -- quite the surprise, because his previous two don't suggest he has a good novel in him. A book-length suicide note and an international adventure about the decline of the West.

Examined Lives by James Miller. A well-done survey of the great minds, from Socrates to Nietzsche, that reasonably asks just how well these august gentlemen practiced what they preached, and finds that a lot of them fell wide of the mark. Miller isn't a snarky, snotty debunker; he's often sympathetic to the fact that wisdom often involves risk. This is one of those books, like William Barrett's Irrational Man, that make you want to drop everything and spend the rest of your life reading all the great philosophers. Shrewd and intelligent.

At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing from the Library of America. I'm the last person you'd assign to review a collection of writing on boxing, but someone did, and I learned an enormous amount.

MetaMaus. Art Spiegelmann returns to his masterpiece, lifts the hood, and shows how he pieced it altogether and made it run. Indescribably fascinating.

Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. I'm not sure if I overpraised or under-praised this book; it's a straightforward biography that may fall under the category of "deceptively simple." I read it compulsively, but Kael is one of those figures in my pantheon (others include Vladimir Nabokov, Luis Bunuel, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal) whom I simply like reading about, above and beyond whatever their achievements are. I could listen to stories about her all day and this book has plenty -- and I loved reading all the reactions the book received from people who knew her. The next book offers a superb portrait as well, and one a little more finely-etched.

Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York by James Wolcott. Superb memoir of life in the Rotten Apple in the 1970s, as Wolcott roams through high culture and low. Wolcott could almost be talking about himself when he describes the way Kael’s writing style bopped and danced: “ She wanted the writing to read like one long exhalation that would seize the reader from the opening gunshot and then drop him off at the curb after a dizzy ride.”

Everyone who knew Kael, it seems, has written about her, and Wolcott delivers a great store of memories: her legendary disputes with New Yorker editor William Shawn, her deadly response when George C. Scott’s rep asked for her take on his latest movie (“Tell him to bury it”), her awkward, hilarious defense of Roman Polanski against his statutory rape charge (“It’s not as if he could physically hurt those girls…He’s quite tiny and slight…”), her stunned response to Renata Adler’s 8,000-word bitch-slap in the New York Review of Books. (“She’s trying to take away my language,” Kael tells Wolcott, “to make me so self-conscious that every time I ask a rhetorical question or do something jazzy I’ll catch myself and worry, `Is this something everyone will jump on?’”) Wolcott makes his own mark as a critic, burning writers (“Oh, I was such a scamp,” he writes, recalling how he trashed a Pete Hamill thriller) but also making important discoveries. One was named Patti Smith, the punk priestess who knew she would make it big, setting the stage for Madonna and Lady Gaga, bearing “the crowned awareness that to become a true star is to act like a star from the moment of self-conception and let the world play catch-up.” Wonderful.

Anna Massey, 1937-2011

2011-12-27T07:43:00.005-05:00

Just noticed this, after looking at a year-end wrap-up of celebrity deaths: Anna Massey. British actress, died in July. Fans of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom will recall her as Helen, the gawky good girl who is a little too trusting of Mark, the title psychopath. Also starred in Hitchcock's Frenzy. Daughter of Raymond Massey, a Powell regular. (See A Matter of Life and Death, a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven.)

Regarding Michael Powell and Peeping Tom:

He was the most elegant man; he looked the country gentleman. But he was a demon director; he got exactly what he wanted and he never accepted anything that was false. He was intimidating, but he was very observant. That was good, because the more observant the director the better the performance you give. That was a particularly marked learning experience. Peeping Tom was panned beyond belief when it opened, but it’s now become this cult movie. When it was released it wasn’t that long after the Ealing comedies, which were very cosy. Well, Peeping Tom wasn’t cosy; it was very ugly, although it was very well made and had great psychological depth. The film hasn’t changed; it’s people’s perception of it that has changed.

Speaking of Rain Taxi...

2011-12-21T12:41:00.000-05:00

It's a terrific Minneapolis-based literary publication, whose pages I joined this month, with a piece on Vladimir Sorokin. My little essay is not on-line, but here's the table of contents.

Kael! Kael! Kael!

2011-12-21T12:38:00.000-05:00

My review of Brian Kellow's biography: Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark.

More to say, on the Library of America's collection, in next month's Rain Taxi.

Van Gogh

2011-12-14T17:01:00.002-05:00

I spent a week reading Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's Van Gogh: The Life (reviewed here), and though it's nearly 1,000 pages I was very rarely bored. Reminded me of other terrific biographies, like Robert Caro's three books and counting on LBJ -- the forthcoming volume of which I'll be reviewing for The Millions -- and Claire Tomalin's recent book on Charles Dickens. Every page of the book really moves, and the art criticism struck me as very astute and interesting.

I had a great conversation with Greg Smith yesterday. I'll be publishing the interview in about month (in the issue preceding Naifeh and Smith's Jan. 20, 2012 lecture at the Columbia Museum of Art), and I will likely post more chunks of the interview here, in the land of unlimited space.

Spiegelman's Magnificent MetaMaus

2011-12-14T16:51:00.000-05:00

Also, here's my piece on MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman's superb re-visit to his masterpiece, which supplements the reader with a motherlode of information on how a family history becomes a classic tale of survival and guilt.

James Wolcott

2011-12-14T16:43:00.002-05:00

I keep forgetting to post my reviews, and my non-existent readers are not giving me no end of grief about it.

Here's my review of Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York by James Wolcott, which I enjoyed immensely -- in part because any book with Pauline Kael as a character automatically has my attention.

I'm in the process of writing a longer piece on the recent Kael bio by Brian Kellow and the new collection of her criticism from Library of America.

I'm supplementing it with occasional glances at James Agee and lots and lots of other critics.

And I'm constantly tempted by Hulu or Netflix to watch or re-watch all the movies that brought about all this impassioned critical writing in the first place. The other night I watched Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, the story of two boys in post-war Italy who are corrupted by the system of justice into turning on each other, with tragic consequences. Reminded me a lot of Bunuel's later film, Los Olvidados, especially the ending.

Agee and Kael were both beside themselves ecstatic about it. I thought it was a very good film, if not as moving as De Sica's The Bicycle Thief or Umberto D (that poor old man calling for his dog is an immortal movie memory.) It's a powerful slice of pure Italian Neo Realism, and it has a strong sense of authenticity to it. When it first came out, there was probably nothing like it; it was so unvarnished and raw, yet a little too familiar as well. (Neither Agee or Kael seemed to have noticed or cared that the authority figures were just stereotypes.) At the time, it must have looked like pure cinema.
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Inseparable

2011-12-11T15:10:00.001-05:00

Here is a film that grabs the attention from the start and won't let it go: Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau's adaptation of his 1929 novel, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. It's a lustrous work of Surrealist decadence, filmed in rich, romantic, dreamy black and white; parts of the movie definitely have the texture of a dream. Poetic and and Poe-esque.

The title characters are a teenage brother and sister who live in a dark, seedy mansion with a dying mother. The relationship of Paul (Edouard Dermithe, a kind of vacant-eyed blonde male model) and Elisabeth (Nicole Stephane, a kind of boyish sprite, a teenaged Ariel) is just this side of incestuous -- actually, closer to the other side, as they are so intimate with each other that it's impossible to imagine that they haven't explored each other sexually (and they aren't afraid to bathe together either). But sex isn't really the point with these two, although it's not beside the point either; they are, as Cocteau says on the voice-over narration, unembarrassed about being naked in front of each other because they are two halves of the same body. One cannot exist without the other, and therein lies the story.

Paul is laid up for weeks after getting hit by a snowball, hurled by his friend Dargelos, who is the kind of good-looking young rebel who can get away with anything, and someone to whom Paul is rather intensely attracted. It's a deliberately absurd plot element, and the movie acknowledges it: what kind of snowball knocks you out? Did it have a rock in it? Maybe. No matter. The movie blithely accepts the irrationality and moves on. Paul, now bedridden by the nefarious snowball, is nursed and doted on by Elisabeth, with their activities primarily restricted to the messy bedroom they share together. Here they alternately fight and cuddle, like some married couple, and collect items for their treasure chest: pictures, items, scraps of no significance to anyone but themselves. Eventually, they bring other people into their world, Paul's friend Gerard (Jacques Bernard), Elisabeth's friend Agathe (Renee Cosima, who bears a striking resemblance to Dargelos) and Elisabeth's eventual husband Michael (Melvyn Martin) -- anterior relationships that have an ultimately disastrous effect on the union of Paul and Elisabeth.

The Surrealists, almost to a person, hated Cocteau. They thought he was a fake and a wannabe and a little too close to the artistic establishment they were trying to dismantle. Also, they hated his uber-ridiculous debut film The Blood of the Poet, rightly dismissing it as a pallid imitation of Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. That, anyway, is how Cocteau stood in the 1920s. I'm not sure what they thought of him some 30 years later, after The Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, and Les Enfants Terribles (where his stylistic influences are pretty obvious). He had become very much his own Surrealist, even if he never received a stamp of approval from Andre Breton, and you can see touches of it throughout this film, from the sculpture with a mustache (an homage to Duchamp?) to the Lautreamontesque treasure chest of strange objects.

This film about people creating their own strange world does in fact create a lush and sordid world of its own.

Hilarious Drive-In Trash

2011-12-06T08:42:00.000-05:00

The Babysitter (1969) is the kind of pulpy, nasty teen nonsense that made the perfect date movie for horny young couples who managed to borrow the car for a few hours. Pretty lousy, for the most part, but it has that very tonic mix of the sleazy and the awkward. The script is just atrociously funny, real Ed Wood-level stuff, almost certainly written by an over-the-hill square with a mostly pornographic take on all that free-loving hippie stuff. The kind of person who thought, "I wonder what young people do they do at those dances? I know! They take all their clothes! It's a pagan festival!" The acting is deliriously ludicrous; the crazy generation gap conversation that George (the lamentable George E. Carey) and Candy (the fetching yet empty-headed Patricia Wymer) share while eating a taco is just priceless. Pretty much begs for the MST3K treatment, although it's probably more fun to watch it with friends and just do it yourself.

WTF Book Covers

2011-11-15T06:52:00.000-05:00

This week, we honor the 160th Birthday of Herman Melville's singular American novel about the prep-school football hero who became the role model to to a generation of young men. And who could forget his little Scottish Terrier, Queequeg?

Click here for more takes on this delightful, whimsical, classic account of sporting youth...

A truly unfortunate title

2011-11-12T23:36:00.003-05:00

What about the Presidency of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan?

2011-11-12T23:32:00.000-05:00

[Herman] Cain will not be our next president. Even without the sexual harassment scandal, he has neither the necessary funds nor the establishment clout. Plus he is profoundly unprepared for the job. But his strong appeal to a large sector of the American electorate is worth considering precisely because it reveals the strange state of populist politics in this moment of economic crisis and anti-government fervor.

-- Sophia Rosenfeld in today's New York Times.

The Office is losing its mojo

2011-11-12T23:12:00.000-05:00

Just watched the latest episode and the rhythm was really off. It was very conventionally, self-consciously jokey, as if it was timed to a laugh track. Scenes might just as well have ended with a flashing sign that said "You can laugh now." I've been patient with the new season so far, but it's becoming clear that the people behind the scenes are just trying too hard.

As brilliant as Steve Carell was as Michael Scott, I actually kind of looked forward to seeing him leave just to see how the show would rise to the challenge -- the way "Cheers" did, when Coach was replaced by Woody and Diane was replaced by Rebecca. In both cases, the show adapted perfectly, and found a way to make the change work in its favor. With The Office, though, I think you're seeing a lot of confusion. They don't know what to do. Should the show center around the new boss, Andy (Ed Helms), or around the CEO, Robert California, played by James Spader? Do you replace Michael's brand of uncomfortableness with Andy's? Do you let Robert California's domineering not-so-passive aggression set the tone?

I'll remain faithful to the end, but I gotta be honest: I'm smelling flop-sweat.

iTunes lost my movie

2011-11-12T22:28:00.001-05:00

Just downloaded Water for Elephants from iTunes. It froze after about one minute. I restarted the computer, and the movie completely vanished. I spent 30 minutes trying to find it, but it's nowhere to be found. All this for a movie I didn't want to watch, which is beside the point, because she did.

Today's minor ego boost

2011-11-12T21:43:00.002-05:00

I've just been informed that I am quoted (approvingly, I hope) in this book.

What I'm listening to at this moment

2011-10-18T07:01:00.002-04:00

A Classic of Despair

2011-10-17T22:33:00.002-04:00

Lou Reed's Berlin is one of the saddest albums in the entire history of rock and roll. It's a brilliant and morbid tale of a doomed couple. The songs touch on a lot of heavy subject matter (or at least it was considered that way back then, back when people actually used words like "heavy") -- drug addiction, abuse, prostitution, suicide, and the breakup of a family -- but the dominant note is heartbreak. It's about the singer watching his girlfriend, Caroline, kill herself, coming closer to the end with every song.

People hated it when it first came out in 1973. It's a bum trip, to quote a line from the album, and there's nothing remotely subtle about it. Reed just lays it out there, offers you no distance. He rubs your nose in the sheer pain of it all.

Parts of it are pure poetry, such as "Carolina Says II," which perfectly captures the sheer numbness of someone who has to stay high to kill her pain. In this song, Caroline is referred to as "Alaska," which brings to mind both the snowy whiteness of her dope and her own coldness:

She put her fist through the window pane
It was such a funny feeling

It's so cold in Alaska
it's so cold in Alaska
It's so cold in Alaska

The record reaches a high point of sensational morbidity with "The Kids," where Caroline's children are taken away by the authorities. Reed took no chances when it came to making sure the song brought tears to the eyes of his audience: as the orchestra swells with melancholy, we hear actual piercing cries of children screaming Mommy.

It's a record you have to be in the right mood to listen to, because it's a classic downer.

I listened to it again this evening after hearing a recent Sound Opinions podcast, which featured a great interview with the producer, Bob Ezrin -- who describes just how he recorded those horrible, gut-wrenching, pain-wracked cries of wailing children.

He brought a tape recorder home -- and told one of his young children it was time for bed. He was a toddler; of course he wailed. Then he played a game with his two kids: pretend Mommy is behind this door, and she can't hear you. The kids banged on the door, screamed "Mommy!" at the top of their lungs.

He was laughing as he told the story and I laughed as I heard it.

The first thing it brought to mind was a story the film director Lukas Moodysson told about the making of Lilja 4Ever, which includes a very hard-to-sit-through rape scene, where the victim muffles her screams by burying her face in a pillow.

Except that she wasn't screaming. She was laughing hysterically. She was a young actress on a set in a studio, naked and sprawled on a bed, trying not to laugh during a scene that, at the time, as it was being rehearsed, just seemed absurd.

Another reminder of the enormous difference between what we hear or see and the circumstances under which it was created.

Anyway ... hearing that podcast drove me back to listening to Berlin again, for the first time in maybe a year or two. Ezrin downplayed its effect a little, said that what seemed bold then probably seems tame today, but it didn't, because it's not about the subject matter. It's about the mood, the feeling, the vibe. It's as fascinating and as alienating and frightening as ever.

13 Songs I Probably Play Too Much

2011-08-22T07:26:00.000-04:00

Random selections from my iTunes "Most Played" list:

"Hot Head," Captain Beefheart
"What's Important," Beat Happening
"Molly's Lips," The Vaselines
"Caught With the Meat In Your Mouth," Dead Boys
"Gobbledigook," Sigur Rós
"It Only Takes One Night," Dum Dum Girls
"Everybody's Happy Nowadays," Buzzcocks
"Summertime Clothes," Animal Collective
"First Breath After Coma," Explosions In The Sky
"I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked," Ida Maria
"Sharkey's Day," Laurie Anderson
"The Strangers," St. Vincent
"Prime," Marnie Stern

Martin Amis on Philip Larkin

2011-08-21T17:32:00.000-04:00

"His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them – was anxiously awaiting them."

See The Larkin puzzle in The Financial Times.

Larkin at his most quotable:

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Notes on a Sorry Ass Racket

2011-08-20T23:52:00.001-04:00

A few months ago -- too many, to be honest -- I agreed to write about a book which was not up my alley: At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, a Library of America anthology. I enjoyed the book and took copious notes, but it took me forever to figure out exactly what to say. I didn't want to write the standard kind of review -- this piece by Gay Talese is excellent, this one by Norman Mailer is brilliant, and boy get a load of that A.J. Liebling -- so I went more for a kind of mosaic approach of all the great contrasts at the heart of the book: that it's a venal, ugly, corrupt sport and also a powerful one. I think that is partly what attracts so may people to it, that while it's an uncivilized, exploitative racket, there are moments of greatness to it, and that, for many writers, makes it all worthwhile.

Moments like this one, which I referenced in the essay: the second match-up between the young Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. It only lasts a couple minutes, but that's all it takes for the future Ali. He makes Liston do all the work; Clay is more content to bob and weave and duck, dancing around the ring like Fred Astaire until he suddenly sees an opening and swoops in for the kill.

DBC Pierre

2011-08-20T23:40:00.000-04:00

Here's my WaPo review of DBC Pierre's Lights Out in Wonderland, a book I unexpectedly liked. I did my homework on Pierre, reading his first two novels, Vernon God Little and Ludmila's Broken English. The first one is famous and famously terrible, a story of a Texas school shooter written in numbing first-person slang with one absurd caricature after the next. Big-time English award winner for no apparent reason. The second had a lot more potential, but it was a novel where the writer had bitten off way more than he could chew. I didn't expect much with Lights Out, but I found it very direct, very focused, in a way the others were not. I'd say more, but I pretty much said everything in the review.

Song of the Day: "Sometimes" by Paris Suit Yourself

2011-07-28T20:35:00.001-04:00

Song of the Day: The Pica Beats, "Summer Cutting Kale"

2011-07-22T10:08:00.002-04:00

Immortal college wear.

2011-07-22T05:33:00.001-04:00

A Long Moment

2011-07-16T19:52:00.000-04:00

My Washington Post review of John Sayles' endless, tiring A Moment in the Sun.

Song of the Day: "Sea Cruise" by the Hondells

2011-07-16T19:48:00.000-04:00

Song of the Day: "Fortune Cookie Prize" by Beat Happening

2011-07-13T07:18:00.002-04:00

Beats the Kindle Edition

2011-07-08T17:48:00.002-04:00

Wallace Shawn Just Has To Be a Prick

2011-07-06T11:31:00.000-04:00

Time: What will you be reading this summer?

Shawn: Well, that's really not anybody's business, is it? It's very personal. It's too personal.

Time: Is there a book you find yourself rereading in summertime?

Shawn: Move on to the next question.

More on what writers are reading this summer.

What is it about "summer reading"? I don't read differently in the summer than I do any other time in the year. I read whatever I feel like reading at the time. This whole idea of sasonal reading eludes me.

Garry Kasparov, the chess champ, does make a good pick, though: Vladimir Sorokin's futurist nightmare The Day of the Oprichnik.

I got Sorokin's other books because of it. Essay forthcoming.

Vollman for Cheap

2011-07-06T11:08:00.001-04:00

Thurston Moore's tribute to Mina Loy

2011-07-06T09:11:00.001-04:00

I've been listening to Thurston Moore's new album Demolished Thoughts, about which I can't immediately say much more than that it's intriguing. I haven't given it a full listen with my complete attention yet, but I do play it a lot.

This song grabbed my attention, mainly because of the title: Mina Loy. The name was just vaguely familiar, so I looked her up.

Here's more from the always-helpful Poetry Foundation.

I had no idea she was married to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism and and an early supporter of Mussolini. Here's a good sampling of his work, if you can get through it. Very strange cat.

"A textbook case of High and Low in one parcel"

2011-07-06T07:06:00.002-04:00

Robert Hughes' 1994 assessment of Cy Twombly, who died yesterday at 83.

From MOMA, an audio-visual guide to one of his masterworks.

2011-07-05T10:47:00.000-04:00

Fortune

2011-07-04T12:44:00.001-04:00

Ciccone Youth - Macbeth

2011-07-04T08:56:00.000-04:00

Will Farrell's Latest

2011-07-03T01:14:00.000-04:00

Saw "Everything Must Go" this afternoon at the Nickelodeon, and quite liked it. Very solid movie, especially in light of it's source material.

It was based on a very short Raymond Carver story titled "Why Don't You Dance?", which I read just before the movie. Pretty good story but, being Carver, very minimal. It's about a guy, apparently an alcoholic, who moves all his stuff out on to his front lawn, for no other apparent reason than that it seems like a good idea. He keeps up a steady drunk, and gradually a young couple stops by and figures he's holding a yard sale. They dicker with him for some furniture, mainly a bed. They listen to his records and dance. He watches, thinking possibly of their future - I say possibly because suggestiveness is always Carver's stock in trade. The young couple think of how they'll always remember this day.

That's about it. It's only six pages.

The movie basically just borrowed the situation. It had to invent a much bigger plot, in which an alcoholic named Nick (Farrell) loses his cushy job and comes to see that his wife has moved all his stuff out on the lawn, changed the locks, cancelled his credit cards, and left. He has no money and no job and, with the help of a local black kid, starts selling his possessions, which has the therapeutic effect of freeing him to start over. He finds moral support from a new neighbor across the street, a pregnant young photographer whose husband hasn't arrived yet - and who sees her own possible future reflected in Nick's.

The movie is explicit where the story is subtle, but that's not a criticism. The story showed the effects of alcoholism; the movie, in its comedy-drama way, explored the whys and wherefores, and did it pretty well. The punchlines had bite; it angled a little too much for the hopeful happy ending, it lacked brutal realism, perhaps - and it handicapped the situation by giving Nick the kind of successful past that assures the viewer he won't be destitute. Despite that, it didn't feel shallow either.

Emma Forrest's Just Plain Terrible Memoir

2011-07-02T23:29:00.001-04:00

Certain books, like certain people, just beg to be loathed; they chatter on and on until it's all you can do to restrain yourself from reaching over and slapping on their head. So goes it with this one.

Tiny review I wrote of new Joseph Heller biography

2011-07-02T21:12:00.001-04:00

I'm still trying to feel my way around writing short-but-pointed reviews for Kirkus, but here's an initial effort. Not a bad book, but I wish I could have said more.

Bent

2011-07-02T20:54:00.000-04:00

Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones is one of the rare films about juvenile delinquents on the loose that retains the power to disturb. It focuses on a trio of thugs -- Akira (Tamio Kawachi), his hooker girlfriend Fumiko (Noriko Matsumoto) and Masaru(Eiji Go) -- who typically live for the moment. Akira and Fumiko, like the couple in Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth, usually work as a team; she serves as the bait to lure men and he picks their pocket. The goal in life of all three is pure sensation: sex, violence, drinking and jazz. The music sends Akira into a frenzy, his face frequently contorted in a stupefied orgasmic rictus. He has a maniacal James Cagney smile when he's thinking, and an idiotic Jerry Lewis pucker when he isn't.

What's really interesing about the film, though, is that, as I see it, this gang of miscreants aren't the warped ones of the title, or at least, not the only ones. That distinction is also shared by the young couple whom they victimize: the reporter Kashiwagi (Hiroyuki Nagato) and his fiancée, Yuki (Yuko Chishiro), an abstract painter. To retaliate against Kashiwagi for turning them in, the grou, led by Akira, beat Kashiwagi nearly to death, then kidnap his bride and rape her.

The couple can't face the shame of what happened to them, so they don't go to the cops. Kashiwagi, instead, pretends it didn't happen. Yuki, however, is so traumatized by the rape and her fiancee's denial that she seeks out her attacker. She asks him, in effect, to rape her husband-to-be, so that the two of them will both be at the same level of disgrace, and then can start all over again.

This, Kurahara seems to be suggesting, is what middle-class morality in Japan does to victims of rape. It warps them. Dealing with shame and disgrace are more important than justice, which in this case means victimizing, and destroying, yourself even further.

The film is very much a Japanese cousin to Godard's "Breathless," which was released the same year. Kurahara pits animalistic and destructive youth against castrated, soulless society, and doesn't seem particularly hopeful about the outcome, whichever way it goes.

I tried the coffee at Drip in Five Points

2011-07-02T19:54:00.002-04:00

Felt a little like I was cheating, since my heart basically belongs to Cool Beans, but it was pretty good. Brought back memories of Adriana's.

The Geisha Life

2011-05-07T23:33:00.004-04:00

Watched Apart From You, early melodrama from Mikio Naruse, who, like Mizoguchi, was especially attentive to the limited role of women in pre-war Japanese culture. This is a story of both desperation and shame: an aging geisha's son, ashamed of his mother's life, stops going to school and joins a gang. The girl he loves is also a geisha, but her own family cares less about honor than the money she brings home. Simply told, deeply felt. Interesting precursor to Naruse's masterful When A Woman Ascends the Stairs.

2011-04-20T23:57:00.001-04:00

Six Novels in Woodcuts

2011-04-11T17:04:00.000-04:00

Lynd Ward

The High Cost of Knowing Yourself

2011-03-25T19:38:00.001-04:00

Free-Times review of James Miller's Examined Lives.

Notes from the Underground

2011-03-25T19:36:00.001-04:00

Free-Times review of John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters.

J.D. Salinger

2011-03-07T06:41:00.000-05:00

For The Millions: For Sonny – With Love and Sympathy: Kenneth Slawenski’s J.D. Salinger: A Life

Review I wrote: "Made in Dagenham"

2011-02-20T00:06:00.000-05:00

"Made in Dagenham": In 1968 England, the Auto Industry Gets A Lesson in Equality - Chicago Movie | Examiner.com

Toilet Bowl Realism

2011-01-19T16:44:00.000-05:00

Serbis is an ambitious, slice-of-life, apparently improvisational drama in bad need of a script. In more or less real time, it follows the day-in-the-life events of a Filipino family struggling to keep afloat their sole means of support: a seedy porn theater. Director Brilliante Mendoza has an agreeably crumbling set to work with, lots of space for characters to roam and rooms for them to enter. It's a great backdrop for a family drama. Unfortunately, the fates assigned to the family members range from conventional to dull: there's a grandmother facing the prospect of her faithless husband coming home from jail, a daughter who tries to manage the financial affairs of a theater which is becoming dependent entirely on loans, another daughter who gets pregnant, thereby adding to the financial burden, and then there are all the "service" boys out back, offering blow jobs to patrons. Also, the toilet is backed up. Also, one guy has a nasty boil on his ass. All told, it's more squalor than story. With his pointless follow shots of people going up and down stairs and brutal close-ups of sex, ass boils, and sewage, Mendoza is truly the kind of director who wants you to feel you are there. Unfortunately, you'd rather be anywhere else.

The Millions : The Great Late Henry James

2011-01-19T11:31:00.000-05:00

My latest: essay/review of sorts at The Millions on the late novels of Henry James.

Forever Strange

2011-01-13T08:43:00.003-05:00

Captain Beefheart, a.k.a. Don Van Vliet, at left, with Trout Mask Replica producer and old chum Frank Zappa.

There are records, a great many of them, that sound just great the first or second time you hear them, and then quickly deteriorate in terms of interest or originality.

There are, also, records that are ahead of their time, ones that were perfectly alienating in their day and then, over time, as other artists come up to speed, begin to seem not that unusual.

And then, there are records, very few, that just plain stay strange, that never get ordinary, no matter when you hear them.

This is the case with Trout Mask Replica. It takes off like a rocket, goes far into deep space, and never comes back. It's still out there.

It's the most alienating, polarizing album in the entire history of rock music. Very much a love it or hate it experience, with little room in between. It's the kind of record many people hate on first listen, and then grow to love and admire. It is, also, the kind of record some people hate after repeated listenings. ("The problem is, after six plays, Trout Mask Replica still sounds fucking awful," writes John Harris in a 2006 Observer article.) But I seriously doubt anyone in either camp gets used to it. Forty years after it's release, it still jumps out of the stereo (or whatever device you may choose) and attacks you, demands to be reckoned with.

What is there to get? Well, it dawned on me yesterday, in the midst of listening to an earlier Beefheart album, Safe as Milk, which is definitely worth a listen to anyone with an interest in Trout Mask Replica.

Safe as Milk, first of all, gives the lie to anyone who thinks that Trout Mask is some kind of joke, that it's bad music performed by people who had no idea what they were doing. It's downright foot-tapping. The Magic Band (which in its earlier carnation featured a young Ry Cooder) was an exceptionally skilled blues band, backing a singer with a decidedly idiosyncratic, avant-garde sort of vision. Safe is a far more conventionally listenable experience, but you can hear where Beefheart was going with his future masterpiece.

I think of Trout Mask Replica as an act of both demolition and liberation. Destroy all tradition, destroy the past, go back in time to the first time someone ever picked up a guitar, pretend you are that person, and deliver your own barbaric yawp into the microphone. I'm not sure he wants your foot to tap. It looks back to Dadaist art, Jackson Pollock, and Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, and it looks forward to punk rock, Sex Pistols, and most definitely Tom Waits.

It's primitive, it's modern, and after a dozen listens, it still sounds fucking gorgeous.

The Modern Library Reading Challenge

2011-01-11T00:39:00.001-05:00

Ed Champion takes The Modern Library Reading Challenge. Every time I look at that list, which came out some years ago, I check my stats. Seems I never get out of the low 40s or so. A lot of the books are really long (and as Ed points out, some are actually several books) but there are some I've inexcusably never read (Tobacco Road, The Call of the Wild) that are small and manageable. And, of course, there are some whose presence on the list is a mystery: From Here to Eternity. I doubt anyone but the author thought that was great -- although I can absolutely attest it is readable and my teenage memories of it are happy ones. Just not great great li.

Next on the list

2011-01-10T22:09:00.002-05:00

Been meaning to read -- or actually finish -- this book forever. I started it sometime in college, late 1970s, when it was a very hot book, and I got about halfway through before I bailed. Yet it has stayed in my head for years, this very savage parody of Richard Nixon and the general paranoia of the 1950s. Part of the reason I'm interested: I'm wondering how well such a topical novel lasts, whether it endures, stands the test of time. I wonder how it compares to, say, Philip Roth's Nixon parody, Our Gang, which I read again a few years ago. I still found it hilarious, although I can't say the same would be true for someone in their 20s or even 30s who wasn't connected to the era.

33 Reputedly Great Albums I Have Never Heard

2011-01-09T14:19:00.000-05:00

At least, not that I recall.

I’m a sucker for lists of anything, and like anyone I go through them and mentally calculate how up-to-date or culturally aware I am, or not.

The following are records that all ranked on Mojo’s 1995 list of the Greatest Albums Ever Made, and while I’ve heard of all of them, and in some cases maybe a few tracks, no, in the ends, these are all records I don’t really know and certainly do not own.

I post them here, along with ranking number, as a reminder of what to buy the next time I’m in Papa Jazz and don’t know what to look for.

21. David Bowie - Station To Station
25. David Bowie - Hunky Dory
31. Otis Redding - Otis Blue
32. James Brown & The Famous Flames - Live At The Apollo Vol. 1
36. The Byrds - The Notorious Byrd Brothers
40. Big Star - Third (AKA Sister Lovers)
42. Gram Parsons With Emmylou Harris - Grievous Angel
47. The Byrds - Younger Than Yesterday
48. Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express
56. Donald Fagen - The Nightfly
59. Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
60. Kate Bush - Hounds Of Love
62. Can - Future Days
63. The Beatles - With The Beatles
64. Captain Beefheart And The Magic Band - Clear Spot
66. Eno - Here Come The Warm Jets
67. The Wailers - Catch A Fire
68. Massive Attack - Blue Lines
72. Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance
73. Steely Dan - Can't Buy A Thrill
77. Pink Floyd - Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
78. Joni Mitchell - The Hissing Of Summer Lawns
81. The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night
84. Randy Newman - Good Old Boys
85. Prefab Sprout - Steve McQueen
86. Marvin Gaye - Here, My Dear
87. Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden
88. Margaret O'Hara - Miss America
89. Frank Zappa - Hot Rats
93. Todd Rundgren - A Wizard, A True Star
94. The Smiths - The Smiths
97. The Zombies - Odessey & Oracle
100. Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom

Hot Sexy Crap?

2011-01-06T22:46:00.000-05:00

No Strings Attached looks like a Judd Apatow movie with twice the tits and none of the jokes.

What Makes a Man Start Fires?, The Minutemen

2011-01-06T09:12:00.000-05:00

"Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs" announces the first cut on the Minutemen's second album, and they mean that as a compliment. The songs here are political, polemical, confrontational, abstract and biographical -- and played loud and fast. Supposedly, the name of the band refers to the soldiers of the American Revolution, although it just as well indicates their speed: this is a band that's all about capturing the moment with no dicking around. On this, their second album, 18 songs fly by at just under 27 minutes. The Ramones by comparison sound as if they are playing waltzes.

The Solipsist

2011-01-06T09:03:00.000-05:00

If ever there was a uniquely gifted observer of the natural world, it's Henry David Thoreau, and he knew it early.

Here he is at 27:

"Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, methinks I am favored by the gods. They seem to whisper joy to me beyond my deserts, and that I do have a solid warrant and surety at their hands, which my fellows do not."

This sense of specialness is what makes him not only so fascinating, and so informative and interesting, but also so frustrating. He felt a real genuine oneness with nature; I think he much preferred nature over people, and to read Walden again is to spend time with both a marvelous teacher and an arrogant shit, a prig, a puritan; self-aware but also self-involved and self-important. Solipsist and misanthropic environmentalist.

Like Whitman and, perhaps, everybody, Thoreau was his own best subject. He knew himself, and not only that he was interested in discovering it, recording, attentive to his moods, although I don't think he ever stood outside himself that much, ever saw himself in perspective; maybe it would have shut him up.

"I should not talk about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience."

If you just glance at his life, no one would doubt that his actual experience probably was narrow; he didn't live the big life of a writer, like, say, Melville. But he made that narrowness expand.

Thieves Like Us

2011-01-06T08:59:00.000-05:00

Robert Altman had a fantastic run of success in the 1970s. No one could touch him. He was the king of independent cinema. Every movie was both fresh and familiar, partly because Altman was often (if not always) trying to demolish one genre after the other. Whether it was a war movie (M*A*S*H) or a western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) or a private eye film noir (The Long Goodbye), he always brought his own jaundiced sensibility. The tradition ends here, he seemed to be saying.

The same goes for Thieves Like Us, which I watched again recently for the first time in several years. What struck me about it was something that had escaped me before: that Altman was doing the same thing all over again, taking a well-recognized genre, this time the gangster film, and scrapping every one of its conventions. Forget all that business about sweaty, brutal desperadoes on the run, knocking over banks and killing people before they meet their brutal fate at the hands of the law.

Actually, all that does happen, but Altman's game is to take this whole form just a little less seriously, to take it down a notch. The thieves here live in their own universe and the law barely figures into the story at al until the end. The usual story simply doesn't interest him and as is often the case in an Altman film our own interest comes from the fact that he is going a different direction altogether.

Take, for example, the beginning: a long slow shot of a prison work farm that drifts over a lake where a couple of men are rowing a boat. The viewer does not immediately know that these two -- Bowie (Keith Carradine) and T-Dub (Bert Remsen) -- are escaping from prison, and once you catch on you wonder why the movie isn't a little more aggressive about making the point. They seem a little nervous, but not particularly concerned about getting caught. They get out of the boat and wait for a pre-arranged ride from the third of their trio, Chickamaw (John Schuck), who has hoodwinked Jazzbo, a hapless pot dealer (apparently they existed back then) into providing transportation. Once they carjack Jazzbo, they change into new and ill-fitting clothes, and discard their prison stripes on the side of the road.

Isn't that kind of a bad idea, you think -- just leaving them there, tipping off the authorities? Well, that's the kind of movie it is. They do a lot of dumb things, but the cops barely exist. As our three thieves veer between several domestic hideaways, they are, oh, a little concerned about getting nailed by the authorities, but more concerned with making plans for their next heist, and which of the three gets the biggest play in the newspaper. You could, quite possibly, wonder just what kind of universe these three and their families are living in; shouldn't they be fretting anxiously? That would be a different kind of movie altogether, like maybe They Live by Night, which is adapted from the same novel.

In this movie, far from the usual gangster film, there is nothing glamourous about these bank robbers, and their dialogue is not tough, hard-boiled and witty. They are loud, crass characters and their jokes are always stupid. Also, there's no crackling tension to the story, at least not until the last 30 minutes or so, but that's not a mark against it. It moves at its own slow, dreamy rhythm, a little less concerned with plot than with the world in which these people live, which is another amazing thing about it: by viewing the Depression from the perspective of years, it almost seems more true to the period, more evocative, than the films of its day.

For example, all the way through the film, we hear the sound of the radio: news reports, old serials, orchestras, a dramatization of Romeo and Juliet, interspersed with lots of ads for every new product. The films of the 1930s only used radio to advance the plot; for Altman, it's a part of the plot, a part of the mood. The radio provides the soundtrack of these lives and, along with the newspaper, it helps shape who they are, their idea of themselves.

Take a few of these off my hands?

2011-01-06T08:45:00.000-05:00

The title of Joanna Newsom's overlong three-disc set from last year, Have One On Me, may say rather more than she intended. Listening to it is a little like hiking the Alps, and somewhere in the middle of disc 2 you find yourself saying "If we head back to the car now we can get there before it gets dark."

Just testing this out

2011-01-06T08:35:00.001-05:00

Just seeing whether this app works.

I prefer this to Twitter and Facebook.

Resolution: less social media.

I watched "GoodFellas" this afternoon

2011-01-04T21:15:00.000-05:00

Didn't mean to, exactly, but when I saw it was streaming on Netflix I clicked on it, telling myself I'd just watch the first few minutes, and then that I'd stay until they nabbed the postman, and, well, sooner or later Billy Batts is getting beaten to death and I'm there for the whole show. I don't know how many times I've seen it in the last 20 years. A bunch. You really have to pass it by if you've got things to do, because there are no bad scenes, every character is interesting, it never slows down and the story just builds and builds.

When it first came out I was working for a newspaper and I wrote a little column about it. Don't remember what I said except that I kind of downplayed my enthusiasm. I was skeptical of how good it really was because I was obsessed with Mean Streets and didn't want to entertain the idea that maybe this was better. That seemed like a hasty perspective.

I still can't say which is better, to be honest. One is deeper emotionally and has more of a spontaneous spark, one is a perfectly planned, expertly executed example of top-of-the-line Hollywood film-making.

For any fans, here's a recent GQ article that will take up the rest of your evening:

Love Marnie Stern, love this song. It's called "Prime."

2011-01-04T00:20:00.000-05:00

I really ought to update this more...

2011-01-03T22:19:00.000-05:00

Maybe I ought to make it a resolution or something.

I now tend to keep my scattered thoughts in a journal, though. Writing comes more naturally to me than typing.

Actually, I do write the occasional post here. I just never finish it, or publish it.

Here's something I wrote, oh, some months ago that got published: review of a Paul Auster novel that isn't remotely as good as The New York Trilogy. Wish I could have reviewed that. I took enough notes.

Sunset Park.

There'll Always Be a New Yorker

2010-10-04T20:59:00.000-04:00

"Malkmus was anointed as the voice of a generation, and he seemed to deserve the gig. He had the cheekbones, the patter, and the poker face—a William Powell for the nineties." -- Sasha Frere-Jones on Pavement.

2010-09-02T12:22:00.001-04:00

Ninety-nine percent of the commentary on the Internet -- from Amazonians to newspaper readers -- is penned by miserable wage slaves who have never been asked their opinion on anything and, given the chance, don't know how to do much more than bitch, sulk and howl. You don't have to spend more than five minutes on the computer to see that the country just seethes with resentment.

Don't read this review!

2010-07-22T21:14:00.000-04:00

I tried and tried to like Katherine Shonk's latest novel, but in the end I just couldn't. This pains me, since I liked her first book so much. I think she should write more short stories. I think she may have what I call a Maile Meloy Problem: a brilliant, merciless, sharp-eyed short story writer who just plain turns to a puddle of sappy, girly mush when she writes a novel. The short story allows objective distance in a way novels -- these novels anyway -- somehow don't.

Nonetheless, I wish Katherine Shonk all the success in the world and I hope from my tiny little perch I have not affected it.

The Situation Room

2010-07-02T19:24:00.000-04:00

The Spot: Stories by David Means. Faber and Faber. 164 pages. $23.00

John Cheever said somewhere that the great thing about a short story is that it offers a quick payoff: it delivers up front all the drama that a novel makes you wait around for. This tight, tough collection by David Means seems to take this fact as a guiding principle. Each story puts the reader right in the thick of a situation, as people face yes or no, life or death, stay or go conflicts. Means puts his characters in a spot of trouble and works his way backwards to show how they arrived there. Not all of the stories work, but all of them are, at some level, tense; sometimes a made-to-order tension (a full three stories involve robberies that go bad) but not always.

Whether it’s an apartment, a hotel room, a dinner table, or under a table, in one case, every story has the feel of a pressurized room.

Exactly like one, in some cases. In "A River in Egypt," a struggling father takes his child to be tested for cystic fibrosis, which means spending time in a heated room. This ultimately gets to both of them -- the child has a fit, the father loses his cool and looks bad in front of the nurse -- and as they return home the dad feels the full weight of how life is closing in on him. He's just lost his job, he's running out of money, he may lose his child, and he doesn't know what to do except take life on a day to day basis, a progression of ebb and flow from which you may, possibly, emerge unscathed.

This is by far the mildest fate of any of Means' people, all stuck in their private heat chambers. One of them, a merchant living in the early 20^th Century, actually burns to death: a case history of spontaneous human combustion, where the story is pieced together by way of theories as to just what physical or emotional forces could make a man catch fire.

Most of the people here live on the edge. They are people on the outside of the law, mostly: meth addicts, both modern and Depression-era hoboes and thieves, and psychopaths, as well as the usual sad men and women in or just out of bad marriages.

The first story, “The Knocking,” sets the claustrophobic tone: a divorced man, living alone, is tormented by the incessant noise from the apartment above: sweeping, walking, vacuuming, hammering that goes on a lot longer than necessary – as if the guy upstairs, whoever he is, is on a mission to drive him crazy. It makes him think of the home he built and lost, where he did his own share of repairing, and the noise may be some form of communication from someone who is just as lonely as he is -- or the sounds may be in his own head. Maybe what he's really hearing is the gradually maddening sound of his own crack-up.

In the title story, Shank, a former preacher turned pimp, considers poisoning the Cleveland water supply, hitting it at just the right spot where the water goes into the system. The idea appeals to him because poison is what he has become: a smooth and amorphous virus, drifting from place to place, contaminating and destroying everyone he touches.

A common theme throughout is the way people use stories to get by, either in the lies they tell others, or the illusions and justifications they tell themselves. In "The Spot," Shank, while waiting for a hooker to take care of business with a sweaty john, imagines the ways a young woman can take part in her own degradation: by focusing on the need for her own survival, or by thinking of her self as merely a sexual object, or an organism:

Assume a protoplasmic mobility; the creep of the protozoan, one-celled hydra, primal and original and eager to consume itself for lunch.

Hoboes regale themselves with tales of murder ("The Blade") or narrow escapes ("The Junction"). In “Oklahoma,” a low-life crank addict named Lester, who dreams of being a movie director, lures a young woman named Genevieve into his plan for a robbery. Lester plots the robbery like a movie, framing everything with his hands. But where Lester is making one movie, Genevieve dreams of starring in another -- one with a happier ending than the one she'll likely get.

Although these stories are all set in the Midwest, they have rather a lot in common with Flannery O'Connor's "Christ-haunted" South, full of believers, religious exiles and cracked mystics. Shank himself is a dead ringer for both the smooth con man from "Good Country People" and the murderous Misfit from "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

While these people tend to be creatures of confinement, they are no safer outside than in, as the great and often polluted outdoors seems to be closing in. Leaving the hospital, the father in “A River in Egypt” passes over a bridge; crying “for himself as much as for his son, and for the world that was unfolding to his left, an open vista, the gaping mouth of the river…” Nature itself becomes a constantly devouring presence, whether in the form of a gulch that serves as the scene for a crucifixion, an open grave whose diggers appear to have killed their father, or Niagara Falls.

The stories also have a lot to do with the role of chance, where best-laid plans are suddenly subject to the whims of fate. "One wrong move and God enters the world at a weird angle," says Shank, who is actually talking about himself. In "The Botch," a Depression-era bank robbery goes bad when a gunman is distracted by a woman walking down the street.

There are some lapses here and there; a few stories promise more than they deliver, and in at least one Means samples so freely from William Faulkner and O'Connor herself that I wonder if he wasn't just testing to see if anyone was paying attention. Also, I hope he leavens his fatalism a little in the books to come, mix it up a little, not be so unrelievedly grim. It will keep his books from getting lost in the modern short story shuffle, which is already over-populated with middle-class losers whose fate you can spot a mile away.

Means' talent is to create very concentrated doses of drama, delivered with a poet's measured, precise sensibility. He doesn't just cut to the chase, he slows it down, scrutinizes it, traces the contours of what it means to be lonely, palpates the shapelessness of adultery. This is fiction where a great deal is happening at once: the present, the sequence of events that led up to it, the likely aftermath. To borrow the description of one of his many troubled characters, Means can “shave it down to a single moment, freeze-frame it to the precise second just before all hell breaks loose.”

He creates prosaic, tightly wound slo-mo tragedies, just waiting to happen.

Snit for the Day

2010-07-01T22:16:00.005-04:00

That shopworn dictum, "No one's irreplaceable," is only true in the worlds of business and government.

It is not true in the arts. It's likely not true in sports, science, medicine, or certain fields of technology, either, but those aren't really my immediate concern.

Poets, painters, writers, singers, actors -- especially great ones -- can't be replaced; neither, I suppose, can good ones. They can be imitated, admired, criticized, dismissed, but they can't be replaced, because they create something that (depending somewhat on technology, but not necessarily) lasts forever.

You can always find someone to push paper, run major corporations, manage hedge funds, fight wars or run the government.

A thousand CEOs and their legal staff and secretaries could perish and someone else would be doing their job the next day, probably just as well. No one but their families and friends would notice. Their customers would be over it in a nanosecond.

Calvin Coolidge famously said that the business of America is business, but in a larger sense the business world is as irrelevant as it is uninteresting.

You can't find someone else to paint the Sistine Chapel, write Hamlet or Remembrance of Things Past, compose St. Matthew's Passion, or make a film like The Rules of the Game or Tokyo Story. These things will last forever.

Businesses come and just as easily go. Skyscrapers vanish within a few generations.

Business is about today. Art is about today as well, but it's also about the future. At least, if it's any good, it is.

All anyone else gives a shit about is getting a raise or getting a promotion. When they die, their concerns will die with them.

Greed is Great

2010-06-19T17:10:00.003-04:00

I recently saw Erich von Stroheim's monumental massacred masterpiece, Greed, or what passes for it, and it's both tremendous and heartbreaking. It's a film of extraordinary ambition, too much ambition, and that's what makes it so sad to watch.

In fact, you don't really watch it today; you watch pieces of it. It was originally ten hours long, and the studio butchered it down to a couple of hours of scraps.

The version I saw, now available on iTunes, fills in the missing holes with stills. The original footage, sadly, was torched.

The story behind the making of it is one of the great cautionary tales of art vs. commerce, the iconic model of an obsessed visionary fighting a losing battle with the men who pull the strings.

If you want the whole story, there any number of accounts in film books and websites such as this.

Here's the short version: in 1923, the fiercely independent Austrian director, set out to make an absolutely faithful version of Frank Norris' classic novel McTeague, not only dramatizing virtually everything in the book but making sure everyone felt it.

The story follows the quick rise and long fall of the title character, whose life is destroyed by a sudden infusion of wealth. A poor boy from a broken home, McTeague becomes a miner, finds some short-lived success as a dentist, and falls in love with a girl named Trina, who wins a fortune at the lottery. The money turns their lives upside down, setting into motion a fatalistic series of events that will result in jealousy, suspicion, poverty, misery, and murder. McTeague, on the run from the law after killing Trina, will wind up in Death Valley, where his money will have no value whatsoever.

It was the dark side of the Horatio Alger story, where the American dream of wealth creates greed, selfishness, brutality, murder, and turns people into animals. It's a real American tragedy, very much on the order of Dreiser's American Tragedy, a contemporaneous example of grim early 20th Century realism with which it is frequently compared.

The result was a 9 1/2 hour film that spared no expense in following everything in the book. By all accounts, it was brilliant; maybe one of the greatest films ever made.

It was, also, insanely too long. It was foolhardy. How could the studio possibly recoup the half-million fortune it had invested in the film? In all likelihood, it couldn't. Almost no one, then or (for the most part) now, sits for a film of that length, and certainly not a mass audience. It was the work of a director who was so committed to his vision that he had thrown out any sense of practicality. It was the work of someone with an unswerving commitment to his own artistic vision, a man who had gambled everything and ruled out anything smacking of compromise. It was a ridiculous venture, a balls-to-the-wall act of bravery, and a pioneering act of rebellion.

The studio answer was to cut and recut, until it finally was shortened to two all but incoherent hours, with whole scenes and characters completely eliminated. The film was a disaster of genius. The fraction of the film that remained may not have made a lot of sense, but scene for scene, it was masterfully acted and directed.

It ended Stroheim's career as a director; afterwards, he became better known as a character actor in other great films, such as Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. The latter is particularly memorable, as he plays a former film director who becomes the butler of his former star, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) -- a role he plays with considerable conviction.

Strange and True

2010-06-19T17:02:00.000-04:00

St. Vincent Likes ‘Things That Are Unsettling’ - NYTimes.com

When She Was Bad

2010-06-19T17:00:00.000-04:00

Of all the femme fatales on the Warner Brothers lot, Bette Davis had a uniquely restless, desperate carnality. As Stanley Timberlake in John Huston's 1942 In This Our Life, she plays the kind of wild girl the older generation thought the younger generation was coming to: a spoiled, lazy, amoral, shameless vixen who uses her body for anything she wants, whether it's her sister's husband or her uncle's money, and has no problem letting an innocent young black youth take the blame for an auto accident where she kills a little girl.

Davis was in her early 30s when she took this role; a little too old to play someone a good ten years younger. There are lines in her face; the soft features of the girl in Of Human Bondage and The Petrified Forest are gone. Still, she had a body for sin and the feral grace to go with it. In this Darwinian family melodrama, she’s the predator with the firmest bust, the trimmest tummy, the roundest bottom, and the sharpest claws. When her new husband tells her she needs a good spanking, she hands him a hairbrush, with a wicked smile that says nothing is out of bounds, that if you can dream it she can do it, and that she'll do anything. "Anything! Anything! Anything!" she promises her lecherous old uncle in another scene, as she all but crawls in his lap. The role is pure Davis, amplified by Huston’s trademark malicious wit.

Guy and Doll

2010-04-28T21:40:00.000-04:00

My review of Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney by Marion Meade

Down to the Bone

2010-04-07T21:25:00.000-04:00

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. My Free-Times review.

The Henry James thing

2010-03-25T15:31:00.000-04:00

gets ugly. I engaged in a little skirmish at amazon.com this morning with someone who inadvertently explained to me why the Emglish major is going straight to hell.

Winging it

2010-03-25T10:38:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I tried reading a late Henry James novel called The Sacred Fount which I couldn't begin to understand, and I felt vindicated in giving up on it when I learned from Wikipedia that my bafflement was shared far and wide. I'm not really sure the fault was all mine -- I came under the impression that James did not really have a firm idea in mind.

I moved on to The Wings of a Dove, where the idea is very firm, and where I think we can shift the blame for incomprehension back to my shoulders. I'm not really qualified to discuss it. All I could discuss, if I were of a mind to, is that it is damnably difficult to follow. It's written in his late period, when his style became radically different and began its long prefiguration of modernism, which is to say his usual way of doing things no longer interested him. He was no longer satisfied to write sentences that described character or dress or motivation, but to capture the grainy specifics of moments, and the multiple complexities of what any given individual is thinking right this very seciond. Or at least I think that's what he's doing. I'm not really sure.

I'm not uninterested and I'm not bored; I'm intrigued but plodding along in a state of partial if not complete bafflement, and I find myself looking forward to scenes where something really important happens -- which was actually occurring when last I left it.

Getting Better

2010-03-13T21:51:00.002-05:00

A few months ago, I bought the remastered edition of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at a Starbucks.

I was listening to it again this evening on the drive home and it's a bit of a revelation: not just the vocals and music but that great swelling orchestrated blend of bells, whistles, animal sounds and whatnot -- all brought to the fore so that the whole record sounds spectacularly new and fresh, and makes for one very compelling listening experience, even if you've heard the record hundreds of times. From the organized cacophony of the opening track to the lush strings of "She's Leaving Home" to the immaculate whimsy of "When I'm Sixty-Four" to the multi-tracked existential masterpiece that is "A Day in the Life," here is a recording that truly lets you sit back and let the evening go.

As you and I both know, this is a legendary record for innumerable reasons, but mainly because like a lot of great works of art it showed the sheer power of ambition. Here was the band most people regarded as the greatest in the world, trying to create the greatest album imaginable, pushing their form of pop music as far as they could. Most, if not all, of the songs were excellent, and George Martin's production maximizes the potential of even the weaker ones ("Fixing a Hole," "Good Morning, Good Morning," et al.)

Is it the greatest album ever? For years it had that sort of general reputation and I guess in many minds still does, if annual best-of lists have any meaning. But I'd suggest there are probably just as many if not more people who are ready to argue against it as for it.

One who comes to mind: Frank Zappa, who made a famously anti-Sgt. Pepper record titled We're Only In It For the Money.

Also, Lou Reed, who has said his own first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, was better in every way.

Before I could say "Oh, Lou, shut up," I realized he was probably right. I mean, I've listened to the Velvets album a lot more than I've ever listened to any Beatles album. Their songs are more interesting, more layered, and over all they probably tell better stories. I somehow suspect that the same sentiment will be shared by most rock fans who own both albums.

Lots of records are better than Sgt. Pepper, when you get right down to it -- even the Beatles made better ones, although probably not a more influential one.

That's always been one of the interesting aspects of the 1960s, to me: the competition was extremely high, and it kept a lot of people working at the top of their game. There would have been no Sgt. Pepper had there not been a Pet Sounds or a Bob Dylan. And without Sgt. Pepper, there would have not been so many imitators, all trying to either catch that singular sound or, in Zappa's case, reacting against it.

Cool Little Reviews

2010-02-20T01:55:00.000-05:00

I've lost the occasional afternoon to catching up on A.O. Scott's sharp little video reviews of great movies.

OK, No More Reviews For the Evening

2010-02-20T01:27:00.000-05:00

I'm planning on seeing the new Scorsese tomorrow, but everyone just keeps nailing it left and right.

Salinger's Face

2010-01-28T14:03:00.033-05:00

For the longest time, the paperback cover of The Catcher in the Rye was distinctly bland. It was brick-red, bearing only a title; no blurbs, no synopsis, and most definitely no author photo. It told you nothing about what was inside, mainly I suppose because this author who so despised publicity of any kind didn't want the p.r. machine to come between you and him. No doubt there are other writers with the same wish: just take me as I am. Don't believe what you've heard. Here's the title, here's the book. Read it or don't.

Of course, Salinger's book certainly began with a great deal of hubbub when it was published in 1951, and the original covers certainly reflected it. Eventually, there was no need for it. The title alone was famous, particularly back in the mid-1960s, when it was controversial and quite the topic of conversation in homes across the country.

I was about nine or ten when I first saw it on a rack in a drugstore, and I was immediately drawn to it: ah, so this is the book that mother wrote letters to the editor about. The book with so many swear words that adults nationwide sought to get it pulled from the stacks of libraries. I remember picking it up and seeing, probably for the first time, the word "crap" in print. Strange to admit, but I guess I was just sheltered enough for this euphemism to produce a mild shock.

I didn't pick it up again until I was 13 or 14, at which point I became a little obsessed with the book and its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, who has been kicked out of Pencey Prep and spends three days trawling through the Manhattan underground of his day, recalling his past, encountering strangers, reconnecting with friends, teachers and his little sister Phoebe and generally venting about the crumminess of the world and what he hopes not to become. He's an adolescent -- cynical, sentimental, outraged -- and like most people I recognized myself in him.

Perhaps I should say people of a certain age. A New York Times article from last June said kids today find the book horribly outdated, and I'm sure there are people who have felt this way for a long time. Indeed, you can barely mention the book these days without encountering a chorus of people who say they always hated it and that it always seemed like a junior high school teacher's idea of a book that would appeal to the young.

I can't put myself in that group. For me, it may have been the first book I read with a character I could immediately recognize: someone who talked just as slangy as the kids I knew, and who thought the same way, more or less. I don't think I had yet been exposed to the idea that the inner life of a teenager in the 20th Century could be the stuff of great literature. In the years since, I've never recanted this fondness; in fact, Holden's central agon against phoniness -- that to become an adult largely means to become a sell-out, that it's a long process of adopting thoughts you don't believe, pursuing things you don't want, becoming what you never wished to be, and generally becoming a little less alive -- isn't one I've ever really rejected.

I became equally obsessed with the author, whose name was always prefaced by "famously reclusive."

I once spent a long afternoon in the Panama City Public Library reading everything I could about J.D. Salinger; the main source of information was a 1963 Time cover story that I happily dug out of the stacks. I didn't know it at the time, but the basic information in that article would change little over the remaining decades of his life: that he had apparently called it quits after just four books, that he lived in a farmhouse in a little town in New England, and that he doesn't talk to reporters.

For a long time, I had no idea what he looked like, and when I finally saw the standard author photo of him, I was a little surprised to see that he looked like a substitute teacher, or some middle-aged deacon in my dad's church -- a non-descript adult, albeit one who hadn't forgotten what it was like to be young.

Of course, over the years, as The Catcher in the Rye was followed by Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, that was part of the reason Salinger became 1) so massively, incalculably influential and 2) so deeply hated. As so many, too many, commentators have noted through the years and especially in the weeks following his death, Salinger fetishized what it meant to be young, not only with his only novel but with all those Glass family stories that followed. Holden Caulfield and the Glass siblings are in so many ways smarter than the adults around them, and they see through them. They're cursed with the kind of sensitivity and deep spiritual awareness that adults try to shed in their journey to becoming hard-shelled phony sell-outs. Holden wants to save children from adulthood. In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Seymour Glass would rather blow his brains out than remain husband to the shallow society gal he has just married.

*****

Besides his sole novel, there were also the stories, which to my mind are on the same level as Joyce's Dubliners. They changed everything. They were like nothing else at the time, and set a standard against which others, fairly or not, were judged. In Arthur Mizener's 1953 review for The New Republic, John Cheever had the misfortune of having a strong book of short stories (The Enormous Radio and Other Stories) compared against Salinger's singular collection, and found wanting. Mizener saw Cheever -- "not a writer of any great talent" -- as conventionally skillful, clever and moral, and it may be that at that stage of Cheever's career, Mizener had a point. Cheever didn't really integrate his moral vision into a larger, more artistic one until later. Salinger, though, had already arrived:

Mr. Salinger is an altogether different matter ... [The stories] have, as the novel did not, a controlling intention which is at once complex enough for Mr. Salinger's awareness and firm enough to give it a purpose. You suspect that the hovering presence, if not the actual blue pencil of a New Yorker editor had something to do with this ... In fact, though it is a dangerous, perhaps even impertinent speculation, I would guess that Mr. Salinger's special gift for offcenter visions of experience comes from a kind of displacement of the imagination which makes it particularly difficult for him to conceive any unifying intention.

Both his prose (smart, knowing, hip but also acute and perceptive) and his "offcenter visions of experience" created a music which a lot of writers couldn't get out of their heads. Even young, contemporary writers hear it today.

*****

When J.D. Salinger died last month at 91 -- on the same day as Howard Zinn, whom he completely crowded off the web pages -- he went to his grave knowing he had achieved what other writers can only hope for: immortality.

As a writer, he had already been effectively dead for some 45 years, yet in all that time he was never insignificant or forgotten. He wrote four books that have never gone out of print, that were continually read by succeeding generations and which created ever more obsessed fans. I can't think of any reason this will change -- except, perhaps, what comes next. Salinger is dead, but so much of his story remains to be heard, because he didn't want to tell it.

Did he quit writing altogether, or were there more books yet to come? Stories began leaking out from different sources that he never stopped writing, that he had completed between four and 15 novels.

Next question: are they any good? Likely answer: probably not.

Salinger's last works showed a man slowly disappearing into the ether. There was the all-but-unreadable "Seymour: An Introduction," an incessant ramble about...oh gosh, I don't even remember, it's been so long since I've read it. Something about Zen and one hand clapping. Barely a story, as I recall, so much as a piece of short fiction that seemed to last an eternity.

Then there was "Hapworth 16, 1924," which was published in The New Yorker in 1965 and almost (but not quite) made it into book form, possibly because the reviews were so brutal. I never read it, but the consensus is it's terrible.

Would subsequent works be any better, or just more of the same? Are they the work of a man who had, actually, bottomed out completely -- who had, like Seymour, disappeared into the ether, some higher, more artistic plain, leaving behind only the power of a small but unique ouevre? Would they extend his legacy, or just cheapen the brand?

My guess is it probably would be more of the same, but maybe that's not all it would be. We're talking a period of 45 years, and a lot can happen. Maybe the immediate post-Hapworth books would be bad, but maybe after that there would be something worth saving. All writers go through some rough patches. It will be interesting to learn whether Salinger ever got out of his.

But you wonder, just what kind of books does an established writer write all by himself? Books are written in isolation, of course, but writers are affected in some degree by their audience; a writer can't help but be made at least somewhat self-conscious by his public face, by how he's regarded, and it has some effect on what he chooses to say and how he chooses to say it. Salinger severed that bond, so what he created in the confines of his own self-imposed shell remains a fascinating question.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels

2010-01-17T20:17:00.009-05:00

Click on this photograph to get the full effect of it.

I was able to catch the last day of the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Columbia Museum of Art, which was unsurprisingly overwhelming, even if you've seen these images many times.

Or, maybe I should say, too many times -- so many times that you may forget not just how beautiful these images are, but how haunting and strange and very deliberately personal.

It's the last point that particularly intrigues me about Adams' work, because he's the kind of artist whom people think of as realistic, which apparently was not his aim. As I listened to the tour guide (as well as the voice of Adams himself) on my cellphone and read the inscriptions on the wall, time and again it was pointed out that Adams did not aim to present natural beauty as it is, but as it felt.

On this matter, he repeatedly made himself clear:

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

We don't make a photograph just with a camera, we bring to the act of photography all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved.

Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: "Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream?"

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

It's that last point that really got to me, especially when looking at the famous image included here, which is titled "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico." The story of how he got this image has become famous, of how Adams and his sons were driving along and saw this scene, and frantically got out of the car to set up his camera and tripod before the light left the graveyard crosses. Unable to find his light meter, Adams hazarded an educated but lucky guess on the camera settings.

You can read more about it here, along with a note from Adams' assistant that the story may be slightly apocryphal, that Adams likely knew this area and may have already had this particular image in mind.

What's striking, though, is the composition, which contrasts a sky engulfed in black with a small community where people live, work, worship and die. It's almost as if the sky is threatening to blanket the town, and not just because it's getting dark. There's something naturally metaphoric about the picture. Those crosses, which Adams almost missed getting, are absolutely key to what makes the picture so sobering. It's the story of every community, I guess, in some ways, and it's particularly intriguing the way the graveyard almost spans the length of the picture. There are no people in it; just vestiges of people who used to be.

I don't think I've ever seen a picture which captures in a single frame the smallest aspects of life on earth played out against this overpowering backdrop of the universe.

Hitchens on Vidal

2010-01-11T09:23:00.002-05:00

Christopher Hitchens thinks his former mentor (or forefather or predecessor in the profession of all-round smartass public intellectual) is nuts.

I have no wish to commit literary patricide, or to assassinate Vidal’s character—a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide.

I'm not crazy about my wall calendar.

2010-01-11T09:07:00.002-05:00

In the past, it's been something rock and roll or art-oriented. This year, it's Shives Funeral Home. every time I look at it I think "You're not going to live forever." Mortality, fleeting time, the vanity of human wishes ...

I've been reading a lot of Lydia Davis and Henry David Thoreau, who may or may not have something to do with each other. (There's a story to come yet titled "Cape Cod Diary.") I read Thoreau for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment, and Davis because I'm going to review her stories, which I'm rather looking forward to doing, if I can somehow amass a lot of notes into a few good paragraphs. Remains to be seen. It's not entirely true what they say, that learning to write short is good for you as a writer.

Robert Lowell was a magnificently dense poet

2010-01-10T00:44:00.002-05:00

I spent this morning trying to make sense of Lord Weary's Castle, which I picked up on a recent visit to Blue Bicycle Books in Charleston. My copy is a retro version of the one in the Amazon link, with a bland, nondescript cover, published in 1966, back when you could still buy a paperback book of poetry for $1.35.

The first poem is "The Exile's Return," and as is my usual custom I had to go through it about three times before I figured out what was going on, and I still don't know, except that it has something to do with post-WWII alienation, although you could probably figure that much from the title.

I keep telling myself to read more poetry -- and not just read more, but to read it in an intelligent, organized fashion, where you focus on a few poets and use that as a basis to understand more about what poetry is, feel less alienated from it. I probably listen to or read a poem every day, but those tend to be those glum, modern, easily accessible and usually uninteresting snippets of domestic anomie they read on "The Writer's Almanac." Lowell hits you with words and images that can be a challenge to untangle. He's no Mojo Nixon. (I'm listening to a very old Mojo disc right now. He doesn't mess around.)

Mark Sanford's Statement on His Impending Divorce: The First Draft

2009-12-11T18:07:00.000-05:00

While ~~I would have preferred "censure" over impeachment, so to speak,~~ it is not the course I would have hoped for, or would choose, ~~I am beside myself with glee that someone has chosen it for me~~ I want to take full responsibility for the moral failure that led us to this tragic point ~~(and by moral failure, I do not mean trying to strip hundreds of thousands of losers of their Unemployment Insurance benefits).~~ Jenny ~~may look more like Ayn Rand than, say, Selma Hayek, but she~~ is a great person, and has been a remarkable wife, mother and First Lady. She has been more than gracious ~~ever since she got her first taste of fame~~ these last six months ~~than she has ever been in all the time I've known her,~~ and gone above and beyond in her patience and commitment to put the needs of others in front of her own ~~although it obviously didn't stop her from writing a book.~~ While our family structure ~~will soon take on a distinctly Latin American flavor~~ may change, I know that we will both work earnestly to be the best mom and dad we can be to four of the finest boys on earth ~~even if they do kind of get in my way on Father's Day.~~

“I will join with her in asking the press to respect our shared desire for privacy ~~as I quietly move to Argentina~~ we quietly move forward. We respectively ask for your prayers.”

The Quotable Ebert

2009-10-16T14:46:00.003-04:00

"Reviewing The Naked Gun... is like reporting on a monologue by Rodney Dangerfield - you can get the words but not the music."

"Angela's Ashes, which reminded me of Mark Twain's description of a woman trying to swear: `She knows the words, but not the music...'"

"There is also a lot of crude four-letter dialogue [in Dirty Love], pronounced as if they know the words but not the music."

"[The Sweetest Thing] is deep-sixed by a compulsion to catalog every bodily fluids gag in There's Something About Mary and devise a parallel clone-gag. It knows the words but not the music ..."

"The Road is a film that, to quote Mark Twain, knows the words but not the music."

Office Space

2009-10-15T11:00:00.005-04:00

Katie gave me an Edward Hopper calendar last Christmas, which I hung in my office. The October painting shown here, Office at Night, from 1940, has attracted more attention than any other, maybe because it is set in an office, and because of its sexual allure. No one fails to notice the woman's butt.

As in all Hopper paintings, you ask yourself what, exactly, is going on, what story is being told: what's up between this leggy secretary at the file cabinet and her boss studying some correspondence at his desk? What's she thinking? What's he thinking?

Kathryn Shattuck had some interesting questions in a 2006 New York Times piece:

Does it depict a power struggle, a political comedy or the build-up to an office romp? Hopper preferred to leave the narratives to the viewer's imagination, said Carter Foster, the Whitney's curator of drawings.

Or, as Hopper put it, "If you could say it, there'd be no reason to paint."

In "Office at Night" a man in his 30's or 40's sits at a heavy desk in a sparsely furnished room, a voluptuous secretary standing with her hand in a file drawer nearby. Twisted in a provocative if physically strained position — both breasts and buttocks are visible — she could be looking at him. Or maybe she's wondering how her skin-tight dress will allow her to stoop down to pick up the paper dropped on the floor, and if she does, what the outcome will be. A breeze enters an open window and rustles a blind as the man reads a document, apparently oblivious to the situation. Or is he?

Hopper himself said this of the painting: "My aim was to try to give the sense of an isolated and lonely office interior rather high in the air, with the office furniture which has a very definite meaning to me."

Hopper's paintings have the odd effect, I find, of making you think about what role certain inanimate objects will play in whatever happens next. How long will it be before someone draws the blind? Will he use that big black dorky phone to call home and say he's going to be later than he thought? Or will the phone ring at the wrong time, and will it be his wife? He may not have a wife, though. There are no pictures on his desk, or on his wall. He may have no imaginative life whatsoever; not even a wall calendar. The sylph in the blue skirt may be the most visually alive thing in his world, and he doesn't even notice her.

But maybe he will. There is, of course, that piece of paper on the floor.

More from Shattuck:

At the time, the position of executive secretary was a relatively prestigious role for a woman, though inherently subservient. Still, this woman, with her fashionable attire, her makeup and her come-hither pose, could be the one with the power. Especially, as Mr. Foster and not a few other art historians have noted, if she does go for that paper.

The experts do tend to focus on that paper. The people at something called artsconnected give a little back story:

Hopper and his wife, Josephine, who also served as his model, went through a series of possible titles for the painting, including Room 1005 and Confidentially Yours, before Hopper chose the more ambiguous Office at Night. In spite of Hopper's reluctance to assign it specific narrative content, the painting is full of clues pointing to the complexity of male/female dynamics in the workplace. The piece of paper that has fallen to the floor, a detail added only in late sketches for this work, focuses the drama. How did it get there? Will she stoop to pick it up?

On his website, an art teacher at the State University of New York asks students to focus on it:

I think Hopper by including this detail is begging us to ask the question as to who will pick up the piece of paper? Who do you think will do it and why? Would your answer change if Hopper had placed the man and woman in a different context, for example a garden? Another way of analyzing the relationship between the man and the woman is on the basis of power. All societies depend on the control and structuring of power relationships. Identify the different types of power presented in the painting. Who or what authorizes these types of power?

Nicky Charlish finds the face full of tension: the secretary looks at her boss "with the annoyed expectation of someone who expects an overdue declaration of affection - or who is dying to leave work and get home."

No such mystery for Gordon Thiessen, in his book Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche: "She is turned toward him with tilted head and lidded eyes, intent to seduce."

We have no idea whether she actually gets the guy -- whom, it occurs to me, may be staring at his correspondence so intently because he's trying not to think of the secretary, and of all the possibilities this particular night has in store. He's trying not to think of her because he can't think of anything else.

But she, and the painting, definitely seduce the viewer, even the casual ones who see a reproduction, nearly 70 years later, on a wall calendar.

Listening Post

2009-10-04T20:04:00.002-04:00

Here are nine songs I've downloaded over the past week:

* "People Who Died", The Jim Carroll Band. Carroll's death last month makes this a bittersweet listening experience.

* " Jesus", Glen Campbell. The song from the Velvet Underground's third album sounds like a prayer, although, in the context of this particular band, it's maybe more of a character study. The Velvets always sang about dead-end characters: whores, junkies, pushers, etc., and this sounds like a prayer offered up by one of them. Glen Campbell takes it out of that world and makes it his own. He plays it straight and sincere. A moving performance that shows how two people can play a song the same way and have two different perspectives.

* "Over At Tom's House", Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers. I came across this number while doing a little Internet research following a recent family reunion in Roan Mountain, Tennessee. We were all sitting around one evening talking about our old home place in Elizabethton, Tennessee, located in an area of town allegedly known as Cat Island. It got it's name following the 1901 flood, when the local constable, Tiger Merritt -- father of my late great uncle Earl -- came back to report that the area was full of nothing but dead cats. The name stuck. Thirty years later, there was this song in which Cat Island is prominently mentioned. This song is a thrown-together mountain jam session where a guy named Tom keeps welcoming new musicians into his home; somewhere along the way a fellow named Clarence Greene walks in and says he's been over to Cat Island in Elizabethton, where he and another shady character named Hog Moore drank and fiddled. Tom has a wife named Katie and a dog that won't shut up and his house is apparently the place to go when you're in the mood for some picking and fiddling and a good swig of liquor. The song was written just before Prohibition died out, so liquor was still a forbidden pleasure. Anyway, better heard than described.

* "It's My Life" and "Spill the Wine", The Animals. Nostalgia.

* "Children of the Revolution," T. Rex. I fell in love with this song after hearing it in the movie Breakfast on Pluto, a terrific gem from a few years ago.

"Too Drunk to Fuck", The Dead Kennedys. Some titles just beg to be heard.

"You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", sung by Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Roseanne Cash. This was one of the highlights of Bob Dylan's 30th Anniversary Show in Madison Square Garden, about which few people remember anything except that Sinead O'Connor was booed off the stage for having insulted the Pope a week before on Saturday Night Live. This is a great song sung by three great voices. Watch it. It's fantastic.

* "Baby I Need Your Loving", The Four Tops. A soul classic, on sale for 69 cents.

A small note regarding The Decemberists

2009-09-25T14:16:00.003-04:00

I started listening to this band for no other reason than that I was reading the books written by the lead singer's sister. The lead singer is Colin Meloy, the sister is the suberb short story writer and not-all-that-good novelist Maile Meloy.

Very literary family. Based on the two albums I've heard, Picaresque and The Hazards of Love, Colin's songs are all short stories themselves, full of all kinds of incident and detail. Unfortunately, a little of him goes a long way: his yearning earnest voice wears on a listener after awhile.

Luckily, his latest album, The Hazards of Love, is both a varied and weird offering that brings in a lot of other, better singers. It's a kind of bizarre pastoral fairy tale on a grand scale, full of shape-shifting beasts and infanticide and rape. I'd tell you the whole story but I don't think I've totally processed it yet.

Jim DeRogatis is a little obsessed with it.

But Would You Read It Again?

2009-09-25T10:46:00.008-04:00

I loved Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which has now been named "best book of the millenium" by the folks at The Millions. This novel about a paterfamilias who believes there is only one way of doing things, children who seem to go all directions at once, and a society that is forever bent on improving, correcting, remastering, and smoothing out every flaw was both a superb family novel and a wonderful literary performance that delivered five thoroughly memorable characters, whose names I've somehow managed to remember: the parents Alfred and Enid Lambertand their children Gary, Denise and Chip.

That's saying a lot for a book I read eight years ago. I thought it was in some ways a brave book, too: brave in that Jonathan Franzen pushed his talent as far as it would go, sometimes coming up with pure gold and sometimes not. I admired even the bad sentences or the sometimes florid or tasteless details, because you got the feeling Franzen was trying to go as far as he could. I admired his ambition and range, his inspired sense of domestic life and his grand taste for Gogolian mischief on an international scale. (There's a crazy subplot involving Lithuania that involves a con man who seemed to be based on Chichikov in Dead Souls.)

On the other hand -- I'm less sure that it's a book I'd want to read again, which I tend to regard as the high-water mark when people are passing out superlatives. With great books, there's always a sense that you missed something, either because this particular landscape offered too much to take in, or because the book left you with several huge and perhaps contradictory thoughts. Maybe it's a book that invites multiple interpretations.

I didn't get any of this with The Corrections, and I wonder if anyone has, if anyone has felt pulled to sit through it more than once, and if it has anything new to offer that wasn't apparent before.

Maile Meloy

2009-09-09T11:28:00.002-04:00

I review her latest.

Grey Villet on the NYT Lens Blog

2009-08-19T16:02:00.009-04:00

Stephen Crowley's NYT Lens Blog has a superb essay today on the life and work of Grey Villet, citing in particular the photo essay I have long raved about, "The Lash of Success."

You can see more of Villet's work in this slideshow from AOL Pixcetera.

Over the weekend, I checked out the classic book Great Photographic Essays from Life, which is where I first encountered the story in college in 1978. In fact I read or re-read several of the essays, including one on heroin addiction (also cited by Crowley) that was photographed by Bill Eppridge and written by James Mills, that is just as powerful today as when it was published.

What I didn't quite see then, perhaps, is that these essays were very much a matter of planning, team work, research, careful selection among hundreds of photos shot, and a fine sense of storytelling drama in the way photographs are cropped and arranged.

The team in the case of "The Lash of Success," which focused on a true Type A businessman named Vic Sabatino, was a writer, Barbara Cummiskey, and Grey Villet, who met during this assignment and later married.

Barbara got Victor to talk about himself, his dreams, and what drives him, and he let her and her photographer into his own stressed-out world.

Using 90mm and 180mm telephoto lenses, Villet clicked away, bent on bringing back images that were "as real as real could get." Here's how the book describes Villet:

He never said a word, just watched and shot everything. He is a big man, six foot four, but with a surprising ability to melt into the woodwork, particularly with Barbara upfront doing the talking.

Consequently, when Vic went after a hapless Chicago employee, Villet was able to shoot right over Vic's shoulder, his camera becoming Vic.

Sabatino understandably thought that appearing in Life Magazine as a model of success was the culmination of his dreams. What he didn't know was the kind of model he would represent: the winner at work and the loser at home.

He surely didn't know how Villet's images would poke through his mask, or that his words would come back to haunt him. (He refers to himself as a hawk and customers as chickens. Speaking of his wife and daughter, he says "I tell myself sometimes that I was doing this for Lillian and Donna, but I knew it wasn't so." He would eventually lose both of them.)

Barbara Villet, the stalwart champion of her husband's legacy, explained to me (as well as Crowley) in a letter that the story "was the outcome of a trilogy I wanted to do called Fame, Success and Wealth."

By the way, if the partnership between Barbara and Grey clicked as well in life as it does on the page, then I can see why they stayed together until Villet's untimely death in 2000. Barbara writes with just the kind of merciless honesty the subject demanded.

For the last few years, she has been putting together a retrospective book of her husband's work.

"His work must not disappear," she said in a recent e-mail. "I miss him."

Oh, the Married Men...

2009-08-18T08:49:00.003-04:00

You probably have to be my age (half a century last November) to remember a song by the Roches titled "The Married Men."

Jenny Sanford's story in Vogue brought it to mind.

"I also feel sorry for the other woman. I am sure she is a fine person. It can’t be fun for her, though I do sometimes question her judgment."

-- Jenny Sanford, regarding Maria Belen Chapur, Gov. Mark Sanford's mistress.

I know these girls
They don't like me
But I am just like them
Picking a crazy apple off a stem

-- "The Married Men," The Roches

Pynchon Lite

2009-08-17T15:49:00.002-04:00

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. The Penguin Press. 369 pages. $27.95.

From the author of such time-bending, globe-hopping, head-scratching multi-narrative intellectual extravaganzas as Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, this rollicking, wisecracking, neo-noir dope thriller comes as a surprise. It’s the most linear and focused novel Thomas Pynchon has ever written and, if not the most rewarding, certainly one of the most fun.

Set in Los Angeles around 1970 -- when the dream of the 1960s has crashed and burned, and family values are being defined by the Brady Bunch on one end of the spectrum and the Mansons on the other -- it's a psychedelic free-for-all, a nostalgic dirge for the end of an era, and less of a spoof than a faithful, loving homage to a genre that perfectly suits Pynchon's world-view.

Here as in every Pynchon novel, there’s a fine line between paranoia and grim reality; conspiracy isn't so much theory as fact, and everyone sooner or later runs up against some omniscient force of corporate or government control that is all the more insidious because it's so deeply concealed.

This is actually not all that far from the shady moral environment occupied by the gumshoes in Hammett and Chandler, the lone cool cats who are all that stand between the dregs who break the laws and the dregs who make them. In their job, as Pynchon's laidback private eye Larry “Doc” Sportello puts it, paranoia is "a tool of the trade," the one that points you "in the direction you might not have seen to go."

Actually, laid-back is understating it, as Doc, the brains (so to speak) behind LSD Investigations (for “Location, Surveillance and Detection”) is a cross between Philip Marlowe and Gilligan, living on a mental isle perpetually engulfed in pot smoke and, as he's told at least once, way overdue for a checkup from Dr. Reality.

As in every hard-boiled tale from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown, the story starts with a visit from a woman. Doc's ex-girlfriend Shasta is seeing a married guy named Mickey Wolfmann, a wealthy and eccentric Jewish real estate developer whose wife is trying to set him up for a stay in the loony bin so that she and her boyfriend can abscond with his dough. Given the fact that Wolfmann has hired the Aryan Brotherhood for protection, she may have a case.

Still, this being L.A. and this being Pynchon, such ties are hardly unusual, particularly where the drug trade is concerned, which is where the story leads once Wolfmann disappears and an Aryan brother turns up dead. Doc finds himself in the middle of a series of events where not only is everyone in bed with everyone else, but everyone is a player in a bigger struggle between the haves who run the system and the have-nots who get in their way. At the center of the mystery of Wolfmann’s disappearance is a mysterious cargo freighter, The Golden Fang, whose name more or less sums up Pynchon’s attitude toward capitalism.

Pynchon has put himself in something of a vice of his own with this book, by hard-boiling his style down to plot, seasoned as usual with silly songs, casual porn, jokes and popular culture references. It's a lark, yet at the same time you feel him holding back, keeping both his formidable imagination and his swing-for-the-bleachers prose style in check. His best novels are truly memorable; they leave behind a lot of evidence in your head that they were there. This one is fast food with an aftertaste of creaky, nostalgic, sentimental hippie politics.

It’s either the work of a writer who figured after all this time he needed a vacation from his usual cosmic concerns or one who is slumming, who wanted perhaps to prove to himself or his publisher that he can fill the cheap seats.

If that's the case, then it may well be that at the ripe old age of 72, America's master fabulist has written a kind of imperfect introduction to his world, a gateway drug to his previous novels and hopefully the (more impressive) ones yet to come.

Wonderful news on the Grey Villet front (with some corrections...)

2009-08-13T10:18:00.003-04:00

(Barbara Villet has pointed out some errors in the following post which I have set about correcting.)

Many months ago, I wrote a little piece here about a great American photographer, largely unknown, named Grey Villet.

He worked for Life magazine among others, and he always took the most beautifully composed images, and some of the most dramatic, especially his close-ups of both the famous and the unknown, capturing them at just the right moment of doubt, or triumph, or tragedy.

That little blog piece brought word from Villet's family, who were just then putting together a website on his work and life.

The website is the joint effort of Grey Villet's daughter Ann (who designed it) and wife and frequent collaborator Barbara (who wrote the text).

Revel in it here.

Take a look in particular at the haunting photo essay "The Lash of Success," which I revere as much as I do certain great films.

Rocking in Oblivion

2009-07-25T22:51:00.002-04:00

Not being a metalhead, I've barely heard of and never actually even heard the subject of Sacha Gervasi's fantastic documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil until this afternoon.

I may never hear them again, but I'll tell you one thing: I wish them all the best, because they are living, noble proof that in rock and roll (and in every field of art and entertainment) there are some people who never stop paying their dues, especially ones who once looked like they had it made.

According to such confirmed fans as Slash from Guns N' Roses, Lemmy from Motorhead, Lars Ulrickson from Metallica and numerous others, Anvil set the bar back in the heavy metal boom of the early 1980s. Unfortunately, while the competition rose into the stratosphere, Anvil only mustered one song, "Metal on Metal," and then basically sank into obscurity.

The main reason, according to the film, is bad production and bad management, but the overriding one simply seems to be bad luck, which only gets worse as the years roll on and younger bands roll in.

Nonetheless, 30 years down the road, the band's two dominant members -- lead singer and guitarist Steve "Lips" Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner -- refuse to let their dream die. They've long since taken on day jobs, with Kudlow working for a catering service and Reiner doing some kind of construction work, but they still make records and still tour, hoping against hope that this will, finally, be their year.

Seemingly cursed to always wind up back where they started, Kudlow and Reiner (apparently the only remaining members of the original band) gear up for yet another Sisyphean struggle against ever increasing odds. With a new manager named Tiziana Arrigoni, a well-intentioned but incompetent Italian fan who can barely speak English, Anvil takes a depressing (but often hilarious) trek through Europe, in which they see old friends playing stadiums, find themselves playing small, dimly-lit clubs, encounter at least one deadbeat club owner -- who nearly gets his ass handed to him by Kudlow -- and miss first train and then plane connections.

Time to pack it in after all this time? That's a constant matter of discussion, but the dream is still out there, just waiting to happen; after all, they have enough material for a new album and a chance to work once again with Chris Tsangarides, the metal wunderkind who produced "Metal On Metal."

At least one reviewer, I noticed, has called Anvil the greatest rock movie since "This is Spinal Tap," and Gervasi (a former Anvil roadie) slyly alludes to its predecessor in a shot that made everyone in the audience laugh; there are some control knobs, as it turns out, that actually do go up to 11. But I also found myself thinking of another Canadian pair, Bob and Doug McKenzie from SCTV's "Great White North," who founght constantly but who gave their all to a little cable access show no one watched.

The two band members could almost be brothers, twins in fact -- Kudlow's goofy grin and Reiner's stolid demeanor are all that sets them apart -- and they pursue their crazy dream with the same fearless moxie. Or maybe not so crazy. You know how documentaries are. They have to have an arc, like any story, and this one delivers an ending that you can't help but hope is only, at long last, a beginning.

Maybe I'm just getting older

2009-07-25T13:59:00.000-04:00

but articles on overrated films such as this latest from Tim Lott in The Guardian, have become such a fucking cliche. And they're so ignorant -- LOTS of people have trashed those films he takes such delight in debunking. It's nothing new, and it's totally boring to read. Old stuff. Tired. Useless. Who cares?

Graphic Lives: Ones With a Beat, And One You Can Dance To

2009-07-25T13:31:00.003-04:00

The Beats: A Graphic History, by Harvey Pekar and others. Hill and Wang, 224 pages, $22.

You couldn't ask for a livelier short course on the Beat Generation than this multi-author, multi-artist guidebook.

Clearly something of a personal mission on the part of Harvey Pekar (who did most of the writing, usually working with artist Ed Pisker) the book starts by focusing on the giants, with chronological, straightforward narratives that illustrate the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Pekar is dry, smart, and witty about the well-known pretenses, peccadilloes, many highs and multiple lows of these fabulous, sputtering Roman candles, and dead serious about their legacy. Too serious, perhaps; he proclaims the Beat gospel with the kind of zeal that can easily go from persuasive to pushy. Pekar and Pisker also serve up shorter, rather dutiful portraits of Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and others.

In the latter half of the book, Pekar and other gifted writers and artists serve up one idiosyncratic portrait after the next from the Beat pantheon, many of them somewhat obscure, but who nonetheless led eventful and interesting lives The poet Kenneth Patchen, bedridden for life following a botched surgery, spends his days creating picture-poems.Nancy J. Peters and Penelope Rosemont, ably supported by Summer McClinton’s photographic graphic style, tell the unusual story of their friend, poet Philip LaMantia, a committed surrealist who would influence Kerouac. We also meet the obsessive painter Jay DeFeo, who spent years painting and repainting a work that would take over her life, and D.A. Levy, whose radical poetry led to both his harassment and his suicide.

The text and art of Jerome Newkirch brings to rousing life a nutty beatnik Chicago dive known as the College of Complexes, led by a one-of-a-kind intellectual hobo named Slim Brundage.

In true Beat spirit, the book also allows for considerable dissent. Joyce Braber considers the lives of the women in the Beat scene, who sacrificed their own ambitions to their mates, and suffered far more than they did from the sexual mores of the time. Kerouac’s girlfriend gets raped as payment for an abortion, Ginsberg's wife commits suicide after his homosexuality ends their marriage, Burroughs' wife takes a bullet through the forehead when her drug-addled husband tries to shoot a glass off the top of her head, and Hettie Cohen, white Jewish wife of the black poet Amiri Baraka, gets ditched when her husband becomes an anti-Semitic Black Nationalist.

This is a comprehensive and imaginative cultural history that is an exuberant work of art on its own.

Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography by Sabrina Jones. Hill and Wang, 144 pages, $18.95

One of the great assets of the graphic form for non-fiction biographies is that it cuts historic figures down to size. The form by its nature makes it hard to take anyone too seriously, especially a figure like Isadora Duncan, who took herself seriously enough for all of us. The Jazz Age dancer -- whose many affairs, near-nude dancing, and general disregard for conventional morality of any kind scandalized the hoi polloi from coast to coast -- saw herself as the reincarnation of the Dionysian spirit, the one who would reinstall the Greek spirit of art and culture in the new 20th Century America.

Sabrina Jones' deeply researched book seems to miss no significant event in Duncan's endlessly dramatic life, spanning her humble, impoverished California childhood to her early success and her extended stays in Greece, France and Russia, and all the many guises she took on as revolutionary, radical, mother, lover. She lived heedlessly and famously died the same way, strangled when her own long, flowing scarf got caught in the rear axle of an open-air vehicle.

While few if any people alive today have seen Duncan dance -- although there are famous pictures by Edward Steichen, the dancer herself refused to allow herself to be filmed by a movie camera -- her name has become synonymous with her art, and Jones draws with a similar rapturous energy. She captures this whirlwind and worldwide life in all of its brilliant fury.

A Less Than Wonderful Life

2009-07-24T18:44:00.002-04:00

I suppose I should wait a few months to post this, and maybe I will post it again then, but I can't wait until then to share it: James Agee's 1947 review of It's A Wonderful Life.

For one thing, it's pure Agee, who besides beng one of the great American writers of the 20th Century was also one of its smartest viewers, and one of its most precise. Reading Agee on Film a few years ago, the first thing I noticed was that he was not necessarily a long form writer. He was not usually the kind of writer who would deliver 4,000-some words in an effort to nail the Next Big Thing (although he certainly could when his thoughts demanded it).

Agee was marvelously perceptive. He stalked through conventionally "good" films and found gaping holes, founds moments of interest and intelligence in movies others dismissed, and in either case could reveal something about what art is and why it works, even if (as was usually the case with most of what he saw) it was art for mass consumption.

In this review of a movie he kinda, but on second thought not really, likes, he gets to the heart of the matter quickly:

One important function of good art or entertainment is to unite and illuminate the heart and the mind, to cause each to learn from, and to enhance, the experience of the other. Bad art and entertainment misinform and disunite them. Much too often this movie appeals to the heart at the expense of the mind, at other times it urgently demands of the heart that it treat with contempt the mind's efforts to keep its integrity; at still other times the heart is simply used, on the mind, as a truncheon. The movie does all this so proficiently, and with so much genuine warmth, that I wasn't able to get reasonably straight about it for quite a while.

In his reviews as in his journalism and novels, Agee wrestles a thing into focus.

Nickelodeon Story

2009-07-17T22:08:00.004-04:00

I wrote and produced this little tribute to the Nickelodeon Theater in Columbia for a show I work on for South Carolina Educational TV.