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| . . . Marriage | |||||
| . . . 1999-06-20 |
Marriage is like when you give a kid an extravagant present and all it wants to do is get inside the box.
| . . . 1999-08-07 |
Undercover girl reporter Constance Kandle joins the club with the first installment of her investigative series, the Nonprofit Chronicles, featuring Bossy the Clown:
Bossy's Day
------- ---9:45 Arrive at the office
9:45-10:05 Call Dad to thank him for the credit card bailout, complain a little about the struggle of working "40 plus hours per week," and promise that his money really will go to pay off debts
10:05-10:10 Talk to personnel manager about candidates for director of the institution, "even though my opinion doesn't count for much around here anyway." Express concern about "the first guy," who seemed nice but used "embarrassingly low-resolution" digital images in his presentation to staff: "We're arts professionals! He should have known better than that!"
10:10-10-12 Leave phone messages for friends on the East Coast
10:12-10:15 Read email
10:15-10:35 Call a friend to discuss the breakup of her marriage
10:35-10:40 Tell Constance about breakup of friend's marriage and difficulty of being a shoulder to cry on
10:40-10:45 Cigarette break
10:45-10:50 Call back friend on East Coast who called during cigarette break; tell her too busy to talk
10:50 Leave for an optometrist appointment, after asking Constance to make sure to be around at 1:00 to open the research center (it's Bossy's day to sit at the desk) in case nobody else can get back from lunch in time
| . . . 1999-08-14 |
Recently received: Invitation to a wedding at the Wing Lam Kung Fu Studio. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for marriage, I have to admit that some weddings have been fun:
| . . . 1999-08-18 |
We've been tardy about noting the nice write-up that Juliet Clark's Art of Walt Disney received from peterme a while back:
Join Juliet Clark on a well-crafted, Disney-inspired reminiscence. There's something almost haunting about it.(I guess the "almost" is in there so's not to confuse it with that f/x movie all the kids are crazy for.) Cholly will add that, like her other illustrated pamphlets, it's an enviably blissful marriage of text and picture, a Fred Astaire of graceful economy somehow strayed into the "Heyyy-eyyy, Abbott! I'm expressing myself! Look! I'm EX-PRESS-SING myself!" wide world of the Web.
| . . . 1999-08-25 |
In the Company of Mormon:
The titles below are particularly popular with customers from Brigham Young University.
1. HTML 4 for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide
2. Tainted Truth; The Manipulation of Fact in America
3. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (Darth Maul Cover)
4. Asking the Right Questions : A Guide to Critical Thinking
5. Film Scheduling : Or, How Long Will It Take to Shoot Your Movie?
6. The Millionaire Next Door : The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy
7. Mary Parker Follett : Prophet of Management
8. Film Director's Team
9. The Act of Marriage : The Beauty of Sexual Love
The titles below are particularly popular with customers from West Sacramento, CA.
1. Songs From Ally McBeal Featuring Vonda Shepard
The titles below are particularly popular with customers from Charities & Nonprofit.
1. Live Now Age Later : Proven Ways to Slow Down the Clock
| . . . 1999-11-07 |
Although the pacing's a bit stodgy, 1936's Mayerling wins on performances, especially from the youthful-but-still-middle-aged Charles Boyer as Prince Rudolf: dissipated, undisciplined, and 100% tragically noble. I would say that Boyer was over-the-top great, but one of the reasons Boyer was always middle-aged was that he was never over-the-top. Under pressure, he just got more impacted.
Besides instigating this woman's marriage, Mayerling's other great achievement was getting me interested in the history of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. 'Cause, I've read Robert Musil and listened to Arnold Schoenberg till the cows came home, but not even the cows ever had the decency to tell me about Only Heir to Empire Dead in Double Love Suicide!, and, brother, that's what I call news.
Well, allowing some elbow room for glamor and the use of French actors, it turns out the movie actually does present the semi-official version of the story pretty accurately. Alas! for romance, it also turns out that not that many people ever believed that version of the story -- what's more likely to hit a Hapsburg: romance or assassination? -- and now it's been thoroughly disproved.
Even after learning that love means nothing, the "what happened next?" factor was still strong, especially since the next thing I found that happened next was the assassination of Prince Rudolf's mother, the Empress, less than a decade after the murder of her son. And by then we're getting close to the Great War.... Would I have to, like, go buy a book or something to work all this out?
No fear of that, because the Atlantic's already bought a book (coincidentally also from 1936) and put it up on the Web: Rebecca West's big dummy's guide to the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I remember when its posting was announced as a public service during one of the more recent genocides, but of course it took an old movie to attract my attention....
West works a well-established mainstream genre -- travel notes alternating with history lessons -- but you can't beat the combination of Balkans history and fascist-era travel for human (i.e., morbid) interest, and in its smoothly mainstream way the series builds to near hysteria by the time it reaches Sarajevo in Part 4: 'So when the poor mayor began to read his address of welcome the Archduke shouted out in a thin alto, "That's all a lot of rot. I come here to pay you a visit, and you throw bombs at me. It's an outrage." Then the Archduchess spoke to him softly, and he calmed down, and said, "Oh, well, you can go on." But at the end of the speech there was another scene, because the Archduke had not got his speech, and for a moment the secretary who had it could not be found. Then when it was brought to him he was like a madman because the manuscript was all spattered with the aide-de-camp's blood.' |  |
| I'm a little worried about West's preoccupation with obesity, though. Would you agree with her that "Marie Vetsera was a very fat and plain little girl"? Ess, ess, Rebecca! |
| . . . 2000-02-29 |
The 100 Super Movies au maximum: The Reckless Moment 
"Cyberspace is no place for mommies." -- Karen Joy FowlerMaybe not, but The Reckless Moment proves that there's sure a place for 'em in film noir. In fact, as with a lot of formulas favored by self-pitying spoiled sons, film noir makes more sense with a mommy in the lead.
Sit-coms and comic strips love the American family because something big always seems to be happening but everything is back to normal by the end of the episode. The Reckless Moment repositions that once-a-day cycle from the mother's point of view: the family member's job is to present every passing fancy as an emergency to the mother, but the mother's job is to maintain stability at any cost. Where Douglas Sirk's domestic tragedies emphasize suffocation (the enveloping family keeps you warm at the cost of snuffing out flames), Ophuls pecks to death.
The eventual effect of this affection-hungry din is to level all stimuli out. Thus Ophuls's thoroughgoing use of a narrative technique I've never seen used anywhere else in film, fiction, or theater: the deliberate tossing away of obvious opportunities for suspense and emotional climaxes. Drama is replaced by fretfulness:
(Those intrigued by Ophuls's gynocentric approach to film noir should also seek out Caught, which must be the only Hollywood movie in which a miscarriage supplies the happy ending. And then probably move on to Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles....)
| . . . 2000-07-18 |
Movie Comment: Boy! What a Girl
As Juliet Clark points out, it's a rare putting-on-a-show musical comedy that could boast of such intimate acquaintance with desperate golddigging (although if Orson Welles had directed a musical comedy...): Given their strictly limited set of venues, race movie producers had to scramble even more than the Poverty Row studios, and this was one of their last gasps.
Like many a last gasp before and after, Boy! What a Girl bet on sheer quality being enough to change the world and save the day. (As we in the software industry know, that trick never works.) Its pressbook boasted that "the production cost of the picture is at least four times that spent on any all-Negro feature to date" (meaning, apparently, about $50,000), and predicted that "an all-Negro motion picture can be produced to play any theater in the country and not merely confined to the some 600 odd playhouses that cater strictly to an all-Negro audience."
They managed the sheer (very sheer) quality. Of the race movies I've seen, Two-Gun Man from Harlem and The Duke Is Tops were kind of fun, the others have been "of historical interest," but Boy! What a Girl is just plain (very plain) good: consistently knee-slapping farce (no one's ever come up with a silly French name to beat "Gaston de la Quatrième de la Douzième de la Pousse-café"), consistently professional acting, music (led by "Slam" Stewart) excellent enough to help us overlook the not-so-consistent lip-synching, and some of the dirtiest jitterbugging ever put on film. Even the familiar ugly-guy-in-drag shtick worked: unlike, say, Jack Lemmon, "Madame Deborah" gave forth with so much personality that you could really believe the marriage proposals.
But, of course, they lost the day. Even with cool white guy Gene Krupa making a cameo appearance, there was no way for a "race movie" to achieve crossover success in 1947: you can't reach the audience if the theaters won't show you, and that would've required the cooperation of major studios and their distribution channels. Instead of triumphantly launching a new business model, Boy! What a Girl signalled the end of an old one: in just two years, Hollywood began to loosen up a bit on its "servants and singers only, and make sure the singers can be cut" rule, and, unable to compete with the application of big money to limited visibility, the production of race movies ceased.
Though their timing may have been bad, the movie-makers' instincts were vindicated some years later when their show's leading lady was called out of retirement for a genuine (and typically compromised) crossover success.
| . . . 2000-07-30 |
(Continuing with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "that gentle degradation requisite in order to produce the effect of a whole"....)
The 100 Super Movies au maximum: The Married Woman
One of the nice things about works of art, and vacations and drugs, is that they give us delimited events to point to and say, "This -- this was the turning point. This was where my life changed," as opposed to the usual waking up to find yourself in a strange bedroom thousands of miles away with a resculpted nose and no left leg and the phone off the hook and the cops hammering on the door.
For example, I used to be pretty normal about movies. I liked them and so forth. I'd say things like "Wanna see a movie?" and then later on say things like "That was pretty good."
Then, twenty-three years ago, I went to the Temple University Cinematheque (which I guess is closed down now) and saw Jean-Luc Godard's movie from thirteen years earlier, The Married Woman. And by the time it was over, I had turned into me.
An essential aspect of turning into someone is that other people don't simultaneously turn into the same person. Even while I sat there head ringing and sparkle-eyed, comments like "Did you get that?" and "Weird!" began to worm their way through my protective daze. On my shamble out, I stopped to thank the wizened Anglophile who ran the place. "I hate Godard myself," he said, "but someone has to show him."
Yeah. Nowadays I'm just embarrassed when I see those 1960s Godard movies, but I wouldn't blame the old guy for that any more than I would blame my mom for how embarrassing it is to think about toilet training. The only one I enjoy all the way through is his comedy noir, Bande à part, which reminds me of the Coen Bros., who, like Godard, seem to have been raised in some sort of white plastic box from which they take random stabs at what real life might be like -- there's a very thin crust of experience sagging under the weight of all these violent gesticulations, a bouncing on the plywood mood that seems to work best with dimwit comedy. Of Godard's work from the 1970s, I like the TV interviews with "real people" where he sounds like Charles Kuralt from Mars; from the 1980s and 1990s, his crazy old coot self-typecasting in Prénom Carmen. The only serious Godard moments that still work are the ones where he finds himself back in that white plastic box trying to figure out why everyone looks at him funny: for example, staring into a coffee cup while taking a break from trying to show off those supposed Two or Three Things I Know About Her that, nowadays, it seems obvious to me that he never knew at all.
Not that anyone called him on it. There's no safer way for an uncool nerd to show off than by bragging about his up close and personal knowledge of women (or, safer yet, "Woman"). All those nouvelle vague guys leaned on that tactic big time; Godard, being Godard, just did so most explicitly. (As French censors realized, the title's "The" is an important part of The Married Woman's ambition.)
And, to Godard's credit as a forever uncool nerd, he was the only one of the nouvelle vague guys to try to engage equally explicitly with feminism. Unfortunately, he's also forever unable to approach female characters without interposing the clearest (and most brain-dead) demonstration of "inside knowledge": nude photography.
At the time, of course, I was more than willing to fall for such demonstrations; as an eighteen-year-old sex-crazed uncool nerd, they seemed like a darn fine idea.
And at the time, all such considerations seemed completely unrelated to what was most important about the experience, which, the next day, I inadequately described as the realization that "movies can do anything."
At the present time, my inadequate description would be that "movies can combine the discursive and the narrative."
I don't feel as comfortable with either account as I feel with explaining why they differ: It's natural for the individual who's gone through an ecstatic revelation to assume that there must be some relevance to the individual's life.
What's changed in my life is what seems relevant.
Twenty-three years ago, I probably thought of myself as someone who "could do anything," so that's how I was predisposed to understand the experience. Right now, I think of myself as someone who has to drag the discursive into every experience, so I think that the movie just happened to strike a natural-born critic.
You see, even though I promised a couple paragraphs back that I wouldn't bring blame into it, I couldn't just leave the question alone; I felt like I had to try to figure out what happened. For us natural-born critics, it's not enough to say, "My taste changed," or "Can you believe we used to like that stuff?" When we like something, it's a public statement, like pledging our troth.
Not that marriages really do last till the death-do-us part. What marriage means is that, having made a public statement of allegiance, you have to make some correspondingly public statement of divorce.
And then you get to make jokes about your ex for the rest of your life.
| . . . 2000-08-23 |
Today we're proud and kinda sad to present the final episode of Juliet Clark's "The Dream Factory". Let's hope that her subject has infected Clark with a touch of sequelitis....
THE DREAM FACTORY
Hold Your Man (1933) |
| . . . 2000-12-30 |
A horse and carriage go together when you're a horse-drawn carriage driver
Marriage takes a sexual relationship and publicly acknowledges it to state and church. Which is a pretty perverse thing to do with a sexual relationship unless state and church need the knowledge to properly allocate rights and responsibilities -- of citizenship, say, or of child-rearing.
Across all disciplines, experts tend to overestimate the importance of what they're focused on -- things get bigger up close -- and so blowhards encouraged to provide the most criminally unreported news or the most egregiously popular fallacies will always come up with something from their own fields. (See Fig. 3, Fig. 4, and also.) And that's where theologians and priests made their entirely understandable mistake: Sex isn't solely for procreation. Procreation just happens to be the only way in which sex is of professional interest to theologians and priests.
| . . . 2001-04-16 |
| Our Motto: | (via June Brigman & Mary Schmich) |
 | |
| What with nostalgia for when I had more writing time and anticipating when I'll have it again and too many dampened spirits among my compeers and maybe even a trace of Joey Ramone sentiment, I feel like expressing less sheepishness than usual about these web ventures. Although deciding that one's desire is deserving of respect probably fulfills some nutritional need or another, audience members with weaker stomachs may wish to turn away. Yeah, as another asshole said in the catchiest phrase he'll ever coin, occasional writings are advertisements for oneself. But the reason so many of my treasured friends write well is because they're also advertising something better than just self: curiosity, engagement, humor, anti-solipsistic passion.... It's possible to attract attention for a worthwhile purpose, like mutual satisfaction. And yeah, the web is vanity publishing. But it's not only vanity: it's also an attempt to add to the evidence that love is other than career. If that's hubristic, at least it's in a tradition of not particularly destructive hubris: Virtually every piece of critical writing I care about came from "amateurs," and quite a bit of the art as well. As a reward for being an amateur at a time when the persistent and cheap publishing medium of the web is available, I get a heartening number of responses from working students and from working artists (although only once from a working academic, I wonder why) -- but the beauty of amateurism is that by definition numbers don't matter. The success of a marriage doesn't depend on how many priests attend the wedding. So, at Juliet Clark's suggestion (she's been reading E. B. White's wartime essays about his small egg-and-dairy farm), I'm going to stop using all those more unpleasant names and start calling myself a "gentleman critic." |
| . . . 2001-05-13 |
The Blasted Stumps of Academe
Lawrence L. White simultaneously kicks off our end-of-school special and continues our previous thread in high style:
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| . . . 2001-07-10 |
Movie Comment: POLA X
Canons is the crrrrraziest people! I mean, I love Melville, but what could be nuttier than assigning a book like Moby Dick to a bunch of kids?
Beats me, but doing a big film adaptation of Pierre, or, The Ambiguities has got to come close.
And POLA X is a pretty close adaptation, given that the story's been bumped forward 150 years. Leos Carax even improved the original by explaining the dark sister as a refugee from the Balkans, which takes care of Melvillean mysteries like her lack of education, her fear of authority, and why in the world a false marriage would be more useful than a firmly stated fraternity. And should Herman Melville have developed a time machine, and travelled into the present day, he would almost certainly watch the Carax version, perhaps on a DVD, would he not? And then it seems clear that the incandescent metal coil of competition would drive deep into his heart, and heat and stir his blood, turning him into a lava lamp of nineteenth century American fiction -- is that not also true? And so it would follow that upon returning to his own time, Melville would modify his novel to make Isabel an escaped slave, which would match Carax's explanations point for point and up the ante by explaining the mysterious weightiness of the paternal sin and Pierre's resultingly mysterious compulsion to atone. And then Carax, in despair, would fold.
Which would be just as well, because the movie doesn't work.
As long as I'm rewriting history, would there have been any way to make it work? First, a true film adaptation of Pierre would have to be about a spoiled kid squandering all of his fortune and then some on making a film, a film upon which he would be desperately staking the fate of himself and all his loved ones, a film which would ultimately not be accepted by any festivals, which would, at best, go straight to video. Next, the film itself -- the film which told the story of this sad indie director -- would have to be equally utterly disastrous for the career of its maker, a contemptuous and self-loathing disaster much bigger than, for example, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, a disaster on the level of The Lady from Shanghai or Marnie. But then also the look of the film must be fevered and murky rather than slick and glamorous.... Oh, perhaps if George Kuchar had married Geena Davis, we'd be approaching the necessary conditions -- but what are the odds? Slim; very slim.
| . . . 2002-02-06 |
Revised at 4:30 AM because I couldn't stop worrying about it
Discussions of "creativity" and "insanity" are often muddied by their emphasis on post-Romantic high art, whose practitioners have stakes on both sides of the "crazy artist" label and whose publicists have adapted to the public's (sometimes justifiable) lack of interest in actual artwork as compared to biographical narrative. More murkiness results from the late twentieth-century marriage of diagnostic psychiatry and self-help books, in which any personality trait can be re-interpreted as a symptom and made reassuringly meaningful in a case history narrative.
But even analogically speaking: If one defines an artist as someone who produces artwork (rather than as a particularly unpleasant lifestyle), wouldn't the proper comparison be obsessive-compulsive disorder?
| . . . 2002-07-22 |
Ba-lue Mun-deii Ba-lues-Are
| "That's The Bag I'm In" by the Fabs Every morning when I wake up | "Fickle Heart" by Johnny Garfield Every heart is a fickle heart, | |
| To further cite Dorothy Wordsworth's much cited formula, poetry takes its origin from dining digested in tranquility. And nothing more reliably feeds pop lyricism -- pop being, as Leonard Bernstein and Rod McKuen assured us, the poetry of our time (that is, too early in the morning) -- than breakfast, whether the breakfast be good or bad. I love breakfast songs, and bummers, and my favorite bummer breakfast song used to be Neil Young's "Last Dance": "The coffee's hot and the orange juice is cold... cold... cold." But the Fabs bum worse. And they deserve to. And they know it! And they don't care! 'Cause they want it that way! No compromise! No learning! Your fingers get burnt, you just push 'em right down home on the range again! Fuck learning! We chose to do this and we will keep on doing it! You know, like when people quit publishing on the web because it's so disgusting to pay attention to hit counts and to newspaper stories and self-promoting programmers and all those things that I guess must be inherent to publishing on the web. Or like asshole yuppie men complaining about how whiny and airheaded and golddigging all attractive women are, or like asshole yuppie women complaining about how sleazy and manipulative and moneygrubbing all attractive men are. God forbid you should ask them to define "attractive." I especially like how the unmodulating 1-2-1-2 garage chords and thump-thump beat emphasize that "it would only happen again." | I understand how legal partnerships can be useful when managing expensive property like houses or children or senatorial seats. But I never got how marriage proves emotional commitment. I mean, why would the government be interested in your emotional commitments, and why would you want them to be? You show an emotional commitment (usually quite explicitly enough to embarrass your friends) by staying emotionally committed. Making a public oath of emotional commitment seems as nuts as swearing that y'all'll nevah be hungreh agehn. It's not up to you. At most, it's inviting disgrace; at best, it's unnecessary. Some folks, not to name names, have accused me of cynicism on this score. Not so! I think emotional commitment is entirely possible. And nice! But I haven't noticed oaths helping it along. People just like to make oaths. Johnny "Everybody Dies" Garfield, on the other hand, he would seem really cynical. Kind of. If it wasn't for this... his... triumph. Garfield belts the song out like a puffy heldentenor: it's heroic how heroic he feels. It's that Nietzschean clasping of tragic fate, but closer than usual because he's really not complaining. He liiiiikes it. What tightens the ties that bind, cutting voluptuously into his flesh, is an ecstatic faith in betrayal. May blessings rain and sizzle upon him and his, pitter pat, acidly and basely. |
| . . . 2002-09-23 |
Simperialism
This seems as good a time as any to brush up our reading comprehension skills. Let's have a go at botanist William Bartram's 1791 Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; Containing An Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians (via Sexual Revolution in Early America) :
| Having paid our attention to this useful part of the creation, who, if they are under our dominion, have consequently a right to our protection and favour, we returned to our trusty servants that were regaling themselves in the exuberant sweet pastures and strawberry fields in sight, and mounted again; proceeding on our return to town, continued through part of this high forest skirting on the meadows; began to ascend the hills of a ridge which we were under the necessity of crossing, and having gained its summit, enjoyed a most enchanting view, a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields; a meandering river gliding through, saluting in its various turnings the swelling, green, turfy knolls, embellished with parterres of flowers and fruitful strawberry beds; flocks of turkies strolling about them; herds of deer prancing in the meads or bounding over the hills; companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busily gathering the rich fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of floriferous and fragrant native bowers of Magnolia, Azalea, Philadelphus, perfumed Calycanthus, sweet Yellow Jessamine and cerulian Glycine frutescens, disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit. This sylvan scene of primitive innocence was enchanting, and perhaps too enticing for hearty young men long to continue idle spectators. In fine, nature prevailing over reason, we wished at least to have a more active part in their delicious sports. Thus precipitately resolving, we cautiously made our approaches, yet undiscovered, almost to the joyous scene of action. Now, although we meant no other than an innocent frolic with this gay assembly of hamadryades, we shall leave it to the person of feeling and sensibility to form an idea to what lengths our passions might have hurried us, thus warmed and excited, had it not been for the vigilance and care of some envious matrons who lay in ambush, and espying us gave the alarm, time enough for the nymphs to rally and assemble together; we however pursued and gained ground on a group of them, who had incautiously strolled to a greater distance from their guardians, and finding their retreat now like to be cut off, took shelter under cover of a little grove, but on perceiving themselves to be discovered by us, kept their station, peeping through the bushes; when observing our approaches, they confidently discovered themselves and decently advanced to meet us, half unveiling their blooming faces, incarnated with the modest maiden blush, and with native innocence and cheerfulness presented their little baskets, merrily telling us their fruit was ripe and sound. We accepted a basket, sat down and regaled ourselves on the delicious fruit, encircled by the whole assembly of the innocently jocose sylvan nymphs; by this time the several parties under the conduct of the elder matrons, had disposed themselves in companies on the green, turfy banks. My young companion, the trader, by concessions and suitable apologies for the bold intrusion, having compromised the matter with them, engaged them to bring their collections to his house at a stipulated price, we parted friendly. |
| . . . 2002-12-24 |
 | The Weeds of Crime: Three Men on a Horse |
Synopses: A sissy in a mutally adoring marriage who's threatened by masculine hostility and a job crisis can solve all his problems by joining a bunch of gangsters.
 More mugs than you can shake an ugly stick at | Three Men on a Horse trampled Broadway in 1935, and has been trotted out for summer stock, amateur theatricals, and sit-com rip-offs ever since. Handed such a slab of certified Grade-A merchandise, Hollywood took the rare and unadvisable step of adapting it closely -- that is, barely. As with Too Many Girls, there's some documentary interest in getting an unadulterated look at 1930s theater, complete with original cast members, original bathroom and easy virtue gags, and even original sets. But Too Many Girls had Rogers & Hart & lunacy on its side, and it quickly becomes apparent that the art of the legitimate "well-constructed" comedy hasn't declined nearly as much as the art of the musical. The talkies were better than plays pretty much right away. |
Stuck in our expensive seats, we pause for laugh lines, we pause even longer for forced laugh lines, we check our watch when it's time for intermission, and the cinematographer's snore goes almost entirely uninterrupted. (Or, as the IMDB reviewer puts it, "Throw a few special effects in and the movie would be a real winner.")
Well, actors enjoy plays even if cameras don't: Sam Levene is easier to take as a negligent criminal than as his usual negligent cop; worrying about her Erwin "lying in some hospital sick, or the back of some drug store," Carol Hughes ditzes with the best of them (where the best of them, as we'll see, is Una Merkel); Frank McHugh discards his usual cynical-idiot bray for unshakable dignity and becomes a surprisingly touching poet-hero. I didn't know he had it in him.
Nor did I know that Joan Blondell had that voice in her; nor did I want to. (Virtue is easy; accents are hard.) Blondell putting on a fake New York accent is as disturbing as me putting on a fake Groucho nose. It says something about the difference between acting and movie acting that she's the least professional aspect of the film and figures in its only moment of visual interest: a bizarrely interpolated upside-down glamor shot explaining why she's draped across the hero's legs. And -- "'Cause I'm just crazy about poetry. That's why." -- she also initiates the kind of exchange a guy wouldn't mind on his tombstone: "You're kind of nice, do you know it, Erwin?" |  "I'm dizzy, Patsy." |
| . . . 2002-12-26 |
| The Weeds of Crime: |  | Baby Face Harrington |
 "Watch me. I'm going to be dynamic. Hey hey!" |
I've never particularly welcomed Butterworth's appearance in a film. He seemed to hobble progress: the camera positioned itself, eager for amusement, waited, faltered, and finally, baffled, moved on. Now I understand the deadlock: Butterworth is as out of place in someone else's movie as a Larry Eigner lyric would be in a paragraph of a techno-thriller, as out of place as an inventor in a Restoration court.
Like his friend Robert Benchley, Butterworth didn't offer a collection of jokes but a critique of consciousness. Where Benchley is driven and betrayed by articulation's social component, Butterworth drifts and dogpaddles into wistfully meditative isolation. Refusing to let go of anything and unable to maintain focus to any conclusion, he clings to blooming buzzing confusion, the material world looming in and out of the fog as idealized promise and as incomprehensible threat. He's certain that a speeding train will let him pass once he's signaled a left turn, and yet he's possibly the only man ever to be physically menaced by Donald Meek.
 "This fella says I got a split personality." "Oh, you mean a sissy." "No; it's a term used by psychiatrists." |
"I also imitate birds. Purposefully."Similarly, any movie might take pleasure in the sight of Una Merkel with a gun; the scene only becomes Butterworthy as she dreamily begins to use it to smooth her beloved's hair.
Although director Raoul Walsh didn't find this assignment worth mentioning in memoirs or interviews, he soldiers manfully through slow parts good and bad, and although cinematographer Oliver T. Marsh may have thought it a bit of a let-down compared to his other MGM jobs that year (A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and Lubitsch's The Merry Widow), he provides an appropriately dim look, especially striking in the movie's most extended sequence, a suicide attempt:
 |  |
 "Would you care to dance?" "If you do." "Well, I do if you do." |  "Well, I do if you -- Willie, do you know you haven't kissed me yet?" "... In front of all these people?" "I will if you will." |  "....... Let's go home." |
A sissy in a mutally adoring marriage who's threatened by masculine hostility and a job crisis can solve all his problems by joining a bunch of gangsters....
Public-minded citizens may wonder at the effect of such a message. Who knows how many crimes were incited and souls degraded before Hollywood finally got around to acknowledging a possible downside to that formula, twenty years later?
| . . . 2003-01-23 |
"Is this the way I used to fall off this log?"
- rockin' weblogger Fred Metascene
For Phillips, his experiment's success initiated a new business model. Rather than having to compete with larger labels such as Chess for rights to the blues and R&B artists he'd been recording, he could sign potentially more lucrative (since they didn't have to deal with segregation) teenage crackers cheap and exclusive. They were eager to follow Elvis's trail, and Phillips was eager to help them.
On the world outside Memphis, the most immediate effect was rockabilly: a collection of easily copied mannerisms that spread fast as Jimmie Rodgers's yodel and shriveled afore the crops came in.
More lasting, being easier to sell, was a transvaluation in which success became a matter of "being real" and "keeping it real," setting sincerity and spontaneity against skill and groove. And I'm comfortable calling that a "rock" attitude, even though its effects haven't been confined to a single recording genre or even a single medium. (Andy Kaufman imitated Presley in more ways than the obvious one.)
As intended, it's generated records of otherwise unattainable moments which, god knows, I idolize. But they remain by design and essence isolated: every hit its own one-hit wonder. Amateurism is a lottery of grace whose winnings are taxed to fund the lottery program.
Irresponsibility is a heavy responsibility, man. You can keep the spark in a stodgy old-fashioned marriage to your art just by occasionally greeting the muse at the door in a little leather G-string. But how to maintain l'amour fou? And why to? Exposed to air, infatuation turns fatuous.
The symptoms aren't hard to find: half-assed tourism (i.e., "experimentation"), flame-outs, desperation unto suicide, or lassitude unto retirement -- or even unto professionalism. (Unless you're a complete fucking nutcase.)
| . . . 2003-05-03 |
Another waffling Democrat!
From "Dean's straight-talking image is getting tarnished By Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times":
Dean, a 54-year-old physician by training, had a more moderate record during his 11 years as Vermont governor than his current favor among liberals would suggest. He was a friend of the environment and signed landmark "civil union" legislation that granted gay and lesbian couples all the rights and benefits of marriage. But at the same time, he supported gun-owner rights, cut taxes, capped spending and consistently balanced the state budget, leaving enough for a rainy-day surplus that has spared Vermont the fiscal trauma facing most other states.Yes, as a liberal, I insist that rights go unsupported, that budgets be unbalanced, that governments maintain no surplus, and that spending always increase. In fact, the persnickety fiscal competence of the Reagan and Bush and Bush adminstrations is the very thing that turned me against them. No deficit, no peace!
| . . . 2003-06-07 |
Wendell Corey abraded 1950s Hollywood like an imperious acne-scarred iguana: outstandingly inexplicable as The Furies' love interest -- Barbara Stanwyck should've spent more time studying that copy of Are Snakes Necessary? -- and delivering his Rear Window banter with such open contempt that I half-expected him to try to pin the murder on Jeffries's little trollop.
But Corey also landed at least two parts perfectly suited to his Republican alienation from the species: "Smiley" Coy and Leon Poole.
 "I don't know why you'd do such a thing." |
I'd say Corey's Poole was as indelible a performance as Perkins's Norman Bates or Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter, except that no one seems to remember it. It certainly seems more realistic (although I've only met, that I know of, one mad killer myself), much more someone about whom you'd say, "He always seemed like such a nice man" and still never want to befriend or even stand very close to.
My shame to admit it, I probably wouldn't have gotten palsy with John Payne or Tom Neal, either. As Juliet Clark pointed out to me, Poole is a film noir hero in a film noir villain's role. The Killer Is Loose crossbreeds three strains of thriller (with a suggestion of the big heist film in the background):
"Even the island boys, they'd say Corporal Foggy, he get lost again, he forget his rifle."
"Yes, I remember."
 "Yes, I remember." |
Thus for the military. That other masculine bureaucracy, the police department, is equally dismissive:
"Worked himself into quite a stew, hasn't he?"We want Poole to prove his worth and show up the bullies, ideally without undue show of ego, just as part of the dirty job what a man's gotta do....
"Scared amateur -- bolted inside."
"Don't you see how wrong it was to do that?Which he does, kind of. Like later comic hero Travis Bickle would thwart the villains and get the girl, kind of.
I'm certainly going to settle with you for it."
"You said he wasn't crazy!"
 "What's more, you've demonstrated an earnest and sincere intention to pay your debt." "I've tried to follow the rules, sir." |
Although Poole remains self-possessed and hard-working, the clear-headed dignity of his first scenes proves anomalous. Unbenownst to us, he was being sustained by the love of a good woman. Love meaning:
"She never laughed at me once."We never get to know this good woman, and, given the general run of pariah relationships, that might be just as well. But even if she had turned out to be Marie Windsor, the Pooles would've been sure to present a more appealing spectacle than the passive-aggressive whine festival offered by the movie's purported hero and heroine.
In Touch of Evil, Orson Welles mocked the narrative convention of the noble cop's good marriage with parody. The Killer Is Loose undercuts it more directly by collapsing that convention into the convention of the middle-class family who's never been tested by fire. By 1956, Joseph Cotten's schoolmarmishness had ripened into querulous old-maidhood, and his shallow bride (best known to noirists as Out of the Past's second-string femme fatale) makes his dithering dotage even more glaring.
The couple's domestic ineffectiveness seems catching, eventually spreading through the entire LAPD and squandering technology, time, and personnel in cross-purposed confusion.
| "I think so, but I can't be sure." "Is it a man or is it a woman?" "I'm not sure." "If it is Poole, what's he waiting for?" "He's not sure it's Lila." "That could be...." |  |
While Poole advances unprofessionally, clumsily, obliquely, bumping into a police car, driving over the center line, limping through the rain, slumping, slopping....
Does he make it?
Silly question. Naturally the natural order prevails, depositing a foggy pool of drag on a neatly trimmed lawn, to be mopped up off-screen later by some equally discardable service industry peon.
That's the story we've been told we were being told, but it's not the only story we've heard.
There's the triumph of being the one who walks out of the last frames of the movie, and there's another type of triumph in defining them. There's the triumph of victory, and a triumph in having set the game. And even a triumph in refusing to acknowledge the existence of a game at all.
What would such uncompetitive types want with winning anyway?
| . . . 2003-10-28 |
Movie comment: Balseros
This patient and splendidly constructed documentary glommed onto a group of Cuban rafters in 1994 and had the good fortune to not let go.
As the rafters struggle to exchange the hopeless claustrophobia of community for the glorious promise of acquisitive isolationism, their story touches on the deadpan fish-out-of-water picaresque, the ensemble-decay saga, and the post-industrial engineering suspense film (e.g., Flight of the Phoenix).
Its most unique genre success, though, may be as a survey of the American Dream, where to my eye it bests such ponderous competition as Elia Kazan, Michael Cimino, and Francis Ford Coppola. Despite the small sample size, the Dream's most familiar manifestations are covered: lotteries, cab driving, drug dealing, whoring (subcategory: marriage), rednecks and blue collars, religious mania.... And the ambitious viewer can even gather some notion as to which path might be best to follow.
(Not to spoil anything, but the spirit of proletariat solidarity needn't feel betrayed. Hee yah!)
| . . . 2003-11-12 |
Men are from Champ de Mars, women are from Picardy
|
| . . . 2003-11-28 |
The true wonders of this world
"... poets and artists in reviving a more living sense of our moral traditions are political in that way -- cleansing the air." |
Regarding the ever-fresh topic of political art, I recommend scooting on over to the Sacramento Bee to listen to Maria Shriver's Maya Angelou reading at the inauguration of Herr Governor Schwarzenegger.
Even in a politician's wife, rarely have I heard fear so tightly corseted. But her strangled dignity reaches Story of O levels at the lines:
"... whose hands can strike with such abandon, that in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living. Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness, that the haughty neck is happy to bow and the proud back is glad to bend."That truth was perhaps a little too brave and startling, since she then stumbles:
"Out of such chaos, out of such contradiction, we learn that we are neither devils nor divines. When we come to it, we this people, on this wayward floating body, created on this Earth, have the power to fashion for this Earth a climate where every man, and every woman, can live freely without sanctimonious piety and without --Where Shriver stumbled, of course, was at "crippling fear." Which she replaced with the improvised equivalent, "enduring history," an easier thing to live without."Enduring history --
"When we come to it, we this people on this wayward floating body, created on this Earth, of this Earth, have the power to fashion for this Earth a climate where every man and every woman can live freely without sanctimonious piety, without crippling fear. When we come to it, we must confess that we are the possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonders of this world. That is when, and only when, we come to it."
In either case, one could say that she spoke truth to power, since Maria and Arnold, like Angelou's other admirers, would indeed be willing to confess that they are the possible, that they are the miraculous.
But why should speaking truth to power so often involve marriage to power and the duty, as hostess to power, of keeping attractive young women out of power's groping hands at public functions?
Well, that's where art comes into it.
This poem was written and delivered in honor of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. © Maya Angelou |
| . . . 2004-07-19 |
Etymology all round humps fecundity and pleasure together with smacking, fidgeting, flicking, scratching, messing up, and sweeping across. Only Old English seems to have prioritized the homey fuckbuddy (which I admit warms me towards Tolkien), and only French the kiss.
Even a preposition isn't always enough to disambiguate. Is the fucking off we confess to the same fucking off we demand of others?
* * *
I see chess as an allegory for life. The point is it's a contest between two opponents.
Because problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.
Journalists call them both chess "masters". But as I remember Vladimir Nabokov considered himself more problemicist than competitor, whereas by all accounts Marcel Duchamp played a vicious semiprofessional game.
Could that be why chess supplanted Duchamp's artistic career but nourished Nabokov's?
* * *
There are at least two ways to get a game wrong:
The second mistake is more dangerous, since it's more often made by winners, and their rewards usually come from outside the game's bounds and the players' expertise — in a large nonrenewable fee after a boxing match, for example, or in journalistic attention after a bestselling novel, or in governmental control after an election.
* * *
Mixed emotions and two left feet. This is a peculiar dance, and like everyone else I step it peculiarly.
As spectator of aggression, I love the graceful conviction of martial arts films, but I can't fill the imaginative gaps left in superhero comics or pro wrestling.
As actor, "I like it but it don't like me." I get the kind of kick from public elocution that people other than Cole Porter get from cocaine, but the rebound's fierce. Between the crush of doubtful conscience, a low boredom threshhold, and a hair-trigger temper, I'm worthless or worse at anything but the smallest-scale cannon-fodder political actions. Similarly, despite my self-evident pleasure in pontification, I'm unable to teach when coercion or grading are involved.
In both cases, skills relevant to a game are more than offset by my distracting awareness of conditions outside the game proper.
Which makes me a very unprofessional player.
It doesn't make me a player hater, though. Our society depends on good politicians, good teachers, and good propagandists. What makes Tom Matrullo's shylockia ridiculous is his implication that political games are novel, rather than an inevitable aspect of representative republics.
What makes him outrageous is his acquiescence to game-for-game's-sake: the refusal to acknowledge that a game is more than a score and that a life is more than a game. Whether a reporter is "partisan" or not hardly matters when all the pages are sports pages, when a voter's job is not to save themselves but to pick the most attractive contestant, when a senator's job is not to avert a health care crisis but to beat Clinton. All three branches of federal government are now made up of high-fiving high-scorers. The destruction of my country simply doesn't register except as winnings.
I led such a quiet life. Then somehow I woke up and found myself married to Mike Tyson.
kari edwards draws an unpleasant connection between this unpleasant post and the unpleasant image on the title bar:
your gender graphic seems to be the same cheap "trans" gender joke that shows up in the mass media, such as sheik 2... this is a cheap joke as the expense of a population that is the target of hate crimes.and if it is so so funny.. replace it with a person of color, or someone with a disability-.. and if not, why not? why is gender the joke? are you not just reenforcing gender stereo typing from a phallocentric gaze...? some on.. this is on the same level as george bush's ruse on gay marriage..
Another reader, another correction:
The destruction of the idea of your country. Right before Grandmasters comes Ghosts. Wasn't Parcheesi the one where you could let other kids play too?
Or, more cautiously still, the destruction of my idea of my country.
The destruction of our idea of our country. I need the reminder at times. Other times I need a minder. Matrullo is calling you "Ray" as familiar or opponent? I couldn't get that from either context. Things are heatin' up. Get that belt on.
I hardly ever wear a belt. But it's easy enough to give me one.
And here to do the job is another nightmare husband:
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the weight lifter and Hollywood actor turned California state governor, accused the state legislature of being "girly-men" and called on voters to "terminate" those that oppose his budget plans at the polls, California news media reported Sunday....
Key provisions of the Governor's budget proposal include school distribution of steroids and Viagra, new subsidies for L.A.'s plastic surgeons, and mandatory sexual harassment insurance.
A sheik joke for John le Bischop, finding his own corrupt flesh remembered long after its integrity got relinquished; who, filled with whatever that is, used his position to generate steam of a kind, the unnatural repression of natural inclinations, dubbed un- while he indulged them. Love the sinner hate the sin; love the baby, hate the act that brings it into being. Flicking is suggested for the mosquito, after smacking, as the smear so common among the thoughtless causes release of bodily fluids, hers, which can be pathogenic to the smearer, as the dermis is breached immediately prior, being the cause of the smacking itself. And remember, she's just trying to feed her kids.
Impressed by the cut of my gormlessness, Candida Cruikshanks offers me a chance at a capon gown.
As if I wasn't already having a bad hair day, another reader pours scorn upon my head:
Natterless bumpkins.
As we both know, we don't come here to watch me bemoan what we call "personal life." In default of anything better, here are a late addition to the Milly Bloom discussion and a warning to avoid installing Yahoo Messenger 6.
An anonymous grader at the School of Love gives me:
amores 3.7
No more summer sessions, hurrah!
| . . . 2004-09-24 |
A free market is a dumb market. I mean, even aside from its stubborn feuds with education, health, species survival, and so on — even on its own terms of delivering quality goods to people who'll pay for them, it's a screw-up. Look at how short-sighted zombie-lived speculative greed over copyright has blocked consumer access to a wealth of wonderful reissues. Look at the Betamax. Or fresh produce.
But in those cases I know what went wrong. A more mysterious failure of American capitalism is the vanishing of orange bitters, key to such classic cocktails as the Manhattan — which can bull on through regardless of casualties, like the Dirty Dozen Minus Two — and, more tragically, the martini.
A mere mix of gin and dry vermouth is as dull, oily, and incoherent as the defeated executives who classically swill it. But with a brush of this liquid Philosopher's Stone, in a harp-and-bell glissando a bad marriage becomes a Drink an sich and you're transformed from Henry Jones to William Powell.
So why isn't it stocked anywhere? It's not like the bottles are that big.
Anyway, I'm not saying this just to taunt you, unless you don't live in the East Bay. I found a shelf that carries orange bitters at Monterey Liquors, 1590 Hopkins, Berkeley, conveniently near a source of fresh produce. Go thou and do likewise. (As garnish for the complete Cholly Martini, olives stuffed with preserved lemon are available from the Spanish Table on San Pablo Ave.)
Je zia sano!
Off your vole! (A raised glass: the truly universal language.)
By gum, that's an inestimable public service you just performed. Come over some time for a martini or three. -paul
It'll take a while to work out just which Paul this is. Happily, I have almost a pint of orange bitters.
I've been reminded that some connoisseurs "suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin." And it's true that the most sophisticated solution to bad marriages is to spend days at the office and nights at the Club. Hélas! I am a sentimental shopkeeper at heart.
Jordan turns out to be a child of privilege. Huh.
Under the provocatively proper subject line "I like 2:1 myself", brilliant Richard Butner pours:
Agree on free market = dumb market. Oh so many examples.[...] But, re: the cinepad link in your recent post. Ahem. Bunuel (sorry, no tilde in this mail program) was right about a lot of things, but probably not the proper role of vermouth in martini construction. (At least he got the brand right.) See LCRW #12! A martini without vermouth is just a punchline to a bad joke.
I'm with you and we are right. I tried to let the spirit of Buñuel down soft and easy with some self-deprecation, but the sincerity of my self-deprecation wasn't meant to negate the sincerity of myself. I like the idea of a saved marriage.
A martini without vermouth is just a reference. Not even a joke. And I know the difference, 'cause I can't tell jokes.
| . . . 2005-04-17 |
In mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain, a group of left-wing lower-class poets publish autobiographical free verse epic dramas. Critics name them the Spasmodics.
It sounds like a Howard Waldrop premise. Could the Winter 2004 issue of Victorian Poetry be hoaxing us?
For a while, my answer was "Baby, I don't care." Editors Charles Laporte and Jason R. Rudy select well and structure novelistically. First, Herbert F. Tucker begins with a high overhead shot of exposition, a lightly satiric, lightly sympathetic tone to draw us into the story. Then, with admirably ethical opportunism, a series of contributors apply varied professional interests to bring out aspects of Spasmodic characters and times. Details and depth accumulate. Finally, Florence Saunders Boos, openly partisan, fully engaged, describes the movement's catastrophe, with heroes ambiguously vanquished and villains ambiguously triumphant, leaving the signature effect of alternate history: an exhilarating sense of possibility; a melancholy sense of possibility foreclosed.
When curiosity won, though, I found confirmation (if not texts) easily enough.
"But, by a certain gorgeousness or intricacy of language, by a scrupulous avoidance of the apparent commonplace in subject; by more or less elaborately hinted or expressed unorthodoxy in religion or philosophy; and, above all, by a neurotic sentimentalism which would be passion if it could, and, sometimes, is not absolutely far from it, though it is in constant danger of turning to the ridiculous or of tearing its own flimsiness to tatters — by all these things and others they struggled to avoid the obvious and achieve poetic strangeness."- George Saintsbury, Cambridge History of English and American Literature
How to excuse, or at least explain, my ignorance?
When I search my memory for verse of the 1840s and 1850s, I find Poe smouldering at one end of a long flat expanse of Tennyson, broken by a few Brownings, between the issueless extravagance of the late Romantics and the parentless extravagance of Swinburne and Whitman.
That bare spot is where the Spasmodic impulse once grew. Insofar as the Spasmodics could be construed as a group, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is what's left of them. Kirstie Blair points out that, for once, reactionaries had reason to welcome a major work by a woman. Despite its provocations, Leigh's redemption ("Oh, wait — did I say Art was the most important thing? Sorry, I meant Marriage.") provided a reassuring ending all round. Domestication was what the Spasmodics most infuriatingly lacked.
+ + +
"A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. [...] USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!"- Charles Olson, "Projectivist Verse"
"Words rhythmically combined affect the feelings of the poetic hearer or utterer in the same way as the fact they represent: and thus by a reflex action the fact is reproduced in the imagination" ... "Depend on it, whatever is to live on paper, must have lived in flesh and blood." ... "certain rhythms and measures are metaphors of ideas and feelings" ... "the word of Man made flesh and dwelling amongst us."- Sydney Dobell
(quoted in "Rhythmic Intimacy, Spasmodic Epistemology" by Jason R. Rudy)
+ + +
Pace (not really) Ron Silliman, the School of Quietude sometimes wins. Not by being remembered, but by making sure its competitors are forgotten first. (Silliman, for example, seems as ignorant of Whitman's Spasmodic interests as I was.)
The literary canon, like other institutions, bases its authority on a set of fragile contingencies. And literary justice, like other justice, usually depends on a few outspoken individuals who refuse to let an injustice go. I'm not sure all English majors realize how unlikely their access to Melville or Dickinson really is. (Most of the creative writing MFAs I've met could certainly benefit by deeper meditation on the subject.) In my own lifetime, Zukofsky and the other Objectivists might have stayed out of reach if weren't for Robert Creeley.
John Keats barely made it through the gates into the immortality of persistent reprinting. Thirty years after his death, plenty of authorities still wished he hadn't and wanted to ensure that it didn't happen again.
+ + +
"Take yourself, and make eyes at it in the glass until you think it looks like Keats, or the 'Boy Chatterton.' Then take an infinite yearning to be a poet, and a profound conviction that you never can be one, and try to stifle the latter. This you will not be able to do."- W. H. Mallock, "How to Make a Spasmodic Poem"
(quoted in "Glandular Omnism and Beyond" by Herbert F. Tucker)
"What a brute you were to tell me to read Keats's Letters... What harm he has done to English Poetry. [...] But what perplexity Keats Tennyson et id genus omne must occasion to young writers of the όπλίτης [hoplite] sort; yes & those d-d Elizabethan poets generally. Those who cannot read Gk shld read nothing but Milton & parts of Wordsworth: the state should see to it...."- Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, 1848
(partially quoted in "Victorian Culture Wars" by Antony H. Harrison)
+ + +
In this case was literary injustice done?
It depends. (See, that's what sucks about justice.)
Like George Saintsbury, the Victorian Poetry essayists admit more or less kindly that the core Spasmodic works aren't great. Although I've only found excerpts so far, they certainly don't seem to my own taste.
But tastes differ. I also dislike the Beats, hippie shamans, declaimed celebrations of groupthink, and most attempts at lyric confession. That hasn't stripped them from bookstores and libraries.
And tastes change. The Spasmodics don't sound more embarrassing than the self-pitying concept albums of 1970s AOR. Or more embarrassing than I was back then, a teenage cracker in an isolated farming town writing imitations of John Berryman and arguing the relative merits of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson with my best friend, soon to become a born-again journalism major. A year or two later, for a few months during an alcoholic nervous breakdown, I even liked Charles Bukowski. For me, as for so many overweeners, Keats's defiant blush has always been a beacon.
At the very least, if I'd heard of them, my college band would have been named the New Spasmodics.
Most pertinently, authors can change if they're given the chance. Victorian Poetry essayists describe most Spasmodic targets as first volumes from beginning writers, not outrageously weaker than the first volumes from their better remembered peers, and usually more interesting than any volumes from their most hostile enemies. If there was a Spasmodic "school", it was shut down before the students matriculated. I was able to read this academic journal as alternate history partly because it so often emphasizes their lost potential.
Their pop-scientific poetics anticipated twentieth century avant-gardes. Their class diversity anticipated the GI-Billed New American Poetry. Their sprawling yet motionless epics of young writers struggling to produce sprawling epics anticipated the Thomas Wolfe subtype of the Great American Novel. Their shameless invocation of neuraesthenia as muse should have interested Eliot and the poet-professor crowd. That poor sap R. H. Horne anticipated the New Directions paperback with his one-farthing-cheap Orion. The young Alexander Smith was advised to produce one long poem rather than a collection of short ones, and that's a fairly early example of narrative trumping lyric.
Smith chose to embed his lyrics in an autobiographical fantasy epic drama, since that's what everyone else seemed to be doing. And it did indeed attract attention. It got him and his advisor whacked by viciously conservative William Edmondstoune Aytoun, first from the sniper tower of Blackwood's, and then in a book-length parody, Firmilian.
"Other 'spasmodic' impulses migrated into fiction, most conspicuously the 'sensation fiction' of the 1860s, but the shadow-movement's preoccupations with romantic populism, formal experimentation, and unguarded honesty endured. Aytoun played successfully to a receptive claque, but subsequent generations have largely consigned his sensibilities to a literary and political backwater. Then as now, it was easier to be a clever critic than it was to write a memorable poem."More disspiriting were the enduring triumphs of the iron laws of class and education that Aytoun exploited. No acknowledged 'major' poet of Victorian Britain came from working- or lower-middle-class origins, and none of the 'spasmodists' is likely to gain more than token entry into any twenty-first-century anthologies. Even here, however, Dobell, Smith and the others might have found a measure of vindication in the vast palette of subsequent generations' preoccupations with despair, recovery, aberrance, marginality, and self-examination — a palette they helped, in the face of withering critical abuse, to configure."
- Florence Saunders Boos, "'Spasm' and Class"
Snobs produce memorable satires and parodies because reactionaries depend on reaction. Without venom, their tongues go dry. Without a victim to strangle, they lie limp and tangled, a heap of parasitic ivy. Having deadened the nervous impulse that gave it life, even Aytoun's Firmilian vanished from collections: an Acme-brand hole slapped onto the cliff face, and then peeled off and thrown away.
+ + +
"The calm philosophy of poetry, in its addresses to the understanding and the domestic affections, now holds the ascendancy; but as the fresh and energetic spirit of the present age advances, a contest is certain to take place in the fields of Literature on the above questions. The sooner, therefore, the battle is fought out, the better; and to this end, the poetical antagonisms shall at once be brought into collision."- Richard H. Horne, A New Spirit of the Age, 1844
(quoted in "Editorial Introduction: Spasmodic Poetry and Poetics" by Charles Laporte & Jason R. Rudy)
"... and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
i am still suspicious of a hoax.
Apparently, if you happen to have university library privileges and can get away from your job and family for a bit, you can see for yourself.
an elaborate hoax.
The word "hawk" begins in the air and ends with talon in the heart
'At's a good one, boss. Now I tell one: What's high in the middle and round on both ends?
Minnesota
Right! (I was gonna guess "E-40", myself.)
| . . . 2005-04-23 |
The first time I watch a Stanley Kubrick movie, I'm thrilled by its ambition and clarity.
The second time, the anticipated moments of humor, beauty, and shock re-arrive precisely in order, but thinner, like an anecdote that's outlived the memory it tells. Actors who'd conveyed life in other roles are played like tokens. My laughter and startles are a bit forced, as though I'm trying to put a lecturer at ease.
The third time, after the first ten minutes or so, there's no more movie. Just an idea I already know.
Only two Kubrick movies have interested me past that point. Both are literary adaptations, and in both, the ideas are formal. I watch them as literary analysis. With a 100-to-1 shooting ratio.
+ + +
"How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?"
Well, Lolita is a story of European guile in crass America. To make a highbrow book of it, European artist Nabokov told it guilefully. To make a commercial movie of it, American "they" told it crassly. In Nabokov's medium, Humbert Humbert takes advantage of a decadent tradition of ambiguously angst-riven confession. In Kubrick's medium — Hollywood film, c. 1960 — if you wanted to show middle-aged men lusting after girls, you made a leering sex comedy. And so that's the movie Kubrick made: The Twelve-Year Itch.
The logic is undeniable and, for me, anyway, irresistable. And James Mason makes an ideally sophisticated Tom Ewell, although Sue Lyon seems better suited to play the good-humored attractive wife than the drool-bespattered fantasy. (Tuesday Weld turned the role down after playing a similar part in a less prestigious movie and before playing similar parts in less prestigious movies.).
The problem is that Kubrick, as heir to Stroheim's flesh-loathing joylessness, isn't good at sex comedy. Even within the esoteric sub-sub-genre of leer noir, Lolita was bettered by Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid.
Maybe if they'd gotten Tony Randall for Clare Quilty?
+ + +
What most rewards me with pleasure viewing after viewing is Barry Lyndon.
I realize this reaction isn't universally shared. It's not, however, unique. I've watched the movie with others who've enjoyed it — I even remember one very successful pan-and-scanned commercially interrupted viewing on late-night television. And maybe it's helpful to see it in such irreverent circumstances: I laugh pretty much all the way through, but acolytes seem to find (or seek and not find) a different experience — the fresco series of sadness described by Mark Crispin Miller.
Although I admire Miller's argument, do I really care about Barry's sad fate? Or the sad fates of all who surround him?
Of course not. It's a Kubrick movie. I don't care about these characters any more than I cared about the fates of the Haze females, or HAL's or Alex's victims, or all life on Earth. And, in this case at least, Kubrick's coldness is no betrayal of his source material.
William Makepeace Thackeray attempted at least four simultaneous goals in The Luck [or Memoirs] of Barry Lyndon, Esq.:
This was an extraordinarily ambitious combination for a second novel. It was also kind of a mess.
In place of Thackeray's stew, being more a pastry chef, Kubrick neatly separated each ingredient and layered them in a tidy pattern.
First, to resolve the mix of fictional conventions, his movie splits down the middle. Its first half, naturally enough, is assigned the eighteenth-century: painlessly ironic misadventures of a young man, fairly good-hearted but amoral and far from bright, attractive through sheer boisterous health. This picaresque story ends in the hero's ascension to landed prosperity and a good marriage.
After an intermission, we enter the nineteenth-century: domestic melodrama, the horrors of class mobility, cross-generational tensions building and snapping, tragic accident, and villainy brought down, with lingering regret.
The problematically unreliable narrator was resolved by relocating out-of-character quotes from Barry into the omniscient third-person voice of Vanity Fair or Trollope's novels. The feeling of unreliablity was maintained by persistent discords between the dismissive tone of the "author" and the evidence of screen and soundtrack.
This solution kept Barry's character inarticulate and opaque, well within the scope of Thackeray's original blundering creep (or Ryan O'Neal's acting), and able to inhabit both halves of Kubrick's new scheme without dissonance. The new narrator was similarly at home, perhaps a bit more detached and worldly in the first half and a bit more censorious in the second.
Other techniques help bind the two halves. Kubrick's slow zoom-outs begin scenes as formally as the chapter titles and introductory paragraphs which were common to both centuries. Natural lighting, location shooting, and period costumes push material reality forward, while the meticulous care lavished on them reinforce the abstraction of pre-naturalistic style. As with Barry's character, so with others: Kubrick tones down Thackeray's vicious caricatures (which, photographed directly, might give us something more like Fellini's Satyricon or Welles's Don Quixote than like Richardson's Tom Jones) and adds flaws to Thackeray's more admirable (but almost blank) figures, resulting in fairly even affect.
The result, I admit, is cold and schematic — but also intellectually engaging and very funny. It even induces, yes, a pleasant melancholy.
Not directly, though; not through parodic extravagances such as The Death of Little Bryan, with its "sad music" (that one piece of sad music, used whenever "sad music"'s needed), its angelic pain-free child, and its bravely tear-choking parents. That scene is pure clip art, like the Spooky House, Soul-Shattering Perversity, and Horrors of War sequences in other Kubrick movies.
No, the sadness is one uniquely suited to Kubrick's abilities. It's the sadness of distance. The distance between these dehumanized figures, each forever their own framed portrait, nailed to the wall, untouched and untouching. The distance between them and us, separated by time and telling. The implied identity with ourselves, and our own distances.
Even the voiceover dies as we watch, and a printed epilogue emphasizes the point:
It was in the reign of George the III that the above named personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.
"... and [to complete the quote] do not the Sunday papers and the courts of law supply us every week with more novel and interesting slander?"
| . . . 2005-09-18 |
No government which executed so many citizens could be called "limited," but Elizabethan England was certainly privatized: Constantinople's "British ambassadors" were directly employed by the Levant Company. Government's role was to coordinate espionage networks, corporal punishment, military action, proclamations of religious intent, spectacular patronage, and highly profitable monopolies by and for the benefit of the powerful few. Delivering arms to yesterday's or tomorrow's enemy helped finance the looting of today's. Power was centralized and capricious, the middle class kept in line by a mix of fear and feverish speculation. Life was spent in display and exited in debt. Expressions of charity, unlike professions of faith, were left strictly to the individual conscience; long-lived consciences learned to be flexible in their professions.
Marlowe's play fantastically alters a siege that took place the year after his birth. Obviously, some alterations were part of his job as a playwright with a scene-chewer to feed. Speculatively, some were due to religious-economic war with Catholic empires and Anglo-Turkish conspiracies against Malta.
Given these backgrounds, what strikes me about the play isn't its cynicism, or its plea for tolerance, delivered by neo-con Machiavelli himself:
I crave but this,— grace him as he deserves, |
What strikes me is who's been added and who are missing.
The addition, of course, is Barabas.
In Marlowe's alternative history, Barabas gives the Maltese governor the trifecta of his dreams: Barabas provides an excuse for the governor to steal all his possessions, purportedly to pay off an urgent debt which is then reneged on; Barabas blocks an embarrassing interfaith marriage between the two families; Barabas delivers a valuable hostage into the governor's hands and is then neatly deposited down his own trapdoor.
In Marlowe's real history, there existed Jewish (or quasi-Jewish) agents who played all sides against each other. But it was a thoroughly British relative of Marlowe's own Lord Strange who engineered the time's most Barabas-worthy betrayal. And the English (like the Maltese) managed to eke out some profit through these wicked middlemen before discarding or slaughtering them.
Who're missing are the English.
Absent Protestant characters, the play's taken-for-granted pro-Christianity and its boisterous anti-Catholicism clash scene by scene. On the one hand, the Jew's daughter assuredly gains redemption by joining a convent and the Maltese victory is thanks "to Heaven"; on the other, the monks are money-grubbers and the nuns are whores. In Wilson's formula, Barabas somehow stands for the English point of view — and yet the governor of Malta is clearly meant to be cheered by the English audience — and yet the Catholic Maltese were (in Wilson's theory) Marlowe's patrons' chief targets.
Such awkwardness has its uses.
Since the Christian governor cheats Turk and Jew twice over, when Barabas advances arguments like:
Thus, loving neither, will I live with both, |
Or:
It's no sin to deceive a Christian; |
No one disputes his points. Instead, they bring up less ambiguous issues, such as his people having been cursed by God, or his having poisoned a nunnery. In doing so, they've been relieved of the responsibility of making his arguments themselves. They reap the benefits of tacit agreement while avoiding the danger of overt advocacy.
By having the Jewish villain espouse doing business with heretics, Marlowe avoids the propaganda problem that worried Edward Barton. By having the Jewish villain commit such horrendous crimes, Marlowe insinuates by contrast that doing business with heretics isn't so heinous.
These "love the sin but hate the sinner" narratives are familiar enough. We're titillated; we condemn; all's well.
Sometimes such narratives smuggle out otherwise uncommunicable signals. It's Snowflake's Choice: a narrative which dehumanizes or no narrative at all. The envelope cuts both the sender and the recipient; the envelope may even be poisoned; still, the urge to communicate finds outlet.
But Marlowe apologists should limit their liberatory claims. No gaybasher ever paused to say, "Wait a minute — this guy reminds me of the insane killer in Laura!" And Marlowe's choice of a Jewish scapegoat for capitalist sins brings him closer to nineteenth and twentieth century anti-Semitism than to medieval or Counter-Reformation anti-Semitism.
Similarly, the play's Christian-and/or-Catholic awkwardness reminds me of the awkwardness a later generation of privatizing profiteers faced while constructing a "Judeo-Christian" pseudo-identity which permitted relations with "good" (that is, profitable) non-Judeo-Christians, at least until such heretics could be cut out of the picture....
And the play's solution isn't far from theirs: Justify a war for profit as a war on terror.
* * *
We began in an approved literary relationship. Serial monogamy: individual reader and individual work, in bed alone with the covers drawn up. Maybe spiced a bit mendaciously by fantasies about the author. All very legitimate and, in this instance, very unsatisfying.
By opening our sheets to encompass the work's political and economic context, vague background texture snapped into vibrant focus. The relationship became intriguing.
And problematic.
Well, that's my problem, not Marlowe's. To deal with it, I had to broaden the scope again, to the reader's political and economic context.
In doing so, although I strayed from what might be called "appreciation", I don't think I dragged in arbitrary matter. The extent to which The Jew of Malta is depiction, indirection, prediction, or coincidence is unascertainable, but Marlowe himself opened this purse of worms. His play becomes more interesting when politically contextualized because his play was to some unknown degree a political act — not only a depiction of Realpolitik but an example of it.
* * *
Here, I've essayed a response to CultRev's request some time ago for "brief statements about what we think the role of politics in the study of literature might be." Not so brief, I'm afraid. Particulars are my statement, and they take a while.
Thanks to some gruesome reaction of genetics and environment, I'm an unapologetic aesthete. (Well, I apologize sometimes, but it doesn't do much good.) Art is central to my metaphysics, ethics, and even (shamefully) my politics. It's the lightbulb the world revolves around.
I revolve with the world. To an absurd extent, my essay on Lubitsch's final movie and my edition of The Witlings were prompted by last autumn's American elections. In the case at hand, if I'd wanted to write about shallow trash on purely aesthetic grounds, I would've chosen John Marston, the English Renaissance Trey Parker.
And the light's not confined to the bulb. "Politics" can clarify what would otherwise remain obscure, solve puzzles or remove the blinders of arrogance. If we ask readers to imaginatively ally themselves with those heroic canonical authors, why not promote imaginative alliances with their circumstances? If it's not cheating "literary value" when we explain The Jew of Malta's vocabulary or the conventions of blank verse, or when we treat a haphazardly published assortment of poems and commercial scripts as evidence from which to deduce a fascinatingly singular Marlovian mind, how could anyone protest when we explore the political and economic conflicts at the dirty heart and fingertips of the play? If students bitch about Jane Austen's lack of interest in colonial injustice, we might remind them of their baggy jeans' provenance. If they snub Thomas Jefferson, we might point out the profitability of their state's prison system.
There are other roles for "politics", I know — maybe I've been displaying them myself; you tell me — bulking up one's blinders, deploying righteousness as an ornamental shield for ignorance....
I just don't think they're as useful in the study of literature.
| . . . 2008-05-26 |
Hurry up; this is impossible.- Junior Potter, Son of Paleface, 1952
Although Son of Paleface made money, Paramount didn't extend Tashlin's option. His next break came in 1955 when he managed to squeak under Hal Wallis's stringently low standards, and incidentally provided Jerry Lewis's first inkling that cinema could be a worthwhile medium.
Hope fell back to familiar (if depleted) ground. No more panicked thoughts of escape; the animal had become reconciled to its cage, unresponsive to prod or thrown trash. When he turned to the camera, it was in search of cue cards. Six years later Hope reprised the watered-down Western parody of Norman Z. McLeod, who Tashlin never did get around to killing. The final stop of interest is 1960's The Facts of Life, a grim comedy of re-failed-marriage in which Hope's forced unfunniness worked as stark naturalism.
Tashlin meanwhile found a way out of his pacing issues, not by accelerating the gags but by integrating them with the mise en scène. In his best pictures, even ontological intrusions fit into an overall rhythm — the snapping point intermission of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, the choreographed walks of The Girl Can't Help It, Jerry Lewis's shtick-till-I-drop slow a-goh-nee.... After Son of Paleface, Tashlin redirected his satire from the bad habits of dying genres to those of the movie mainstream: juvenile delinquency, gray flannel angst, and most notoriously the overstated but under-remarked bosoms of the era, which, especially in Rock Hunter, seemed to embody a miserable oscillation between the devalued real and the alluring purported.
His best pictures were intermittant, though, and their generation brief. After being tossed between the Scylla of Doris Day and the Charybdis of Lewis, a stormweary Tashlin vanished beneath the waves in 1968, Bob Hope aboard the wreck.
I have always thought that the most fitting way for an American man to die is in a brutal accident on the freeway. Because that way he will be giving up the ghost in a rare moment of freedom.- Frank Tashlin, interview with Robert Benayoun, 1964
Rich as are the gifts of the imagination bitterness of world's loss is not replaced thereby. On the contrary it is intensified, resembling thus possession itself. But he who has no power of the imagination cannot even know the full of his injury.- William Carlos Williams, Prologue to Kora in Hell, 1918
Jaime J. Weinman has unearthed Harvard University's response to their less-than-favorite son, and a New York Times piece by Tish-Tash himself.
Doris Day had wings, she could really sing, her timing (musical) is inspirational. She wound up with the zeitgeist overload of archetypal 50's jivety All-American girl, and thus those who disdain that, her. No fair. Like Lucille Ball, another too-popular for her own good genius.
Your cause is just. For that matter, I probably count as a Jerry Lewis fan — I keep a copy of The Total Filmmaker close at hand. But this is an essay at Tashlin rather than Day, and I don't think The Glass Bottom Boat or Caprice represent either party's best work.
p.s Firefox blocks psdpdm with a "Suspected Attack Site!" no go page. Sea Monkey doesn't though.
Most of Pseudopodium is hand-crafted and impervious to non-self-inflicted harm, but the one portion of the site which I stupidly made dependent on web-hosted software — NO ONE SHOULD USE WEB SOFTWARE! NO ONE SHOULD HIRE WEB PROGRAMMERS! — exposed its succulent belly to some predator while I was in the midst of the professional and personal issues which continue to block my next damn post. Google picked that up and alerted the protection service used by Firefox 3. I've hurriedly dealt with the issue and I hope the good Googlians will overlook those intemperate remarks about web programmers and restamp their approval soon.
alleyalleyincomefree
| . . . 2009-01-18 |
CONSTABULARY NOTES FROM ALL OVERFrom The New Yorker, July 28, 2008, "Fantasy Suite" by Hilton Als:It's a note that Durang himself struck in a recent Times interview, in which he referred to "The Marriage of Bette and Boo" as his "one unabashedly autobiographical play." "My relationship with my partner has lasted twenty-three years and my parents' bumpy marriage lasted fifteen years," Durang said. "So I win." The only thing a playwright should be concerned with winning is a greater command over the truth and his art. |
| . . . 2009-10-24 |
... and to console her private Distress I called into the Room to her my own Bosom Friend, my beloved Fanny Burney; whose Interest as well as Judgment goes all against my Marriage — whose Skill in Life and Manners is superior to that of any Man or Woman in this Age or Nation; whose Knowledge of the World, ingenuity of Expedient, Delicacy of Conduct, & Zeal in the Cause will make her a Counsellor invaluable; & leave me destitute of every Comfort, of every Hope, of every Expectation.- Hester Lynch Thrale's Thraliana, November 1782
Copyright to contributed work and quoted correspondence remains with the original authors.
Public domain work remains in the public domain.
All other material: Copyright 2004 Ray Davis.
