"Donnie! You're Out of Your Element!"

If you're going to send up the Southern California hard-boiled mystery--do it right. Send it WAY up.

"Darkness warshed over the Dude--darker than a black steer's too-kiss on a moonless prairie night."

"I'm a brother shamus!"
"A brother shamus? Like an Irish monk?"


P. S. I just noticed on this rewatching that "Nihilist Woman" is played by Aimee Mann.

Ain't No Caine on the Brazos

To get the taste of the last blog post's subject out of my mouth, I decided to watch the HD-DVD version of Batman Begins. I forgot, or more accurately relearned, that video and aural bells and whistles ("mixed metaphor there, doc") cannot strengthen a meandering script--in the case of this film, who's the real villain. I liked the actors, but the action was too choppy and disjointed, so I spent my time trying to figure out which portions of Chicago* were real, and which portions the product of CGI. (Lower Wacker Drive--again!?)

Michael Caine's effortlessly polished performance as Alfred, the butler ("Nevv-ah!"), though, led me to pop in a movie I had been meaning to watch, Get Carter (NOT the abominable remake with Sylvester Stallone). In the original 1971 production, Caine plays a London gangster who journeys north to Newcastle to investigate the death of his brother. My ulterior motive for watching this was the portrayal of a Newcastle gangster chief by John Osborne--his only appearance, as far as I know, in films.

Well, Osborne's performance was languidly reptilian and Newcastle's industrial grunge pictorially fascinating (was that why they picked Seattle for the remake?). But the movie as a whole was unsatisfying, maybe because it was too knowing. On the train ride north, Carter is reading Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely--the title is shown twice, in case you miss it. OK, nice in-joke--except a spiv like Carter would read Mickey Spillane if anything--not Chandler's simile-sodden prose and period wisecracks. And the plot itself, while suitably quest-like (and it's Chandler who names a character Orfamay Quest, and in FML, Mrs. Grayle), just gets too numbing. And director Mike Hodges overuses telephoto shots--why use that lens in an over-the-shoulder shot when the blur of the person in front obscures the face of the speaker?

But one moment of pure movie acting made my viewing worthwhile. After bedding a northern gangster's girlfriend, Carter turns on a 16mm porn movie for some entertainment. As the movie goes on, Carter realizes the identity of one of the participants, and the way that Caine shows that dawning revelation, both cognitively and emotionally, is masterful. In that moment of pure film, I "got" Carter.


*It's ironic that here they use Chicago as a model for Gotham City, because in the comics Gotham City was modeled on New York, and Metropolis on Chicago. Smallville was in Illinois.

Four-letter Word that Begins with "C" and Ends with "P"

This was supposed to be a light-hearted, witty romp through the wreckage of Queen of Outer Space, a 1958 science-fiction movie starring, as you can see, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Eric Fleming. I would love to make jokes at the expense of those responsible, but the sad truth is that this movie is simply too bad to even be ridiculed.

At least two of those people should have known better. The idea was attributed to Ben Hecht, probably the greatest script-doctor in the history of Hollywood, and I wonder why he didn't cash the check and deep-six the credit. The script was by Charles Beaumont, generally an excellent writer for Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. However, director Edward Bernds was previously a director (and not a good one) for the Three Stooges and the Bowery Boys, and the crew (and cast) go down from there.

One thing I hadn't noticed the only time I saw this before was the obvious recycling of costumes and even the lettering of the opening credits from an excellent sf movie, Forbidden Planet.

Truly funny camp is only possible when all involved take themselves seriously, whether as participating in an original work or in an imitation. The moment the eye starts to wink or the tongue moves toward the cheek--camp becomes crap. Yet somehow I have the feeling La Gabor thought her talents could deodorize this ordure.

Excuse me--I have to join the editorial staff, who are still retching in the corner.

Lost in the Web of Words

One bit of seemingly at-first useful information I picked up during my recent blog-hopping was the existence of http://www.librarything.com/, a free service that would "catalog your books online." I started to play around with it, and then realized it was a kind of intellectual honey-trap, for me at least.

I would end up like a character in some weird combination of Borges's "Funes the Memorious" and "The Library of Babel": cataloging everything, trying to remember everything, while life seeped away . . .

Pol. What do you read, my lord?

Ham. Words, words, words.

"Very Like a Whale"

My anxiety dream took a new form the other night:

1) I am in a Shakespeare play.

2) I cannot remember my lines.

3) I cannot find my lines in any copy of the play available.

4) The play is Hamlet and I am playing . . . Polonius.

Not even the Ghost? Or Claudius? I suppose it's better than an "attendant lord," but not much.

C'mon, subconscious--how about Falstaff?

P.S. "How about Andy Devine as Falstaff?"

Shudder.

"Equinox Flower"

I did not mean to give the impression in a previous post that I am inimically opposed to spectacular blockbuster motion pictures. I treasure those moments that only the wide screen and a large vision can give: the ship seeming to move on top of the dunes in Lawrence of Arabia, the star child looking at the Earth in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the lighting of the beacon fires in The Return of the King. The problem occurs when people think that such moments are all movies can (or should) give us, and the cinema's smaller pleasures and insights are forgotten.

I've mentioned Criterion Films a couple of times before in this blog, and I've just started to sample the third volume of their Eclipse Line of no-frills releases, The Late Ozu. I've seen several of these films before: I'd even subscribed to an Internet dvd rental place called Nicheflix to borrow copies of Ozu's films that had not been released here to play on my region-free dvd player.

The movie I chose was Ozu's first color film, Equinox Flower. Ozu was like Charlie Chaplin in that he did not take to technological advances like sound films easily, but once he did, he proved to be a master of them. The film's plot is simply told: a father eventually agrees go along with his daughter's decision to marry for love and not participate in an arranged marriage.

But what moments unfold on the way.

In general, Ozu's camera was locked low to the ground, particularly in interior scenes, at about waist-high for someone who would be seated in the traditional Japanese manner. His actors often look directly at the person they're talking to. Here's a still from Equinox Flower that illustrates this:

Also, Ozu always cuts between shots and scenes: no dissolves, fades, wipes, etc. This can make for some abrupt transitions at first, but viewers soon get used to them. More famous are what became known as Ozu's "pillow shots." These at first seem to be the equivalent of establishing shots: an exterior location that characters are approaching or will arrive at--like the heads at Mt. Rushmore in North by Northwest. But in Ozu they take on a spatial symbolism and a rhythmic importance: the angularity and straight lines of buildings; the curves and sinuosity of landscapes. Here's another example from the film:

The magic that occurs in an Ozu movie is when we realize the emotional importance in a scene that simply shows a woman walk quickly down a corridor in her house, turn abruptly around, and sit down. She is deliriously joyous, and if you told that to someone who had not seen what led up to that scene, she would think you were delirious. Similarly, the same character just gently drumming her fingers on a table to traditional Japanese music on a radio. She radiates happiness. This is the other magic of movies: that we can see into one another's souls for a time, and share in the events and emotions of ordinary lives.

What is even more wonderful is that Ozu so effortlessly communicates all this across cultures. I'm not all that familiar with Japanese culture, but I understand these characters. fully, deeply, even madly. I love movies when they make the adrenaline flow and the jaw drop, but I also love those that make my heart and my eyes fill.

The Editorial Staff

Some of you must be wondering, "Who's that voice that keeps interjecting sarcastic comments in this blog?" Well, let me introduce you to the editorial staff:





Wynken, Blynken, and Sod(all).

Each entry (and comment in other blogs) undergoes a rigorous vetting procedure, as well as ruthless line-by-line editing, in which each comma and adjective must be justified. They are, on the whole, stringent but fair--except for Sod(all), the bear, who is an alter ego of sorts, and has a wicked tongue.

"You great baby! Now they're going to realize you like stuffed animals!"

"Sod off."


Note: Actually, this is my attempt to place the obligatory cute animal pic in my blog, since, try as I may, I can't get our female pit-bull to look cute (she has a sweet disposition, though).

Note to above Note: My comment about "obligatory cute animal pics" was inspired by several random journeys through the Blogosphere using the "Next Blog" link at the top of the page. Each trip was unspeakably depressing, and the main thought rising out of the swamp of despair that they planted in my chest was that the cute pictures of pets, children, and woven thingamacrafts were probably the least harmful bloggotic use, among all the other inanities, cries for help, outpourings of psychotic hatred, spamulous crassness, and the expected but nonetheless melancholy prurient crotch-grabbings. Vanity Fair indeed!

Notes for a Commonplace Book I

" 'In the time of your life--live!' That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition."

--Tennessee Williams

O Lucky Man!--II

I said before that I hoped someone would upload on YouTube the last version of Alan Price's song "O Lucky Man!" in the eponymous movie by Lindsay Anderson.

And luckily, someone has, but this someone is at the very least obsessed with Helen Mirren, because he is uploading rips of all the scenes she appears in from all her movies. That's why if you want to see the more rocking version of this song, you have to wait until the last two minutes of this clip.



The finale of the movie is like one huge wrap party, in which first Lindsay Anderson, the director, and then various actors in the film, such as Mirren and Rachel Roberts, greet Mick Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell.

Unfortunately. O Lucky Man! has not been released on DVD, but the first Mick Travis movie, If..., has just been, by Criterion, and I'll probably have something to say about it later.

"Don't you always?"

"Are you sure you're in this class?"

The Dogs of Summer

I can't remember the last time that a summer roster of movies has left me so unimpressed. I have not felt the slightest urge to see any of the 3's that have filled multiplexes so far. I'm even more disappointed that two directors whom I used to respect, Sam Raimi and Steven Soderbergh, have become so enwrapped in the Hollywood love affair with the blockbuster that they have stopped pushing their talents and forgotten the risk-taking that produced such classics (to me, anyway) as Army of Darkness and The Limey.

One movie I am looking forward to is Pixar's Ratatouille. Its director, Brad Bird, was the guiding force behind The Incredibles, a movie that was so right on so many levels, yet so different from other Pixar triumphs as Toy Story and Finding Nemo. The only problem with watching Ratatouille here is that I will probably have to make a 180-mile round trip to see it in a decent theater, since the local theater owner automatically puts any movie remotely classifiable as kids' fare on a screen that is insufficiently lit, with a monaural sound system to boot, on the grounds, I suppose, that the kids won't care about the conditions.

Bring on the rats.

Daisies

More flower name usage of a sort:

The real "Doc" Holliday said to one of his opponents in the shootout at the OK Corral (1881), when told he was about to be shot, "You're a daisy if you do"--and then proceeded to gun down his opponent. Was that use of "daisy" a flowery Southern locution (Holliday was from Georgia)?

While doing a little botanical research on the previous entry, I learned that "daisy" (like "pansy"--it was cross-referenced) can also mean "slang. (chiefly U.S.). A first-rate thing or person; also as adj. First-rate, charming."

An illustrative quotation is cited from Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) by Frances Hodgson Burnett:

"She's the daisiest gal I ever saw! She's well she's just a daisy, that's what she is."

The last recorded reference is 1889, so I don't feel terrible about not knowing that meaning off-hand (or off-mind).

But to all my readers: you are the daisiest people I know!

Censoring Gays in the Home of Liberty

In one of the first posts I made in this blog, I talked about Franklin Pangborn, who appeared in two of W. C. Fields's last films: The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. He was also on my mind at the time because I was viewing a series of Preston Sturges's movies, and Pangborn was a member of Sturges's "stock company."

I have always been the type of movie-watcher who relishes learning the names of what used to be called "character actors," so I had been familiar with Pangborn for years. He's a comic foil, I thought, often playing frustrated characters, such as the movie executive in Never Give a Sucker... or an event co-ordinator in Hail the Conquering Hero (in the above still, Pangborn is on the left). But according to Turner Classic Movies, the American cable network that has been running the series "Screened Out: Gay Images in Films," Pangborn's characters were supposed to have been meant as portrayals of a "sissy" (code term "prissy") in his films. I remembered Pauline Kael declaring that once too.

Then I read this excerpt from 1941 Production Code Authority memo by Joseph Breen on the script for Never Give a Sucker... in James Curtis's biography of Fields:

"If Pangborn plays his role in any way suggestive of a 'pansy,' we cannot approve any scene in which this flavor is present."

Huh? Whose gaydar--or taste, considering that weird use of the word "flavor"--is being used to ascertain the "pansiness" present? In both above-mentioned movies, Pangborn's character blew a whistle to quiet down a chaotic scene and give orders. Was that a signal too? Why were the Hollywood censors so afraid of any characterization that carried the faintest hint (or tang) of homosexuality?

Fast-forward to this week, and I'm reading John Heilpern's biography of John Osborne. I was mainly familiar with Osborne from his seminal play, Look Back in Anger, and Luther, which helped propel Albert Finney into stardom. I had not heard of a slightly later work, A Patriot for Me, about the blackmail of an Austrian army officer into spying for Russia in the 1890's because of his homosexuality. At the time of Osborne's play (1965), the Lord Chamberlain's office in England had the power to censor plays, and they certainly wanted to forbid certain parts of this one, especially a drag ball scene. "Omit the whole of this scene" was the command. Why?

The Official Reader declared that the scene "would certainly attract all the perverts in London and might even persuade the young and ignorant that such a life might not be so bad, after all." The Assistant Secretary warned that "presenting homo-sexuals [sic] in their most attractive guise dressed as pretty women will to some degree cause the congregation of homosexuals and provide the means whereby the vice may be acquired." The assistant comptroller called the play "the Pansies' Charter of Freedom."

If you made this stuff up, no one would believe you. You can say that English youth rebelled at the time because of a hide-bound, class-ridden, blinkered, morally bankrupt society, but until you read the evidence, you do not realize the depths to which these people, as well as the Hays Office in America, would sink. Canny directors like Hitchcock and Wilder ("I'm a man!" "Nobody's perfect") could get around the censorship, and the Court Theatre got around the Lord Chamberlain by becoming a "club theatre" during the run of A Patriot for Me, but why wouldn't countries that touted themselves as the cradles of liberty realize that art needed freedom too? The Lord Chamberlain's office was gotten rid of three years later, homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain in 1967, and the Production Code lost its force in America during the same decade.

No wonder the records of the Lord Chamberlain were kept secret until 1991.

Note: pansy is the name of a flower that the English called "heartsease," and the word pansy, as Ophelia suggests, comes from the French: "And there is pansies: that's for thoughts." Another pensee: according to the OED, the first recorded use of the word to denote a male homosexual took place in 1926.

The Wayback Machine

Since it's Friday, and the song-shuffling capabilties of my iPod have been working a lot better since I learned how to isolate my pop songs (thanks again, Muffy), I decided to list once again the first ten random songs that came up on a shuffled playlist.

1. "Add Some Music" by the Beach Boys.
2. "Let's Get Pretentious" by Pete Townshend (from Psychoderelict music only).
3. "Picture Book" by the Kinks (stereo mix).
4. "Bits and Pieces" by the Dave Clark Five.
5. "Powderfinger" by Neil Young & Crazy Horse (live from Weld).
6. "I'm One" by the Who.
7. "I'm Looking Through You" by the Beatles (alternate version from Anthology 2).
8. "Sad Little Girl" by the Beau Brummels (demo version).
9. "Yesterday's Paper's" by the Rolling Stones.
10."To Love Somebody" by the Flying Burrito Brothers.

That just feels more representative than what I came with before, as far as number of songs by each group. It also has a couple of gems, like the slower version of "I'm Looking Through You" without the bridge, with handclaps and exquisite acoustic guitar work. The line, "I'm looking through you and you're nowhere" becomes a lot more forceful, almost Lennonesque in its intensity. And the ragged "To Love Somebody," so unlike the Bee Gees' polished version, with Gram Parsons' anguished vocals. I'll stand by that list, and people can make of it what they like. ;)

Of course, looking at it makes me think, as I'm wont to do, that I have been listening to some of these songs for over 40 years.

And if I live for 40 more, I shall still love them.

Remembering Ollie

No, not Ollie Dragon, as in Kukla, Fran, and..., but Oliver Reed. He made a lot of crappy movies, but along the way made two of my favorites. One was Ken Russell's Women in Love, in which he played Gerald Crich, the son of a colliery owner. Physically, he was all wrong for the part, but by the power of his acting, made it his own. His wrestling scene with Alan Bates is remarkable (and shook up the Grundies at the time).

The other role was that of a more minor literary character, but one that has grown on me: that of Athos in Richard Lester's The Three (+) Four Musketeers (I'll call it that, because it was shot as one film and released as two, without telling any of the cast members). Here's the first big sword fight of the heroes, as D'Artagnan (played by Michael York) meets Athos to fight a duel. The other two muskeeters (Frank Finlay as Porthos, and Richard Chamberlain--whose epicene qualities work for him here--as Aramis). Lester stages the fights with a bravura physicality, a style that suits none of his actors more than Reed, whose hoarse whisperings of line readings, with his lidded eyes, make him seem like some basking lion. (The video quality is good, but there's a severe sound synch problem.)



In the latest DVD of this movie, Christopher Lee complains that he has never been recognized for his superior sword-fighting skills, and implies that even the great Errol Flynn seemed so good at swashbuckling because Flynn's duels were slightly undercranked when shot.

Here's Ollie at the beginning of his career--if you can recognize him.



With music by John Barry before James Bond. Nice to see that the Brits had teensploitation movies too.

And a pic of Ollie at the end of his career:



On the island of Malta as the gladiator owner/trainer in Gladiator. "At 50, everyone has the face he deserves," Orwell wrote. Rest in peace, Ollie.

Middle-class Fowl

While reading the recent biography of playwright John Osborne by John Heilpern, I ran across a detail that confirms a suspicion that I had about British cultural shorthand for indicating that a house is firmly upper working class or lower middle class. I'm like Goldfinger, who believed in the evidentiary rule of three: First time, happenstance; second time, coincidence; third time, enemy action. That semiotic shorthand is--ducks on the wall. (This might be no big secret for the British, but for an American, it's at the least interesting.)

Evidence:
1) In Epitaph for George Dillon, the play Osborne wrote just before his breakthrough, Look Back in Anger, the stage directions reveal that lower-middle class family's home has "painted china ducks" in flight on the sitting-room wall.
2) The song "Ducks on the Wall" from the Kinks album Soap Opera.
3) In the Who's concert version of Quadrophenia in the late 1990s, the hero, Jimmy, soliloquizes (on projected film) from his home. The only props are the ducks on the wall behind him.

In the 1930s, George Orwell insisted that the badge of English middle-class respectability was the aspidistra in the front window. I wonder if there's a corresponding totem for American middle-class life?

Rereading "V."--II: Keep Cool, but Care

I have several theories about rereading favorite novels--several because they change every time I try and fit my experiences into my last speculation. My hypothesis this time was that the first time I had read V., I loved it because it was fresh, new, funny, well written, and I was young. The second time I read it was dulled by my having to teach it; I thought I did a bad job of that because an otherwise excellent student hated the book, couldn't finish it.*

But as I reread the book now, and once again enjoyed it this side of idolatry, I realized the my present enjoyment was different than my initial pleasure, and also, that I perhaps had skewed my memories towards the negative about teaching V. I can tell this from my notes. I decoded parts of the book I probably missed the first time, because I had not then read the works alluded to--or undergone the experiences that Pynchon writes about. The problem with teaching a long, complex novel like V. is losing sight of the larger picture, getting bogged down in the minutiae--El Gaucho is like Nostromo, Satin is like Diaghilev, Wittgenstein is parodied in a pop song, and so on, ad nauseam. We had just gone through Nabokov's Pale Fire, which in itself is a novel that cries out for a key (which Brian Boyd has since elegantly provided in Nabokov's "Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery). V. is entirely about a search for meaning: who is V.? What is she? Is she animate? What does it mean to be animate--to have an anima, a soul? Which way does the novel finally lean: can meaning be discovered? The "hero" of the novel professes at the end that he hasn't learned "a goddamned thing," and his scholarly doppelganger refuses to stop searching, because if he did stop, he would learn that what he suspects is true--his life has no meaning outside of his search.

The key to all mythologies is that there is no key. Venus? Victoria? Vhiessu? Spin Fortuna's wheel, and you may be staring at a spider monkey encased in ice at the southern still point of the turning world.

What if you strike through the mask, and there is nothing behind it all? A void? Time rewound and recovered is not paradise regained, but merely a vector in a different direction, like Schoenmaker's elaborate looking-glass clock? The universe plays dice with itself, inimical and implacable.

Fun stuff, huh? But never has such an apprehension of the nullity behind all things, the futility of signification, been presented with such zest, such chortling, particularly in the 1956 chapters. I noticed for the first time the motif of Westerns throughout the novel. In one chapter Benny Profane watches Westerns on TV, beginning with a Randolph Scott Western, then Tom Mix, and ending with The Great Train Robbery, further back than which you cannot go--not only is it the first Western, but the first narrative movie (and I doubt if New York television stations were showing it during the 1950s). Regression? Decadence?

And the "Real McCoy" joke without its punchline! (Pig's "story about the coke sacker, the cork soaker and the sock tucker.")

And these are balanced by the horrors and the nausea in the chapters about the past: Egypt, Florence, Namibia, Paris, Malta. The skull beneath the skin with a vengeance. But even that phrase has its humorous echo in Benny Profane's job (which the Space/Time Employment Agency [!!!!!] has gotten for him), where he talks with a test dummy that includes a real skull beneath artifical skin (SHROUD).

And maybe it is all palatable because the meaning that adheres and inheres in the narrative is given to it by the artist. Evan Godolphin, the wounded flyer whose gruesome treatment inspires Schoenmaker to become a plastic surgeon, is also Veronica Manganese's servant on Malta, etc. In a Victorian novel, this would be derided as coincidence; in a postmodern novel, it is a pattern. Nabokov's triumphant identification of the man in the mackintosh in Ulysses in his Cornell class would have led Pynchon to this point--although I don't think Pynchon is anymore likely to appear in his own fiction than he is to do a Charlie Rose interview.

When reading becomes too much like work, the decoding too arduous, too removed, the game (and the best literature is ludic) is not worth the candle. But the glorious times when it does seem worth it. I live for the days when I look up at my class and say, "I can't believe I get paid to do this!" Almost makes up for grading first-year essays.

Almost.


*On further thought, I think this student, an ardent Catholic, was put off by Father Fairing, the sewer-dwelling, rat-converting priest, and was probably better off not finishing it.

Met-him-pike-hoses

Happy belated Bloomsday!

"Can't pretend that growing older never hurts"

YouTube strikes again--two live versions of one of my favorite Pete Townshend songs, "Slit Skirts," neither of which I was aware existed before tonight. Townshend started releasing solo albums while he was still with the Who, and other band members began to feel that he was "saving" his best material for his own records. (One song, "Pure and Easy," was released on a solo album and recorded by the Who, but the Who's version was only released decades later.)

I think the charge was accurate from Empty Glass on. Soon, Townshend's solo efforts became transformed from song collections into concept albums, which is what the Who's "rock operas" really were. White City was an overlooked gem about growing up in a tough part of London: I still have the laserdisc of its visual version. Psychoderelict was an amalgam of a Townshend-like rock musician's failed career with the original ideas behind Townshend's "lost" epic musical experiment, Lifehouse. The songs that originally formed the basis for that experiment, plus new music, were released as a six-CD set, The Lifehouse Chronicles, available from the Who's website. He did a musical based on Ted Hughes's Ironman. He also presented Quadrophenia as a much more unified multimedia experience during a tour of the U.S. in the late 1990s.

This first version of "Slit Skirts" (1986) comes from the period when Townshend was playing with a large band called "Deep End," many of whom would continue to tour with Townshend and the Who in years to come. The lead guitar player, though, was a sporadic member, as he had a gig with another group.



The second version is from a couple of years earlier, as can be seen by the hair growth on the top of Townshend's head, as well as his jacket, which appears to be the same one he's wearing on the cover of the album, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes,* that contains the song. He flubs up the vocals here too, but his excuse was that he can't sing and play piano well at the same time; indeed, it's the only time I've seen Townshend play piano during a live performance. And I never thought I'd say this--but Phil Collins does an excellent job on drums.



*And they do: John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Roy Rogers. Maybe that's why I never trusted Gene Autry or Yul Brynner as cowboys.

"Lectures on Literature"

I've been meaning to come up with semi-expansive entry on Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, a work edited from his notes on the novels he taught at Cornell University in his course Masterspieces of European Fiction (which Thomas Pynchon took). It's a valuable book for those who are interested in Nabokov as a novelist, and also for those interested in the novels he discusses.

I've been thinking about it recently because of some discussions about whether Ulysses is worth slogging through. While thinking about Nabokov's book, I remembered that a short adaptation of Nabokov's lecture on Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" was filmed, with Christopher Plummer as Nabokov. Even with the makeup he doesn't physically resemble VN that much, but his imitation of Nabokov's voice is spot on, from what I remember of the recordings of Nabokov reading from Lolita. I checked on YouTube, and lo and behold ( ;) ), someone had uploaded it!



The second part is here. A cursory check shows that the introductory remarks in the lecture are cobbled from comments in several lectures. Also, a remark elsewhere by Nabokov about teaching in general shows that he wasn't quite the yuckster he's made out to be here, and as someone who does try to be a yuckster in the classroom every once in a while, it is a role undertaken at one's own risk. (Students laughing at "Gogolian"? C'mon!)

Another YouTube clip, in Spanish, has VN being interviewed in French about Lolita, as well as a short scene of him walking and capturing butterflies, but it's mostly excerpts from Kubrick's film of Lolita dubbed in Spanish. There is, however, a BBC documentary about VN dating from the 1960s, which I would love to see again, and I hope some kind soul will upoad it one day.

Thank you for the Days, Mr. Davies

YouTube reminds me of a toy chest: the deeper you go, the further back you go, you initially wonder, "What was so charming about this?" But then you remember.

I've talked a little about the Kinks before. Like most British groups of the Sixties, they matured and evolved rapidly. The songwriting abilities of Ray Davies, and later his brother Dave, were remarkable, considering they started out as a three-chord rock group--probably the best three-chord rockers in history. Here's a clip of them doing "All the Day and All of the Night" live on Shindig, ABC's weekly rock show. (You know it's live because Dave flubs a bar chord just before the guitar solo, then grins ruefully.)



One of the canards at the time was that on the recording of this song, Jimmy Page did the guitar solo in the studio. This pretty much proves it was Dave.

Then Ray's songwriting abilities blossomed. Perhaps no British rock songwriter of the Sixties was so influenced by the British music hall tradition. Albums like The Kinks Kontroversy, Face to Face, and especially Something Else were far ahead of the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who in seeking out song material in the everyday lives of ordinary people. "Situation Vacant," about a young married guy looking for a new job; "David Watts," about class envy; and the sublime "Waterloo Sunset," about watching the Thames from the title bridge. And then came the two albums that the Kinks never surpassed: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

The latter was the soundtrack for a British TV drama that was never made, but its songs encapsulated British history during the 20th century until that point. The first song, "Victoria," was a rocker with typically witty and arch lyrics:

Long ago, life was clean,
Sex was bad, called obscene,
And the rich were so mean,
Stately homes for the lords,
Croquet lawns, village greens,
Victoria was my queen.

The songs follow the title character through the First ("Yes Sir No Sir") and Second World Wars ("Mr. Churchill Says") to emigration ("Australia"). The previous album, Village Green, was less of a concept album, but on its way to being one, charged with an ironic nostalgia, like so much of Sixties British rock. The title song has some of the most clever lyrics in all of rock--or at least rhymes that lock the lines and make listeners wryly shake their heads. Here's a performance from 1973, much more of which used to be available on YouTube, and its removal is a shame, because it's one of the best live Kinks performances I've seen.



We are the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium
God save the George Cross and all those who were awarded 'em.

We are the Sherlock Holmes English-Speaking Vernacular
God save Fu Manchu, Moriarty, and Dracula.

The Kinks later got bogged down in a series of self-conscious concept albums that contained few good songs, if any: the two Preservation albums, Schoolboys in Disgrace, Soap Opera. But those two earlier albums live on.

Thank you for the days,
Those endless days,
Those sacred days you gave me.
I'm thinking of the days
I won't forget a single day believe me.

"I am not a number--I am a FREE MAN"

Saturday evenings in the summer of 1968 The Jackie Gleason Show on CBS was replaced in its early Saturday evening slot by a weird British TV series. It starred Patrick McGoohan, who was familiar to audiences as spy John Drake in Secret Agent, the American title for British TV series Danger Man. McGoohan, it later turned out, had supposedly twice turned down the role of James Bond, because of that character's immorality. (Drake never even so much as kissed a girl during the entire run of the TV series.)

The new show, The Prisoner, had one of the most striking openings ever seen, before or since, for a TV series: its arresting music, the cool Lotus Seven (KAR120C), the deft editing. The first part, which never varied, told what happened to McGoohan's character after he resigned from what we presume is MI6. The second part, after McGoohan wakes up, only varied from week to week in the title information and the voice and image of the actor playing Number 2. Here's the opening of the second episode, with the sorely missed Leo McKern as Number 2:



Number 6 awakens from his drugged sleep to find himself in The Village, an isolated place only accessible by helicopter and water, the latter barred as an escape route by the balloon-like watchdogs, aptly called "Rovers." Each week a new Number 2 tries to find out from Number 6 why he resigned. We don't know who runs The Village--East, Far East, or West--or maybe all three at once. Number 6 struggles to keep his intellectual freedom, while always attempting to escape. The 17-episode series (only 16 of which were aired here initially) did conclude before the end of the summer.

I'd claim it was the greatest television show I've ever seen, but will settle for saying it's my favorite.

Its strengths were, first, its writing. The show began in the quotidian and swiftly moved into the symbolic. Is this saga just the struggle of a spy to preserve his identity? Perhaps. Although it is never said that Number 6 is John Drake, one of the themes of the earlier series was Drake's integrity and his reluctance to perform morally questionable assignments. Move out one circle. Is The Village a trope for modern society, or at least a kind of society that many see as utopian? The second strength was the locale, the Welsh seaside resort of Portmeirion, the arabesque dream of an architect who tried to recreate a Mediterranean town on the west coast of England. Its out-of-kilter solidity unsettled as it delighted. The third was the casting, with a wide variety of English character and TV actors, such as McKern, in roles large and small (for instance, Finlay Currie, the large, craggy Magwitch of David Lean's Great Expectations, or Patrick Cargill, the urbane police detective from Help!).

The series was not without its weaknesses. Not all the scripts are strong, and the ending episodes fall considerably short of their symbolic reach. A love for The Prisoner used to mean you were condemned to be part of a coterie, but the show's fame has grown gradually, until it is alluded to on Michael Penn's album Resigned and even on The Simpsons (although that show has been on so long, it has become a kind of Encyclopedia Popculturis in its references.)

However, any increase in "popularity" means rumors and stories about a Prisoner movie or new TV show. Ugh. If that happens, gas my room and ship me out.

Be seeing you.

(Note: Herman Melville fans might be interested in this role early in McGoohan's career. Unfortunately, Simon Callow's multi-volume biography of Welles has not reached this point in his career yet, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the linked article. But what a cast!)

The Whole Magilla

Shufflin' along, part 2: here's what comes up when I shuffle everything on my iPod--pop songs, classical music, soundtracks, dramas (which is what happens if I hit shuffle, because I can't figure out how to shuffle just the songs):

1. "Alone." Cue from soundtrack to Five Fingers by Bernard Herrmann. (William Stromberg cond.)

2. "Prelude" from Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia Antartica," by Ralph Vaughan Williams. (Andre Previn cond.)

3. Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 by Ralph Vaughan Williams. (Richard Hickox cond.)

4. "The Shire." Cue from soundtrack to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Complete Recording by Howard Shore. (Howard Shore cond.)

5. "Andante con Moto" from Symphonic Dances for Two Pianos by Sergei Rachmaninoff. (Pianists Vladimir Ashkenazy and Andre previn.)

6. "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon and Garfunkel.

7. "The Winter's Past" by Wayne Barlow (Jonathan Parkes cond.)

8. "Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon

9. "The Road Goes Ever On and On," Pt. 1. Cue from soundtrack to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Complete Recording by Howard Shore. (Howard Shore cond.)

10. "Cirith Ungol." Cue from soundtrack to The Return of the King by Howard Shore. (Howard Shore cond.)

Just how random are these?

No Dealing Off the Bottom!

"Why are you listing the first ten songs that come up on a random iPod shuffle?"

"Well, everybody's doing it!"

"If everybody jumps off a cliff, are you going to too?"

"Only if I can yell "Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit" on the way down!"




1. "Stardom in Acton" by Pete Townshend.
2. "I Can't Give Back the Love I Feel for You" by Rita Wright.
3. "I Can't Take It" by Badfinger.
4. "Copperhead Road" by Steve Earle.
5. "Fortunate Son" by John Fogerty (live).
6. "Don't Be Long" (aka "It Won't Be Wrong") by the Byrds (Preflyte version).
7. "The House Is Rockin'" by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble.
8. "In My Community" by Paul Revere & the Raiders.
9. "A Little is Enough" by Pete Townshend.
10. "Lazy Days" by the Flying Burrito Brothers.

Wow--great music to run to (except #2, which is a vocal rendition of a Jeff Beck instrumental that I love). Looking at this, I realize that the pop music I put on my iPod is still geared towards someone who runs 30-40 miles a week--which, unfortunately, ain't me anymore.

"Gee, too bad 'Living in the Past' didn't come up."

"Quiet."

Rereading "V."--I

I had forgotten how dense and allusive V. is--it's one thing to remember a novel as being so, another to experience it all over again.

And I'd forgotten how funny and superbly written it is, probably because the last time I read it was when I taught it, and I spent most of the class time trying to explain V.'s layers of meaning. Explaining humor is difficult at best: I remember in my first college English class the professor looking out the window (he rarely looked at us) and laughing over some literary joke only he got the point of. One guy in the front of the room also joined in the laughter, even though he had to admit to ignorance later when we asked him what the hell he was laughing about.

Humor? Pig Bodine asking about Sartre's ideas of authenticity of character.

Well, you had to be there.

As a musical footnote, here's a clip from YouTube of Ornette Coleman, who, according to one critic, is the model for McClintic Sphere (although I don't think his alto sax is ivory).

Whew---Next!

Now that the writing workshop is over, I find myself--as I knew I would be--not so much relieved as depressed. As is usual with tasks that I find daunting and anxiety-fueling, it turned out to be exhilirating and exhausting. It charged me up in all kinds of good ways, and I look forward to doing it again next summer, if I still inhabit this astral sphere--and doing it better.

Now for some light reading, or in this case, re-reading, before I work on my next essay. Let's see--Ada or V.? Ada or V.? I'll chicken out for now--V. Back to Benny, Rachel, Pig, and the Whole Sick Crew.

And to conclude with a simply celebratory piece of music: another founding father of rock, Chuck Berry, from an appearance on Hullabaloo, which was NBC's mid-1960's rock show, and which usually forced performers to lipsynch, except during its concluding section, "Hullabaloo A Go Go," in which performers were sometimes allowed to sing live to a recorded intrumental track. Here Chuck performs "Johnny B. Goode" entirely live, because he had to, what with the weird choreography during the guitar solo (what are those guys supposed to be? Basketball refs?). It's fun, but it's also Chuck a couple of years before the delayed adulation he originally deserved, after finally being given to him, went to his head. Duck-walkin' his way into adolescent dreams of cars, school, and girls.

Rippin' It UP!

One Saturday afternoon in the 1970's I was watching WTTW-11, the public television station in Chciago, and a British music program came on, titled, I think, Don't Knock the Rock. It was interesting because all the music was live, not lipsynched, and the groups were interesting--the Animals, younger than I had ever seen them, and two rock'n'roll legends, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, the latter two backed up by a British band, Sounds Incorporated. The period seemed to be after their initial exiles from rock: Richard's from his sojourn in the ministry (!!!), and Jerry Lee from the notoriety that accompanied his marrying his underaged cousin. It was also done before Richard became a caricature of himself.

Lewis gave an performance almost demented in its frenzy, climaxing in a delirious rendition of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," replete with large dollops of tent-show evangelism (not for nothing is his cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart) and foot-banging on the keyboard. A current seems to run through him, and he's surrounded by fans (almost all male), who, it seems, just want to touch the hem of his garments.

Then Little Richard comes out, and I've always felt he watched Lewis and decided to blow his doors off, so to speak. Nothing proclaims this more than his version of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." It's like the Beatles coming on after the Stones and playing "Satisfaction." Right from the start, when members of the crowd run to begin dancing, and Richard catches them out of the corner of his eye, it is completely Dionysian, but almost deliberately calculated. When Richard takes his jacket off, he carefully folds it (while impishly ogling someone off camera), then loosening his collar and tie before he tucks in his shirt. Lewis's hushed diminuendo in the middle of the song becomes Richard's Singsprache on his knees, from which Richard explodes back into singing. He doesn't play piano much, perhaps realizing he could not compete with Lewis's bits of stage business, but by his standing in front of the band, they are able to follow his rhythms better, and the beat becomes one huge machine, as Mods and Rockers spin in the aisle.

I did not see these performances again until they, like so much else, were shared on YouTube. I was surprised to learn from the closing credits that the show had been "designed" by Alan Price, whose name has come up before in these posts.

What insouciance. What balls.

Real Cool Killer

With apologies to Chester Himes for the title of this post--

Once if the nice things about a blog is that you can think on the "page," as it were. My last post, on Jean-Pierre Melville, led me to line up and arrange some ideas in my mind about him and his movies, which I have always liked, but without being able to state precisely why. None of my thoughts are particularly original, but they help clarify and deepen my viewing experience. So I decided to re-view Le Samourai, perhaps Melville's most influential movie, which stars Alain Deloin as Jef Costello, a contract killer.

Never have blue eyes been blanker, more glacial, more affectless. Costello is a samurai in that he lives alone, and by his own code. His hat and his coat become his uniform, and like the gunslinger Wilson in Shane, when he put his gloves on, he's ready to work. Melville's deliberate pacing of the plot makes the action, when it erupts, all the more startling. Both the police and the men who hired him pursue Costello, and there is almost, but not quite, a Langian equation of the two (as happens in M). Both groups are ruthless towards women, and it is Costello's code towards women that dooms him.

Le Samourai was released in 1967; Bullitt, with Steve McQueen, in 1968. A chase occurs in each as police pursue hitmen; the cops pursue Costello on the Metro in Paris, and Bullitt pursues the black Dodge Charger in his green Mustang. The latter is adrenaline-inducing; the former engages higher brain functions. Both chases--on a subway and in a car--occur in The French Connection, but it is the car chase that is remembered, which is unfortunate, because Melville's meticulousness, his precision, deserve to be as influential.

But then again, Hollywood always goes for the glands.

Melville--but not that Melville

Jean-Pierre Grumbach so loved things American (particularly its movies) that he changed his last name to Melville, and it's under that name that he directed a brilliant series of movies about the French underworld of killers and thieves, including four of his last five movies. The series begins with perhaps the best of them, Le Samourai, starring Alain Delon as a contract killer with his own code (the movie is also important because it forms another link in the stylistic chain of fashionable criminals from Gun Crazy to Face/Off). The movie not about criminals in that group of five is 1969's Army of Shadows, a film about the early French resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II. It was not shown in the United States until last year, and when it was, it was hailed as a lost classic. Criterion recently issued a characteristically outstanding DVD of the restored film, and having seen it, I have to agree with the general consensus.

At first, though, it's hard to understand why. Most movies about a resistance movement are chiefly engaged in generating suspense, yet Melville is so methodical, almost architectural in building his scenes, that little tension is generated. What then becomes interesting is character.

In one scene, the active leader of the small cell of resistance fighters has been captured by the police and is about to be shot without trial. A long scene in a jail cell shows him distributing the last of his cigarettes to his fellow prisoners; as the camera follows the pack around the cell, we see from each prisoner's face how he will face death. They are summoned from the cell, and during their slow journey to the death-room, the leader meditates on how he will face death. Their shackles are deliberately removed; the guards leave them; they face a machine-gun some 50 feet away. They are told to run in the opposite direction: the first one who reaches the wall will be spared until the next execution. The leader refuses to run, until the German officer shoots at his feet. He runs; stops because of smoke bombs that bar his path; notices a rope hanging from a side wall; escapes. As they are driving off, one thought dominates his mind--that the German officer knew he would run.

All this is presented almost clinically, almost--dare I say it?--existentially. The escape is as surprising to us as it is to the leader, but it's not exhilirating in any sense. In fact, we realize that if he hadn't run, he would have been dead. By displaying courage, he would have doomed himself. The movie is full of moments like this, where we are forced to evaluate motives, causality, character.

What is trust? What is true loyalty? Can a mathematics of morality be achieved? These are the questions Melville asks in this somber movie about ombres, and indeed, throughout his crime pictures as well.