Little by Little

I, Hamlet

2007-08-16T16:28:00.000-05:00

The BBC in the 1970's made the decision to tape performances of all of Shakespeare's plays, and when they came to Hamlet (first broadcast in 1980), they chose the most versatile actor of his generation to play the title role, Derek Jacobi. Jacobi has been appearing in Shakespearean films since 1965, when he played Cassio in Olivier's Othello; in 1996, he played Claudius in Branagh's Hamlet. Even though many British actors have played different roles in Hamlet at various points in their careers, I don't think that many could achieve the combined quality of these performances of Jacobi's . He is directly in the line of British transformative actors I've written about before, such as Charles Laughton and Laurence Olivier, but is subtler in his use of make-up and facial putty to change his appearance. He even tackled a role that took Charles Laughton so long to get ready for that it imploded the movie he was to star in: that of the stammering C-C-Claudius in Josef von Sternberg's adaptation of Robert Graves's I, Claudius, of which Jacobi later did the TV version.

All that said, Jacobi's performance, while supremely intelligent, is not moving enough for me. I find myself more admiring of it than becoming involved in it. His line readings are full of wit, passion, and beauty, and I would like to like his portrayal more than I do. Frankly, I think his Claudius for Branagh is better: subtler, more revealing of the character's constant need to remain under steely control, the level of his apprehension only betrayed by his eyes. You, however, might find his Hamlet more moving than I do.

This production also has the strongest Claudius and Gertrude of any version in Patrick Stewart and Claire Bloom. Students always get a kick out of recognizing Picard under the curly wig and beard; his Claudius is full of bravura and chutzpah. The rest of the cast, though, is very weak, until you get to Ian Charleson's Fortinbras, who is a right cold bastard. Unfortunately, he comes in at the end of the play.

The production is videotaped, in color, with early seventeenth-century costumes and an eminently forgettable set design. The real joke of this version is its price: the BBC licensed these performances to a company who demands around $30 per DVD, probably because they assume that libraries will foot the bill. But even libraries get hit by budgetary constraints (and often are the first to suffer when they have to be applied). Charging so much for workmanlike and sporadically brilliant versions of the plays is no way to make Shakespeare palatable--or even available--to the masses.

Roundhouse

2007-08-15T17:34:00.000-05:00

The other "greatest" Hamlet of the last half of the twentieth century was, according to some critics, Nicol Williamson's. It become so famous that he was invited to perform a one-man show for Richard Nixon at the White House, a circumstance that gives rise to multiple ironies, since Hamlet is a play full of spying, overheard conversations, and advice to be true to oneself given by self-deceivers. At any rate, the movie version of Williamson's Hamlet was filmed at the Roundhouse in London and directed by Tony Richardson. It shaves the text to a minimum (reducing the Ghost to a brilliant light and a clangorous sound effect), but is nevertheless worth seeing, because Williamson's performance is special, and some of the other casting is daring and works.

Burton's Hamlet paved the way for more choleric Hamlets, angrier princes; Williamson's keeps some of the anger, but no actor quite combines that quality with Hamlet's nervous tension, and above all, his intelligence. Add to that the hint of a burr in Williamson's accent (most previous Hamlets sounding as if they had all been born in Mayfair), and the interiority that Richardson's close-ups evoke (especially in the soliloquies, where the actors address the camera directly), and Williamson's becomes a very personal Hamlet.

The interesting casting choices include one of Anthony Hopkins's earlier notable performances, as Claudius, and it doesn't seem to matter that in this case it is not the Gertrude who is too young, but the Claudius--Hopkins is only a year older than Williamson (further irony lies in the fact that Hopkins later played Nixon in Oliver Stone's movie). Hopkins's voice also still conveys a Welsh lilt. Gordon Jackson is another splendid Horatio, and Michael Pennington (who has written a fine book on Hamlet) is a solid Laertes. One of my favorite actors, Roger Livesey, he of the gravelly voice, plays both the first player and the Gravedigger. Several other actors double roles, thus giving a hint of the kind of performance a repertory company like Shakespeare's would give.

The gamble in casting, one which at first seemed a capitulation to the Zeitgeist, was having Marianne Faithfull play Ophelia, but she does a creditable job. Only here Richardson makes the questionable decision of implying that Laertes and Ophelia have an incestuous relationship--their kiss in Act 1 would probably prompt cries of "Get a room" from today's audiences--or at least one person who shows it in his classes. When Polonius reports to Claudius and Gertrude about Hamlet and Ophelia, they are depicted as granting a general levee in their bed, greasily eating a meal, with their large dogs on the blankets. It's as if Richardson wants to remind us that he directed the "lusty" Tom Jones.

The film is shot in color, and the costumes are traditional early seventeenth-century garb. It is a short Hamlet, less than two hours long, but Richardson decides to keep in the rarely performed scene where Polonius sends Voltemand to spy on Laertes, as well as the fourth soliloquy. The second and third soliloquies are transposed. Unfortunately, the movie is available on DVD only in Great Britain, and no decent stills seem available on the net. Still, it pops up on cable and satellite from time to time, and it's worth watching--within fifteen minutes you'll know if this Hamlet is palatable for you.

No John-a-dreams, this

2007-08-15T01:31:00.000-05:00

In 1964, just as he was about to reach the heights of gossip notoriety, Richard Burton starred as Hamlet on Broadway, in a production directed by John Gielgud, whose own performances of the role stressed the beauty of Shakespeare's line. The production immediately sold out, so the producers decided to enact what passed for "pay-per-view" in that day: one live performance was filmed, and presented simultaneously in movie theaters across the U.S. on one night. Then all the prints were to be destroyed. However, Burton kept one print for himself, and, of course--and thankfully--it's made its way to DVD.

The film was shot in black-and-white, on a stage devoid of scenery, with the minimum of props (and those used are ratty in the extreme), the actors wearing casual contemporary clothes. Gielgud wanted the words to shine forth, so he called it a "final run-through" Hamlet, with nothing to distract the audience from the text--most of which he used. The cast, besides Burton, was mainly American, with the notable exception of the Ghost, which was shown as a monstrous shadow with Gielgud's voice. Alfred Drake, normally a musical lead, played Claudius, and not too badly (except he died like a punk, as Samuel L. Jackson might put it); the most famous American was Hume Cronyn (pictured in the still), who got quite a few laughs as Polonius.

That fact points out the strength and weakness of the film. It is a performance, with a live audience, and thus is one of the few presentations on film of Hamlet as an actual drama on a stage. Unfortunately, the film is directed more like a film, in that during Hamlet's soliloquies, Burton is shot in various forms of close-up; scenes with two characters are done in a two-shot, with the entire stage shown only to establish a scene or when absolutely necessary (as during the final duel). An audience sees Hamlet in the theater as an entire image, as it were; if an actor is alone on stage, it is up to him or her to make us look and make our own mental close-ups.

And Burton does this chiefly with his voice, although at this stage of his life he was surprisingly graceful, and had not entered that degree of alcoholism that prevented him from holding a gun steadily in Where Eagles Dare, thus prompting co-star Clint Eastwood to do volunteer to do all the shooting. As I've mentioned a few entries ago, Hamlet is a role well suited to Burton's strengths, particularly his voice, with a superlative control of range both in loudness and pitch, biting the words off: "to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets," delivered in throaty growl, for instance. A friend of mine saw this performance in New York, and said Burton was amazing, which I can well imagine. His Hamlet is angry, intelligent, and witty.

My students generally do not like this version, but it provides magnificent examples of stage acting to contrast with movie acting, as well as a performance that some have called one of the two best Hamlets of the second half of the twentieth century. The other? That's for next time.

Some Sweet--and Some Sour--Princes

2007-08-11T23:44:00.000-05:00

In honor of a film that's finally appearing on DVD this Tuesday, I decided to go over--here--a few versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet that have been captured in various media over the years. Every year I teach Hamlet as part of first-year course in composition and literature, and I show as many versions as I can, trying to cover most of the important parts of the play, also showing several different versions of key scenes--the play-within-a-play, the final duel and deaths--to show that actors and directors have to make all sorts of decisions at almost every line of the play to present it. How drunk is Claudius? How much of a buffoon Polonius? Should the fourth soliloquy ("How all occasions do inform against me") even be performed? Since Hamlet is a play, it should be watched as well as read.

Directors first have to decide what text should be used, how much of it, and in what order. Most modern texts of Hamlet are conflations of the three versions published during and soon after Shakespeare's life. The First Quarto (these name come from the size that the paper that formed the book was folded in) is often called the "Bad Quarto," because it's much shorter and rougher than the other two versions. Scholars once thought it was constructed from the memories of two actors who played minor roles in the play, but more recently some have argued that this is Shakespeare's "rough draft" for the play. The Second Quarto is the longest version; it contains all four soliloquies, as well as a famous passage about the tragic flaw. The Folio version was published after Shakespeare died in 1623 as part of his collected works. It's shorter than the Second Quarto (no fourth soliloquy) but includes some lines not in either version. Some critics thus claim it is Shakespeare's final version of the play, "streamlined" for performance in the theater.

Because the conflated Hamlet runs about four hours.

So: do you cut, what do you cut, why do you cut, and what do you do with perceived imbalances in the play? How do you set the play? One set, many sets? What time period? What sort of costumes? How do you cast it? What genders? (in Kenneth Branagh's A Midwinter's Tale, an "old queen," as he calls himself, plays Gertrude, and I've seen a Marcella, and heard about Bernhardt's Hamlet.) How Oedipal do you make the scene in Gerturde's bedchamber? Does Gertrude know the cup is poisoned? How do you handle the switching of the swords? Is the Ghost visible? Does Hamlet hear Polonius and Claudius when he asks her, "Where's your father?" Do you stage both the plays-within-the-plays, and if you do, how do you show that Claudius doesn't "get" the dumb show? And so on.

Laurence Olivier had proven he could sell audiences on Shakespeare in general with his Henry V, and when he did Hamlet a few years later, won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Actor, but I think his achievement as a director was even greater. I have never particularly liked his characterization: too pretty, too epicene, too weak (maybe it's that blond wig the Brits think a Dane should have). However, his physicality in the duel scene is amazing: the leap he takes on to Claudius is one he used to do every night in the theater. It does have one of my favorite Horatios, Norman Wooland (seen above next to Larry), and as strong a cast of actors in minor roles as any version: John Lawrie and Anthony Quayle in the still, Stanley Holloway as the Gravedigger, and Peter Cushing as Osric (or the Grand Moff Tarkin as I tell students today). But why is Osric usually always portrayed in British performaces as such a homosexual fop?

As far as directing, just watch the way Olivier presents The Mousetrap (he only shows the dumb show). The stage is set with the audience forming a "U" with Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius at the bottom of the U, the play at the top, Horatio at the top of the right side of the U, and Hamlet and Ophelia at the top left. The camera starts behind Horatio, then tracks down the U, behind the royal couple, who are kissing and thus missing what's happening, and then up to behind Hamlet, with Hamlet staring at Horatio, Horatio staring at Claudius, and the action visible on the stage. The camera then retracks, and this time you can see from behind that Claudius is watching the play (Polonius is very concerned), and back, till Olivier cuts to a close-up of Claudius shielding his eyes. It's masterful, with an economy of cuts, and every camera movement meaningful, purposeful. It's a shame that Olivier didn't get to direct more Shakespeare on film than the three he did.

Costumes: seventeenth-century. Black-and-white. Cuts: extensive, and the second and third soliloquies are juggled so that they are not as close as they are in the play.

"The Speech of the People"

2007-08-11T19:14:00.001-05:00

When James Joyce created for Ulysses his modern analogues to Homer's Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, he intended them to be, if not anti-heroic, then at least a-heroic. The modern Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, is Dublin Jew, who suffers from his countrymen's prejudices; his wife, Molly, is anything but faithful; and Ulysses's "son" is, at this point, an artist manque, whose last name (Dedalus) only hints at his vocation. The political aspect of Joyce's decision to treat characters of this social stratum (lower middle-class) is that his main characters are of the people: not royalty nor aristocrats. However, the manner in which Joyce describes their thought processes (except perhaps Molly Bloom's) is such that the book becomes a coterie experience; while democratic in spirit, it is anti-democratic in execution.

In U.S.A., John Dos Passos gets around this modernist dilemma by concentrating the least readily intelligible texts into "The Camera Eye" sections, and even those are far more comprehensible than, say, the "Proteus" section of Ulysses (which nevertheless contains such immediately beautiful sentences as Stephen's wondering "Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand?" "Ineluctable modality of the visible" indeed). By allowing his characters their own language in free indirect discourse when describing their actions, Dos Passos fulfills the definition that he sets out in the preliminary section he wrote for the novels when they were finally published together, also called "U.S.A.": "But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people." And their speech is human, sometimes all too human. But as Hemingway observed, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," and the demotic strain of Twain is fulfilled in the works of both Hemingway and Dos Passos.

However, U.S.A. is also a vast novel of political ideas about American history, much more overtly so than most works by Hemingway or Faulkner. The first character we meet, Mac, becomes involved in the labor movement, as does Mary French, the last character we read about some 1200 pages later. Labor is constantly exploited by capital; America was hoodwinked by the mendacious Woodrow Wilson into entering the Great War; the laws and ideals of America are constantly bent by those in power: these themes are hammered home again and again over the course of the work. Although the impending Stock Market Crash of 1929 looms in the minds of readers as they approach the end of the saga, it is the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti that are crucial to the best characters in the book.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," complains Stephen in Ulyssses. And while Irish history permeates the fabric of Ulysses, Joyce presents no over-arching theory about it, as Tolstoy does at the end of War and Peace. Is history affected by great individuals, such as Napoleon, or are even they moved by intransigent forces? After finishing the novel, readers of U.S.A. can come away with the impression that all the characters have been swept along, except for the few who valorously labor against the system; however, the biographies that Dos Passos interjects into the flow show that individuals can make a difference, for good and ill. There is so much here, so much in this novel that especially now needs to be remembered, beyond the triumphs of its methods.

Note: One of the few examples of another author's adapting the methods and form of U.S.A. is the sf novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, which won the Hugo Award in 1968. In this near future dystopian novel, Brunner substitutes for Dos Passos's Newsreel sections the SCANALYZER, providing an "INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface" between the reader and "the happening world." Brunner also quotes tellingly from Marshall McLuhan at the beginning of the novel:

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Some Old British TV Show

2007-08-11T01:54:00.000-05:00

To break up the monotony of my critical acumen on display ("Hey, Doc--can you use the word 'technique' just one more time?"), I decided to share this music video of one of my favorite XTC songs, "Mayor of Simpleton."

I don't know why I felt the need to watch this again.

Really.

"U.S.A." 2

2007-08-10T20:29:00.001-05:00

One of the central ideas of modernism is the fractured nature of modern life, the loss of an organic unity both in reality and in art. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," as T.S. Eliot says in The Waste Land. The three novels of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) are written in a set of deliberately fragmented sections, representing the overt discontinuities of American life. These are

The NEWSREEL. This title is somewhat anachronistic, since the first "newsreel" in the novel deals with events at the beginning of the twentieth century, when newsreels per se did not exist; it is also inaccurate, since a newsreel is made up of moving images, and Dos Passos presents us with snippets of texts from newspapers, popular songs, speeches, press releases, and slogans ("BONDS BUY BULLETS BUY BONDS"). These snippets can sometimes form a larger pattern (the lyrics to an entire verse from a song will be spread throughout one newsreel), but more often, when taken together, evoke a comprehensive mood of the period--a mood that Dos Passos himself selects. You soon get the impression that Dos Passos has a thesis behind the details that he chooses; someone could very well select other details and claim that they were equally representative of the period. There are 68 of these over the three volumes, the last entitled WALL STREET STUNNED.
The Camera Eye. This section is closest to the stream-of-consciousness techniques that Joyce perfected in Ulysses. These are the supposedly unmediated thoughts of the narrator; they start in infancy and progress throughout the series. They are impressionistic, "poetic," and fairly opaque. There are 51 of these.
"Biographies," for want of a better word, since that's what they are--lives of people that Dos Passos deems important and representative, for good or ill, usually introduced by a descriptive noun phrase, such as TIN LIZZIE for Henry Ford, or ADAGIO DANCER for Rudolph Valentino. The cast of notables is easily divided into heroes, often inventors/scientists like Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison, political figures such as Eugene Debs, or thinkers like Thorstein Veblen, along with villains such as tycoons like Ford, William Randolph Hearst, and Samuel Insull, or politicians like Woodrow Wilson. About celebrated performers such as Valentino and Isadora Duncan he is mainly neutral. The two most moving biographies are the ones that conclude the last two volumes: THE BODY OF AN AMERICAN about the Unknown Soldier, and VAG, about an out-of-work "vagrant" hitch-hiking across America. What is interesting about these biographies is that they adopt the techniques of what would become known much later as "the new journalism": the application of fictional methods to non-fictional subjects. To me they are the most brilliant--and successful--sections of the novel.
Characters: these sections, taken together, most resemble a conventional novel, third-person narratives that trace the lives of twelve people throughout the series, each section introduced by that character's name and concentrating on him or her (CHARLEY ANDERSON, for instance). For example, there are 17 character sections in the last volume, covering four characters. Their lives can intersect, intertwine, collide, or just as often do not meet; sometimes a complete arc is described, while sometimes the story is broken off at what later seems at arbitrary point. For some of these we can assume the character will not change; with others, who knows?

In these sections Dos Passos comes up with his most conspicuous joining of modernism and democracy, one that I was surprised to find (while reading a book about film noir) that Jean-Paul Sartre praised. Dos Passos uses free indirect discourse in these sections to give the thoughts of his characters in their own words, without resorting to first-person narrative or stream-of-consciousness. Here is a paragraph about Mary French, one of the more heroic characters in the work:

She'd never been in Boston before. The town these sunny winter days had a redbrick oldtime steelengraving look that pleased her. She got herself a little room on the edge of the slums of Beacon Hill and decided that when the case [of Sacco and Vanzetti] was won, she'd write a novel about Boston. She bought some school copybooks in a little musty stationers' shop and started right away taking notes for the novel. The smell of the new copybook with its faint blue lines made her feel fresh and new. After this she'd observe life. She'd never fall for a man again. Her mother had sent her a check for Christmas. With that she bought herself some new clothes and quite a becoming hat. She started to curl her hair again.

The sentence "She'd never fall for a man again" is in Mary's words, as is the phrase, "quite a becoming hat." The other words and phrases are probably very close to Mary's thoughts, except perhaps for the description of Boston, but in Mary's case, they could be her words. The narrator's own voice only becomes plainly evident in these sections at such times of description, which can seem more highly charged, more "poetic," than the normal language of the characters. And the omission of hyphens from compound adjectives ("oldtime") and nouns is straight out of Joyce.

But what does this all mean?

See--and hear--the U.S.A.

2007-08-09T20:16:00.001-05:00

Serious novelists were confronted with a problem after the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce had taken all the techniques of fiction, including some newer ones, such as what has been labeled "stream-of-consciousness," ratcheted them all up a notch, and produced a magic mountain of a novel--a Matterhorn that would loom over the rest of twentieth-century fiction, daring other writers to construct a more massive monument, challenging readers to scale it. And that was the problem, in both senses. Ulysses is a magnificent achievement whose summit leads--nowhere. It is inimitable. And for readers, while most acknowledge its significance, I'd bet that fewer than 10% of the voters in that bookstore poll that made Ulysses the greatest novel of the twentieth century read it.

So what does a novelist do in the wake of Ulysses (the problem does not arise with Joyce's final, oneiric peak--perhaps chasm is a better word, Finnegans Wake, which despite its circularity of form, almost shouts, "Dead End!")? Hemingway grasps a flensing knife and cuts away everything but the bare essentials, the 10% of the iceberg that is visible on the surface. Faulkner takes stream-of-consciousness to new levels (the beginning of The Sound and the Fury), but then relapses into baroque mellifluousness, since unremitting experimentation does not sell (and even Joyce had to have a patroness). And beside the omnipresent shadow of Joyce's achievement lies the other white whale of American literature--"the great American novel." Enter John Dos Passos. What better way to harpoon the latter than by writing a massive, triple-decker novel about America itself over the past thirty years (the first part was published in 1930)? The result is U.S.A., a trilogy of novels I've been traversing for a while now, with rest stops in 17-century Maryland and the realm of film noir. It is a tour-de-force, a panorama worthy of its subject--and yet I can also see why the book is, compared to the best of Hemingway and Faulkner, virtually unread today--a real shame, since its very technique is a triumphant democratization of the main methods of modernism.

To spare my readers (I think there's more than one), I'm going to break this discussion, like the meta-novel itself, into three parts. I want to mention here that the Library of America edition of U.S.A. that I read is, like all their editions, a joy to read: suitably heavy, but not overly so; nicely sized so that it can be held in one hand without fatigue; easily legible (I had to buy another copy of The Sot-Weed Factor since my original paperback copy's print was made for eyes 35 years younger than mine); printed on acid-free paper (so it will never take on that brownish-yellow tinge that made that paperback even more unreadable); and with just enough notes to explain obscure references, as well as a helpful chronology of the historical period covered. Superb value for the money.

Acting

2007-08-07T20:53:00.000-05:00

When I was researching my review of a biography of British playwright John Osborne, I found a DVD available in Britain of a film by Tony Palmer about Osborne. It arrived too late to be useful for the review, but I'm still interested in Osborne, and I finally got around to watching it last night. It contained interesting archival interviews with theater people like Kenneth Tynan and Tony Richardson, as well as interviews with Osborne himself and contemporary playwrights who have been influenced by him, such as David Hare.

But by far the most fascinating bits were filmed excerpts from Osborne's plays as they were performed in the theater. This included extensive color footage of Olivier in The Entertainer ("you'll be out by half-past, uh, half assed"), as well as Osborne himself and his wife at the time, Jill Bennett, in A Patriot for Me. The performances though that astounded me were those of Albert Finney in Luther and Nicol Williamson in Inadmissable Evidence. The were revelatory, unbelievably transformative.

Take Finney's. His voice became deeper, his words seemed to be masticated and then spit out, his forearms corded and taut as his sleeves of his monk's gown kept rolling up. You could not take your eyes off him. I don't think this was merely due to the differences between acting on stage and in film. There is something about the transitory nature of dramatic performance that allows for this risk-taking; probably also the nature of film acting, with its breaks, pauses, and retakes, ameliorates the momentum a theatrical performace can build, especially with the long speeches Osborne gives his main characters.

Same effect with Williamson. His portrayal of Bill Maitland, a lawyer undergoing a breakdown, was riveting. In fact, this entry was going to be about what happened to Nicol Williamson's career, since at one point, to me, he had the greatest promise of any British actor. His Hamlet was original--barbed and acerbic--his Merlin suitably alien and chilling after the avuncular Merlin of Sword in the Stone, his Sherlock Holmes quirky and intelligent (the performance as well as the character). The IMDB mini-biography explains why his career kept self-imploding. He looked fine and was wickedly witty in his contemporary (2004) interviews in the film.

Interestingly enough, a film performance by Finney was also included in this documentary--his title role in Tom Jones, for which Osborne wrote the screenplay. And in it Finney seemed to be younger, less heavy, altogether lighter. Make-up was not the only explanation. He was acting, in the best British tradition. Olivier's Archie Rice is nothing like his Othello. Seems obvious, right?

Well, another movie extensively excerpted was Tony Ricardson's version of Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which stars Richard Burton as Jimmy Porter. And while I watched Burton's performance, I discovered that he really wasn't a very transformative actor at all. His Jimmy Porter is not all that different from his Hamlet. His voice is a magnificent instrument--to hear those soliloquies in the theater ("Frailty, thy name is wOMAN!") must have been thrilling. But he does the same vocal tricks with his Porter, modulating his voice and then jumping on a word (vIRGIN!"). Maybe he became a star too soon and didn't do enough repertory work, but he did not have all that much of a career to throw into the bottle when he finally did that.

But, as Finney said, it was Osborne's works at the Royal Court Theatre that gave him and other less "well-bred" actors opportunities to play leads in dramas instead of gardeners, and for that we can all be grateful.

Why Does Johnny Read?

2007-08-05T17:16:00.001-05:00

In home movies my uncle took of family gatherings during the 1950s, one child is, more often than not, caught off in the corner, reading a book. That child was me. The first thing I did upon entering someone's house was to look for the books, and then start going through those that intrigued me. Thinking about that child now, I feel mixed emotions. I could not have acted otherwise, since most social occasions at the time sent me into the throes of a boredom that bordered on the depressive. If I couldn't read, I was close to agony. I did not care about other children's laughing or pointing, but I did not forget it.

Thus throughout my life I have always felt slightly guilty about reading. Reading (like writing) is a solitary activity (except when you're reading aloud to someone else, an activity that unfortunately has fallen into disrepute, unless the listener is a child). Thus when I am reading, I am not engaging myself with the world (even though such times are when I can feel most alive, aware); I am not living life, experiencing it. I consequently feel more guilty when I read for "pleasure"--even though, happily enough lately, some of those pleasure-giving authors have turned into essay subjects and nice little paychecks.

Another, less obvious reason to read is as an anodyne for pain, usually mental or emotional. Reading makes you think about something else, gets your mind off the wound you constantly keep gnawing at, lets time do its healing. During one period of depression, I could only read essays by Joseph Epstein. His lucid and sane voice accompanied me, even got me through a painful valley.

All that reading, though, paid off in that now I can read and teach pretty much what I want--within the bounds of academic integrity. Of course, it also means that i have to teach writing as well, and as I tell my writing students, for me, introductions are much, much easier to invent than conclusions--as is the case here.

I'm going to go read.

Mnemosyne still speaks

2007-08-02T01:51:00.001-05:00

A couple of recent incidents have reassured me that my memory is still functioning, at least in some particulars. The first occurred during my eager rewatching on DVD of Crime Wave, which I had first seen several years ago on Turner Classic Movies. I've mentioned before that the movie included an unforgettably weird performance by Timothy Carey, who has been referred to as a "Method character actor" (whose method? Stanislavsky's or Rasputin's?). This screen capture proves my memory was not at fault.

In this scene, Carey has been introduced to Phyllis Kirk, who plays the wife of an ex-con whom a group of San Quentin escapees are trying to enroll in a bank robbery. The lascivious intentions of the hoods have before been betrayed by the actor on the right of this scene, who is credited as "Charles Buchinsky"--and at that point in his career, Charles Bronson was at least attempting to act. Carey, the seated criminal, is trying to convey by this facial rictus that he is both charmed by Kirk and trying to charm her. Unbelievable.

The other event happened while I was rereading a book that I had first read probably 35 years ago. During one portion, I started laughing uncontrollably--every phrase, every clause, released gales of laughter, paroxysms of cleansing mirth--the kind of laughs that make you dizzy while you try to catch your breath. And I recalled that I had laughed at the exact same passage all those years ago. I don't think one's sense of humor changes all that much over time.

"I spit on metaphysics, sir"

2007-07-31T00:39:00.000-05:00

I hate to shill for any upcoming product, but the release of an extraordinary set of DVDs of a sf classic does have me excited. For years, people have been talking about a possible multi-disc set of the various versions of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and it's finally going to happen. Several editions of the edition itself will be available, with this as the most elaborate:

Accompanying some versions of the DVD is the documentary Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner. A trailer for it, as well as four clips from the film, is available here.

Blade Runner is a seminal film, despite its being dated already as sf (if LA turns into a city with a polyglot language, it will be based on Spanish, not Japanese). The look, the feel of the film is film noir placed in the future (something the Philip K. Dick novel it was based on totally lacked.) This shot from the movie shows an iconic part of noir imagery, Venetian blinds, the shadows of which reveal that the characters are not as free as they might imagine.

And besides, any movie that has Edward James Olmos utter the line that is this entry's title has to be cool.

Ch-ch-changes

2007-07-30T13:28:00.001-05:00

These are what make purists reach for their one-volume edition of LOTR to throw at the screen. This is my take on the most important ones that JWB (Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens) made.

Changes that strengthen the movie. The excision of Tom Bombadil leads the list, since I have always had a problem with the versifying . . . just what is he, anyway, besides a creature based on a Dutch doll the Tolkien children had, and a means of linking the more childlike world of The Hobbit with the darker tone of LOTR? Unfortunately, though, no Tom means no Barrow Wight.
Some will take this as heresy, but the elimination of the Scouring of the Shire never bothered me that much. People complain of an overlong denouement as it is.
Elves at Helm's Deep. The JWB commentary track for TT is hilarious on this point, as each of the writers blames the other for this plot shift. I have no problem with it, since without it, it appears the Elves are bugging out of Middle Earth, when in the books, much is made of the Elves of Lorien and Rivendell fighting in the North--if you read the Appendices. You have to show events in movies, not just talk about them, a maxim that leads to the magnificent montage of the lighting of the beacons between Minas Tirith and Edoras.
Thus also the Paths of the Dead. Tolkien tells how frightened all of the characters are traveling through these caves, but you can't have actors telling each other how scared they are on the screen. And anyway, Pete had to get some zombies in this movie. The hill of skulls, though, was a bit much.
However, the use of the Army of the Dead as a kind of green scrubbing bubbles to clean up Minas Tirith after the Rohirrim and Gondorians had displayed real heroism of the kind Tolkien loved was a major weakness.
The exorcism of Theoden by Gandalf. Again, making concrete what is implicit in the text. Grima complains that Gandalf still has his staff, but all he does with it in the book is to cause some distant thunder. Theoden then acts like he's taken a particularly large dose of Geritol, but he doesn't undergo the rejuvenation process depicted in the movie. (Theoden's cinematic character arc--"I'm not a good leader either"-- is also confusing and unnecessary.)
Super Arwen. Her importance in the novels was only realized until Tolkien got to the end, so JWB were forced to come up with a strong woman before Eowyn made her appearance. Arwen playing Glorfindel's role in FOTR is no big deal, and fan pressure actually stopped JWB from committing real mischief in implementing their plan of AAHD (Arwen at Helms Deep), some of which was filmed, but not included.
Gimli as comic relief. No problems for me: I think JWB were always on guard against the Holy Grail syndrome--that an epic can become a parody of itself. Humor helps prevent that--but the dwarf-tossing jokes could have been tossed themselves.
What they got wrong. All the changes to characters that had to do with a character arc. Aragorn--too afraid to be king? In the books, he does doubt that he can make the right decisions after Merry and Pippin are abducted and Frodo goes with Sam; no need for all the added hand-wringing angst about inheriting Isildur's weakness, as well as the sigh just after he is crowned. Frodo too is wimpified; in the book he tells the assembled Ringwraiths to go back to Mordor at the Fords of the Bruinen, for instance.

The most grievous wound is to Faramir. Once the confrontation with Shelob was replaced as the ending of Frodo's storyline in TT, then Faramir had to become a danger--Faramir, who for many readers is a special character. The Ithilien Rangers become bullies too, working over Gollum like a band of rogue cops with a junkie. As Filmamir, Faramir becomes the whiny younger son, who has to prove to Daddy that he's strong too. This leads to the unbelievable moment where Filmamir changes his mind and lets Frodo go on to Mordor after Frodo's offering the Ring to a Nazgul! I've tried to figure out JWB's justification for Filmamir's change of mind, and I'm still lost. At least Faramir becomes himself in the last film, where much of his and Denethor's dialogue comes right out of the book.

But still, all in all, the good in these movies far outweighs the bad, and for anyone who thinks that Jackson's adaptation was so terrible, then just remember the names Ralph Bakshii and Rankin & Bass, and think of Glenn Yarborough warbling, "Frodo, of the Nine Fingers..." and then remember that JWB's cinematic version of the Field of Cormallen ("Praise them with great praise" in the novel) is an actual improvement on the text: "My friends--you kneel to no one." Sniff. ("You want my hankie, doc?")

Farewell to the Master

2007-07-30T05:31:00.000-05:00

Ingmar Bergman, who investigated like no other artist the agony that silence can bring, is finally silent. But his films will still be eloquent.

What they got right

2007-07-28T13:56:00.001-05:00

Peter Jackson and his team--that phrase should be understood throughout what follows, but from the documentaries that accompanied the various DVD editions of The Lord of the Rings, it's clear that the ultimate decision-making power for most areas of production rested with Jackson. Plans were not developed, concepts not pursued, models not made into reality, unless they were "approved by Peter."

(And I write from the point of view of a thorough-going, unadulterated fan of the novels. I read the works when they were initially--and unethically--published as paperbacks by Ace in America, and have read most of everything else by Tolkien published since then, multiple times, including the twelve volumes of The History of Middle Earth, although I have yet to get to the two volumes of drafts of The Hobbit. Once someone told me that she never got into Tolkien. I replied that I never got out of him.)

Production design and realization. The key to the success of the movies. If they had got the look of Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age wrong, it would have ruined everything else. The wisest decision they made was to base the designs on the visions of the two best artists working on Tolkien today, Alan Lee and John Howe. And then they brought them to New Zealand, so their designs could be organically placed within the various New Zealand landscapes selected. From Hobbiton to the beacons of Gondor to the Grey Havens, from Frodo's clothes to Eomer's armor to the Orcs' weaponry--everything looks right. And down to the smallest detail--as Miranda Otto said when she picked up the cup that she was supposed to offer to Aragorn in Edoras, "It's heavy!" No need to act like it is.
Casting. After numerous reviewings, I can't think of a single casting decision or performance I have a problem with. (I do have a problem with some of the lines they have to say--more on that later.) Some work so well--Ian McKellan as Gandalf, Orlando Bloom as Legolas, and Elijah Wood as Frodo--that I can't envision anyone else in the parts. I'm especially glad that McKellan's career achievements were finally recognized. I remember when the execrable Alec Baldwin Shadow came out in 1994 thinking, "Here's one of the greatest actors in the world appearing this piece of sh*t." Now if he appears in a piece of sh*t, it's because he wants to, not because he has to.
Music. These movies needed a big, late Romantic score, with a variety of echoes of other kinds of music, and plenty of motifs and "tunes," all of which Howard Shore provided. Not only have I bought the soundtrack albums when they came out, I've been picking up the complete recordings, which contain all the musical cues in the works, and run around three hours each. From Dwarvish chants to the forlorn gallantry of Gondor, Shore gets close enough to the essence of what he is portraying (the two personalities of Gollum, for example) to be very effective.
Direction. This might seem a given, but in all the arguments raging over the film, I think Jackson's skill as a director got lost. I realized this the last time I watched his remake of King Kong. Since I wasn't so heavily invested in it, I was able to watch more objectively the way he put a scene together, such as the offering of Naomi Watts to Kong: the camera angles, camera movements, editing, perspective, combination of music and action, the overall vision. When I watched the end of The Fellowship of the Ring recently, I freshly noticed all the touches: the slow motion as Aragorn approaches the Uruk-hai; the cut to regular speed with the first sword slash; the camera on a trolley as the Uruks run to Boromir; the use of silence as Lurtz shoots Boromir; the performances he gets out of Mortensen and Sean Bean. Jackson has learned the lessons of the masters well.

One more to go: the changes.

Some early "music videos"

2007-07-28T02:46:00.000-05:00

Hopscotching around YouTube, I stumbled across some early Stevie Winwood performances (I don't know precisely when he became "Steve"--sometime during Traffic, I suppose). The first is a quaint promotional video for the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin," which was the first time most of us in America became acquainted with Winwood's voice--one of the best in rock history. I thought this was merely lip-synching of the single, but it is not the single version, since the band does not echo Winwood's cry to perform the title action. The second stanza is different too. (It's quaint to me because it's set in a department store; that was some British PR staffer's idea of being original.) And Stevie looks like he's about 15 and just got up.

The next is from Winwood's next group, Traffic--"Paper Sun" from their first album. Here the PR genius decided to have the group wandering through a museum as the long version of the song plays. What I also learned from other Winwood videos is something I had forgotten: Winwood might be a better guitar player than he is an organist. He held his own against Clapton when they were in Blind Faith.

Actually, this search started because I learned another artist who performed at the Concert for George had died, Jim Capaldi, Traffic's drummer. Rest in peace.

"Even the smallest person can change the course of [movie] history"

2007-07-26T23:29:00.001-05:00

Thus (almost) says Galadriel to Frodo in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring: a non-Tolkienian line, but movies have never shied away from being explicit. Before I plunge into Kristin Thompson's The Frodo Franchise, I thought I'd set down my thoughts on Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, which is, I think, on the whole, brilliantly successful.

Now I never got into the pissing matches on the Net before, while, and after these movies were released; it just wasn't worth it. Minds were often made up before the movies were even seen--it's like the person on Amazon.com who gave the latest Harry Potter book one star before it was published. I found that time, as it usually does, brought clearer reflection. Some points became more obvious; some weaknesses more apparent. But these movies became awfully useful to me in writing classes, as I used them as a method of showing how to provide examples to support a thesis--even their Appendices--and while doing so, engendered further thoughts on the motives behind the production.

The main point to remember--and one that the Harry Potter motives have reinforced for me--is that Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens decided to make a successful movie. To do that, they had to draw in as an audience people who had never read Tolkien. The latest Potter movies show that their makers are relying more and more on the audience's having read the books. To recoup the staggering costs of production, Jackson and his team had to engage a mass audience, not just the fans--who would probably come to the movie anyway.

The second point is related. When Bob Shaye at New Line gave Jackson the green light to make three movies, certain structural problems became evident. The team had to rewrite their two-movie screenplay. The first two books end on a cliff-hanging event, and I think Jackson did not want to alienate those members of the audience who might not even have realized that two movies followed The Fellowship. Thus each movie has a rounded ending--the last movie's being too rounded for some.

The third point is again related. How do you make a successful Hollywood movie (even in New Zealand)? Learn how to write a screenplay from a master: in this case, Jackson and Walsh attended a scriptwriting seminar given by the modern guru of the art, Robert McKee, author of Story, who is so famous he was portrayed by Brian Cox in Adaptation. All modern screenwriting manuals emphasize a character "arc," that characters change over the course of a movie (or three). Thus some characters in the novels with immutable personalities become more plastic in the movies, usually weaker (in some aspect) before they can become strong.

More to come...

Dear Readers

2007-07-25T15:47:00.001-05:00

I'm like many other bloggers in that once I learned that I could find out who's reading my blog, I did. Since I usually only write about subjects that a) interest me and b) seem to me worth having a thought or two about, I know my numbers will never be high. Nevertheless, it's fun to see that one person has searched for "cork+soaker+pynchon" on Google and landed here. Or "no Caine on the Brazos," which is interesting since it's an intentional pun (and not that good a one), combining the spelling of Michael Caine's last name with the title of a song the Band and Bob Dylan did on the Basement Tapes. Or "hanging+clause," since it's a mistake on my part--it should be "hanging cause."

One reader I learned about initially shook me up a little. Right after I wrote about Albert Brooks,* and titled the entry after his latest movie, someone from Iran read my blog. Synchronicity? Yes, since it was one of those navbar searches ("next blog") that led him/her here. Still...

*One movie I forgot to mention in that entry was a movie Brooks acted in, Steven Soderbergh's excellent adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, Out of Sight. In it, Brooks plays a thoroughly repellent Wall Street insider who has been sent to prison for fraud. Here the whininess that underlies much of his comic persona is dialed up--and he still manages to be funny.

Random Notes

2007-07-24T21:09:00.001-05:00

That was the title of my favorite section in Rolling Stone in the days of Ralph J. Gleason and Hunter Thompson and Ben Fong-Torres and John Mendelsohn and Lester Bangs, so I'll happily steal it for here.
My mind has finally recovered from the after-effects of finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The emotion was akin to the come-down after a sugar-high, or the sadness a child feels on Christmas afternoon, knowing that that state of ultimate expectation that Christmas excites will not return for another year. Did the novel meet the hype? Mostly yes, although Rowling almost swamped the novel with again more exposition about a mythology that she invented. At least by the middle of The Return of the King, for example, you don't find out that the fellowship maybe should have gone out and discovered Sauron's technicolor dreamcoat.
Criterion keeps making excellent choices in the movies it is selecting for its editions. In October, these will include Godard's Breathless and a personal favorite I've written about before, Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. Not to mention Robinson Crusoe on Mars in September (big guilty pleasure).
More reviews are appearing of Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4, and it looks better and better each time I look over the inclusions: films by Fred Zinneman, Don Siegel, Anthony Mann, Andre de Toth, Nicholas Ray, and John Sturges, with commentary tracks for each film, including one by James Ellroy for Crime Wave: all this for about $4 a film.
The Frodo Franchise, a book on Peter Jackson's films of The Lord of the Rings by Kristin Thompson, an academic film critic who actually writes readable, interesting English prose worth reading, has been released early, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

We bring you the man responsible for all this

2007-07-20T15:43:00.001-05:00

In a few hours, I, like millions of other readers around the world, will be plunged into the final adventure featuring Harry Potter. So I thought it only fair to present this YouTube clip of the writer indirectly responsible for the success of J.K. Rowling and virtually all of modern fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkien. In this interview from 1968, Tolkien explains some of the backstory of the various races in his entire mythology (and listen to the way he pronounces "meyethology").

In his memoirs, Kingsley Amis remarks that Tolkien was the worst lecturer on the Oxford English faculty (and C. S. Lewis the best), in terms of elocution and audience understanding. This clip reveals some of that. Many of the comments to it declare that his speech is incomprehensible, and the uploader has seen fit to append a translation of the remarks (although it gets "demiurgic" wrong, calling it "emerging").

I think it's nice that he at least got to see a little of the money his tales would earn before he died--even as a tenured professor in England, he'd had to grade exams during his vacations to supplement his income (no National Health then). Orwell, on the other hand, died before his works took off, and from what I've read, his wife, whom he married on his deathbed, drank up all the money.

Oh, well. Ave, Tollers, and Vale, Harry.

Ain't That a Kick in the Head?

2007-07-20T02:56:00.000-05:00

Who says you can't dance to Led Zeppelin?

(The title refers to a unique dance step some 2:40 into the video.)

Goodness, Gracious, Great . . .

2007-07-19T23:58:00.001-05:00

While watching a Billy Wilder documentary that accompanied Ace in the Hole, I was reminded that Wilder and Charles Brackett had done the screenplay for Howard Hawks's screwball comedy Ball of Fire. Since that was in my stack of DVDs-to-be-watched, I pulled it out and had a wonderful couple of hours watching a movie in which an English professor gets to be the romantic lead--and played by Gary Cooper, no less.

Of course, much of the comedy lies in listening to the normally laconic Cooper deliver the professor's sesquipedalian verbiage in his clipped bursts; much of the rest lies in the gulf between the slang that Cooper's character is trying to nail down and his own vocabulary, as well as that of the other seven dwarfs--I mean, professors. (The resemblance of its plot to that of Snow White is intentional; "Heidy Ho!" says Barbara Stanwyck as she greets the professors). Some of this humor must have flown in under the censors' radar, as Cooper explains the slang etymology of "Sugarpuss" O'Shea's first name as referring to her face, while those with more lecherous minds muse upon a more venereal location.

What was surprising--and also delightful--about the movie was its cinematography by Gregg Toland. He employs his deep-focus technique very effectively, such as in the still above, with Cooper and Stanwyck in the foreground, three professors in varying degrees in the middle distance, and one sneaking down the stairs in the background--all clearly in focus. The scene in which Coooper first mentions his attraction to Stanwyck is even more striking: Cooper confesses this attraction just as he is about to throw her out, that he particularly noticed her the previous day when she was standing in the window and the light hit her hair. Stanwyck moves back a few feet until she is framed by the window, and poof! it glows. No CGI, just a knowledge of light, lenses, and film, and how to combine them.

Wilder said that after he wrote the script, he hung around the set to watch Hawks direct the film, a kind of "working vacation." Wilder admitted that he became a director to have ultimate control over his scripts, and told the anecdote about Charles Boyer and the cockroach again ("If he won't talk to the cockroach, the sonovabitch won't talk to anybody!"). But he also said that he became a director because that's where the fun in movie-making is. Writing, he tells the interviewer, is, "to quote Winston Churchill, 'blood, sweat, and tears.'"

Amen, Billy.

Five down, two to go

2007-07-19T02:32:00.001-05:00

A few thoughts after seeing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

These movies are being made for people who have seen the books: little exposition or backstory is given, and what is offered is spoken by the younger actors, who do not have the clearest enunciation in the world. And even if you have read the book, you'll be digging around in your memory for names of characters, spells, and objects. Important flashbacks flash by. One character who will become enormously important later is hardly introduced at all; you suddenly realize, "Oh, she's the one who's going to become Harry's love interest."
This series is really being carried by an group of excellent British adult actors: Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy, Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall, Ralph Fiennes as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Emma Thompson as Professor Trelawney (the last two almost cameos), Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, plus series newcomers Imelda Staunton and Helena Bonham Carter (who adds a nice dollop of mad sex appeal to the mix), as well as Brendan Gleeson (oops! he's Irish) and David Thewlis. I left the best for last: Alan Rickman as Snape, whose line readings are striking and unforgettable. In his performance, diction becomes a weapon.
The set designers once again deserve a large portion of credit for making disbelief more easily suspendable.
The special effects are fine, but really just an extension of concepts that have been around since the 1930s. What comes out of a wand? Out of a ray-gun? Glowing stuff. The results are just less laughable now.
I still found myself moved at the end. One of the main messages of the Harry Potter books is the same one as Tolkien said was contained in The Lord of the Rings: "the ennoblement of the humble."

Now to see if the last book will make the last two movies worth watching.

You knew this would be coming

2007-07-18T16:55:00.000-05:00

The Eddie Cochrane video was not quite a set-up, but I had to include this YouTube clip of the band who made "Summertime Blues" their own, especially after they were shown performing it in Woodstock, complete with guitar acrobatics caught in freeze-frame. ("Blue Cheer?" "Quiet, or you'll be taking a trip to Michael Vick's home for retired bears.") Daltrey used to introduce this song as "The only one we do that was written by someone else, so you know it has to be good," forgetting about Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues."

The Woodstock version of that song was the one they did with Moon, which they usually performed right after whatever version of Tommy they were doing live. They would start the song off almost in mid-beat, the whole band together, like a wave of sound hitting a beach. This version begins more like Cochrane's, with the beat slowly filled in on guitar. The notes to the clip say that this performance was a 1989 rehearsal version of the song, with the larger band that the group toured with after getting rid of Kenny Jones. Townshend is in his David Carradine-as-Caine-with-a-beard phase, and although he's surrounded by walls of transparent plastic to shield his hearing, he still shows the lead guitar player who's in charge by signalling the key change during the lead guitar break.

In the Cochrane version, the bass player looks supremely bored, probably because he's not very good. I like this live version by the Who because of the relative clarity of the sound; Entwhistle's bass is shorn of the fuzz overtones that accompany the normal Who version. And nobody--well, maybe Bill Wyman on "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown"--looked so cool doing a bass run. John, why didn't you leave that cocaine alone?

Ace [in the] Hole?

2007-07-17T22:11:00.000-05:00

One director I find myself enjoying more and more as I grow older is Billy Wilder--not only for his dialogue, but for his candor in discussing his works, such as Cameron Crowe caught in Conversations with Wilder, and in the interviews he did on film with Volker Schlondorff in Billy Wilder Speaks. And now finally Criterion--who else?--has released its edition of one of the few Wilder flops in the 1950s, Ace in the Hole.

It's not hard to see why it bombed. Its hero is a reporter, played by Kirk Douglas, who prolongs the length of time a cave-in victim must spend trapped so as to build his own reputation back up. The victim's wife is a tramp, immediately signaled by Jan Sterling's hair being bleached to the same shade as Barbara Stanwyck's in Double Indemnity. And for the most part, the public is portrayed as gullible yobs, eager to vicariously participate in a story, uncaring after it's over, and preyed upon by scavengers of every size and shape. The few good people include the victim's parents, and the newspaper publisher who initially hires Douglas--he's portrayed in the still above, with the crucifix over his shoulder, while Kirk somehow defeats the laws of time and channels his son Michael.

The real fault of the picture is its ending--it doesn't know whether it wants to be Double Indemnity (lovers clash); Stalag 17 (antihero not as selfish as he appears to be); or Sunset Boulevard (what you sow, you reap). And it takes too long. Maybe it was because Wilder was between his strongest writing partners, Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond. But it has its moments: more visually composed shots than one usually associates with Wilder (including Douglas's face lit from underneath in the cave that turns him into a troll), and the usual Wilder touch in the dialogue:

Sterling (to Douglas): I've met some hard-boiled ones. But you're twenty minutes!

Summer Nights

2007-07-17T20:20:00.000-05:00

According to what I've gleaned while teaching Homer, the phrase "dog days" refers to the appearance of the Dog Star, Sirius, during the month of August--something which many people know. But why is Sirius baleful? Its dominance of the heavens signified the most dangerous period of time for the plague: the rats get frisky and the fleas are jumpin' and the cotton is...oh, that's another allusion. At any rate, when Achilles races after Hector near the climax to the Iliad, his newly forged armor shining in the rays of the sun, he is compared, in a somewhat brief epic simile, to the fateful and dangerous Sirius.

I'm sure that was on Eddie Cochrane's mind when he penned his most famous song, "Summertime Blues." Here's a video from YouTube of Eddie, at the height of Fifties cool, doing that song. (The volume is extremely low on the recording.)

(I love the way he breaks up more and more when the backup singer delivers the punch lines.)

One more summer allusion--a song I very vaguely remember from the Sixties was titled "Summer Nights." All I could remember that it was sung by a British female singer and had a prominent harpsichord--as well as a few words from the bridge's lyrics: "there's a little cafe..." I thought the singer might be Linda Hopkins, but it was, as Google told me, the much throatier Marianne Faithfull. And thanks to iTunes, I found it was much better than I remembered, which, unfortunately, is not always the case. That vibrato contralto...

How's by You?

2007-07-17T15:27:00.001-05:00

I had been planning to do a little piece on Timothy Carey anyway, but the mood I've been in lately is perfectly summed up in this still of Carey in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, in which Carey plays one of the three French soldiers (along with Ralph Meeker and Joe Turkel) shot for their unit's refusal to fight during a battle in WWI.

I first noticed Carey in One-Eyed Jacks, a Western initially directed by Kubrick, but then directed by its star, Marlon Brando, after a falling-out between the two. Carey plays a thoroughly odious piece of work whom Brando kills after Carey attacks a girl. His character seems just intelligent enough to be evil.

In Paths of Glory, Carey is more pitiable than hateful, but in his other work for Kubrick, he plays Nikki Arane, a racist member of the gang of robbers in The Killing. This wasn't the only time Carey worked for an A-list director; he was also in John Cassevetes's Minnie and Moskowitz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Carey also did a lot of television work; he appeared in a couple of episodes of Columbo as the proprietor of a greasy spoon--typecasting, if you ask me.

Carey has been dubbed a "Method character actor," and Quentin Tarantino dedicated Reservoir Dogs to him. Carey also worked for years, a la Orson Welles, on his own auteur project, The World's Greatest Sinner, in which he plays an insurance salesman who...ah, it's too ridiculous to summarize.

I was thinking about Carey because one of his films, Crime Wave, is being released as part of Warner Bros. fourth volume of Film Noir classics. And if you need any more proof of Carey's, ah, unique qualities, just check out his publicity still on IMDB.

Looking for Good Comedy in the Modern World

2007-07-13T22:58:00.001-05:00

A couple of recent comments by my blogging friends have led me to think about the work of an actor/writer/director whose comic films I generally love--although a couple of his more recent works have not been up to his standards, plus he is just slightly more productive than Terence Malick. The first comment was by Muffy St. Bernard in our discussion about "The Up Series" below. She talked about reality TV and its hunger for ever-more "interesting" subjects. The other comment was thinkulous's entry about the evolutionary drive for humans to develop "big brains."

The name that immediately came to mind was Albert Brooks, and since 56 Up will probably be released before his next auteur effort, I figured I'd better write about him now, while we're both still alive, instead of waiting for his next film to come out.

Brooks's first directorial effort was Real Life (1979), a riff on the attempt by PBS to produce the first serious "reality" series, An American Family (1973). Brooks and a film crew set out to record a year in the life of a family. "And it's real!" as he yells at the end. This movie revealed how closely Brooks mined the border between the comedic and the discomforting: that what is humorous, if dialed up a notch, becomes disquieting, unsettling and embarassing.

A Modern Romance (1981) was Brooks's second movie as director, and I find it characteristically alternately hilarious and painful to watch--often in the same scene. Brooks's character is chronically jealous, which leads to some hilarious situations that teeter along the edge of, and by the end of the movie fall into, pathology. It's funny, but since we like his character, we don't want to watch him cause his romance to implode. The movie has a hilarious scene in which Brooks, whose character is a movie editor, works with the late Bruno Kirby on adding foley effects to a cheesy sf movie starring George Kennedy. I use it in my movie classes to illustrate how some foley effects are added to a movie, and besides doing that, it always gets some good laughs.

Defending Your Life is my favorite of Brooks's work. The central conceit--that the afterlife is like one huge, perfect time-share vacation spot where you await your assignment to your next life--is ingenious and affords an opportunity for satire on all sorts of levels. It's here that the "big brains" come in. Brooks's life on earth is defended by Rip Torn, who plays a more evolved creature who uses more of his brain--47%, vs. 3-5% by humans. We humans are thus called "little brains." In one scene, Brooks's character is eating a heaping plate of delicious food--none of which will make him heavy, or fill him up. Torn's character has a plate with a small amount of what appears to be burnt corned-beef hash.

Brooks: What are you eating?
Torn: You wouldn't like this.
Brooks: What is it? What does it taste like?
Torn: You're curious, aren't you? Good, I like that about you. You wanna try it?
Brooks: Yeah. (Reaches over and takes a forkful.) Looks so weird. (Puts it in his mouth and immediately spits it out in disgust).
Torn: (Laughs).
Brooks: Oh, my God.
Torn: A little like horseshit, huh?
Brooks: (Nods, with his napkin shoved over his mouth and audibly gulping with distaste).
Torn: As you get smarter, you begin to manipulate your senses. This tastes much different to me than it does to you.
Brooks: Eeeew. This is what smart people eat?

Brooks's comedy is overt and sly at the same time. There's the gag, that smart people's food tastes horrible, and then there's the subtext--that smart people like terrible things. Later, Brooks goes to a comedy club called "The Bomb Shelter." There, a smart comedian is making jokes about little brains, most of which are unfunny. When he asks Brooks, "How did you die?" Brooks answers, "On stage--like you." The audience laughs. Exactly how smart are these people?

Brooks manages to thrust in another almost unbearably painful scene, during which he has to watch himself as a small child witness an argument between his parents. Most of the scenes replayed from his previous life have been funny: this knocks the breath out of you.

Brooks's next two films, Mother and The Muse, each have their moments, but are generally disappointing. His latest movie, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, was generally panned, but I thought it was a return to much of his previous form. A joke on outsourcing requires the audience to pay attention to what is happening in the background of a scene, on two different occasions. Similarly, the main joke behind the comedy concert that Brooks gives contains several different layers, and takes time for the audience's realization of these layers to develop. This is the least unsettling of Brooks's movies, perhaps because of the potential for explosive adverse reaction if it became too unsettling.

Albert Brooks's comedy takes patience, intelligence, and sensitivity to understand, and ususally provokes some thought afterwards. To think that he and Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler owe the same TV show their first big breaks.

"And it's real!"

Added later: What makes those lines I quoted from Defending Your Life charactertistically Brooksian is Torn's character saying, "You're curious, aren't you? Good, I like that about you." It adds nothing to the joke per se, and it seems to make Torn into a nice guy, until we realize that he's (a) looking for anything that will buttress his defense of this loser, and (b) he's a condescending prat.

Mick Travis and the Deadly Quadrangle

2007-07-12T00:35:00.001-05:00

I suppose this is as good a time as any to finally get around to watching Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968). I'm getting near the end of the "Up Series" of documentaries, in which at least three of the boys attended schools much like the public school depicted in Anderson's film. And in another ten (?) days, the final volume of the most celebrated series of novels about British public schools ever written, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, will be released.

The first thought that occurs to my mind is that I don't have enough "real-world" evidence to go on about British public schools ("public" here meaning upper-class and exclusive) to make a considered judgment, even though I've been absorbing British culture all my life. How realistic is the depiction of public schools meant to be in If....? Was corporal punishment by other students still allowed in the late Sixties? (I know the young Eric Blair and other Etonians were rejecting it in the early Twenties.) Was OTC mandatory in the late Sixties, as depicted here? The precise nature of reality is important because so much of If.... is a fantasy, and that fantasy is never clearly demarcated.

If.... is the story of three public-school sixth-formers who rebel against their school finally by shooting and blowing up their classmates, masters, and their families. Of course, the shadow of Columbine looms over such a depiction. And issues from that tragedy span reality and fiction: bullying, ostracism, labeling. The ending of the movie, almost everyone seems to agree, is a fantasy (one of the mothers, for instance, grabs a rifle and starts shooting at the rebels). Right here I'd like to make some sententious declaration, but I remember what happened to another maxim-giver at the hands of a college student ("Thou, wretched, rash, intruding fool...").

To J. K. Rowlings's credit, she does show the evils of prejudice (in this case ethnic) and of bullying as well at Hogwarts, but there are still the worship of sport (quidditch is like rugby) and the rivalries among the various houses. Harry Potter, like Mick Travis, is pretty much the outsider (again, often forced to be), and a rebel, but for a good cause.

The first time we see Mick, he is called Guy Fawkes for his hat and the scarf hiding the moustache he grew over the summer.

It's the first time audiences saw those eyes up close, those eyes that could be so faun-like, yet a centimeter wider, become a gargoyle's, and with a little liner, are those of a--well, use your gulliver and supply your own Nadsat phrase.

"La, la , la, la, life goes on"

2007-07-11T01:26:00.001-05:00

A lot of what I'm doing lately is so immense (such as reading a three-volume, 1200-page novel written in fragmentary modernist mode) that I don't want to talk about it until I have gotten farther along. One longer viewing experience I can comment upon and recommend highly is Michael Apted's "Up Series," a seven-movie series of documentaries. Few documentaries have been constructed around an individual's chronological life as it is lived: this one does it with a group of people.

It began as a 1964 documentary about a group of seven-year-old British children selected for differences in social class, geographic location, and gender. One boy grew up on a Dales farm, three boys went to a exclusive prep school, three girls are friends at an East London school, two boys are from a children's home, two boys from a Liverpool suburb--the backgrounds and personalities are nicely varied. Most of the program consists of interviews with the children, but the narrator does come in at the end and announces the Jesuits' maxim: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

This bothered me--not because the Jesuits didn't say it (they did) and not because it isn't true (q.v. James Joyce). But I thought the series, which returns to this group of young Britons (and even that fact changes fairly quickly) at intervals of seven years, would show more the accuracy of Wordsworth's statement in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality": "The child is the father to the man." In other words, we'd see how much of a personality, a character, was present already in childhood and would remain in adulthood. Character is destiny--or would we learn differently?

But as the series wears on, as the filmmakers return to the same group every seven years, I learn that both points are true. What has been ground into these children as thoroughly as their gender roles are their positions in a class-demarcated society. Also, a lot of the adult is present in the child. But those are the generalizations. The heart of the series--and I'm up to 35 Up now--are the individuals. Some people's lives change abruptly--divorce, an unexpected child--some stay the same. I don't want to get into many specifics because, like fiction, one of the joys of "reading" these lives is to see what happens.

But life is not fiction in that it doesn't have an Aristotlean plot. Austen, Dickens, and other novelists often end their fictions with a marriage--but for many people, that's only the beginning. What is the shape of a life as it is lived? Its weight? And in this sense the "Up Series" resembles U.S.A.

The word that keeps returning to me in attempting to describe this series is deep. It is deeply moving at times, deeply human, and deeply humanistic. One story in particular is almost ineffably sad. I'm holding my breath, so to speak, for the last two installments.

What cold little hands...

2007-07-07T14:34:00.000-05:00

One more Bjorling clip--I have to, because this one always makes my jaw drop and my eyes water. It's from Act 1 of Puccini's La Boheme, "Che gelida manina," and in this case, I do know what it means--it's the title of this post. Rodolfo, having met Mimi, is now beginning, in that quaint Victorian sense, to make love to her.

This recording comes from 1938, which means it was recorded on 78 rpm records. They have done a superb job of cleaning it up, but still--the power of Bjorling's voice is almost frightening. I used to think Pav was supreme in this aria--but he can't hold a candle to Bjorling. What was it like to hear him live? Soaring. Searing.

Rocking the Dikes

2007-07-06T23:58:00.000-05:00

I wanted to put a song here that was the complete opposite of my last post's subject, so I was listening to a YouTube clip of the Who singing "Long Live Rock," where Pete Townshend is so drunk that he almost falls into Keith Moon's drum kit, and Moon laughs his ass off, when I noticed a clip from the same British show--The Old Grey Whistle Test--of a favorite song I had completely forgotten about for decades: "Sylvia" by the Dutch group Focus.

It's coupled with their only U.S. hit, "Hocus Pocus," which features the vocal--what to call them--acrobatics? pyrotechnics? inanities? of Thijs van Leer: let's say "unique vocal stylings." Jan Akkerman, the guitar player, was always more interesting to me.

"The sweet power of music"

2007-07-06T13:57:00.000-05:00

In a famous passage in E. M. Forster's Howards End, the Schlegel sisters attend a concert that includes Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Forster describes Helen's reaction to its third movement as a vision of goblins marching across the world. Thus Forster proves that it is almost impossible to write about music in words or images that can bridge the gap between the spirits hearing the same piece.

In Merchant of Venice, Jessica tells Lorenzo, "I am never merry when I hear sweet music," and he answers, "The reason is your spirits are attentive." Much of this interchange was set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, itself a gorgeous work. All this is prelude to a piece I found wandering through the slim pickings of classical fare available on You Tube. I normally would not draw anyone's attention to a recording that is played over a static picture, but the music is so beautiful, and the voices so unforgettable, that I had to. It's Jussi Bjorling, the immortal Swedish tenor, and Robert Merrill, baritone, singing the duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers.

I have no idea what they are singing about, nor do I want to know. I want to bask in Bjorling's effortless purity of tone and Merrill's perfect blending with and support of Bjorling. I just want that stream of melody, that "concord of sweet sounds," as Lorenzo calls it, to reach inside me and touch that within me that is immortal. One response to this video on YouTube was, "It's because of stuff like this that I bother trying to stay alive."

Lorenzo says of the music of the spheres:

Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

When listening to this recording, I think I, at least, come pretty close.

P.S. I came across this comment to another video of Bjorling: "The beauty of Jussi Bjorling's voice is the clarity and his annunciation." Well, the word should be "enunciation," but in this case, it's a felix lapsis, a happy slip. The word becomes fleshed by the artist's voice.

Punks

2007-07-05T00:36:00.001-05:00

Sitting here with actinic afterimages smoldering in my retinas, miniscule grains of spent gunpowder lining my air passages down to my lungs, and mosquito bites pebbling my thighs and biceps and forehead, I consider the primitive device I used in another vain attempt to discourage those summer pests--the humble punk, which also doubles as a fireworks igniter, and whose pleasant, slightly rancid odor always evokes memories of past summers in me.

I thought about the lowly punk because John Dos Passos mentions it in the first volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, The 42nd Parallel; according to him, young women walking out on a summer's night at the beginning of the twentieth century would place one in their hair to ward off mosquitoes. I found that fascinating--the same device used over one hundred years later, for much the same purpose. It is a unifying object, linking centuries together, and in my own life, linking decades. (The word "punk" with this denotation derives, it is supposed, from a Native American word, first applied to spongy growths on oaks used for tinder.)

A lot more about U.S.A. to come, but just this thought inspired by a summer night with fireworks: words are cement, glue, link, tinder, explosive--all at once.

Through the Eyes of a Child

2007-07-04T02:45:00.000-05:00

No, not the Moody Blues--but the events of The Fallen Idol--a 1948 collaboration between writer Graham Greene and director Carol Greene. Their later work together included the iconic The Third Man, but this movie is almost as good, and covers some of the same themes, including perceptions, loyalty between friends, and when that loyalty has to be sacrificed.

A seven-year-old boy is friends with a butler, who is having a clandestine romance with a younger woman. Almost all the events of the movie are seen through this boy's eyes, and it is up to us to interpret what is happening--and what the boy thinks is happening. (As David Lodge points out in an essay accompanying the film, Greene probably picked up this twist from Henry James's novel What Maisie Knew.) The boy is played with remarkable skill by Bobby Henrey, and the butler is nicely underplayed by Ralph Richardson. The set--a five-level replication of a foreign embassy in London--allows Reed all kinds of shots showing the boy as an observer, and his judicious use of Dutch angles (those askew, out-of-plumb shots) is more effective, I think, than his flamboyant use of them in The Third Man.

The still shows the wealth of acting talent that Reed worked with--Jack Hawkins, Richardson, Bernard Lee, Henrey, and Denis O'Dea. Criterion's remastering is characteristically meticulous: during Henrey's nightmarish odyssey through London streets, each cobblestone, each brick, shines with reflected light. It's almost a rehearsal for Holly Martins's vertiguous chase of Harry Lime through Vienna's fitfully illuminated streets. Supposedly, Greene liked this movie even better than The Third Man, and I can see why.

Japan Confidential

2007-07-03T13:33:00.000-05:00

A popular singer and an artist, staying at a resort, have their pictures taken together on the balcony of the singer's room and are accused of engaging in a torrid affair by a scandal sheet. They sue the rag. "Ripped from today's headlines"? No--it's the plot of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 movie, Scandal.

This sort of story, of course, was going on in the U.S. too, particularly with Confidential magazine, lawsuits against it eventually putting it out of business. It's fascinating to see it happening in Japan as well. In fact, they did not even have an equivalent for the word "scandal": they use the English word. The entire movie is about the influence of the West on Japan, after five years of Occupation.

Takashi Shimura (to the right in the still) plays the alcoholic lawyer who approaches the artist (played by a young-looking Toshiro Mifune) to sue the magazine, Amour (its title is another example of Western inroads). He has a daughter who is suffering from T.B., and the prelude to the climax of the movie occurs at Christmas, when Mifune brings a fully decorated Christmas tree for the daughter on the back of his motorcycle (when the neighborhood kids ask him who he is, he replies, "Santa Krausis!") When Shimura comes home drunk that night, his daughter is being serenaded by the singer (with Mifune on organ) performing "Silent Night." He runs out to a tavern, Mifune following, where a band is playing "Buttons and Bows," and later on, the entire tavern joins together in a drunken chorus of "Auld Lang Syne." Is all this Westernization good or bad? As far as the possibility of "scandal" goes, yes. Does this mean the same for Christmas and New Year's?

Four months later, Rashomon debuted, and Japanese cinema became widely known in the Western world. Mifune and Kurosawa would go on to one of the greatest collaborations in the history of cinema (Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, High and Low, Yojimbo, Red Beard), but this early movie shows that the influence of the West, while inspiring in its cinematic aspect, also brought dangers to Japan for which they had no words to express.

A Semi-Janeite

2007-07-02T14:08:00.001-05:00

Needing fiction in another vein after chewing on Pynchon and before climbing Dos Passos, I just finished Persuasion, Jane Austen's last novel, which I wanted to like more than I did. It has most of Austen's virtues: the poeticizing of everyday emotions; the ironic eye for the missed communication, the misinterpreted glance; the sure control of point-of-view and free indirect discourse, letting the reader use her intelligence to discern the truth; and as an added bonus, an awareness of global events beyond the English village that is her usual territory. In this case, it is the British Navy, which Austen was intimately familiar with, as far as possible for a woman of her time, since her brother eventually became an admiral.

It's a short novel, but even so, the climax does seem delayed, and when it finally comes, the curtain falls even more quickly after it than in her other novels. We know her main characters will get together: it's the how that is of infinite interest in Austen. I enjoy Austen most when her characters realize each other's love because they are acting unselfishly or disinterestedly, such as happens in Emma. Anne Elliott in Persuasion is so perfect, acts so rightly almost all of the time, that no real suspense builds over whether she and Captain Wentworth will get together. Perhaps Austen's health affected her writing. Still, I think her art would have expanded had she lived; some people bemoan Mozart's early death, but I think Austen was the more grievous loss.

I am not a full "Janeite," as her followers call themselves, and I do not read all her books annually, as, supposedly, E. M. Forster and Angus Wilson did. But I hate when she is called a "miniaturist" who worked in a constricted field with a limited cast of characters--employing "a fine brush on ivory." Her field was the human heart, which is infinite in its depths and heights--or at least to each of us it is.

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

2007-06-30T01:48:00.001-05:00

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

2007-06-29T15:13:00.000-05:00

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"

2007-06-28T19:58:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-28T04:43:00.000-05:00

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"

2007-06-26T21:04:00.001-05:00

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"

2007-06-26T18:49:00.001-05:00

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

2007-06-26T17:24:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-26T16:39:00.001-05:00

" '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

2007-06-25T13:39:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-24T03:18:00.001-05:00

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

2007-06-23T01:46:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-23T00:39:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-22T15:14:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-21T17:53:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-19T17:15:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-18T00:21:00.001-05:00

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

2007-06-17T03:05:00.000-05:00

Happy belated Bloomsday!

"Can't pretend that growing older never hurts"

2007-06-16T22:37:00.000-05:00

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"

2007-06-14T17:28:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-14T00:05:00.000-05:00

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"

2007-06-12T20:59:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-12T00:21:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-06-11T21:23:00.000-05:00

"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

2007-06-10T15:38:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-06-08T21:10:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-06-04T10:16:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-02T20:06:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-02T14:12:00.000-05:00

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.

What! No Pin?

2007-05-31T00:45:00.000-05:00

It was twenty-seven years ago today.

Heaven is in the eyes

2007-05-30T21:41:00.001-05:00

I have been wracking--probably wrecking too--my brain for movies to show at this upcoming workshop, since I almost immediately made the decision to show movies of more artistic or social importance than merely those that had a tangential connection to this immediate area. So, John Ford's The Searchers--that's a given; and to give the opposing point of view, Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals, a movie I was very happy to get to know.

So that leaves--what? Shane? Maybe, because then one can play the later Eastwood cards of Pale Rider and especially Unforgiven against it. But I also want to show the same historical event through the refractive lens of the movies, show how a legend is built--or deconstructed. So six gunfights at the O.K. corral, from Ford's black-and-white chiaroscuro in My Darling Clementine (Victor Mature as a consumptive!) to George Cosmatos's almost apocalyptic Tombstone (which, incidentally, is the one probably closest to the "truth"--Doc Holliday actually answered the cowboy who said, "I have you now, you son of a bitch," with "You're a daisy if you do.")

Then I watched Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, and was completely bowled over again by the beauty of its cinematography (supposedly shot by Nestor Almendros, but a lot of work was also done by Haskell Wexler). Most of the movie is supposed to take place in Texas, but, as is usually the case in these degenerate times, America's pristine landscape is played by--drum roll, please--CANADA. Much of the outdoor shooting was done during the time when the sun has not yet risen or has just already set, and the land glows. Even the actors' beauty becomes part of this theme, especially that of the males--the young Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, even the ragged, time-lined face of Robert Wilke. Few movies remind me more that the cinema is a medium of the senses, primarily the visual, but also the auditory, with Enni Morricone's delicate score, supplemented by Leo Kottke's guitar. The only weakness is the script, the initial version of which, I'm not surprised to learn, was thrown out, so the actors could find the story. Linda Manz's voice-over narration, which verges on the edge of incomprehensibility at times, has all the strengths and weaknesses of improvisation.

But those images overwhelm any weaknesses.

The Band on the Rilly Big Shew

2007-05-27T17:19:00.001-05:00

I'd say I was trying to kill two birds with one stone with this post, but I just spent part of the afternoon being distracted from my reading by a flock of blackbirds feeding in my front lawn--rustling the grass like a larger animal, all taking off at once because of some danger I can't see, softly plummeting back to earth, one by one, myself fascinated by their individual flights. So no killing of birds, even metaphorically.

First: By 1969, the presentation of rock on television in America had gotten fairly sophisticated. No more lip-synching, no more stupid props (the Byrds singing "Turn, Turn, Turn" in a tableau of female models dressed as duckhunters), and a sensitivity to the mood of the song and who was singing it. This clip of the Band from The Ed Sullivan Show shows that evolution. I hadn't previously seen it before its appearance on YouTube, not even when it originally aired, and I was impressed with the shot selection and moving camera. The sound is another matter. The performance sounds entirely live, even the instruments, but it sounds thin, and not until 2:01 does the sound engineer remember to bring up the levels of all of the group on the soundboard.

The second subject: the Band, former backup group to rockabilly Ronnie Hawkins and more famously to Bob Dylan on his infamous electric tour, where, in response to folkies who were booing him for the sacrilege of playing electric, turned to the group and said, "Play f*cking loud" before breaking into a majestic rendition of "Like a Rolling Stone." The group who made the Basement Tapes in Woodstock, New York, with Dylan, after he "broke his neck" in a motorcycle accident. The group who released the album Music from Big Pink (a house in Woodstock) with "The Weight" and "I Shall Be Released" and "This Wheel's on Fire," and whose second album, the self-titled The Band, assured the group's place in rock immortality.

And, of course, as noted at the time, this album, a loving--yet never nostalgic--evocation of American history and themes ("Up on Cripple Creek," "King Harvest," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down") was chiefly written by a Canadian, Robbie Robertson, and performed by a group consisting of three other Ontario natives (Garth Hudson, Windsor; Rick Danko, Simcoe; and Richard Manuel, Stratford) and one American, Levon Helm.

What I find interesting about this performance is that it contains the only instance I can remember of Garth Hudson's actually looking at someone else in the group (he usually appeared to be inhabiting his own astral plane at the organ), and how young they look compared to their appearance in The Last Waltz, Matin Scorsese's documentary of their last concert in 1976. And are they tight at the start. Even Levon doesn't settle in until the second line.

At the end, Ed introduces the band members, and his elision of "they came" from "from upstate New York" makes it sound like he means Levon came from there. He was mocked for his woodenness, but now I see he was trying to be a nice guy. For his willingness to present (even sometimes censored) rock music, I can forgive him Topo Gigio and Senor Wences.

"A grope is a grope. It's not the Annunciation."

2007-05-26T02:55:00.000-05:00

The History Boys is one of those under-the-radar movies that caught my attention because of an Internet review, and word-of-mouth from an Australian friend in a chatroom. It's a wonderful movie, which, as the back of the DVD declares, is about "the true meaning of education and the relative values of happiness and success." And it's sort of sold that way, as a group of British grammar-school boys (the equivalent of US seniors in high school) vie for scholarships and admittance to Oxford University. The design of the front of the DVD implies that these boys will cut corners--perhaps cheat--to get there.

What is not mentioned in any of the ads is what presumably caused American posters on IMDB's message boards to write "This movie is disturbing" and "Unable to finish this movie." That would be the homosexual crushes, longings, and emotions among the "boys" and two of their male teachers. I think it's all sensitively and wittily handled, and interlaces with the overall theme of the movie (just what is history?) as well.

Scriptwriter Alan Bennett (who also wrote the play the movie's based on) has also so loaded the movie with quotations from poetry, philosophy, and popular culture, that most US audiences would baffled as to what they're talking about (I was asked "What's a nancy?" as we watched a scene in which W. H. Auden was quoted). In one scene, a picture of Rupert Brooke is visible over one of the boy's shoulders (Brooke is also quoted). How many Americans would know why Rupert Brooke would be important in a movie with such themes, or why two of the boys enact the end of Brief Encounter in one class?

I am not doing justice to the wit, subtlety, and range of this movie. The cast is superb, with Richard Griffiths almost stealing the entire film as the seemingly pitiable yet heroic Hector, and the always delightful Frances de la Tour (whom I fondly remember as Reggie's secretary in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin) as the history teacher, who absolutely nails a wonderful speech about women in history. (It is she who tells Hector the lines of this post's title.) The boys themselves are uniformly excellent.

Hector is the character who will linger longest in my mind. There's a beautiful scene in which Hector goes over Thomas Hardy's poem "Drummer Hodge" with a student. Why do we teach students about literature, or "general studies" as Hector's class is called? His explanation of the deepest joy in reading moved me to (crybaby!) tears.

And his use of popular culture in his classes was somehow very endearing to someone who, when asked to put together something to show how attractive the study of English could be to first-year college students, showed "Battle of the PBS Superstars" from SCTV to prospective majors. Every once in a while, we do have fun, and then we have to think about how it all fits together. That's the lesson the history boys ultimately learn.

Thanks to Criterion II

2007-05-25T20:05:00.000-05:00

Sansho the Bailiff--a film that plumbs the depths of late Shakespearean tragedy and and rises to the heights of his late romances--recognitions and resurrections. And I lived 57 years without seeing it. Thank you, Criterion, for making this film available in an edition that displays the delicacy and textures of the image. More Mizoguchi, please.

"Relieve me of the bondage of self"

2007-05-25T18:26:00.000-05:00

I should have expected what would happen if I started reading a biography as a way to alleviate, or perhaps illuminate, a rotten mood, especially if that biography is I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon. It is a sad, hilarious, and ultimately harrowing story that left me in tears (but I guess I'm a weepy sod, at that).

At first I thought this was just another one of those lazy biographies, which is made up of snippets of quotations from the subject's friends, and not thoroughly composed and written by one central, controlling, selective intelligence. But in the end this method works, not only because of the connective narrative tissue that Crystal Zevon provides at appropriate times, but also the large amount of text from Warren Zevon's journals. Along the way I learned a lot of facts I might be the only person interested in: that the Turtles recorded "Outside Chance" (as I noted before) since they knew Warren's music from being on the same record label, White Whale, at the time. The title "Werewolves of London" is related to the 1935 Universal horror film, via one of the Everley Brothers. Oh, and Zevon was himself unsure of David Sanborn and his band when he appeared on Nightmusic (a clip which I commented on earlier). And so on.

Zevon's life mirrors my own on so many important levels--booze, books, OCD--that I can't even begin to talk about it. Mon semblable--mon frere, indeed. The end of the book reinforces an important lesson I might have to face someday.

The biggest difference between us is his talent, and I was just happy to learn about songs that do, and will help with these moods.

Don't let us get sick
Don't let us get old
Don't let us get stupid, all right?
Just make us be brave
Make us play nice
And let us be together tonight.

"Les Mis"--le Movie

2007-05-25T01:20:00.000-05:00

I thought I would watch some of David O. Selznick's cinematic literary adaptations for MGM in the 1930s, but a new set of both of 20th-Century Fox's verions of Les Miserables intruded. It's just as well, for the producer of the first, 1935 version was Daryl F. Zanuck, who was almost as assiduous as Selznick in adapting famous novels, and even more daring--he supported John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, getting most of the novel's anger on the screen. Zanuck was just as supportive of films that confronted social problems. The Day the Earth Stood Still was based on a 1930s short story ("Farewell to the Master") that had little to do with atomic warfare, for instance, but Zanuck supported Edmund North's added slant in his screenplay.

The 1935 Les Miserables stars Frederic March as Jean Valjean, whose search for justice as opposed to the law's precepts is the social fuel for the theme. March is an actor who seemed to be pretty much a journeyman when I was younger, but his subtleties I now appreciate. Near the end of his career he was able to display his range as the president of the US in Seven Days in May and as the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind. Since Valjean requires him to be mostly stoic and suffering, he is only able to use his gifts when he portrays the addlepated double for Valjean who is being threatened with the galleys, and whom the real Valjean must save. March could have gone over the top, but his subtlety in showing the double's mental weakness makes him more sympathetic and Valjean's decision more believable.

Javert, on the other hand, is portrayed by Charles Laughton, who was making a career in the 1930s out of portraying all sorts of outlandish characters: Nero, Doctor Moreau, Henry VIII, Rembrandt, and, most famously, Captain William Bligh. His Javert is constructed by Laughton, as he did with so many of his roles, out of exterior make-up and interior tics. His face is baby-smooth, and he pouts like a malevolent Humpty-Dumpty. His internal weakness is revealed by a ghastly tremor of those fleshy lips, and he shows Javert's social origins by letting his voice betray him with a hint of a Yorkshire accent when Javert becomes ("becooms") angry.

It's a hammy performance, but it fits in with the expressionist touches that director Richard Boleslawski employs, in uneasy combination with some overt Cross symbolism and Alfred Newman's score (which comes close to plagiarizing Schubert's "Ave Maria" at particularly "spiritual" moments). The expressionism is evident in the sets, the Dutch angles employed during chases, and the lighting and cinematography. I remembered halfway through the movie that the DP was the great Gregg Toland, who collaborated with Welles on Citizen Kane and with Ford on The Grapes of Wrath. His close-ups are particularly luminous and effective, and his later daring use of shadows in films such as Ford's The Long Voyage Home can be seen in his lighting of Valjean's via dolorosa through the Paris sewers. The movie could stand to be fifteen minutes shorter, and the Cossette is fairly drab, but this adaptation shows how the studio system usually could produce something of lasting worth, even when it was not trying particularly hard.

The other side has the 1952 Fox adaptation, but that will have to wait until I finish watching History Boys.

Brain Candy

2007-05-24T13:54:00.000-05:00

Nothing like a toothache to make higher-level brain functions (or at least what passes for them in me) impossible. Suddenly the prospect of tackling a difficult literary novel or writing an honest appraisal or preparing for a workshop I'm going to lead feels beyond me, and I grab whatever "easy" reading has piled up next to my bed and go through them like a bag of Chips Ahoy.

So I've discovered that I can still read Lee Child after writing a long article about him, and that a British TV-producer-turned-writer is still producing the best American thrillers today.

And a trilogy of novels by a relatively new SF writer, John Scalzi, are not only in the tradition of Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's Forever War, but better than them. Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Lost Colony are better because they are not written to support a thesis, as Heinlein's novels so often were. They are concerned at their heart with choices that characters must make, and the discovery of their own ethical boundaries. I like to see that portrayed in all types of fiction, from TV shows to Greek tragedies. By making these difficult choices, these characters become more meaningful to readers--I found myself actually caring about these characters' fates, and it's been a while since that happened while reading a SF novel. Scalzi wisely says at the end of The Lost Colony that he is moving on to other fictional universes for the moment, which I think is a wise decision--The Lost Colony could probably have been 100 pages shorter.

I wish other writers and editors would show the same wisdom in not succumbing to the lure of easy money in sequelitis.

"The Tune Ends Too Soon for Us All"

2007-05-23T15:33:00.000-05:00

Since that last post was short--if not that sweet--here's another song that always gave me pleasure, and more so now that I have gotten older.

I never quite got into the Jethro Tull of Aqualung--the Who's Uncle Ernie (and their earlier Ivor the Engine Driver) gratified all my desires for songs about old pervs. But Ian Anderson did a lot more thoughtful and melodic stuff, and this song is a continual delight, as well as his "Up the Pool," about the British seaside resort, Blackpool, that he grew up in ("We're going up the Pool, from down the Smoke below...")

An even sadder song when you consider for how many people the song has ended since this video was made.

"We will meet in the sweet light of dawn." I hope so.

And It Has Hit the Fan

2007-05-23T03:47:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to ration my YouTube posts: only if I write a couple of posts about other subjects will I let myself ramble on over another musical favorite.

Warren Zevon here encapsulates my mood right about now, and I think I'm going to read the recent biography about him and meditate upon bad karma and the indifference of heaven--WZ fans will get my allusions here.

Rock out--and why didn't someone stick a sock in Sanborn's sax?

An innocent bystander? No. Between a rock and a hard place? Hell, yes.

Criterion and Eclipse

2007-05-22T15:07:00.000-05:00

When I moved to this god-forsaken--strike that--garden spot of America, my biggest loss was all the cultural opportunities that a large city like Chicago offers--symphony, opera, theaters (Steppenwolf, Goodman), movies, radio stations. A colleague in the Psychology Department introduced me to the joys--and addictions--of home theater, such as it was at the time, which helped make up some of that loss. Soon he had me buying laserdiscs, and I became familiar with the Criterion imprint, a company that released copies of hard-to-find foreign films (The Seventh Seal, Red Beard), as well as copies of American classics loaded with extras--Welles's The Magnificent Amerbersons with a reconstruction of the ending before Robert Wise and RKO butchered it--and commentary tracks by film critics and experts.

The only problem with these discs was their price. I remember buying myself a birthday present of Criterion's edition of John Woo's Hard-Boiled that cost over $100. Enter the era of the DVD, and Criterion began to rerelease many of its laserdisc successes, much more cheaply, and often improving on them: a three-disc edition of Brazil, consisting of the theatrical edition, the edition that the studio head wanted to release, and Gilliams's director edition--all this for under $50 on sale online. Their recent release of Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff includes the story the movie is based on in a beautifully printed booklet. Heaven! But recently Criterion has done themselves one better.

They've introduced a series of "no-frills" discs, without any extras, but still using the best source prints available, under the Eclipse label. These are multi-disc sets of works of one director that have not been often seen or collected before, such as the first films of Ingmar Bergman, or the early films of Sam Fuller. I am eagerly awaiting their release next month of a set of films by Yasujiro Ozu, a director whose subtle and deeply flowing joys I would have been unaware of if not for Criterion's release of Tokyo Story and other masterworks.

I' ve just worked through the first disc of Eclipse;'s Series 2, "The Documentaries of Louis Malle," which I had never heard of--and they are wonderful. The first one is a short 20-minute film on the Tour de France, Vive Le Tour, which shows that people were complaining about doping in 1962, and shows riders eating, leaping off their bikes to grab bottles of wine or beer from roadside bistros (the owners send the bills to tour organizers after the race), and struggling through the mountain areas. Twenty minutes, and you get more of a feel for the event than if you had watched hours of it on televsion.

At first glance, the title of the second film, Humain, Trop Humain (Human, all too Human) seems ironic, for most of it concerns how a car is made in a Citroen factory in the north of France. (In the middle of the film, Malle cuts to people discussing and buying these cars at an auto show.) But in the end, it is not the machines that we remember, as in Chaplin's Modern Times or Lang's Metropolis; it is the people who are operating these machines--especially the women. The film ends on a freeze frame of a woman doing an exasperatingly repetitive action, as all the workers do, and we are left to confront the question of how human these people are as they perform the same tasks, some simple, some, such as threading wiring, maddeningly complex. No narration: we have to make a narrative in our minds.

The last one is perhaps the best. Place de la Republique is a street in Paris where Malle and his small crew interivew a variety of people over a week or so. At times we can see the camera and microphone; the crew asks people whether they can talk to them; all the devices are in the open, so to speak. By the end of the film, Malle returns to some people who have been interviewed earlier; one of them, a young blonde who bears a slight resemblance to Malle's wife, Candice Bergen, actually conducts a few interviews herself. The final interview is a long diatribe-monologue by a woman talked to earlier, who is is either mentally ill or just a monomaniac nationalist; her tirade fades into the sea of voices at rush hour, and the last image in the film is Malle and his soundman racing after the woman as she pedals away on her bike. By placing their tools in view, they remind us that while this may appear to be a slice of life, it can never be absolutely, as long as people know they are being filmed.

Thank you, Criterion and Eclipse. I'll be reporting on further films in this series as I get to them. But now for some literary classics as seen through the eyes of David O Selznick.

Tracing Icons

2007-05-20T22:18:00.000-05:00

Joseph Lewis's Gun Crazy came up in a discussion, and as I was checking up on it (the most reliable and understandable information about it came from a book, not a website, but that's a whole other discussion), I came across this image from the movie--an updated version of Bonnie and Clyde (for 1950).

This still comes from a montage of Peggy Cummins and John Dall doing a string of robberies. It's the outfits that are interesting to me, the trenchcoats and shades. I don't know if this particular type of costume for cool robbers began in this movie, but John Woo had certainly fastened on it by A Better Tomorrow.

Supposedly a run on the brand of sunglasses that Chow Yun-Fat is wearing in this scene occured after the movie was released in Hong Kong.

I tried to find an image of Nicholas Cage in the same regalia in Face/Off when he's playing bad guy Castor Troy, but couldn't come up with one. Oh, and here's a still from the scene in Gun Crazy that secures Cummins's place in the film noir Femme Fatale Hall of Fame.

Which gun are you going to play with, John?

Till Human Voices Wake Us...

2007-05-18T23:10:00.000-05:00

The other day I was interviewed on public radio concerning a writers' workshop I'm taking part in, and of course, I couldn't hear the broadcast because it was live. But it was rebroadcast later that evening, and is available on the network's website. People asked me if I listened to it, and I answered, "No!" For some reason, I cannot stand listening to the sound of my recorded voice (students will attest that I don't have any problem listening to my voice live, so to speak).

It is not so much because of its sound (although it's more nasal than I would like, and I have more of a Chicago accent than I think I do, although not as much as George Wendt when he does the SNL "Da Bears"). It's because I can't edit what I say; I always think, "Why did I say it that way?" I am just thankful that other people seem to enjoy the sound of my voice, and leave the psychological ramifications of my distaste with other character fragments I sweep up every once in a while and send down the memory hole. I've got bigger problems to worry about.

Back to the Books

2007-05-16T22:27:00.000-05:00

Vladimir Nabokov used to tell his literature classes that any novel worth reading was worth rereading; he must have faced the same distaste for reading endemic in college students today. His main point is unquestionable: one reading of a novel such as Bleak House by Charles Dickens will not reveal the patterns with which Dickens has interlaced his narrative. We read for story, initially; for style too, and for overall theme. We approach the depths only when we replunge into the work.

The interval between readings also matters. I would say that I read "The Alexandria Quartet" (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) by Lawrence Durrell several times in my early twenties. I remember this because of the different editions. I first read the small Pocket Books paperbacks, then later the sturdier Dutton paperbacks (which I still have). At that time I read the work for its subject--love--its style--fervid and lush--and its experimental basis. The Quartet is not a roman fleuve like Galsworthy's Forstye Saga or Ford's Parade's End, that is, a series of novels treating the same basic group of characters, each novel a chronological advance.

No, Durrell's claims were much weightier, as he says in the Note to Balthazar: "Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern." This may sound pretentious, and it is, to a degree. The "three sides of space" are the first three novels, and the last novel advances the plot--it is a sequel to the first three.

Justine tells the story of the relationships among a group of lovers, friends, and acquaintances in Alexandria, Egypt, at an unspecified time soon after WWII, from the point of view of an English teacher and writer, Darley. X loves Y, who is afraid of Z's jealousy, but X also loves A, who might love B, and so on. The second novel, Balthazar, is again narrated by Darley, who learns from the title character that most of his assumptions--or at least the major ones--have been mistaken. Y actually loved C, and X was a kind of "beard." D, who was supposedly killed for raping Y when she was a young girl, is really alive and living in Syria. The third novel, Mountolive, is a conventional third-person narration, with some excursions into various first-person points of view via letters. Here Darley is a quite minor character, and readers learn that Balthazar was wrong, too, and that the underlying causes for many of the events in the first two novels were not personal but political.

I remember from my initial readings that I was disappointed to learn that everything devolved into politics; the explanation seemed reductive. Now as I reread Mountolive, I'm struck at how prescient Durrell was. He was a diplomat as well as a novelist, and he could foresee the effect that the clash of religions and nationalism would have in the Mideast. Also, I find that the political basis for personal attraction is not as far-fetched, or simple, as I thought then.

The relativity link that Durrell postulates seems overblown, because novels have been written for centuries based on the limited knowledge of their main characters, how wrong they are in their assumptions and conclusions: Don Quixote, Emma, and The Good Soldier spring to mind. The results can be comic (Emma) or tragic (The Good Soldier) or both (Don Quixote), and novels are often about the limits of humans' knowledge of each other, and the gulf that is often bridged on the flimsiest of evidence. Why does Bartleby "prefer not to"? Who can say for certain?

Durrell's metaphor for his "investigation of modern love," as he calls the subject of the Quartet in his Note, is, however, apt in that relativity implies the importance of the observer or measurer in making sense out of phenomena. And each successive novel in the spatial trio does seem to add another dimension; the second expands the narrative laterally, the third vertically. It is an astonishing achievement.

Clea awaits.

"Now cracks a noble heart"

2007-05-15T20:11:00.000-05:00

"Hey, Perfesser Misogynist, don't you like songs and performances by women?"

I certainly do, and are you sure you're registered in this class? Here are two that break my heart every time I watch. The first is by Laura Nyro, singing "Save the Country," and shows that, like Randy Newman, all she needed was a piano.

The high school I attended in Chicago gave us Thursdays off; we went to school on Saturdays instead. So I was able to get a subscription to the Lyric Opera for Wednesday nights fairly cheap. Unfortunately, this next artist had already gotten into her fight with the Lyric's GM, Carol Fox, so I was not able to see her live. Maria Callas is singing "O Mio Babbino Caro" by Giacomo Puccini from Gianni Schicchi, probably Puccini's most ravishing melody, and the funniest too, since the singer is threatening to throw herself off the Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) in Florence unless Gianni, "O my dear daddy," lets her be with her lover. Look at Callas's eyes when she sings "Ponte Vecchio"--you believe she'd do it.

There's another clip on YouTube of Callas singing this, from much later in her career; her voice is weakened, but she makes up for it in expressiveness.

Good night, sweet singers, and may flights of angels sing you to your rest.

Good Movie Rock, pt. 2

2007-05-15T14:56:00.000-05:00

Another way to use rock music effectively is to have a rock songwriter write the music and songs for your movies. I realize this is a matter of taste; I like the work Alan Price, original keyboard player in the Animals, did for Linsday Anderson in O Lucky Man! The title song summarizes what will happen to the main character, Malcolm McDowell, during the course of the movie. (Anderson is in the black leather jacket during this clip.)

I wish someone had posted the reprise of the song at the end of the movie: it rocks more, and we can see a young Helen Mirren dance, somewhat unmajestically.

How to Use a Rock Song in a Drama

2007-05-13T14:52:00.000-05:00

"Well, Dr. Smartypants, it's easy to criticize, but can you name any effective uses of rock music in a movie or tv series?"

Yes, I can, and thank you for asking that perspicacious question. Certain directors are fairly effective at selecting rock songs to play within their movies, such as Martin Scorsese, who often gets help from friends like Robbie Robertson or Eric Clapton. In Casino, when Joe Pesci's character describes how he and his gang used Las Vegas as their personal thieves' paradise, Scorsese plays "Can't You Hear Me Knocking?" by the Rolling Stones as the underscore. Chilling as well as cool.

Television producers, though, can rarely afford to get the music rights for tunes by such well-known groups--although I notice a Rolling Stones song was used during an episode of Criminal Minds this year. They also have to worry about securing the rights for any future viewings of the show--such as on DVDs now. Some shows have not been released on DVD because the cost of the musical rights for the songs in them are prohibitive.

However, one movie director who is fairly accomplished at using songs in his movies also directed a two-part television episode of CSI that contains one of the best uses of a song in a drama I've ever heard. Quentin Taratino directed the episode "Grave Danger," in which CSI investigator Nick Stokes is kidnapped by a man who wants revenge on the department for what he thinks they unfairly did to his child. He send a cassette and a jump drive to the other members of the team.

The song is "Outside Chance" by the Turtles (it was not coincidentally written by Warren Zevon). The song works at several levels. As Marge Helgenburger's character complains, it taunts the team. "You don't stand an outside chance." It also describes Stokes's situation in his grave. "Stone walls surround me--I'm surprised that you even found me." And its jaunty, percussive use of the electric piano is an ironic counterpoint to the concern on the team's faces as they watch the monitor. "I'm only flesh and bone--but you may as well forget me . . . you better leave me alone--yeah."

When I first saw this scene, I immediately realized that it was a) unlike most other scenes in a tv show, and b) that was only possible because of Tarantino's clout. On a normal episode, this scene would have lasted a quarter of the time, just long enough to give the audience the pertinent information. But look at how Tarantino draws out the scene--the first circular pan around the team at the table, the camera swooping up and down. Then the look on the faces of the team as they watch Nick--the time spent on the slow close-ups and push-ins. It makes you wish that tv directors focused less on plot and more on character.

Oh, and in case you think that the CSI team was completely glum that day:

Uses of Rock in Movies--What not to Do, pt. 2

2007-05-09T18:51:00.000-05:00

The Yardbirds are a fabled group because of their trio of lead guitar players--Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. I stumbled across them in the Beck era; I wore out the grooves of their Having a Rave Up With the Yardbirds LP. My favorite song from that album was "Train Kept A-Rollin,'" which, fortunately, is one of the few Yardbirds live (not lip-synched) performances preserved from that era at a concert sponsored by a British publication. The song is always notable because of the way Beck on guitar and Keith Relf on harmonica imitate the eponymous train and trade licks with each other. But in this performance, Relf at one point looks like he's ready to blow that lonesome whistle, while Beck goes softer.

Fast forward to--well, the same year, 1966. Michaelangelo Antonioni is filming his indictment of Swinging London, Blow Up. He wants to get the Velvet Underground, but can't, so he gets the Yardbirds. By now their bassist, Paul Samwell-Smith, has left the group (to produce, among other people, Cat Stevens), so their rhythm guitarist, Chris Dreja, becomes the bassist, and the new guitar player is a rather callow but enormously talented Jimmy Page. For their scene, the group does "Train Kept A-Rollin,'" but probably for copyright purposes it is titled "Stroll On." This clip has become so famous that one version of it on YouTube claims it comes from the Yardbirds movie.

Another poster claims that this is an accurate portrayal of London in the Sixties. Bull. It's Antonioni riding his hobby-horse that modern Western society is vapid and vacuous. The audience stares listlessly at the group, two people dance as though they were stepping on ants, and one girl has regressed to an infantile state. The crowd only emerges from its narcolepsy when Beck destroys his guitar--then it's a bunch of savages. I liked this message better in L'Avventura.

To show that even film commentators can be full of the same material as posters, I listened to the commentary track for this scene on the DVD. The commentator said that the Yardbirds were a proto-punk group known for destroying their instruments. Sorry--that's the Who. I'm surprised he didn't talk about the neo-colonial implications of the club's name (Ricky Tick).

The most interesting fact to me is that I have always thought that the bystander who picks up the guitar neck and throws it down after Hemmings has discarded it was played by--Jeff Beck.

Sumer is Acumen In

2007-05-07T10:55:00.000-05:00

And loudly sing cuckoo. . . Another academic year is down the--uh, has just passed, and as usual, I feel better about the literature courses than the freshman writing courses, although I think there were fewer really weak writers this year. Maybe it was the absence of those novae stellae that made it seem so uneventful. Oh, well. How to teach Dante's Inferno next fall now that the Pope has consigned the idea of Limbo to, well, limbo? Just have to muddle through.

In honor of the occasion, a 1999 video of "Here Comes My Baby" by the Mavericks, who, according to Wikipedia, are an alternative country group. The title says that they are performing this song with Cat Stevens, but I can't hear him, or see him--unless he's got clown make-up on. And the horns give this more of a salsa feel than a country one.

I became enamored with this song again after Wes Anderson used Cat Stevens's version of it in Rushmore. Anderson has a real knack, for me, of using the right song at the right time--or maybe it's just because I like his musical taste, such as "A Quick One" by the Who in Rushmore, or songs from the Stones's Between the Buttons in The Royal Tennenbaums.

Maybe 89%

2007-05-02T09:42:00.000-05:00

Part two. When science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon was asked why 90% of science fiction was crap (or crud, in one version), he replied, "90% of everything is crap," thus formulating what has become known as Sturgeon's Law. In youtube, that percentage seems a little low, as one searches for an elusive video, only to come up with countless amateur performances digitally immortalized, or the song recorded over a picture of the artist--as happened when I tried to find a video of Cat Stevens doing "Here Comes My Baby."

So when searching for "The Shape of Things to Come," not only did I get the Wild in the Streets Version (as well as clips from William Cameron Menzies's move version of H. G. Wells's novel of the same name), I found this compilation video done by Heroes fan StevieOh: stills from the series displayed during a recording of the Mann-Weil song done by the Ramones.

And it works.

I have no idea if the song is used in the show--I've never seen it. But this makes me want to see the show, and seems to capture its spirit, from the little I know of it. StevieOh calls it "Something I threw together during the March-April hiatus," but it seems to be that elusive bit of gold that it's possible to find in the effluvial river that is youtube. I hope NBC doesn't pull this video off of youtube, because it's made one person ready to go out and buy the DVD when it's released.

Up Against the Wall--and here's your ticket stub

2007-05-01T21:16:00.000-05:00

A two-parter. First, a clip I had never seen, even though I was familiar with the song. It's from the 1968 AIP youth-exploitation film Wild in the Streets, with Christopher Jones (whose bod almost got Ryan's Daughter an R-rating) as Max Frost, a demagogue rock'n'roller who takes over the government (his drummer was played by Richard Pryor). I never saw the movie, hating such cynical crap then and now. But the theme song was cool: "The Shapes of Things to Come," performed by a band masquerading as Max Frost and the Troopers. I've learned that the song was written by (surprise, surprise) Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, whose other ditties include "We've Got to Get Out of This Place" (our real anthem at the time) and "Kicks."

So here's pretty-boy Chris Jones lip-synching "The Shapes of Things to Come" in a scene so boring you wonder how they took over.

Flying Burrito Monkees

2007-04-30T18:44:00.000-05:00

Another little gem from youtube that I never knew the existence of: The Flying Burrito Brothers lip-spynching their way through "Older Guys" (mistitled on the video). It must have come from some variety show, because it's introduced by John Byner ( a bargain-basement Rich Little), who's cut off in this clip.

I know who most of these guys are, but from what particular point in the history of the band this comes I neither know nor care--this was before Gram Parsons got thrown out, and before they were filmed at Altamont in Gimme Shelter singing "Six Days on the Road." The history of the Burrito Brothers rivals that of a Byzantine ruling family in complexity. The group here includes two members of the original Byrds, Chris Hillman (I'm sure of) and Michael White (I think). Hillman, like so many bass players in other groups, was probably the finest musician in the Byrds. White was the drummer, although it's rumored Hal Blaine did all the drumming on the first album. Gram Parsons was a brief member of the post-Crosby Byrds, until he got kicked out.

The other two musicians are a pre-Eagles Bernie Leadon (who did a lot of fierce, choice work on the album) and Sneaky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel. Kleinow just died, which I only learned about because I read a blog about animation, Cartoon Brew by Jerry Beck. I never knew that besides being one of the best pedal steel players in the business, Kleinow was a stop-motion technician for Art Cloakey, and had worked on series like Gumby. Far out, as Arlo would say.

This video is blatant in the way it rips off the Richard Lester-via-the Monkees sensibility that seemed to rule so much video work then. Gram looks incredibly fey hanging in and out of the doors, and I wonder if anyone has shown Hillman and Leadon the shots of their popping out of the hatches. I bought the album this song appeared on because it featured "Wild Horses," a Jagger/Richards song that had not yet appeared on a Stones album; Gram got real buddy-buddy wiv Keef, and Gram's influence can be seen in that song and "Dead Flowers." So the Burrito Brothers were supposed to be cool, and I would have cringed to see this video then.

Now I just grin.

"Hazlitt in Lo..."

2007-04-29T15:45:00.000-05:00

TLS tells me that a new book has been published on the circumstances behind critc and essayist's William Hazlitt's book Liber Amoris (Book of Love), which recounts his unsuccessful affair, or wooing, of the much younger daughter of his landlord. I'm interested in Hazlitt, one, because he was one of the three precursors to George Orwell I talked about in my dissertation, and I thankfully never got to the point where I never wanted to hear another thing about any of them again. Two--and I only began to realize this as I read the book--he was the great-grandfather of the blog, if you consider the well-written blog to be a form of the personal essay in which the writer creates a consistent persona, meant to be congruent with the writer if not entirely so, and writes about what he or she is thinking about or feeling or whatever the hell he or she likes. Hazlitt wrote wonderful essays on, among other subjects, meeting Wordsworth and Coleridge, the use of common language in formal writing, and even prizefighting.

So even though it's only been published in England, I order the book through an Amazon.com affiliate, and it arrives just as I finish up my mandatory reading for now. It's very nicely done: it gives the background to the affair, what probably happened (or didn't), how Hazlitt reconstructed it in his essays, in his letters, and then in Liber Amoris. I'm reaching the end as Liber Amoris is published--get to the last page, 208--and realize that it isn't the end of this book! Page 208 on the left-hand side ends in the middle of an indented quotation! I look on Amazon.com again and see the book is 288 pages long. Well, at least I know how the story ends...

Beware of Maya

2007-04-27T22:32:00.000-05:00

I guess I got thinking about George a couple of weeks ago when I reheard the demo track for his haunting song, "Beware of Darkness," which not even Leon Russell's vocals could screw up at the Concert for Bangladesh. When I hear one of these densely produced Beatles tracks in its unadorned, pristine state, just vocals and guitar, the true strength of the song emerges--like when I heard John's demo track for "Strawberry Fields Forever" on The Beatles Anthology. It became a lament--dirge is too strong a word--for a lost childhood, a childhood that maybe even never was.

So, the familiar lyrics are passing by: "Beware of darkness...beware of Maya...beware of ABCKO." What the?!? I should watch out for the illusion of reality, and also keep an eye peeled for Allen Klein? Supposedly this was done as a joke for Phil Spector, but still, it made me think how many other songs by the supposedly most spiritual Beatle dealt with the quotidian details of the world: "Taxman," in which two British prime ministers are named; "Piggies," a song about greed and gluttony; "Living in the Material World," with its monetary pun on Ringo's real name ("we got Ritchie on the tour"--followed by a drum fill by Starr on his unmistakeably less-than-taut skins); "When We Was Fab," a look back at a period of fame that George probably hated more than all of them.

In the end, though, maybe it all makes sense. Only someone who was so aware of the world, its lures, its slights, its temptations, its human carnivores, would be so interested in learning how to detach himself from it, to become "free of birth."

I sat down and watched most of The Concert for George, the 2002 celebration of George's music and life by his friends at the Royal Albert Hall. Most of the time, such tributes are flawed to the point of being messes, and the number of musicians guarantees a kind of ball of sound, but this one was moving, and what's more, produced some excellent music. The sound was crisp and focused, particularly in DTS 5.1 sound, but I should have guessed who was responsible for that--the sound was produced by Jeff Lynne, who also did fine imitations of George on "Give Me Love" and Roy Orbison on "Handle with Care." Some of the musicians I was surprised were still alive (Traffic's drummer, Jim Capaldi, looks like Gerard Depardieu if he were ten years older and a prizefighter); some are, alas, dead now, such as Billy Preston (on whose first album "Harry Georgeson" plays, along with Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards). Even if some of the singers didn't know the lyrics (Gary Booker looked like he was ready to "skip the light fandango / and turn cartwheels cross the floor" at times), and there were more drumsticks flying than at a Salvation Army Thanksgiving dinner, the spirit of the evening was right. Not only in the monumental songs ("Isn't It a Pity?" "Wah Wah"), but also in the little songs that were often overlooked because of the Lennon/McCartney hits. When Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers sang "I Need You" from Help!, I found myself singing along softly--and crying.

As I did when I saw the picture of Clapton with George's son Dhani in the accompanying booklet. Clapton is explaining something, looking off to his left, and Dhani is smiling at him, and his eyes, nose, and mouth look just like his father's (well, with better teeth).

He was a seeker, and he left the world a better place because he had been in it.

Baby's in black, and I'm feelin' blue.

Harry Georgeson

2007-04-26T16:25:00.000-05:00

To dispel the miasmatic pall I have spread over my own blog, I'd like to talk about a video I found on youtube by the most spiritual of the Beatles, George Harrison--or Harry Georgeson, as he was cutely called to hide his participation in friends' music-making. This video reminds me once again that while Harrison was the most spiritual Beatle, he was also the most likely to mention mundane matters such as money and lawsuits.

The video is for Harrison's song "This Song"--which I had totally forgotten about, even though I loved it when it was released, that is, as far as the music goes. I can understand the emotions behind the lyrics, which were inspired by Harrison's losing a plagiarism lawsuit over "My Sweet Lord" to the writers of "He's So Fine." I'm sure Harrison unconsciously adopted the melody (unlike, say the writers of [CENSORED] did when they stole the melody of [CENSORED]--references deleted upon advice of legal counsel).

"This Song" is the result, and the song is bubbly, happy, and Beatleish in the best sense, and the video is good-natured for all the bitterness that inspired it. I particularly like the expression on George's face as he mimes, "This song is in E." The other participants in the video are on the edge of being recognizable--the vampiric lawyer looks like Eric Idle, but isn't, I don't think: same with the second rock star in drag (Ronnie Wood?). Are the horn players supposed to be droogs? The court stenographer is an actual piano player, I think--she's in Pete Townshend's video for "Slit Skirts."

Silly stuff--but [CENSORED] 'em if they can't take a joke.

Pro Prozac

2007-04-25T23:23:00.000-05:00

I realize that I might have given the impression in the last blog that I am against antidepressant drugs, and nothing could be further from the truth. No one should have to suffer an instant from clinical depression--the chronic, immoveable depression that has no immediate and identifiable cause--and I just wish people who do so suffer could be matched more quickly and more efficaciously with those drugs that might work for them.

Of course, then my mind wanders to analogies. My old friend George Orwell used to rant not only about how the beer in England was worse than in his youth, but that England had become a nation of aspirin chewers. He thought--I speculate, for he never clearly spells it out--that a headache or muscle ache should be suffered through, or perhaps that people were taking aspiring too frequently. (This from a man who was shot through the neck during the Spanish Civil War and did not refuse injections of experimental sulfa drugs as he was dying of tuberculosis.) But if all physical pain is bad--beyond that which tells us something is wrong with our bodies--then why not all psychic or emotional pain, whatever its source--depression, or the death of a loved one?

I was going to tie this up with Plato's banishment of artists in Book X of The Republic--which to me is more invidious than any of my philosophy profs ever let on: it's not just that they are liars--but I need a better translation--and at this moment, probably a better mind.

A Canticle for "A Canticle"

2007-04-23T23:53:00.000-05:00

Whenever I teach science fiction, I try to include Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. When I don't, I feel its absence, and every time I do teach it, such as this semester, I feel it works. But it shouldn't, because, like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, history has caught up with it--even earlier in Miller's case. Orwell at least had to wait the 35-odd years until his prophetic date rolled around, but the rites of Miller's post-apocalyptic Catholic Church were gone by the beginning of the 1960's, when the Second Vatican Council changed the liturgy beyond recognition--among other reforms. Why, then, does A Canticle still work? (And the evidence is that it still does by its remaining constantly in print. Even a supposed "classic" sf novel like Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End goes out of print every once in a while.)

First, I think the monastic life that Miller describes in the first section, "Fiat Homo," just seems to fit naturally in a post-apocalyptic culture. The desert and interior portions of the U.S. are what remain relatively unscathed in Miller's future, so their harsh conditions would seem to be ideal for the establishment of monasteries, as happened in North Africa in the period around the time of the fall of Rome. That leads to the second reason: the historical parallels are logical and comfortable. After the fall of a literate society--in Miller's imagining, the "Simplification"--it also makes sense that the monks would once again preserve culture, but in this case, more science than literature and philosophy (one in-joke in the second part of the novel occurs when a scientist identifies a fragment of Karl Capek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) as a historical document, not as a work of fiction). And the importance of Latin at such a time is not far-fetched, when the U.S. has broken into fiefdoms, each with its own language--much like happened in Medieval Europe.

The third reason is that in the final section, "Fiat Voluntas Tua," crucial decisions have to be made on the basis of moral theology. An atomic bomb strikes near the Abbey, and Green Star (a futuristic Red Cross) offers voluntary euthanasia for those with a fatal overdose of radiation. The last Abbot tries to convince a young mother to spurn the offers of a doctor that she and her painfully stricken young daughter avail themselves of the "Eucrem" facilities. Miller does not take sides here--or at least to me he doesn't. Perhaps some 50 years later the answer seems more obvious, but, in a sense, the slippery slope that mercy-killing opponents have posited has begun to occur. Now all suffering is deemed by some to be useless and avoidable; thus, if you are grieving for a reason, take a Prozac--don't feel the anguish.

And all I can answer is, I don't know what other people should do, but I know what I would do. Both my parents died long and painful deaths from cancer. My mother had lost mental control before her death--I prayed for her death, because there were no Eucrem facilities available. But I did not want to dull my pain. I once thought that I would begin drinking again when my parents died, but I didn't--I owed them at least that much. And I still feel the pain: I see some dead people, but in my dreams.

These are questions worth thinking about, and Miller's novel brings them up again, as well as the Big Question: will we, because of our nature, repeat this same endless cycle? Since I'm more an Augustinian than a Pelagian, I tend to agree with Miller's answer. Also, Miller throws in two wild cards that are scientifically unexplainable but symbolically effective: Benjamin, the seemingly deathless hermit who lives outside the abbey, and Rachel, Mrs. Grales's second head that becomes preternaturally aware at the end of the novel.

Miller, who like my father and some airmen described by Joseph Heller, flew American bombers in Italy during World War II, broke with the Catholic Church before his death; over what I don't know, but I have read a fierce essay he wrote on post-atomic-war fiction in general, and he was even less optimistic than in A Canticle. (His "sequel" to A Canticle, St. Leibowitz and the Wild-Horse Woman--actually more of a "midquel"--to me is unreadable, and I would like to know what Miller wrote and Terry Bisson added.) Our future perhaps is not coming as the Diluvium Ignis (Flame Deluge) that Miller foresaw, and Frank Herbert's Dune with its mahdis, jihads, and death squads, might be more what we can expect. But a lot of people have not waited for an apocalypse to begin a Simplification.

Writing

2007-04-22T18:21:00.000-05:00

I can't figure this out, and I've been writing for as long as I've been alive, it seems. Why is it that the emotions that you have while you are writing bear little resemblance, at times, to the emotions you have when you read what you've written?

I'm writing a couple of pieces now for a deadline, and I feel at times like my brain is a wet rag that I'm twisting with all my strength to get a few drops of dirty dishwater from. I'm hitting the word count tab every minute to see how much more I have to do to finish. Then later I read what I have written, and it's decent. At other times, I sit down, and in an hour, I've got more than a thousand words. I read it later, and it's jumbled, disorganized, awkward, lacking in transitions, incomprehensible at times . . . well, maybe not quite that bad, but certainly not like beautiful icing squeezed out on to a cake, which is what it felt like when I was writing it.

Other physical activities have a correlation between ease of action and results. I remember from hitting a softball that if I could establish a rhythm, the flow of the swing and the sequence of muscles (left knee, right hip, hands pull back, wrists cock, unlock, arms drive, hip reverse, weight shifts, bat hits ball: undercut--deep fly; open stance--pull; close stance--right field), the results were what I envisioned. I was never good enough to be consistent, but when everything went right--the body, the muscles, the nerves remember.

And now I have only words to play with.

"This Time Tomorrow"

2007-04-19T01:14:00.000-05:00

One of the first groups I searched for on youtube was the Kinks, and of course a lot of the hits I got were for lip-synched early songs from American rock TV shows of the 1960s like Shindig and Hullabaloo. One of them had Annette Funicello, whom I had lusted after ever since seeing her on The Mickey Mouse Club, introducing the boys miming "All the Day and All of the Night," and then her beginning to dance as they cut to the group. Heck, they should have kept the camera on her.

One link was to a song from Lola versus Powerman and the Money-Go-Round, a song about an airplane flight I had always liked, "This Time Tomorrow." It turns out that the clip is from a 2005 movie, Les Amants Reguliers, by Philippe Garrel. I don't know quite why I like this so much--its texture, from La Novelle Vague French cinema of the 1960s, the spirit, the dancing (and I don't know why I find that girl's planting her leg on the wall behind her so sexy), but I hope that the afterlife includes a few scenes like this. (And I notice that the DVD of this film will be available here next month. )

William Demarest--an appreciation

2007-04-14T02:09:00.000-05:00

I grew up watching a lot of sappy versions of American family life on television, including the mildly depressing My Three Sons, starring Fred MacMurray, who was always better as a heel than a good guy (as Billy Wilder proved in Double Indemnity and The Apartment and MacMurray revealed in The Caine Mutiny). When William Frawley's alcoholism caught up with him, he was replaced on the show as the old mother-figure (it's hard to guess what was on the scriptwriters' minds by having the father a widower and an older man playing the mother-hen role) by William Demarest as Uncle Charley, who to me was just a scolding voice bleating out under a particularly bad toupee.

And I didn't know it, but in doing so I wronged an actor who turned in at least two immortal performances--in Hail, The Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek--as part of Preston Sturges's stock company. In those pictures he became the voice of demotic public wisdom. In the former, he played Sgt. Heppelfinger, who comes up with the idea of turning the 4-F Woodrow Truesmith into a returning hero, and then saves him when the truth inevitably emerges. In the latter, he plays a befuddled widower whose elder daughter has become preganant without proof of marriage, and whose younger daughter, it's hinted, will prove even more of a challenge to public morality. In both pictures he delivers Sturges's acerbic dialogue with impeccable timing, in a flat voice that manages to echo both the urban and small-town banter of the time. He is also a suprisingly adept physical comedian, as shown in Morgan's Creek, when he pulls a stunt I have only once witnessed in real life, when my mother tried to deliver a kick in the pants to myself and my sister--with the same ineffectual, but painful, results for the kicker.

Uncle Charley, I hardly knew ye.

Preston Sturges and "French" phones

2007-04-08T21:07:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine and I have been investigating when the use of the French phone became widespread in North America. In the so-called "French" phone, the earpiece and mouthpiece are in one unit, unlike the older phone, in which the receiver was a bell-like piece that was held to the ear, while the mouthpiece was separate--either mounted to the wall or on a column connected to the dial.

A nice DVD set that recently came out is Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection, which contains seven of his best comedies (all except the wonderful Miracle of Morgan's Creek, in which William Demarest plays Officer Kockenlocker and Betty Hutton his daughter, who is impregnated by a soldier leaving for the war whose name she can only remember as Ignatz Ratzkywatzky--because of the Production Code, she claims she got married at a justice of the peace, but cannot remember where, not because she was drunk, but had hit her head on a mirror ball while being vigorously elevated during some boogie-woogie). Because of its time period, this set seemed a perfect sample in which to investigate the extent to which French phones had become a part of American life.

The Great McGinty (1940). Brian Donlevy plays a bum who is gradually elevated to political high office by a crooked boss, but he becomes honest, all through--I can see you've guessed it--the love of a woman. Better than it sounds. Supposedly Sturges, a Paramount scriptwriter, offered the script for $1 if Paramount would let him direct it too. Phones: almost all two-piece, particularly in the boss's office. However, that scene is a flashback.

Christmas in July (1940). Dick Powell thinks he has won a slogan contest, but he really hasn't--some fellow workers decide to fool him. A satire on advertising, American business, and creativity. Contains ALL French phones, including the office of the coffee company for which Powell works as a comptometer operator in a warren of desks, each of which has its own French phone.

The Lady Eve (1941). Henry Fonda plays a beer-company heir who meets a father-and-daughter team of cardsharps (Charles Coburn and Claudette Colbert) on a ship; after he spurns her, she gets her revenge on him: much, much better than the plot summary indicates--as are all these films. No phones on ship, but back at Fonda's estate, all are French phones. Could be the result of the upper class being represented. Maybe.

Sullivan's Travels (1941). Sturges's masterpiece. Joel McCrea plays John L. Sullivan, a Hollywood director of comedies, who wants to make a socially relevant movie about the poor, etc., based on the mythical bestseller O Brother, Where Art Thou (a later shot of the dust jacket shows it was written by famous author "Sinclair Bechstein"). Sully goes a-tramping, and all the phones--even the radio phone in the "land yacht" (read RV camper) that follows him around--are French phones, EXCEPT the pay phone in the morgue.

The Palm Beach Story (1942). Inventor Joel McCrea's failures cause his wife Claudette Colbert to leave him and marry a rich man so her new husband will support his invention. (Unfortunately, his most recent idea is an airport suspended in the middle of a large city--some Sturges scholar must have commented by now on what this makes viewers feel like after 9/11.) Colbert goes to Palm Beach, city of easy divorces, and meets Rudy Vallee, who plays John D. Hackensacker (read Rockefeller) III, The Erl King. This movie has one of the most elaborate hanging clauses I've ever seen. (A hanging clause is something that is mentioned or shown early on in a movie, its significance only explained much later.) Only a couple of phones, both at the beginning, and even though that scene takes place in 1937, they are French phones--but it is supposed to be a ritzy area (the couple lives on Park Avenue).

The Great Moment (1942). The story of the invention of anesthesia, the picture takes place during the mid-nineteenth century, so no phones at all. Probably contains the first seeds of Sturges's creative downfall, but those were hidden by the magnificent

Hail the Conquering Hero (1943). Eddie Bracken plays Woodrow Truesmith, son of a WWI Marine hero, who is discharged from the Marines after one month for hay fever. Six Marines whom he meets convince him to go home and pretend he was not discharged, with predictable--and unpredicatble--complications. A neglected masterpiece, with wonderful performances from the Sturges stock company, particularly William Demarest; perfectly pitched dialogue, in terms of characterization and class; little touches that show Sturges was a superb visual director; and every bit of its sentimentalism earned. Phones: French in the mayor's office, but wall-mounted speakers with bell-receivers in the pay phones and in the lower-middle-class Truesmith home.

So--what's the verdict on phones? I'm leaning to the conclusion that the use of the French phone is a function of class in these Paramount movies, but not convinced. At any rate, I have plenty of other collections to investigate from the same period, although perhaps the Tarzan collection is not going to help out much--except for Tarzan in Manhattan, perhaps.

The verdict on Sturges: a great director who shows his mastery in scenes like one from Hail, The Conquering Hero in which Ella Raines and her fiance talk about their proposed marriage while walking three or four blocks in a single sustained tracking shot, hitting their marks perfectly (as do the citizens around them) in a variety of lighting conditions, while delivering their lines faultlessly and believably. Sturges is also that rare director of the period who can depict characters expressing physical desire for each other both verbally and physically within the constraints of the Production Code (Fonda and Stanwyck, McCrea and Colbert).

Too bad that for Sturges, as with other American geniuses, there were no third and fourth acts.

Novel Dreams

2007-04-06T22:25:00.000-05:00

Another weird tendency I have noted in my dreams: if I happen to fall asleep for an early evening nap, I often dream that I am writing a novel. Once it was a mystery story. Tonight it evolved into the story of two baseball-playing friends during the Depression. It is both a dream, as I experience the story, and a story, as I write the sentences to describe it--and generally, I am very satisfied with the words I come up with (something I have had to spend decades learning in real life: not to let my internal critic inhibit me from writing anything.)

It's weird because I have little or no urge in waking life to write fiction. But it must be there, because I can almost taste the desire, the necessity of writing the novel, as I do it: the sense of satisfaction, of joy, of doing good work, is unmatched in what I can remember from other dreams.

"Very strange."

Postscript: combining my thoughts on dreams in a previous entry and the recent Orwell piece, I suppose if I had written Nineteen Eighty-Four I would have said,

"Winston woke with the word 'Devine' on his lips."

George and Me

2007-04-05T20:09:00.000-05:00

George Orwell and I have a complicated relationship--all on my part, of course. Because of the enthusiasm of his early admirers, his reputation has been relentlessly torn down even as it was being built up. Recently, claims have been made that he raped an early girlfriend of his, Jacintha Buddicom, despite her writing a loving memoir of their growing up together, Eric and Me. Orwell's alleged use of Burmese prostitutes during his time in the Indian Police there is also said to have been his attempt to fulfill his fantasies with the diminutive Jacintha. The witnesses are all dead, in either case.

Orwell still passes for me the crucial test of being almost infinitely rereadable--the litmus test that I tell students should be their chief means of selecting a major research subject. If you eventually tire of your subject's style, it will affect your analysis--and/or your mental health. I am slowly working my way through Peter Davison's monumental edition of Orwell's writings, and I still do not cringe at his wild over-generalizations, his flip-flops on issues, his about-faces that have been never fully explained. (Bonus question: Reconcile Orwell's linguistic strictures in "Politics and the English Language" and in "The Principles of Newspeak" in Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

At any rate, two sentences sum up Orwell's appeal for me. The first is a sentence from his seminal essay, "Why I Write" (why, indeed, do any of us?). The essay as a whole is an attempt to come up with a dispassionate anaylsis of why some people feel the need to write. Near the essay's conclusion he comes close to his own credo:

"I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information."

Notice the qualification: "completely to abandon" (and the unsplit infinitive). Solid objects? "How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?" And scraps of useless information. Decades before the concept was imagined, Orwell had his own blog, "As I Please," his column in Tribune, where he was able to discuss, for example, the derivation of the word "jackboot," metal railings around squares in London, or a bound volume of The Quarterly Review for the year 1810.

The second quotation is from his last major essay, "Reflections on Gandhi":

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push ascetism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon individual humans."

Or upon those creatures with whom we inhabit the earth on our journey upon it.

"To be defeated and broken up by life..." Yes. That sums it up nicely.

Reading for Fun--Finally

2007-04-05T00:44:00.000-05:00

It looks like that after this month, I will actually get to read some books just because I want to again: nothing for work, nothing for writing projects--just reading for the simple joy of reading. Here's a few works I'm waiting to sink my mental teeth into and masticate and savor:

Mountolive and Clea--the third and fourth volumes of Lawrence Durrell's "space/time" series, The Alexandria Quartet, which I initially read several times more than thirty years ago, and the first two volumes of which I reread recently, but have been unable to get back to. Definitely a young person's work, but still wonderfully readable, magnificent in its evocation of place. Maybe I will finally get through Durrell's The Avignon Quintet as well.

Swann's Way. Marcel, here I come again.

Rising Up and Rising Down--the shorter version--by William Vollman. Recommended by a friend whose taste I trust, and who has discussed the longer version in enough detail so that I am pretty sure I will not be disappointed.

A Winter's Tale. Every summer I try and get though one Shakespearean play I have not read, and the late romances (save The Tempest) are a far range of mountains I have put off until now.

The U. S. A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos. Because it's there.

And a pinch of Pynchon (although he generally comes in 50 lb. bags).

That should keep me occupied.

Two Countdowns

2007-04-01T16:15:00.000-05:00

Two groups of fans are undergoing countdowns to publishing day, I noticed recently. The first, and probably much the larger, are awaiting the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This week the publishers also released the cover art for the book, and both jackets (American and British) are undergoing exegesis worthy of that applied by medieval clergy to the Revelation of St. John. In general, I like the Harry Potter books, and like even more their power to get children to read, and read beyond their level, and thankfully J. K. Rowling has not succumbed to Jordanitis--the temptation to milk a cash cow by breeding them ad infinitum.

The other countdown--and this one I was more surprised about--is for the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin, Christopher Tolkien's contruction, out of a variety of his father's material, of the saga of Turin Turambar, a human hero of the First Age of Middle Earth. Some Tolkine sites and newsgroups have indulged in speculation on the work, since its table of contents has been released, but nothing on the scale of Potterian guesswork.

I await both works with the melancholy knowledge that in both cases, the books are probably the last major works from each author (in Rowling's case about Harry Potter), both of whom consistently exemplify Tolkien's reflection that the chief opponents of so-called "escapist" literature are those who would chain the imagination.