Rodney Welch: The Blog

The Quotable Ebert

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

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

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

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

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

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

Office Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from Shattuck:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A small note regarding The Decemberists

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

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

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

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

Jim DeRogatis is a little obsessed with it.

But Would You Read It Again?

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

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

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

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

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

Maile Meloy

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

I review her latest.

Grey Villet on the NYT Lens Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, the Married Men...

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- "The Married Men," The Roches

Pynchon Lite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revel in it here.

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

Rocking in Oblivion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I'm just getting older

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Less Than Wonderful Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nickelodeon Story

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

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

Books, we get books...

2009-07-17T14:33:00.003-04:00

Today, Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and William T. Vollman's Imperial, both scheduled for early August release dates, arrived in the mail, as did a colorful graphic novel of Fahrenheit 451.

The first one looks like a beachy crime thriller, a detective story, a, ahem, quick read ... a thought I should no doubt banish immediately. If my past experience (a little over half my life) with reading Pynchon tells me anything it's that everything is far more complex (not to mention more sinister) than it looks. I liked his mammoth last book, Against the Day, a multi-story chronicle set in the early 20th Century in which characters from around the globe are trying to wake from the nightmare of history, the history that is bearing down on them; they wage real and surreal battles with destiny. Some try to step out of time, and a few hardy characters actually try to get out of the book.

It's a work of genius and I've never found a simple way to talk about it.

I know nothing about Vollmann except that every book he writes is a cinderblock, and so is the new one. I have one of his books, Europe Central, and I checked out a pile of them from the library the other day. Why? I don't know. Maybe I figured staring at them would get me in the mood. I do kind of like big novels, they tend to be more involving than the average-sized book, and I suppose I should catch up on what Vollmann is all about, but that would take a year. Imperial is very long, so long that I don't want to let it linger.

Lumpy Epic

2009-07-15T15:36:00.006-04:00

Stay awake! Or I'll SHOOT!

No surprise to learn that Steven Soderberg's two-part Che, which costs $61 million to make, has to date earned an embarrassing $1.7 million at the box office.

I saw it back in March and was woefully unimpressed.

Some thoughts I never got around to posting:

I'm sure if I cared enough to pursue it I could find out just what possessed Steven Soderberg to make not one film about the late revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, but two. A four-hour film -- normally shown in two parts, as it has been over the past week at the Nickelodeon -- is nothing if not an act of ambition, presumably from a film artist with a lot to say and the clout to say it at considerable length. Soderberg is an unquestionably talented filmmaker, and the trademark hand-held camera work we always associate with him is on considerable display, but this is a dull, plodding, torpid, oddly inert and passionless film; it feels somewhat dutiful and educational and the one movie that kept coming to mind was Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, except that was a lot better.

Soderberg seems to have had a real problem knowing just what his film is about. I got the feeling he had no particular sense of Che, that he wasn't sure whether to take the objective approach or the wide-eyed hero-worshipping adulatory one and he wound up settling for both. Benicio del Toro certainly looks the part of the title character, and I don't doubt he seized the role with passion, but the script never turns him loose.

The first part, which tells the story of Che's adult life and political awakening and activity, is bookish and undramatic. The second part, which focuses on Che's campaign in Bolivia, is unendurable, illustrating the sheer difficulty of finding the drama in a long, drawn-out guerrilla campaign. It amounts to little more than two hours of people moving from bush to bush.

Short version Cheever

2009-07-15T13:23:00.001-04:00

From this week's Free-Times.

A Few Words About A Band I Don't Really Get

2009-07-14T23:32:00.011-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I bought two albums by a band named Grizzly Bear, a group about which I knew absolutely nothing except that a lot of people liked them. I'm not in love with them. I don't find myself singing along. They're not what I would call melodic, generally, and despite the name they are most definitely not funky or raucous or loud or brazen. In fact, more than a few times, listening to their swirling, dizzying, arty, somewhat narcoleptic rhythms, I found myself wanting to hear James Brown talk about his licking stick or the Louvin Brothers sing about Jesus.

And yet, I do find myself listening to them repeatedly, for no other reason than somewhere in their aural haze there's something indefinably weird and interesting going on.

The earlier of the two albums is titled Yellow House, which I can only describe as an album of ghostly melancholy. The songs are all keyed to a very somber, meditative sort of mood, and while I wouldn't say the songs all sound the same, they do seem to be about the same thing, which is trying to connect with someone who is either about to leave or who is no longer there. "Can't you feel the knife?" one song asks, but there's no anguish or hurt or passion to it. It's like some disembodied observation. Other songs seem to be about searches that end up nowhere or thoughts that can't be expressed. Beyond that, I can't really say what the songs are about, because the lyrics are like broad, occasional brush strokes of words to go with the sweeping, semi-orchestral sounds, the wash of strings and high, sleepy choral harmonies, which is why I'm not bothering to quote them.

The words elliptic and lacunae keep coming to mind.

The music matches well with the beautiful pictures in the sleeve, of empty rooms in an old house. It occurs to me, looking at the Edward Hopper calendar on my wall, that they would similarly match the visual effect of Hopper's wide spaces and lonely, often reflective people.

The band's latest disc, and the one that has gotten so much enormous acclaim, is Veckatimest, "named after a small island in Dukes County, Massachusetts," according to Wikipedia. The themes tend to be the same, these very brittle love songs where couples see the future yawning before them, but the music is more song-oriented, the lyrics don't seem like an afterthought, and it rocks a little harder. Or maybe I should say it rocks a little.

When Everyone Wore a Hat

2009-07-14T16:08:00.006-04:00

Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey. Knopf. 770 pages. $35.00
Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings. The Library of America. 1,040 pages. $35.00
Cheever: Complete Novels. The Library of America. 933 pages. $35.00

In a series of short stories, most of them published in The New Yorker from the 1940s through the 1970s, John Cheever examined the the lives and hopes of American domestic life, postwar commuter class division. They were set in and around the `burbs, where husbands took the train to work, wives stayed home, everybody smoked three packs a day, and everyone got drunk at the Saturday dance at the club. The characters are, generally, residents of the upper middle class who have sacrificed everything for the good life, and then find themselves trapped in it: public successes and private failures, alcoholics, adulterers, people who feel their lives slipping away and who yearn, comically and tragically, for time that is lost for good.

Classic American fiction, but not everyone noticed. Critics made worthless comparisons to Salinger, found Cheever a "toothless Thurber," a "culture-hero to the barbecue and Volkswagen set," or "coy and cloying." New Yorker editor Harold Ross, despite the fact that he published Cheever, wished he would follow the house rules, and stick to the lighter side. ("Goddammit, Cheever, why do you write these fucking gloomy goddamn stories?")

Although the criticisms never really let up, Cheever had the last laugh, or so it seemed. When he died in 1982, he went out on top, thanks to the late career resurgence of his acclaimed novel Falconer and, particularly, the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Stories. With his beaming smile and attractive blazer, the man on the book jacket looked like everyone's favorite uncle, and the books seemed a testament to the longevity of patient craft. He was an old-school tortoise who had calmly beaten out so many strutting post-modernist hares. ("All writing is `experimental,'" he once told a student, the future novelist T.C. Boyle. "Don’t get caught up in fads.")

His fall from grace was swift. No sooner was Cheever buried than his private life came crawling from the ground, in his daughter Susan’s memoirs, Home Before Dark and Treetops, Scott Donaldson’s erratic but revealing biography, and the author’s own graphic-to-the-point-of-repulsive letters and excerpted journals. Cheever went from being an elegant scribe of the torments and hypocrisies of grasping American life to a glaring symbol of it: a raging alcoholic, closeted bisexual and, like so many of his characters, a man who tried and failed to negotiate some balance between his public and private selves. In the 1990s, he even became a punch-line on "Seinfeld" leaving the world to wonder if that was his final legacy.

Does anyone read John Cheever anymore?

These two beautiful new volumes from the Library of America, published in concert with Blake Bailey's long-awaited biography, make an excellent case for this fucking gloomy goddamn writer of stories. Cheever, who yearned for success as a novelist above all, said a novel was "massive, longlived" while a short story "has the life expectancy of a mayfly." The exact opposite is true in his case. The short story was his true means of expression; a point only reinforced by such novels as the engaging but episodic The Wapshot Chronicle or the beautiful but incomprehensible Bullet Park.

The stories are miraculously old and new. They’re set, as the author himself once noted, in a "long lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat." Despite that, there’s a freshness to them; from the ones that work brilliantly to ones that don’t work at all, Cheever’s always trying to tell a story a new way, adopting an odd or sometimes deceptive perspective, or taking a startling approach.

Take for example, the first entry in Collected Stories, "Goodbye, My Brother," one of Cheever's earliest masterpieces (although not as early as it's placement suggests; Bailey points out that Cheever and editor Robert Giroux rigged the chronology to make it appear Cheever blossomed before he actually did.)

Set in a familiar Cheever environment, a semi-annual family reunion at a waterfront family home, it's a story about one man's struggle with his wet blanket younger brother, who won't participate in family activities, regards everyone with chilly contempt and may be something of a manic-depressive.

That, however, is just the surface, which Cheever thickens considerably, by giving us an unnamed narrator we're inclined to like, much as we are someone like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, with whom he bears a resemblance. Both have the kind of mature skepticism toward privilege and family honor that suggests he's playing straight with us.

He is a Pommeroy, he says, and "while we are not a distinguished family, we enjoy the illusion, when we are together, that we are unique." They aren't unique, he continues, but they are loyal.

It's this sense of loyalty that Lawrence, his younger brother, seems to threaten, not because he's the bad guy but because the narrator simply keeps insisting he is. He's a projection of the narrator's worst fears, and a near constant reminder of what all he doesn't want to face.

Cheever's best stories compress whole lives and worlds into a few pages, such as "The Five Forty-Eight," where we get an acute picture both of an odious employer, who will be forced at gunpoint to pay for his sins, as well as the urban life which has squeezed out his humanity. Another sterling example, wit an opposite environment, is "The Country Husband," whose title character is a family man suffering both from the onset of middle-age and the claustrophobic mores of his community. It's the texture of his very routine neighborhood that Cheever is really after, though; the unusual details as well as the ordinary but funny ones, like the wandering child who never goes home or the dog who steals steaks from outdoor grills, all of which are ultimately woven into a truly magical ending.

Best of all perhaps is "The Swimmer," a real and surreal tale in which a former golden boy swims his way home by way of every pool in the neighborhood. The trip, over the course of a mere 11 pages, takes him through his past and right up to the doorstep, literally, of his disastrous present.

Blake Bailey was given full access to Cheever’s journals, which cover the whole of his writing life. His biography is balanced, judicious, smart, extremely well-written, likely definitive, and sometimes tough to sit through.

On the plus side, they reveal a very hard worker, a man who sought to live entirely by his imagination, and who slaved over his word; even a bad story, in one instance, took nine months.

The biography reveals a man both kind and terribly needy -- for fame, attention, alcohol, and sex -- who stayed soused for most of his life and hit on everyone from his teenage son’s girlfriend to students in his writing classes. There's even a predatory, sex-for-advice relationship with a pathetic, untalented young man that seems to come straight out of a Fassbinder film.

Also, he takes off his clothes at a moment’s notice. (The Index entry, "John Cheever, naked in less than private situations" lists seven references, which seems to be understating the matter.) There are times in his marriage battles when I found myself inclined to take his side against his icy, affectionless wife; then again, any husband who sits at the family dinner table and brags about who he’s screwing probably gets what he deserves.

It must be said that Bailey never aims for sensationalism, that nothing is revealed without a sense of perspective or judiciousness or a duty to the truth, and that he’s a very original reader of Cheever’s fiction. He gives Cheever his full measure, and Cheever, both as writer and exhibitionist, could not have asked for better.

But this is, also, another compelling example that it’s best not to know much about people you admire. Read the biography, but please, read the stories first.

Old age ruined John Updike

2009-07-14T05:36:00.000-04:00

Such is the opinion of Martin Amis, at his absolute crotchetiest in this Guardian review of Updike's last book of stories.

Bob Dylan's Debut

2009-07-13T12:58:00.001-04:00

I walked down there and ended up
In one of them coffee-houses on the block.
Got on the stage to sing and play,
Man there said, "Come back some other day,
You sound like a hillbilly;
We want folk singer here."

--Bob Dylan, "Talkin' New York"

There's something very punk about Bob Dylan's first album, punk in several senses of the word, whether you take that to mean brash upstart or fierce independent, a hillbilly trying to be a folk singer, a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota trying to sound black and poor, or -- what it really comes down to -- a 20-year-old hoping to win over an audience armed with nothing but a guitar, a harmonica and a very strange voice.

I suspect in 1962 it sounded like nothing else, and it still does. It's stark and alive and brazen; Dylan at a microphone, relying on nothing but his own raw vocals and his fierce guitar playing, as if he wanted on this first effort to say this is me, all me, nothing else, and to be judged strictly on that and nothing else.

The songs were well-chosen and varied, allowing his voice to shift between the easy humor of "Talkin' New York" to the raw scrapping defiance of "In My Time of Dyin'" , the low-down mournfulness of "Man of Constant Sorrow" and "House of the Risin' Sun" and the bluesy yowl of "Freight Train Blues." Also, just as this first album was make or break for Dylan, there's something very much life or death about the songs, mostly death. "In My Time of Dyin'", "Fixin' to Die", "Highway 51", "House of the Risin' Sun", "See That My Grave is Kept Clean".

This marked the first time most people had heard Dylan, and what they heard was someone with something to prove, which is that he's part of a great tradition, that he's here to pick up where Woody Guthrie -- soon to be dead from Parkinson's Disease -- left off. From the perspective of 47 years later, it's hard not to believe him.

Today's word...

2009-07-13T12:48:00.004-04:00

is brachiate: "to progress by swinging from hold to hold by the arms." Example Sentence: "Sarah sat on the park bench and watched as her five-year-old son confidently brachiated along the monkey bars."

My guess is that's from a children's book titled "Tommy's Day Out" by John Updike.

Don't read this review!

2009-07-12T19:52:00.004-04:00

The title of this particular blog post was one used many years ago by theater critic Robert Brustein of The New Republic. He was writing about Marsha Norman's great play `Night Mother, which is about suicide, and which is difficult to write about without giving away much of the story, the hook, the surprise.

The same goes for Ramin Bahrani's wonderful and bracingly honest new film Goodbye, Solo, which is like Norman's play in that it never condescends to the viewer by cheating on reality; so if you're one of those who gets all wound up about spoilers, consider this fair warning. It goes where others dare not; it heads down a hard road, and refuses to turn back, or even blink. If you haven't seen it, go to one of the handful of theaters across the country where it is now playing or soon will be. Or wait for the DVD on August 25.

Set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the story involves Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane), a cabbie from Senegal, who picks up a moody passenger, William (Red West, whose face looks like a crumpled road map of hard living). William offers him a mysterious deal: a thousand dollars to take him, at a specified later date, to the North Carolina mountain known as Blowing Rock, where he will likely end it all, or so he implies.

Implication is how William communicates; he keeps quiet, smokes, and says only what he must. Solo, by contrast, can't keep quiet for a minute. He's a good-natured, lively fellow who sings, laughs, jokes, and has a native belief in the importance of family, where people work hard to take care of their children and the children in turn take care of their elders. Surely, he says, William's family will take care of him. He is both ambitious (he is studying to become a flight attendant) and care-free; faithful that troubles will work themselves out. William's offer of easy money troubles him, as he can definitely use the money but doesn't want to be party to a man's self-destruction. Instead, he takes it upon himself to become a Good Samaritan to his new passenger. Over the weeks that follow, Solo (who is trying to hold his own family together) temporarily leaves his pregnant wife to become William's constant driver and usually unwanted companion, even moving in with him in a motel.

Yes, you think you know where it's all going. We've seen this kind of warm-hearted movie a hundred times: youth vs. age, black vs. white, joy vs. sorrow; surely, life will triumph. Weary old William will come to his senses, everything will work out, and he and Solo will become buddies. It's set in the fall; hey, maybe it will end with a Thanksgiving scene.

But Goodbye, Solo is simply not that kind of bird. The triumph of Bahareh Azimi's superbly subtle script is that, in effect, it departs from the script we're used to. It takes a different, perhaps more honest, definitely more original route that not only avoids the easy answer, but respects the mystery of the situation, and it is something of a mystery. Just what is William's problem anyway? We don't really know. We're left to guess a great deal about William, not because the part is underwritten, but because he's a man in the shadows. We suspect, from his cooking skills, that he was probably a chef. We also know there has been a rupture, somewhere, in his domestic life, although we are spared the details; all we know is that in his spare time he is fixated on a young man who is likely his grandson, but who doesn't know William is his grandfather.

We also know, by the steely determination in his eyes, without William ever having to say it, that he knows he must end his life, either as personal punishment or because it is, to him, the only remaining option. He's hard-headed, stubborn, and can be violent when pushed; maybe that also has something to with why he's here looking to end his life, and why no family has come looking for him. We don't know if he's the good guy or not. We don't know if this is a situation that can be fixed.

One of the most refreshing things about this film is that it's set in the middle of nowhere, a nowhere with which I'm somewhat familiar. I have relatives spread out all across that stretch of North Carolina from Winston-Salem to Blowing Rock and into East Tennessee, which I still visit every couple of years. The fog lifting over the Blue Ridge Parkway and the rich fall colors of the trees are sights I know well. I even lived in the area briefly and quite miserably, although it's not necessarily the kind of territory you associate with suicidal depression. Although the film captures the environment, this is a story that could happen anywhere. That's one of it's charms.

Like last year's Ballast, this is one of those tough, smart films that are inspiring much the way Italian Neo-Realist films are. It restores my faith in independent film-making, and it suggests that the best films in America are coming from flyover country.

Ever notice...

2009-07-10T21:13:00.000-04:00

that when certain frustrated readers, either on Amazon or on certain cranky websites like The Second Pass start bashing "canonical" novels, they often wind up not only sounding kind of old, tired, and lazy, but they have the effect of making you want to do the opposite of what they so adamantly insist you not do? Much in the way that Richard Dawkins makes going to church seem like some edgy, dangerous political act, the no doubt well-intentioned folk at The Second Pass make you want to read the very books they hate. In some instances, like The Corrections, they even have more to say in its favor than not. And, on top of that, they quote the ever unreliable B.N. Myers as an authority. Am I the only one getting a distinct whiff of reverse psychology?

On the other hand, I have to admit U.S.A. is a very tough slog.