Podcast Adulation II

Black Jack Justice
produced by Decoder Ring Theatre

Since I've started taking a longish train commute every day, I've become a rather avid devourer of podcasts. Reading on the train is great too, but on days when I have only gotten a few hours of sleep (far too many days), it's nice to be able to rest my eyes and just listen. Since a large portion of my ride is underground, music sometimes gets swamped (or at least the subtleties of it do, and I like the subtleties) by ambient noises, and rather than enjoy it in a John Cage way, I'd rather listen to some people talking for a while.

Which brings me to radio play podcasts. If you've read here a while, you know I'm a fan of the hard-boiled detective fiction, and it probably won't surprise you to know that I like listening to old radio serials from the 40s and early 50s - Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, et al. Really fun and excellent stuff, and the podcast medium is quite perfectly suited for it.

There are a small number of groups out there performing new radio plays for podcast, but by far my favorite is Black Jack Justice, produced by a Canadian outfit called Decoder Ring Theatre. It's a detective show in 30-minute self-contained episodes, centering around private eye partners named Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon, who investigate the seamy underbelly of midcentury Toronto.

For me, the tone is pitch-perfect. If you've ever heard the later Sam Spade broadcasts done on NBC radio in the 50s, you'll recognize the combination of pulpy action, broad but wry humor, winking self-awareness, and attention to character. I'm impressed with how very few stylistic accomodations need to be made for this format and style to fit contemporary understandings of gender roles, the social contract, etc.

The writing is ridiculously sharp throughout - obviously someone's labor of love - in plot arc, character development, dramatic pacing, and fast-paced witty dialogue. The actors really strike the perfect tenor for this kind of endeavor too, playing it just larger-than-life enough without going into the kind of self-mockery that can ruin enjoyment. Voice acting is a real lost art, and it's great to see it making a comeback in this new medium.

Tremendously entertaining stuff, which you should give a listen to on their website, or get from itunes.

Mainstreaming

I have a daughter in grammar school, which means I have been exposed to the unstoppable pop-cultural juggernaut that is the Disney "High School Musical" franchise. One day, when cultural theorists are dissecting it (and yes, that day will come), I hope they take some time to notice this part of High School Musical 2:

I Don't Dance

It's one of the weaker numbers as far as the music and dancing go, but it's my favorite because of its wonderfully unabashed depiction of a homoerotic seduction. Yes I'm aware that there's the long-standing popular conception that musicals are always "gay," and yes there is a long tradition of thinly-veiled homoeroticism in the American musical (among lots of other kinds of theater), but this is Disney! This is aimed at pre-teens. This is one of the most wildly popular bits of youth culture in the landscape right now.

And it would scarcely be gayer if the jock character were singing "I Don't Have Sex with Dudes" instead.

I have to applaud the producers and writers and everyone involved, because they got about as far as they possibly could get without having two teenage boys kiss on screen (Give them time - maybe they can work it into the next sequel). A young generation is being exposed to some of the dynamics and tropes at play for queer teenagers, and it's all set to a funky beat. Thanks, mighty Disney Corporation!

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
Philip K. Dick, 1960

This was an intriguing read, partly because I really had no idea what to expect. I didn't even look at the jacket copy, just saw the book at the library, picked it up, and started in reading.

I've read a few of Dick's science-fiction novels, and enjoyed them a lot. If you can imagine the author's preoccupations in the more famous sci-fi stuff, but pushed into the framework of an "American realist" novel (like maybe something by Steinbeck?), you'd get a sort of an idea of what's happening. All of his usual manias are there: sexual politics, class- and race-consciousness, anxiety, altered mental states, and most especially that vast paranoia that seems to fold in upon itself.

There are plenty of great scenes in the book, and the characters are more complex than I recall reading in other stuff by Dick. There's also a focus on what it was like to live in West Oakland in the 1950s, slice-of-life stuff that was very immersive and interesting. I have to say that it doesn't all hang together as a novel too well, though. It's essentially a handful of small stories, stitched together in a rather perfunctory way, and the seams really show. There's a bit too much repetition of themes for my taste as well - as if the same idea came up in two short stories, and when the author tried to fuse them into a novel, he couldn't figure out how to alter the storytelling to keep the same phrases and images from cropping up. Or maybe it was done on purpose and it just didn't work for me.

Very interesting, in any case, and I suppose if you are a Philip K. Dick completist or an Oakland historian, it's a must-read.

Get it at Powell's

Spring into Action

Bullitt, 1968
directed by Peter Yates

The Bourne Ultimatum, 2007
directed by Paul Greengrass

For some reason, when the weather starts to warm up as it's doing now in my neck of the woods now, I get a yen to watch action movies. The first two I watched this year were an old favorite and a new effort, and I thought it might be fun to write about both of them together here...

Bullitt is part of the received history of San Francisco in pop culture (like Streets, which I wrote about before), and proof to those of us growing up there that it was an important place where exciting things happened. Narcissistic, yes. The movie certainly revels in its location - lots of outdoor scenes, ambient sound, etc., concentrating on quirky details of architecture and geography.

The plot is run-of-the-mill, but the pacing is tight. The French New Wave influence is obvious - open space in the dialogue, long takes with short bursts of action, a certain amount of stillness in the acting styles, focus on quotidian details amidst the "big plot" elements. By the standards of something like Bourne Ulitmatum, the action scenes and chase scenes are dreadfully slow, but for me they pack a more visceral wallop because of that. This is a movie made in an era when someone (well, a male someone, I suppose) watching was more likely to know what it felt like to take a punch or drive off into a ditch. The filmmaking relies on that a little, I think, in a way more recent movies can't.

The Bourne Ultimatum is likewise a product of its time. Thank goodness we've moved somewhat beyond the 1980s blockbuster action-movie explosion porn of Schwartzenegger, Stallone, and Seagal, who all came across more like cartoons that human beings on screen. I really think that one of the reasons the Bourne movies have worked is that Matt Damon has that baby face, and maintains a confused look throughout, even (and especially) when he's throwing bad guys at each other. He looks like he's out of his depth and just doing the best he can with his special skills under the circumstances - amazing how far just that facial expression can carry the movies.

It goes without saying that the first movie of the three was the best - after all, it was a romance gussied up as an action movie. But I'm talking about Ultimatum here, and its main feature is that the editors worked overtime on it. It's the pop-film equivalent of music by Brian Ferneyough - ridiculously intricate in detail, extremely overwrought, with intensity that never wanes. There's just enough plot to hang some emotions on, so you know why people are shooting at each other, but mostly this is one set-piece after another, beautifully run together.

Oddly, I puzzle over the casting David Strathairn, Joan Allen, and Albert Finney. They are visibly trying to bring texture and profundity to their characters, and good on them I suppose, but I can't help but wonder if the movie would have been better served by moustache-twirling cardboard cut-outs instead. This is one way that the movie is like one by the Three S's I mentioned above - our hero is pretty much a blank slate with a limited moral compass, while the bad guys have complex subtle motives (well, comparitively). If this isn't a microcosm of America in the world today, I don't know what is.

Matt Damon has the potential to become an action-movie "actor" yet - he came close in The Departed, I thought. Meanwhile, Steve McQueen is the epitome of that kind of screen presence for me. In Bullitt, we get large doses of slice-of-life (watching him buy groceries, for crying out loud, and not played for laughs!) that would be out of place in a Bourne movie, and there's a continuity of character from the domestic to the police-procedural which isn't found in your typical Hollywood action movie of recent vintage.

These were fun movies to watch in close proximity to each other once, but I don't think I'll do that again any time soon. Much better when taken separately.

Get Bullitt at Powell's

Get Bourne Ultimatum at Powell's

Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino, 1972

[Editorial note: Ah, feels nice to have huge horrible life-changes out of the way and to be back here blogging again!]


My first Calvino was Cosmicomics, which I essayed for the first time in high school, on my parents' recommendation. I definitely grasped the whimsy and greatness of it, but it wasn't until reading it again for a class in college, and starting to branch out into his other books, that I came to see it as genius-level stuff. It's difficult for me to pick favorites among his works, but Invisible Cities speaks to me in a more personal way, so I often turn to it first when I'm on a Calvino kick.

In a lot of ways, the fact that I could enjoy and appreciate this stuff at fifteen goes to the heart of what makes Calvino so great. His plain but considered prose (well, as far as I can tell in translation), his sense of the fantastic and the absurd, his ecstasy at the power of language and narrative. It's akin to the sense I get from reading fanfiction, or stories written by junior-high students: giddiness over the power and possibility of authorship.

Of course, unlike fanfic authors, Calvino has subtlety in addition to enormity, generosity in addition to sympathy. He has myriad narrative tools at his disposal, and he has a deeply ironic sense of human history and the human condition. Postmodern and playful, but to a purpose.

Narrative doesn't really exist in this book, or not in the usual sense anyway. There are certainly hints of it that tend to spiral back on themselves, and there's a framing conceit of Marco Polo in conversation with Kublai Khan, which does have a momentum and forward-drive to it, but that's a small thing to hang a whole book on. The meat of the work is somewhere around a hundred descriptions of cities, each one or two pages long.

Of course, being astute readers, we know that cities are never just cities. They are maps of the human mind, they are histories of civilizations, and - in Calvino's elegantly reflexive way - they are works of literature. I have a particular attraction to fiction about cities, whether real or imagined, and this may be the best set of observations on urbanity I've read (I'll have to bring this book up again when I get around to writing about China Mieville's novels). Crazily, there's an actual hotel in Spain, the guest rooms of which are modelled after some of the cities described in the book.

The book is put together with the author's usual mania about structural detail - sets of five city-descriptions, with sub-topics in a set rotating order, interspersed with conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The focus on mechanics seems especially apt here, since a book about cities should involve a certain amount of architecture, no?

But the real draw is the imagistic language, the effortless sweeping prose, the way small moments that are rarely more than brief descriptions of setting build into something stirring, sweeping, and fascinating:

"All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."

What can you do but nod your head and breathe deeply when you read that?

Get it at Powell's

The Lady Eve

The Lady Eve
directed by Preston Sturges, 1941

I should say up front that this is the best screwball comedy I've ever seen, and among the top few romances as well. I should also say up front that I have had a crush on Barbara Stanwyck for years, so that may color my opinion somewhat.

I almost don't want to talk too much about this movie, because it's hard to do it justice in words. But yeah like I'd ever shut my mouth about something I liked...

First of all, you've got Henry Fonda who's got the dorky rich boy shtick down, but isn't satisfied to do just that. His character has quirks and depth and realness, and also all the qualities you want in a romantic leading man. (It's amazing how many so-called romances will have lead characters who are pretty despicable and unlovable.) And Stanwyck is just a marvel really - I don't think I could say enough positive things about her. She's absolutely radiant and full of life and like Fonda she seems like such a real person. Well, of course "real" within the ludicrous context posited by a screwball comedy.

As in Sullivan's Travels (reviewed a couple weeks ago here), it's the tone that makes it all work. Unlike in that other movie, the director isn't "playing tricks" with tone here, but keeping us engaged as viewers, sucked into the story. The genius is a matter of making us feel that the people on the screen are reflections of ourselves, that there's a human commonality that connects us.

So in this context, the plot is beautifully wrought, with actual developments that alter the relationships among the characters and further the drama. (Again, how often have you seen films wherein the plot twists are nothing but that - a little obstacle to make sure it doesn't peak too soon?) A great second act and third act, each one stretching the bounds of credulity further, adding new possibilities for dramatic irony, characters study, and just hilarious dialogue.

And anyone could fall in love with Ms. Stanwyck just by watching.

Get it at Powell's

open

I'm feeling rather open, expansive, and generous tonight for some reason. Just in a nice mood I guess, and you know what that means .... yep, some more Whitman (never let it be said that I am full of surprises)

This is the meal quickly set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp'd slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

The is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,
This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
Well I have, for the fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?
Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?
Do I astonish more than they?

This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.


by the way, it took me a minute, and then I double-checked. "venerealee" does mean what you think it should mean.

Get it at Powell's

The Grifters

The Grifters
directed by Steven Frears, 1990

This movie combines a lot of my favorite genre tropes and mixes them up into a great pulpy psychodrama. You got your Jim Thompson story cataloging the dark side of the American Dream as usual. You got your Frears eye for colorful mise-en-scene that makes you feel somehow boxed in and wide-open vulnerable at the same time. And of course you got the kind of acting that just knocks your socks off.

I don't think John Cusack's ever been better - brilliantly cast. Annette Bening is pitch-perfect throughout. And man that Angelica Huston... she is just such a good film actress it's insane. The highest compliment I can pay the other actors in this movie is that they manage to hold their own in the same room as her - her character here has got layers and twists and depths and just wow.

Think I may have to do a little 90s-noir festival for myself ... Red Rock West, Last Seduction, etc. Got any suggestions?

Get it at Powell's

Sullivan's Travels

Sullivan's Travels
directed by Preston Sturges, 1941

For some reason I had never seen this movie before, and wow. What a lovely piece of work it is, enjoyable on so many levels. I think that the most amazing achievement is the fine control of tone throughout ... really I should watch it again, because it seems impossible that it was all handled so masterfully. The movie manages to be all post-modernly self-referential, but without using our current technique of snarky "look at me" humor to cover up its anxiety.

This is definitely a movie that's nervous about itself, refreshingly so. And just so entertaining. I laughed so hard over and over. It even manages to have to have African American characters two steps above the expected uber-cringey brain-freezing stereotypes. Great performances from Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, and a huge cast of spot-on character actors. I'd really like to watch this one a second time right away, and preferably on the big screen.

[Side Note: the Pynchon reading continues apace. Loving it so far!]

Get it at Powell's

Warriors, come out to play-ay!

The Warriors
directed by Walter Hill, 1979

Watching this movie was a long-delayed fulfillment of an adolescent desire. When I was in junior high and high school, the movie played on late-night tv constantly. All the cool kids were allowed to stay up to watch it, and it was a sort of generational touchstone - catch phrases and worldviews came out of it which I absorbed somehow not ever having experienced the film myself. I'm happy to say that I watched it for the first time the other day, and it was pretty much what I expected it to be a couple decades ago.

This is an exploitation movie, plain and simple. It shows a New York City overrun by multicultural teenage gangs, the sort of representation that sank so deeply into the public consciousness that it got Giuliani elected mayor years later. Of course, most voters didn't envision the sartorial splendor of these hoodlums...

Yes, one of the most memorable parts of the movie is the costume department's conceit of having each of the many rival gangs dress up in different matching outfits. Each more ludicrous and more impractical than the last. It reaches a dizzying apex with the group of thugs who where Yankees uniforms and clown make-up.

Then again, there's no particular desire to remain grounded in realism here. Ibsen this ain't. What this is: male teenage anxieties writ unwieldly large. No wonder everyone in high school couldn't stop talking about it. I'm actually kind of glad I saw it as a (slightly) mature adult - for one thing I can see the misogyny for the cartoonish fear-exploitation that it is.

The most entertaining aspect of the film for me was the decision to show a New York in which adults don't exist. The gang members in the movie roam freely over a landscape nearly devoid of grown-ups. Those that do show up are shown in very brief glimpses, often faceless. They are obstacles to be avoided like subway turnstiles. At no time is there a sense that these kids are part of the community around them - that there's a human being driving the subway train that they wreck, that the driver might be the uncle of one of them. There are no obvious reasons why these kids would be in gangs in the first place, even. It's taken for granted that if you are in the right age bracket and live in the five boroughs, you will join the local gang.

This feeds on the paranoia of us older adults (that youth are on a rampage, and worse: that we are irrelevant). And it feeds on the paranoia of teenagers (that the world is dauntingly big, and worse: that they have power within it) at the same time. On that level, it's quite an achievement. Of course, none of that really amounts to anything in the end, except a general mood of fear and anxiety.

Fun piece of film, when you're feeling like something silly.

Get it at Powell's

Spenser

Hundred-Dollar Baby
Robert B. Parker, 2006

So as a pause in the middle of the Pynchon, I buzzed through this recent installation of the Spenser mystery series. I was hooked on these books for a little while when living in Japan - the writing style is so breezy you can finish a 250-page book in a couple hours standing up in the English-language section of the bookstore, and thereby avoid paying the price they'd charge for foreign books.

These novels follow in the pulp tradition in that the prose snaps, the structures are formulaic, there's a cast of recurring characters, there are just enough twists to keep each novel fresh, and you pretty much always know what you're getting into when you plunk down your $6.99. Spenser is a relatively likeable character, and you can always count on some witty dialogue (as well as some precious dialogue and some forced dialogue).

Parker seems interested in infusing the hardboiled detective novel form with a social conscience, and he seems to have found a formula that manages to get his points across with a minimum of clunkiness. In the earliest books, the prose style was dense, the plotting often intricate, and the big social/psychological ideas sometimes tackled obliquely. But he hit a stride at some point - the writing is loose and bright, the plots zip through their required turns, and the "issues" are spoken about bluntly when they need to be, and folded into the drama when they can be.

I'd say that Hundred-Dollar Baby is a middling entry in the series of books. A fun easy read that engages your higher faculties just enough so you don't feel like you wasted your time. It's a puff pastry, but with some tasty summer fruits on top. Definitely worth some of your attention.

get it at Powell's

Duck Soup

Duck Soup
directed by Leo McCary, 1933

I think I may make my way through a few of my favorite Marx Brothers movies, and I started with this one, which has to be one of the best political films ever. And I don't think I can do better than to just type out a few of my favorite lines here (excuse my poor memory if these aren't exact - I know there's no excuse in the internet age, but part of this blogging deal is that I want to write about things as I remember them). It's good to have a nice bracing dose of wordplay and semi-absurdity now and then.


- I suggest we sentence him to ten years at Leavenworth or eleven years at Twelveworth
- How about I take five to ten at Woolworth's?



- Why weren't the indictment papers placed in my portfolio?
- Well, I didn't think them important at this time, your excellency
- Not important? Do you realize I had my dessert wrapped in those papers?



- I am willing to do anything to prevent going to war
- Too late, I already put down a month's deposit on the battlefield



- What's a matter with you? Do you want to be a public nuisance?
- Sure! How much does the job pay?



- Here's the report sir. I hope you'll find it clear.
- Clear? Why, a four-year old child could understand this report. [aside] Quick, find me a four-year-old child. I can't make heads or tails of it.



- I'll have you know I danced before Napoleon! No, Napoleon danced before me. About 200 years before me, as a matter of fact.

Get it at Powell's

The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep
directed by Howard Hawks, 1946

[Side note: I've recently started the new Pynchon, Against the Day, which weighs in at close to 1100 pages. Most of my posts while I make my way through this behemoth will be of movies or the kinds of short things I read when I need a break from a long dense work]

I do enjoy this movie a lot. Probably not the very best Bogart-Bacall pairing, but definitely a good one. You've got your Faulkner-enhanced dialogue, your Hawks mis-en-scene and pacing, and you've got really excellent performances throughout. The changes made from the book used to bug me a little, but watching it this time, I found the injection of hollywood romance and other stuff more charming than distracting.

I've never been a fan of the odd and adolescent practice of having every woman who shares a sidewalk with the sleuthing protagonist throw herself at him. For the most part, it just makes me snort and roll my eyes. (That said, I wouldn't have minded if Dorothy Malone had wanted to close up her bookshop to share a drink with me on a rainy day ... and I wouldn't have asked her to remove her glasses either, but that's just me.)

It struck me on this viewing that Lauren Bacall is really the heart of the movie, and that she brings a depth and steely power to the role that it probably doesn't deserve. The character as scripted ranges wildly, is largely self-contradictory, and yet in the whole mess somehow seems real. And more than that, seems like an archetype of human experience. Well, maybe "archetype" is too big a word - how about she is a model of a certain way of living, personal and specific in time, place, and class, but somehow in the larger-than-life film she's just one more person trying to keep the frayed and tangled ends of her life in order. And like all of us, she deludes herself and others, finds both prosaic and creative methods of making sense of things, gets lost in the snarl of power relationships, and forges both smart and stupid human bonds.

Oh, and she sings too.

Get it at Powell's

More on Huck Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, 1885

Finally finished this wonderful book, and I'm so glad I took the time to read it again. I'm more than a little bit in awe of it, to tell you the truth - there's a greatness in it that I never really touched before. I suppose it's testament to the novel's depth that I could read it in high school, enjoy it, get a lot out of it, understand its "classic" status, but never see what makes it a singular work of literary art. You never read the same book twice, I guess.

Twain really swings for the fences here, trying to encompass as much of American society (and Western civilization generally) as he can possibly fit into a picaresque boy's-adventure book of less than 300 pages. It seems somehow essential that the smallish, personal story, told in what's more-or-less a popular style, is what's brought to bear on these huge issues of politics, philosophy, and morality. There's a hopefulness implicit in it.

The thing that strikes me hard this time through the novel is that Twain just never lets you off easy. That's not to say that the book isnt' easy to read - it rolls along quite breezily, and is damn funny to boot. No the "ease" I'm talking about is a moral ease. Time and again, the author sets up a moral quandary in story form that seems it should be a parable, then layers of complexity get heaped on, and multiple veiwpoints onto the issue are opened. Soon the plot has moved along, before a resolution is reached, and the situation has morphed into something new, with a newly updated problems. Sympathetic characters become monsters and vice-versa. This is "democratic" fiction, wherein everyone gets a say and everyone is capable of both brilliance and folly.

In this light, Huck is a genuine hero. He navigates this moral landscape like he navigates the river: relying on experience, taking stock of changes, having self-confidence, learning from mistakes. If it's been more than a few years since you've read it, go grab a copy and read it again. It's really quite intimidatingly great.

Get it at Powell's

fun youtube mashup

So I enjoy youtube as much as the next person, but I'm not an addict or anything. And I surely wouldn't post this link unless it was stunningly awesome and spoke to me in a deep way:

Sesame Street/Do the Right Thing

Iconic Spike Lee movie - check
Slammin PE soundtrack - check
Muppets! - check
Animation geekery - check
Wonderfully dorky sense of humor - double check

I swear that while watching it, I kept thinking "didn't I just dream this?"

New York State of Mind

Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman, 1892

I was in New York a few weeks ago, and I didn't realize how much I've missed the teeming hugeness of it, and the way there are always 100 different scales of interaction happening in parallel. Good ol' Walt understood that too (of course):

City of orgies, walks and joys,
City whom that I have lived and snug in your midst will one day make you illustrious,
Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus, your spectacles, repay me,
Not the interminable rows of your houses, nor the ships at the wharves,
Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows with goods in them,
Nor to converse with learn'd persons, or bear my share in the soiree or feast;
Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love,
Offering response to my own -- these repay me,
Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.

get it at Powell's

Some Huck Finn reflections

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, 1885

I'm about halfway through Huck Finn, and it's far more wonderful than I remember. Probably just because I'm older and have more appreciation for its beauty and vigor that I did when I was 17 or when I was 25. I used to take for granted that everyone was right when they said it was such a great novel, and of course it's an easy book to enjoy, but until now I don't think I really understood its genius. And I've read a lot more literature from the rest of the world now, so I get what makes it so richly American too.

- Those rapturous lyrical passages about the riverscape that just make me want to weep sometimes.

- The ten thousand layers of conflict, basically an attempt to encompass human civilization, so deftly tucked into a personal narrative.

- The loose, base, unfettered spoken language, jangling off the page.

- Characters that can be cartoons when they need to be, and yet never lose their resonance as breathing fellow human beings.

- That ironic humor that cuts so deep and makes you laugh so hard:

"Yes, gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin', exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin' rightful King of France."

Say it out loud to really enjoy the poetry of it. At this moment, I can't think of anything funnier or more affecting than that. I'll write more when I finish the book, but man am I glad I'm reading this right now.

get it at Powell's

Austerity

Ghosts
Paul Auster, 1986

I have quite enjoyed everything I've read by Paul Auster, which I'm ashamed to say doesn't amount to much. This short (under 100 pages) novel is the middle installment of a set called the New York Trilogy, and probably my favorite of the three.

There's a lot of great stuff going on in this piece, including a beautiful deconstruction of the postwar ennui-filled private eye genre, a love letter to Brooklyn Heights, and a meditation on 19th century American literature. It's put across in a flat, declarative style, not a single quotation mark, with sentences often in the passive voice, full of odd textural details of setting and state of mind. At points, it reads like it should be an allegory or roman a clef, but if it is, it's one that subverts itself at every turn.

Some of my favorite parts use the detective-story framework to contemplate what literature is in the world, the relationship between author and audience, the reflexive nature of narrative, the dual consciousness required in storytelling, and other highfalutin stuff like that. I don't generally have anything against the contemporary popular novel style, wherein any big themes are talked about openly in the prose itself, but it's nice to have something slightly opaque once in a while - good brain exercise, you know.

There's this nice passage, wherein one detective is talking to another about a surveillance job:

Does he know you're watching him or not?

Black turns away, unable to look at Blue anymore, and says with a sudden trembling of voice: Of course he knows. That's the whole point, isn't it? He's got to know, or else nothing makes sense.

Why?

Because he needs me, says Black, still looking away. He needs my eyes looking at him. He needs me to prove he's alive.

There's a certain kind of tragic pithiness in that kind of writing which is far from ordinary. It's as if the psychology and emotion are small, plain things to be pushed around and played with like words on a page. There's treachery, double-crossing, and self-doubt through the book, but on a higher level, there's just a sense of futility about even those elements, which evokes the late-40s milieu better than anything else. Thoreau, Hawthorne, and especially (hilariously) Whitman are presented as models for a human optimism and spirit of connectedness that seems almost farcical in the context of the world the characters inhabit.

I don't want to make it sound like a depressing book either. If anything, it's magical in the way it shows a path from being a ghost to being fully human. All crammed into 90-odd pages with time for costume changes, pulp-culture ruminations, and Jackie Robinson. This is one to read over and over.

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Invisible Monsters

Invisible Monsters
Chuck Palahniuk, 1999

So this was an interesting read, by turns frustrating and insightful. It's my first exposure to Palahniuk (best known for having written Fight Club), and there were enough interesting ideas and well-written passages to get me to try another book another day.

At first I thought he was leaning too heavily on the "shock value" of body modification as a metaphor, but that smoothed out after a while. What didn't ever get easier to take were the couple of verbal/rhetorical devices that pervade the novel from start to finish. One of these - the use of the phrase "Jump to" at every change of setting - would have been mildly annoying but forgivable in a shorter novel, but in a 300-pager it's just tedious. Yes, I get that it fits with the overarching themes of the book, but come on.

On another dynamic level, Palahniuk quite effortlessly sets up a very unreliable narrator, whom I trusted less and less as the story progressed. It was really quite masterfully done, until the last 30-40 pages, when the whole thing explodes, all doubts are removed, and it felt like I was getting an authorial pie in the face. Again, I get it, but it comes across as trickery for the sake of trickery.

There are a few other gimmicks and structures like this, and their use reminds me of the aesthetic of some of the so-called minimalist composers. There's a certain ideal of obviousness - a feeling that the audience should always be in on the artist's tricks. Nothing wrong with this at all of course, but I have a harder time adjusting to the idea in a novel than in music, for some reason.

Of course this is also part of the point, I think. As readers, we're supposed to feel uncomfortable and know precisely why. Within the world of the text, personalities are disconnected things, made up of isolated cells which can be shuffled and reshuffled. Any sense of richness, unity, or complexity of mind is an illusion. A depressing concept to be sure, and one that rings just true enough to be highly disconcerting.

So there's quite a lot to like about the book, a lot of risks were taken, and it certainly got me thinking (which is more than a lot of books do for me). Maybe rough around the edges, but certainly a worthwhile read.

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Streets

The Streets of San Francisco
A Quinn Martin Production, 1972-1979

Well I've been slowly making my way through the discs of Streets of San Francisco TV show that they just brought out on DVD. Before I get started on talking about it, I first want to say that I really enjoy the whole concept of renting TV shows a few episodes at a time like this, and even owning a boxed set of a show that you really like. I don't watch that much television because I don't find much to my liking on most of the time, so getting discs of a show I know I enjoy every time can come in handy when I want to be audiovisually anaesthetized for a while. Sometimes I'm just in the mood for a certain kind of entertainment, and these DVD sets are a great way to get a quick fix. Yes I know I should want to read Paradise Lost, but sometimes I'd rather enjoy some Alias.

Anyhow, Streets is definitely one of those shows I can nearly always get into the mood for. I grew up on the reruns in the late 70s and early 80s, and being born and raised in the town of the title, it always had a special resonance. I love the cop-buddy stuff between the costars, the exploitation of counterculture, the outrageous 70s clothes and hair, the drool-worthy glam shots of the city itself, the pretentiousness of its division into acts and usually an epilog (no "epilogue" for this hard-hitting cop show, no sir! we ain't Shakespeare! We're, like, maybe Eugene O'Neill or something). Despite itself, perhaps due to the straightforwardly generous Karlmaldentastic acting, there's a genuinely positive "healing the wounds of the 60s" vibe that's pretty addictive at times.

And the theme song.... in a class by itself. So perfect it almost makes my teeth hurt.

One of the best games to play, if you know the layout of SF pretty well, is to watch the car chases, and see how they turn a corner and end up five miles away in the next shot. Always fun to wait for the moment when Michael Douglas has to jump too - I swear he jumps over something or onto someone in every episode. There's definitely a good drinking game in there.

And if the plot ever starts to flag, there's always listening to the incidental music, which is enjoyable all by itself. What an entertaining show - enjoy it some evening instead of "When Gray's Desperate Apprentices Attack" or whatever.

Get it at Powell's