Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude
directed by Hal Ashby, 1971

Well this was a thoroughly enjoyable movie, with a wicked sense of humor and that particular late-60s/early-70s aura of Significance, tempered with a light touch.

I suppose the big surprise in the film for me is its warm humanism. Judging from what I'd heard about it in the past, I was expecting a lot more heavy-handed morality and a soundtrack of axes being ground. To be sure, there's plenty of that going on, but at its heart this is a story of two idiosyncratic individuals, and it's no small feat that it finds ways to undercut the potential for grandiosity most of the time. Makes sense that the title of the movie is the names of the two characters.

The San Francisco and Bay Area locations are a huge attraction for me as well, of course. In fact, the more I think back on it, the more I think that the setting plays an important role (I can imagine a New York-based version, but it would require a more somber tone, to the detriment of the drama). The director spends a lot of time on the settings, letting the surroundings sink in and inform the scenes: the cold ornateness of the mansion, the artificially sculpted cemetery grounds, the crashing power of the pacific ocean, the cozy warmth of Maude's trailer, etc.

And the all Cat Stevens soundtrack? Well, it kind of reminded me of the zither music in the Third Man, to tell you the truth: sometimes beautifully fitting, sometimes very distracting, all the time energetic and amateurish. Oddly memorable, just like the rest of the movie.

Get it at Powell's

Somewhere in Time

The Time Traveller's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger, 2003

OK, so let's get the bad news out of the way first: this is a very poorly-written novel. The prose is the kind where sometimes you find yourself wincing and feeling embarrassed for the author. Big ideas are largely absent, and the small ideas flare out quickly for the most part. The characters, relationships, evocations of time and place, are all of the kind one might find in a freshman creative writing seminar at a tiny liberal-arts college in the midwest.

Now let's get to what I like about it.

This story is a romance, and when it remembers that it's a romance, it can be excellent. The sci-fi time-travel angle is a natural set-up for exploring the myriad temporal aspects of what love is (how people are bound together over time, the feeling of "fatedness," the sense of flashback and flashforward inherent in long-term relationships, the way love is linked into biology, etc., etc.). Of course, I wanted a lot more of that - that's what makes the book special and gives it unique angles on such ideas - but the glimpses that are there do tantalize.

I'm also intrigued by a couple of the side characters, though that may be because the characters that are dwelt upon for the longest attain a certain drab similarity to each other. The author doesn't seem to want to dwell on the sadness in the minor characters, even when that's their most interesting aspect (every family is miserable in its own unique way, as we know). Perhaps it was the right choice to focus on the two main characters - it is a romance after all, and the book is just the right length as it is.

Reading the book was an interesting experience, because I felt I was reading a "treatment" of the theme of the novel the whole time, instead of a novel. Never full invested in the text itself, I'm sure it's partly my own imagination getting the best of me, but I kept envisioning different directions the story might have taken, different ways ideas might have been developed and investigated. All this, of course, points to just how compelling the germinal idea is.

I read that there will be a movie version, and I will be interested to see another "treatment" of the story in that medium. Meanwhile, I'm happy to have read the book first.

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Multitudinous

This has always been one of my favorite passages in Song of Myself. Something about it is speaking to me today, so I thought I'd share it here. This sense of leaning toward the future and how that emphasizes the potentialities of the present, restless contradictions just part of the whole, and why am I trying to write tepid prose about it when you can just read the lines?


The past and present wilt--I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

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Eat It Up

The Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan, 2006

Well I'd been thinking about reading this one for a while, and when someone was lovely enough to loan the book to me recently, I dug right in.

The book is about food, the food industries, and our relationship to what we eat. Rather than get into the specifics of the topics, though, I want to talk about the author's prose style, tone, and structural choices, which to a large extent carry the book.

If you've read here before, you know that I'm not much of a nonfiction reader (unless it's music-related stuff). This kind of work really makes me rethink my stance on nonfiction, though, because Pollan manages to do things that really good fiction does: talk about what it means to be human, illuminate some of the complex web of societal relationships, imaginatively exemplify ways of being in the world, bring to life modes of thought and emotion.

At its base, this is a work of journalism: a (mostly) first-hand investigative report on the way we eat and the supply-chain that keeps the supermarket shelves stocked. It's also a personal story about the author's education in such matters and his experiences along the way. One aspect of poor nonfiction writing is the use of personal experience as a mere "hook" to make the big dry subject seem human-scaled, or worse, to provide a kind of comic relief from the weightiness of the larger ideas. There is none of that here. On the contrary, Pollan deftly uses his narrative passages as a springboard into reflection and, yes, even philosophy. We are always focused in the true subject matter of the book, just approaching it from different angles.

The author's job is made easier, of course, by the fact that cooking and eating are things we all do daily. The main structural conceit at play here - that Pollan is describing the whole story (personal and political) behind four meals that he eats - provides an opportunity to engage each of his four topics with varying mixtures of memoir, literature survey, first-hand account, conversation, science reportage, interview, recipes, etc. True, a couple of the attempts fall flat (one chapter in which Pollan has an imaginary conversation with the author of a book on vegetarianism struck me as particularly stilted), but even the less-than-stellar passages carry the thread forward. There are rich and cogent arguments being made here, and they have an immediacy to a reader who will eat many meals during the course of reading the book.

And make no mistake that this is a fascinating, multi-layered topic, very worthy of the deep exploration here and then some. It's a breeze to read and full of fun conversation starters, in addition to being impeccably well-written and well-researched. It's made me think twice about everything I have been cooking since the very first chapter.

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Grotesque

Grotesque
Natsuo Kirino, 2003

Someday I will review Kirino's Out on this blog, which was pure brilliance on many levels. Grotesque, which I think is only the second of her novels to be translated into English, isn't quite the dazzling tour de force of the other book, but still has a lot going for it.

As in Out, Kirino here focuses on women's roles in contemporary Japan. She casts a wide net, but particularly investigates the culture of elite private schools and the psychological dynamics of prostitution. Yes, there is certainly a lurid side to these topics, but the treatment isn't particularly exploitative.

In fact, a little more exploitation might have been welcome, in a way. From time to time, characters come across as mere archetypes - stand-ins for ideas like you might find in a morality play. This wouldn't be so distracting in itself, except that it keeps bumping up against the gritty naturalism and twisted psychology that make up the rest of the novel. A recipe for cognitive dissonance that may be an artifact of translation, for all I know.

Kirino is at her best here when using the trappings of the crime story and the desperation of her characters to frame her sociological insights. The nameless narrator whose voice we follow throughout most of the text, is a richly-drawn and highly memorable character - full of human contradictions which reveal themselves bit by bit. Her attempts to make sense out of her own childhood, and the murders of her sister and schoolmate, are riveting.

So many details of place, character, and situation are vividly and poetically drawn, including a mid-book excursion into the lives of illegal Chinese immigrants in Japan, making the work easy to admire and hard to forget. I think it would have benefitted from an astute editor, however. I get the impression that the author was having trouble thinking of a good way to end the book, and at some point decided to pull out the old "this is all really a meditation on the nature of truth" trick. So fragments of the story told from points of view other than the main narrator, which seemed like tools of exposition and characterization when first read, are retroactively elevated to something more metaphysical. It's entirely possible that this was what Kirino had in mind all along, and it was just poorly executed, but to me it came off as a cheap trick, so the drama set into motion wouldn't need to be resolved on its own terms.

Flawed, but full of greatness, I still recommend taking the time to read this one.

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Whitman on Craigslist

I was reading some Walt Whitman last night, as I often do, and this gem struck me as being evocative of personals ads:


Among the men and women, the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else—not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am;
Some are baffled—But that one is not—that one knows me.

Ah, lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections;
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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!]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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