Some Came Running

I am Romina Puga

For the record, I am firmly with Jesse Eisenberg with respect this ridiculous dustup, and I don't think what he did to the fluffy little Romina Puga falls under the category of "berating" at all. I also think Puga's response to it was repellently opportunistic. My advice to any self-described entertainment journalist who does "schtick" is, when in the cattle call situation of the movie-promoting video junket, to give a little heads-up to the publicist or the talent before you start rolling, so the talent at least has the benefit of some knowledge and hence the opportunity to play along if he or she wishes. Eisenberg is clearly caught off-guard by Puga's arguably ostentatiously breezy style right off the bat, and registers more trying-to-regain-balance bemusement than actual hostility for the rest of the encounter. For Puga to try and turn this around and act as if Eisenberg maliciously ripped her a new one is utter bullshit.

And yet. I understand, in a sense, her pain. In spring of last year, I was assigned by my MSN editors to do a round of video junket interviews for 21 Jump Street. I don't consider myself particularly telegenic, and the video junket format isn't my favorite way to conduct interviews. But as Hyman Roth says in The Godfather Part 2, this is the business we've chosen, and as an aging white male ostensible film critic in the twilight of print and all that my feeling is that maybe I ought to take every available opportunity to diversify my skill set and earn income. Although, like I said, in my gut I pretty much know I'll never be an entirely acceptable on-camera presence until I at least get my horribly dingy teeth replaced. And maybe grow some fucking hair.

I enjoyed the movie version of 21 Jump Street, and I was particularly amused by the way it toggled between coarse homoerotic male bonding jokes and relatively sophisticated meta humor. This suggested, in my mind, a question, that I mentally filed away prior to the day of the junket. The actual day of said junket was not an auspicious one, generally speaking. It was a gray and chilly and rainy day in early March, a Saturday at that, and my call to show up at the swanky hotel where the interviews were being staged was nine in the morning. To top all that off, I was starting to get a cold.

Arguably, 21 Jump Street costars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum might have had it a little worse. For their interviews, they dressed in costumes they wear to comic effect in the film, that is, the black shorts worn by police officers who patrol on bicycles. The joke in the movie being, they go through all this training and think they're gonna be totally badass and their first gig out of the academy is bike patrol in a local park. Ar ar ar. So here these two guys are at nine in the morning on a Saturday in silly outfits. Maybe it was their idea. I don't know. I choose, for some reason, to believe that it was not.

Perhaps that reason is their demeanor as I was brought in to begin my interview. In addition to the shorts and clingy shirts, Hill and Tatum wore dark wraparound sunglasses. We exchanged greetings that struck me as extra-perfunctory before I sat down.

As it happens, I'm friendly with both a director and an actor who've worked with Hill in kind of notable contexts, and I'm also on terms with a director with whom Tatum has profitably collaborated. My relations with these other people are arguably not intimate, but they're also on a level higher than that of cordial acquaintance. So I thought about dropping a name or two, if it could get things off on the right foot. And then I thought better of it. Because I didn't want to be that guy. (Even now, I worry that I'm being that guy just by mentioning it. God, no wonder I drank.)

Would that I had. Maybe it would have been worse. Anyway, as we began rolling I asked Hill, "As both a star and producer on this movie, did you keep tabs on the ratio of homoerotic male-bonding jokes to self-reflexive ones?" Or something along those lines. Delivered in what I hoped was my best hail-fellow-well-met jocular tones. And even from behind the shades, I could see Hill's genuinely withering contempt as he answered, "I assume that was some kind of attempt at humor, and I'm going to ignore it and just say I had a great time making the movie."

Now what the viewer is not privy to while watching these manufactured snippets is that each journalist doing these interviews is allotted a very specific time limit, and that time limit doesn't allow for reshoots. And when I say specific, I mean very—two minutes to the second, in some instances. So when my admitedly silly—but then again I mean what the hell, THEY were the guys sitting down in biking shorts—question got that response, my strong burning sense of humiliation mingled with a kind of panic. I had unwittingly wasted maybe thirty seconds of time, which means I had to scramble to get anything usable in my remaining minute and a half with the fellows. Even in the best of situations with these things, in which the talent is genuinely enjoying the exchange and you're actually able to get good stuff, there's a publicist off to the side giving you the throat-cutting sign. And yes, the talent has to sit there for the better part of an entire working day doing the same thing in two-to-five minute patches. How badly do you want to be famous? Badly enough to be cool with doing that? Because maybe you should try it some time.

I couldn't call to restart the session so I just switched to automatic inane innocuous pilot, and salvaged the encounter, but as anyone who looks at the footage will note, nobody involved in the exchange is particularly interested in simulating even a simulation of chumminess. 

Was I angry? Fuck yeah. I was furious. I got up and showered and shaved and dressed and schlepped to Manhattan on a rainy miserable Saturday morning when I could have been sleeping in with My Lovely Wife so I could be insulted by Jonah Hill? Seriously? When the video posted, I put up a blog post here and I alluded to the shutting-down and I remember feeling as if I was being incredibly restrained while so doing. One of the professional associates of Hill with whom I am friendly sent me an e-mail which in effect said, that's too bad. Which it was. And the point is: that's all it was. Too bad. It wasn't the end of the world, it wasn't cause for me to nurse a grudge against Jonah Hill (for all the good that would do). It's just a minor anecdote concerning an interaction that took place in a context that in most respects has very little to do with what constitutes the real world for either Hill and myself. Puga's reaction to the Eisenberg incident only has validity if one accepts the idea that she and Eisenberg have some sort of gnuine relationship to each other. They do not. Similarly, my day-to-day life has nothing to do with Jonah Hill's. All any of this means is that if one wants respect within the context of one's profession, one ought to conduct oneself professionally. That's not a guarantee that respect will be given, but at least it gives you a leg to stand on. Be an entertainmnent journalist, or be Rupert Pupkin. You can't have it both ways. 

And finally, as "Freeman" put it in Bonfire of the Vanities, "be decent to each other." And Romina Puga, buy a goddamn paper notebook or something. 

New avenues in De Niro research: Grace Hightower's coffee

So. I've submitted the manuscript of Anatomy of an Actor: Robert De Niro to the editors at the book publishing arm of Cahiers du Cinema. The book is part of a series (Karina Longworth's consideration of Al Pacino is out soon, and Longworth has started a Tumblr devoted to the book; I might do same myself, or something, when the time is appropriate and I Oh Christ do I have to think about it right now) that's pretty strictly formatted: General introduction, essays on ten films that encompass the whole of the performer's career until now, outro (or "Conclusion"), ten sidebars, and supplemental materials such as biographical chornology, filmography, and footnotes footnotes footnotes. But of course in writing about the ten individual films one does contextualize by discussing other movies, and so in the short time I had to write the book I ended up extremely immersed in the man's work. Thank God for Amazon Instant Video, and by the way, Ivan Passer's Born To Win is actually worth your time if you haven't seen it already. After a little bit I started developing a slight resentment. Then I began to feel like Steve Brody in the Looney Tune Bowery Bugs, at the point when he fails to put two and two together on discovery that all of his tormentors throughout the cartoon have been Bugs Bunny in various disguises. "Everybody's turning into rabbits!" he laments before diving off the Brooklyn Bridge. Substitute "De Niro" for "rabbits" and you get where I was coming from. I won't go into the details of a dream I had in which an appendage...well, as I said, I won't go into the details. 

The book doesn't mention De Niro's personal life all that much, which was good for me given that the two De Niro biographies I worked with were highly problematic anyway; when I started this project I learned that my pal Shawn Levy is working on a proper De Niro bio, and I regret it wasn't available to me as it would have been an excellent resource. (See Shawn's superb bio of Jerry Lewis and you'll understand what I'm saying.) But given the extent to which certain of De Niro's career decisions have been affected by changes in his personal life, and by his increased visibility as a public person, and so on, some things are discussed. I'm not sure if I necessarily would have made room for a mention of the below discovery had I made it before finishing the book. Said discovery occured at the Court Street branch of Union Market, a grocery much favored by the Young And Awful Parents Of Gen-X-and-Y Driven Bourgeois Brooklyn. What can I tell you? It stocks a lot of good, albeit pricey, stuff, and it generally plays vintage Blue Note fare on its sound system, which is nice. (And sometimes, as when the "free" section of Herbie Hancock's "Survival of the Fittest" came up on  one Sunday morning, this music makes the Young And Awful Parents Of Bourgeois Brooklyn a little uncomfortable, and they're not sure whether admitting to their discomfort will make them seem unhip, and their psychic gyrations in this respect are a wonder to behold. Unless I'm just projecting. I could be.) It was in the coffee section. New among the offerings of Stumptown and Peet's and all these new concerns whose rubber-stamped-logos-on-plain-brown-paper-bags contain beans as costly as gold I saw a shiny deep purple package and on closer inspection discerned it was a product from Mrs. Robert De Niro. 

You wanna talk pricey? $12.99 for a 10-ounce bag. But I bought it. How could I not. 

Let's get into the coffee first. On opening, one encounters a pretty nice looking bunch of beans. I took a picture of those, too. 

I threw said beans in the Krups burr grinder and brewed up a big pot for myself and My Lovely Wife. 

It's pretty fruity," My Lovely Wife observed. Whenever I hear anyone say "fruity," I think of Mrs. Bates protesting to Norman about being displaced from her bedroom, but I let it go quick and— agreed—it did have a ripe but acidic sweetness to it. "Do you prefer the African bean or the South American bean?" My Lovely Wife asked. I had to admit that as much of a coffee connoisseur, I mean HOPELESS AND ABJECT COFFEE ADDICT as I am, I hadn't given the matter much consideration before. I guess when it comes right down to it I DO prefer the South American. The best cup of coffee I've experienced in recent years was from a Honduran bean harvested by Those Fucking Hippies at Ritual Coffee. Scarfed it down in San Francisco, brought home a bag, haven't been able to find another since. As it happens I'm not crazy about the fruitiness for which African coffees are renowned; I prefer something a little more robust. Although I'm extremely partial to the Tanzanian peaberry. I contain multitudes, clearly.

Anyway, none of this is to say that the coffee from the Rwandan bean that's the signature of Hightower's brand was bad. It's highly flavorful—complex, as the reviewers like to say. I could totally see it, personally, as a dessert coffee, if I was back on dessert. 

The other salient feature of the Grace Hightower/Coffees of Rwanda brand brings us back to the packaging. Which is shiny and has a weird design (I don't think that extended ampersand really works, frankly) and features a shit ton of copy. On one side there's copy that begins, "There is a place called Rwanda." On the other side a couple of paragraphs signed "Grace Hightower De Niro," beginning "We believe that doing good business means doing good for the communities in which we work." On the back, a sticker that, in this case, tells the story of Buf Café founder Epiphanie Mukashyaka; below that, on the package itself, an explanation of the "Signature Series."  If all this copy doesn't keep you engaged while the coffee brews, or if you want to learn more (and my feeling is that the people behind the product are going for the latter) there is of course a website for you. 

I don't point this out to make fun. It's pretty clear this business idea emerged from a philanthropic impulse on Hightower's part, and a laudable philanthropic interest at that. What's interesting is the way that this enterprise so neatly slots into the contemporary Way Of Doing Things. Anyone who's tried to get a business off the ground or publish a book or do something along such lines is invariably told that regardless of how strong your idea might be, it cannot be launched without a PLATFORM. A celebrity, or the wife of a celebrity, or the partner in a celebrity marriage that has already established its philanthropic bona fides, already has, it is universally acknowledged, a viable platform. Once that's established, the individual with the platform will be told that he or she needs to construct a narrative. This is regardless of whether the venture is charitable or profit-driven; narrative is all, even if it's made up. In Hightower's case, the possible narratives have deep roots in recent history and of course the chosen narrative is the one that is all about hope. One that also, here, tends to assuage non-climate-change-related concerns about the ethics of coffee consumption. At least until the contrarian perspective on that starts coming into vogue, as it may be. (I read a headline somewhere the other day about how "foodies" were actually morally reprehensible, or something, but you know I almost never have been able to hear or read the word "foodie" without throwing up so I skipped the actual article.) Until then, if you're looking for a fruity and complex coffee that supports a growth industry in a particularly fraught part of Africa, I give Grace Hightower's brand a thumb's up.

How I was a dick to Clive Davis. Twice.

In commemoration of my friend Tom Carson's engaging review of Mr. Davis' latest book, The Soundtrack Of My Life, I relate this anecdote. 

I guess it was 1994. I had been a pop music columnist for the New York Daily News for a while, so I got asked to a bunch of music events, but by this time I don't think I had the column any more. Nevertheless, I got an invite to a very special—I believe the word "intimate" was used—private mini-concert by Carly Simon. The main reason it was special was because of Carly Simon's oft-cited reluctance to perform live. Another was that it was being held at Fez, a cozy, some might say funky, even, spot below the chi-chi Time Cafe on Lafayette Street. 

Why did I go? I wasn't the world's biggest Carly Simon fan, as many readers may have inferred quite some time ago. Then again, it WAS in a sense an honor just to be invited. And there would be an open bar. And at the time I was a lot more insecure about my position relative to New York night life than I am now, so there was that. The issue of there having nothing better to do that evening may have been pertinent. I went, and I went stag. 

The reason I place the show around 1994 is because her band had Doug Wimbish, of the Sugar Hill session band and further fame, on bass, and he had played on Simon's album of that year, Letter Never Sent. He sure is a good bass player. Anyway, the invite hadn't been kidding about an open bar. It was wide open, including the top shelf stuff, and I could not believe that I was sitting at a little table with a couple of people I didn't know and belting back the Macallans like there was no tomorrow. Soon enough I was feeling fine, and even singing along with some of Carly's greatest hits. "Do the Mashed Potato with a new attitude..." Aw yeah. She plays for like a half hour, 35 minutes, and then off she goes, and of course the place goes wild, clamoring for an encore. She makes the crowd wait good and long before she comes back out, and when she does come back out, she's got Clive Davis, who at the time was the head of her label, Arista, with her. And again, everybody's going nuts, and he's grinning, and she's grinning, and everybody's standing, and Carly and Clive are motioning for everybody to sit down (I myself was still sitting, swilling in my Scotch) and be quiet for just a minute. Once everyone's sitting down and shutting up, Clive takes the mic, and the first thing he says is, "I probably don't have to tell you who I am."

And the crowd lets out an appreciative chortle. And I have to tell you, I don't think my timing was ever better, because I waited just a microbeat and a half after the chortle died down and I bellowed, "Who are you?" And a couple of people laughed, and a couple of people gasped, and Clive looked annoyed and continued with his speech.

Cut to May of 1996. I had spent the late winter/early spring of that year in Dublin, Ohio, working as a freelance consultant for CompuServe, and after that I thought it would be a swell idea if I took the money I had earned and, instead of paying taxes with it, going to Paris with it. Through a series of circumstances too tortuous to be profitably related here, my traveling companion is Young Rosemary Passantino, a one-time rock critic herself, who was accompanying me on a purely platonic basis (her live-in boyfriend is even going to pick us up from Kennedy when we get back—I remember that return flight being the last time I smoked on an airplane). On our first night there we decided to visit the legendary nightclub Crazy Horse, because you haven't really lived until you've seen an elaborately choreographed stage show featuring a dozen identically proportioned nude young women. Anyway, the only reservation we could get was for the midnight show, so we had time to kill after dinner, so we went to the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysee. It was around 11:30, near closing time. I was gonna check out with some Lester Young double CD set (called Le Quintessence; I still have it, it's real good). And I notice, standing on the marble floor of the grand lobby, a familiar figure. 

"Clive Davis!" I say. "What are you doing in the lobby of the Virgin Megastore in Paris just before midnight?" Clearly chuffed to be recognized, he says, "Where else is there to be?"

"Say," I ask as I sidle up to him, "you remember that nice little Carly Simon thing at Fez a few years back?"

"Sure I do. Great show!"

"It really was! And remember, before the encore, when you had a few words for the crowd and you started by saying 'I probably don't have to tell you who I am'?"

Clive looked a little wary now. "Uh-huh!"

"And there was this drunk guy in the back and he yelled out, 'Who are you?'"

"Yes..."

"That was me! I was that guy!"

And Clive just looked at me. 

"Anyway, it was great meeting you!"

After we had left, and were walking to the Crazy Horse, Rosemary was all like, "What'd you have to go and alienate Clive Davis like that for?"

And I'm like, "Oh, right, because he was ready to ask us to cruise around with him in his limo all night."

"You can't be sure of that. Maybe he wanted to hang out with some nice Americans."

Maybe he did. Who knows? If I had played my cards differently, perhaps I  could have been Mrs. Clive Davis today. But no. I had to be a dick.  

The auteur is present

Last night, the 25th of February, was a big night in the big town, culture-wise. Bjork was doing her "Biophilia" show at Roseland. Philip Glass and his ensemble gave a perhaps not-to-be-repeated-in-this-lifetime performance of his amazing three-hour-plus work, Music In Twelve Parts (the Glass equivalent of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier or Young's Well-Tuned Piano, essentially), at the Park Avenue Armory. And over at Lincoln Center, there was a special screening of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, after which Lonergan and select cast members spoke of the shot-years-ago critical cause celebre. Jaime Christley, one of the most crucial of the film's champions, was there (I was at the Glass concert myself, which was SO AMAZING), and he tweeted later that Lonergan himself chastised a viewer who was loudly crinkling a candy wrapper during a crucial scene. This reminded me of a couple of things, chiefly of Frans Liebkind saying "You are ze audience, I am ze author, I OUTRANK you." Although I imagine that the candy-wrapper crinkler wasn't aware at the time that he was being shushed by the director.

Back in 1987 I was working at Video Review magazine, and some time during my then-one-year tenure there I had been introduced to the work of director Andy Sidaris. Sidaris was then the king of more or less direct-to-video T&A action movies, which invariably featured super-busty former Playmates awkwardly carrying guns and taking on drug-dealing bad guys so pockmarked they made Robert Davi look like a Proactiv spokesmodel. The movies were invariably ruthless in keeping their female leads as frequently topless as possible; it seemed these fetching freelance investigators were constitutionally incapable of discussing the day's events without explicitly stating that it would be best to do so naked, in the hot tub, and then taking action to make it happen. Never any lesbian action, though; Sidaris pictures were also kind of ruthlessly hetero-normative, as they say. 

They were also, it might go without saying, entirely ridiculous, and risible. So when a bunch of the Video Review guys, most of us in our highly glib twenties, were invited to an actual screening of a new Sidaris picture, which I believe was Hard Ticket to Hawaii, pictured above, to be followed by a press dinner at a deli across the street with the director himself, we were all over that. It was at a small screening room on Park Avenue, and there wasn't enough room in a single row for our entire party to fit, so I sat one in from the aisle in the row behind my boys...and about 40 minutes or so into the movie, which we had been wisecracking and giggling at MST3K style for the whole time, an older gentleman of Greek extraction took the seat on the aisle, next to mine.

It was Andy Sidaris. And he did not understand what was so funny. "Cool it guys," he addressed the row in front of him. Looking at me, he asked, "What are they laughing at?" I actually felt kind of bad, and shrugged. "The big twist is coming up," he said with some enthusiasm.  You have to give Sidaris this: in addition to copious enormous boobies, his fast-moving films were packed with explosions, action, and, um, plot twists. I think the one in Hard Ticket involved a giant cheap fake animatronic cobra emerging from an exploded toilet. Nothing funny about that. 

Fortunately it was dark enough in the theater that Sidaris could not later identify the party of gigglers, and he amiably regaled my colleagues and I with tales of his days shooting professional sports, and how he had directed all of the football sequences in M*A*S*H, and what a no-talent prick sonofabitch Robert Altman was. 

Now for the funny part. In the fall of 2001, I'm in the same screening room, in the same row, in the same seat, about to see a pre-release, pre-New York Film Festival screening of The Royal Tenenbaums. This is the cut that ends with the Anthology recording of The Beatles' "I'm Looking Through You," and it's always bugged the crap out of me that that music had to be changed for the release. In any event, who comes along and takes the aisle seat next to me but Wes Anderson. 

"This is really weird," I said to Anderson. "I've only ever sat directly next to a director at a screening of his film once before, and it was in this same screening room, and I was sitting in this same seat."

"Who was the director?" Wes asked me.

"Andy Sidaris."

"Who?"

I began to explain, but then the lights went down.

Apes-ma

I'll admit that I got Planet of the Apes much more than I got 2001: A Space Odyssey in the year I first saw both films, which was in fact the year of their releases, that is, 1968. I have no problem admitting this because I was eight years old going on nine at the time, and of course it totally follows that what Planet of the Apes was selling was a lot easier to "get" for an eight-year-old. That said, I will tell you that I can still remember, without googling, the name of the then-15-year-old prodigy who wrote an exegesis on the Kubrick film that inspired Stanley himself to rave: "What a first-rate intelligence," that name being Margaret Stackhouse. I read about her, and her writings on the film, in that sui generis mass-market paperback The Making of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and have been nursing a major inferiority complex ever since.

Anyway, back to Apes. Yeah (SPOILER ALERT), the Statue of Liberty. That really messed our minds up but good. But even more nightmare fuel came with Beneath The Planet of the Apes,the bleakest, creepiest, most outright sad and nihilistic of the series. I'll never shake the mental picture that forms my recollection of Chuck Heston pressing down on the button that will bring nuclear ruin to our planet YET AGAIN, his actul heart seeming to beat its last as he holds it in his actual hand (the one that's not pressing on the big button) even as he does so. Fucked up, man. Weirder still is that this truly inspired and Dante-esque vision occurs in what is for all intents and purposes a completely tossed-off sequel directed by Ted Post, a guy I identified as a hack of hacks when trying to discern just what it was that distinguished Magnum Force from Dirty Harry. Just goes to prove what the surrealists said about how you never really can tell about these things. 

So of course I was hooked on the Apes saga, such as it was, but it isn't as if I didn't notice when the series shifted from a Heston/James Franciscus focus to a Roddy McDowell one. Nothing against Roddy, of course. But still. It was interesting to see how the subsequent films found themselves inadvertently balancing overt cheese with very confused ruminations on present-day "Black Power" activity. We continued to want to believe, but I dunno, Ricardo Montalban as a kindly circus chimp handler wasn't really making it for me. By the time Battle came out, this then-13-year-old just couldn't take it seriously. Wouldn't it be amusing, I thought, if the Apes films were made into an opera cycle, like that Ring thing? "This is the battle for the battle for the battle for the battle for the planet of the apes!" I sang, to the tune of the overture of Bizet's Carmen. "With Caesar as our leader/we know we cannot fail/For with Caesar as our leader/we found the Holy Grail!" I further extemporized. Why not? Since this was to be an operatic work in the Wagnerian tradition, it made sense to link it back to certain themes in that composer's work. As you can imagine, I raised a bit of an eyebrow when I saw that Simpsons episode with the Planet of the Apes musical in it. I am reasonably sure that nobody I went to Dumont High School with went on to write for The Simpsons.

Anyway...I'm not a religious man, but I always thought that a remake of the first Planet of the Apes film was kind of a lousy idea for the simple reason that it represented an irreproducible result. It's like at the end of the 1957 Looney Tune Show Biz Bugs where Daffy finally elicits applause from the vaudeville house audience by, as the saying goes, suiciding right on the stage; as his soul ascends to heaven (surely that can't be correct?) he laments to Bugs that the problem with this trick is that you can only do it once. Hence the essential uselessness of the Burton version, even though everyone is clearly putting something resembling their best foot forward. As for Beneath, I don't know that Hollywood would have the balls to even try, recollecting that the motivating factor behind the original was less balls than profit taking. But the subsequent Apes films strike me on principle as recombinant fair game. Still, I wasn't expecting much of anything from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which is one reason it's one of the most pleasant surprises of the summer. Another reason is because it's kind of awesome. I wasn't able to discuss it in these terms in my review of the film for MSN Movies, but as you are know doubt aware, I've seen a fair amount of films, and one side effect of that is I don't get a whole lot of "holy shit!" moments in a theater anymore. And by "'holy shit!' moments" I mean parts where I'm watching the film and something happens and I go back in my seat and I say, "Holy shit!" Hopefully not too loud because I don't like to disturb my fellow moviegoers. Anyway, I recall counting at least four "Holy shit!" moments watching this. That's one for every $2.50 or so of your moviegoing dollars. Not bad.

Two anecdotes on the problematic nature of referentiality in the arts

I believe I have related these anecdotes before, in somewhat different form, in different venues. I hope that given their ostensible relevance to topics being touched on in the thread for the post below this one, I might be forgiven for repeating them. 

In September of 1977 Sire Records released Blank Generation, the debut LP from Richard Hell and the Voidoids. I purchased this later-to-be-termed "seminal" document, and, as was my custom at the time, pored over the album artwork for long minutes on end. Of particular interest was the collage that took up one whole side of the inner sleeve, which contained a lot of pictures of Hell preening in sunglasses, a reproduction of Voidoid guitarist Robert Quine's old Berklee College of Music ID card, and at least one photo of Jean-Luc Godard. And a picture of a neon sign of Godard's name, torn in half and placed on far-apart positions in the collage, with "GOD" close to the middle and "ARD" in a corner. 

Sometime in late '77 or early '78, the Voidoids played at The Show Place in Dover N.J., a strip club by day that became a rock-and-roll club on weekends. It was a convenient out-of-town gig for CBGB groups that didn't have a Manhattan booking on a given weekend, just a 45 minute drive from the city. By then an enthusiastic Voidoid fan, I took my 18-year-old self to the show (as none of my Chicago-and-Journey-loving high school buddies wanted anything to do with such music). It was highly enjoyable, although I was a little confused that Hell and his band chose to cover "I'm Free." What happened to no more Beatles and no more Stones in 1977? I was later able to suss out that this was hardly Hell's own position but at the time I was thrown for a loop. Anyway, as was also my custom, I hung out after the show to have a few words with the band, because at the time I truly believed (among other things) that punk rock was all about destroying the false hierarchies that separated the artist from the audience and creating an environment of revolutionary unity, motherfuckers! What an idiot. Anyway, I got "backstage" (a long room right next to the men's room entrance, and there was Hell on a couch, flanked by two bottle blondes in fishnets. He was ready to get his something on, it looked like, but first a word with a fan or two. A quick word.

So I asked him about the Godard connection—what it was about what Godard did/does and what Hell did that made him feel an affinity of sorts. Only I didn't put it that way. I put it more like, "So, why do you like Godard so much?" To which Hell just grinned and shrugged and said, "I dunno, man, I just think he's a cool guy!"

Well, all right then. Hell and the bottle blondes kind of tittered at me as I fumbled for the next thing to say. Eventually I fell into chatting with Quine, who took pity on me and couldn't have been nicer. We discussed Berklee ("the only thing I learned there was how to use my pinkie;" also, "everybody there just wanted to play in the Tonight Show band") and Coltrane (it was from Quine that I learned of the existence of two separate issues of Ascension). From this encounter I learned that sometimes people make "references" "just because." Interestingly enough, many years later Hell became a film critic of sorts, for Black Book; in this respect he wasn't really much better at explicating the reasons for his enthusiasms than he had been decades before. He did manage to get across on proclamations of authenticity, however. (Funnily enough, there was one time when I was listening to the Hell compilation Spurts on my iPod as I entered the Sony screening room, and there, as I was hearing Hell yowl "Love Comes In Spurts," there sat the much older Hell himself! Neat trick, I thought; I'll have to try conjuring another musician thusly. Next screening I went to I had Wayne Shorter on as I came in; Mr. Shorter, alas, did not turn out to be in attendance at the event.)

This taught me that sometimes people make references not for any pedagogic or otherwise instructive reasons, but just 'cuz. This next story, more to the point at hand, is about a reference that wasn't a reference. January of 1998 I'm at the big ballroom of Caesar's Palace with David Foster Wallace, Evan Wright, and Nathaniel Welch, watching that year's Adult Video News awards. I am downing the Jack-and-Cokes, as was my custom (for his piece on the awards, Dave would make that Grand Marnier and Coke, which, it strikes me now, would have been a good drink for the Erotic Connoisseur to tout), and looking around the room, and on the walls there are various posters and banners announcing upcoming events at this very ballroom. One of which events is titled, as it happens, Kontakte. I don't know why. But I tap Dave, and I indicate the poster, and I say, "I didn't know they were big on Stockhausen in Vegas." And Dave looks at me blankly and says, "What are you talking about?" And I say, "You know, Stockhausen. The German composer. Kontakte, he wrote that. You name one of the characters in an Infinite Jest footnote after him." Dave reflected for a moment. "Oh, that's the name of a composer? I wasn't aware of that. I had just heard the name somewhere and thought it sounded cool." I expressed some incredulity. "But it works so perfectly in the context of being an actual reference to the guy, I can't believe you really didn't know who it was." Dave was hardly coy or disingenuous about this stuff: "You know, it's funny, but if you are in the habit of making references in that way, sometimes things can just fall into place without your necessarily being aware of them." At which point we went back to looking at all the pretty girls getting awards and stuff. In any event, it just goes to show: you can be too sure. But you can never be too unsure. 

Ciao, Manhattan, or, the chocolate of reality gets into the peanut butter of fiction in "Sweet Smell of Success"

This post should be considered as a contribution to the above-depicted blogathon; please see here for further details. And please give!

Is Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 The Sweet Smell of Success really a film noir? The Clifford Odets-Ernest Lehman scripted picture isn't a crime movie per se, although it does feature a supremely slimy corrupt cop, a very nasty frame-up, intimations of incestuous feelings, and a constant stream of back-and-forth recriminations and resentments and sublimations of guilt and obsessions that it can't really be anything BUT a noir, can it? As The Siren herself put it when I was hashing out with her whether I was gonna discuss this picture for her and Marilyn Ferdinand's very worthy blogathon, "you've got fate, dark deeds, twisted motives, great shadowy cinematography, what's not to noir?"

Right. Of course there's also the problem that Sweet Smell has already been written about pretty much to death, and if you're a fan of it (and good lord, if you're not a fan of it, what are you doing reading this blog?) basically all you want to know about it right now is how good the new Criterion discs of it (standard def and Blu-ray editions) are, and they are very damn good indeed, by my estimation. In any event, there really isn't, to my mind, all that much new to say about the picture...unless I bring things into the putatively actual, and possibly personal. 

The picture establishes its snappy, practically breakneck, pace—and seedy/glamorous Manhattan milieu—in its credit sequence, which shows us a bustling Times Square as the latest editions of the Globe, the paper for which columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) acts as "The Eyes of Broadway," are loaded onto trucks that will deliver that edition far and wide...and, in one case, to a newsstand literally around the corner from these loading docks, before the feet of hungry press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), who will be quite disappointed to see and mention of his clientele once again absent from Hunsecker's jottings. The avid amateur historian of New Amsterdam will know that newsstand is literally around the corner via a visual parsing of the locations captured by Mackendrick and James Wong Howe for their montage. By gum, those docks look very much like the ones that were on the ground floor of the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street between Broadway/7th Avenue and Eighth Avenue. There they are from street level facing west, behind Curtis' credit. 

If we need any further confirmation of the location, it's provided within a couple of shots; the visual closer is hard to catch when watching the film in a theater, but easy to nail with the tech capabilities of DVD. The trucks of "The Globe" have big ads on their sides advertising Hunsecker's column; but the prop department didn't cover every truck at that loading dock. And as one of the trucks moves out, another truck is visible...

...and this truck bears a plaque with the New York Times' "All The News That's Fit To Print" motto, and an advertisement for that paper.  

...and off the truck goes.

"I love this dirty town," Hunsecker famously intones a little later in the film, outside and a little down the block from the still-extant restaurant "21," over on 52nd Street. The town would get a lot dirtier in the coming years, and the trucks leaving the Times' loading dock would get a lot bigger. Across the street from the Times' building was a hotel first known as the Dixie, and then known as the Carter (and no, I'm not making that up); never exactly the Waldorf-Astoria, it was for a time the home of the frequently down-on-his-luck writer and race enthusiast known as Colonel Stingo, immortalized by A.J. Liebling in his wonderful book The Honest Rainmaker. By the early 1990s, what had been the hotel's ballroom, I presume, had become one of New York's truly great trannie dives, Sally's II, yclept Sally's Hideaway. It opened its doors at around five o'clock every afternoon, around the time the vast majority of the isle's transgendered population was just getting out of bed, really, save for a handful of stalwart gals whose circumstances necessitated a slight boost of spring to the step. Okay, I'm exaggerating/romanticizing a bit, but you get the idea. While a fair amount of business, that is, hustling, went on at Sally's from the late rush hour onward, its main function was as a place for the indigenous community, such as it was, to socialize. Which also kind of made it a great place for a non-transgendered heavy drinker and substance abuser to isolate, and watch life's rich and strange pageant go by. And so I did, on way too many nights than I sometimes care to recall.

For the trannie prostitute, Sally's was the prelude to Edelweiss, down the way west, next to the diner on 43rd Street and 11th Avenue, which was much more of a "real" nightclub, and had a more sex-tourist/regular-tourist friendly vibe to it. A friend of mine from the transgender world had strong connections to the larger demi-monde, and was frequently asked to act as docent to the celebrity class in their quasi-slumming activities; one night he was deputized with squiring Tim Burton, then-cohort Lisa Marie (this was 1996, around the time of Mars Attacks!), and Francis Ford Coppola to Edelweiss to see the gorgeous dancing Dominican not-girls. Lisa Marie went down a storm with the queens, as you might imagine; Coppola, apparently, walked around marveling at how "theatrical" it all was, and was frequently mistaken for a potential john by some of the working girls, on account of his having kept his overcoat on for the whole visit. Anyway. So on a particularly lucky night, any given girl working at Sally's could hook either a regular client or a new friend and get him to shell out consistent cash for blow, and drinks, and possibly some partying later. This entailed sticking around for the evening "show" at Sally's (lip-syncing in fabulous gowns, natch; my Southern belle pal Miss Gina Germaine really sold Reba McIntire's "Fancy," as you might imagine), waiting around for whoever was dealing the always badly stepped-on coke to show up, and, after that transaction was completed, skipping down to Edelweiss for several nightcaps or more blow or someone to bring to the party later or whatever. Except. (I bet you were wondering where the hell this was leading, right?) If you'd try to catch a cab from Sally's to Edelweiss between one and two-thirty or three in the morning, chances are you'd have to wait outside for some time, because taxi traffic was frequently halted by the fleet of now eighteen-wheeled trucks backing in and pulling out of the Times' loading docks. This activity led to considerable interludes of anxiety for both hunter and game, hustler and hustled; if the john started feeling pangs of conscience (I probably don't need to tell you that good number of these fellows were leading some form of a double life) or, you know, budgetary concerns, this break in the momentum of their, um, headlong rush into sybaritic degradation could conceivably provide them with an exit strategy, escape hatch, what have you. And the queen, left in a relative lurch, would have relatively short notice from then until closing time (which really just meant a dash to some after-hours joint in many cases) to find another sugar daddy for the evening. 

Yeah, it sure was a dirty town, and it still is, but not that way, not anymore. I always thought it was not insignificant that Sally's was padlocked for good on November 13, 1997, the night of the official opening of The Lion King. The photographer Brian Lantelme has a reasonably fabulous website commemorating the joint here. Its contents are not thoroughly NSFW, but still...you might be the type who worries that your work cohorts will take you for a trannie-chaser. Some of the people pictured therein are still my friends; and too many of those pictured therein have died. 

Hairless, toothless

Julius Tannen, after a long fame on the stage, came on hard times in Hollywood. For a number of years he was unable to get a job acting. Tannen’s friends were unable to help him. Something always slipped up, and the witty Julius found himself finally in a desperate way. His friends persisted, and after much intrigue a part was secured for Tannen. He was to play an editor in a newspaper drama. All that remained was for the producer to see him and pass on him.

Tannen dressed himself carefully that morning. He was completely bald and wore a toupee which he stuck on his head each morning with a special mucilage.

After studying him for ten minutes and listening to his nimble speech, the producer shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Tannen. But I don’t think you’ll do for the part.”

Julius inquired quietly in what way he was deficient. Was he too tall, too thin, too old, too young?

“No,” said the producer. “You could act it very well. But I have always visualized a bald-headed man for the part.” 

Julius smiled and slowly pulled the toupee off his head.

“I think I can satisfy you on that score,” he beamed. “I happen to be completely bald.”

The producer sat studying the polished Tannen skull and then shook his head again and pronounced, “I’m sorry, Mr. Tannen. I simply can’t visualize you as a baldheaded man.”

—Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century, 1954 

Last year, we asked Harry [Bugin] to play Aloysius, the malevolent door-scraper, in our movie The Hudsucker Proxy. Harry understood immediately that an evil door-scraper would, in the nature of things, have a shaved head, and was amenable to shaving his: “Sure fellas. It grows back.” […]

But any actor can shave his head. As shooting drew near we were still groping for a means of ending the climactic fist-fight in the Hudsucker Building’s clock room. The script called for our great clock to be stopped twice, once by a broom shoved into the gears, which was well and good, and a second time by something else—not just anything, clearly, but a capper that would keep the audience from resenting our repeating the gag of the stopped clock. The nature of this was a puzzle of daunting specificity. The object had to be of just the right size to be stuffed into our great clock gear, and had to be of such consistency as to offer temporary—but only temporary—resistance before being ground away. Mere days before the scene was scheduled to be shot, co-producer Graham Place had a leaping insight: Harry’s character might have his dentures knocked out in the course of the fist-fight. This would leave an ideal gear-stopper at hand, and would incidentally let us punctuate the fist-fight with the classic Chattering Teeth Gag. Dentures were clearly the one perfect—the only perfect—the only conceivable—solution. There remained only one question, and on it rode all our hopes for satisfactorily resolving the very climax of our movie: Did Harry Bugin wear dentures?

“Sure fellas. Full uppers and lowers.”

And that’s why Harry Bugin is our favourite actor.

—Joel and Ethan Coen, "Our Favourite Actor," in "The Positif Collection," Projections 4 1/2, 1995

For Armond White

Situational irony

So I go into town today to attend this relatively early, super-embargoed screening of an upcoming picture, in a relatively swank corporate room. The joint doesn't even seat fifty, I think, and yet everyone was asked to surrender their cel phones beforehand. It's insulting, sure, but I assume it's happening on account of something some asshole in a situation similar to my own did, so why take it personally. I do wonder what the people who work for the security firm that took care of checking the phones. "So what was on your security detail today, honey?" "Oh, I checked cel phones for a screening of [redacted]." "Whew. Sounds dangerous." Etc.

So, cel-phone-less, I go into the screening room, thinking, well, I'm not gonna be able to tweet now, thank you very much, so I guess I'll finish the Times' crossword. Except the lights in the room are really dim and I'm working from the photocopied Times "digest" I picked up at my gym, the type of which is a couple point sizes smaller than what you get in the actual paper, and, well, you get the idea. So I'm thinking, well, wonder if I've got time to get in a couple pages of Bleak House, and if the type is big enough. Except there's this guy standing several rows behind me, and he's talking, really loud, in this very shrill voice, sounding like one of Martin Short's feyer, brasher characters from the SCTV days. He's talking to these two somewhat younger people about...how rude everybody is these days, how he was at the opera the other night, and there was this person in front of him who was texting through the whole thing, and how at the theater another other night there was this other person in front of him with an i-something, and you know, it has that panel that's as bright as a flashlight, and he asked the person in front of him when he would be through with using it, and he was so rude he just said he would stop using it when he was good and ready, and how there's just nothing you can do about it because people are just so...

And I'm thinking, wow, how long am I gonna have to listen to this whining I'm-not-even-going-to-try-to-think-of-the-word, really, and then I remember I don't have to; I may not have my phone, but I still have my iPod—with the panel as bright as a flashlight!—and it has a lot of loud tunes on it, so, yes, thank you Steve Jobs, Diamond Dogs it is, at least until the lights start to dim and this nimrod goes and sits down and hopefully shuts up. And as I try, once again, to suss out just what it is that Bowie's singing right before the phrase "handful of 'ludes" (yeah, I know I could look it up, but that's cheating!), I think of all the trite complaints of the would-be social scientists who bemoan how electronics and media cut us off from genuine personal interaction and the "real" world, and how, conversely, sometimes genuine personal interaction or whatever is in fact fully worth avoiding. I know that given the choice between having to sit through, say, a Jeffrey Lyons soliloquy on how these kids today know the names of all the rap people but couldn't tell you who Humphrey Bogart was, and zoning out to "The Chant of the Ever-Circling Skelatal Family," I'll take the latter every time. (And, for the record, I was once indirectly subjected to the former, and it was an object lesson in professional graciousness to watch Lyons' actual "conversational" target—a person who has a very high level job of the sort I'll never land for a reason not unrelated to the here-pertinent quality—react with perfect equanimity and diffidence to the very silly man's silly rantings.)