Some Came Running

Olio

"Pirate Song." Composed by Tim Hodgkinson. Performed by Tim Hodgkinson (piano) and Dagmar Krause (voice), on the album Hopes And Fears, by Art Bears, 1978

"Laugh At Me." Composed by Sonny Bono. Performed by Mott The Hoople, on their eponymous album, 1969. 

"If love is truly going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence."—Lester Bangs, "Where Were You When Elvis Died," Village Voice, August 29 1977

The blog post in which I last trotted out that Bangs quote. 

"By moral in the context of art I mean a style which executes the deeper social and psychological function of form, as opposed to a particular aspect of vanity called taste. Pop sensibility, pop consciousness, pop sentimentality have been invaluable in clarifying the provincialism and nostalgia that actually permeate a culture that has come to pride itself on sophistication."—SIdney Tillim, "Figurative Art 1969: Aspects and Prospects," as cited by Robert Christgau here. 

The essay by Matt Zoller Seitz that made all these things come to mind. 

Oh, forget it...

From "Marnin Rosenberg in: Bad Luck With Women," by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman.

Although I have given up Twitter for Lent, I see from checking up on it for maintenance purposes that my handle has been being invoked there with some frequency of late. Certain individuals seem to be of the opinion that were I currently active in the social media format, I would have some amusing/coruscating/righteous material to contribute w/r/t some news that has been spreading across the cinematic cyberverse, about how the Criterion Collection is going to issue a DVD edition of Lena Dunham's second film Tiny Furniture, but IS NOT going to issue a DVD edition of Abbas Kiarostami's splendid latest film Certified Copy, allegedly because (and this, I should point out most emphatically, is not a confirmed fact but merely a rumor and not in the least anything resembling an official pronouncement) Criterion head Peter Becker supposedly considers the latter "lesser Kiarostami." Well. As much as I hate to disappoint my public, I am not only not going to break my Lenten vow and go on Twitter and deride the decision (this has in fact been the only Lenten resolution I have been able to keep...damn you, damn you to hell, M&Ms!), but I do not in fact have anything derisive to say about the decision, which has not been definitively announced in any case. The deal between IFC and Criterion meant that a Criterion Tiny Furniture was always a possibility; by the same token, it did not mean that a Criterion Certified Copy was a given. If one comes out and not the other, it represents neither the death of Criterion and cinephilia as object and ideal, nor does it represent the triumph of youth and fucking inside metal piping over cinecrophilia, or whatever; it represents nothing more than two discrete business decisions, neither of which is going to bring about anything like a cataclysm.

And quite frankly, I'm getting a little sick of all this dog-piling on Lena Dunham. Yeah, I've given her some shit in the past, and I may well do same at some point in the future, but I feel reasonably confident in every case that it's something that she's said or done that's prompted my irritation, not the very fact that she exists. Yeah, she's the daughter of affluent artist parents, WE KNOW THAT. What the fuck are we gonna do, ban everybody with a privileged background from participating in the arts, or in criticism for that matter? In that case, so long, James Merrill, WIlliam S. Burroughs, Harry Mathews, Greil Marcus even, not to mention the Beastie Boys, etcetera, etcetera, just to mention people who come to the top of my head immediately. And to extend to the coeval, are we just gonna honor poor aspiring artists on account of their no-doubt-superior integrity? Get used to reading a lot of Karl "King" Wenclas, then. I've given it a shot, and you know what? His shit is BORING, not to mention badly "crafted." Yes, I know that I myself coined the term "cinema of unexamined privilege," but that's exactly what I meant—the cinema. I meant that I thought one of Tiny Furniture's larger flaws was its disingenuousness about the actual reality of its lead character Aura's situation; the fact that she really did not NEED to even take the job that she eventually walks away from. It seemed evasive in a way that, say, even something people might consider similar, like Woody Allen's Manhattan, did/does not. In that latter film the circumstances were better laid-out, if not completely explicitly addressed; the characters all had cherry media/academic jobs that allowed them to isolate and create their own neurotic fairy tales; their was nothing in the scenario that obliged the characters to even feel the slightest compulsion to examine their privilege. I'm over-explaining myself into a corner here, but you get the idea. 

And in any event, and I kind of feel like a total dink pointing this out, whatever you might think of Tiny Furniture, the fact is it didn't fucking make itself; Dunham went out and wrote it and directed it and acted in it; she didn't lie back and have her minions and eunuchs put the thing together. Yeah, she got a lot of help from family and friends but so does EVERYBODY who makes a low-budget independent film these days. Even Academy-Award-Winning-DIrector Steven Soderbergh asked people for favors with regards to locations for The Girlfriend Experience (none of the Vegas stuff would have happened had he not made those Oceans movies). As far as I know, well-off as she may be, Dunham didn't finance the film herself (only idiots do that, oops, sorry Tom Ford), and the fact that the film has helped her find likely better-than-gainful employment via deals with Scott Rudin and Judd Apatow and so on, actually represents a return on her investment of labor. She's a rich kid, yeah, but she did the work. I would advise others who seek to emulate her success to do likewise.

By the way, My Lovely Wife, when I was discussing all this with her, said, "You understand that it takes a lot of nerve for you to go all Zen about this and start telling people to 'grow up' at this reasonably early stage of your maturity." To which I responded, "Well, yeah, that's why I wanna use those panels from the Drew Friedman cartoon. Because of the stupid grandiosity of the gesture, and the fact that people never listen to you when you say that anyway, so what's the fucking point?" Exactly!

Effin mad aincha

One of the interesting things about writing for a larger, more mainstream audience, as I have been doing, and quite happily at that, for MSN Movies, is the feedback you get, and the ways some people track you down in order to provide that feedback. As, for instance, the complaint of one "Sauncie" concerning my negative notice on The Tourist, in a post on this blog that has no relation to The Tourist. Another dissatisfied customer contacted me via my Facebook account. This individual wrote, in part, "...your review seemed extremely arrogant, self-assuming, full of big words to try and impress people who have no clue as to what you are talking about. Your veiled insults to the fun Pirates movies was extremely irritating. One thing that I think all critics forget is that they are watching MOVIES. Things that are NOT real but made for entertainment purposes. You may not like the story, and that is your right, of course, but could you maybe dare to condescend to the little people and word it to where people can understand it easier and not want to throw darts at a picture of your face? Chronicles of Narnia are fun adventure movies....why take them so seriously. Relax, stop trying to impress people and let yourself be taken away. By the way, the Pirates movies were fantastically done. The last one may have had too much of a story but hey, it was easy to let yourself get into.......IF you let yourself. Take care."

The review in question was of the new (and lousy) Narnia movie with the seafaring stuff, but as you'll note, my correspondent was more irritated by my incredibly offhand (albeit admittedly sarcastic) and brief mention of the Pirates of the Cari-whatsis film franchise therein. I was somewhat reminded of back in the early '90s, during my brief but glorious sojourn as the Sci-Fi/Fantasy columnist for TV Guide, and I was writing something about the then kinda inchoate Cartoon Network debuting a new series, and I said something along the lines of "Just in case you've had your fill of Huckleberry Hound reruns on the Cartoon Network," which elicited this pained three-page letter from a minister (I forget which denomination) out in the Midwest taking me to task for disparaging this beloved, humane, wonderful cartoon character who never did anybody any harm. I always found that a little...well, quizzical. And whenever that story springs to mind, I remember when voice artist Daws Butler passed away in 1988, and the New York Daily News ran an obit of him, and they didn't have a picture of him on file, so they ran a drawing of the beloved, humane, etc. character Huckleberry Hound, only the layout didn't provide room for a very long caption, so the caption read "H.Hound." Which, when it comes to mind, never doesn't crack me up. 

And this of course in turn reminds me of the great bit in the 1946 Disney animated short "Donald's Double Trouble," in which the ever-irascible Donald Duck finds himself once again alienated from the lovely Daisy. On the street Donald happens upon a doppelganger, one who talks like Ronald Colman even, and persuades him to pose as Donald and make nice with Daisy. You can see where this is going. When the doppelganger gets a load of Daisy, he figures he's a cinch to tap that, particularly if he lays down the swanky smarm, which he correctly figures she's not accustomed to from the other guy. "We'll paint the town vermillion!" he promises her, and squires her to a nearby fair. Donald tails them, and keeps an obsessive record of all the PDAs he observes. It's all very Raging Bull. Near the, erm, climax, the doppelganger proposes to take Daisy through the fair's Tunnel of Love. The enraged, desperate Donald scribbles a note, which he passes surreptitiously to his would-be destroyer:

Who knew that Donald, in the privacy of his interiority, referred to his own self as "Don?" Fascinating.

Incidentally, the argument raised by the objector to my dismissal of the Pirates of the Whozis movies—"Things that are NOT real but made for entertainment purposes"—is echoed in a much more full-of-big-words-to-try-and-impress-people fashion in a recent Die Filmkrant post by Adrian Martin. 

At top: Hatfield and the North, a vault recording title of whom provides the name for this post. Their music is highly enjoyable to let yourself get into...IF you let yourself. No, really. 

Blu movies

Believe it or not—and I know you want to believe it, really I do—I'm not too often prone to professional jealousy. My dislikes and resentments, and I admit, they are many, generally stem from who people are and what they do, what they stand for and what they don't, rather than any position they hold relative to my own. On the occasions when I do feel a pang of "I can't believe they gave him/her that job"-ness, I try to keep it to myself. But I have to admit I felt a bit of a twinge when I read earlier in the week that Michael Atkinson was taking the position of DVD reviewer at Movieline. 

Now Michael's been reviewing DVDs for the IFC Independent Eye website for a while, I know. Hell, I even made fun of one of his DVD reviews there a couple of weeks ago. And while he and I have had our tussles on the internet (Jesus God almighty, is there anyone I haven't had a tussle with on the internet?), when all is said and done I consider Michael a fine fellow and a distinctive writer. A little blustery at times, for sure, but you know, he owns his bluster, much as I own my...raging dickheadedness? No, it shouldn't be that. It's something. But I'm not sure. But anyway. The point is that it really caused me no pain to learn that Movieline now wants to pay the guy to compose prose poems on Marlon Brando's jawline as said jawline is rendered in a leading home theater format. No, this was the sentence in the announcement that irritated me: "Michael will provide excellent reconnaissance from the DVD/Blu-ray front several times per week." 

Blu-ray? Really? Goddamnit, I didn't write the book on Blu-ray (now that I think of it, that might not be such a bad idea), but I did write the Popular Mechanics article on it (the entirety of which appears to no longer be online, but here's the first page), and I made only one mistake in it, mixing up Super Technirama with VistaVision, which given the technical similarities of the format, could have happened to anybody!!!! Also: I started my career at a magazine named Video Review. Editing the Test Reports. You know, the ones with the luminance numbers and the signal-to-noise ratios and the goddamn footcandles/footlamberts. I've forgotten more about this technology than most of these schmucks who yammer on about this and that but probably couldn't set a goddamn clock on a  VCR back in the day to save their life ever even learned. I was IN JAPAN to see the very first demonstrations of the MPEG video compression format that wound up MAKING DVD AND BLU-RAY EVEN POSSIBLE! ("This will never work," I said at the time, so crappy did the results look back then.)

Back when I was running the Home Guide at Premiere, I rather developed a horror of DVD reviews that functioned as de facto late critiques of contemporary pictures. My perspective was, well, the film critics have had their say, and if you're reviewing the disc version of the movie, then review that. (Although I recall that when Christopher Kelly was writing most of the reviews for the section, his perspectives could yield some interestingly counterintuitive results; a positive notice for The Other Sister, for instance.) Now obviously it's a whole other kettle of fish when you're dealing with classic or repertory fare on disc. Dave Kehr, who's completely The Man in this department, is invariably brilliant when discussing both the films in question themselves, and also how they've fared in the transit from celluloid to the digital domain. This issue is, I think, particularly crucial when you're discussing Blu-ray. I don't mean to sound rude or anything (well, maybe I do), but with rare exceptions I've got to say that unless you are Dave Kehr, I really don't give a shit what you think of any given movie on Blu-ray. I just want to know how it looks and why it looks the way it does. (See DVD Beaver...and even they can get it wrong, as they did here, a review that needs updating since the recent correctly remastered version.) The rest I can figure out myself. Whether Michael Atkinson's gonna talk about that in his Blu-ray writeups remains to be seen—I haven't seen him tackle a title in that format yet from his Movieline perch. But I wish him all good fortune in the gig in any event. 

All this is also by way of guiding you to this week's topics, questions, and exercises at The Auteurs' Notebook, which contains a chat with Warner Home Video's Vice President of mastering Ned Price, about the gorgeous new Blu-ray of Doctor Zhivago (not depicted above, in case you were wondering) and the upcoming digital rethink of Citizen Kane, and a bit more. All very wonky and technical...just the way I like it when we're talking film preservation and Blu-ray and stuff.

You must be joking. Oh man you must be joking.

A friend, who I adore dearly but whose e-mails I've come to dread, precisely because of circumstances such as this, directs me to the announcement that the suave and debonair (just look at those socks!) Eric Kohn will be assuming the position of lead film critic at indieWIRE. Well, congratulations and good luck to him, is pretty much all I have to say. Or would have had to say, had my friend not directed me to this particular passage in indieWIRE majordomo Eugene Hernandez's celebratory interview with Kohn:

Older critics than me tirelessly claim that today you have to network and fraternize to make a living in entertainment media, at the expense of serious critical thought. To me, that complaint sounds like an expression of personal insecurity. Of course, critics have to wade the waters of the industry with caution, but that’s part of the job; I’m not perfect, but I’m not a tool, either. If there’s a reason for me to voice my opinion about a movie, for better or worse, it’ll usually happen.

Reflections on a new year

So I'm in the eating area of my in-laws' kitchen, sitting at the table before this damnable machine and thinking about why I'm dreading going home. It's not as if I don't love my home, or how My Lovely Wife and I (mostly My Lovely Wife) have turned it into a welcoming, warm, workable environment. It's more that being out here has allowed me the space to wind down, look around, appreciate what I've got, shudder in horror at the varied ways in which I've squandered or taken for granted those things over the past year, and try to concoct ways of NOT doing that in the future. The thing about home is that it's where all my bad habits are, habits of mind and habits of action. 

I think about the ways I go through days, what I get right, what I get wrong. The ways I keep myself informed and the ways I wind myself up. How often the two are kind of inextricably linked to each other. I think about how angry I am, or can be, and how destructive that anger can be...and also how constructive, in its way, how it's fed in to other creative projects over the past year, and even to some polemics. I want to deploy my energies into constructive, creative outlets, but I know that more often than not my anger feeds my sloth, which feeds my insolence, which feeds into a compulsion to shoot from the hip, or whatever you want to call it. I know that it's right to be outraged by the rewarding of mediocrity, and by mediocrity itself, but I also know that railing against it in the ways that are most obvious—the ways I'm most prone to turning to—gets very little done, finally. I look at the New Year and I wish I had a formula to instantaneously make everything make sense, and I know that no such thing exists. But I raise my head and look at these people I love, who have given me so much, and I feel kind of unworthy of them, and wish I could snap my fingers and conjure a better self to be sitting here. Not possible, I know. And what is possible seems...well, seems like it's gonna take a lot of time. Wonder if I ought to take up transcendental meditation. David Lynch sure is a convincing proselytizer for it. Works for Clint Eastwood, too. One thing I understand from hearing them talk about it is that focus, finally, is all. And we're all, to some extent, in a business, a culture, that thrives on distraction.

Also, I'd like to lose sixty pounds or so.

Ah, well. The amazing breakfast Claire's been working on since last night (which will not help me lose sixty pounds) is almost ready. Later we'll be visiting the folks next door, who, as a family activity, watched The Girlfriend Experience on Thanksgiving night (really!), and apparently the head of that household has a lot of questions for me. I'm gonna wear the blazer I wore in that picture over to the house, because why not?

Happy New Year, all!

Young and dumb versus old and in the way

I began writing professionally about 25 years ago. As was befitting to someone with no degree and little practical training, I started as a rock critic. And I was a man on a mission. I wanted to share my enthusiasms with the world. My first piece for the then still-fabled-as-a-"writer's paper" The Village Voice was about the first solo album by the great singer and songwriter Peter Blegvad, a work I rather optimistically deemed "The Great Lost Pop LP Of 1983." (Some might recall that Thriller was a rather big record in 1983.) And so for a couple of years I went my merry way, extolling the virtues of Tom Verlaine, They Might Be Giants, Robert Wyatt, The Golden Palominos, none of whom went on to conquer the charts as a result of my exertions (except, to a certain extent, They Might Be Giants, I guess, and yes, that is odd). I don't think I published a negative review in the Voice until Doug Simmons sent me to cover a Tears For Fears show at Radio City Music Hall. (I don't know why Doug thought they'd be up my alley; maybe on account that they'd dedicated one of the tunes on their album to Wyatt.) The twee-anguished synth rockers actually brought out that fucking chimp from the "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" video when they did that song. I slagged them, titling my review "Schlock Therapy," and so began honing my alternate critical identity as a snarkster.

I had a lot of fun in those days, but I was frustrated, too, in that way that young men and women of particular enthusiasms can be frustrated. With all the great music out there that I was trying to bring to light, why did mass taste suck so bad? Why weren't music fans beating a path to Peter Blegvad's door? I decided the reason was lack of coverage. At a panel at the 1985 New Music Seminar, I laid out a "J'accuse" to Bob Guccione, Jr. of Spin, on account of the fact that he wasn't putting the likes of Blegvad on any of Spin's covers. Jon Pareles, then of Musician and The New York Times, was not unmoved by my impassioned gibberish, but he was also kind of amused. "I used to carry a big torch for that kind of dreck when I first started writing," he told me. (I knew that—I had read his against-all-odds defense of Peter Hammill's solo oeuvre in The Voice.) He assured me that I would get over it.

And so I did, up to a point. I learned that critic's weren't marketers, for one thing, and couldn't function as such. I also learned that there wasn't a whole hell of a lot that one could do about mass taste, particularly if you didn't really share it. The best you could do was write honestly, champion stuff you loved/believed in, and hope that you'd attract the attention of like-minded individuals with which you could conduct at least some kind of virtual give-and-take. 

Of course this was not the only approach a critic could take. A critic could also just say "fuck it," and, to show that he or she was not entirely alienated from the zeitgeist, embrace popular taste. It didn't hurt that the '80s and '90s were ripe with highbrow theorizers putting together substantial toolboxes for just such a product. In popular music criticism, the invention of this not-quite-but-might-as-well-be straw man called "rockism" (which holds, among other things, that admiration for such artists as listed above is a particularly pernicious form of elitism) achieved the aim of letting practitioners of such writing believe that they "mattered" again.It is the anti-rockist, pro-mass taste arm of popular music criticism that enables a thumbsucker in The New York Times, for instance, to refer to the eldest Jonas Brother as "the brooding auteur" of the group. Nice work if you can get it. 

What I'm getting at, in my roundabout way, is why I can't quite join Roger Ebert and Jeffrey Wells when they lament the paucity of young people seeing and/or enthusing over Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Ebert's August 6 post has the portent-filled title "The gathering Dark Age," while Well's more, shall we say, straight-from-the-gut rumination is called "Eloi." Both combine a frustration with their inability to shape mass taste with a disdain—more measured and mournful in Ebert's reflection, more fear-and-loathing filled in Wells'—for these kids today, with their loud hair and long music. 

I grant you—as the Rolling Stones once sang, things are different today. I saw In The Loop a couple of weeks ago and thought it was just splendid—hilarious, kind of chilling, boasting a script of magnificent structure and content. 

And coming out of the theater, I thought, "You know, in the '70s, there's a good chance this would have been a major studio film, something like Network or The Hospital, featuring major movie stars in pretty much all the roles. It would have gotten nationwide distribution and marketing support and been up for a lot of awards. Now it's an import from an indie and it's gonna play maybe 50 theaters top nationwide before it goes to DVD, pay-per-view and cable."

What would The Hurt Locker's place be in the '70s movie landscape? That's a tougher question. I suspect, to be quite honest, that it might have ended up as one of those tough, under-the-radar B pictures of a not-quite-one-thing and not-quite-the-other ilk, sorta like Rolling Thunder. I'm not quite sure.

And I'm also not quite sure just why Ebert and Wells feel that the film's middling profile among the 17-and-under crowd says such dire things about the lack of intellectual curiosity among contemporary teens. If I recall specific scenes and individuals of my own adolescence accurately—say, the long-haired kids who mocked me for carrying around books of Buñuel scripts before repairing to behind the football field to smoke dope while listening to Deep Purple's Made In Japan on a portable 8-track player—I can conclude that intellectual curiosity wasn't all that much in vogue back in the day, either. Add to that the fact that The Hurt Locker was never aggressively marketed to a youth demographic anyway and you finally don't really have too much to complain about.

Unless, that is, you just like complaining, wallowing in your own impotence, and concluding that said impotence is actually tied in with the soon-coming demise of Western Civilization itself. Ebert and Wells' posts come hot on the heels of a controversial bunch of pronouncements by walking smirk Bill Maher, who has assembled not-unconvincing pieces of evidence to support his assertion that America is a "stupid" country. Here's the thing, though—America might be a stupid country, but so's every other damn country in the world. Paris Match's cover last week was of Sharon Stone flashing her tits—how fucking smart is that? 

I'm not arguing for a quiet acceptance of the status quo, nor, for that matter, for an anti-rockist analog one can apply to film criticism, wherein post-Derrida-theory can be distorted in order to posit that G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra is actually Teh Awesome. What I'm saying is, a man's gotta know his limitations, and the limitations of his discipline...and then do all that he can nevertheless.(That goes for a woman, too. But I didn't want to spoil the Magnum Force evocation.) Tearing one's hair out and venting about how stupid everyone else is may have some short term therapeutic effect, but doesn't get much done. The kids of today didn't invent dumb. They inherited it. 

American trilogy

...well, of course I have a bunch of thoughts and feelings concerning the death of Michael Jackson, not to mention the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon...I daresay if I did not, I'd probably be obliged to give up my United States citizenship. The echoes of Elvis in the decline of Jackson, for instance, and how Jackson in fact managed to outpace The King in waste and weirdness. I remember reading, in recent years, an article in Mojo magazine by soul music chronicler Gerri Hirshey, about the dawning years of Jackson's superstardom, that ended with the still-young, still plastic-surgery free young singer half-cheerfully asking Hirshey, "Scared for me yet?" For Fawcett, I think how she never really made it as a film actress, because that's sometimes the way that cookie crumbles, and how she gave it a good shot in Altman's Dr. T and the Women, and was Martin Amis really fair to mutate and recast her as "Butch Beausoleil" in his novel Money, a part send-up of the disastrous making of Saturn 3? And as for McMahon, I think that were this a socialist country like Europe (I know, Europe's more than one country, but bear with me here), McMahon would be a member of our equivalent of the Académie Française, and the taxpayers would be footing the bill for his house.

I eagerly await, incidentally, Roger L. Simon's column on how Obama likely engineered Michael Jackson's demise so as to further distract our populace from the situation in Iran. 

Deep thought

If I watch enough House, I may soon be ready to finally tackle that Stan Brakhage autopsy movie I've been afraid to look at for so many years.

In anticipation of attending a screening of "Away We Go"

"Hoping to change the subject, the author asked Oswald [...] what it was he was working on. (Oswald was some sort of professional writer.) The author, of course, was both expecting and dreading that Oswald's project would be of grave importance and grand scope—a renunciation of Keynesian economics, a reworking of Grendel (this time from the point of view of nearby conifers), whatever. But do you know what he said, he of the feathered hair and purple velour? What he said was: a screenplay. He didn't italicize it then but we will here: a screenplay."

—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2000