Some Came Running

Literary/critical interlude

I don't read as much jazz journalism as I should, but of what I did read in 1969 it is Down Beat's account of the Rutgers Jazz Festival that has stayed with me most vividly.

Down Beat, as you know, is the principal magazine of the American jazz music profession; it has been going thirty-five years, and has correspondents in every land from Denmark to Japan. Its policy is a comfortable, middle-of-the-road tolerance: whatever is, generally speaking, is right. And the man they sent to Rutgers was clearly cast in the same mould: let 'em all come, DIzzy, Herbie Mann, Jethro Tull, B.B. King, the Adderley Brothers—the more the merrier. He sat patiently in his seat and tried to hear good in everything, even sermons from Stones had they been present, and on the whole he succeeded, though there is the occasional wince. ('I was beginning to wish I wore a hearing aid so I could turn it down').

The flashpoint, if one can call it that, came on the Sunday evening. Our man arrived late, to find the Miles Davis group launched into what proved their final number, or, as he puts it, 'in the throes of what I most deplore, a free-form free-for-all' that "degenerated into a musical catfight." One must salute his honesty: here was one of the groups he was most anxious to hear, and it was terrible, and he admits it was terrible. But then—and this is the point—there followed the Newport All Stars Braff, Norvo, Tal Farlow, and good old George Wein on piano, and the reporter's relief was so enormous that his encomia became almost pathetic in their hyperbole. Braff and his friends were sparkling spring water, they were 'Macbeth' and "David Copperfield', they were incomparable, they were as eternal as sex and sunlight: 'man, this is what it's all about.' In his enthusiasm he asked a 17-year-old girl what she thought of them. She said: 'It's music to go shopping at Klein's by.'

Now the point of this anecdote it two-fold: first, all kinds of jazz are not equally good, no matter what editorial policy might be; some of it is ravishingly exciting, and some a musical catfight scored for broken glass and bagpipes, and you only have to hear the two in succession to grab one and reject the other. Secondly, jazz (that is, the form of Afro-American popular music that flourished between 1925 and 1945) means nothing to the young. This should strengthen us in our devotion to it. True, we must give up any notion we may have been cherishing that beneath our hoary exteriors lurk hearts of May: we may dig jazz, but the kids want something else. Our passion for this extraordinary and ecstatic musical phenomenon that lasted a mere twenty or thirty years in the first half of our century must now take its place alongside similar passions for Hilliard miniatures or plain-chant.

—Philip Larkin, "Moment of Truth," The Daily Telegraph, January 10, 1970, reprinted in All What Jazz, Faber and Faber, 1985

Hitchcock's bubbles

In Robin Wood's 1981 introduction to his seminal study of Howard Hawks, Wood cites "an extreme and habitual self-consciousness" as a characteristic of modern art, one to which he has an ambivalent response; citing Losey's Eve, a film he expresses a qualified admiration for, he enumerates several shots containing an "insistence on significance." The most egregious, to Wood's mind, being a "waste of a whole camera movement" to show the viewer that a character in the film is reading Eliot.

"This kind of thing is so alien to Hawks that I am almost at a loss to find anything in his films sufficiently like it to make direct comparison possible," Wood continues. "[B]ut there is one such moment in Red Line 7000. Julie (Laura Devon), the sheltered younger sister of a race-team manager, sits waiting for her lover, one of the drivers, who has in fact left her. She waits most of the night, with an opened bottle of champagne on the table before her, and when her brother comes to find her, and tells her he has seen her boy-friend out with other women, she looks at the bottle and murmurs that the bubbles are all gone. It's not a profound bit of symbolism, but the point is that Hawks doesn't treat it as if it were. It arises naturally from the scene[...]"

The scene, and Wood's description of it, crossed my mind recently when I watched a restored version of Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 melodrama The Ring, playing tomorrow night on the big screen of the Harvey Theater as part of BAM's presentation of nine silent movies by the master director. The Ring is an unusual Hitchcock picture in several respects. For one thing, it's the only Hitchcock picture for which he is credited as the screenwriter; for another, it's not a suspense or crime picture but rather an odd romance in which an up-and-coming boxer has to cope with an imposed romantic rivalry. The movie's sexual politics seem a mix of the tenor of the times and Hitchcock's own damage, and will no doubt prove scintillating to some latter-day observers, but are not the concern of this consideration. 

There's an extent to which what may be considered symbolism and what is in fact metaphor may smear into each other, the way chocolate smears into peanut butter. Near the climax of The Ring, the protagonist, Carl Brisson's Jack, wins an important bout, and he and his cronies repair to his place to celebrate. The absence of Jack's wife, known in the film only as "The Girl" (Lillian Hall Davis, and what did I tell you about the picture's sexual politics?) is noted, but Jack assures the fellas that she ought to be back soon. In the meantime, champagne! Jack pours it out. 

What then follows, in a matter of mere seconds, via a series of meticulously-executed dissolves, is a visual account of the bubbles going...

...and going...

and there they are, gone. And in the event you needed more emphasis on the literal, metaphorical, and perhaps symbolic fact, Hitchcock dissolves once more, to the whole tray of flat drinks. 

(N.b., the screen captures here are from a 2007 DVD issue of the film, not the excellent restoration BAM will be running.)  What Hitchcock accomplishes with this effect, the economy of which belies what must have been some pretty elaborate preparation in order to pull off, is kind of remarkably multivalent. Via the dissolve, he sculpts in time, demonstrating its passing while also showing the life, the liveliness, going out of the ostensible celebration. Jack's victory is an empty one, because his wife is in fact out on the town with his rival...the man he will, as the scenario has it, have to face in the title ring for the final, you know, showdown.

The champagne effect is one of the most striking in a movie that is full of cinematic storytelling touches that were innovations at the time and subsequently became part of the lingua franca. Most of the pleasure to be had from The Ring today is seeing Hitchcock working out his ideas; his cinematic apparatus, while remarkably assured, isn't entirely refined. But there's a raw exuberance to the way he throws one effect after another. For the next thirty-plus years of his career, you never see that enthusiasm flag, but you do see it applied more virtuosically. While this movie plays awkwardly to that bugaboo of cinephilia, the "contemporary sensibility," it's also entirely clear that in The Ring,  Hitchcock isn't just learning the ropes, he's making them.  

The current cinema: "White House Down" and "I'm So Excited"

If you think I'm going to easily let go of the fact that Channing Tatum's character in White House Down is named "John Cale," you don't know me very well. But my MSN Movies review doesn't go into the movie's oddest line of dialogue, which is "Killing Ted Hope was the second hardest thing I ever had to do in my life." No, really.

Also, I'm So Excited. 

Literary interlude

HOMAGE TO WBY

after you read all them books

all that history and philosophy and things

what do you know that you didn’t know before?

 

Thin sheets of gold with bright enameling

                                                                         23:xi:63

—Philip Whalen

Faulkner and Sirk, "Pylon" and "The Tarnished Angels," "melodrama" and "art"

I went on a bit of a Faulkner reading jag recently, looking into As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Pylon for the first time since college at least. The experience was both exhilarating and disquieting. I had forgotten what a stone modernist Faulkner was, and I was a little unprepared for both the work's swampiness, and the sharp focus of what Faulkner adapted from Joyce into an entirely American idiom. The compound words of Pylon, and there seemed to be at least two per page, are confoundingly inventive and/or unselfconsciously bizarre (plucked at random, from the first chapter: "murallimning" and "shadowlurked"). It was a pleasure to immerse myself in his multivalent style, and eventually I felt in a better position to appreciate it than I had been in the past.

Same for Faulkner's acute understanding of alcoholism and the alcoholic brain. It's a funny thing: of course there are events in Sanctuary and Pylon, indeed the events in Sanctuary are/were pretty infamous, but there's no way that you can cite these novels for their narrative momentum, nor call them plot-driven. For every one incident that occurs, there are pages and pages depicting drunken paralysis. Temple Drake wakes up in a strange room and it takes her a whole chapter to get to the opposite corner of the room. And it's a small room. I'm exaggerating of course. But not much, I think.  I was often struck by what I perceived as Faulkner's personal tragedy: that his profound understanding of alcoholism came so early and was of so little use to him outside of his art. 

Of course having finished Pylon I was compelled to rewatch The Tarnished Angels, the 1957 film adapted from that 1935 novel, directed by Douglas Sirk. (Sirk would direct only two more features after this, both masterpieces: A Time To Love And A Time To Die, and Imitation of Life.) In the book Sirk on Sirk, the director cites Faulkner as "a very early influence on my outlook" and says that he had a yen to adapt Pylon during his days at the German studio UFA. Working in Hollywood gave Sirk the chance to adapt the American book as an American director, to retain some of the idiom of the original.  But a literal-minded movie version of Pylon was of course an impossibility in the Hollywood of the 1950s. But I think, I hope, we know this already. The point is that the Hollywood "auteur" of the era in which Sirk was at his most productive and most eloquent was a pragmatist as well as an artist.

And so, Sirk seemingly cheerily admits to his interlocutor Jon Halliday in Sirk on Sirk, "the story had to be completely un-Faulknerized, and it was." A very literal-minded person may well ask at this juncture, "Well what's the point of making the film from the book, then?" And here is where, within the system in which Sirk labored, the personal meets the pragmatic. Here, actually, lie the roots of what is sometimes called "the auteur theory."

In his essay on the comedies of director Allan Dwan, Kent Jones describes a mode of Hollywood moviemaking he calls the "proto-sitcom." He calls the majority of these pictures "attempts to mass-produce the form of romantic comedy that Cukor, Capra, Lubitsch, Hawks, et. al., had perfected in the 1930s" and notes their "new kind of impersonal zip, airiness, and lightness." Allan Dwan, the critic continues, "may have been the only director who knew how (or had the inclination) to harness this industrial beauty [...] [b]ut, very unlike the aforementioned machine-tooled items, Dwan's movies are inflected with little grace notes—sudden tiny shifts in speed or perspective or visual design that gives the films a humming beauty." "Grace notes"—that's an important phrase.

A version of what Jones is talking about applies to Sirk, and it particularly applies to Sirk whether he is adapting Faulkner or Fannie Hurst. In his chat with Halliday, he notes that "while the book is completely transformed, the characters in the film are pretty close to Faulkner's." This might not seem readily apparent. The unnamed reporter co-protagonist in Pylon is described as looking like a ghost, and has a shambling, zombie-like air to his movements; The Tarnished Angel's reporter is given the studly name of Burke Devlin, and is played by Rock Hudson. (It's worth mentioning that Hudson gives one of his most sincere and direct screen performances here, and is very fine indeed.) But leaving aside the matter of surface appearances, Sirk is correct. In both the book and the movie, the reporter gives a speech to his editor in which he confoundedly describes the aerial barnstormers whose story he's dying to write as "not human." That is, as all too human in their isolation from themselves and from each other. And Sirk conveys that in the most refined but potent cinematic means available to him. 

There's also the matter of the grace notes. "Having revealed how much you can take out and still have rock and roll, they now explore how much you can put back in and still have Ramones," Robert Christgau wrote of Rocket To Russia in 1977. Having de-Faulknerized Faulkner in the scripting process, Sirk judiciously chooses moment of pure Faulknerian pain and places them at key junctures in the picture, creating a network of exposed nerve endings. The first is in the "who's your old man" taunting of the young Jack Schumann—whether or not he's the child of pilot Roger Schumann is an issue in both the book and the movie, and the early revelation of the playful cruelty of this world is a defining one. Sirk frames young Jack's trauma economically, in one unflinching, perfectly framed shot in which the kid (beautifully played by Christopher Olsen) flays at the right side of the frame with his short arms, sobbing and yelling, his face disappearing and reappearing in flashes as his head ducks and his arms fly before him. It's a remarkable distillation of the scene as written in Pylon. 

Sirk and screenwriter George Zuckerman also introduce a fascinating bit of intertextuality, something not in the book, having Devlin and Jack's mother, Laverne (Dorothy Malone, brilliant and alternating between haggard and ravishing, sometimes with a mere turn of the head), bond over Willa Cather's My Antonia. "My Antonia, there's another influence," Sirk said to Halliday, in the late 1960s. "As I remember it, My Antonia is a novel about circularity; the hero comes back to the place that he started out from. Today it would look passé, perhaps. But there was a time when I was deeply in love with America, a love that was shaken, though, to a degree, by wars and by Hiroshima, and by the things that happened afterwards, McCarthyism and so on." Though it is itself set in a time behind 1957, in The Tarnished Angels Devlin says of Cather's book, "Nostalgia in Nebraska. Lost farms and faded loves."  Laverne counters, "It brings back memories of home. How I was. And who I was. When I first started reading it. Twelve years ago." She takes up the book again, to finish it, and the below shot is, in the context Sirk creates for it, heartbreaking. 

As it happens Cather was an important influence of Faulkner himself; in her excellent study of Cather and her critics Joan Acocella notes that Faulkner "considered her one of the foremost American novelists." Whether Sirk was aware of that is maybe besides the point, and in fact if the connection is a happy coincidence that only bolsters a particular sense of affinity.

These other shots of isolation (above the actor is Robert Stack; below, Malone is seen with Robert Middleton) are exemplary minor-key grace notes that underscore for me the impression that while The Tarnished Angels cannot transpose Pylon, it authentically honors that book, and Faulkner's particular tragic, humane vision.  The movie in its entirety, aside from being a beauty in and of itself, is also, alas, an object lesson that when critics throw around the term "Sirkian" nowadays, almost none of them actually know what that word means. 

Auteurism as formulated by Truffaut and Sarris and others instructed cinephiles not to be enslaved by genre hierarchies, and that's one thing. Current mutations of this perspective seem to be tending to a conclusion that quality itself is a hierarchical construct. As a non-academic, I can't speak to the extent to which this notion is useful on the higher plains of theory. In practice on the lower plain of film writing on the internet, it enables a particularly glib kind of perversity. In March of this year, the writer Calum Marsh contributed a piece to Film.com entitled "Tyler Perry's Defense: Why The Filmmaker Deserves Our Respect."  The chatty essay leaves any number of questions unanswered, including "what do you mean 'Our'?", and, "what it is about the punitive sexist moralism of certain of Perry's film's is worthy of respect?", but the issue of immediate concern is Marsh's declaration that Perry at his best is "making some of the strongest melodramas since Douglas Sirk." Again, we leave aside the curious fact that in seeking to legitimize Perry's work, Marsh tries to put Sirk back into the pigeonhole that auteurist critics removed him from.

It does not take a particularly acute critical sense to understand that any posited equivalence between Tyler Perry and Douglas Sirk is a false one. It only takes a functioning pair of eyes, and a functioning pair of ears. Perry's actual cinematic forebear is Hugo Haas, a filmmaker I daresay many young cinephiles of the vulgar auteurist inclination are not familiar with. They might want to look into him. But this kind of false equivalency is not good for film studies students and other living things. 

James Gandolfini, 1961-2013

In Not Fade Away, David Chase, 2012.

David Chase used his secret sharer James Gandolfini in a quietly devastating way in his feature film writing/directing debut last year, Not Fade Away. Gandolfini plays Pat, the disapproving dad of '60s Jersey teen and fledgling rocker Douglas (John Magaro), and in the early exchanges between the working-class father and the Beatle-boots sporting son the words and attitudes are conventionally gruff and bluff, standard get-a-haircut stuff goosed with racial and sexual epithets for extra added discomfort. The discomfort turns out to carry something beyond its initial shock value, which the viewer doesn't get right away. And it seems a little odd, at first; having cast Gandolfini in the first place, and knowing all of what the actor is capable of, why give him so seemingly little to do? Well, we might think, this is after all a coming of age story; the son's, not the dad's. 

But Chase is an artist of expansive brilliance and exquisite sensitivity, perhaps even more sensitivity than the television critics who have built a kind of church on the rock of The Sopranos even know. Later on in the movie, after a particular family crisis, Pat dresses up and takes his college-age, still-rocking son to a "nice" local restaurant, a private, favorite place of his, a place where he can unwind like a man. Having long not understood his son, Pat having experienced a personal crisis that has left him at something of a loss, now thinks that his son can understand him. And he makes a confession to his son. The confession is written in the words that a simple man, or a man who takes pride in believing himself a simple man, would use; no one, really, is better at a certain working-class idiom right now than Chase is. And Gandolfini takes the words, and without any affectation or winking or any kind of actorly showing off, he launches them over an entire emotional spectrum; he's sheepish, he's prideful, he's confident, and most of all, he's free, he's free...because he thinks his son, who's maybe a member of what Otis Redding called "the love crowd," is a person who can comprehend the sense of yearning that Pat is finally allowing himself to fully feel, to feel despite the very real danger involved. 

And the finally crushing thing about the scene is that Douglas doesn't get it. At all. He reacts like the kid he still is.  He's embarassed, he's why-are-you-telling-me-this; the bluster of the ostensibly enlightened young generation can't stand up to genuine emotional revelation. (It's a tough scene for me personally, not least because my parents split up when I was in my teens, and there was more than one exchange I had with my old man that was rather like the one here.) And the look on Gandolfini's face as the scene ends is amazing. He never expected to be disappointed by his son in this way. But because Pat is a decent man, and perhaps not as simple as he believes himself to be, he does not let the rebuff stick. He begins to encourage Doug, albeit quietly, with magnanimous gestures, and an instruction he makes not with words but with a tilt of the head: If you can just get away from this (Jersey, stifling family. everything), you'll be all right.

Some critics have called Not Fade Away an exercise in nostalgia, and while it certainly does regard the fashions of its time with affection and avers that the music of its time was seminal in ways that go way beyond what we call mere "pop culture," it hardly trucks in the kind of triumphalism one normally associates with celebrations of good old days. The movie ends with its hero, lost and alone, on the streets of a Los Angeles that's past the summer of love and about to turn freakily ugly, his dreams unrealized, far from his friends, with failure behind him and failure likely in front of him. After he declines a ride from a car full of what look like future Mansonites, the night envelopes him like a shroud, and in that shroud is the shadow of his father, and his father's own sense of failure, and disappointment in himself. And without Gandolfini's presence, and acting genius, Chase could not have conjured precisely that shadow before bringing Douglas' sister back on screen to dance us out of the dark. 

I don't think there's been a screen actor since Warren Oates who could do what Gandolfini did. His death is a gargantuan loss to art.

"My Best Day," at ReRun Gastropub Cinema June 14-20

Ashlie Atkinson and Rachel Style

It can be kind of awkward when you become friendly with someone who labors in the arts and you're not familiar with their work. The filmmaker Erin Greenwell has been a neighborhood friend of mine for a while, and we've had constructive discussions about movies, and she's been kind enough to offer me very useful advice on some of my own projects, but it was only recently that I got to see My Best Day, her 2012 film that premiered as part of the "Next" program at the Sundance Film Festival of that year. As you might imagine, I looked at it with some trepidation. I had heard good things about it; John Anderson, who's also a pal and whose critical judgment I consider very sound, wrote very positive things about it for his Variety review when it screened at Sundance. Still. You never know. As I say, could be awkward.

So I'm happy to report that I found My Best Day delightful. It's a small-town-set comedy that has a very credible sense of place to it—something that hardly happens at all these days in movies either studio-made or independent. Greenwell pitches her depiction of this environment perfectly between lyric-pastoral-potential (let's take a walk by the railway tracks) and you-could-be-bored-to-death-out-here (let's lie down on the railway tracks) perspectives; it's a perfect place for her characters, whose quirks stem from ostensibly postmodern identity issues that were likely always pertinent, but just never discussed in the Norman Rockwell days. Rachel Styles' Karen, raised by her mom, works as a refrigerator-repair dispatcher, and at the beginning of the single day covered by the movie—the Fourth of July, as it happens—gets a call from a household she believes is that of her biological father. So begins her odyssey, for which her helpmate is Ashlie Atkinson's Meagan, who had planned on spending the day figuring out whether she was going to stray from her long-term girlfriend or not. The folks they meet on their journey are in a sense kindred spirits in that they're all looking for a home, or at the very least some relief from a problem they believe makes them unique. Greenwell's point is that everyone's a misfit in some way, and it's through recognizing that fact that we can forge true community. But the movie makes its point the best way possible, through engaging you with the characters, and it does this via brisk writing and excellent performances (the cast also features Kate McKinnon, who's been making a big impression on Saturday Night Live recently). The direction is also very assured: Greenwell's aware that her human story is also a little on the fanciful style, and she doesn't try to disguise that with faux-gritty cinematography; her visual style is crisp, alert, attractive. 

The movie is getting its first New York theatrical run at the ReRun Gastropub Cinema starting tomorrow; check it out there if you're able. The movie's website, which will update you on how to see it and when, is here.

Zack Snyder and "Vulgar Auteurism"

Just kidding. A review of Man of Steel, for MSN Movies.

I'm not an inordinately star-struck kind of person, I don't think, but I am an admirer of Michael Shannon, and it was kind of cool over the past few summers to occasionally spot him doing laps a couple of lanes away from me at the Red Hook pool. I have a sneaking suspicion that won't happen this summer, alas. 

Also: reviews of The Purge and  Much Ado About Nothing. Later this week: This Is The End. 

UPDATE: As promised, a review of This Is The End. 

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. 

My direct experience of progressive rock

I hesitate to publicly take issue with Rob Sheffield for several reasons. First off, I find him an engaging, sharp, funny writer. Second, I'm acquainted with him and we share warm kind feelings for each other as people, I think. Thirdly, he's one of the greatest audiences I've ever had. Whenever I run into him and we converse, his laughter at whatever attempted witticisms I drop is the most appreciative I have ever heard. Knowing Rob and his pop tastes as I do, I wasn't surprised by some of the less charitable perspectives on prog (or "progressive") rock that he puts forward in his New York Times Book Review assessment of the essay compilation Yes Is The Answer. And in point of fact said review confirms, to my mind, some of the things I suspected about the book when I paged through it at a printed matter emporium and mused that this did not look like the prog-rock book I was looking for, if in fact I was looking for such a thing. 

As described by Sheffield (and his description jibes with the impression I had paging through it) Yes Is The Answer seems a rather silly book, and if I'm going to read a book on prog rock, I'd prefer it to be either entirely po-faced or uproariously funny rather than rather silly. Rob, however, takes the book's silliness as a cue to propound upon the silliness of prog rock itself as far as he's concerned, and to look down his nose at the social lives, particularly the sex lives of its enthusiasts. As for its makers, he chortles at the fact that Yes once stocked a recording studio with bales of hay to evoke a properly rustic atmosphere for inspiration. This IS indeed silly, but hoe much more or less silly is it than spending tens of thousands of dollars on heroin and/or cocaine, as so many other rock musicians, progressive and otherwise, have done? But he reserves most of his nyah-nyah you can't get laid disdain for consumers of the genre. One of the book's essayists, he notes, got turned on to the music of the loosely-defined Canterbury Scene by a high-school girlfriend; "not a typical prog story, to say the least." In his kicker, Sheffield states "oblivion seems entirely suited to prog, which at its best functioned as a shelter from school, from sex, from the frightening adult world." Even without parsing too closely, this seems a curious stone to have been thrown by the author of Talking To Girls About Duran Duran. The implied demand that a more acceptable music is one that assists teens and post-teens in facing that adult world seems, frankly, unrealistic. But really, the fallacy of the generalization stems from a not-uncommon rock crit problem, that is, mistaking one's practice with that of a sociologist's.

Sheffield's actually not even ten years younger than me, so my initial mental rationalization for his curious contempt doesn't hold, entirely. And since I never even liked sociology, let alone believed that critical practice compelled me to attempt any form of it, I can only respond with anecdotal evidence that for a number of my confederates in the late '70s, a taste for prog not only embodied zero contradiction to an engagement with adulthood, but also constituted a palpable asset to it.   For instance, and not to tell tales out of school, but take My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™. When I arrived at William Paterson College in 1977, he had transfered to NYU but was still a legend at the college paper, for his photographic acumen, his merciless sarcasm, his way with "the ladies" as some used to call them back then, and his ability to recite all of the dialogue from the 1933 King Kong. I didn't meet Ron until spring of 1978, at the funeral of a mutual friend who COULD have gone with me to see Richard Hell at CBGB on the weekend of his death, but instead went out to Central Jersey and...well, it's a long story...and at the funeral I asked him about the Kong thing and he responded with the exact contempt and merciless sarcasm that such an inquiry might warrant when delivered at a funeral. Ron eventually got around to forgiving me this trespass, and we became friends, and soon I was hanging around the basement of his folks' place in Clifton, which he had redone into his bachelor pad. He had an awesome stereo of separate components—I had only ever had variants of a Close-And-Play myself—and a huge record collection of mostly classical and prog. I was mildly appalled, really. King Crimson had its moments, I had to admit, having affected an appreciation of Shoenberg and Coltrane in my high school years, but despite my fondness for Eno and such I was at this point a reasonably dedicated punk rock person. "How can you listen to Yes? I mean that vocalist is the worst. And those lyrics!" "Eventually you learn to hear through it, or past it," Ron shrugged. "And you're complaining about lyrics? What about the Ramones?" "They're ironic," I nyah-nyahed back. We were both schmucks, but he made a little more immediate sense.

The point I'm taking my time getting to is that the component-stereo and sophisticated-musical-tastes combination was a crucial component of Ron's mystique in the dating department. It was I, Mr. Punk Rock and Socially Conscious Lyrics and I'm Against Society Man and all that other shit who had a bit of struggle. This is not to say that I came around to prog out of a desire to enhance my appeal to the opposite sex. My first college girlfriend, to whom I gave the flower that was my sexual innocence, was an exemplary suburban Punk Rock Girl (her copy of The Basketball Diaries was festooned with "I love you"s in the margins of the passages describing the most debauched instances of drug abuse), and when I brought home (to my first apartment, which I shared with a college roommate in Paterson, New Jersey in the late '70s, in case you're wondering where I earned my "street cred") a copy of Art Bears' debut album Hopes and Fears, which opens with an austere cover of Brecht/Eisler's "On Suicide" sung by Dagmar Krause in her direst sharp tones, she pronounced her conditional approval on grounds that it was bracingly abrasive. Which indeed it was.

The College Girlfriend, Ron, and myself, eventually started experimenting with making our own music. Ron  was a keyboardist, and a pretty good one I thought (he remains to my mind sometimes frustratingly dubious with respect to his abilities in this respect), the CG played guitar, and I played a little guitar, and bellowed, and had an outsize personality, not necessarily in that order. We had another friend, a college poet, who wrote lyrics and also bellowed, or wailed; and we dicked around in various permutations trying to write songs. We thought that our differing sensibilities—Ron's prog taste was supplemented by a slight Ray Manzarek jones, and a lot of his compositional inspiration was taken from the film score work of Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann; CG was a big Stones person; I was "literary" and obnoxious—might create interesting material. We were not particularly correct, but we persisted, and were very constructive in coming up with band names: Transparent Things (I know, I know), Plan Nine, etcetera. Eventually CG and I broke up, and she took up with more competent and dedicated musicians who later went on to stints in real bands such as The Brandos and Dramarama (look 'em up!). But Ron and I kept at it and eventually we, in the decades-later-to-be-immortal-words of Art Brut, formed a band. 

From left to right, Douglas Harvey, Ron Goldberg, Gene McCallister, your humble servant, Thomas Santamassino, circa 1981. God, I hated that air conditioner, can't you tell? 

Whether or not we were any good (and the debate continues to this day as we, having reconvened largely for the purpose of continued fellowship, slouch toward the completion of a professional-grade recording of material we "composed" over thirty years ago), our unusual concept—to create music that melded the complexity of certain prog with the DIY attitude and dissonance of punk and post-punk—was a way of enabling us to engage the world rather than retreat from it. We had to do things—write material, rehearse it, and play it in front of people. Our parents weren't involved in the project. Ron and some outside friends had rented a house, and that became the GHQ for band activities, the protest of certain neighbors and roommates notwithstanding. When drummer McCallister either quit or was fired (I honestly don't remember which...he's a cop now, if you were wondering), we had to go out and find a drummer, and we were blessed for a year with the best one in not just the Hoboken/North Haledon scene but in all of northern and central Jersey, Stanley Demeski, then also of the Phosphenes and Winter Hours (both of which bands really, really hated us) and later of the Willies, then the Feelies, then Luna, and now the Feelies again. If you're familiar with his work, you know that Stanley nails the 4/4 like nobody's business, but what you might not know is that, like his fellow one-time Feelie Anton Fier, he at one point in his development learned every drum pattern on the notoriously difficult (and some might say secretly proggy) Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Our band had one highly questionable (and unsingable-over) tune called "Refraction," the main section of which had a 9/5 time signature. Once Stanley left the band, that number left the repetoire. Actually, the whole band kind of fell apart; we couldn't find an adequate let alone competent full time replacement drummer, and the band's front man was such a mikestand-kicking prima-donna non-singing asshole that nobody really wanted to work with him any more. Guess who?

Anyway, the ideal remained alive in our sensibilities if not our musical practice. You might not remember this, but the reformed King Crimson—the quartet with Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Bill Bruford and Captain Fripp, and no mellotron—actually had some New Wave cred given Fripp's and Belew's session work with Bowie, Talking Heads, Blondie, and so on. Artificial Intelligence aimed to meld Gang of Four and Pere Ubu with Henry Cow, and the distances between those bands was not as huge as some might imagine. (The distinctions might not be cost-effective to poptimists such as Sheffield, I allow.) Even as Ubu founder David Thomas was running Seeds and Alice Cooper licks through a darkly arty iteration of Cleveland weltschmertz, he was engaging in correspondence with one-time Henry Cow drummer Chris Cutler, with whom Thomas later worked as a solo artist. Cutler himself drummed in an iteration of Ubu that included its biggest commercial successes, including the college-rock quasi-hit "Waiting For Mary." 

The point is that there was/is more to prog and its tendrils that is dreamed of in the institutional philosophy of the New York Times these days, Jon Pareles' presence at the paper notwithstanding. The sectarian anti-prog bias, not to be paranoid, is I think reflected in the illustration for Rob's review, in which Genesis-era Peter Gabriel is seen in stage makeup with mouth agape, an image meant to evoke a snicker. I do not laugh, because I'm vaguely aware of how many column inches the New York Times devotes to Lil Wayne, who, objectively speaking, doesn't present a much more overtly "admirable" visual picture. Also, one need not like what Gabriel did in order to appreciate the line his theatrical mode of presentation points directly to Lady Gaga. But again, this is par for the course for an institution that gifted us with the phrase "cultural vegetables," and at which a top reviewer interpreted an assignment to write on a book about video games as an occasion to voice his dislike of Jethro Tull.

Prog rock, Sheffield snarks in the final line of his notice, "is the genre that gave the phrase 'comfortably numb' to the language." Except The Wall (a problematic record but maybe a better one than you remember) is the work of an arena-rock band—that's part of its whole subject. As spacey as Pink Floyd's music got, it never approached prog's level of difficulty (Dave Stewart, the Canterbury Egg/Hatfield/National Health guy as opposed to the Eurythmics guy, once observed of a Robert Wyatt concert he participated in that it "turned out well despite Nick Mason's inability to play in 7/4") or popularity.