Some Came Running

Readings of 2021

The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson (Recommended by a friend. Enjoyed it quite a bit, as Churchill worship goes; I think Larson's writing here is a substantial improvement on The Devil in the White City, which I found clunky in parts.)

The Nolan Variations, Tom Shone (A good way to look at Nolan, I think. I'm in it, too.)

A Fairly Honorable Defeat, Iris Murdoch (There's a lot of Murdoch to be read and last year I read a bunch. This is a pretty nifty vinegary allegory of sorts.)

Mike Nichols: A Life, Mark Harris (Aside from its inherent value, which is more than substantial, it gives writers like myself something to aim for.) 

The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright (I knew a lot of this already but this is a better than decent aggregation so to speak.)

True Believer, Abraham Reisman (See above; also Abe's enthusiasm for the Golden Age of Marvel relative to his disappointment in Lee makes for engaging reading.) 

Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley (Oh those wandering modernists. Great.) 

The Recognitions, William Gaddis (Finally did it! And dug it!)

Last Call, Elon Green (A true crime account with a real purpose.)

Beeswing, Richard Thompson (Fascinating, spectacular)

The Quiet Americans, Scott Thompson (The origins of the CIA in four ironical portraits; recommended to Charles McCarry fans for sure.) 

Dark Passage, David Goodis (Goodis, as you like him.) 

V., Thomas Pynchon (A second reading; the first was when I was about 13. Definitely got a touch of the magic I felt then. "Keep cool but care" is a stressed-out character's observation, not the book's, or Pynchon's, life motto. Jesus.) 

Moscow to the End of the Line, Venedikt Erofeev (Drunken Soviet monologue, exhausting for such a short book.) 

The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy (I could never get into Hardy's prose when I was a collegiate reader, but loved his poetry. [Still do.] This hit me hard, so I'll be getting to his other novels.)

Letting Go, Philip Roth (A sweeping, curious, genuinely tortured book.)

Castle in the Air, Donald E. Westlake (Mid Westlake, which is still pretty damn good.)

Rhythm is our Business: Jimmy Lunceford and the Harlem Express, Eddy Determeyer (An informative but dry account of the amazing bandleader.)

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, Edward White (A wholly admirable and readable attempt to come to grips with Hitchcock's character defects while insisting on the pertinence and ultimate humanity of his art)

My Life As A Man, Roth (Whatever you think of the guy, you have to admit he got put through the wringer. I mean, maybe you don't, but I do.)

Enter the Aardvark, Jessica Anthony (A very entertaining and purposefully eccentric political fable.) 

The Conjure Man Dies, Rudolph Fisher (It's terrible that Fisher died in 1934, only two years after publishing his first detective novel. Had he lived to keep at it, I think he'd have written mysteries that improved on this fascinating but not entirely satisfactory Harlem mystery.)  

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (Believe the hype.) 

Ending Up, Kingsley Amis (Old people quarreling and falling about. Figured I'd read it now, before it got too on the nose.) 

The Black Prince, Murdoch (Good loony philosophical fun.) 

Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, edited by Bob Stanley and Tessa Norton (A dizzying compendium of Smith unpacking, packed with promo artwork and scribblings)

Later, Stephen King (The Hard Case Stephen King has kinda become a genre unto itself. I dig it.)

Nuns and Soldiers, Murdoch (Possibly the most solidly constructed of the Murdochs I read this year.) 

No Beethoven, Peter Erskine (Wow, this dude is the father of one of the co-creators of Pen15! Anyway. Protean drummer tells cool anecdotes.) 

Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky (My first go-round with this. Hot stuff.) 

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino (Good loony not particularly philosophical fun. And a revealing peek into the psychopathology of its author to be sure.)

The Wall, Mary Roberts Rinehart (A bit creaky but enjoyable. A mystery, in case you don't recognize the name of the author.) 

Inside Out, Walter Bernstein (Believe the hype.)

Frankly We Did Win This Election, Michael Bender (Aiiiieeeee)

Letters, John Barth (I'd wanted to read this for forever but hadn't completed all the prior Barth works which provide this opus with its dramatis personae...until I did. This was fun, and instructive, mainly in demonstrating that the author can kind of do anything he damn well pleases after all. It is not entirely an exercise in dickering trivial postmodernism, either. )

The Hook, Westlake (A masterpiece, chilly as hell. ) 

The Plague Court Murders, John Dickson Carr (As expected)

Always Crashing in the Same Car, Matthew Specktor (This one slammed me with the force of discovery. Two discoveries, really: that of a kindred spirit, L.A. division [although Specktor's a way better writer than myself I think] and of a truly new form derived from two well-worn ones, the cultural history and the memoir. Cowley's book falls into that dual category too, but Specktor does something with it that's...well just read it.)

The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch (A couple of philosophical essays. Heartening, sort of.)

Get Real, Westlake (More, Mid Westlake, fun times)  

I’d Rather Be The Devil, Stephen Calt (Or, How Getting To Know Skip James Messed My Mind Up. Eye-opening, disheartening, and while Calt certainly turns over a genuine rock, so to speak, he's also priggish and snobbish in a really jolting way.) 

Dune, Frank Herbert (Research.) 

Seven Types of Atheism, John Gray (A cogent and actually entertaining survey of disbelief.) 

Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment, James R. Gaines (Gaines' decision to tell their lives in parallel, while great for marketing I guess, resulted in some brow-furrowing for this reader. Otherwise aces.)

Flaubert and Madame Bovary, Francis Steegmuller (A little dry and a probably more than a little unfair to Louise Colet but still something.) 

The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch ( I wished so passionately to defenestrate its narrator that the whole thing temporarily stalled my Murdoch journey.)

Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen (A true pleasure to read and not nearly so Updike-like as its synopses might lead you to believe.) 

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (Finally, and fine.)

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Nation, Jeff Chang (Again, a lot of stuff I've already learned, put together with passion and purpose.) 

The American Gun Mystery, Ellery Queen (A little too far-fetched.) 

State of Terror, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny (Aiiieeeee.)

Fog of Doubt, Christianna Brand (Surprisingly racy London mystery.)

Your Turn Mr Moto, John P. Marquand (Gak.)

In The Woods, Tana French (Highly satisfactory.)

Spirits of the Dead, Tim Lucas (Great stuff.) 

Bugsy Siegel: The Dark Side of the American Dream, Michael Shnayerson (A good primer on the man who hated being called Bugsy.) 

Sound Man, Glyn Johns (Breezy, fun, slightly wonky [and I like that] chronicle of a mixing man. Nothing about his '60s clothes sense though.) 

Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner (Whew. Exhausting, agonizing, all that good stuff. Also kind of an object lesson in how a little Faulkner can go a long way.)

The Case of the Borrowed Brunette, Erle Stanley Gardner (A little more transparently pro forma than a lot of the Masons I've read but okay.) 

The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman (Great fun.) 

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor (Aging and [spoiler alert] dying in somnambulant Olde London, just the way you wanna ring out the year.) 

"My Life In Pornography," Part 1: "A Girl's Best Friend"

From the end credits of A Girl's Best Friend, Henri Pachard, 1981

My Life In Pornography is the title of a memoir I completed in the summer of 2012. Its first section, titled "A Girl's Best Friend," about the making of the motion picture of that title, is now published on Thought Catalog. You may read it here. 

The book, which I'd been messing around with in some form or other since the early 2000s, has five parts. The second part, titled " 'Goin' Through The Motions' " is about my relationship with Susan Merchant, later Susan Walsh, and contains a misadventure at a live sex show. Susan, a fine writer and a dear friend, disappeared in 1996; iterations of her story have been told on two different television series, Unsolved Mysteries and Investigation Discovery. The third part is called "Meet Dick Filth" and recounts a trip to Las Vegas with David Foster Wallace, Evan Wright, and Nathaniel Welch to cover the AVN Awards in 1998, and the editorial challenges that ensued a little thereafter. Part Four is "The Connoisseur," about my participation in the motion picture The Girlfriend Experience. It is a different—less jovial—account than the "set diary" published by MUBI in 2009, a piece that had originally been commissioned for GQ by Dan Fierman and ultimately rejected by editor-in-chief Jim Nelson. The fifth and final section is called "Documentation" and wraps everything else in a manner that one reader complained was "too postmodern," but I like it and I'm keeping it as it is until some actual editor talks me out of it, or something. 

Why publish this section now? Well, after seeing the New York Times feature on the DVD label/film distributor Vinegar Syndrome titled "Smut, Refreshed For A New Generation," and  then learning of Williamsburg venue Nitehawk Cinema's "Nighthawk Naughties" series of midnight shows, which kicked off with a screening of Radley Metzger's 1976 The Opening of Misty Beethoven (from which my Erotic Connoisseur quotes a line in GFE), I thought, "Well I've had a pretty good retro-porn tale on tap for a few years now, why just leave it lying around?" Obviously I am also hoping to generate some interest from editors and publishers. But mainly of course I'm doing it for YOU, my readers...well, yeah, actually why else, right? I hope you enjoy it and I do hope the opportunity to get the whole thing out there in dead tree form and/or otherwise arises soon. 

How Steely Dan REALLY feel about Wes Anderson

Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen has a book out, a collection of essays and one diary entitled Eminent Hipsters. It's real good. The topics of the essays range from the singing group The Boswell Sisters to the influence of pulp sci-fi and semantic theory on the "work" of L. Ron Hubbard. The showcase piece, comprising over a third of the book, is the tour diary "With The Dukes of September." By turns snide, poignant, antically hilarious, and genuinely heartbreaking, it's a remarkable piece of writing: the "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" of musicians-on-the-road chronicles, I'd reckon. (I don't want to get into any kind of pissing contests with other critics who've praised the book, but I will insist that the "Donald Fagen hates his audience" reading that a number of enthusiastic critics have given this section is lamentably superficial, and a genuine mischaracterization.) On July 4, dyspeptic Donald finds himself in Ashland, Oregon, with a night off.

"In the evening, having zero interest in the town fireworks display, Vince [the tour's accountant and Fagen's de facto assistant] and I saw a film at the cute little movie theater, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, which was intelligent and carefully made, as his films always are. Walter [Becker, Fagen's partner in Steely Dan] and I once had a bizarre interaction with Anderson's fans over the Internet, which started when we posted a couple of humorous letters (we thought) on the Steely Dan website.

"I think one of the reasons we're intrigued by Anderson is that he seems to be fixated on the sort of geekish, early-sixties adolscent experience that he's too young to have had but that Walter and I actually lived through. And yet he nails the mood precisely, using comic exaggration and fantasy to do the job. Although it was no picnic, it's too bad everyone's coming-of-age can't take place in the early sixties. Seeing the scouts in Moonrise Kingdom, I was reminded of my own experience at Boy Scout camp. I remember spending a lot of time in my tent worrying over a huge pot of boiling water in which I was trying to brew just the right blend of herbal tea, mostly wintergreen picked in the forest, following some recipe in the Scout handbook."

So there you have it. I recall the "bizarre interaction," so dispiriting that I am not even going to bother finding relevant links; basically it was a lot of dumb snotty humorless kids sniffing that these progenitors oa "dad rock" didn't "get" Wes. Fagen's observations here strike me as entirely apt. (As a Scout camp kid in the late sixties, I found my own solace in making Sassafras tea.) Anyway, get the book. It's fantastic. 

"Orson Welles And Roger Hill: A Friendship In Three Acts," by Todd Tarbox

I am grateful to the critic and scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum for a good many reasons, and most recently I find that I owe him for steering me in the direction of this splendid book, a far less hyped correlative and corrective to the Henry Jaglom/Peter Biskind offering My Lunches With Orson, which I considered on this blog a couple of weeks ago. 

The eleven-year-old Welles was enrolled at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois in 1926. Roger Hill, twenty years Welles' senior, was an instructor there; he later inherited the position of headmaster, which had been that of his father, Noble Hill. Roger Hill was one of Welles' earliest mentors and a lifelong friend and supporter, and, according to the introduction to this book by Tarbox, a grandson of Hill's, Hill and Welles began recording their phone and in-person conversations in the early '80s in the hopes that the tapes would aid in their respective memoirs. The first recording in the Tarbox book is from November 25, 1982; the final one is from October 9, 1985, the evening before Welles' death. This is the same period in which the conversations that make up My Lunches With Orson were recorded. But while there is a certain amount of crossover, there is absolutely no redundancy here. While I'm not going to address the controversy concerning whether or not Jaglom is entirely truthful when he says his conversations with Welles had been recorded with Welles' prior consent, the Welles in My Lunches, sometimes truculent, spiteful, perverse, given to venting resentments, etc., is a particular kind of private Welles who coexists with an Orson who is very aware of the fact that he is giving a performance for a younger admirer. Is the Welles in the Hill conversations on his best behavior because he clearly knows that these conversations are in some sense intended for posterity? I would say yes and no, and I would also say that the Welles that emerges in Tarbox's book is the truer Welles. And yes, it is a Welles that is more noble than the one constructed via Biskind and Jaglom. 

That Welles lets his better angels speak through him via Hill has to do with, you'll see if you read the book, which you definitely should, his ease with Hill. The two go back a very long way, and we can infer that Hill knows Welles' quirks and foibles like almost no other, and that he forgives them all because he really loves Orson, and Orson really loves him back. There's not as much filmmaking talk in this book as there is in My Lunches; there's quite a bit of fond reminiscing about places and events and people that may not have a too-privileged place in the philosophy of those who are exclusively concerned with Welles the cineaste. But these topics are not brought up in the service of a facile nostalgia; everything touched upon in these conversations of course deeply informed Welles the artist, a deeply sophisticated man and a product of a very American culture that I sometimes fear vanished about thirty or forty years ago. 

As the title implies, the book is structured as a play. Rather than lay out transcriptions of the conversation, Tarbox provides settings and stage directions and incorporates flashbacks in which the players, Welles and Hill, read from correspondance or other texts. This may strike some readers as an overly sentimental, even quaint device, and it does lead down some awkward alleys, particularly during one conversation in which Welles admits he's speaking from a phone extension in his loo. At other junctures, however, the conceit of a stage presentation works pretty beautifully, as in an exchange in which Welles and Hill discuss a small civil-rights crusade that Welles spearheaded via his radio show in 1946: 

ROGER: Your finest hour, actually many hours, on your [radio show segment] Almanac was championing a black soldier who, returning to his hometown somewhere in the South, was beaten by a mob. What was his name? 

ORSON: Isaac Woodard. He wasn’t beaten by a mob, but by a policeman. Woodard was on a bus, not too far from his home in South Carolina. As a stop, he took too much time in the “colored” men’s room to satisfy the bus driver. A heated exchange followed, prompting the bus driver to call a cop, who, without provocation, beat the nejesus out of Woodard with a billy club, which blinded him. I immediately inveighed against this mindless madness, and, over the next several months, as the case unfolded, I continued to seethe over the air.

ROGER: Didn’t the NAACP contact you?

ORSON: Yes, the NAACP brought Woodard’s plight to my attention.

ROGER: Now it comes back. Wasn’t he a decorated war hero?

ORSON: He served overseas for over a year and was decorated with a battle star.

[Scrim: Thirty-one-year-old Orson in an ABC radio studio reading his July 28 1946 commentary.]

Wash your hands, Officer X. Wash them well. Scrub and scour. We will blast out your name. We’ll give the world your given name, Officer X. Yes, and your so-called Christian name. Officer X—after I have found you out, I’ll never lose you. If they try you, I’m going to watch the trial. If they jail you, I’m going to wait for your first day of freedom. You won’t be free of me…You can’t get rid of me…Who am I? A masked avenger from the comic books? No, sir. Merely an inquisitive citizen of America.

[Lights dim.]

ORSON: Week after week, I updated my audience on the progress of the case. I was threatened with lawsuits if I didn’t cease and desist. The threats only heightened my resolve to make America aware of the bitter fruits of this man’s service to his country. A lot of people from the South and North wrote and asked what business it was of mine to involve myself in this case. 

[Scrim: Thirty-one-year-old Orson at the ABC microphone reading his Woodard script.]

God judge me if this isn’t the most pressing business I have. The blind soldier fought for me in this war. The least I can do now is fight for him. I have eyes. He hasn’t. I have a voice on the radio. He hasn’t. I was born a white man and until a colored man is a full citizen like me I haven’t the leisure to enjoy the freedom that this colored man risked his life to maintain for me. I don’t own what I have until he owns an equal share of it. Until someone beats me, and blinds me, I am in his debt. And so I come to this microphone not as a radio dramatist (although it pays better), not as a commentator (although it’s safe to be simply that). I come, in that boy’s name, and in the name of all who in this land of ours have no voice of their own. I come with a call to action.

[Lights dim]

ROGER: What became of the case?

ORSON: The Department of Justice filed charges against the rogue cop.

ROGER: Didn’t the NAACP credit you as the prime mover in causing the government to act?

ORSON: There were a number of us on the side of the angels. I was just the one with a microphone and a weekly national audience. Our broadcasts led to a benefit in New York on Woodard’s behalf. Billie Holiday, Milton Berle, Cab Calloway, and many others joined me on stage and performed for an impassioned audience of over 30,000, demanding justice for one black man and for all of black America.

ROGER: Was justice served?

ORSON: Sadly, no. Though the Justice Department took the case to trial, an all-white jury acquitted the cop. I’ll never forget a line from the defense attorney’s closing argument to the jury, “If you rule against my client, then let South Carolina secede again.” 

 

This is moving, still vital stuff, I'd reckon. And it speaks multitudes of both men, multitudes that are maybe willfully ignored in Biskind/Jaglom, whose book starts by taking too-giddy pleasure in Welles' deliberately impishly provocative pronouncement to Jaglom that "everybody should be bigoted." Peter and Henry should be ashamed of themselves. 

The Tarbox book is also generously illustrated, not just with photos but with reproduced pages from Welles' scripts, including more than a few from the Shakespeare staging adaptations on which Hill and Welles collaborated. You can buy the book via Amazon here. And you should also read Jonathan R.'s thoughts on the book, here. 

"My Lunches With Orson"

I’m pleased to be able to report that My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom And Orson Welles (edited and with an introduction by Peter Biskind, Metropolitan Books) is a substantively better book than most of its positive notices would have you believe. To be honest, when I first heard of the thing, my immediate expectation/desire was mixed with at least a mild dread. There was this sense of a potential funhouse mirror version of This Is Orson Welles, with Henry Jaglom standing in for Peter Bogdanovich and Peter Biskind standing in for Jonathan Rosenbaum, and everything those substitutions could possible imply besides. Once first word about the ostensibly scandalous contents of the book started coming out, the dread heightened. Orson Welles, pathetically washed-up Hollywood one-time wunderkind, talks smack about the great Olivier, and so on. Imagine that. If this was gonna be the book, then the book was an ignoble enterprise, I decided.

Well, the book is not an ignoble enterprise, and I can’t even be snarky and add that it’s not for lack of trying. But it’s not entirely unproblematic, either, as we’ll get to further down. I should have had a little more faith in its subject and main speaker. The value of My Lunches With Orson lies in about 250 pages worth of the company of an artistic genius who was also a first-rate mind (as we know these qualities are not always mutually exclusive) and the sheer conversational, philosophical, polemical and emotional pleasure such a thing organically affords. There is poignancy here, too, afforded by Welles’ frequently querulous personality and his roundabout ways of acknowledging his flaw.

While Bogdanovich, in his more formal interviews of the ‘70s, was not content to have Welles the cineaste, but persistently tried to formulate his idol as a cinephile, to often hilarious effect (see the exchanges with respect to Mizoguchi in This Is Orson Welles), Jaglom, taping his lunches with Welles in the early ‘80s after the latter’s falling out with Bogdanovich, played the eager audience and potential co-conspirator. And Jaglom WAS a good audience, although some might fall over in their chairs at the extent to which he was a seemingly willfully ignorant one; e.g., “Now [Carole] Lombard could not have been very bright.” Now THERE’S a real “WTF” moment (I like to imagine my friend the Self-Styled Siren heading for the fainting couch), but friend Welles merely responds “Very bright,” and elaborates, delightfully. This is right before he lays the conspiracy theory stuff about Lombard’s plane crash death on Jaglom. This assertion got played up big time in the gossip columns—well about as big time as anything concerning Orson Welles can get played up in the gossip columns nowadays—but, as with so much in the book that’s supposed to put Welles in a nasty or kooky light, it’s something that plays better in context. First off there’s the not unpalpable sense of Welles playing up to Jaglom with I-know-where-the-bodies-are-buried lore. And he also adds, “Now I cannot swear it’s true. I’ve been told this by people who swear it’s true, who I happen to believe.” There’s an entire county of nuance in Welles’ saying “cannot” rather than “can’t;” the “who I happen to believe” is a nice touch as well. It’s the voice, the changes of register he puts into his dishy improvisations, which provide the real and deep fun, not the data itself.

Similarly, there’s a peculiar, tetchy evenhandedness and even sometimes affection in Welles' putdowns. The stuff on Olivier, which is dropped throughout, is peculiarly fascinating. He thinks the actor/director kind of a dolt (one can almost hear him rolling his eyes as he recalls the opening of Olivier’s Hamlet, in which Olivier, narrating, calls the play “the story of a man who could not make up his mind”) and also a mean, malicious person, but throughout his rages there’s also a more than tacit acknowledgement of Olivier as a peer and prodigious talent. While he hasn’t much time for Sternberg, he schools Jaglom well in Stroheim, but he’s largely kinder to performers than other directors. Even after irritatingly dismissing Richard Burton, there’s a sense in his rancor that he’s talking about a recalcitrant relative. He dumps pages of resentment on Charlie Chaplin, and proclaims Keaton Chaplin’s filmmaking and comedic superior, but still insists, rightly, on Chaplin’s genius. The only performer for whom he expresses unambivalent contempt is Woody Allen, and there largely on a matter of personal taste. What Steven Soderbergh terms “rude” in his blurb on the book’s back jacket is bracing, to be sure. But the mitigating circumstances pertaining to the rudeness make something like a window into the great man’s psyche. And Chapters 21 and 22, in which Welles wrestles with the idea of directing what would many years later become Tim Robbins’ highly questionable film The Cradle Will Rock, and then gives Jaglom some script notes for what would become Jaglom’s film Always, provide mini-seminars on two very different but ultimately not unrelated aspects of filmmaking, and show a true master not at work, but unselfconsciously brandishing the brilliance that made his work what it was. Remarkable.

Which isn’t to say that Welles doesn’t trip himself up, wisdom-wise, from time to time. Speaking of a never-to-be-realized film of King Lear, Welles ponders shooting at a studio near an airport: “It’s a great location, and you can make multiple deals, but only if you’re making a silent picture. Or else dub it afterwards which, if you do that with Shakespeare, it comes off as totally fake. You simply cannot do it.” Except the maestro had already done it, with the sublime Chimes at Midnight. At other places, it’s both exhilarating and sad to see him mulling over ideas for casting films that will never be made. Regretfully rejecting Robert De Niro for a role as an up-and-coming politico in The Big Brass Ring, he says, “My candidate is a fellow who’s got to carry Kansas. I really don’t see De Niro carrying Kansas.” True then, true now.

Because as he’s offering up these scintillating and edifying transcribed bits, editor Biskind is also constructing a narrative, a narrative of Orson Welles never making that final film. It’s heartbreaking when Jaglom has to bear the news that their last best hope for a Brass Ring lead, Jack Nicholson, is for all intents and purposes turning Welles down. And in Chapter 26, the penultimate one, Welles and Jaglom are joined at their Ma Maison table by an HBO executive named Susan Smith, whom Welles perversely cuts dead the second he perceives something—disinterest? disrespect? ignorance?—in her that he disapproves of, and can’t let go of. It’s a hair-raising exchange and for Welles lovers it will bring to mind the scorpion-and-the-frog parable Welles relates in Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report, a bit that Andrew Sarris applied to an analysis of Welles’ career as far back as 1968, in his The American Cinema.

Given the evidence of the book, that 1955 is not much dreamt of in Biskind’s philosophy. If you are already conversant with Welles’ life and career, you may find much of my former colleague’s introduction to the conversations troubling, or funny. Writing of the immediate post-Ambersons period, Biskind states, “With his directing career sidelined, he found work as an actor, performing in pictures such as Journey into Fear (1943), Jane Eyre (1943), and The Stranger (1946), much of which he unofficially directed.” Rumors/accounts of Welles’ directorial participation in Fear and Eyre are common, but as it happens The Stranger is actually signed by Welles, so, you know. This is the sort of error that can arguably arise out of a copy glitch, but I still cringed when I read Biskind credit his editor for “refus[ing] to let anything slip by her.” The assertion that Lady From Shanghai was “mutilated by the studio” is contradicted by Welles himself in interviews with Bogdanovich, in which the director’s sole complaint is that Columbia head Harry Cohn slapped an unsatisfactory music score on the picture [UPDATE: this bit of gainsaying on my part is destroyed below in comments, and I apologize here again for shooting from the hip with respect to this issue];  the provenance of a Jean-Luc Godard citation is muffed; and so on. Biskind’s description of Janet Leigh’s character in Touch of Evil is so peculiar and hostile that one would suspect that Peter is going through a bout of [Jeff] Wellsian late-middle-age women issues, but I’m confident the passage is just misguided editorial assertion, which is also applied to Elia Kazan in the book’s “Partial Cast Of Characters” appendix. (It’s telling, by the way, that even as he expresses disapprobation of Kazan, Welles still revers to him by his old nickname “Gadg.”) Biskind’s explanation of the auteur theory as propagated by Sarris is reductive to the point of inaccuracy, and it almost seems as if he expects Welles’ and Jaglom’s dismissive remarks about Howard Hawks to compel Hawk’s admirers to pack up their tents and go home. As the guy in the commercials used to say, “Sorry, Charlie.” I was also uncomfortable with a passage late in the book in which Welles and Jaglom discuss their former friend Bogdanovich’s book about Dorothy Stratten; their views may be useful or pertinent in the context of an actual scholarly work, but as reproduced here, there’s a distinct whiff of, for lack of a better term, scab-picking.

And the mirror-image of This Is Orson Welles idea holds, for better or worse, through all of that. The Bogdanovich/Rosenbaum endeavor was lively with a scholarly bent and execution. Jaglom/Biskind volume is conceived and executed as a pop culture entertainment; it doesn’t even have an index. It is nonetheless an essential and, yes, largely enjoyable addition to one’s Welles library. I look forward to reading…oh wait...

It was/is De Niro

Well, now the paperwork is more or less done and the work is well underway, I feel less antsy about publicly disucssing the book I'm working on. The commission is from Cahiers du Cinema, for an entry in its Anatomy of An Actor series. These are hardcover editions, beautifully designed and copiously illustrated, in which a particular screen performer's body of work as a whole is examined through the critical prism of ten specific roles/performances.  The French critic Florence Colombani has written the book on Marlon Brando, Karina Longworth has written one on Al Pacino, and I am doing one on Robert De Niro, for publication in the Spring of next year. The work on the book is pretty well underway and I am right now feeling as if it might not turn out so badly if I manage not to screw it up. I am grateful for all the good wishes I've gotten from readers and social media contacts already. I haven't read Colombani's text yet but I have read Longworth's, and I sincerely believe she did a great job, and that her insights will get you thinking about Pacino in a way you haven't up until now. If I can achieve something even slightly to that effect in my work, I'll be pleased. 

In the meantime, I have, ahem, a bleg. I really ought to have accosted Kurt Anderson at the screening of To The Wonder we both attended this evening, but I'm shy that way. So. I need to trakc down an article in Spy magazine, from the mid-eighties, which was about how the most celebrated actors in motion pictures weren't really movie stars from a box-office-grossing perspective. This was before Midnight Run and so of course De Niro was Exhibit A in the piece. I'm off to various libraries tomorrow for the second leg of my clippings research, and am hoping it will just turn up, but if anyone can give me a leg up with respect to this particular item, I'd be much obliged and you'd earn a mention on the acknowledgments page (oh, the glory). Please feel free to chime in such data as might be useful below, or send me an e-mail. Thanks!

UPDATE: Article located as of the morning of March 27.  Many thanks to all who gave tips. 

"Olivier Assayas"

The monograph edited by Kent Jones is out now. You can get it directly from the publisher, the Austrian Film Museum, or via Amazon, or at finer book stores everywhere, I would hope. 

The book is really beautiful: the layout is terrific, the illustrations fantastic, well-chosen; it's truly a wonderful package. I'm proud and honored to be a part of it, and particularly chuffed that Kent asked me to write on Olivier's first feature film, Désordre, an essential movie for anyone whose life has been at least partially consumed by rock and roll. 

Here is a passage from my essay on the film, which I titled "Black Boxes:"

Artistic genius is hard to simulate in cinema, as is actual artistic process. I once knew a painter who told me that she didn’t much care for fictional films about visual artists and that every movie about a painter she’d ever seen, with the exception of Scorsese’s Life Lessons in New York Stories, got the actual act of painting completely wrong. As far as music is concerned, it’s not for nothing that Clint Eastwood largely stuck to Charlie Parker’s own saxophone solos for his fictional biopic of the musician, Bird. It is no fault of Robert De Niro that he doesn’t quite convince as even a journeyman sax player in Scorsese’s New York, New York, whereas his counterpoint Liza Minnelli is exactly right playing a singer of the precise dimensions and talent of…Liza Minnelli. We do not hear enough of Yvan and Henri’s band to come to any musically-based conclusion about them (their sole song is the invention of an actual combo called Les Avions). It is pretty clear that Yvan does have a post-punk charisma but a style that’s about four or five years out of date by London or New York standards (albeit cutting-edge for the Continent). We learn that the band does have some major-label interest, and Assayas is pretty casually accurate about how the tendrils of corporate rock reached down via seedy managers and indie record stores to scoop up talent; the viewer never gets into the corridors of real power the high windows and the prestige and the money are all tantalizing rumors, like those of the afterlife. (Even in Assayas’ 2004 Clean, whose protagonist is the one-time manager and now widow of an overdosed rocker, the “industry” is seen from something of a remove, in this case an inverted Eden from which its protagonist has been expelled.)

But back to the act that, it would seem, throws everything into disorder: it’s significant that the viewer is never made privy to the actual logic behind it. Yeah, it’s clear in a sense; if you’re in a band, you need gear, and stealing gear is kind of a rock and roll, and particularly punk and/or post punk tradition; Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones more than once jocularly bragged about how his own setup fell off a truck after a Faces or Roxy Music show. But these aren’t such street kids, all that needy; Assayas makes a point, not very long after the botched robbery, of depicting an exchange between the band’s keyboardist Gabriel (Simon de La Brosse) and his father (Phillip Laudenbach). Gabriel’s tried to steal some cash from dad, much in the style of Patrick in Truffaut’s Les Quatre-cent coups, and here it’s kind of pathetic rather than shocking/cute because Gabriel’s a young adult; in any case, Gabriel’s dad finds him out, and barely taking a break in his toilette, gives him a little talking to, imperiously offering to write the kid a check as he strips down to enter his bath. 

You see that I do that thing that some American cinephiles give other American cinephiles a hard time about: using the original-language title of a film. Well, fuck it. The book is in fact an international publication after all so American cinephile anti-"pretention" rules don't apply. (Sorry, does that sound too Wellsian?)

As a companion piece to the monograph, the Film Museum is also publishing an English translation of Assayas' sui generis A Post-May Adolescence. Watch this space for word on any upcoming readings or whatnots. 

If I may be allowed a moment of self-promotion...

...I'd like to say that I'm incredibly honored and excited to have participated in this. I am actually happier with the essay I wrote than I am with, well, pretty much anything else I've ever written, for which I credit the encouragement and belief of my friend Kent Jones, who edited. I can't wait to see the soon-coming finished product, which, as you can see from the table of contents, promises to be exceptional, and exceptionally varied. 

Geoff Dyer's "Zona"

J. Hoberman ended his excellent and largely admiring review of Geoff Dyer's new book, a lengthy, discursive, highly personal exploration/exegesis of and or "riff" on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1978 film Stalker with a backhanded compliment that's all but unimprovable, as such things go. "Zona is extremely clever — and that’s one thing Tarkovsky never was." Upon finishing the book itself, it occured to me that Hoberman was being slightly unfair there, but unfair in a way that Dyer kind of invites. I enjoyed the book to a degree that surprised me, maybe in part because I was prepared for it. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Stalker, but I imagine it has to be at least as many times as Dyer has, and under as varied a set of circumstances. Hence, while his descriptions/evocations of certain scenes made me eager to revisit those scenes, never did I feel the actual need to put down the book and pop in the (problematic available) DVD of the movie to get my bearings. 

And Dyer's got some things to say about the movie. The offhand style of his prose voice notwithstanding, he's done some heavy lifting, thinking-wise, on both Tarkovsky the artist and this particular work. Dig this: "One of Tarkovsky's strengths as an artist is the amount of space he leaves for doubt. In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog looks into the eyes of the bears caught on film by Timothy Treadwell and decides the chief characteristic of the universe—or 'the jungley' as he metonymically termed it in Burden of Dreams—is 'overwhelming indifference.' For Tarkovsky the artist, despite his Russian Orthodox Christian faith, despite his insistence that the epic scenery of Utah and Arizona could only have been created by god, it is an almost infinite capacity to generate doubt and uncertainty (and, extrapolating from there, wonder). This, it hardly needs saying, is a far more nuanced position than Herzog's. The story of Porcupine, Tarkovsky said later, may have been a 'legend' or myth, and spectators 'should doubt...the existence of the forbidden Zone.' So to give oneself entirely to the Zone, to trust in it as Stalker does, is not only to risk but embrace betrayal by the principle from which he draws his life. That's why his face is a ferment of emotions: everything he believes in is threatening to turn to ashes, the ledge he clings to is poised to crumble beneath the weight of his need for it, the weight that also supports it."

That's my favorite passage in the book, I think, and it encapsulates what Dyer is capable of: his formidable intellect seems fully and unselfconsciously engaged with what is, at least in part, a philosophical work of art, and he's getting some stuff out of it. In other sections of the book his other masks serve him less well, and there's an example of what brings him up short in the above passage. While I don't really have any kind of personal objection to Dyer's never capitalizing the word "god," this insistence can't help but come off as a bit of an affectation and just the sort of thing that would go down a storm when he's a guest at one of those mythical Park Slope literary dinner parties that the folks who dream about them always complain about. Dyer's made an admirable career in part out of his insistence on fluidity viz his identification, self and otherwise, as a writer. And of course as a working film reviewer who wants to be, spiritually and practically, an actual film critic, this stance is going to abrade me somewhat. By "stance" I specifially mean a "them" (film critics writing about Stalker) versus "me" (disinterested polymath Geoff Dyer writing about Stalker) hierarchy, although to his credit Dyer only applies it implicitly. (It is perhaps no accident that the only English-language film critic he cites in the book is David Thomson, who is similarly albeit more explicitly imperial.) But the multiplicity of masks this fluidity affords him doesn't always rescue him from glib disingenuousness. As salutary as the average cinephile may find Dyer's admiration for Stalker, other aspects of his taste apparently stubbornly remain other aspects of his taste, as they say. And when he deigns to dismiss "the witless Coen brothers" or allows that, on revisiting, both The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie AND Belle de Jour "sucked," he comes off like the know-somethingish head of a homicidally hip ad agency trying to get a rise out of a nerdy junior exec.

Other times his cleverness serves him much better. Addressing the mystery of the Zone's mysterious Room (no relation to Wisseau's, I hope I don't need to say), which reputedly grants whoever enters it his or her greatest desire, Dyer asks "is one's deepest desire always the same as one's deepest regret?" "If so," he continues, "then my greatest regret is, without doubt, one I share with the vast majority of middle-aged, heterosexual men: that I've never had a three-way, never had sex with two women at once?" At this point I was, I admit, seized by a desire to throw the book across the room, and then Dyer keeps pushing: "Is that pathetic or is it wisdom?" and in a little while I thought, "Oh, okay, I see what you did." Whether Dyer is being honest or "honest" or not, he's playing purposefully with a theme of the film, which has to do with the venality of human desire, or the unaspirational nature of our aspirations. Which he doesn't tell of but shows, in some slightly mortifying family reminiscences that would be poignant if Dyer didn't relate them with such coolness.

It's the coolness, finally, that is not off-putting or even confounding but a little...I don't know the word. Dispiriting? Stalker is a work of art of an unstinting and unawkward earnestness; its daunting complexity notwithstanding, it's also painfully sincere. Dyer's voice doesn't convey so much a distrust of sincerity as an evasion of it, and one isn't sure during the passages wherein he makes himself look rather silly, as the bits in which he bemoans the loss of a beloved Freitag bag made of recycled tarps and seatbelts,  as to where the effect he's going for breaks off from, you know, actual silliness. (My advice to him here is: you're a year older than me, pal. Forget the Freitag thing and next time you're in Paris go to the A.G. Spalding store on Rue Bourg Tebourg and pick yourself up a nice leather murse, you can totally afford it.) "Stalker has long been synonymous both with cinema's claims to high art and a test of the viewer's ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett's enthusiasm—'every single frame of the film is burned into my retina'—attests not only to Tarkovsky's lofty purity of purpose but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement." As a fellow lover of Stalker, I don't find Blanchett's enthusiasm in the least bit fulsomely stated; Stalker is in a sense an INVASIVE work of art, and for all the ambiguity it contains it's also suffused with a proud Russian Orthodox defiance; it's not, "this is my truth, now you tell me yours," it's "this IS true." As for Dyer though, well, can't yousense his discomfort in the above passage? I really wonder just what the hell he's afraid of. Like, if he truly gets off the pot and yells I LOVE THIS, the kids at Slate are gonna like him less? Who knows? Of course, the very act of writing this book itself can be seen as getting off the pot and yelling I LOVE THIS, but...upon reading the book entire, one can actually be less convinced of this somehow. Weird.

This Saturday at the Tishman Auditorium in Manhattan, Dyer will head a fascinating panel (Walter Murch, Philip Lopate, Francine Prose, Michael Benson, and, sigh, one of the kids from Slate, Dana Stevens) for "Tarkovsky Interruptus," where Stalker will be screened in installments, which the assembled will discuss interstitially. An interesting idea. I will attend and report; details on the event are here. 

What I read on my winter vacation

1) The final third of The Last Genet, Hadrien Laroche (1997; Arsenal edition, 2010)

Certainly a great idea for a book: an in-depth examination of the writing/political activism of notorious thief-turned-literateur Genet, from his  activities at/coverage of the Democratic Convention in Chicago '68 to his roosting with Palestinean refugees et.al. that culminated in the creation of his posthumous Prisoner of Love. And to give Laroche credit, the guy did do his homework, and draws quite a few provocative and pertinent parallels (his evocations and citations of Ezra Pound are extremely savvy, to say the least). But the whole damn thing is so very damn French in all the wrong ways. The thing does put one's guard up right from the start: Laroche begins his study, for all intents and purposes, with a section called "Outrageous Hair." Which topic is not EXACTLY beside the point but which hardly requires foregrounding either. Elsewhere, and largely, this student of Derrida (the book is a version of a dissertation that the Great Man oversaw) overworks a deconstructionist pretzel logic that leads to word-groupings like "Hitler (the good man)" and impossible conclusions such as "[...] Genet misses his target twice: he gives in to the cliché about the plot, and offends death." "Offends DEATH?" I thought when I read that passage. "Who wrote this, Armond White?" And then it occured to me...well, you can imagine. Anyway, Laroche is not entirely insupportable, as an Italian-born/French-raised ex-girlfriend used to call me all the time, but he's pretty damn irritating in too many respects. Mainly, the whole thing made me want to look further into George Jackson's Soledad letters, and into The Declared Enemy, a collection of Genet interviews and essays and a major source for Laroche. 

2) The Death of the Author, by Gilbert Adair (1992; Melville House edition, 2008)

I didn't plan it this way, but it turned out to be kind of funny that I started this after putting down the Laroche, given that DOTA is, for one thing, a pretty wicked and wickedly on-target sendup of certain strains of European postmodernist theory, and such. I picked it up because after eulogizing Adair after his very untimely death last month, I felt bad that I wasn't all that up on his fiction, and this particular example of it proved extremely easy to acquire. "Based on a real-life scandal," the inner-flap promo copy reads, and I was glad they didn't go further and say what scandal, as it was pretty evident once the point came up, and Adair finesses the point with his customary wit. Aside from expertly pastiching both the novel of academe and the whodunit, Adair uses a diabolically clever structural device that gets funnier (and, some might notice, deliberately more difficult to pull off, and doesn't Adair know it) each time it recurs. The impeccably crafted clockwork mechanism works its way to a punchline that's as frustrating as it is inevitable, which is, as one could say, central to Adair's point. Nifty, engrossing, and entirely worthy of Georges Perec, whose La disparation Adair so lovingly and resourcefully translated. 

2) The Third Reich, Roberto Bolaño (written 1998, copyrighted 2011; Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, 2011)

Frustrated novelists might want to avoid this book. Not because it's bad; in fact, its relatively excellent quality is part of the reason. This is actually an unpublished novel by the prolific Chilean writer Bolaño, who by some accounts only began writing novels to increase his earning potential and better support his family—he apparently thought himself a poet first and foremost. But it's the novels that are continuing to earn the late writer (he died in 2003 at the age of 50) his international reputation, and this early effort was found among his papers after his death. As far as the fiction goes—and this only goes as far as I can tell, because I've only read four of his other novels and a not-unsizeable smattering of his short stories—it strikes me as pretty quintessential. It's about a young German war-game champion vacationing in Spain who undergoes an odd personality mutation after a fellow vacationer he wasn't all that enthusiastic to know to begin with disappears. Soon the gamer is engaged in an intense, up-and-down round of the, um, game from which the novel's title is derived with a horribly burn-scarred young beach bum. The storyline goes along a fairly predictable acolyte-becomes-the-master reversal course for a bit, but the pleasure here is in the details, and how much confidence Bolaño brings to both his droll detachment and moral ferocity. The story never explodes into the meta territory that it appears to flirt with, nor does it contain the kind of mind-blowing narrative twist/summation that made The Savage Detectives such an admirable Borges/Not Borges exercise. But the fact that it makes you hink it might go to either place is testament enough to Bolaño's entirely enviable deftness. 

4) Mamoulian, Tom Milne (1968; BFI Silver edition 2010)

The world sure can be perverse at times. I can't testify to what impact this study of the distinctive director had on its first publication, but as of now I can't say that Mamoulian's critical rep is in all that much better a shape than the one Milne himself bemoans in the opening pages of this book: "Parallel to the neglect by the studios, critical evaluation of Mamoulian's work seems to have solidified to a remarkable degree [...] [e]verything from The Gay Desperado to Silk Stockings is [...] cheerfully consigned to oblivion."  Some decent DVDs of Mamoulian's work are readily available, but what still seems fixed in amber is a sometimes kinder reiteration of Sarris' verdict in The American Cinema of an innovator run out of innovations. What Milne therefore concentrates on in this, essentially a film-by-film critical monograph, is the elegance and compassion of the Mamoulian sensibility. This provides the through-line, and Milne also insists that Mamoulian's innovations held him in good stead even after they ceased to be innovations per se. In the chapter on Silk Stockings, he implicitly praises Mamoulian's adaptability, providing eloquent accounts of the way he shoots the film's dance sequences in the "breathtaking Cinemascope" one of the film's songs sends up. He's particularly good on Mamoulian's use of color, making one wish for a goddamn respectable video version of the early Technicolor Becky Sharp (public domain has yielded us a cavalcade of digital crap on this one) and glad that one may now get the apparently unsung gem Summer Holiday from Warner Archive. (There's another good Rouben hopefully out this year from a very reputable source, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about it yet. I know of it cause I did the liner notes...) Very worthwhile and largely convincing.

5) Two-thirds of Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original, Robin D. G. Kelley (2009, Free Press)

This is just the kind of biography I tend to really go for: fact-crammed, heavily researched and heavily footnoted. So far it strikes a near-exemplary balance between illuminating the art (Kelley knows his stuff musicologically, and can explain it pretty cogently, although it helps if the readers has SOME technical knowledge) and chronicling the life. While indubitably a warts-and-all portrait, it largely (so far) achieves what Kelley told various interviewers his aim was: creating a portrait of Monk that counters the mythic accounts of Thelonious the eccentric, or mad genius, or just plain weirdo. Diagnosing Monk as bipolar and providing both engaging stories of his ups and dispiriting examples of his downs, he's coming pretty close to presenting a biographical man in full, if you will. Kelley's style is of no small interest; while largely straight, it sometimes veers into the casual/colloquial, with references to family as "folks" and phrases like "jazz guys." Kelley's a clear and solid enough writer that these usages not only don't jar, but they're even apt to make the reader feel more at home in the text. His language also points to his conviction with respect to presenting Monk as a Great African-American Musician, which conviction irked some of the folks who left reader reviews at Amazon; one dude complains that Kelley has a "leftist/racial grievance axe to grind" while another finger-wags at the "left-wing socio-babble." Yeah, Kelley sure has a lot of nerve implying that those cops in Delaware who kicked the crap out of him FOR NO REASON other than maybe he was in a car driven by a white woman were racist; I bet it's Kelley who's the REAL racist. Heh. By the same token, however, at every point when Kelley insists that a civil rights offense "deeply affected" Monk, the lack of corroboration for this is made especially conspicuous by the missing footnote. As I said, I'm not done with the book yet, so I can't definitively talk about this issue in terms of projection just yet. But even if I could, I'd be inclined to forgive it as a reasonably harmless affectation on the part of an otherwise largely blameless writer, researcher, and champion. (My only real argument so far is with Kelley's apparent eagerness to go along with sources who would disparage producer Orrin Keepnews, who did, after all, have no small part in shepherding the absolute classic records Brilliant Corners and Monk's Music to completion.) And of course the whole thing has given me an excellent excuse to embark on an ever-pleasurable orgy of Monk listening; I've loved the man's music from the first beautifully skewed note of his I ever heard.

Conversation about "Conversations With Clint"

One of the best film books of the year is also one of the most unusual. Conversations With Clint, edited by Kevin Avery, presents the "lost interviews" conducted by the writer Paul Nelson between 1979 and 1983, for a Rolling Stone cover story that Nelson, who could be stone-cutter slow in the composing process, never completed. Eastwood's a good interview, well-schooled in the art, but Nelson was an unusually sensitive and knowledgable interlocuter, which Eastwood is known to appreciate (I recall during our own single conversation, a phoner for a sidebar in Premiere, Eastwood was inclined to extend our brief discussion for a bit after I had demonstrated that I knew who henry Bumstead was), and the two men had friends in common, and they got on. So these chats go well beyond standard interview stuff and give you a lot of unfiltered Eastwood, which is pretty entertaining in and of itself, but also shows just what a deft filmmaking mind the man has, how thoroughly well-versed he is in pretty much every aspect of moviemaking. In this respect, I'd say it's as crucial a text as Lumet's Making Movies, for instance, and of course it's just as impressive a study in voice, if you will.

On Thursday, December 1, at 7 p.m., I'll have the privilege of leading a discussion with Kevin Avery, the editor of this volume and the writer/editor of the equally impressive and crucial Everything Is An Afterthought: The Life And Writings Of Paul Nelson at the 7th Avenue Barnes and Noble store in Park Slope, Brooklyn. If you can make it, please do; it ought to be a very stimulating chat.