Some Came Running

The Books I Read In 2016

1) Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth

The second half; I started it right after Christmas 2015. I liked the Ambrose stories way better than the mythology stories.

2) Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. I,  A. David Moody

Detailed, a little stodgy, very partisan, which aspect I infer will get more interesting as Our Hero's behavior worsens in subsequent years. Worthwhile.  

3) The Fugitives, Christopher Sorrentino

I'm friendly with Christopher and I'll still say I can objectively call this a superb novel.

4) Fifty-Two Pickup, Elmore Leonard

Primary motivation for reading was research for an audio commentary on the movie, but a genuine pleasure. 

5) Black Wings Has My Angel, Elliott Chaze

First rate girl-gun-grief-guilt stuff. One of the better armored-car heist sequences ever set on paper. 

6) The Ivory Grin, Ross Macdonald

My first Lew Archer. Wasn't entirely crazy about it. 

7) Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth

I was crazy about The Sot-Weed Factor when I read it in 2015, so much so that I was very eager to tackle this, and my oh my was I disappointed. I have to give Barth credit: when he woolgathers, he does it on an epic level. But imagining the gargantuan campus that he was then employed by as the metaphor-laden locale for an allegory of the American Experiment in Oppression was maybe not the best way to go with his fancies. 

8) Better Living Through Criticism, A.O. Scott

I gather a lot of people were irritated by my colleague's disinclination to dictate definitive answers to the questions he raises herein, instead building varied dialectical structures around them. I enjoyed the whole thing and continue to be stimulated/challenged by it. 

9) High Rise, J.G. Ballard

Essential then, essential now. 

10) Apostle, Tom Bissell

Tom's book is written in a conversational style that sometimes seems a little at odds with the philosophical and informational density he brings to bear on his stories of visiting the supposed resting places of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. Many years in the making, worth the wait. 

11) The Deep Blue Good-By, John D. Macdonald

My first Travis McGee. I was not impressed. Indifferent "realistic" plotting, poor fun-to-squalor ratio, too heavy on the self-infatuated sexism. Someone tells me when this series gets better than this. 

12) Petersburg, Andrei Bely

I guess if I'd read this when I was 24 and had Vladimir Nabokov's raves about it fresh in my head, I might have been blown away. Instead I waited until now and found it a bit of a slog, its innovations having been adopted and refined in subsequent modernist works I like a lot better. 

13) My Antonia, Willa Cather

My first Cather. All killer, no filler. Eager for more. 

14) Norwood, Charles Portis

One of two Portises I've been sitting on because I don't want to be done with his novels so soon. (Norwood is his first novel, the other one I'm sitting on, Gringos, is his most recent.) Anyway, it's perfect. As I expected. 

15) Zero K, Don DeLillo

Really strong. Prime DeLillo. Guy's still got it. 

16) The Way Some People Die, Ross Macdonald

My second Lew Archer. Liked it pretty much just fine. 

17) Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

Wound up finding this very worthwhile despite the exceptional punchworthiness of the lead character. 

18) Gaza Wyoming, Seth Colter Walls

This funny, astute, sometimes Pynchonesque novel by my fellow critic and friend is worth seeking out. 

19) Ratner's Star, Don DeLillo

Its sometimes frustrating obliqueness is of course entirely deliberate. Very strong and unsettling. 

20) Paths of Glory, Humphrey Cobb

I was asked to write a booklet essay for the Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Blu-ray edition of the Kubrick picture. After accepting, it occurred to me that it would be very difficult to write anything new about the movie. I went to the novel looking for a possible angle. It's a really good book. And it was useful for my work. 

21) Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz

Re-read this work of genius the better to write about Zulawski's film but there's no bad time for this.

22) Eric Rohmer: A Biography, Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe

Rviewed here.

23) The Lost Weekend, Charles R. Jackson

Magnificent. 

24) Lock No. 1, Georges Simenon

A good Maigret-versus-some-cranky-bastard tale.

25) Driver's Seat, Muriel Spark

Good thing a woman wrote this rather than a young Martin Amis, because oh boy. This is not your Miss Jean Brodie's Muriel Spark, although of course it kind of it. 

26) The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell

Pretty vivid and mordantly funny slab of Colonialism And Its Discontents action. 

27) The Dalkey Archive, Flann O'Brien

Reliably bonkers.

28) Havana Blues, Leonardo Padura

Of interest for a number of reasons, particularly for its view of ordinary boomer life in Castro's Cuba. I wanted more genre elements though. 

29) Still Life, Louise Penny

Recommended by a family member; first in a series of village mysteries starring the unambiguously good and wise Inspector Gamache. Penny is smart and a diabolical plotter. Also a bit of an over-writer. If I were her editor all three of the books of hers I've read this year would be at least 20 pages shorter. Then again, I've read three and intend to continue, so...

30) Stoner, John Williams

Williams' Augustus was my icebreaker. And yeah this is everything everybody says it is. 

31) Caught Stealing, Charlie Huston

Frantic, funny, well-constructed, it gets more absorbing as it gets more ridiculous. And it gets REALLY ridiculous. 

32) The Death of Napoleon, Simon Leys

A droll parable.

33) Book of Numbers, Joshua Cohen

Huge talent, sometimes bad judgment, best when dealing with death. 

34) Alice James: A Biography, Jean Strouse

Spectacular, read it.

35) Butcher's Crossing, John Williams

Spectacular, read it.

36) The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

See 34 and 35.

37) The First Administration of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 1, Henry Adams

A bit laborious but largely fascinating, not least for Adams' unabashed love for TJ.

38) The Skin of Dreams, Raymond Queneau

A short, piquant, satisfying Queneau

39) The Sunday of Life, Raymond Queneau

See 38.

40) Actress in the House, Joseph McElroy

Not so much stream of consciousness as fractals of consciousness. Indescribably dense and sometimes maddeningly frustrating. A remarkable thing in any event. 

41) The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Brian Moore

You'll never guess. Okay, maybe you will. Scruplously bleak. 

42) The Last of the Clan McDuck, Don Rosa

Great Duck stuff. 

43) American Pastoral, Philip Roth

I'd read all of the late Roth except this, for whatever reason, so when a publicist jammed up my ability to see the movie for a week, I thought I'd fix that issue. I think I would have loathed the movie even without having read the book, which I was both dazzled and a bit flummoxed by, but reading the book sure helped me particularize my complaints about the movie. 

44) Dog Eat Dog, Edward Bunker

Another reading-in-preparation for a film review. I knew of Bunker, and I knew what a hit-or-severely-miss proposition a real-life-felon-writes-crime-novel move can be, so I was pleasantly surprised at what a knockout this book is. Added value is its genuine soulfulness, which the movie adaptation decided to jettison. 

45) A Fatal Grace, Louise Penny

See 29. The second in the series. 

46) Hellfire, Nick Tosches

This is another case of me depriving myself of a legendary book until whenever, and so whenever came and I read the legendary book and lo, it was pretty great. 

47) My Struggle Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Very good, liked the second half (cleaning up after dead alcoholic father) better than the first, still in all I'm somehow less than eager to tackle the second book which I'm told is him mooning over wife the second at inordinate page count.

 48) Troubles, J.G. Farrell

A quite unusual historical novel, this one set in Northern Ireland, which I did not like nearly as much as Seige of Krishnapur. 

49) Notes on the Cinematographer, Robert Bresson

and...

50) Bresson on Bresson, edited by Mylene Bresson

...are reviewed here.

51) The Jewish Question, Jean Paul Sartre (translated as Anti-Semite and Jew)

Essential reading for 2017, for obvious reasons; see also my thoughts on it here. 

52) The Strangers in the House, Georges Simenon

I've read a lot of Simenon and it's still just a fraction of his output so I'm not qualified to say this is the closest thing to a redemption story in his oeuvre, but it's the closest to a redemption story that I've read. 

53) The Cruelest Month, Louise Penny

See 29 and 45. Third in the series.

54) Wolf Pupy Storys, "Wolf Pupy"

Purports to be stories by a five-week-old wolf puppy and who am I to argue.

55) The Life And Legend of Wallace Wood, Vol. 1, edited by Bhob Stewart 

I'm a sucker for chain-smoking alcoholci genius comic artists so yeah. Lotsa good pictures. 

56) Home, Marilynne Robinson 

An unspeakably beautiful book. 

57) The Plague, Albert Camus

More prepping for 2017. About halfway through now...

Happy New Year to all readers everywhere. 

Heroin and creativity

Art Pepper, the jazz saxophonist, wrote, with his wife Laurie Pepper, one of the great books about art and addiction, his memoir Straight Life. After describing his childhood, and his discovery of music, and his development as a musician in the Central Avenue "scene" of the 1940s, and his stint in the Army, Pepper writes, with great frankness, of the sexual compulsions he struggled with as a rising star in jazz. Then he writes about the first time he got high on heroin, and how, in a flash, he realized he had "found God."

"I loved myself, everything about myself, " Pepper writes. "I loved my talent. I had lost the sour taste of the filthy alcohol and the feeling of the bennies and the strips that put chills up and down my spine. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at Sheila"—Sheila Harris, the singer who was getting Pepper high—"and I looked at the few remaining lines of heroin and I took the dollar bill and horned the rest of them down. I said, 'This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I'm going to do, whatever dues I have to pay...' And then I knew that I would get busted and I knew that I would go to prison and that I wouldn't be weak; I wouldn't be an informer like all the phonies, the no-account, the nonreal, the zero people that roam around, the scum that slither out from under rocks, the people that destroyed music, that destroyed this country, that destroyed the world, the rotten, fucking, lousy people that for their own little ends—the black power people, the sickening, stinking motherfuckers that play on the fact that they're black, and all this fucking shit that happened later on—the rotten, no-account, filthy women that have no feling for anything; they have no love for anyone; they don't know what love is; they are shallow hulls of nothingness—the whole group of rotten people that have nothing to offer, that are nothing, never will be anything, never were intending to be anything." 

In Pepper's unstuck-in-time rant of resentment (the actual scene is set in 1950, but his voice goes ahead to his stint in prison, and speaks to a number of attitudes he was still coming to terms with as he was composing the book) will of course remind one of Lou Reed's song "Heroin," in which the protagonist,  asserting his intention to "nullify [his] life," sneers at "you sweet girls with your sweet talk," and celebrates the fact that "when the smack begins to flow/then I really don't care anymore/abouts all the Jim-Jims in this town/and everybody puttin' everybody else down/and all the politicians making crazy sounds/and all the dead bodies piled up in mounds." The key phrase is "really don't care" and the key word is "really." The ecstasy of heroin, if ecstasy it in fact is, is the ecstasy of genuine indifference. You REALLY just don't care. And really not caring can seem like an exceptional blessing to people of exceptional sensitivity. Hell, to people of average sensitivity, even. Who knows. 

Arguably, indifference does not enhance creativity; it shuts out creativity. True indifference creates the craving for more true indifference, because giving a shit about anything, you've figured out once you've properly numbed yourself, is just too fucking painful as it turns out. Who needs it? I turn to Pepper again: "All I can say is, at that moment I saw that I'd found peace of mind. Synthetically produced, but after what I'd been through and all the things I'd done, to trade that misery for total happiness—that was it, you know, that was it. I realized it. I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. That's the word they still use. That is what I became at that moment. That's what I practiced; and that's what I still am. And that's what I will die as—a junkie." 

And Pepper did die, in 1982, a junkie who had been up and down and up again and who created some great music along the way; and he created that music, it's pretty clear, in spite of being a junkie. Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section, with Paul Chambers and Red Garland, a milestone of hard bop recorded in 1957, made by a strung-out Pepper who hadn't picked up a sax in six months and whose instrument had old dried cork stuck in its neck. And so on. The book has plenty of such stories, and it ends on a particularly good one, in which Pepper recounts being challenged to a cutting session by the great altoist Sonny Stitt on a bandstand in San Francisco. Stitt, Pepper writes, "did everything that could be done on a saxaphone, everything you could play, as much as Charlie Parker could have played if he'd been there. Then he stopped. And he looked at me. Gave me one of those looks. 'All right suckah, your turn.'"

"And it's my job; it's my gig," Pepper writes. "I was strung out. I was hooked. I was having a hassle with my wife, Diane, who'd threatened to kill herself in our hotel room next door. I had marks on my arm. I thought there were narcs in the club, and all of a sudden I realized it was me. He'd done all those things, and now I had to put up or shut up or get off or forget it or quit or kill myself or do something." He concludes: "I forgot everything, and everything came out. I played way over my head. I played completely different than he did. I searched and found my own way, and what I said reached the people. I played myself, and I knew I was right, and the people loved it, and they felt it. I blew and I blew, and when I finally finished I was shaking all over; my heart was pounding; I was soaked in sweat, and the people were screaming, the people were clapping, and I looked at Sonny, but I just kind of nodded, and he went, 'All right.' And that was it. That's what it's all about." 

"I was given a gift. I was given a gift in a lot of ways," Pepper writes at the beginning of this section of the book. "I'm one of those people, I knew it was there. All I had to do was reach for it, just do it." Heroin creates nothing; rather, it obliterates, among other things, the inclination to reach for anything, except more heroin.

I only tried the drug once myself. It was 1993 or 4 or so.  I was hanging out at Sally's Hideaway, the old drag bar on 43rd Street, the old ballroom of the Carter Hotel—it was later transformed into The City, the nightclub where that schmuck Sean Combs got into his gun trouble, and I don't know what it is now—and I was in the company of a charming preoperative transsexual who went by the name of Christina Piaget, and she was undergoing some sort of personal paroxysm of self-disgust that ended with her spoken resolve to never do heroin again, and handing over to me a small glassine envelope containing the substance, and then quitting the venue. Soon as she was out of sight I scurried to the first available lavatory stall and hoovered it up, and I have to say that my direct experience of it was pretty much as Pepper describes. Although my articulation of delight was decidedly more banal: more along the lines of "Wow, this is the greatest thing ever!" And of course my subsequent resolve was a different: "Good thing I don't know where Christina got this, because if I did I'd be in a cab on my way there now and I'd never come back." And for a good decade and change after, I got a lot of venal self-congratulatory personal mileage out of the fact that I hadn't been "stupid" enough to become addicted to heroin. It's kind of funny. But not really. 

Almost too easy

At the end of a post for Indie/CriticWire chronicling some "awkward moviegoing experiences," the ever-game Matt Singer asks readers if they  can "top" his anecdote about how he ill-advisedly brought his future in-laws to see Knocked Up. My answer is, yes, in a walk. Frenzy with my grandmother. When I'm twelve. I told the whole terrifying story here.  

Note to self: never go "full suicidal depression"

I recently began writing a cultural column for a website that addresses the concerns of citizens over fifty years of age. Yeah, I know. You can't read it yet because the site's still in beta, but rest assured, when it goes "live" I'll let you know, even if you aren't over fifty years of age. In any event, I sent the below to my editor warning him that the contents were a little on the "downbeat" side, and he wrote back to me saying, yeah, they were, and that's why he was gonna decline to run it. So I have to come up with something else. FML, as the kids say. Anyway, I figured I'd put it up here so the last couple of days of downbeat cogitation wouldn't be a total waste. N.b. that the title, the styling, and the general mode of address are undertaken with an imaginary audience not entirely like the one for this blog in mind, so bear with that, if you would be so kind. 

Mr. Jones and me, and you

The short, impish, British Monkee, Davy Jones, died at the end of February at the relatively young age of 66, of a heart attack. The eulogizing that went on in the various cyber arenas rather predictably touched on the burning question of the musical validity/authenticity of the ‘60s group referred to in some quarters as “the Pre-Fab Four” (for the record, my own contribution to the Twitter debate was the bald statement “The Monkees made great records. Period.”). Which was followed by sentimental romanticizing about how Jones died with his boots on, so to speak, still plugging away on the showbiz circuit. One entertainment blogger who makes something of a specialty of demonstrating his courageous honesty by finding something vinegarish to say about every celeb whose death notice comes under his transom wrote, “I was walking south on Eighth Avenue when I happened to notice he was doing a live show in a modest venue near the corner of 42nd Street. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, it's a gig at least.’” Guess it’s a good thing for this guy’s sense of self-worth that there’s no blogger equivalent of B.B. King’s Times Square nightclub, the venue in question. Which does, truth to tell, book nostalgia acts mostly. In any event, the conventional wisdom is that if you’re still doing what you love when you kick it, you’ll have gone out somehow somewhat ahead of the game.

Then again, it’s arguably all a matter of perspective. It happens I have a friend, a contemporary of Jones', who worked with the man WAY back in the day, on stage, when they were both child and teen actors respectively. “Well,” my buddy, whose subsequent life/career trajectory was rather different from Jones’, reflected, “this business is even tougher than usual when you come into the way we did.” Jones and my friend were among the last of the “born in a trunk” kind, post-vaudevillian entertainers from childhood on, trained and thrown on a stage so early they never even necessarily got to figure out if they were in fact doing what they loved. And while I’m all for the notion that doing what you love, either professionally or as a hobby, can keep you young at heart and of brain, the culture these days does tend to spin a pretty facile narrative around that notion. That narrative contains at least two fallacies: first, that one reason doing what you love is desirable is that doing what you love is easy, or it should be, you know, provided you love it enough. The other is that doing what you love will be a kind of panacea that’ll take care of all the other ills of your life, and life in general. Going all utopian on the idea tends to, among other things, elide all sorts of economic/structural realities. But it also ties in to another rather dubious cultural meme, all about our “stories.” This week I saw the movie “Being Flynn,” which was adapted from the memoir “Another Bullshit Night In Suck City,” and the title change tells you everything you need to know about the movie, really. In any event, at one point in the movie, its hero, a young writer (who, to be fair, DOES encounter some difficulty in doing, you know) observes, “We all need to create a story that makes sense of our lives.” This observation may indeed have its roots in Joseph Campbell or someone equally venerated, but the last time I heard it put so flatly was in a damn Citibank commercial. My own takeaway from a too-soon death like that of Jones’ (a cultural figure I certainly respected but did not hold hugely dear), or anybody else’s, eventually gets to the inadequacy of our own platitudes to really deal with them.

The 84th Academy Awards and the denial of death

Apparently the Internet believes that anyone who accesses it is some kind of a human content maw that requires endless feeding, because there's really no other way to explain the reason that Oscar coverage proliferates like poison ivy despite the fact that said coverage almost invariably obsesses over how lame the Oscars are. I don't often point to myself as a positive example in any respect, but after Ordinary People...well, I don't need to go on, do I? (And yes, before you contemplate getting shirty about it in comments, Ordinary People is, by a certain yardstick, not a bad, or "bad," movie. All right?) After that, "Won't Get Fooled Again" became my Oscar theme song and, until such point as watching the ceremony became something like a professional obligation, I didn't let it trouble me. 

Recently the internet film journalist/gadfly Jeffrey Wells complained that the film producer Gavin Polone was usurping his (Wells') curmodgeonly throne by deigning to outline for New York magazine what he considered to be the problem with the Oscar "farce," as he calls it. Polone's piece is quite the earnest little finger-wag (were you aware, incidentally, that the Miss America pageant is "misogynistic?" Man!), and I suppose we're all supposed to be impressed that a MAJOR HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER is waxing so frank on the irrelevance of the event. Watch as he throws down about acceptance speeches: "by the third speech of someone thanking his spouse, agent, manager, psychic, dog walker, and the person who clears his chakras, I am always bored and left wondering why he couldn’t just have a private conversation with the person to whom he wishes to express his gratitude, and then find something more interesting or entertaining to talk about on television." 

Yes, God forbid anyone should bore the eternally tetchy Polone. Anyone remember that great profile of him in the New York Times Magazine some years ago, in which he volunteered that he and his girlfriend would never have children because the human race sucks and it's better to rescue dogs or something, and how he and said girlfriend were such monkish ascetics in spite of their Hollywood riches that they regularly breakfasted on DIRT (or wheatgrass or wheat germ or something like that, I forget what) and so on? Yeah, that makes it pretty funny that HE should be bitching about people who believe in chakras. Polone is somewhat more interesting on how awards actually skew the business itself, so at least he's complaining about something he has an actual stake in. Somewhat more mystifying is the "Fix The Oscars" interactive thingie going on at Slate, overseen by the ever-engaging Dan Kois, wherein readers and Slate's own delightfully insouciant contrarians offer exciting suggestions on how to make the televised ceremony less stodgy and dull. 

Thing is, the Academy Awards have ALWAYS been largely stodgy and dull; their whole reason for being, the initial screwing-over-organized-labor thing aside, was to confer a certain air of respectability to the filmmaking industry. One watched the awards at least in part to have a lit of a laugh over the extent to which they didn't get it. Hell, even the streaker who "disrupted" the 1974 ceremony was at least a few months behind the curve, as it were. This is acknowledged right off the bat in the intro to the Slate thingie: "Academy Awards ceremonies are laughable, even to those of us who love them." This admission begs several questions, but the answers have less to do with the actual Awards than with the civilians who believe they can improve them. They are film lovers, but not in that starry-eyed way; they have gone on record that talk of the "magic" of cinema makes them break out in hives. No, what's most important to them is their vitality in terms of identifying trends, staying on top of the latest modes of snark, embodying a sensibility that makes them not the ideal Entertainment Weekly reader but some form of an ideal Entertainment Weekly senior editor if Entertainment Weekly were still hiring, or ever likely to hire again. BUT. These people, who still talk of drinking games despite being at least a decade and a half out of college, who still bleg for recommendations of karaoke bars, are intuiting that their time in a desired or even really respected demographic ain't long. No, their coronaries are not coming like Christmas (H/T: Phillip Larkin), no, not quite yet, but they understand that they are approaching a certain age. And so are their children. They will soon be past the age when they're complaining about their snooty friends and Phineas and Ferb and one day they will wake up and not only despise the parents they were once coddled into unconditionally adoring but they will also deem all of the enthusiasms of said parents irredeemably quaint, and WORSE, they will unerringly regard every effort their parents make to adopt enthusiasms of a more contemporary variety as entirely pathetic and feeble. And as their (the parents', that is) waistlines grow even puffier and their hair thinner, the only thing that they (the parents, that is) will be able to cling to with any kind of demonstrable credibility whatsoever will be their claim that they are indeed "hipper," if not actually more "relevant," than the Academy Awards.

And then, like you, me, and Gavin Polone, they will die. 

Another riddle

Q: What's the difference between Elvis Mitchell and Roger Kimball?

A: There's more than one. But a particularly salient one, though, it seems, is that when Elvis Mitchell makes a descriptive error concerning a film, he gets fired from his position, whereas when Roger Kimball repeatedly perpetuates a complete falsehood concerning a film, he is permitted to maintain his various sinecures with few or no repercussions.

Make no mistake, by the way: Elvis got canned because a director complained about a review. (A review of a film that Elvis did, I know for a fact, sit through.) Put that in your "New media/the internet roolz! Freedom!" pipe and smoke it, kids. 

Oh, forget it...

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

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

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

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

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

Steely Dan's "Aja" makes the National Recording Registry twice in the same list, sort of

I can't be the only one who noticed this, but I thought I'd mention this unusual circumstance: the announcement today of the 25 recordings selected for the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress contains not just our beloved Captain Beefheart's beloved Trout Mask Replica (a text from which I shall be reading Friday night; see personal appearance alert below), but our beloved Steely Dan's beloved Aja. AND it also contains our beloved De La Soul's beloved Three Feet High And Rising, a prominent song from which, "Eye Know," actually samples a song from Aja, specifically "Peg." I do believe this is the first time such intertextuality has manifested itself in the National Recording Registry list, no?

A few words from Stephanie Swift

From "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment (It Turns Out)," Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet, Premiere magazine, September 1998 issue: 

To be fair, some of the nominees' titles really are confusing. Triple Penetration Debutante Sluts 4 is up for Most Outrageous Sex Scene—along with Wild Bananas on Butt Row and 87 and Still Bangin'—but loses out to a scene the program entitles "Anal Food Express" [...] from something called My Girlfriend's Girlfriend. Paul Thomas's Bad Wives wins Best Film. Evil Angel's Buda wins Best Shot-on-Video Feature. Bad Wives also wins Best Actress (Film) for Dyanna Lauren, Best Supporting Actress (Film) for Melissa Hill, and Best Anal Sex Scene (Film) for Lauren and Steven St. Croix. Ms. Stephanie Swift wins Best Actress (Video) and tells the crowd: "Thanks, everybody. My gang bang was a blast."³⁶

^36. Though Ms. Swift won for Miscreants, she is here alluding to her and director Rob Black's real breakthrough video in 1987, Gangbang Angels, which is essentially a one-woman show and features the years' most infamous scene: twelve woodmen line up and do an about-face, and S. Swift performs analingus on each one in turn; she then adopts a prayerful/compliant posture as the twelve do a right-face and form a patient line and take turns hawking and spitting in her face. 

In addition to Best Actress (Video), Swift took home an award for Female Performer of the Year, perhaps in at least partial recognition of her game, shall one say, participation in the above described film. Well do I, and several other veterans of Premiere magazine, recall the fact-checking sessions for that piece; sitting in the section of our offices that we called "the pod," legal pads in our laps, counting one, two, three, four, yes, all the way up to twelve gobs.

That was several months after the actual awards—we had to wait some time before we had sufficient room to publish the piece—so let me flash back a moment to the actual AVN Awards of late January 1998. The actual author of the piece was, of course, David Foster Wallace, who would publish a somewhat different version of the piece under his original title "Big Red Son" in the collection 'Consider The Lobster' and Other Essays. (One indication of how different is that footnote number 36 in the Premiere version is footnote number 51 in the book version.) On the evening of the awards themselves, our photographer Nathaniel Welch mostly stood in the hallway outside the ballroom of Caesar's Palace, taking portraits of the various award winners; hence, the portrait of Swift with her two statuettes. We had devised a little game, Dave, Nat, our fourth musketeer Evan Wright (future author of Generation Kill and Hella Nation, at the time very unhappily ensconced at Hustler), and myself: throughout the weekend, at the various parties and receptions that surrounded the awards, at least two of us (and I always had to be one of the two) would approach a porn star and begin chatting him or her up. We would drink in their complete indifference and annoyance for a bit (for in addition to being "civilians" and probable "mooks," Dave and myself in particular were pretty poorly dressed), and then at a strategic point I would present the porn person with my business card, which of course had the Premiere logo very prominently placed therein, and have a good interior chortle as the individual's demeanor and approach changed. "Oh, you really should interview me," I recall Jill Kelly saying rather breathlessly, "because this is a very important weekend for me, it's the weekend I'm going to decide if I'm going to stay in the adult industry or not." Indeed.

Now I myself had a little bit of a "thing" for none other than Ms. Swift—considered her "my type," or what you will—so it was a peculiar moment for me when Dave and I chanced to encounter her, along with the aforementioned Ms. Melissa Hill, on the steps of Caesar's after the ceremony had wrapped. How peculiar? Allow me to quote again from the essay: "Because porn films' worlds are so sexualized, with everybody teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time and it taking only the slightest nudge or excuse—a stalled elevator, an unlocked door, a cocked eyebrow, a firm handshake—to send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices, there's a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/hope that this is what might happen right here in Max Hardcore's hotel room. Here your correspondents find it impossible to overestimate that this is a delusion." I remember after the piece came out that some clod or other argued that the whole "expectation/dread/hope" trope was an indication of immaturity on Dave's part. Must be nice to be so advanced; it almost goes without saying, though, that the "grow up, it's just a fantasy" stance tends to ignore the reason the fantasy exists in the first place. In any event. When we spied the object of my whatever the hell it was, Dave and I were saying our good nights; he  was suffering from a flu, and really needed to get back to his room and rest; in the meantime, Evan, Nat and I would work reconnaissance by crashing a party thrown by porn star Vince Voyeur. For some reason we had gotten on the subject of music, and he was asking me to outline the differences between Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett edition and Pink Floyd, post-Syd Barrrett edition. And then we saw Swift and Hill—like Swift, Hill was known for being a porn star that didn't look quite like a porn star, and no doubt at least partially due to this affinity, the two, aside from performing with each other on occasion, were known to be personally tight—and Dave was all like, well, here's your big chance. Dryly, that is. He didn't really MEAN it, in case the person who scolded the "expectation/dread/hope" thing is reading this.

So we made our approach, and rather than play any games I had my business card at the ready. For all of their not-looking-like-conventional-porn-stars, the male escorts of Hill and Swift were pretty, well, conventionally mooky—brightly colored satin shirts over tanned and buff physiques, overly moussed post-New-Wave pompadours, the works. One of them grabbed my business card out of my hand as I tremblingly offered it to Ms. Swift, gave it a thorough going over, and announced, "I think this guy's legit. His card is embossed."

No, really. 

And that was pretty much that. Swift went on to work as a "contract girl" for the adult entertainment concern Wicked, which put out far milder products than Gangbang Angels; when that agreement ran out in 2004, she spent a couple of years at a distance from the industry, but made a comeback a few years back doing material that tended to capitalize on the "Cougar" or "MILF" vogue that was sometimes credited with keeping the "legit" adult video business afloat. 

"In June of 2009," Swift recounts in a video that was recently posted on the XXX Church website, "I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And I really feel that cancer saved my life." And, yes, as you might have inferred, Swift is now not only a cancer survivor, but a born-again Christian. The story she tells in the brief video will not necessarily be an unfamiliar one; there was, it happens, sexual abuse in her childhood. She is very calm and clear as she discusses how she felt during the creation of what she terms "over 300 movies:" "There was this always...not really nagging, but just like a...uncomfortableness in my stomach." "I always wondered the real reason why I was in the business, and why did I win the awards, and why did I get the recognition...because in the industry...it's not a real accomplishment, I mean it's just a false sense of accomplishment, it just covers up..." And so on. 

It is odd, remembering all that, and reading Dave's words, and then watching Swift's largely calm but entirely...rueful recounting of what was her career. I post all this not to be, well, a prig, nor to get all hypocritically "You see! Porn is bad!" buzz-killish, or what have you. I do, on the other hand, believe Swift's words are worth a listen, and that while it is a coincidence that this news is coming out at around the same time as a rather squirm-inducingly-large portion of the pop-culture-consuming populace is having a not-so-good laugh over Charlie Sheen's porn-star "goddesses," it is perhaps a potentially not uninstructive coincidence. If you know what I'm saying. And of course I do, as is often the case, have to wonder what Dave might have made of this. 

On the current state of Oscar punditry

Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

I'd say it's the Melissa Leo "controversy" that's pushed matters "over the edge," as it were.