Quiet Bubble

The Look of Love #6: Ernesto and Lae-Lae, 28 June 2008

Light clarity avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn’t love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritating boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing

—Frank O’Hara

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Photograph shot by Quiet Bubble’s mom at Storybook Farm in Ashland, Oregon, 28 June 2008. The poem was read during the wedding ceremony.

Branching out

“One morning while she was working in her studio in the basement of Tavistock Square, Virginia [Woolf] put down her pen, aware of a faint vibration, as of some deep nerve being plucked. She leaned forward; she held her breath. The eerie and rapturous feeling that something was about to be communicated to her, as from another world. She half closed her eyes and she waited. What came: a muffled music, like distant horns; a soft rising and falling, a rhythm to which she matched her breathing when she breathed again. Looking round her studio, she saw a kind of haze over all—and the next instant her mind took flight: people, houses, streets, landscapes, weather, seasons, friendships, passions, fates, patterns, necessities—

“A new novel.”

—Sigrid Nunez, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998)

I don’t customarily wait for inspiration to begin writing—I’d rather plunge in and hope for the best—but it’s nice when the flash hits me. That’s what happened, about a month ago: A sudden image of a sixteen-year-old boy, dressed nattily in suit and tie, sitting at a card table in a restaurant’s walk-in cooler. The table is covered with a lush blue-and-silver tablecloth (Art Deco simple pattern of alternating blue and silver swans) and on it is an opened tin of shiny black caviar, pearl knife slipped within its mass; glistening, cold smoked salmon, drizzled with honey and topped with green, sour capers, lay on a porcelain plate; a flute glass full of high-dollar champagne rests near the boy’s tapping fingers.

It’s the first time he’s seen or eaten anything this fancy, and I’m going to spend the next year or so trying to figuring out how he got to this point, and what comes after that.

I’ve tried to write fiction all my life, in a variety of ways. As a kid, I scribbled in wide-looping cursive, in spiral notebooks. I included my own illustrations. For a couple of novel manuscripts written in college, I just tried to put one foot in front of the other, and not map out the structure in advance. Since that didn’t work, I tried with my next manuscript (a children’s book) to outline everything in detail, but that just turned out stilted. The poetry, which I don’t much of anymore, comes out in bursts that get revised a day later, and then left alone. The two completed screenplays—one feature-length, one a silent short—came in torrents; from start to finish, I was done with each in less than two months. Short stories I’ve written begin just as my blog posts and nonfiction—a series of loose connections, things I’ve been mulling over, that find their way over time as I let them percolate in my brain. Some works, some does not. I’ve been proud enough of three short stories to spend a year submitting them to journals and having them rejected. A poem’s showed up in a literary review you’ve never heard of (and won’t right now).

One thing that’s never changed: I’ve always started from the beginning and wrote linearly. And that’s why this new flash excites me—it’s not the beginning. I can see the characters, the city (Dallas), the situations, a lot of the relationships, and I can see clearly that none of them begins in this walk-in cooler, with this teenage boy. Yet again, I’m going to try something new. I won’t try to write from the novel’s (or novella’s) beginning up to this point, and then continue on to the end. Rather, I want to branch out in both directions from the cooler, writing the scenes and plots and loves and heartaches and little victories around this. I’ll figure out the connective tissue once I’ve built the boy’s environment, his place in this world. Hell, by the time I get done, the scene may not exist in the final manuscript.

Anyway, if you’ve been wondering why this blog is on an abbreviated posting schedule this summer (and why this will probably be extended until the new year), well, now you know. I’ve got to see about a boy and his caviar.

Commonplace

“He was face to face with the true meaning of work, hadibut.  As in, had he but realized.  Work was invented to take care of drudgery, hadibut.  It wasn’t that work was drudgery, like everybody thought.  No, life was the drudgery: there was a certain irreducible majority of time that was going to be sheer hellish drudgery, doowaddy.  As in do what he would.  God himself hadn’t been able to weed it out, doowaddy.  Heaven was just earth without the kapok.  Heaven was Eternal, but only for a few hours.  Then it was over, God’s day off was over, and here was the shitpile of creation again, earth again, time to start over, Day One: Work.

    “Work was invented to channel drudgery, to put all the shit in the same place and keep it away from the fun stuff.  To give us something tangible to blame the boredom on.  That’s why the people you work with are idiots and shitheads, so you can go home and live with nice people.  Though a lot of people don’t understand the principle and so live with idiots and shitheads at home, too.

    “People who don’t work run the risk of having disorder run rampant and flood over its levees and stink up their whole lives.  That was Roger’s situation exactly.

    “Or maybe not exactly.  Maybe there was one other element, one thing more that work took care of that Roger was missing.  You could take a more positive view of work.  You could say that work is what connects us to the rest of the world.  Because work is the way we marry the world, pretty much.  For better or worse, work is most of how we enter the earth aside from our families.  And a novelist who doesn’t have work, whose time is his own to spend as he wishes—why he or she may find his or her writing getting more and more ingrown, less and less connected to how most people spend most of their time.”

—Jack Butler, Jujitsu for Christ (1986)

Down with “whitey”

In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Lois Borges posits an imaginary country that snowballs out into real-time and, despite the fact that the place and its customs are complete fictions, begins to affect the world in which we live. It begins with a nightly conversation between Bioy Casares (a real person) and Borges. To punctuate a point he’s made, Casares quotes from a gnostic from the country of Uqbar; he found the quote in a copy of the Anglo-American Encyclopedia. Borges is skeptical—he’s never heard of Uqbar. Casares insists it exists and searches for it in his copy of the encyclopedia. He can’t find it, but insists that it was “a region either in Iraq or Asia Minor.”

The next day, though, Casares finds a copy of the encyclopedia volume with the “Uqbar” article and, indeed, with the quote. Casares’ volume (XLVI) appears to be the only copy printed with the “Uqbar” volume; despite countless searches, neither Casares nor Borges can find another copy of the volume featuring “Uqbar.” It’s not listed in the encyclopedia’s index. They can hardly find mention of the region in any libraries.

To compound matters, the few times in which Uqbar is mentioned, it’s made clear that the region’s peoples never wrote directly about the place. Instead, their histories and mythologies refer to a fictional world called Tlön but there’s (of course) no actual, extant copy of any works on Tlön. Through a series of circumstances involving a family friend, Borges ends up with Volume XI of A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. The number of the volume indicates that Tlön wasn’t just some mad whim but rather a fully realized, thoroughly imagined world with ethnicities, languages, climates, flora, fauna, history, and mythology. All of it, of course, is completely fictional.

But who created it? Borges and his team of scholars—almost all of whom, by the way, were real people, though employed for fictional services in this short story—quickly deduce that Tlön can’t be the work of a lone nutjob, but must have been created by committee, by an organized team over the course of a generation. That leads us, ultimately, to Orbis Tertius, a shadow conspiracy dedicated to promulgating the world of Tlön and, hell, maybe Uqbar as well.

Borges’ signature genius, beyond all the ideas that the 20-page story conjures up, is his tone. This obvious fiction is played as straight nonfiction, as pure scholarly text. Most of the characters involved in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” are real people, more or less doing the things they did in real life, and many of the footnotes and asides are true and drawn from actual texts. Just as the fictional Uqbar seeps into reality, Borges’s 1941 story blends fact and fiction until it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference. As the story’s Wikipedia entry notes, “A fictional entry about Uqbar stood unchallenged for some time on Wikipedia.”

The story ends ominously:

Contact with Tlön and the ways of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels. Now, the conjectural “primitive language” of Tlön has found its way into the schools. Now, the teaching of its harmonious history, full of stirring episodes, has obliterated the history which dominated my childhood. Now, in all memories, a fictitious past occupies the place of any other. We know nothing about it with any certainty, not even that it is false.

“Uqbar” is a malignant virus, a dangerous fiction that overtakes its host—the real world. Art tends to do this: Think of how much our perceptions of history are shaped by what we’ve seen in movies; how our understanding of, say, Marie Antoinette’s life is shaped more by a movie than anything we’ve read in a history book; how even the best historical fictions (Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Kathryn Davis’s Versailles) flatten and simplify our history, but how we know them better than we know the truth.

All of this leads me, of course, to what Kim McLarin hilariously dubs “Whiteygate.” If you’re (blessedly) unaware of this tempest in a thimble, here are the basics. For the past three or four months, rumors have floated, disseminated by right-wing media, that Michelle Obama once used the word “whitey” to refer to white people from the pulpit of Trinity United Church in Chicago. Oh, the horror. It’s gotten so bad that Barack Obama has had to publicly and repeatedly denounce the completely unsubstantiated rumor on the campaign trail.

The flap is further proof of Borges’ prescience regarding the spread of fictions, and how fictions overtake truth. (John Kerry learned the Argentine’s lesson the hard way during the “Swift Boat Affair.” The lies spread and became part of the public record and, as with Tlön, without a shred of evidence.)

“Whitey,” I think, is just another version of Uqbar; its disseminators a cabal of Orbis Tertius imitators. McLarin points out “the clearest and most obvious knockdown of Whiteygate. Namely this: When the hell was the last time you heard a black person call somebody ‘whitey?’”

I’ve lived as a black American for 31 long years, and I have never, not once, heard a black person refer to a white person as “whitey” or, for that matter, “honky.” I think I’ve heard the terms used ironically but, even then, it’s rare. More often than that, the ironic quippers are white, anyway. Hip-hop, a music that dominates American popular culture, is created primarily by black people. Quick thinking: Can you name a single rap song in which the words “whitey” or “honky” are used? While I suppose the words were used in the 1960s and 1970s, I’ve mostly heard them in movies from that period.

McLarin clarifies:

I mean, ‘Whitey?’

[Michelle Obama] has a law degree from Harvard, for crying out loud. If, for some reason, she was trying to rile up a congregation she could do much, much better than that. I have spent the afternoon trying—with all the honesty and courage and humble introspection that is called for in this historic moment, with America poised to finally cast off its original sin and move into the full realization of those ringing words in the Declaration of Independence—to think about the terms black folks use when talking among themselves about white people.

I could barely move my pencil tip. Probably because black folks spend a lot less time talking or even thinking about white people than most white, right-wing reactionaries and their black counterparts dream in their hot little dreams. I had trouble, and, after hours and hours, the best I could come up with was this:

White folks. Whites. White people. They.

If “whitey” was ever a common term outside of the Black Panther Party, and I’m not even sure about that, it’s certainly not now, and I doubt it’s part of the everyday language of a woman who was born when the term was about to go out of style. The rumor’s employment of this stale term reeks of right-wing paranoia and desperation. Only people who don’t come into regular contact with, you know, black people would ever think we spray “whitey” in public or at all.

But the “whitey” Tlön feeds into a larger Uqbar, which McLarin hints at: the fiction that white people are at the forefront of black consciousness at all times. My biggest problem with Paul Haggis’s execrable Crash and the equally misguided James Toback movie Black and White is that racial epithets are constantly at the tip of every character’s tongue, rubbing the surface of every personal conflict and character motivation. Maybe that’s true of white Americans—I doubt it—but it sure ain’t true for black folks. I think of white folks as consciously white only when the context requires it. Race gets mixed into all kinds of other things—sexual insecurity, class, alcohol—to cause fistfights and foul language. I’m always aware of white presence but awareness and obsession are two entirely different things.

Whether or not “whitey” was ever a real and lasting insult in black communities, it’s clear that it’s insinuated itself into popular culture and discourse. It’s a fiction made real through obsession. Whitey. Tlön. Honky. Uqbar. Again. It’s no more than this but, alas, also no less.

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If there was ever a man who used “whitey” in the aforementioned contexts, it would be Washington, D.C.’s beloved, controversial Petey Greene. The radio host, talk-show personality, gadfly, and all-around contrarian took on all comers in his freewheeling commentary on race, sex, relationships, and politics. His idiosyncrasies—both good and bad, both community-building and self-aggrandizing—were toned down in Kasi Lemmons’ bland Hollywood biopic Talk to Me (another fiction eclipsing the real), but the man himself is incredible to behold in clips. He tweaks black and white perceptions, and was just as interested—maybe more interested—in critiquing African American life as he was in white life.

Case in point: Buppies—and I suppose I’m one at this point—have an, ahem, complicated relationship with eating watermelon. Like fried chicken and chitlins, it’s a food we’re long associated with liking, and the minstrel stereotypes associated with blacks and watermelons are strong enough to make some folks sidestep the fruit in public, even if we actually like it.

Until last week, I hadn’t touched watermelon in half a decade. That’s not entirely due to images like this and this, but they didn’t help. Why would I need to confirm in public what white people might think in private?

As Petey Greene might say, though, “why should you give a good goddamn what white people think, anyway?”

La Bella’s hosting a watermelon party at her place on Saturday, complete with a seed-splitting contest, watermelon margaritas, and a recipe that calls for the fruit in combination with feta cheese. In her honor, here’s Petey Greene showing how it’s done, and why black folks should be proud to chomp down.

Enjoy.

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UPDATE: More on "whitey" and the black folks who might–just might–use the term audaciously... In the Department of How Did I Miss This? (#5,373), Paul Beatty has a new novel out. I’ve foisted The White Boy Shuffle and Tuff onto at least three friends, and he’s come up on this site before. Anyway, Slumberland is the name, and it looks like a corker. Chris Abani reviews it for the Los Angeles Times and Alex Abramovich seems to like it, guardedly, at Bookforum. I’m headed to the bookstore after work.

Toast

In my 31 years of living, I’ve attended several weddings but never been in one. Now, in 2008, I find myself in the odd position of being a groomsman in Ernesto and Lae-Lae’s wedding in two weeks and being the best man for my brother’s wedding at the end of July. I’m excited but I don’t know what to do.

Specifically, it’s the latter that concerns me. It’s a honor and I’m happy with it and all, and I know, theoretically, that they’re not much for me to do. My brother organized the bachelor party—a Texas Rangers baseball game and a bar; no strippers—so that was off my back.

For me, it’s just a matter of keeping the tuxedo clean (easy), keeping the rings safe (easy enough) and making a toast to the bride and groom (oh dear god). As you can guess from the parenthetical statements, speechmaking is not my forte. I’ve been told, a decade ago, that I have a voice (and a body) perfectly suited for radio, but I’m sure neither of the words I will write nor the vocal delivery I’ll have when the time comes. I’m scoured YouTube for best man toasts, but the delivery and quality of camerawork varies wildly. They all try to be funny—the YouTube videos are like stand-up comedy tryouts—and generally toast the couple early on. Beyond that, there’s no consistency, and I need help in shaping this thing.

That’s where you come in. What advice would you give to a best man? What are things you’ve heard in speeches that ring true or false, or that you’d rather lose a kidney to science than ever hear again? What do you think is the appropriate tone? Would you recommend any books, movies, etc., that might help? Any assistance would be appreciated.

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Out and about:

David Remnick profiles Phil Schaap—jazz historian, radio host, and Charlie Parker obsessive to the nth degree.

David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson argue the merits of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

CultureSnob announces the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon.

A long, thoughtful interview with Nicholson Baker, in which he discusses his controversial Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.

The City by the Bay

Study in red and gold. Photographed 22 May 2008.

The Ferry Building: morning, twilight, and night. Photographed 24 May 2008.

Photographs taken in San Francisco, California, by Quiet Bubble. (Click on pictures for larger views.) This month’s edition of “Quick Hits” is below.

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Quick hits (June 2008)

Foreskin’s Lament (2007), by Shalom Auslander: David Lee Roth once quipped that “all critics like Elvis Costello because he looks like they do,” and I thought of this while reading Foreskin’s Lament. Like a number of books championed profusely by the literary blogosphere—think of Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan (2006) and Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land (2004)—Auslander’s prose is long on the acerbic, bitter wit and short on narrative follow-through. I suspect that’s why lit-bloggers swooned for him. As with many lit blogs (and the aforementioned novels), Auslander’s autobiography of growing up ultra-Orthodox Jewish and leaving it behind is colloquial, episodic, vituperative, jumps around chronologically all willy-nilly, is intermittently hilarious, is fascinated/repulsed by porn, and is ultimately unsatisfying. His caustic remembrances make for guffaws a few times—a “blessing bee” contest at yeshiva school, a long walk on the Sabbath to a New York Rangers game, assistance with building an ark for three Torahs—but it’s not moving nor does the laughter feel cathartic. These episodes, honed and polished, are stellar journal articles and magazine pieces but, taken together, Foreskin’s Lament feels as flimsy as a bound transcription of a stand-up comic’s routine. And a mediocre comedian’s at that—around page 45, I wanted Auslander to suck it up and shut the fuck up. I still had 250 pages to go. B-

Vampire Loves (2001-2003), by Joann Sfar: Finally, a Joann Sfar comic that I love. I’ve complained before about his scratchy line, inconsistent figures and shaky sense of perspective, but there’s no question that he’s full of ideas, both aesthetic and emotional. Vampire Loves, which collects three graphic novels starring Ferdinand the Vampire, fulfills Sfar’s intentions. Though the line is shaky as ever, it’s confident and no longer half-assed; the characters have vivacity, depth, and warmth. In particular, Ferdinand is a whopper—romantic, charismatic, a little bit meek unless enthralled by the many beautiful women (mortal and otherworldly) in the collection’s universe, in love with vintage records and clothing, with old-world charm and a reluctance to kill. His searches for love are wistful and hilarious, and Sfar’s madcap plunges into different genres, shades of folklore, and comics idioms means that the stories have the customary Sfar shifts in tone. Even better than the character is the Vampire Loves world, which is fully rendered and richly detailed; it feels lived-in, even though it’s a miasma of pulp fiction, Gothic tropes, Jewish mythology, vaudeville, and Sfar’s previous comics. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good description of the whole interconnected universe that Sfar’s spent his career making. Vampire Loves is his most representative and most accomplished work. A+

The Professor’s Daughter (1997), by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert: Then again, Sfar’s still like Bob Dylan: His stuff seems better when other people are rendering it. The Professor’s Daughter, written by Sfar but drawn and painted by Guibert, is a case in point. This lovely, funny novella sends up Victorian culture’s chief obsessions and tropes—decorum, Egyptology, foreign adventure, romance—with a bravura that borders on arrogance. The story of a reanimated 3000-year-old mummy and the proper (but sexy) aristocrat who loves him careens—sometimes from panel to panel—from slapstick to tragedy, but never wavers from its high-spirited tone. Sfar’s writing is full of quips and sly asides to English literature, but it’s Guibert’s lush artwork that mesmerizes. His line is assured and solid in a way that opposes Sfar’s ever-changing tone—and that seems, in part, a rebuke to Sfar’s own chaotic drawing style—and the muter, subtle colors give the story a firmness that it might otherwise lack. The novella is, of all things, a grounded flight of fancy. A-

Of Walking in Ice (1978), by Werner Herzog: In November 1974, filmmaker Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man) learned that German film critic and historian Lotte Eisner was on the verge of death. As she was a great friend of Herzog’s and a champion of the New German cinema of which Herzog was a member, the director did what anyone might do: walk from his home to hers to visit her. The trouble: Herzog lived in Munich; Eisner was convalescing in Paris. Herzog, convinced that traveling by foot would restore Eisner, grabbed a knapsack and new boots, and launched himself into the icy German winter. Of Walking in Ice is his diary of his mad journey. Like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s similarly themed travel memoirs of walks, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, Herzog infuses the tale with dense, rich imagery, gorgeous and overstuffed prose, and a sense of ecstatic wonder that’s occasionally unnerving. Herzog’s a filmmaker through and through, and throughout the book there are startling visual motifs and counterpoints. What resonates most, though, is the sense of emotional urgency to the undertaking. Herzog’s melancholia (and sometimes desolation) seeps through the novella-like book, and his intense recording of his walk strikes me as a meditation on his psyche and an opportunity to exorcise his demons and move forward creatively. Of Walking in Ice is a leap of faith—every step is a prayer to Eisner’s good health, even if Herzog’s never sentimental enough to say such a thing. By the way, Eisner lived on another decade. A

Hank wouldn’t ‘a’ done it that way: Phish’s “Scent of a Mule”

“Authenticity” and I don’t much get along. The fistfight probably started back in junior high, when I was semi-regularly called a sellout or, worse, an Oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside) for not “talking black enough” or for my growing interest in “non-black” culture such as rock music, jazz, and comics. Ironically, the first two’s roots are very much steeped in black culture, and one of comics’ seminal figures—George Herriman and his wonderful Krazy Kat—was probably a certified African American and, in any case, certainly explored racial themes in his strips.

Anyway, I’ve grown used to being one of the only black persons at the local art exhibit opening, and getting the customary curious (but vaguely rattled) glances from white folks and nods of recognition from the few other black folks in attendance at the opera. Even my hip-hop tastes veer towards the underground and alternative rather than the typical: J-Live over Jay-Z. I’ve been accused of being insufficiently African American on enough occasions to know to ignore the Bronx cheers. Besides, I’ve got enough ex-cons and ex-baseheads in my family to cast a jaundiced eye over gangsta rap’s ideal of “keeping it real”—and I know enough from personal experience to realize how much of the hos-and-Caddys aesthetic is updated minstrelsy, rather than real blackness, anyway.

All of this is a longwinded way of saying that I’m distrustful of art that emphasizes how “authentic” it is, because “authenticity” tends to drown out the complicated nuances of life as it’s actually experienced, of people as they actually are. “Authenticity” is a reductive, rather than inclusive, force. I’ve felt that reduction firsthand, when I’ve been the only black person at a blues concert other than the man onstage. I love the post-punk of Talking Heads, the Mekons, and Hüsker Dü, which consciously fuses genres, but glance sideways at “real” punk like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. (And don’t get me started on Fugazi and the Washington, D.C., “straight-edge” aesthetic. It’s as dogmatic and birdbrained as Dogme 95 was for cinema.) Folk music leaves me cold. With few exceptions, moldy-fig music leaves me bored. The idea of “independent film” makes my head hurt, not because of its resistance to corporate ideals, but because of its insistence on some half-baked idea of “pure” cinema. (Cinema, a collage and concatenation of various art forms, is the least pure art in existence. That’s why I love it so much.)

As a result of my battle with “authenticity,” I’ve reserved a special animosity for that musical genre that’s most concerned with the subject: country. Country’s got a lot in common with rap that way, in that both constantly need to be validated by purists as being non-elitist. Both forms are obsessed with “keeping it real” and glamorizing outlaws. But I love hip-hop because its starting point is the fusion of genres—i.e., sampling—and because it used the found materials of recording playback (turntables, tape players, vinyl records, speakers, microphones) as recording instruments. An egghead with time on his heads and too many records could figure out how to make the music. That’s the myth, anyway, and that myth is democratic, inclusive, and a hodgepodge at heart. The heterogeneous nature of hip-hop’s music and roots clashes endearingly with the purist principles of the lyrics, and that collision makes for great music.

For a long time, I couldn’t find a similar tension in country music. So I was left un-amused by the quest for the most authentic twang and the dull desire to keep things rough-hewn and working-class. There’s nothing wrong, mind you, with rawness or with keeping it simple. It’s frustrating, however, when that’s all there is, or at least all that’s acceptable as “country.” At the same time, the schlock of country radio was too slick, too processed, too much like mediocre pop that had been hickified.

I eventually discovered the western swing—big-band jazz smashing into country—of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys; and the oddball psychedelic country of the Grateful Dead and the Byrds; and the kitchen-sink, faux-old-timey brilliance of The Band; the ambient prairies and back porches conjured up by Bill Frisell; the Dallas cowpunk of the Old 97’s; and the delicate mix of rough and smooth in Lucinda Williams’s voice.

But all that would come later. This essay concerns, instead, the gateway drug that made a love of country even possible for this black city slicker.

Phish’s headlong fusion of genres, along with a strong absurdist bent and a cockeyed reluctance to sentimentality or straightforwardness, drew me to the band like flies to a bug zapper. Its roots are in the 1970s—prog rock, country-rock, new wave, synthesizers, Hobbits, and Frank Zappa’s heyday—but Phish’s concerns spoke, and continue to speak, to me. To this day, I can’t explain adequately why I’ve traveled hundreds of miles to see the band nine times, or why I’m so giddy at the possibility that it might re-form.

I was already a sucker for Phish—having heard and traded for bootlegs of live concerts—by the time I heard Hoist during my junior year of college. Now, it should be noted that the band rarely captured its onstage mix of improvisation, complex structures, and sheer silliness on a studio album. (The band managed to be grandiose and mock grandiosity simultaneously.) 1993’s Rift and 1996’s Billy Breathes come close but it’s primarily the concert albums that I listen to these days. Still, Hoist is fun. Perhaps the band’s biggest radio hit, “Down with Disease,” comes from the album. It’s produced and mixed, respectively, by the team of Paul Fox and Ed Thacker, who had produced They Might Be Giants’ most successful album (Flood) in 1990, and broke 10,000 Maniacs to mainstream audiences with 1992’s Our Time in Eden. Fox and Thacker are known for a clean sound, the use of snazzy horns, and a strong sense of pop concision. Phish, looking for its first full-fledged hit album, turned to Fox and Thacker for Hoist.

Still, Phish is Phish, so the inner weirdness seeped out occasionally. It found its best form in the Mike Gordon-penned “Scent of a Mule,” which remains one of my favorite Phish songs. It’s a bluegrass tune on an album otherwise full of high-octane, multi-movement, progressive rock. Live, the song incorporates Russian folksong, but it’s strange enough on the album to qualify as a true oddball in its original form.

On paper, the notation must look like straight bluegrass. Hell, banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck nearly steals the show on this track. “Scent of a Mule,” however, is among the strangest four minutes of pop that I heard that year. It opens with a fast-tapping drumbeat on snares—so far, so normal—but the drums fade in. And there’s that organ that sounds like a train speeding past. It sounds like the band’s talking to itself behind all this. The guitar, bass, and banjo emerge into the mix, all initially with ambient textures, like something out of The Twilight Zone. It’s like the sound is slowly coming in from outer space.

This makes sense. Get a load of the opening lyrics:

Kitty Malone sat on a mule, was riding in style
When suddenly, like the sound of a buzzard’s breaking,
Kitty felt laser beams being fired at her head
She said, “I hate laser beams, and you never done see me askin’
For a UFO, for a UFO, for a UFO, in Tomahawk County

What the hell?! I asked myself. (Keep in mind that the “I hate laser beams” quote is sung by Gordon in a high-pitched mock-woman accent, like a boy play-acting.) But that’s just the beginning. The space aliens keep firing at this poor country woman, until she’s forced to defend herself by having her mule shit at the aliens as she (and, presumably, the mule) run and duck for cover. (That’s the chorus.) The second verse doesn’t normalize things at all:

She felt the fire against her neck
And it saddened her to feel it burn
When suddenly, like the sound of a breeding Holstein,
Kitty said, “Stop, we ain’t lookin’ for fightin’ in Tomahawk County
A little guy from the UFO
Came on out and said his name was Joe
She said, “Come on over for some lemonade
Just follow me now with the whole brigade.”

There’s so much to unpack. The idea that a 19th-century pioneer woman is “saddened”—as opposed to “surprised” or “shocked” or “alarmed”—to feel the burn of a laser beam is hilarious; sci-fi meets the Western, and both shrug at each other. The narrative moves briskly—in four minutes, we careen through a pioneer landscape, space aliens, a shoot-em-up, and a peaceful resolution—moves us along as quickly as the music. It’s worth mentioning that the musicianship is superb, with crack comic timing—Jon Fishman’s metallic percussion effects and strikes on bottles and wood blocks give off the correct dose of odd perfection. The breakneck pace is reflected into the plucked instruments and Page McConnell’s cascading keyboards. Through all the weirdness, “Scent of a Mule” maintains its country bonafides: The pickin’ is sublime, and Gordon even shouts out a classic Bob Wills “A-ha!” during the breakdown.

By the time the aliens “walked into her cabin shack” and proclaim it “a place of elegance/ Here we shower ourselves in lightness,” I was prepared for anything. Indeed, this bridge is soaring, with a calliope-like swirling bridge; it’s gospel as conceived by George Lucas. The whole thing could be called a parody of the country music tradition, but it clearly loves the tradition as well. “Scent of a Mule” is a collage of Phish’s nerdy interests, country, bluegrass, progressive rock, and Monty Python.

I would discover that it’s far from the band’s best song, but it’s one of its most representative. As Waylon Jennings might say, “Hank wouldn’t ‘a’ done it that way.” Hell, Willie Nelson wouldn’t have it done this way, and he’s recorded a reggae album. Phish introduced me to the idea of country as experimental. “Scent of a Mule” is strange, a collage of styles, and thoroughly unconcerned with authenticity. But it’s still somehow country and, finally, it was a tradition I could get into.

—————————————

“Scent of a Mule” by Phish. I’ll leave it up until 15 July 2008.

Out and about (June 2008)

When, oh when, will Zadie Smith publish a book of her literary criticism? Along with being a ferociously talented novelist, she’s quickly becoming one of the most astute critics of her age. Here she is on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, perhaps the greatest of all English-language novels. Another Smith volume that needs to be out in the open is novel #4. In the New Yorker, she’s teased us with two great stories—“Hanwell in Hell” and “Hanwell Senior”—which makes me think she’s hard at work.

Speaking of tributes, Craig Fischer at Thought Balloonists pays his respects to cartoonist Will Elder, with a detailed, illustrated analysis of Elder’s “chicken fat” aesthetic.

Yet another tribute: Roger Ebert celebrates the life of Studs Terkel on the historian/raconteur’s 96th birthday. Terkel’s introduced me to labor history, oral history, humane leftist politics, and the pleasures of a daily martini, so I consider him a hero and a shaper of my soul. It pleases me to no end to know that Terkel’s still alive and productive at his age.

Enough with the tributes. With all the essays about the “crisis” in contemporary film criticism, it’s good to have a long view on what criticism is, does, and can do in the online climate. David Bordwell provides a terrific examination, essentially giving his philosophy and ideal practice of film criticism. Anyone interested in the subject should read his essay.

To be more particular, Wesley Morris uses his critical podium to wonder about the African American presence in cinema:

A few weeks ago I got to see Terrence Howard and Anika Noni Rose play Brick and Maggie “the Cat” in Debbie Allen’s Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I went home depressed. Not because the show was bad, although, in its clanging way, it is. I was depressed because for all its shortcomings, the show was a big entertainment event that doesn’t happen much in the movies: It had premium melodrama and black stars being starry. As a moviegoer, I hurt for that kind of glamour.

I felt the same hangover leaving an exhilarating concert by Erykah Badu and the Roots earlier this month, and watching both The Wire, which just said goodbye to us and HBO, and the staggering acting in that production of A Raisin in the Sun ABC aired in February: Why isn’t black life this interesting, vibrant, or complex at the movies? How is it that Terrence Howard can play a legendary character on the New York stage but is stuck as the sidekick who’s jealous of Robert Downey Jr.’s hardware in Iron Man?

When it comes to black America, the movies are stagnating. Well, when it comes to any nonwhite male subject matter at the movies, the pickings are slim. But there’s such a wealth of black stars, producers, and directors that the scarcity of movies—big-ticket or small, serious or light—focused on the lives of black people is surreal. There’s a gaping entertainment void. It’s not just the lack of quantity. It’s the lack of variety.

Finally, I think I’ve found a hobby I’d like to pursue: light graffiti. See some pictures here.

That is all.

Oh brother: Longwinded answers to the only quarterly film quiz that matters

Every four months, Dennis Cozzalio gives out his film quiz, which buzzes with odd, endearing, cinematic questions about movie love. The queries certainly yield more interesting responses than “What’s your favorite movie?” and are fun to consider. And now he’s back. I believe that I’ve now participated in a year’s worth of these: see here, here, and here for my previous answers. As with my past entries, I’ve opted to respond here; be sure to go to his site for more responses in the comments box. Okay, here we go.

1) Best transition from movies to TV (actor, actress, producer/director, movie/show)
Ernest Dickerson. As director of photography for Spike Lee’s first few features, he brought a highly stylized color palette, beautiful compositions, crisp lighting, and a seamy and sweaty undercurrent to everything from Do the Right Thing to Jungle Fever. His own directorial efforts—including Juice and the truly awful Bulletproof (I paid money for this one, on a date, and I’ve still got an axe to grind a decade later)—are dicier propositions. Lately, though, he’s been on a roll, directing stellar episodes of superb shows—six or seven for The Wire, a couple for Weeds, a few hothouse episodes of ER, and Heroes apiece. So, his choice in TV shows is generally better than that of full-length screenplays. Perhaps he’s found his niche.

2) Living film director you most missing seeing on the cultural landscape regularly
Clare Peploe. She’s made three gems—High Season, Rough Magic, and Triumph of Love—over 18 years. Each one is radically different in time period, and they’re equally unclassifiable beyond that they’re all comic to some degree. She’s created her own genre—fancy-free, languid, gently sliding from one genre convention to the next without us being able to clearly identify the transition, and very, very sexy.

3) Eugene Pallette or Charles Coburn
Coburn.

4) Fill in the blank: “I pray that no one ever turns _ into a movie.”
Invisible Man.

5) Jane Greer or Veronica Lake
Lake left me so woozy in Sullivan’s Travels that I couldn’t think straight even when I was desperately trying to stay focused and catch all the jokes. Greer never left me punch-drunk, not even in Out of the Past. So, Lake.

6) What was the last movie you saw in a theater? On DVD? And why?
Theater: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—because I love Spielberg and have been itching to see this for six freaking months. DVD: Monsoon Wedding—because it’s my favorite romantic comedy, I make a point of seeing the movie once a year, and La Bella had never seen it. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Mira Nair should be a household name and I’m totally convinced that she’s worthy of a major critical study.

7) Name an actor you think should be a star
Thandie Newton. (I’ve made my case before.)

8) Foxy Brown or Coffy
Neither. Go with Friday Foster.

9) Favorite TV show still without its own DVD box set
This one’s a tossup. Max Headroom has still not been released on DVD. I haven’t seen this sci-fi show since I was a kid and I’m not sure its ideas would hold water 20 years later, but I’d like to find out. On the flipside of the same coin, I’m pretty sure the humor in Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures would be much hipper, stranger, and more subversive to me now than it did as a 12-year-old.

10) Jack Elam or Neville Brand
Brand.

11) What movies would top your list of movies you need to revisit, for whatever reason?
Yi-Yi, The Royal Tenenbaums, Porco Rosso, The Thin Red Line and the aforementioned Monsoon Wedding. I’m pretty sure that I watch each of these at least once a year.

12) Zodiac or All the President’s Men?
All the President’s Men.

13) Using our best reviewer-speak, what is an “important” film comedy? And what is to you the most important film comedy of the last 35 years?
An “important” film comedy is one that’s both funny and visually enriching—i.e., one that uses the techniques and tricks of cinema to enhance and create its humor, instead of relying primarily on writing, facial gestures, and good line reading to carry the jokes. For this reason and more, my favorite comedies tend to be 1930s and 1940s screwball, or Buster Keaton shorts, in which common sense is flipped on its head in terms of action and technical derring-do, and in which the absurd is often present in the design and setpieces. Even here, though, screwball—unless in the hands of Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, or (to a limited degree) Leo McCarey—often seems like fast and furious radio plays that happened to be filmed. They’re stagy and still. It’s not that often that a comedy heralds in major stylistic change and influence, at least not in America, which is why Wes Anderson’s movies are so refreshing, in that the wit comes as much from the mise-en-scene and camera movement as from the deadpan acting and terrific dialogue. These elements move in tandem. Now, as for the most “important” film comedy since 1973… that’s tricky. From a commercial standpoint, I’d have to say There’s Something about Mary (1998), in that the success of its outré gags, upfront sexual humor, potty mouth, and gross-outs paved the way for the last decade of male anxietyfests—from the career of Ben Stiller to Judd Apatow and his foul-mouthed minions. Mary has filtered down to TV so that much of what seemed risqué about the movie in 1998 now seems passé on Comedy Central. (South Park, of course, helped there as well.) The movie has popularized the use of bodily fluids in embarrassing situations in even kids’ animated features. Certainly, it upped the ante on what was acceptable to laugh at. Plus, it’s funny. From an aesthetic standpoint, however, I’ll go with 1999’s Three Kings. Here’s what I wrote about it in 2006: “I’d seen plenty of genre-hopping movies before—movies that change tone and pacing from one scene to the next—but Russell’s masterpiece is another beast altogether. It’s not so much that it’s the funniest movie of 1999, but it’s one of the most nerve-wracking action thrillers ever made, and a ferociously incisive (and unfortunately prescient) political movie, and a dark, vicious satire on race relations, too. But it doesn’t hop from one genre to the next. Rather, it’s somehow all of these things at once. It’s not a genre-hopper but instead a genre-blender. I never imagined that all these genres could fused together and maintain a consistent, world-weary, wise-ass but righteous tone. Russell does it. And, as if experimenting with genre conventions just wasn’t enough, its visual aesthetic—the use of a silver film stock that made the blacks super-inky and the colors lurid and almost flat; shutter speeds and consciously grainy footage that make the moving images look like they’re moving in staccato, almost silent-screen-era fashion; the long takes during moments of war chaos and intensity; following a bullet at extreme close-up as it travels from gun nozzle to (and through) flesh—is avant-garde, too. I’ve got no idea how Russell and company got away with a big-budget, mega-star, deeply political and personal war film. But I’m glad they did.”

14) Describe the ideal environment for watching a movie.
In Ed Inman’s backyard, on his big screen, with the movie being projected from his kitchen window, on a breezy night, with twenty or so in the audience, with the crickets chirping quietly and the occasional hum of car wheels on asphalt and plane engines in the stratosphere.

15) Michelle Williams or Eva Mendes
I’ve been a sucker for Mendes since Out of Time—I can’t even think straight when she’s onscreen. So, Mendes.

16) What’s the worst movie title of all time?
To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.

17) Best movie about teaching and/or learning
Rushmore (1998). Well, it mostly takes place in school, anyway.

18) Dracula (1931) or Horror of Dracula (1958)?
Dracula.

19) Why do you blog? Or if you don’t, why do you read blogs?
A great question, which requires an equally great answer that I’m perhaps incapable of giving. I started this blog because I noticed a dearth, in print, of the sort of nonfiction writing that I most like—a fusion of close critical reading, large-scale cultural/political commentary, reportage, and memoir. This lack was understandable. A standard newspaper arts review just doesn’t have the place for this sort of interlaced commentary, which means that the critic’s sensibility is necessarily subsumed by a strict (and small) word count allocated. (Robert Christgau manages to flourish with extreme concision, but he’s a rare exception.) Magazine writers do better—The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly are the gold standards in developing and fostering writers of this ilk. But I saw it disappearing in print, and flourishing on blogs. I thought I’d give it a try but not for the reason you may think. My nonfiction’s always had trouble staying in one place, and I figured that forcing my writing to be seen and judged regularly would rein in my “worst” impulses, and would make me focus instead of skipping from mode to mode, from artform to artform. That way, I would eventually make myself marketable as a film critic. The blog was intended as little more than an open-faced sketchbook of ideas, idiosyncrasies, and passions; making it public would keep me honest. Well, these aren’t boom times to be looking for work as a paid critic of any kind, and I soon discovered—much to my initial chagrin—that the posts that garnered the most hits were precisely the pieces that combined elements of my life and views with criticism and larger commentary. Worse, I discovered that I didn’t want to write solely on film at all, but about all the culture in which I was interested. I was encouraged by cinema itself, which is necessarily a concatenation of a variety of art disciplines; I get tickled by critics who insist upon the notion of “pure” cinema because there’s no such thing and never can be. (Even Stan Brakhage’s films in which he painted directly onto celluloid involves two arts—painting and photography.) A great film critic is one whose eyes, ears, and heart are attuned to all the arts—theatre, music, writing, choreography, etc.—that go into producing a movie. (Academic film writing sometimes irritates me because it places films in the contexts of other films, but not often the other arts going on around it at the time of creation.) I love cinema, in other words, because it forces engagement with art that’s not cinema; to pretend otherwise is to miss the point of the artform. Anyway, I quickly lost the sketchbook idea—though I kept the quotes and snippets that I collected—and instead began trying to make connections between forms and the loose-firing synapses in my head. The pieces became longer. I slowly built an audience and began to look at the blog as a sort of résumé. That, too, was silly—the blog hasn’t led to any jobs. It has led, however, to a sense of community that I cherish. I haven’t been as diligent in responding to comments or in building a readership “neighborhood” of regulars as has Girish Shambu, but the blog has led directly to my attending last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and sharing meals and conversations with film bloggers. Knowing that my ideas, good or bad, are out there being discussed among a community of peers is central to why I blog. So, this place has gone from a sketchpad to a CV to ultimately a flower in an ever-growing, ever-evolving garden. I’m proud to be a part of that, no matter how small that part is.

20) Most memorable/disturbing death scene
Bambi, mother. Still can’t watch it without tearing up.

21) Jason Robards or Robert Shaw
Shaw, for Jaws.

22) A good candidate for Most Blasphemous Movie Ever
Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961).

23) Rio Bravo or Red River?
Among my many lapses in cinema literacy is a basic lack of knowledge about westerns. I’m not a fan of John Ford (I know, I know), I like Howard Hawks best when he’s making screwball comedies instead of westerns, Budd Boetticher bores me, etc. All of this is a longwinded way of saying that I haven’t seen either of the above.

24) Werner Herzog is remaking Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage—that’s reality. Try to outdo reality by concocting a match-up of director and title for a really strange imaginary remake.
Woody Allen directing a remake of First Blood. I’m more than a little ashamed to note that I’d be first in line to see it.

25) Bulle Ogier or Charlotte Rampling
Rampling.

26) In the Realm of the Senses—yes or no?
Theoretically, yes, but I haven’t actually seen it.

27) Name a movie you think of as your own.
The Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? The movie was shot entirely in my adopted state of Mississippi, and large chunks were shot in and around Jackson. On each of the three times that I saw the movie in the theater, the theater was jam-packed with people who would hoot and holler whenever they recognized an onscreen extra or a location. “Look, look, look, there’s Jethro, mama! There he is!” “Yessir, that’s him. What on Earth did he do to his hair?” I now do volunteer work for the local film society, members of which include people who worked on O Brother, so the movie feels like a family affair in some small way. Also, as must be obvious by the number of times that I saw it live, it’s my favorite Coen Brothers feature, and I can quote most of the movie, accents and all, at any point. In fact, my brother’s fiancé and I bonded, initially, by recreating stretches of the movie.

28) Winged Migration or Microcosmos
Winged Migration, by a nose. (I wrote briefly on it here.)

29) Your favorite football game featured in a movie
M.A.S.H.

30) Wendy Hiller or Deborah Kerr?
Hiller, for I Know Where I’m Going

31) Dirtiest secret you have that is related to the movies
I have none.

32) Name a favorite film and describe how it is illuminated and enriched by another favorite film.
See question #27 for the favorite film. Along with being an intentional mishmash of mythologies ancient (The Odyssey) and more recent (Mississippi blues/folk culture), O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a farce that provides multiple laughs with every minute, and offers a warmhearted and complex understanding of the region that I call home. Set during the Depression, it’s also an extended riff on Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels. In that film, socially conscious filmmaker John Sullivan (think Frank Capra, but with less wit) wants to make a politically relevant movie about the working class. Never mind that he doesn’t know, or even want to know, anyone who’s actually poor. His film is entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Sturges spends the next 90 minutes poking fun at the distance between Sullivan’s film and poverty as it’s actually lived. The Coens, by consciously stealing that title and setting their film in the same era as Sturges’s classic, one-up Sullivan by creating a farce with flat characters that’s nevertheless truer to human experience than anything Sullivan could have created. In fact, in some ways, I think the Coens’s masterpiece is precisely the crackpot comedy Sullivan might have made after his comeuppance and revitalization via a Disney cartoon at the end. O Brother, Where Art Thou? has the anarchic, anything-goes spirit and aesthetic daring of a great 1940s cartoon but, unlike Sturges, the Coens are submersed in history all the same and address the ugly racial and class politics that Sturges elides and in fact lampoons in his Sullivan caricature. O Brother updates Sullivan’s Travels while also mimicking it. It’s not the first time they’ve flirted with Sturges—see the great, horribly underrated Hudsucker Proxy—but O Brother is the most potent, direct distillation of their love affair/argument with the great 1940s filmmaker.

33) It’s a Gift or Horsefeathers?
This is a little confusing. There are silent slapstick shorts (say that three times fast) by both of these titles, made, respectively, in 1923 and 1928. I suspect that Dennis means the 1934 version of It’s a Gift, starring W.C. Fields, and the 1932 version of Horse Feathers (note the difference in title), starring my beloved Marx Brothers. These two are both features, and the connection is that they’re both directed by Norman MacLeod, which is why I think Dennis links these two and not the two otherwise unrelated shorts. So, if we’re comparing the features, Horse Feathers wins in a walk, because the idea of Groucho Marx as president of a university is the most inspired idea for a slapstick comedy ever, and it’s one of the few Marx Brothers in which Zeppo is a) present, and b) funny.

34) Your best story about seeing a movie at a drive-in
Shamefully, I’ve never seen a movie in a drive-in. The venues were already in sharp decline by the time I was born in 1976, but there are apparently two active in Mississippi, in Iuka and Pontotoc, and it would be worth a road trip or two.

35) Victor Mature or Tyrone Power?
Power.

36) What does film criticism mean to you? Where do you think it’s headed?
At its best, film criticism offers an exchange of ideas about art, and how art reflects human experience and longings, and provides an opportunity for me to crystallize thinking about both. In the past, the exchange has been mostly one-sided—the critic writes, I read and reflect, and that’s that. With the spreading influence of blogs, the back-and-forth exchange has become more immediate and conversational; fact-checking and corrections occur in real-time; writers actually see how their readers respond to their work. I’ve said before that the collective blogs like The House Next Door—where multiple writers are corralled together under the influence of an overriding editor—are where online criticism is headed, simply because it’s a model that allows room for a lot of writing styles and genres to be discussed under a single rubric. (It’s also the format closest to print journalism, which is something the Web 2.0 embracers should keep in mind in case they get too smug.) The biggest issue that’s always faced film criticism is that criticism is writing, which means that it’s at least one step removed from the medium it’s discussing. Online, however, that gap can be bridged to some degree, because an online essay can include screen grabs, sound files, and movie clips in a way that’s not available to print. Three recent articles—one on Spielberg’s editing style, one an elaborate defense of Tony Scott’s filmmaking, one on Jia Zhangke’s compositions and editing in Platform—use screen grabs not as mere eye candy but as contextual illustrations that bolster their points. I hope that, as early cinema’s works fall increasingly under public domain, we see more essays illuminated by extensive clips as well as stills.

Summer schedule

This summer, posting will be slight here at Quiet Bubble. A lot of things have happened recently in my world—almost all of which are fantastic, by the way—that necessitates a downturn in the blog’s production.

What this means for you, all three dozen of my faithful readers, is that the posting schedule will be limited to Mondays and Fridays from here until the end of September 2008. Given my tendency towards procrastination, let’s be realistic—the Quiet Bubble blog is now on a once-a-week schedule (every Monday), with blips to come on occasional Fridays. The monthly “Out and About” clearinghouse of links will continue unabated, and the “Quick Hits” feature will be reinstated.

So, if you’re new here, this summer will be a great time for you to lather on the sunblock, crank up the laptop, and discover what you’ve been missing by reading the archives. There’s over three years of stuff to read. To guide your hand, I’ve updated my “Greatest Hits,” to give you a sense of what I consider to be the best published at this site. If that’s not enough, the fine folks in the blogroll to the left have plenty of content to tide you over.

Enjoy the hot months, and stay tuned.