Quiet Bubble

Out and about

Department of What Should’ve Been, Part #22,957: A test film for an anime adaptation of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo strip, directed by Whisper of the Heart’s Yoshifumi Kondo. Kondo’s one and only feature, written by Hayao Miyazaki, is among my favorite Studio Ghibli films. Kondo’s wry, subtle sensibility and concentration on the slow, domestic and quotidian had more in common with Ghibli’s other master Isao Takahata than with Miyazaki, but this two-minute clip shows off his skill with the fanciful as well. He was being groomed as the next great lead director in Ghibli’s stable when he died of an aneurysm at age 47. I guess we’ll have to make do with the strips themselves.

Speaking of all-ages comics and illustrated books, editor extraordinaire Francoise Mouly is on the move. The RAW co-founder and New Yorker art director has created Toon Books, a new line devoted to children’s comics. Over at Panels & Pixels, Chris Mautner has a loooooong interview with Mouly about the new venture. (On a related note, Jeet Heer argues convincingly that Mouly’s design and editorial influence have been seminal to the development of comics.)

It looks like Outer Life is back to posting on a semi-regular basis. Here’s two new essays on life in suburbia: “Ear Candy” and “To Serve and Deflect.” Go read them.

The filthiest advice columnist you can imagine writes a sweet, foulmouthed ode to his recently departed mother. It’s rare that Dan Savage can force a lump in my throat but he’s had a rough week.

Sunset Gun pays tribute to the recently departed Richard Widmark by reposting her review of Don’t Bother to Knock, starring Widmark and a young Marilyn Monroe. The Siren gets into obit mode, too, with thoughtful reflections on Jules Dassin and Charlton Heston.

Five Branch Tree surprises himself by liking a work of art by Damien Hirst.

Girish asks the pertinent question: why blog? His emphasis on the intertwining of teaching and learning is terrific, as is—always true for his blog; how does he do it?—the comments section.

That is all.

Out and about (March 2008)

From here on out, if you see a random splash of art used as graphic design on this site, you’ve got a 85% chance of knowing exactly where it came from: matchbox labels from around the world. Most of these are Eastern European, Cold War era. I can’t decide if I should be alarmed that the U.S.S.R. used even matchbox covers as propaganda or impressed that it did it so effectively. In any case, here are over 600 masterpieces of modernist design, inch by little inch. (If there are similar collections from Africa or from India, you folks will let me know immediately, right? Right?!)

Nicholson Baker has also packed a lot into small spaces himself—hell, he even wrote a novella called A Box of Matches. (Check out the paperback’s cover to see a perfect fusion of subject and form.) As he’s gotten older, his books have gotten larger and more unwieldy—his new Human Smoke sounds like it’s taken on five subjects too many—and here he traces the development of ultimate informational sprawl: Wikipedia. With his love of obsessive attention to minute details and his zeal about libraries and archival preservation, Baker’s found his perfect subject:

But the sources and the altruism don’t fully explain why Wikipedia became such a boom town. The real reason it grew so fast was noticed by co-founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales in its first year of life. “The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive,” Wales wrote. Addictive, yes. All big Internet successes—e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component—they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you're trying to sleep.

Brion Vibber, who was for a while Wikipedia’s only full-time employee, explained the attraction of the encyclopedia at a talk he gave to Google employees in 2006. For researchers it’s a place to look stuff up, Vibber said, but for editors “it’s almost more like an online game, in that it’s a community where you hang out a bit, and do something that’s a little bit of fun: you whack some trolls, you build some material, etcetera.” Whacking trolls is, for some Wikipedia editors, a big part of why they keep coming back.

In examining the latest round of memoir scandals, Daniel Mendelsohn takes a somewhat less sanguine view of the Internet’s reliability as a fountain of truth:

Think of the Internet: an unimaginably powerful tool for education but also a Wild West of random self-expression in which anyone can say anything about anything (or anyone) and have it “published,” and which has already made problematic the line between truth and falsehood, expert and amateur opinion, authentic and inauthentic identities, reality and fantasy.

That pervasive blurriness, the casualness about reality that results when you can turn off entire worlds simply by unsubscribing, changing a screen name, or closing your laptop, is what ups the cultural ante just now. It’s not that frauds haven’t been perpetrated before; what’s worrisome is that, maybe for the first time, the question people are raising isn’t whether the amazing story is true, but whether it matters if it’s true. Perhaps the most dismaying response to the James Frey scandal was the feeling on the part of many readers that, true or false, his book had given them the feel-good, “redemptive” experience they’d hoped for when they bought his novel—er, memoir.

Then again, that pesky World Wide Web can be a boon to real journalists. The mighty Nancy Nall explains how she caught a plagiarist by doing some basic followup—you know, what journalists are supposed to do as a matter of course.

Another journalist trying to speak truth to power is the obscure Bob Herbert. Bob who? Don’t feel bad—I hadn’t heard of him, either, which is more surprising given that he’s a weekly columnist for one of the most widely read editorial pages in the world. How can a regular columnist for the New York Times be essentially unknown to the media sphere and readers? T.A. Frank asks that question because, apparently, Bob Herbert has done it. Frank's article is a good mix of profile, media studies, and deep thinking about how and why we read the news. Plus, it turns out that Herbert is worth reading. (Go here for an archive of his columns, and then complain that I’m a liberal softy. Fine—it’s true.)

The Self-Styled Siren writes a looooong analysis of William Wyler’s The Letter, starring Bette Davis. I admit that I admire Davis’s resolve more than her acting, and that I’ve never quite understood the sexual aura she supposedly radiates, but this is a fine appreciation. (Be warned: It contains spoilers galore, so you might not want to read it if you haven’t seen the movie.) In the law of (relative) simultaneity, Terry Teachout gives a long, process-oriented update on the opera he’s writing with composer Paul Moravec—a musical adaptation of The Letter. Both film and opera are based on a 1924 Somerset Maugham short story, which was turned into a play three years later, and then a movie two years after that. (And then a movie again—it’s the 1940 film, not the 1929 one, that’s under discussion by the Siren.) That little piece of prose has gone through a lot of versions; I wonder why it’s so supple.

“Supple but sharp” is an apt description of Sarah Kerr’s criticism, which I’ve been missing since she left Vogue a few years ago, and I lost track of her. Slate urges her out into the light to review Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, a movie book that’s immediately going on my wish list.

“Sharp and sassy” fits His Girl Friday to a T, along with “pee-your-pants funny.” Still, it’s worth wondering how it became regarded as a classic American movie? It deserves its reputation, but it flopped at the box office, and even when Howard Hawks’s career was re-assessed a couple of decades later, HGF wasn’t among the works initially thought of as masterpieces. David Bordwell is on the case, with one of the strongest pieces of film criticism and analyses of cinema history—from production to promotion to entrenchment in the academy—that you’ll read in the blogosphere.

Bordwell’s colleague Kristin Thompson pays tribute to Warner Brothers animator Bob Clampett. It’s a close reading with lots of still animation cels to make her argument about the weirdness of Clampett’s vision of Bugs, Daffy, and the rest of the gang.

Anyone interested in African Americans in cinema—in front of and behind the camera—should catch Odienator’s monthly series on Black History Month. They’re spirited, foul-mouthed, funny, sometimes scatterbrained, but always entertaining and provocative. Here are links to every post in the “Black History Mumf” series.

Michael S. Smith writes thoughtfully on Miles Davis’s seminal and still-controversial Bitches Brew, which popularized the jazz fusion movement. A characteristic passage:

Occasionally, I read or hear critics state that Miles' late-60s albums, including Miles in the Sky, Filles de Kilimanjaro, and In a Silent Way, are more transitional than complete. But in most cases art seems transitional only in retrospect. Bitches Brew might represent a point on a long, arching trajectory from the acoustic Miles of previous years to the later electric Miles, the one who played over heavy back-beats with his trumpet siphoned through a wah-wah pedal. Yet Bitches Brew is nevertheless a destination, a work that had its own present. Those who, in 1969, stared, wide-eyed, at Mati Klarwein's surrealistic cover while listening to Miles and his crew drift loudly and energetically through modes and wildly loose structures were not aware of what Miles would do in the future because the future had not happened yet. Bitches Brew, for them, was the immediate, revolutionary present: cacophonous, free, entirely cauterizing. I suspect that, for Miles, it was too; in light of his development in the mid to late 1960s, this was perhaps the natural place to stop and explore, not only as part of a larger ensemble, but also as a soloist.

Finally, Armond White loves Bruce Springsteen’s Magic much more than I did, but we’re both black men looking with love at a white musician’s attempts to capture us all in our humanity. I still think White’s writing about the album I wish Springsteen had made rather than the record he actually did make, but it’s a brilliant essay all the same:

The basis for all this in Magic is Springsteen’s regard for humanity—the sense of respect, value, love that is found in the way individuals treat each other. The amazing open-heartedness of the songs’ many characterizations comes down to Springsteen digging the depth and weight of their beings—their souls. These characters are from the same world as Born to Run, but worn ragged by 9/11, the Iraq War and by life as mankind has always endured it. Young Springsteen’s beautiful pop-records-based mythology has given way to something more mature, just as these world-weary people (veterans, waitresses, bikers, tired parents, doubt-filled spouses and frustrated lovers) reach for something deeper than romanticism. The only way he can account for their struggles is through religious analogy—the best source we in the West have for measuring qualities of soul.

That is all.

Out and about (February 2008)

The pace has slowed around here, but I’m getting back up to speed. Memo to self: never volunteer again to work on a film festival; I’ll forget this advice by the time next year rolls around. (But please come.) Also, the black dog bit me again—it was a brief chew, and I managed to wriggle away without too much loss of blood, but it was enough to derail me from posting more than once a week.

With that being said, I think this wordless comic about depression is a good place to start this month’s edition. Wonderful and oddly uplifting.

When you’re spending a lot of time alone, the home video game system can be both a savior and a curse. Todd Levin writes thoughtfully on his experiences with the Nintendo Entertainment System and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, which mirror my own joyful memories of gaming. (Incidentally, here are a few independent games for the computer that are worth checking out: Mr. Robot, Aquaria, and Cave Story.)

Branching outward, Bookslut conducts a thorough interview with Mississippi poet Natasha Trethewey. (Did you know she was head cheerleader while attending University of Georgia? Apparently true.) Her most recent book, Native Guard, is worth seeking out. A taste of the interview:

Down here I drive around all the time with this sense of exile because everything is named for Confederate heroes; you’d think the South won the war. During the flag controversy [a movement in Georgia and elsewhere to ban the Confederate flag from government buildings], there was a letter to the editor saying all true Southerners love that flag. It was his way of saying all true Southerners are white Southerners. It was important for me to say: This is my South; I love it and I hate it, too, but it’s mine.

In the Department of Much More Interesting than You’d Assume, Wired offers a grounded, terrific capsule history of East Germany’s Secret Police. As you can imagine, there’s lots of cogent thoughts on security, surveillance, and political issues worth considering, even here.

Careful QB readers know of my undying love for the comics of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. Fantagraphics Books, publisher of their Love & Rockets, unearths a loooooooong 1988 interview with the brothers as a celebration of the company’s redesigned site. How long? 116 freakin’ pages long. Get the PDF here, and find a quiet afternoon to read it in full.

That is all.

Out and about (Christmas edition)

With the exception of Friday’s “Looks of Love,” this will probably be the last Quiet Bubble posting until January 2008. There’s lots to read below, and to your left. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all the rest. Thanks for reading.

Jazz, perhaps more than any other musical genre, has been shaped by its critics. Audiences, concerts, reputations, and even recordings have been influenced deeply by such writers as Whitney Balliett, Nat Hentoff, Ralph Ellison, and Stanley Crouch. It’s understandable that there’s a continual push-and-pull dynamic between the musicians and the writers, but few historians have taken the time to explore this relationship in full. John Gennari, whose book Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics tries to do just that, giving a history of jazz criticism and its influence on the music. Over at Jerry Jazz Musician, there’s a long, fascinating interview with Gennari. A taste:

Since one of the jobs of a critic is to mediate between the bandstand and the audience, and because musicians’ interactions on the bandstand are so personal and “inside,” they can feel resentment toward anyone trying to speak for them outside of that insider's realm.

Another role for the jazz critic is to spread the news of this great American art form that has not received the acknowledgement it should and may otherwise slip into obscurity. I believe the musician understands that role. So, while they want to hold on to their insider, almost hermitically-sealed realm of creativity, they realize that if they are ever going to be known or understood, they need critics to spread their message.

Bruce Springsteen’s career, particularly in the 1970s, was shaped by critics calling him the “future of rock and roll.” He was too interested in looking to the past—and to siphoning styles and concerns from older, black pop—for the phrase to truly stick, and audiences were far ahead of writers in noting the supernovas of his live shows. Still, criticism certainly helped establish his reputation, and he continues to have hosannas flung upon him by boomers and the indie crowd alike. Consider this concert review another log on the fire, but it gets at what makes the Jersey man worthwhile even now:

But for the most part, there’s more darkness on the edge of the Magic show than any tour before it. In the context of such alienation—especially in the D.C. setting, which Springsteen acknowledged with the hot-cha zinger, “I’m so glad to be in your wicked, I mean beautiful, city tonight!”—“No Surrender” became a fierce challenge (the “wide open country in our eyes” seemed a lot more distant). “Reason To Believe”, meanwhile, was rebuilt as a dust-spitting Western rocker in the vein of “La Grange” and “Radio Nowhere”. The tune opened with a war cry ("Is there anybody alive out there?”, which Bruce has been stage-pattering since the ‘70s) that was part call to arms, part indictment—a line that can kick off a big rock show while slyly wondering what, exactly, in the hell have we let happen around here.

If jazz and rock has had a tense relationship with critics, though, that’s nothing compared to the media’s conversation with hip-hop. Hell, at least there are jazz studies departments at universities now. Hip-hop is unquestionably more popular and more influential to the culture at-large, but there’s basically no academic component worth noting (Mark Anthony Neal is a significant exception.), and the media outlets devoted to the genre—XXL, The Source, and Vibe—often seem more like fanzines than serious periodicals on hip-hop. One of the most contentious debates in the rap community concerns the place of white folks within it: Can authentic hip-hop be created by whites? Is hip-hop even still a black form, seeing as its most popular subgenres (as well as its most self-consciously “underground”) are consumed primarily by whites? What happens to hip-hop production, lyrics, and themes when white boys (and a few girls—hello, Northern State!) enter the fray? I think the Beastie Boys, Eminem, Beck, 3rd Bass, Peanut Butter Wolf, El-P, RJD2, and especially DJ Shadow have answered the first question in the affirmative, but the rest still float out there, making us black folks a little uncomfortable. (I resented the Beasties for a decade—until I finally heard Paul’s Boutique—because their Licensed to Ill felt like a thinner version of a Run DMC, but sold three times as well. My experience isn’t uncommon.)

So, when a friend sent me a link to her boyfriend’s new label, Beats Broke, I wanted to beg off writing about it. But the label ups the ante. Beats Broke focuses on rap from the Netherlands, especially Utrecht. I wouldn’t have thought Utrecht would be a site of beats-bonanza, but groups like Illicit and Pax & Pry, and producers Inf and Arts the Beatdoctor prove me wrong. Yes, white folks dominate the label and set the terms—the lone American rapper there is named after the quintessential Wes Anderson character, which pretty much defines arch-whiteness. (But he’s good, like an even-more-adenoidal, and less grating, Eminem.) The label’s music tends toward live instrumentation, particularly keyboard washes and good guitar, and the short-and-sweet aesthetic of Stones Throw. (Not many songs cross the four-minute mark.) For starters, try Kapabel and Inf’s EP (especially “Beter Wel,” which I think is a Dutch-language cover and reinvention of Ghostface Killah’s “Shakey Dog”) and Pax & Pry’s album; both are downloadable for free. Beats Broke is worth checking out.

Julie Doucet left comics a decade ago, but we still can’t get over it. She talks with The Walrus here about her current art projects, and even offers a rare comic strip.

I’ve said unkind things about Sheila Heti’s writing in the past, but she conducts a good, sometimes combative interview with art critic Dave Hickey.

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have a long, long conversation about the merits and (mostly) demerits of Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture Beowulf, and what it means for film and video culture and technology. (Animation historian Michael Barrier hated it, by the way, and this even after being a champion of Zemeckis’s The Polar Express.)

For filmic praise, please read Roger Ebert’s beautiful, inspiring letter to Werner Herzog. In the middle of it, there’s this paragraph:

You often say this modern world is starving for images. That the media pound the same paltry ideas into our heads time and again, and that we need to see around the edges or over the top. When you open Encounters at the End of the World by following a marine biologist under the ice floes of the South Pole, and listening to the alien sounds of the creatures who thrive there, you show me a place on my planet I did not know about, and I am richer. You are the most curious of men. You are like the storytellers of old, returning from far lands with spellbinding tales.

That seems like a good toast to what artists can do for us, and a good way to end this post. See you in January.

Out and about (November 2007)

Sorry about the dearth of material here lately. I’ve been car shopping, and getting my heart and mind out from under black waters. I’m still waist-deep but no longer submerged. All the same, let me direct your attention elsewhere for the time being.

The Self-Styled Siren pays tribute—two times—to Joan Fontaine.

James Wolcott pays tribute to another actress, Isabelle Huppert.

And now for a lesser, ahem, thespian. I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed this hard at a celebrity profile, but Jean-Claude Van Damme deserves every jibe:

Jean-Claude’s other limitation, however, has turned out to be impossible to overcome: He can’t act. If that sounds judgmental, then I suggest you watch Universal Soldier, a movie in which both he and Dolph Lundgren play cybernetically enhanced, reanimated corpses. You’d think this was the perfect showcase for Jean-Claude Van Damme, but watching him pit his acting ability against Lundgren’s is like watching one of Jerry’s Kids get in the ring with Mike Tyson. Even as a zombified killing machine, Jean-Claude is clearly out of his depth.

But he’s managed to do a lot with a little. Jean-Claude has three expressions: worried, charming, and doing a split. Of the three, doing a split is the most convincing. Getting crucified in Cyborg? Worried. Disposing of a bomb that could blow up a sacred Muslim shrine and start a jihad in The Order? Really worried. Meeting a spunky lady reporter in any number of movies? Charming. Confronting the hitmen who killed his wife? Do a split.

For a lot of actors, not being able to act would be an obstacle, but Jean-Claude has transformed it into his trademark. Acting? Acting is for weirdos like Forest Whitaker (Bloodsport), Kylie Minogue (Street Fighter), or Kieran Culkin (Nowhere to Run). Jean-Claude is just a normal, average guy, you know? When he fights, he likes to head-butt his opponents and kick them in the nuts, the way normal people fight. His love interests don’t look like supermodels or even actresses, they look like the gals you see at commuter bars packing away Bloody Marys and waiting for the 6:45 to Hackensack. In Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, USA Today is the paper of record and foreign countries are where the police are corrupt and you get hassled by immigration. He may be from Belgium, but in his movies, he’s an All-American Guy.

Moving from Belgium to France proper, Girish writes thoughtfully and intricately on screenwriting and the French New Wave. As always, the comments are as lively as the piece itself.

Wes Anderson, a filmmaker whose aesthetic is heavily influenced by the French New Wave (among other things) gets much-deserved love from Walter Chaw. A revealing, moving take from his review of The Darjeeling Limited:

Anderson has up until now touched on spirituality only obliquely. Here, his disconnected players stop to pray at every altar passed along the way; the loss of a father initiates/necessitates this desperate casting-about for another. Towards the end, there’s a flashback bookended with matching shots that laid me to waste, and in watching the picture a second time, I was stunned by how controlled and economical Anderson is with his images. The film isn’t about the desire to be found, as lesser films might have it—rather, it’s about growing comfortable with being lost. In its way, The Darjeeling Limited is all that needs be said about post-modernism: with the search for God finished, move into an acceptance of aloneness. A character at one point says, “We lost him, and we’re never going to be okay, but it’s the past now—and the past is over. Isn’t it?” There’s an understanding that life is Renoir’s Indian river: it’s never the same twice, and it’s always the same. Anderson handles the shift from deadpan comedy to formalist pathos better than he ever has in the past—The Darjeeling Limited resembles a Takeshi Kitano masterpiece: instantly recognizable, intricate and artificial, and overwhelmingly human. It’s a stunning companion piece to The Royal Tenenbaums (I imagined, more than once, that this is the procession and eulogy for that picture’s patriarch), a distillation of Anderson’s surprising sobriety. If you hear the music, you’ll recognize that beneath Anderson’s hipster veneer is the low keen of loss and wounds that never close.

That might be the best paragraph I’ve read on Anderson.

The last film-related link of this edition, I swear, but Matthew Dessem deserves more attention that I think he’s getting. He’s working his way through every film that the Criterion Collection has released, and offers up interesting, difficult-to-find factoids. Here, he writes on the W.C. Fields classic The Bank Dick.

Apparently, Bill Watterson was a great craftsman well before Calvin & Hobbes. Here’s a collection of cartoons and comics from the genius’s college days. There’s oodles of rare stuff here.

Rockslinga writes a tribute poem to Edward Said.

Mississippi poet and recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey writes a beautiful, complicated poem about her home state. (Thanks to Chicken Spaghetti for the heads-up.)

Signs above Zack Oberman’s Halloween candy, 1996-2006: hilarious.

One small item that helped get me out of the doldrums was receiving a kind, completely out-of-the-blue letter from Daniel Mendelsohn. As I’ve said on more than one occasion, he might be the best critic in America, so I’m pleased to spread the word that, according to him, next year will see the release of his first collection of criticism. As a further boon to the world, here he is on the Met’s new production of Lucia di Lammermoor. I can’t think of better proof of his prose than the fact that, while my interest in Italian opera is limited to say the least (shame on me), I read this straight through, utterly absorbed. Go read it.

Why has it taken me so long to find Luc Sante’s rave of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day? The longstanding assessment is that it’s too long, it’s got many characters, and has too many longeurs. Sante says no to all that. This comes from the essay’s closing, but it’s too good to resist quoting:

Pynchon thinks on a different scale from most novelists, to the point where you’d almost want to find another word for the sort of thing he does, since his books differ from most other novels the way a novel differs from a short story, in exponential rather than simply linear fashion. Pynchon’s work has absorbed modernism and what has come after, but in its alternating cycles of jokes and doom, learning and carnality, slapstick and arcana, direct speech and poetic allusiveness, high language and low, it taps into something that goes back to the Elizabethans, who potentially addressed the entire world, made up of individuals with differing interests and capacities. He also thinks big because he is extremely American (like many of his fellow citizens, he is never so American as when traveling abroad). In this way he is reminiscent of the “millionaire ascetic” in Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” who “declared that in America it was absurd to invent a country, and proposed the invention of a whole planet.” Here, in Against the Day, by his own admission, he has made what “with a minor adjustment or two [is] what the world might be.”

Which is not what the world ought to be, mind you. Thinking big is not necessarily megalomania, and fiction-writing is not exactly voodoo. Against the Day is a flawed time machine, trying without much luck to find a version of history where iniquity failed to triumph, but in the process coming up with many reasons why it should continue to be resisted.

That is all.

Out and about (Autumn edition)

The first fall snap of the season arrived last night. I was chilly enough on the balcony that the cat’s leap into my lap was welcome warmth. The colors haven’t started turning, in part because Mississippi isn’t a place that customarily gets the rich reds, golds, and oranges of northern areas. (Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to Frank King’s annual autumn Gasoline Alley strips—I’m longing for what I’ve never quite experienced.) If you’re north or west of me, perhaps you too are heading inside to the fireplace or the comfy, battered chair. Here’s some reading material to take with you.

The Onion’s A.V. Club completes its official Wes Anderson week with a too-brief but detailed interview with the filmmaker. Earlier, the site posted columns on “16 Movies Without Which Wes Anderson Couldn’t Have Happened” and “10 Movies That Couldn’t Have Happened Without Wes Anderson.” I know it’s du jour to denounce the director of Rushmore and the new Darjeeling Limited, but I’m not jumping on that bandwagon. (The primary meme is that he’s too hip for his own good, but the hippest, easiest, most reflexive act going now in film criticism is to, alas, denounce Anderson for being hip. And ’round and ’round we go.) Besides, like me, he’s a Texas boy from way back, and the closest thing to an American auteur we’ve got from the under-40 set. Anyway, a taste:

People seem to think that my movies are so carefully coordinated and arranged—and in a lot of ways, they are—but every single time I make a movie, I feel that every director makes these choices. You make choices about your script, you make choices about your actors, and how you’re going to stage it, and how you’re going to shoot it, and what the costumes are going to be like, and in every single detail, you make that decision. And for me, what ends up happening is, I wind up surprised at the combination of all these ingredients. It never is anything like what I expected. That was certainly the case with this movie. In the end, it doesn’t resemble anything like what I had in my mind. And yet, piece by piece, they were all things we chose together along the way.

One of Anderson’s fascinations is with old-school rock and roll. Using the Rolling Stones as his primary example, Jon Zobenica takes the piss out of people who romanticize rock ideals, and the idea of rock as purely revolutionary force, and other stuff along with it. Passages like this are worth considering, and arguing with:

To be fair, however, the Rolling Stones, a few clever lyrics aside, never put much stock in revolution, the youth movement, or the counterculture in general. They never hoped to die before they got old, never argued that all you needed was love, never warned against trusting the over-30 set. Pressured to make some declaration of solidarity with the growing protest movement, Jagger would simply say, “We admire your involvement, but we’re primarily, um, musicians.” A drug-addled Keith Richards, the seeming poster boy for anti-establishment living, echoed the sentiment in a 1971 Rolling Stone magazine interview (reproduced in The Rolling Stone Interviews: 1967–1980): “So ridiculous, cats asking what to do about the Vietnam War. ‘What are you asking me? You’ve got your people to get that one together.’” And yet fans insisted that any group of libertines who flouted authority with such aplomb, who sang songs like “Sympathy for the Devil,” who courted mayhem at their concerts, had to be revolutionaries at heart, if only sly ones. Hence the acute dismay over the corporate-sponsored antiques road show the group has become.

Speaking of puncturing sacred cows, this review actually makes me want to read a book of pop sociology, and that’s a very hard thing to do. Deborah Cameron’s The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? sounds fascinating:

For Cameron, [the idea that women talk more about relationships and feelings, and men talk more in terms of facts and things] is simplistic eyewash, best countered with a few well-aimed stats. She cites the meta-analysis of Janet Hyde, a psychologist who has collated masses of research findings on male-female communications. Hyde’s number-crunching suggests that the difference in language use between men and women is statistically negligible. Women don’t interrupt more than men, nor are they more talkative or empathetic in conversation, less prone to assertive conversation, or any better or worse at verbal reasoning. The headline for Hyde’s discovery could read “Men and Women pretty similar, research finds.” And yet, Cameron muses, this isn’t a story any of us, male or female, much care to talk about.

To prove her point, she cites the slew of news reports last year claiming that women on average utter 20,000 words a day, while men on average manage only 7,000. This “fact,” from a popular science book called The Female Brain, turned out to be based not on research, but on a self-help book, which itself cited other self-help books, each featuring wildly varying figures. As Cameron concludes, “All the numbers were plucked from thin air. The claims were so variable because they were guesswork.” The invented figures were quietly deleted from reprints of the book—without headlines.

Back in early August, I went to New Orleans. On my first afternoon, I watched a scene being taped in front of St. Louis Cathedral that, upon asking other onlookers, I discovered was for Fox’s new TV drama K-Ville. The locals already had their misgivings. So far, only Sarah Hepola’s looooong interview with an actual, active New Orleans police officer has explored the discrepancies between reality and the show’s “reality” with any degree of depth. It’s an engaging, complicated look at how television messes with real life, both for good and ill. (And the cop gives a plug—a couple, actually—to The Wire for its accuracy and dramatic vision, so yay for him.)

Tingle Alley (sorry, she’ll never be just CAAF to me) spent last weekend bawling over Amy Bloom’s Away, a novel about which I’ve heard nothing about wonderful things. She asks what books have moved you to tears. The last time I cried while reading a book, it was for Vikram Seth’s gargantuan, brilliant A Suitable Boy, which it’s high time I started again. I’m coming close, though, the book I’m reading: Lawrence Weschler’s A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers, which is just as harrowing as it sounds, and all true to boot. What about you?

The House Next Door is currently hosting a Close-Up Blog-a-thon. Go, read.

It’s not just me, kiddos: Lots of folks have been posting their thoughts about the recently concluded Toronto International Film Festival. Girish, Where the Stress Falls, Long Pauses, J. Robert, and others have all been essential reading about this year’s exciting and involving crop of festival movies. Scroll down through each blog’s most recent entries, and you’ll find oodles of worthwhile, quality writing. Girish’s entries, in particular, have generated lively discussion in the comments section.

Christopher Hitchens and I disagree about our occupation of Iraq—not that he cares what I think—but at least the man’s willing to look its consequences in the face. This lovely, heartbreaking piece concerns a man who went to fight in Iraq, in part because of columns Hitch wrote, and died. It’s one of the best magazine pieces I’ve read this year.

That is all.

Out and about

I’m still on a more-or-less hiatus until mid-September, but that just means I’m not writing much; I’m reading plenty, though, and here’s a sampling of the best:

Mark Sarvas makes me want to read David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk. A key graf:

In his 2005 biography of Alan Turing, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, Leavitt first displayed his skill at taking complex mathematical concepts and making them accessible to lay readers. Here he goes a step beyond, making them not merely accessible but integrating them into his novel so that they not only do not hinder the narrative, they resonate emotionally as well as intellectually. Readers of The Indian Clerk will learn a good deal about prime number theory but the book never feels like a math class and, in fact, the metaphor of the prime—a number divisible only by one and itself—is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. From the damp residences of Cambridge to the busy streets of London to the humid swelter of Madras, Leavitt has expertly weaved real events and real places with his formidable cast of real and imagined characters. His control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive—astonishing, at times—and yet despite its scope, Leavitt keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn’t resemble most so-called “historical fiction.” Rather, it’s an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self—and how frequently the two are intertwined—that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes.

Robert Christgau rocks out to M.I.A.’s brand-new album, Kala:

Arular was about M.I.A.—her ambition, her education, her contradictions, her history of violence. Kala is about the brown-skinned Other now obsessing Euro-America—described from the outside by a brown-skinned sympathizer who’s an insider for as long as her visa holds up. It opens with the uninvitingly spare “Bamboo Banga,” which samples Indian Tamil filmi composer Ilayaraja and bends the lyric of Richman’s “Roadrunner” so it celebrates a kid running alongside a Third World tourist’s Hummer and banging on its door. “BirdFlu” disses dogging males everywhere—“selfish little roamers”—over another filmi sample and a barely synchronized four-four on some thirty deep-toned urmi drums. Also on “BirdFlu,” high kiddie/girlie interjections add a cuteness that’s sustained pitchwise on “Boyz,” with its video of synchronized Kingston rudies shaking their moneymakers for the Interscope dollar. Only with “Jimmy,” a Bollywood disco number a kiddie M.I.A. used to dance to for money at Sri Lankan parties, does a conventional song surface.

She’s the new face of pop and, despite that last line, Christgau seems to really dig this one. I dug Arular, and Kala’s got me as giddy with anticipation as the indie kids seemed to be over the Arcade Fire a few months ago. It’s a well-considered take from a long-time M.I.A. booster.

The old, brilliant though messed-up, face of pop is, of course, the King. Over at Television Without Pity, three folks—Matt Zoller Seitz, Steven Boone, and a woman known as Sars—watch an Elvis Presley concert documentary so you don’t have to. Maybe it’s the heat, but it’s been a long time since I’ve laughed this hard:

MZS: I love that Elvis loved the Beatles’ music as much as they loved his. That seems to be true at the uppermost levels of the arts—the big dogs respect each other, and it’s only the fans that sit around denigrating one to raise another.
Sars: Didn’t one of the Beatles get yelled at for smoking grass at Graceland one time? …“Grass,” listen to me. Hi, I’m 70 years old.
MZS: Yeah, but I would be surprised if the yeller was Elvis. And I believe the term you’re looking for is “wacky tobacky.”
Sars: He was really against street drugs. Elvis was a Cross Tops man.
MZS: Interesting. Only pharmaceuticals, then.
Steven Boone: His killers were pills and Colonel Sanders.

[…]

Steven Boone: Whether it’s drugs or genuine connection with the audience, I think he’s actually ON at this point.

Sars: I agree. It’s just hard to tell what he’s perceiving, if that makes sense. If there’s a there there.

Steven Boone: He’s actually participating in the drug counterculture unbeknownst to his fans.

MZS: I like his patter between verses of “Pork Salad Annie,” about the character being the sort of woman who’d carry a straight razor in her purse. …Oh, Elvis. No. Don’t pull a piece of paper with lyrics on it out of your pocket IN THE MIDDLE OF PERFORMING THE SONG.

Sars: ...Wow, that was unfortunate.

MZS: Elvis Aaron Presley, you break my heart.

Comics critic—and founder of Fantagraphics Books—Gary Groth interviews my favorite working cartoonist, Gilbert Hernandez. Here it is, in audio. I’ve expressed my love before for him, and I’m sure I’ll do it again once I read his new Chance in Hell. Here, in an 1989 recording, he talks about his schooling (hated it), Batman, the origins of his Heartbreak Soup stories, and watching foreign films late at night as a teenager. Good stuff.

Speaking of great cartooning, the Onion’s A.V. Club’s monthly comics round-up has become the go-to spot for informed, concise criticism on the form. Seriously, be on the lookout for this feature.

And, finally, the Self-Styled Siren takes on the prickly subject of making a film canon, and how (and why) filmmakers go in and out of vogue:

Other directors are also getting fewer awed reactions than in the past. When in her late teens the Siren started trying to watch movies in an intellectually engaged manner—reading up on history, seeking out serious critics, trying to mix as many highly regarded films into her viewing as possible—it was axiomatic that John Ford was a towering great. That was a while back, and Ford’s status has slipped for some; he even got a sideswipe in Rosenbaum’s piece. David Thomson and Richard Schickel, both veteran Ford haters, have a lot more company now.

On the other hand, back in the 1980s the Siren had a hard time getting a serious discussion of Billy Wilder going, unless she wanted to talk about his supposed misogyny. (She didn’t want to talk about that, because she doesn’t think he IS a misogynist, but that’s another post.) Reagan was in office and, not coincidentally in the Siren’s view, Frank Capra was fashionable. It was a go-go era, a time of vocal patriotism, even more so than now. Capra was better suited to it than Wilder, with his mordant view of what success means for Americans, and what we will do to achieve it. With the publication of Cameron Crowe’s book and the tributes after Wilder’s death in 2002, suddenly the Siren had no trouble finding Wilder admirers. He is better suited to the tenor of our own times than Capra—Ace in the Hole is a lot closer to the age of reality television than Meet John Doe—so it isn’t surprising that Wilder now is more in vogue.

That is all.

Out and about (July 2007)

Ezra Klein on Michael Moore’s Sicko and the relentless fact-checking that it’s undergoing by the mainstream media. Klein wonders, as I do, why a left-wing filmmaker comes under such careful scrutiny by the networks and cable news, but it’s left to the bloggers to uncover the nonsense spouted by some right-wing pundits (and/or presidential administrations). He hazards a guess:

Michael Moore elicits a very specific type of status anxiety in mainstream journalists. Moore’s product–passionate, provocative political commentary–is a close cousin of the media’s product–bloodless, boring political commentary. And Moore is a former journalist, an editor at papers in Flint, Michigan and Mother Jones. What he does is, broadly speaking, in the same realm as what they do. But there are differences between the product he puts out, and what the media offers. A major one is that Moore’s releases strike massive emotional chords with the American people, setting off weeks of heated discussion every time he unveils a film. Additionally, he is paid in the tens of million for the production of his documentaries and invited to Cannes when they’re released. Nice as the occasional invitation to the White House Correspondents Dinner may be, the two just don’t compare.

So there’s an acute desire on the part of the press to separate what Moore does from what they do, both in order to explain away his successes and to underscore their own assumed strengths (objectivity, rationality, etc). His failings may be manifold, but that hardly renders him unique. His treatment, however, is unique. The world is full of political provocateurs and public hotheads, but only Moore triggers the media’s all-too-absent obsession with factual accuracy. Ann Coulter doesn’t, and Al Franken doesn’t, and Rush Limbaugh doesn’t, and Mitt Romney doesn’t. Only Moore. Because he scares them.

A good interview with Don DeLillo.

Outer Life seems to be back to his semi-regular frequency. Here he is on Los Angeles; life, the universe, and everything; and a new system for electing presidents. Go read him.

The Cinetrix writes about Waitress, and raises some interesting questions about its setting.

Ryland Walker Knight sizes up a double bill of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and A Century and Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, and makes me badly want to see the former.

Michael S. Smith takes on the late-period movies of Yasuhiro Ozu, writing eloquently on Late Autumn and The End of Summer. A typically terrific paragraph from the latter essay:

Ozu’s seamless visual minimalism creates an appropriate, understated tapestry for his central concern. The End of Summer, as the title implies, is about the inevitability of change, the temptation to resist it, and the fading of tradition and the onset of modernity. Neon lights bring Osaka to life at night; the right angles of the city’s concrete and steel structures stand off against the curved rooftops of older Japanese temples; the imposing figures of American suitors, shot from shortly above floor level, block the doorways and crowd the halls of a traditional Japanese home; Akiko and Noriko feel bound by family strictures but desire futures of their own; a son doubts the need to merge the family business with another but also feels the pull of a new economy. And within this rubric of change, resistance, and the gradual dilapidation of traditions, another, equally vital contrast emerges between generations and between freedom and obligation. “I’m still considering whether or not I can maintain this life,” Akiko tells her sister, Noriko. Later, in one of Ozu’s beautifully static compositions, Akiko and Noriko kneel, realizing that the inherent sadness of change, and particularly of painful generational transition, can bring the unexpected, bittersweet beneficence of knowing where familial obligation ends and individual freedom begins.

Tingle Alley has stormed the barricades of Terry Teachout’s blog, offering book-reading suggestions and W. Somerset Maugham. She’s always worth reading.

The monthly comics roundup done by The Onion’s AV Club is quickly becoming essential reading for those of us who want quick, informed, intelligent criticism of new comics. This edition proves to be no exception, running the gamut from reviews of Douglas Wolk’s must-read collection of essays to John Porcellino’s collected mini-comics to the latest Superman/Spider-Man/Flash/whatever blockbuster boondoggles.

That is all.

Out and about (June 2007)

There’s all kinds of good stuff that’s been posted lately. There’s so much, in fact, that it’s tough to decide what my twelve faithful readers should seek out. Here’s this month’s attempt...

Because Hayao Miyazaki looms so large over the figure of Studio Ghibli, the studio's other great animator gets far less garlands than he deserves. If Miyazaki is the animation equivalent of Kurosawa (dazzling, furious action interwoven with moments of magical quietude, a graceful but continually moving "camera"), Isao Takahata is anime's Yasuhiro Ozu (silence, stillness, the quotidian being emphasized far more than the extraordinary). Noel Vera aims to fix this with an essay on Takahata's Only Yesterday.

Dennis Cozzalio likes horror and schlock cinema far more than I do, and is a superb writer on the subjects. (I don't mean to come off as a prude. After all, one of my favorite contemporary directors is the ever-so-polite-and-demure Takashi Miike.) Here, he opens up a forum for discussion on Eli Roth's Hostell II.

The Self-Styled Siren takes the bait with regard to Hostel II, but thankfully admits to some guilty pleasures of her own.

Wheeler Winston Dixon writes a long, deep-think essay about the future of cinema, the advent of digital video, the decline of celluloid, and how all of this changes how we'll make and see movies. It's among the most levelheaded pieces I've seen on the increasingly popular subject of discussion.

Completely safe for work, but still one of the sexiest photographs ever. God bless Weegee.

Speaking of good photographic art, Gorjus at PrettyFakes gets inspired by David Hockney.

Are you reading Nancy Nall? Well, why the hell not? Here she is on brides, writer Kem Nunn, and the end of The Sopranos. As with anything she writes, these posts cover a lot of territory beyond their ostensible lead subjects. My kind of writer.

The Shamus (formerly That Little Roundheaded Boy) muses on Whit Stillman's Metropolitan and makes me interested in revisiting Stillman's three movies.

Terry Teachout’s introduction to Elaine Dundy’s sexy, charming, and hilarious novel The Dud Avocado is available in its entirety at Maud Newton’s place. Read the intro, and then read the book.

The Undercover Black Man, who's quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers, uses a commemorative jazz CD as a springboard for slapping down how and why conservatives use the race card.

Let’s end this edition with a post about an ending: Scott McLemee writes a well-considered obituary of philosopher Richard Rorty.

That is all.

Out and about (May 2007)

My brother graduated from Hendrix College last weekend. I’m very proud of him, and blog concerns seemed small in comparison, hence the radio silence here at Quiet Bubble. Nevertheless, before I set off for the subtly ascendant hills and trees of Conway, Arkansas, I read some things online. They interested me; I hope they interest you, too. Here we go.

3 Quarks Daily defends Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a movie I admired more than liked, and compares Coppola’s work favorably with that of Wes Anderson. In particular, the blog argues that critics dismissed Marie because Coppola operates in a style—mannerism—that they don’t quite understand.

Two of my favorite cartoonists, leftist Peter Kuper and minicomics guru John Porcellino, are interviewed at length. The Kuper conversation is here; the Porcellino talk is here. Porcellino’s a man after my own heart:

Punk rock was the first thing I found in my life that made me feel acceptable. The thing that got me into punk rock was the idea, “You’re fine just the way you are.” It sounds kind of dorky, and the bands wouldn’t have put it like that, but you don’t have to make excuses for who you are or what you do. I was probably kind of a weirdo. I felt isolated, like, “Wow, there must be something terribly wrong with me.” When you find something like punk rock, not only is it okay to feel that way—you should embrace that. Embrace your weirdness. The world is totally messed up, and punk rock was a way to see that and work with it without candy-coating it or sweeping it under the rug. It was saying, “Yeah, the world is this way, but you can still do something about it. Take energy from that.”

Speaking of men after my own heart, the Millions discusses the merits of reading a book series rapidly, instead of reading each book in the series in a trickle, as new books appear… slowly. I’m rampaging through the Harry Potter books now (I’ve read 2000 pages of J.K. Rowling in a month), and know precisely what he’s getting at.

This one’s made the rounds, but Stephen Elliott decided to go offline for a month, and lives to tell the tale.

L’affaire Imus is, I hope, past us now. Alas, I read three takes—from the right, left, and center—that were worth my time.

And, finally, Scott McLemee offers the best appreciation of Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre, as opposed to his public persona, that I’ve read:

“I deal with sophomoric questions that full adults regard as settled,” he told an interviewer once.

He had, for example, a large capacity for facing brute contingency as part of human existence. A great deal of life is chance. (The fact that you were born, for example. Think how arbitrary that is.) And much of the rest of life consists of learning to evade that truth—walling it off, away from consciousness, because otherwise the reality of it would be too hard to fathom. Instead, we throw ourselves into fictions of power and belonging: nationalism, militarism, religion, the acquisition of cool stuff. These are ways to contain both the vulnerability before chance and the terrors of loneliness. In Vonnegut’s understanding of the world, loneliness is a fundamental part of human experience that became much, much worse in the United States, somehow, during the second half of the twentieth century—with no particular reason to think it will get better anytime soon.

As contributions to the cultural history of mankind, such thoughts are pretty small beer. On the other hand, just try to escape their implications. To call a point simple is the cheapest and least effective means of gainsaying it.

[...]

Vonnegut (who once called himself “a Christ-worshiping agnostic”) drew from the ground truth of existential terror a moral conclusion that it made sense to try to love your neighbor as yourself—or at least to treat other people with radical decency. This sounds simplistic until you actually try doing it.

That is all.