Quiet Bubble

Quick hits (March 2008)

In my rush to see 2007’s best movies in advance of the Oscars and my annual “favorite movies” posting, and since I’m on the screening committee of the local film festival, I’ve neglected other arts to a large degree. But the birds sing, the weather’s delightful, and I’ve gotten back to culture that exists beyond the flickering screen. February has been mostly about the rediscovery of walks, sunshine, and good books. That’s reflected in this edition—no movies, though I’ve seen plenty. Here we go.

Music for 18 Musicians (2007), composed by Steve Reich (1976), performed by Grand Valley State University’s New Music Ensemble: This demanding, repetitive piece somehow calms me. Its looping xylophones—though never looped electronically; this is live—create a fog that disguises the cello and vocal surges that emerge from the ether. Its basic rhythms are with us from the outset, and never falter for the piece’s full hour. In the hands of these students, though, Music for 18 Musicians never feels remotely static. The percussive layers—and every instrument, even the voices and horns, sounds like a drum somehow infused with melodic possibilities—are always moving in and out of the foreground. The sound surprises the ears constantly. Though the precision makes the execution initially feel mathematical, its root is emotionally affecting. It’s minimalist in rhythm, deeply textured in sonic layers, and thoroughly lacking in atonality and dissonance, so it’s accessibly avant-garde. Perhaps because I was reared on hip-hop and pop beats, the repetition is soothing to me rather than alarming. This isn’t to say it’s a mere balm. It soars, swoops through a melancholia wrought by those bowed cellos, and arrives at a well-earned and uplifting state of grace. A+

The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) by Brian Selznick: In Spring 1999, I took a college course on French cinema that, among other things, introduced me to Georges Méliès and René Clair. These early film geniuses brought a conscious aesthetic of contraption to filmmaking—Méliès is widely regarded as the inventor of special effects in cinema; Clair dazzlingly merged sound experiments with elaborate on-screen machinery. Whereas other directors tried to make their tricks look seamless, Clair and Méliès were interested in the audience seeing the process as much as the final product. Their movies look clunky and handmade, as if we’re watching cinema being created as it’s projected onscreen. We are—that, in large, is why I love the silent era so much. (Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement keep the spark alive.) I was so enraptured that, when I went to Paris the following May, I made a special point of visiting Père Lachaise, for the primary purpose of photographing Méliès’s grave. So, I’m a sucker for Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, as it tries for two things: 1) it fuses comics, prose, book illustration, and photography until it’s unclear what form the book ultimately takes; and 2) its central figure, though not quite its protagonist, is the elder Georges Méliès. Hugo Cabret, a young thief/inventor who lives in the Paris train stations, finds himself reluctantly working for a wind-up toy maker who caught him stealing. The boy makes for an endearing, effective hero, and his efforts help to rehabilitate the life and work of the toy maker (Méliès). Clockwork, finely tuned gears, and the magic of cinema are all involved. Over half the book consists of Selznick’s detailed, heavily hatchmarked Conté-pencil drawings. The drawings usually spread over both verso and recto pages, rectangular, and evoke nothing so much as black-and-white celluloid projected onto a silver screen. Long sections of text convey the psychological mindsets of the characters, but occasionally seem to run slipshod over what might have been better done as artwork. I can’t decide whether Selznick chose his form to break new ground or because he was too lazy to either draw it all or write it all. Because the drawings must be read sequentially in order for the book to make any sense, it’s close to comics. There are no pages of multiple panels, however, and the stretches of prose belie Hugo Cabret’s categorization as comics. But it fits uneasily in whatever category it’s placed in. Selznick’s a better artist than a writer—his characterization is somewhat thin, despite the book’s 530+ pages, and the story could have been told in half the book’s length. The story is arresting, though, and Hugo Cabret may be ushering in a new style of children’s book. We’ll see. B+

The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (2003) by Elinor Lipman: Alice Thrift, a young surgical resident, is so bereft of social graces that her mother thinks she has Asperger syndrome. The only way she knows that you don’t tell someone he’s in a terminal, non-operable stage of cancer by blurting out “You’ve go no chance. Are your affairs in order?” is because, well, she did that once. She’s decided sex isn’t worth it because she tried it, once, futilely, at age twenty, just “to see what the fuss was about.” If she has a sense of humor at all, it’s buried under a taciturn, overworked façade. So why do we love her and root for her? Elinor Lipman’s first feat is putting us directly in Alice’s head; the novel is told in first-person. We’re forced to empathize with Alice, as she’s our guide through her tortured life. Lipman’s brisk, acerbic sentences capture Alice’s pain but, at the same time, allow us to see (though Alice doesn’t) how self-involved and problematic she is. Alice is hilarious but rarely knows it. We can’t condescend to her Lipman’s second feat is to create other, equally rich characters for Alice to bounce off of. For instance, anyone but Alice can see that her fiancé is a shyster, but he’s endearing enough to teach the woman a lot of what she needs to know about life. Her true love’s paramour is snotty and self-righteous, until she turns out to be competent and thoughtful in her line of work. Alice’s friends and potential lovers feel as lived-in and dynamic as she does, even with less speaking lines and even though we’re seeing them through a limited perspective. Lipman’s hat trick is that she’s at once both wickedly sardonic and sexily enticing about love. (When Alice finally has an orgasm, our toes curl, even though it’s clearly with the wrong man.) Alice Thrift is romantic and hilarious, but it’s not a “romantic comedy” in the conventional Bridget Jones’s Diary sense, as Lipman’s as interested in Alice’s emotional development as she is in her love life. The novel moves convincingly from hospital to bedroom to first-date restaurant to awkward dinner party, because it’s ultimately a book about social relationships and mores. The Beatles sang “all you need is love,” but Lipman shows that you need a lot more than that to get through life. (Hat tip to Sheila, who recommended this one.) A

Euphonic Sounds (1998) by Reginald R. Robinson: Chicago pianist/composer Reginald R. Robinson has spent the last two decades trying to convince the world that ragtime remains a vital musical genre. He joins Dutch pianist Guido Nielsen and the Rag-Time Ephemeralist folks on this lonesome crusade. While not as technically precise as Nielsen, Robinson’s a strong, swinging pianist, and his original compositions, such as the tango-inflected “Sweet Envy” and the soulful “Incognito” (in which Sondra Davis sings), are jaunty. The solo piano is straightforward—if you’ve seen a Western with a scene set in a saloon, you’ve heard ragtime—and the production is clean and ringing. The mix of songs—Robinson’s seven originals, plus tunes by Scott Joplin, James Scott, and others—are delightful, but I’m not sure this work introduces anything new to the genre. Robinson keeps the flame alive, but Euphonic Sounds serves more of an archival function than an aesthetic one. B

The Invisibles (1994-2000), written & created by Grant Morrison, drawn by various artists: British mainstream-comics writers that emerged from the late 1970s and 1980s—Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Bryan Talbot (who also draws)—are all pop maximalists. They cobble together various strands of pulp fiction, superhero comics, sci-fi, and British and American history to form their own mythological cosmos. Usually, but not always, these pop-culture myths are half-satirical and half-reverential. Their comics feature lots of characters and overlapping narratives, often confusing and always convoluted systems of government, constant formal experimentation with the comics form, and splashy, overheated violence. (Gaiman tones the latter down, usually, but the others more than make up for his lack of excessive gore and dead bodies.) They’re all trying to explode the system, whether it’s that of comics or society is sometimes hard to tell; James Wood’s theory of “hysterical realism” applies here more than to the novels he derides. Grant Morrison’s seven-volume The Invisbles takes the maximalism to further extremes. Every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard about is true, and it’s up to anarchic splinter cell groups called Invisibles to keep the world from plunging into fascism of an interstellar scale. The thing is—and I think this is Morrison’s intent—aren’t exactly noble or even likable, and their tactics prove to be as ruthless and destructive as their enemies. Morrison ultimately holds that chaos theory is the only workable route to surviving and thriving in modern life, which I don’t buy. Large swaths of his theories—on gender, sex, conformity, religion, the perception of reality—are unreadable, and sometimes his characters seem like clunky ciphers for his thoughts rather than well-conceived people. Some of the artists he works with terrific—pencilers Jill Thompson and Phil Jimenez, inker John Stokes—while others obviously rushed to meet their deadlines. The snappy, ever-so-hip conversations, fashions, and cultural references sometimes feel dated now, as pop obsessions can, and the art often feels overcrowded. Still, I couldn’t put the damn thing down. For every two crackpot theories, there’s one that’s enlightening, and occasionally there’s one visual idea that turns me on my head. The sex-and-guns dynamic is a cover for high-falutin’ thinking about how we understand reality and dreams, and how the two merge uncomfortably. The art, changing radically from artistic team to artistic team, gives the sense that the characters and the Invisibles world isn’t static—how we’re forced to perceive them changes per issue, by circumstance. (In American Splendor, in which Harvey Pekar’s visage is different depending on who’s drawing him for a particular story, Pekar mines the same territory.) That’s more like life than I’m sometimes willing to admit. B+

Diva (1979) by Delacorta: Beating Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis to the punch by half a decade, Delacorta’s Diva combines superficially drawn characters, clichés and racial stereotypes, the height of fashion consciousness (the characters themselves seem like brand names), and just enough sordid behavior to keep us turning pages, even when we know it’s crap. The writer’s no stylist—clunky phrasing; wooden, expository dialogue; the constant use of pop-culture detritus as substitution for characterization and a sense of-lived-in place—and he has a habit of telling us what we already know. A sample paragraph: “Technically, the tape was flawless. Musically, it made Gorodish feel as if two big wings were carrying him through space. He had never heard anything like it.” Another, from the same page: “She wondered why that woman hadn’t taken off her raincoat. There was something stiff and formal about her. Maybe Jules liked mature women, as they were called in magazines.” The sentences simultaneously feel like they give too much—we don’t just know that Jules decided to go to a movie; we know that it’s “Pasolini’s Medea, with Maria Callas, [which] was being shown at a movie house in the Latin Quarter”—and too little. (This descriptive detail adds nothing to our understanding of Jules; we already know that he’s an opera lover, even if that’s all we really ever know about him.) But it’s no wonder Delacorta’s novella was a hit. It’s fast-paced, darts between multiple storylines that finally intersect (though not well), it has snappy pop references throughout but takes place in the high-culture world of opera, fine dining, and hi-fi sound systems. It’s ideal for 1970s Playboy readers who want to feel like they’re reading something sophisticated in their swank pads and monogrammed silk pajamas. It plays to its base, in other words, allowing readers to revel in filth while still feeling classy. I only finished it because it’s the basis for an acclaimed movie—further proof that great books rarely make for great films, but bad books can often lead to good movies. F

Quick hits (December 2007)

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, everywhere you— Stop it, get that song outta my head. I’ve got enough Christmas-card writing, gifts to buy, stocking stuffers to consider, and chirpy salespeople to contend with already; there’s no need to add a song I actively dislike to the roster. And, really, it’s not looking that much like Christmas. The temperature reached 70 degrees today, and that’s been standard for the last week or so. Mississippi’s muted version of fall colors is still in effect; we’ve no snow-laden ground and barren trees here in Jackson. I haven’t been a major mall yet during the post-Thanksgiving bonanza, so I’m not sick of tinsel and green glitter just yet.

Consequently, the mood’s pretty grand around La Casa Quietbubble. I’m still feeling more Bob Cratchit than Ebenezer Scrooge, which is all to the good for me and everyone around me. Tomorrow night, I’ll brave the Fondren neighborhood’s monthly ArtWalk, to sample free wine and cheese, savor the local arts scene, do some outdoors/indoors window-shopping, and mix it up in a crowded scene of like-minded younguns such as myself, scoping out each other and being scoped out in return. My bet’s that I’ll still be cheery after it all.

Enough preamble. Here we go.

Hot toddies: My version involves two ounces of brandy, ½ cup of boiling water, a sliver of butter, a spoonful of honey, and a sprinkle of nutmeg and cinnamon, all mixed together. A wonderfully warm beverage that’s slippery on the tongue, it’s perfect for the holidays and for the cold weather that I keep hoping will hit Jackson eventually.

Floratone (2007) by Matt Chamberlain, Bill Frisell, Tucker Martine, and Lee Townsend: The last two members in the Floratone lineup are producers, which lets you know from the get-go that this is a bells-and-whistles CD. Essentially, guitarist Frisell and drummer Chamberlain laid down mud-swampy, funky tracks, handed them to bassist Viktor Krauss, who then passed them on Martine and Townsend for knob-turning and effects-fiddlin’, who then handed ‘em right back to Frisell and Chamberlain for more tweaking. And so on. On some songs, Frisell’s running buddy Ron Miles (on cornet) lets loose, and then gets filtered through layers of production. Everything here gets looped, cut-and-pasted, and faded until it’s a mutant cross between gutbucket blues, Jamaican dub, and minimalist jazz. There’s too many cooks in the kitchen, and the CD only jells as mildly interesting background music. Perhaps I’d appraise it more kindly if Frisell hadn’t already done this better with the harder-hitting, truly funky and weird Unspeakable (2004), which incorporated samples. The more driving, bluesy numbers—“Mississippi Rising,” “Louisiana Lowboat,” “Swamped”—work, but much of the album lacks clear direction and personality. The gang here attempts to fuse hip-hop electronics and bebop, but end up with mere atmosphere. B-

Returning to Earth (2006) by Jim Harrison: Harrison returns to the northern Michigan family and relatives he portrayed in 2004’s True North, but this new novel is more satisfying than the former. Donald, a 45-year-old Chippewa/Finnish man is dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and Harrison painfully and powerfully shows us how the man copes, and the fallout around him that results. As with Harrison’s other longer fictions, the prose rambles, stretches frequently for profound effect, and sentences tumble around, bound together by free associations and loose connections. Here, it works, because the novel is divided into four parts, each devoted to a character: Donald, a young friend who loves both Donald’s daughter and wife, the wife’s brother (the narrator of True North), and finally Donald’s wife. Because of the first-person, diary-like nature of the sections, Harrison’s gorgeous, ramshackle, and pungent prose feels right. People don’t talk to themselves in straight lines, with precise narrative architecture leading everything towards a clear structure. They trail off into thoughts, come back pages later, have recurring visions, and are consumed by desires that they can’t shake. Salon once called Harrison the “poet laureate of appetite,” and the description fits. The pleasures of food and flesh—of the tactile world—are rarely more direct and resonant than in Harrison’s hands, and it’s true in this novel as well. His women are at last beginning to feel like rounded creations rather than men with tits, which is a plus after three decades of writing about them. Still, only the voices of the first and last section feel distinct; the middle two talk too much like each other or, rather, like Harrison trying to graft the same accent onto different characters. (It’s the voice he’s always had.) Harrison’s always been a superb writer of novellas, and he’s one of the few Americans who returns regularly to the form, and his novels sometimes feel padded out. There’s a smidgeon of that here, but in Returning to Earth he’s finally found a subject that sustains his overreaching. A-

Late Bloomer (2005) by Carol Tyler: Although Tyler’s been around for decades, Late Bloomer is only her second collection of comics. As the book’s pages attest, she’s been busy—raising children, rearing a sometimes emotionally distant husband (cartoonist Justin Green), dealing with her family’s past and potential future, and substitute-teaching. It’s a hard life, but a fulfilling one. I hope that, now that the children are grown, Tyler will get to the table more often. We need her comics—bracing, refreshing, vividly conceived—like we need water or air. She’s an essential. Her colors are impressionistic in their subtlety—I hate to use the word “painterly” to describe a cartoonist’s work, but their richness is startling; even her character outlines sometimes use colors other than black. Her layouts evoke the natural, wild growth of the gardens and backyards she loves. While her design sense may be flowery and Earth-motherly, her narratives are pure punk—sharply opinionated, precisely jabbing in their humor, and often heartbreaking. For my money, the best story—the five-page “Sub Zero,” about substitute-teaching in various public schools (some primarily black and poor, others primarily white and middle-class)—is perhaps the least representative. In black-and-white art that convey Tyler’s loopy curlicues and lack of straight lines, Tyler portrays kids (and herself) without condescension or sentimentality. All this is offset by the voiceover’s clearly typeset text; the contrast knocked me off my feet. But this anthology brings together over 20 tough and tender tales. Let’s hope there’s more, and that they’ll come more quickly next time around. A

Love Jones (1997), directed by Theodore Witcher: Love Jones paved the ways for the fountain of romantic comedies about the black middle-class, giving rise to Two Can Play That Game, The Brothers, The Best Man, Breakin’ All the Rules, Deliver Us from Eva, This Christmas, and the continuing careers of Morris Chestnut and Blair Underwood. Also, the fact that Tyler Perry is allowed to direct his chitlin-circuit-lite films—instead of remaining stagebound—can be attributed directly to the influence of Witcher’s one and only feature film. In theory, I’m deeply excited that American film acknowledges that there are black folks who care about art, politics, literature, and don’t necessarily live in the ghetto. In reality, few of these movies are as technically accomplished and formally startling as Love Jones. In fact, in retrospect, Witcher’s movie is somewhat pretentious and mannered, and some of the dialogue is as stilted as a dissertation. (A slam-poetry lounge is one of the movie’s focal points—ye gods!) All the same, its cast—Nia Long, Larenz Tate, Isaiah Washington (pre-Grey’s Anatomy), Lisa Nicole Carson (pre-schizophrenic meltdown), Bill Bellamy—is among the sexiest presented in modern cinema, and leads Long and Tate have va-voom chemistry. Tate in particular projects charming nervousness beneath his thin pose of coolness, which makes us like him all the more. Witcher’s lovely photography, rain-glossy and candlelit-looking even in the daytime, is paired with a fluid, mesmerizing editing scheme, and bebop seeps into the film until it feels almost visual. Better still, the movie conveys the variety of rich skin tones among African Americans; they aren’t all shot in the same register, but the film isn’t self-conscious about the tonal diversity in the way that, say, Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever is. By no means perfect, Love Jones is nevertheless an assured, beautiful debut that promised more to come. It’s a shame that the promise wasn’t upheld. B

Stripped (1995) by Peter Kuper: I’m biased towards Kuper’s comics, as his crackpot travelogue ComicsTrips—along with Paul Chadwick’s Concrete—was my gateway from full-color mainstream comics to the black-and-white alternative fold. When I was a high-schooler, I devoured Kuper’s stenciled art, use of collage and occasional splashy airbrush colors, jagged lines, stark contrasts, and his rambling, surprising narrative drive. In Stripped, he collects his best autobiographical strips up to that point, and what’s refreshing is that they don’t feel dated or like relics of the mid-1990s autobio heyday. (By contrast, some of the initially mind-altering work of the Toronto Three—Joe Matt, Seth, and Chester Brown—now feels a bit moldy.) Kuper’s sex-obsessed—here, R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb rear their heads, lording over the entire autobio comix realm—but at least he’s funny about it. His verbal wit and visual caricature veers toward the ragged and bellowing, and there’s little that’s subtle about his writing, but it works because his art is so assured. The longer stories, for the most part, work better than the two-pagers or the recording of his dreams, though the inclusion of the one-page (and full-color) classic “Out of Body Experience” (again, about sex) is most welcome. Kuper’s bold, sharp line feels like punk rock put on the page, but somewhat less crude and somewhat better designed. A-

Quick hits (November 2007)

I tend to start new books before I’ve done with the one I’ve started, with the end result being that I find myself reading three books in the same period. This bibliophilic schizophrenia has gone nuts lately—I’m in the middle of six books. On the movie end, I’m halfway through Dennis Potter’s six-part TV miniseries Pennies from Heaven (which might be the bleakest show I’ve ever seen), a third of the way into Krystof Kieslowski’s 10-part Decalogue (which might be the best), and I’m finishing up the box set of Stan Brakhage movies I started months ago.

All of this is to say that this will be a necessarily brief edition of “Quick Hits,” because I haven’t actually finished much of anything over the past six weeks. Here we go.

The Grateful Dead Hour: I’ve avoided the Grateful Dead for most of my listening life, having only bought (and sold) one album. Each of their influences—old country, folk, Delta blues, bebop—interest me on their own, but the Dead’s combination of the ingredients makes a stew that’s bland to me. It’s the drumwork that bugs me the most. The shuffling, never-quite-danceable beats—two drummers is one too many—always irritated me. The tempos aren’t raging or soulful or bottom-swinging or anything, really. The beats are shrugs—intricate, yes, but never involving. The keyboardist (who was changed out in this band the way most bands change drummers) never seemed necessary. And while Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir were both terrific guitarists, collectively, their sound was too clean, too pristine, too well-measured. The band’s whole sound felt diffuse, untethered to anything but air. (I do like the lyrics, though.) It’s a weird dislike, as I admire and love their modus operandi—changing setlists every concert, emphasizing improvisation over rote perfection, mixing old and new songs with every show, playing two sets, allowing (hell, encouraging) fans to record and trade shows. I revere Phish, a band that sounds very little like the GD, but which has clearly taken up the elder band’s operational aesthetic. Lately, though, I’ve found the Dead’s live concerts to be fascinating documents. The music makes good background music for writing, and they’re bound to be one gem a night. Specifically, I’m growing to love the Grateful Dead Radio Hour. You don’t have to endure a full show—the show lasts an hour—and features the occasional running theme (Mardi Gras takes up #114), interviews with band members and Deadheads, and informative liner notes about songs and GD events. Shows are archived here on the Dead’s official site, with a new posting every Wednesday. Good for neophytes, Deadheads, and grudging admirers alike. B+

The Bat Segundo Show: Book critic/blogger Ed Champion interviews practically any writer he can get his hands on, and talks to them at length. (As of 2 November 2007, there’s 153 episodes.) Each podcast lasts for at least 30 minutes, and Champion’s obviously read the book in question (and some previous ones as well) before talking to the writer, so the conversations are revealing and go beyond the rote PR material. Occasionally, he gets too testy too early on with his questions—he’d call it being provocative and not at the beck-and-call of marketers, but it sometimes comes across as being belligerent for the sake of riling up the author. And the podcast’s intro isn’t as funny as he thinks it is. Still, Champion’s engaged, incisive questions gets great responses and wonderful give and takes. Highlights include: George Saunders, Kelly Link, Alex Robinson, and the mighty Edward P. Jones. But almost all of them are great, and the frequently updated show makes Terry Gross’s Fresh Air look like the bullshit it is. A

Bottle Rocket (1996), directed by Wes Anderson: . I’m partial to the movie because large chunks of it were shot in my hometown (Dallas), and it was a kick to see these losers and has-beens ambling through neighborhoods I drove through regularly. Still, Bottle Rocket rollicks along hilariously even if you’re not familiar with its environs. In this debut feature, Anderson’s style hasn’t quite become so arch and stilted, because here he’s on a poor man’s budget. The mise-en-scene isn’t so hermetically sealed and pointillistically detailed, and the adult’s-fairy-tale feel of his later work hasn’t jelled yet, though the production design of one party scene is so perfectly composed (and pointedly satirical) that it’s unnerving to realize that this is a first film. More to the point, everything comes fast and furious. The camera, particularly the shaky and plentiful tracking shots, is looser and sloppier than anything Anderson would put onscreen until this year’s marvelous Darjeeling Limited. The one-liners, quips, and out-of-left-field dialogue overlaps frequently, and there’s not nearly so many deadpan line readings. It’s possible that Anderson’s been a better director since (My personal favorite is The Royal Tenenbaums, which I think is probably the best American film of this decade so far.), but he certainly hasn’t been as quick-witted and freewheeling in his later movies. Bottle Rocket’s aura is restless and unstable, just like its protagonists, who aren’t quite fully formed adults. It’s weird that critics regularly contend that Anderson is a closet racist, given that every one of his movies lampoons the pretensions of the privileged white upper-class. In Bottle Rocket, this satiric intent is in its most acidic form. What unnerves his detractors (and Anderson’s fans, like me) is his ability to portray these people sympathetically—he loves them, and we do, too, despite everything—while simultaneously skewering their anxieties and childish behavior. Along the way, he slices apart the post-Reservoir Dogs crime sagas that overpopulated the 1990s and the money-mad young adults that emerges from the 1980s. The protagonists become low-rent crooks basically because they’re bored rich kids, but they have 50-year plans [No, that’s not a typo.] and elaborate, completely idiotic schemes for personal development. The violence is slapstick and minor, but it nevertheless has more realistic consequences than most of what’s in Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre. With the exception of Anderson’s abiding interest in family, all of the filmmaker’s thematic concerns are here at the outset, but the aesthetic isn’t fully fleshed out yet. All that means is that we get to watch a master in progress. A

Quick Hits (Flu season edition)

I’m battling a cold, been duking it out with dry sinuses, fevers, and phlegm for almost a week. The doctor says it’s “probably” not the flu. If it is, though, oh well. It had to happen eventually. I haven’t had the full-blown flu in a decade so, if that’s what’s hit me, it got me a month or two before the flu season officially starts, and before the local $20 vaccination shots were ready. Great.

At least I have a chance to catch up on my “Quick Hits” columns. I’ve consumed a lot of culture since mid-July, including the concentrated cluster bomb that was TIFF 2007, but I haven’t had the time to process it all. And I won’t be processing it all here—this is just a taste. Here we go.

Chance in Hell (2007) by Gilbert Hernandez: Over the past four years, the character that cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez has returned to most often is Rosalba “Fritz” Martinez. Whoo smokies, she’s a fuck-up. Fritz started in Hernandez’s comics as a libidinous psychiatrist, in his art-porn romp Birdland, and later decided (or had decided for her; it’s sometimes hard to tell) to parlay her extremely pale skin and über-volupté figure into a career in “B” movies. Currently, she’s an alcoholic coasting on her fame as a cult actress in low-budget sci-fi, exploitation, and erotic-thriller features. Because Hernandez has imagined her so fully, however, he not only knows the names of all 23 features in which she’s appeared, but he’s decided to draw comic-book “adaptations” of each movie. In Chance in Hell, Fritz’s first speaking role, Hernandez imagines a dystopian wasteland in which orphans live violently and futilely. One little girl, known only as the “Empress,” manages to escape it only through wrenching violence. She observes her ever-changing world passively, though it’s riveting and terrifying to the reader—she’s obviously been deadened by shock. She gradually moves up the classes, almost effortlessly, and at each level we see how class ideology imposes itself on Empress. She doesn’t see it, however. Hernandez’s bold, thick lines capture both the chaos of this world and the still, blank clearness of Empress’s lines. The disconnect is unnerving. It’s not clear whether she ultimately breaks free of her passivity—Hernandez devotes big panels, deep black skies, minimalist backgrounds, and page-long sequences to images without speech balloons, and the transitions between images is often oblique—but it’s mesmerizing to see. The Empress travels through a nightmare land of which she’s either not fully aware or that she’s intentionally closing her eyes to. Both options are frightening. Fritz, by the way, serves only a small role as a prostitute, but she’s just a component of this desolate, blank world. Of course, you don’t need to know any of this background to appreciate Hernandez’s dark, anxious vision. A-

It’s Not Big, It’s Large (2007) by Lyle Lovett and His Large Band: A raucous, slightly countrified rendition of Lester Young’s “Tickle Toe” starts the album off with a blast that the rest of the CD can’t quite sustain. That’s alright, though. Lyle Lovett and his 17-piece ensemble let fly with a few knockout dance-hall rockers—“All Downhill,” “Make It Happy,” and the flat-out fantastic “Up in Indiana”—but mostly keeps to a downtempo. Lovett’s soulful croak works best on the slower, gospel-inflected numbers, anyway. His compositions here rarely have breakneck shifts and grand melodic surprises, but Lovett keeps his customary irony in check for the most part. Instead, “I Will Rise Up/Ain’t No More Cane” becomes the standard here—it gradually builds in intensity by slowing adding instruments and layers. Guitar feedback and the insinuating whine of the fiddle bleed into the mix, and the choral influence of Negro spirituals hovers over it all. And it goes on about a minute too long. (This has been an issue with Lovett from the beginning.) The best songs, and there’s lot of good ones here, fuse hard rock, black gospel, gutbucket blues, and acoustic country until you can’t tell the difference between the genres. Lovett’s sincerity is new here, and frankly takes some getting used to, but it’s ultimately welcome. Even the relative sap of “This Traveling Around” and “Don’t Cry A Tear” garner a smile, because you get the sense he really means it. For once. A-

Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998) by Sigrid Nunez: Drawing from the diaries, correspondence, and nonfiction of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Sigrid Nunez writes an irrepressible and melancholy portrait of a marmoset that the Woolfs owned in the late-1930s. Yes, a marmoset—a small monkey. They owned and loved Mitz, who shat everywhere, picked fleas off the family dog, and caused a minor ruckus in Bloomsbury for about five years. Nunez’s delicate, terse, and quietly conversational prose captures the way the animal moves and operates. By following Mitz, though, she’s allowed to follow the lives of these two literary geniuses as they run the Hogarth Press and Virginia works on her novels. It struck me as an odd narrative idea for all of two pages, and then I was mesmerized. After all, Mitz is the vehicle with which we enter the Bloomsbury circle—Nunez’s observations about the creation of art, the travails of writing and political thinking, and the functioning of a good (though tense) marriage never rings false. Hell, it never rings less than completely true and attentive. Mitz is the filter through which we observe everything. No one gets completely off the hook—Virginia’s a snob; Leonard has class anxieties galore; their friends have occasionally idiotic (and dangerous) ideas—but Nunez loves them all. In a stunning trick at the end, Nunez finally dares to enter Mitz’s mindset—the monkey becomes the lens rather than the filter, and the England we see suddenly becomes heartbreaking. A radiant novella, Mitz is far from whimsical, despite the conceit. A+

The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture that Shook the World (1995) by Armond White: I’ve finally figured out what’s wrong with Armond White these days. He’s a better pop music critic than he is a film commentator, and the fact that he’s focused so exclusively on the latter over the last decade has dulled his force. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he sounded the clarion call for hip-hop as a cultural influence and soon-to-be dominant force, writing impassioned and well-conceived columns on artists ranging from the gangsta (Ice-T), the militant (Public Enemy), the populist (Naughty By Nature), and everything in-between (De La Soul). Along the way, he wrestles with black musicians who refuse to be pigeonholed into genres, and who knowingly engage with “white” cultural tropes. White’s best when examining where cultures and mediums clash—as witnessed in this collection, he was among to take the music video as a serious artform, and courageously flies banners for iconoclasts such as Terence Trent D’Arby and Prince. He has the broad knowledge to connect a forgotten pop song with, say, an element of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and to further connect those with Marxist political discourse. Pop singles, movies, ads, philosophy, and leftist political ideology. Along the way, as one of the first black critics with a mainstream voice who wrote on film and pop music, White’s essays tackled race head-on, and refused to let the sticky subject hide away from his examinations of American popular culture. That all sounds good—and, sometimes, it is. For White, though, every pop single and minor setpiece is an opportunity to engage in broad polemic; every actor’s gesture is a synecdoche for her whole career. White loves the broad assertion and sweeping denunciation. Once he’s decided he hates an artist, he’s rarely willing to re-assess her, or concede that he might have, just once, produced something worthwhile. (This is why it’s downright shocking to read White’s defense of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing in these pages.) In his film criticism, in particular, there’s a decided lack of fine distinction and understanding of subtlety. The Resistance collects his greatest hits from 1984 to 1994, and showcases the fire-and-brimstone critic at a time when his opinions hadn’t calcified into predictable rhetoric. From essay to essay, here, it’s impossible to know exactly what White will think, or whether it’ll be dead-on or nonsensical. But each piece—no matter how infuriating, muddleheaded, or insane—will be provocative and headstrong. More often than not, it will be revelatory. (For instance, his piece on De La Soul’s 1991 album De La Soul Is Dead pretty well establishes the record as the Sgt. Pepper’s of rap.) Incendiary and often batshit-crazy, The Resistance is nevertheless essential. A-

Epitaph for a Tramp (1959) and Epitaph for a Dead Beat (1961), by David Markson: Before Markson hitched his wagon to the avant-garde and experimental in such classics as Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, he wrote pulp fiction to pay the bills. These two novels feature his private detective Harry Fannin as he investigates murder and mayhem in New York’s Greenwich Village. The denouements in both novels seem forced, and the latter thirds rely too much on expository dialogue and—in the case of Dead Beat—Fannin taking too long to grasp what’s been obvious to the reader from the get-go. So, as mysteries, these books are so-so. As sharp-eyed portraits of Markson’s long-time neighborhood, however, they shine. Puns, one-liners and cranky, funny wordplay run rampant. Hilarious caricatures of writers, painters, movers and shakers practically steal the narratives out of their hardboiled wardrobes. Markson’s preoccupations—with baseball, modernist literature, unknowable women, art—are present, as throwaway lines and well-executed characters who we wish we’d follow instead of the humdrum plots. (Even Markson’s great love, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, gets a oblique shout-out.) Markson clearly wants it that way. The Greenwich Village world holds his attention, and ours, more than any murder could. The conversational but erudite first-person perspective speaks with a voice eerily similar to that of Markson’s later fictions—that snappy, chatty, but monstrously well-read prose style was already honed for Markson forty years ago. What’s most surprising is not his customary wit but rather what it’s aimed at—Markson’s beloved Greenwich Village. The books caustically skewer Beat pretensions and downtown culture, and it’s fun to guess which New York artists—and Markson’s known quite a few in his eighty years—he’s lampooning in a given sequence. (You think I’m kidding about the “beloved,” eh? My hardcover first edition of 1977’s Springer’s Progress has an author that reads that “He lives in Greenwich Village with his wife and children.” Not New York City, but Greenwich Village. This basic biographical insistence on the Village is true of almost every other book cover I’ve seen.) He loves the place so much that he knows its soft spots, and plunges the knife straight in. B+ / B

Sherlock, Jr. (1926), dir. Buster Keaton: The master at work. This time, Buster’s a movie projectionist who dreams of being in a movie, and then simply walks into the screen. Mayhem ensues. The movie rolls on to random scenes—for two minutes, it’s an exercise in surrealism—as Buster tries to adjust to his flickering new surroundings. All the while, the audience watches. In the movie within this movie, Buster becomes a detective who happens to be much smarter than people think he is, and who is a pool shark to boot. (His spectacular shots, photographed at medium range so that we can see the full billiards table, are marvelous. Is there anything he couldn’t do?) Several fantastic chase scenes ensue, including one where he rides on the handlebars of a driver-less motorcycle—he’s not aware that the driver fell off a while back—and that would be echoed in Jackie Chan’s Police Story 2. The entering-and-exiting of the movie screen would be stolen by Woody Allen for The Purple Rose of Cairo. Steven Spielberg would try to match the elaborately choreographed stunts between man and machine in 1941, but just ends up looking bloated in comparison. Sherlock, Jr. is unmatched and unmatchable. In 44 minutes, Keaton shows off more movie magic (and inspires more) than most filmmakers’ full oeuvres, and does so cleanly and concisely. He doesn’t even look like he’s trying that hard. And, in case this actually needs to be said, it’s hilarious. A+

Quick Hits (July 2007)

Not much preamble this time, and not much fuss. Let’s go.

Home on the Range (2004), dir. Will Finn and John Sanford: Thank God Home on the Range is only 80 minutes long—another ten minutes, and I might have fired buckshot at the screen. Not content to tell its slight, clichéd story with a modicum of grace and intelligence, the cartoon buzzes with catchphrases (“Boo-yah!”; “Let’s bust a can of whoop-hide on him!”; etc.) and gestures that were played out a decade ago. It substitutes sitcom lingo for real wit, and feels a desperate need to keep us thrilled. The movie refuses to trust patience or to pause, and thus ends up winded and empty. It’s constantly on the go, like a forty-something fashionista trying to keep up with the kids, without realizing how pathetic and outdated she looks. The colors don’t just pop, but razzle-dazzle, with ridiculous pastels and candy colors—it’s the Great Southwest hijacked by Miami Vice. The voice actors never just speak when they can yell instead. The filmmakers elbow us in the ribs with every joke they tell. (Did you get what I said? Did you catch my reference to another western? Don’t you loooooooove me?) The camera constantly zooms in, swoops high and low, and whirrs to catch something else, but it uncovers no surprises. There’s no winks, no nudges—just bludgeoning. The effect is the opposite of what’s intended. Despite the jazzy thin lines of the character animation and the throttling colors, Home on the Range is dead in the water. Even Jennifer Tilly, with her lovely helium rasp of a voice, is curiously flat here. Roseanne Barr is just obnoxious, braying and strutting like a drunken Jersey girl at a strip-mall bar. There’s no time devoted to developing characters, plot, or even basic conflicts. The obligatory fight between the headstrong sassy cow (Barr) and the uptight prissybritches bovine (Judi Dench) underwhelms because we don’t know enough about them to care. Since Home on the Range revolves around a trite rescue plot, it needs nuances and subtleties to deepen our viewing, to make us empathize. Instead, every frame makes us care less, and I spent most of my time imagining those antic animals as tasty dinners. F

Black Books: Series 1 and 2 (2000, 2002), created by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan: An anti-social, alcoholic Irish asshole runs—or, rather, lets fester—a secondhand bookshop in London. Bernard Black (Dylan Moran) growls, gnashes his teeth, drinks wine every waking moment, corrupts everyone he comes into contact with, and never seems happy about anything. I love him; he’s well-read (he’s always reading), abrasively funny, and would be quite the looker if he ever bathed or changed clothes. His accountant/assistant Manny (Bill Bailey) proves to be only mildly more competent than the owner. His best friend Fran (Tamsin Grieg) runs a shop of unidentified knick-knacks—the first episode revolves around her trying to figure out what a particular item she sells actually does—and seems the voice of sanity. That’s a lie, of course; she’s as neurotic as the other two, and is mostly an unemployed layabout by the second series. The British TV show shines with a dark, viscous wit that grows on—well, attaches itself to—me. Black Books features inventive photography, bizarre plotting, and dialogue as bitter and funny as a priest in the Playboy Mansion after three glasses of absinthe. What’s refreshing is the lack of sentimentality, and its willingness to satirize modern life and contemporary TV genres without flinching. The show doesn’t so much have a caustic edge as a caustic core. (Thanks, C.) A-

Theories of Everything: Cartoons by Roz Chast (1978-2006): After the clear-line technique and dry, sophisticated wit of New Yorker cartoons pre-1970 or so, Roz Chast seems like a breath of fresh air. Her nervous and jittery drawings, full of bizarre juxtapositions and outright weird “jokes,” engage topics that the New Yorker comic ethos often pretended did not exist—mothers, quotidian family life, suburbia, fashion and décor not seen in glamour magazines. Her main mood is anxious, and so’s her mode. She subverts everything about the everyday—she draws collectible “hypochondria” cards (actually, there are LOTS of “cards” cartoons); two-page comics about standard-issue family vacations or drives home from parties; devotes a drawing to a park statue of “Doris K. Elston: Brain Surgeon, Professional Model, Artist, Lawyer, plus MOTHER OF FOUR” (emphasis Chast’s); and a cat’s diary. Every humdrum activity gets its own set of cards, or a menu, or a statue, or a plaque. By heightening the ordinary, and doing so with her queasiness-inducing line, Chast undermines our solemnity and pomposity. (One of my favorites is a panel from the “Recipes from the ‘I Really, Really Hate to Cook’ Cookbook” cartoon: The recipe is “Ma Bell’s Special,” and calls for a telephone and a takeout menu. Even then, the woman under the “recipe” can’t decide between pizza and Chinese.) Her frame of reference is suburban, but her drawing is pure urban anxiety, as idiosyncratic as that of Saul Steinberg. This big retrospective collects the best of Chast, in chronological order—sorta unnecessary, since her themes and drawing style are pretty well-established from the get-go. Still, there’s a generous sampling of her New Yorker covers and color cartoons, and all of it’s either hilarious or befuddling, and usually both at once. A

Moondance (1970) by Van Morrison: Some white musicians hop aboard the black-music caravan with patronization, carefully enunciating every strain of dialect, so that you absolutely know that they’re not really, you know, black, but rather taking on a popular genre that’s obviously beneath them, but somehow invigorating. Others go native, giving in to the blackface impulse so thoroughly that it comes off as unintentional parody. And then there’s Van Morrison, who clearly loves not only the music but the ideas and people behind it, but is (thank god) unwilling to part with his own heritage. Morrison synthesizes black soul, gospel, and his hometown Irish folk. The result is an R&B showcase—complete with cooing backing singers—whose arrangements would be right at home in a Dublin pub. I can’t say enough about Morrison’s voice—deep, soulful, supple, and in range of a surprising range of octaves and tempos. There’s nothing here that you think you haven’t heard before—“And It Stoned Me,” “Caravan,” “Crazy Love” and “Come Running” leave me humming by the end of the first verse, though I had only actually heard the third one before—but also nothing that sounds derivative. “Moondance” has, perhaps, been covered by too many lounge lizards to have much impact now, though the flute and Morrison’s earnest, un-ironic vocals make it fresh. For my money, the best track is “Everyone,” which soars into the stratosphere from the get-go, like a Bach harpsichord piece gone bouncy and poppy. (If you’ve seen The Royal Tenenbaums, you’ve heard it.) In such a cornucopia, though, discerning the “best” is pointless. Why did it take me so long to listen to this? A+

Quick hits (May 2007)

Airports, as I’ve lately been reminded, are good for catching up on my reading and listening. The books, music, and movies I’ve consumed have that ambient, free-floating, slightly anxious energy about them that’s perhaps too clean, and thus a little eerie, that’s very much like a terminal at Dallas/Fort Worth International. Or maybe they just felt that way because airport consciousness seeped into me while consuming them. In any case, onward and upward…

Tropical Malady (2005), directed by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul: I don’t know what to make of this bifurcated tale, but I loved it anyway. The first half is prosaic, urban, sunshine-filled, told in vignettes, and full of people; the second is suspenseful, mythical, set at night, in a jungle, involves a man hunting a tiger in a forest, is spare, sound carries far, and is utterly elliptical. The fragmented nature of the narrative persists in the second half, with the tense hunt being punctuated by folk-art cue cards, voiceovers, and a talking monkey. What I can deduce after two viewings: A young soldier from the city and a country boy fall slowly in love, go on minor adventures together—a visit to a Buddhist temple that’s also an abandoned mine; holding hands at the movies; the soldier comforts the boy at the vet after his dog is diagnosed with late-stage cancer. These snapshots of their secret life together—we never see them kiss, and the rural boy goes out of his way to mask his affection for the soldier in public—give us a sense of their relationship. Then the soldier leaves to go on assignment, and things go haywire from there. In search of a shape-shifting shaman, who may well be his lover, the soldier creeps into a jungle that may well be the recesses of his own mind. Although the narrative is much more continuous in this second half, its images of ghostly cows, shimmering, spirit-filled trees, tigers, and talking animals threw me off-balance. (And the structural fragmentation keeps up—the action is frequently punctuated by snippets of folk legend and children’s-book illustrations.) Gradually, I realized that the halves comment on, and re-interpret, each other. The lovers’ deep love for each other, and the sense of loss that comes when they split, is explored through realism and myth. Weerasethakul captures (through, I think, HDV) how night actually looks to the viewer (murky, hazy, not quite black) better than any number of high-contrast films noir. Entrancing, eerie, and bewildering. A

Cosmopolis (2003) by Don DeLillo: Multi-billionaire Eric Packer is a young punk (he’s 28), and just wants a haircut. He, his apartment and tricked-out white limo are on one end of Manhattan; his favorite barbershop, and the one that he wants more than any other, is on the other side. In between is a presidential caravan, the huge funeral for a Sufi rapper (Brutha Fez), an anti-globalization protest, and Eric’s would-be assassin. Eric’s all-day journey becomes an epic quest, and DeLillo tries to cram in every concern about American urban culture that he can. The prose has a glossier sheen than that of Huckleberry Finn, and it’s more syncopated than in Heart of Darkness, but DeLillo’s channeling Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain. By collapsing Packer’s voyage into the dark heart of America into a single day, however, DeLillo takes on too much. The dialogue has his customary mix of gnomic utterances, straight talk, and ponderous lectures signifying less than the characters think they do, but the ambient chatter means less than DeLillo thinks it does as well. We never learn what Packer does, though we hear him talk endlessly about it with his minions, all of whom—including his doctor, who performs Packer’s checkup—enter the sleek white limo at some point. Packer gets laid a lot for one day (four times by my count, each more cataclysmic than the last), and he manages to ruin his own fortune as well as his wife’s. Too much happens, and not enough of it means anything. It’s clear that none of this is meant to be realistic, and all of it’s supposed to be soulless. Packer’s sexcapades have no juice; the murder he perpetrates has no resonance to him; his financial decline is beautifully described but somehow empty of meaning. Words, symbols, abstract ideas, and numbers whoosh and hum in the air around Packer and his limo, which is pretty much his home. DeLillo’s point is clear. In this young century, we are creatures who can and do use technology and media to isolate ourselves completely from the rest of the world. By doing so, we are draining ourselves of the possibility of having a soul, of having meaning and emotional attachments. It’s apocalypse by our own design. The design is, however, so calculatedly beautiful—DeLillo is a dazzling stylist—that we’re lulled into the information glut that I think the writer wants us to resist. Even the ominous threat of Packer’s imminent death feels bloodless and muted. The prose should register encroaching terror in the reader, even if it doesn’t do so for the characters, but instead it’s eerily deadening. Packer goes on a Homeric odyssey but learns nothing, and neither, exactly, do we. B-

The Middle Stories (2002) by Sheila Heti: Heti works in a minimalist, fragmented style that’s so opaque that it takes a while to realize that there’s actually little to see under the fog. Half of these tiny stories feature characters who go unnamed or are known only by descriptors (“the giant,” “the young fornicator,” “the little old lady,” “the man with the hat”), who are involved in nebulous affairs in environments that go undescribed. The stories are mere fragments, sparse in prose and imprecise in meaning. Several seem like sketches of stories, like prompts that a creative-writing professor might use to get his class working. Lydia Davis often works in this aphoristic mode, but her stories have emotional depth, characters who are richly drawn enough that we can be bothered to care about them, flashes of wit, and wild experiments with form and content. Heti has none of this, but she does have a hipster’s sarcasm and snidely toned dialogue. Perhaps someone thinks these stories are mesmerizing and adroitly experimental, but it ain’t me. It’s a little book—144 pages, with a generously-sized font, and a small trim size—so the overall design gives a clue as to the slight contents within. D

Mezzanine (1998) by Massive Attack: The brilliant trip-hop group discovers the guitar, and all hell breaks loose. “Angel” opens the album with dirge-like guitar halfway through it, and an undercurrent bassline that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror flick. The band’s beats are still simultaneously sharp, intricate, and seductive, but there’s menace around the edges. Unsettling, unidentifiable noises in the background creep slowly into the foreground without our noticing until it’s too late. Drums, vocals, and looped echoes bleed into each other. Horace Andy’s voice—with his customary spiritual/paranoid lyrics—submerges itself into the murk. “Risingson” and “Inertia Creeps” feature the boys whisper/singing—not to seduce, but almost as if they’re afraid of being overheard. The night closes in around you as you listen to Mezzanine. That’s why the few glimpses of sunshine are so, so welcoming—the juicily erotic symphonic swoop of “Exchange,” and Liz Fraser’s ethereal, heartening vocals on the frankly brilliant “Teardrop.” On this record, though, even Fraser’s sly bell-like voice hides disturbances; she sings so sweetly in “Black Milk” that we almost forget how thick and sticky (like a squashed spider) the song’s music is. Mezzanine is perfect for nighttime, headphones listening. At the same time, you shouldn’t listen to it alone. A+

In A Silent Way (1969) by Miles Davis: The dead calm before the tornado hit, In A Silent Way was Davis’s first true foray into jazz fusion. Whereas Bitches Brew and On the Corner would be explosive and dissonant and sometimes nearly unlistenable, this 1969 session is peaceful and almost sedate. It veers this close to elevator music but the depth of its musical layers keeps it mysterious. Davis rarely blows us away here—in fact, there are several-minute stretches that he’s not playing at all—and that’s the point. Instead, he coaxes out his three (!) keyboardists—Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Josef Zawinul—and the delicate, ghostly echoes of guitarist John McLaughlin. It seems that everyone’s soloing at once, as in early New Orleans jazz, but quietly and without stepping on each other’s notes and tones. The eight players are all distinct at all times but the two tunes (each over 17 minutes) are never cacophonous. In this sense, both tunes have very simple rhythmic and tonal bases—which masters Dave Holland (bass) and Tony Williams (drums) hold down—that allow room for expansion. The interplay between the keyboardists is so intricate that I can’t tell where one player’s fingers end and another’s begins. The record sounds like a waking daydream. A

Quick hits (April 2007)

It’s April in Jackson, which means it’s jogging time. Every other day, I get home from work around 5:15pm, change into sneakers and shorts, grab the iPod, and head for Parham Bridges Park. I walk/jog five or six miles, slugging back water and letting Sleater-Kinney carry my legs forward. (Okay, okay, it’s still more “walk” than “jog,” but it gets the heart rate going and the legs toned, so I think it’s for the good.) I get home around 7pm, in need of a shower and dinner. By the time all this gets done, the choice comes down to this: 1. Absorb some culture, and thus go to bed around 11:30pm, or 2. do the dishes, iron tomorrow’s clothes, and go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Right now, it’s about half and half.

So, while I’m exercising the body more, I’m exercising the mind a little less. Sort of. Maybe it’s just that I’m taxing the brain in a particularly challenging way.

Two years ago, I bought By Brakhage, a 2-DVD collection of Stan Brakhage’s movies, on eBay. The set features 26 of the experimental filmmaker’s most “famous” works from the 1950s to the year before his death in 2003, ranging from minute-long shorts to the hourlong Dog Star Man. He’s arguably the most celebrated avant-garde filmmaker that America has produced, though it’s worth noting that being called the most famous experimental moviemaker in America is like being the world’s most well-known skeeball champion.

In any case, I’ve unsystematically worked my way through By Brakhage since 2004, enjoying some, rolling my eyes at others, and being perplexed by almost all of them. Last month, I pledged to myself that, every time I watched a movie on DVD, I’d watch a Brakhage short beforehand. It would be like the cartoon before the main feature—a palate cleanser.

So, that’s what I’m doing with my art-observance these days. I might have more to say about the whole collection after I get done, and once I finish his book, Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker (which is even denser than his movies). For now, though, here’s the rest of what I’ve been experiencing lately. Welcome to the April 2007 edition of Quick Hits…

Blue in the Face (1995), directed by Wayne Wang: There should be an award for movies that waste this much talent. The movie features, in various improvised scenarios revolving around a Brooklyn cigar shop, the following: Harvey Keitel, Michael J. Fox, Giancarlo Esposito, Roseanne, Mira Sorvino, Lily Tomlin, Jim Jarmusch, Lou Reed, RuPaul, and apparently anyone else who dropped by the set. It’s written (sorta) by Paul Auster. Something should be here. Whereas Smoke is overly formal, with interlocking plots that catch just-so, this companion is looser than a porn star. Through newsreel footage, documentary interviews, and improvised scenarios in and around Auggie Wren’s (Keitel’s) smoke shop, the movie tries to capture the borough in all its diversity and complexity. From technical and narrative standpoints, Blue in the Face is more ambitious and experimental than Smoke. It’s a character study, where Brooklyn is the main character. But Wayne Wang’s stateliness and Auster’s lackluster situations don’t allow room for the actors to breathe, so the improvs and casual nature feel forced. It should be a kick to see Fox nag Esposito about his sex life, with the questions getting more and more uncomfortable, but it’s flat. Tomlin ponders Belgian waffles to no effect. Mel Gorham sings “Fever” to herself in the mirror, and she’s voluptuous and tempestuous enough to pull it off, but the scene’s neither erotic nor funny. Several writers cry in their beer about the departed Brooklyn Dodgers. Even RuPaul choreographing an impromptu block party’s dance sequence can’t save this. Only Reed and Jarmusch—oddly, two non-actors—have weight. Reed rambles elegantly about why he loves/hates New York. Jarmusch has his final cigarette with Keitel, and muses about the role of smoking in his life and in the movies. He’s so effortlessly cool that the movie relaxes during his scenes. (I enjoyed these scenes more than I’ve liked any of Jarmusch’s films.) The whole thing’s still not particularly funny here but it’s at least fascinating for once. D

Smoke (1994), directed by Wayne Wang: The actors—Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Harold Perrineau, Jr., Forest Whittaker, Ashley Judd, Stockard Channing, and others—are sharp enough to make Smoke feel less stilted than it is. The stories of various characters interweave, sometimes in ways that the characters themselves never understand, and Brooklyn is presented vibrantly. The color palette nears sepia tones in its austerity and reverence for the borough, and the pace uncurls about as fast as, well, thick smoke. The movie resonates, however, less than it should. Wang’s style (a distinct lack of closeups, fairly static camerawork, slow editing scheme) and Paul Auster’s brittle, precise dialogue are distancing. It’s rare that we’re not aware that the actors are acting—there’s a lot of significant pauses in the line readings; the gestures are a little too practiced. Only William Hurt truly comes across as naturalistic. He exudes warmth and care, but it’s clear too that he carries more emotional weight than any man should, and his quickness to exasperation feels earned. Hurt’s performance isn’t loose—there’s not much that’s loose in Smoke—but the character’s rigidity comes from his attempt to keep enormous pain at bay. He’s the most straitlaced person in the movie but he’s the least mannered. The plot tics build up to an incredibly careful structure—everything, and I mean everything resolves neatly—but one’s a little arid. It’s like we’re being forced to acknowledge how significant Smoke’s themes are, instead of being led to feel them for ourselves. B

Nathan Coulter (1960, revised 2002) by Wendell Berry: A taut, fragmented coming-of-age tale of a Kentucky farmboy, Nathan Coulter is the first of Berry’s fictions set in his imagined Port William, Kentucky. It’s a place as well-conceived and character-rich as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, but without the racial tensions or the Modernist experiments. Berry’s prose style—a mix of plainspoken simplicity and opaque lyricism—is dry and witty. In carefully chosen, meandering vignettes, Berry shows Nathan progress from a boy to a young man, showing how he learns about sex, family trauma, alcoholism, farming, fishing, and the other big aspects of life. Sometimes, Nathan himself seems to be merely the straw through which we suck in the experience of those around him, but he gradually becomes an interesting character in his own right. Most of the families, terrain, and moral concerns that will absorb Berry for the next half-century come through this novella. As such, it’s a terrific introduction to a great community and a great writer. A-

The Playhouse (1927), dir. Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline: Buster makes mayhem on- and offstage at a vaudeville revue. In a bravura dream sequence that opens the 20-minute short, he manages to make three, four, or five versions of himself appear onscreen—doing unsynchronized motions, in different costumes—simultaneously, and it’s totally convincing. The two-reeler was created in 1927, so it’s not like he had CGI, advanced effects, or Rick Baker’s makeup design at his disposal. I’ve got no clue how he pulled it off (Can any Keaton fans or film technicians help me out here?). Like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Keaton’s movies use the same essential premise for each, but they each feel fresh and hilarious. The Playhouse makes Eddie Murphy’s bloated multiple performances in The Nutty Professor, Norbit, and Coming to America look amateurish by comparison. Unbelievable. A+

Quick Hits

Now that we have a street date for the seventh and final Harry Potter novel, I’ve decided to reread the previous six. I’ve only read each of them once, as they appeared, so I’ve forgotten loads of minor characters, little details, Rowling’s sly winks of cleverness, cool inventions, and her gift for comedy. Alas, I’d also forgotten her occasional lapses into tired cliché, sometimes numbing use of expository dialogue, and her tendency to summarize the previous books in each new book of the series.

Still, it’s loads of fun. Reading the books in quick succession, spread out over a few weeks instead of over a near-decade, is fascinating. (It’s hard to believe Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 1999, or that there’s a generation of kids that’s basically grown up with the Harry Potter books.) In the back of my head, I’ve always thought of each book as a very long chapter in what would wind up as an epic children’s tale, rather than as discrete entities, and that the series should be read critically as such. To read them again is to be reminded of how sharp a plotter Rowling is. She plants ideas that sometimes don’t get resolved until three books later, but the structure’s so sound that the clues are all there.

Anyway, the light volume in this edition of Quick Hits is not because I’ve not been consuming much culture, but because I don’t want this to become a Potter fest. Now, that may come in July or August, once I’m wrapped my head around the completed series. Here we go…

The Little Man: Short Strips, 1980-1995 by Chester Brown (1980-1995, 2006): I’ve tried to like Chester Brown. I’ve muddled through his surreal, semi-improvised Ed the Happy Clown, his bizarrely told but curiously deadpan biography of a Canadian-Indian revolutionary (Louis Riel), and the eleven issues of Underwater, which even he couldn’t adequately describe—and which I like best of all his work. I acknowledge his influence on the alternative comics scene, and even understand the admiration cartoonists have for Brown’s brave experiments and adamant refusal to neuter his vision, whatever the hell it is. But I confess: his scatological art seems too calculated by half; his thin, brittle lines lack solidity; his here-goes-nothing layouts irritate me; his writing and narrative pacing is slack; and, even when he uses close-ups or shows himself eating his own snot or peeing in the toilet, his art as a whole feels distant. The Little Man reprints all of his shorter “narratives,” with Brown’s customarily expansive and revealing notes—easily the best part of the package. A couple of the autobiographical strips are engaging, I suppose, but even “My Mom Was A Schizophrenic,” revelatory in comics on its first appearance, is borderline unreadable now. C-

Tales of Woodsman Pete by Lilli Carré (2006): Tales of Woodsman Pete concerns primarily the title character, who lives alone in his log cabin and talks to the stuffed bucks on his wall and the dead bear (he names him Philippe) on the floor. It’s funnier and more morbid than it sounds. Carré’s droll, jazzily loopy drawings have an old-timey woodcut feel, which is helped by the off-white paper and deep blue ink. Most of the stories are no longer than five or six pages, and indeed the vignettes feel like stand-up comedy done in comics form, if the comedian had drank too much moonshine and spent a few years in solitary confinement. Paul Bunyan makes a couple of appearances, mostly so that we can see how this mythological figure’s life would have played out if we watched him going about the everyday—hint: his sex life stinks; he keeps accidentally killing his lady friends. As the comic progresses, Carré infuses the dark comedy with sadness, but it feels like a teenager’s version of moroseness. And ending things with a flood is juvenile, not profound. But she’s a cartoonist on the make—as a jokester, she’s terrific. B

The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez (2006): Two girls—Georgette George and Ann Drayton—meet at Barnard College, in 1968. Georgette (known as George) comes from a hardscrabble family in upstate New York—her mom is verbally and physically abusive; her sister Solange runs away at age 14; her brother gets emotionally shattered by Vietnam. Ann—leftist, passionate and hardheaded—is a rich girl from Connecticut who makes life hell for everyone. Through them, we see the 1960s and its aftermath played out in America. George tells the story—understandably, as Ann spends half her life in prison after killing a cop—and her sharp, no-nonsense, deceptively simple voice gives the last 40 years a deep resonance. Hippies, Black Panthers, Weathermen, Young Republicans, feminists, Partisan Review-esque public intellectuals, dropouts, and more all get their due, and are recreated without sentimentality, mean-spiritedness (okay, a little mean-spiritedness), or oversimplification. The whole kitchen sink’s here, but Nunez’s supple prose and rich characterization keeps the book from being a mere summarization of the 1960s. A tremendously ambitious novel about what America has done to itself over all these years, The Last of Our Kind dazzles, disturbs, and delights in equal measures. A+

Black Hole by Charles Burns (2005): A comic book with teeth, Black Hole gave me nightmares. Deep in the wastelands of suburban Seattle, circa 1976, sexually active kids are being smitten with the Bug. It’s like no STD you’ve ever seen—your skin might peel off, or you might grow you a tail or horns or slimy spikes on your abdomen, or you might wake up to discover a small mouth at the base of your neck… that talks, even when you’re not saying anything. Burns’s metaphor about the fears and anxieties of American sex burns deep, and gets complicated as we grow to care about these deformed kids, and deplore their outcast lives out in the forest. And that’s before people start dying. Burns’s art is thick-lined, with the richest black inking I’ve ever seen—it’s dark and hard enough to shine, like an electric eel. And, like an eel, the comic hides ferocity and danger just beneath the meticulously, shadowy, high-contrast art design. It’s American adolescence as German Expressionism or high noir, and even those who escape to (relatively) happy endings feel doomed or at least forever on-guard. It’s creepier than David Lynch, because Burns is more tied to everyday experience (we all know high school was this dreadful), and Black Hole ultimately make more sense. A

Quick hits (February 2007)

February’s been a long month. Not a bad one—just long. Nevertheless, the Quiet Bubble radio silence has been lifted… for a few days, anyway. Now, on to this month’s quick hits.

Klezmer (Book One: Tales of the Wild East) by Joann Sfar (2006): First Second Books has two flagship cartoonists—Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar. Both are European, about 40 years old, and hyper-prolific. (Both have over 100 comic books to their credit.) As with most prolific artists, quality control ain’t their strong suit. With Trondheim, at least, I get the appeal. Sfar, however, leaves me cold. Klezmer, the first in a series about a band of adventuresome Jewish musicians traipsing through early-20th-century Europe, seems like a good idea, a welcome approach to exploring the continent’s past. But the drawing is wavery—Sfar’s line is so thin and bodiless that it lacks depth; the watercolors are so splotchy that I feel like I could wipe away an entire page with one swipe; the layouts are slapdash. The character designs are so inconsistent that a person’s face changes drastically from page to page, as if Sfar hadn’t quite decided on the book’s feel. (The same problem afflicts his Rabbi’s Cat and other works I’ve skimmed by Sfar.) If the writing were sharper and the characters more compelling, I might be inclined to judge Klezmer as a worthwhile experiment in improvisational cartooning (as with Chester Brown’s groundbreaking Ed the Happy Clown) or an intentionally minor experiment that experiments with sketchbook design (as with Seth’s Wimbledon Green). Alas, no can do. The whole thing feels rushed, and it looks as insubstantial as it is. C-

Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings by Lawrence Weschler (2004): Lawrence Weschler could make a rotten apple core interesting. In Vermeer in Bosnia, he picks a selection of his best essays on art, politics, Jewish life, Eastern European culture, odd people, and the convergences between all of these subjects. Weschler’s voice is gentle, curious, precise, bemused but willing to be surprised, capable of amazement but also capable of sniffing out bullshit. In profiles of cartoonists (Art Spiegelman), filmmakers (Roman Polanski), artists (David Hockney, Robert Irwin), his voice is resonant, but Weschler—unlike New Journalists from Hunter S. Thompson to Tom Wolfe—is rarely interested in being the center of the story. Rather, he casually teases out connections, contradictions, and mysteries about profiles. He’s equally lucid about ideas ranging from the finer points of photography, the mid-1990s political mindset in Belgrade, the horror of genocide (a subject Weschler returns to again and again), and the qualities of light in Los Angeles. His essays never go quite in the direction you think they’re headed—indeed, they surreptitiously zigzag on multiple occasions during the same piece—but Weschler’s mix of wonder and serious moral inquiry is always dazzling. Practically each piece is worth the $15 entry fee, which is another way of saying the collection is priceless. A+

Right As Rain by George P. Pelecanos (2001): If you’re a white writer who plans to enter the mindset of a black protagonist, do it the way George P. Pelecanos does it—just go for it. Don’t draw attention to the fact. Don’t apologize. Don’t equivocate. Just do it right. In Right as Rain, the black man in question is Derek Strange, a Washington, D.C., private investigator who’s trying to uncover the circumstances in which a black cop was accidentally gunned down by a white cop. The case turns into an exploration of D.C. racial politics, contemporary love, and the victors and victims of the drug trade. Pelecanos’s language is terse, but with cutting details—the cut of a man’s suit, the songs a man enjoys listening to in the car, the aromas and tastes of a midtown Vietnamese restaurant. His dialogue, which is often funny and often digressive, is pungent and fresh. Pelecanos refuses to sugarcoat the city life but he’s no cynic about the street. With only a few slip-ups, he writes convincingly in the voice of a multitude of do-gooders, schemers, rascals, and honest folk of all races and ages. Critics call this “crime fiction,” but it’s more honest about the perpetually uneasy dance blacks, whites, and Hispanics do around each other socially than most literary American fiction I read—further proof of the relative uselessness of genre distinctions. A

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, directed by Shinichiro Watanabe (2001): The zippy, quick animation style dances around the cheerily noir urban backgrounds, while a killer soundtrack—acid jazz, techno-rock, and low-hued hip-hop—makes the Mars of the 21st century come alive. More so than the TV series on which it’s based, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie truly evokes a lived-in atmosphere. Because we have more time to explore its sci-fi city than a 25-minute episode could allow, we feel the texture of the neighborhoods, and it’s just as much fun to walk its streets—alongside Spike, Jet, Faye Valentine, and the other bounty hunters—as it is to be dazzled by the rapidly paced and often brutal action sequences. For instance, Moroccan Street, with its dim yellow glow, Persian draperies, and women in burqas, feels as real as San Francisco’s Chinatown. Minor characters—including elderly bush pilots playing cards, an Indian squatting by the city’s river, and a mysterious bean seller who seems to be the Godfather of Moroccan Street—are so vivid that we know they have lives beyond the cels in which they appear. Quiet wit, jazzy acrobatic moves, and flashy style are the order of the day in this movie’s city. But, then, Cowboy Bebop has always preferred style over substance, and it’s at once exhilarating and disappointing to see that the feature film stays true to its source. While the movie is saved by its intelligent characters and gorgeous setpieces, it quickly falls into routines established by countless American action films. It cops shots from 2001, Mexican standoffs from Westerns, an aerial dogfight from Top Gun or Firefox, the lighting scheme from Blade Runner, and a crucial plot development from Tim Burton’s Batman—poisonous agents released by balloons during a parade. Like the movie’s villain, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is a classy thief, but a thief all the same. B

If You Got to Ask, You Ain’t Got It! by Fats Waller & His Rhythm (1926-1943, reissued 2006): As someone said in Ken Burns’ Jazz, Fats Waller swings so hard that he doesn’t even need a band. This 3-CD box set gives us 66 cuts of the big man at the best, ticking his piano to heights of ecstasy and storming it through harsh blues, hot jazz, and ice-cold sourmash whiskey. Waller’s gravelly, witty voice comes through on every track he sings, but the set wisely includes a full disc (disc 2) of his instrumentals (mostly by himself) that establishes him as one of the greatest jazz pianists to ever walk the streets of New York. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Whether as an interpreter of Tin Pan Alley standards or a player of his original compositions, he transcends swing, ragtime, blues, or any other jazz genre you can place him in. A+

Quick hits (December 2006)

It’s Christmastime in America, which means I’m turning down the radio and spending lots of money on other people. Here’s a quick Christmas gift for critics: Robert Christgau’s “Consumer Guide”—the sort-of inspiration for “Quick Hits”—returns after a four-month absence. Rejoice! And now, on to the show…

A.L.I.E.E.E.N. (2006) by Lewis Trondheim: In a brief preface, Trondheim explains that he found this alien comic book while hiking in the Catskills. Its speech balloons are written in a pictograph-like language that’s not from Earth. The characters are sometimes vaguely humanoid, but mostly they—and the landscape in which they live—look as otherworldly as they are. It’s all bullshit, of course, but Trondheim is a master cartoonist and it’s fascinating to see how far he takes this conceit. The book’s pages are even printed with fake dirt smudges, dog-ear marks, stains, and with cruddy color separations as if it’s been printed on cheap newsprint. It looks like some kid’s read (and re-read) comic. The silent stories—well, they might as well be silent, since the words are incomprehensible—are a series of interlocking tales that are bloody, disturbing, scatological, and hilarious, usually all at once. Trondheim’s minimalist line, lack of shading or hatchmarking, and simple Day-Glo colors serves A.L.I.E.E.N. well. I can’t imagine that I’d tolerate the sight of these cute aliens getting impaled, flushing out their bowels for pages at a time, ripping off each other’s skins, and torturing each other if the drawing had been more realistic. The odd narrative structure—it moves back and forth in time; the vignettes end abruptly—works because it’s consciously off-kilter. I learned to go with it because it’s willfully perverse. Underneath all the cute horror, A.L.I.E.E.N. is touching. The aliens ultimately seem human after all. A-

Dhoom 2 (2006), directed by Sanjay Gadhvi: In Dhoom 2, Aishwarya Rai and Bipasha Basu wear clothes that should bag their designers either a Nobel Prize for engineering or a night in jail on obscenity charges. But, technically, neither actress is ever nude at any point. Ridiculously gorgeous Hrithik Roshan spends much of his time in unbuttoned shirts, sweaty, and dancing. Rai rocks out in the shortest miniskirts and clingiest shirts I’ve ever seen, sometimes in the driving rain. I swear, Indian censorship is the best thing ever; without it, the filmmakers wouldn’t go through so much effort just to see what they could get away with. The movie—a nonsensical action movie that’s too choppy and poorly written to be loved by anyone over fifteen—is va-va-voom sexy. Rai and Roshan are, respectively, the biggest female and male stars in Bollywood today. Open-mouthed kissing isn’t banned in India but it’s still relatively rare. So, when Rai darts her tongue into Roshan’s willing mouth, after a tense exchange involving a pistol, the whole audience around me cheered. Otherwise, we were stuck with bad slapstick, incomprehensible chase scenes, and Abhishek Bachchan phoning in his performance. (He can’t even be bothered to stay in rhythm during the dance sequences—it’s the first bad performance I’ve seen by him.) But Dhoom 2 is a testament to star power—Rai and Roshan (and Basu, who gets too little screen time) ignite the screen, and make the movie much, much better than it should be. C+

Moomin (2006) by Tove Jansson: Lovers of classic American comic strips should weep with joy this year. Fantagraphics continues its complete Peanuts, along with complete runs of Dennis the Menace and Krazy Kat. They even started reprinting Popeye this year. Drawn & Quarterly’s publishing standards are, if anything, even more lavish and loving than Fantagraphics’s stuff. D&Q’s taste in strips, though, runs toward the contemplative and quiet rather than the brash and flamboyant. Frank King’s Gasoline Alley is getting the complete-run treatment, and now D&Q has started reprinted Tove Jansson’s Moomin. The Finnish cartoonist’s strip only ran for five years but its clear line, gentle humor, oodles of great (and cute) characters, and wry maturity should be remembered for prosperity. Her humor builds on you. I started off chuckling and wondering what the fuss was. By the middle of a story (there are four in volume one), though, I was cackling with each new panel. Characters play off each other—and needle each other—terrifically. The stories meander from one unexpected circumstance to the next with a breezy grace, as Jansson stops to smell the flowers, luxuriate in a beautifully drawn seaside or garden, or just to watch her characters make absurd, almost hidden gestures. She’s a superior drafter. Those thin lines of hers have substance. She’s a master of space and composition—her cluttered frames never feel overstuffed; her white space conveys openness and air. If this is only the first volume, that means Jansson probably got even better from here. That’s hard to believe but I’ll buy volume two as soon as it appears. A+

Russian Dolls (2006), directed by Cédric Klapisch: In Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi, and Wendell Berry’s Port William, Kentucky, the respective writers create fictional communities whose major characters, locales, and events are played out over the course of several books. Beyond the obligatory blockbuster sequel, however, we don’t often see fiction-based filmmakers tryin