Quiet Bubble

Quick hits (June 2009)

It’s been a few months since the last column but it’s back. Let’s go.

Sita Sings the Blues (2009), written, directed & animated by Nina Paley. A feminist critique of the Ramayana? Fine, but why exoticize it and add white suburban angst to the mix? The old-timey songs are good as representations of Sita’s mindset but perhaps less necessary than the free-copyright activists would have you believe. Another wholly unnecessary add-on: the 5-minute music video/breakup visual—but, ahhhh, that’s more white-girl mopeyness to the mix, put (ungraciously) on top of some of the most compelling mythology/religious text ever created. One of these things means less than the other. The Flash animation is clean and colorful, with backgrounds sliding by elegantly. Paley creates a collage of sketchwork for the autobiographical segments, the modern clear-line approach for the mythology, and photos and scans for the modern-day Indians commenting continually (and hilariously, and perhaps sacrilegiously) on the nuances/contradictions of the Ramayana. But the faces and gesturing isn’t expressive at all, and only a megalomaniac would think that her breakup with her boyfriend jells well with a country’s creation myth. When the contemporary Indians crack wise about their sacred text, that’s one thing. When a navelgazing cartoonist grafts her sob story onto it, that’s insulting. B-

French Milk (2007), by Lucy Knisley. As discussed before, I’ve a weakness for illustrated books that fall somewhere between comics and prose. Even giving French Milk this handicap, though, I wonder why this book—a journal/sketchbook of a 22-year-old white girl’s (utterly touristy and eventful) six weeks in Paris—merits so much positive attention amongst the comics critical sphere. Her autobiographical ruminations don’t have the depth of Joe Matt’s Peepshow, the forceful sensibility of Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte, the maturity of Carol Tyler’s comics, nor the drafting chops of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I like that Knisley likes food—a rarity amongst American girls—and there’s a sensual fervor in her descriptions of good meals. But an illustrated menu, peppered (ha ha) with milquetoast (I can’t stop myself) musings, doesn’t make for a real book. Sure, anyone who’s ever been to Europe for vacation probably filled up a diary or scrapbook with detritus. 99.5% of those remain buried in closets and basements, for good reason. French Milk’s journey to publication is probably a result of Knisley’s unspoken class privilege—she and her mom rent a nice apartment and eat out at least once a day; her dad flies across the Atlantic for a visit; another artist friend flies over, too; Knisley’s always buying stuff; we hear more about her period than about saving money. I’ll bring out my inner Marxist by noting that we also hear more about Knisley’s spending habits and consumerism than about her off-kilter family dynamics; Mom and Dad are divorced but Dad flies over to France to spend a week with his ex-wife during a mother-daughter bonding trip, and it’s not awkward at all? Knisley sketches more tourists (consumers) than residents. She draws and talks about things, and how things fashion her, more than anything else. And her things don’t interest me as much as they interest her. If this had remained a diary, I wouldn’t have minded. C

A Decade under the Influence (2003), directed by Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese. A decent overview of the 1970s American New Wave, though it’s just as smugly beholden to the myth of the 1970s being America’s last great cinema as baby boomers are about 1960s pop music being the Greatest Era Ever (and All You Kids Are Just Amateurs in Comparison). Most of the big names are interviewed, and it’s good to see a lot of attention paid to Hal Ashby. But the omissions are startling—almost nothing about blaxploitation and its place in the rise of independent movies; relatively little on Terrence Malick; no David Lynch or Carroll Ballard or… and on and on. Plus, they blame the 1980s on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, but don’t allow either to defend himself. C

The Book of Illusions (2002), by Paul Auster. David Zimmer, wounded by the death of his wife and children, begins to drink and watch the silent films of Hector Mann, and then write the first monograph about the actor/filmmaker, who disappeared six decades ago. Oh nonsense—he never existed in the first place. So, when a letter (postmarked: New Mexico) from Mann’s wife appears in David Zimmer’s mailbox, inviting him to view a body of work Zimmer didn’t even know existed, what’s surprising is how Auster makes this (non-existent) filmmaker so resonant in the first place. When a gun-wielding woman shows up to force Zimmer to go, this sudden shift in tone feels natural, too. When Zimmer’s narration gives over to film criticism (of films that don’t exist) and to a capsule biography of Mann, these shifts feel unforced as well. This novel slides through several modes—criticism, memoir, mystery, tragedy, True Hollywood story—so well and so rapidly that it’s a work of its own genre, and one that nearly moved me to tears. I’m not sure how Auster made this feel all of a single piece, despite these tonal shifts and hyperbolic action, but I think magic must be involved. There’s a pretty good meditation on Chateaubriand’s Memoirs of a Dead Man; come to think of it, The Book of Illusions becomes a pretty successful Americanization of it, too. This is my first Auster; it won’t be my last. A+

Paul Auster’s City of Glass—An Adaptation (1994), written by Paul Karasik and drawn by David Mazzucchelli. Daniel Quinn writes mystery novels under the name William Wilson, and gets drawn inexorably into a noir tale himself when a phone caller mistakes him for Paul Auster. Eventually, Quinn meets Auster who, although technically is Quinn’s creator, doesn’t offer much help and may even impede the process of the case. That’s an excellent metaphor for how Auster thinks God works upon humans, and also shows how an artist’s creations end up running away from him once a reader gets involved. (It’s the reader who’s telling this dark tale and, by the end of the mystery, he’s got harsh words for Auster.) As with The Book of Illusions, it’s writing about writers and about how the stories they construct can shape the world in magical—and maybe nightmarish—ways. If all this sounds too metafictional and heady, note how well Mazzucchelli’s bold and thick black line and Karasik’s graceful layouts keep the events grounded… and propulsive. Mazzucchelli visualizes Auster’s verbal mazes—and the sense of an ever-encroaching cage—with simple, blocky forms, and brushwork that gets progressively rougher as Quinn’s life spirals out of control. Even in the midst of these metaphysics, there’s never a sense that Auster, Karasik, and Mazzucchelli are just indulging in mind games—the adaptation is too urgently paced, and too controlled, for that. City of Glass may not improve on Auster’s original novel, but it brings his New York to dank, morbid life. A-

Parade (1973), directed by Jacques Tati. A circus goes haywire, and we get to see it being made as it’s being performed. As always with Tati, regular objects take on extraordinary, playful qualities. The audience gets involved, and the line between performers and audience members gets blurred throughout. The movie’s as democratic as Tati’s ever been, with cheap video allowing the master filmmaker to distance himself from the need to be a perfectionist. So, Parade is his cruddiest-looking movie—video’s visual limitations are obvious here—but it’s also among his most humanizing. With the shedding of celluloid, Tati also sheds M. Hulot, and reveals himself to be suave and—as he was in his youth, on the French vaudeville circuit—a brilliant pantomime. Jugglers, tumblers, set designers, mimes and more clown about on stage, but Tati’s choreography keeps things moving briskly and the stage relatively clean. It’s not as immaculate as Play Time, Mon Uncle, or Tati’s other masterpieces, but its looseness pays off in its inspired hijinks. A-

Quick hits (March 2009)

It’s a new year, I’m in a new house, life feels brand-spanking new, it’s time for a new round of quick hits. Here we go.  (Also, this is post #600 for Quiet Bubble.  Yay for me.)

The Way I See It (2008) by Raphael Saadiq: Saadiq hits Motown with a vengeance but on his own terms. Except for the second take of “Oh Girl,” with the unnecessary presence of Jay-Z, there’s no filler. Not much goes over the three-minute mark. Everything Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson fostered gets proselytized here—the horn blasts, the high tenor and swooping baritone of the Temptations, the uptempo hooks that go for days, the rock-out drums and basses. Except for the drums and guest appearances, Saadiq does it all himself, making himself, of course, into the 21st-century version of Motown’s preeminent one-man-band, Stevie Wonder (whose harmonica shows up here, to emphasize the point). But Saadiq likes women—not just “loves” them—more than even Marvin Gaye, and his crisp and clean production owes more to Tony! Toni! Toné! (well, Saadiq’s earned the comparison—he led the band, after all) than to 1960s vinyl crackle and fuzz. As La Bella sez of the sound, “he nails it,” and adds his own thang by simply bringing his own feminist wit to the sound; if the women he tries to woo don’t dig him, he doesn’t blame them or hate them for it. He’s an adult, and he proves he’s not playing around by, well, being comfortable with the concept of playing around. Hell, he even owns a James Brown guitar sample on “Let’s Take A Walk.” Highlights: “Sure Hope You Mean It,” “Just One Kiss,” “Staying in Love,” “100 Yard Dash,” and every other damn track on the album (save one). A

The New Year (2008): …In which Matt and Bubba Kadane finally move beyond Bedhead and establish The New Year as its own entity. A new instrument, the piano, takes a key role on four tracks, and the brothers have finally come to ease with rocking out. Cases in point: the staccato riffs and start-stops of “The Door Opens,” and arena-rock vibe of “The Company I Can Get,” along with the swirling guitar lines of “X Off Days.” Plus, they’ve rediscovered their sense of humor. When Matt sings that he needs “all the company I can get/ Even that redneck in the red Corvette,” I laughed because I feel his pain and know he’s opening up to worlds he/I previously refused to understand. In “MMV,” the band lists off supposed pleasures that they “won’t regret having missed”: “Camping, and orgies, and places on the body that I’ve never kissed,” but acknowledge that those might be good, after all. As fortysomethings, the Kadanes are opening up to the wider world, instead of closing themselves off, and God bless them for crossing the blue/red state divide, lyrically as well as musically. Plus, for such mopes, damn if they’re not funny. Even better, underneath Steve Albini’s surprisingly clean production, there still rests the lugubrious pacing and building crescendos that’s characterized this band from the outset. They might blow up but they won’t go pop. A

Encounters at the End of the World (2008), directed by Werner Herzog: Herzog pontificates into the Antarctican landscape, talks to the assorted freaks and dreamers who live there, and captures the continent’s dangerous glory in all its blue-and-white beauty. Plus, it’s funny, mordantly funny, and filled with Werner’s barbed commentary about man attempting to conquer (or at least understand) nature, and failing miserably. The movie’s the dark flipside of Herzog’s book Of Walking in Ice. A-

Star Time by James Brown: If you’ve heard this box set and Live at the Apollo, you have everything you need to know about funk, and R&B. As a bonus, everything about black pop from 1966 onward will make at least some sense. 4 CDs, worth any price you can find. A+

Never Cry Wolf (1983), directed by Carroll Ballard Startlingly vivid images of the Alaskan landscape make the cold seep into the viewer’s bones, and the slightly distanced, distracted tone of the voiceover—and protagonist Charles Martin Smith in general—keeps things eerie and a little woozy. It’s dreamlike and the narrative, already diaphanous to begin with, gets fuzzier as the movie progresses. That’s not a criticism; Ballard intends to create a sense of opaque story and character motives, even as the visuals get crisper and more resonant as the movie proceeds. He’s a master of showcasing animal life—though NCW is fiction and bound by the conventions of the protagonist’s diary entries (which in themselves get more lyrical and less fact-based as the movie goes further), this could be a nature documentary. Bouts of impressionism take hold and never let go. Never Cry Wolf is structured as a series of vignettes, bound together by the arctic chill that blows through the celluloid and a removed camera that emphasizes—in case you lose the point—how insignificant humanity is in the face of all this dangerous splendor. Show this as a double bill with Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, and you’ll never want to step into the cold again. A-

Fanfan la Tulipe (1952), directed by Christian-Jaque: Swashbuckling fun and Gina Lollabrigida’s lovely and bouncing form—what’s not to love? Well, it goes on for too long, the swordfights are a little clumsy, the movie’s not nearly as funny or charming as it thinks it is, and then there’s Gina Lollabrigida’s, um, acting. (She has, seriously, two expressions. If that.) Still, Gérard Philipe is a dashing rogue—the Hugh Jackman of his day; you’d go to bed with him in a second but you don’t trust him for a second, either—and the photography gleams in the sunlight. C

Christmas gifts

While there are plenty of Christmas songs that I admire, there are few that I enjoy, and even fewer to which I would listen outside the month of December. Mostly, for me, holiday songs merge into an aural soup of cheeriness. I’ve toned down my initial response to the tinkly blast since I last approached this subject—no more blunt “I hate Christmas music” declarations—but I’m still no fan.

What follows are my exceptions to the rule, seven songs that bring a smile to my face and a shake to my hips every time they come on the radio. Consider them my Christmas gifts to you. See you in the new year.

1. John Lennon, “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)”
I’ve made my case before (see aforementioned link), so I’ll just quote myself from three years ago: “Like the Beatles’ back catalog, ‘Happy Christmas’ feels ramshackle, from the slightly off-tune kids to the mighty, fuzzy drums to the clang and clutter of the whole arrangement. It sounds like something my friends and I could do on an inspired day. But that melody stays with me, the lyrics are simple but profound, and the musicianship is tight. The Beatles looked like four ordinary boys, and I guess they fooled us into thinking that they were, too. It’s a façade, of course. Their songs are quite lovely, tuneful, catchy, and impossible to replicate. [The song] is the closest Lennon came to recapturing the magic of his former band.”

2. Otis Redding, “Merry Christmas, Baby”
The snowflake-like percussion brings wintry charm to the backbeat, and then there’s the Memphis horns. The key change around 1:40 brings the song into a higher, more joyous register. And then, of course, there’s the best instrument in the song—Otis Redding’s gravelly, sexy voice. Redding’s delivery would make any woman come closer to his Christmas, ahem, fireplace, and half the men, too.

3. Bruce Springsteen, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”
This song seems to inspire high-voltage performances—see, also, the Jackson Five’s full-throttle version—but this is the most electric. Springsteen’s live take, with the full E Street Band, is jangly and propulsive in the same vein as the 1960s-era Byrds and mid-1980s R.E.M. The band goofs around and makes it into an arena vaudeville number—an oxymoron?—and the version swells, lulls, and swells back up again until it hit’s a final roar.

4. The Jackson 5, “Up on the Housetop”
The Christmas song as funk and proto-rap, with new lyrics specific to the Jackson boys and those Motown horns, “Up on the Housetop” is so danceable that it makes your feet hurt. Michael’s voice sells that cheesy line about “love and peace for everyone,” and everything else about this, a song hard-strutting enough to be appropriate for a rapper’s key sample.

5. Harry Connick, Jr., “I Pray on Christmas”
Connick’s original earns its place in the Christmas pantheon. It’s got the gospel—listen for that swaying, low “Oh, sweet Jesus” in the background—and the saloon sauciness of New Orleans piano pop of the 1950s and 1960s. “I pray on Christmas, that the Lord will see me through” is the inspirational lyric of Christmas songs, because it acknowledges that the holiday is a time of stress, doubt, and anxiety. (This one’s for La Bella and Lois.)

6. The Temptations, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”
My dad’s favorite group brings Eddie Kendricks’s gorgeous falsetto and Paul Williams’ beautiful baritone together to redeem a song that’s so overplayed and cheesy that it’s hard to endure. Oh, and the Motown funk helps, too.

7. Clarence Carter, “Back Door Santa”
“Daddy, why did you laugh when he said ‘I ain’t like ol’ St. Nick. He don’t come but once a year?” “Well, sweetie, it’s called a double-entendre, and— um, maybe you shouldn’t hear this song.” “But I wanna hear the rest. How does he make all the little girls happy when the boys go away?” “Go to your room.”

8. Run D.M.C., “Christmas in Hollis”
Sampling from #7, Run D.M.C. nevertheless own this original from the opening breakbeat. Santa chills in a Queens park with a reindeer, and it gets funnier from there. Merry Christmas, y’all.

And, as a bonus, Straight No Chaser singing "The 12 Days of Christmas":

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All songs will stay active until 31 January 2009.

32 candles (and Quick Hits)

Walter Quietbubble and La Bella, at the former’s birthday party, hosted and coordinated by the latter. Happy birthday to me, etc…. Okay, it’s all music this time around.

Stay Positive (2008), by the Hold Steady: In 1984, Hüsker Dü released Zen Arcade, showing the punks, No Wavers, and post-punks how the music and lyrics could grow up and expand their horizons. With Stay Positive, Craig Finn and company (also fellows of “the bright new Minneapolis”) basically bring the classic record into the new millennium. The album even opens with a song called “Constructive Summer,” a sly nod to the Hüskers’ “Celebrated Summer,” with a riff that’s so close to Bob Mould’s slash-and-scintillate approach that he’s probably owed royalties. Except for throwaway lines, Holly and Charlemagne and all of Finn’s regular protagonists are long gone; and when they do appear, even they seem disgusted by the characters who can’t move beyond adolescence and high-school nostalgia. As with all Hold Steady albums, the characters continue to get wasted, have empty sex and sloppy mornings-after, and nervous breakdowns. But they were teenagers and young adults before—now, they’re pushing 40 and things look grim. Actions have consequences beyond the next moment on Stay Positive: people end up in jail, or wasting away their twenties, and repeated refrains in several songs is that “I knew some kids who didn’t come back” and “I knew some kids who died.” Sonically, the band’s finally found a way to integrate the keyboards into the rock, horns add texture, Finn’s vocal delivery is better than ever before, and song structures get more complicated. Fueled by desperation, hurtled forward by fear, haunted by death, Stay Positive is a cry against the bleakness that, at long last, sounds like it’s coming from full-fledged adults. The closing three songs—merged onto a single track—essentially scolds arrested adolescents, but hilariously and poignantly. The Hold Steady loves its losers as they are but loves them too much to let them remain that way. A+

The Town and the City (2006), by Los Lobos: If Los Lobos has a weakness, it’s that it doesn’t have an inventive full-time drummer. Cougar Estrada has been a de facto band member for a decade but he’s just not as innovative nor as intricate as the guys around him. His flat beats can’t keep up with the ambient guitar textures, keyboard and sax washes, loping bass, and looped effects that swirl around this album. “The Road to Gila Bend” slashes and burns hard enough that Estrada’s parts could have been excised entirely. The stutter-step tempo of “The City” is held together by piano and guitar, not the drums. Only in the Mexican folk-themed songs—“Chuco’s Cumbia” and “Luna”—does Estrada show any flair. He’s solid but not inventive; he’s a mere timekeeper, and The Town and the City’s direct but haunting lyrics and melodic virtuosity need much more. David Hidalgo’s soulful voice and limpid delivery is as beguiling as ever. The songs are R&B masterpieces that have been hijacked by art-rock conventions. In other words, they’re spun gold. Or they would be, if the percussion was as propulsive and hip-swaying as they deserve. Actually, the music is so ethereal and Hidalgo’s voice so grounded that I wonder what this album would sound like without percussion at all. Probably spooky and wonderful, rather than the “almost great” that’s here. B+

Burnside on Burnside (2001), by R.L. Burnside: The north Mississippi hill country features blues that’s electric, with slurred and frayed slide guitar, mumbled and whiskey-befuddled lyrics that I can’t make out on the 15th listen, a willingness to experiment, and explosive drumwork. It’s closer to British punk than to the acoustic Delta blues 40 miles to the west. No wonder the kids like it. Case in point: this live set takes place at a club on Burnside Avenue, in Portland, Oregon. Burnside brings his son and nephew along for a scorched-earth ride through the territory. It’s the blues, so it’s all the same riff, but at least it’s a good riff. “Miss Maybelle,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” and “Long Haired Doney” ignite the room, and Burnside’s low moan keeps things sexy and scary in turns throughout the show. The beats are strong and driving. And he even gets off a good joke midset. B+

Hot Licks (1944-1946), by the International Sweethearts of Rhythm: A hard-swinging, all-women, multiracial big band from the Depression/post-WWII eras finally gets its due. Anna Mae Winburn led and conducted this explosive jazz combo for most of a decade, barnstorming into Armed Forces radio, the Apollo Theater, and dancehalls across America. Through brash, saucy renditions of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” and “One O’Clock Jump,” the girls prove themselves equals of the Swing Era’s better-known male orchestras. Winburn and company lacked the elegance of Duke Ellington and Count Basie’s bands, preferring to move in the musical direction of the high-voltage Woody Herman and His Thundering Herd. They succeeded, as these sixteen tracks show. I only wish the liner notes had paid as much attention to Winburn as her musicians did; the CD booklet adds little context, and misspells Winburn’s name to boot. A-

The Father of Delta Blues: Eugene Powell, alias Sonny Boy Nelson (1936): Since I’m taking on Ted Gioia’s Delta Blues for a book review, I’ve been trying, without much success, to get into country blues. (I’ve outlined my troubles with folk music before.) Nelson’s guitar lines, however, are more sophisticated and, when he sings, his voice is smoother and more relaxed than the vinyl crackle would suggest. Production values are problematic for this CD but that’s par for the course with transferring 78’s to digital means. These 19 songs, recorded on my birthday and the day after at New Orleans’ St. Charles Hotel, feature Nelson mostly as accompanist to Mississippi Matilda (shrill-voiced and haunting) and Robert Hill (throaty and too proud of his own voice). Nelson’s subtleties are perhaps too good for the two leads; at least he gets six songs to himself. Still, I miss drums, bass, melodic variety, structural intricacy, themes beyond trusty guns and untrustworthy women—you know, the lack that makes me shrug at the blues. Maybe it’s just me. B

Seven Chinese Brothers

About a month ago, Professor Fury tagged me with a meme regarding seven songs that I’m into right now, but it wasn’t until I read Michael S. Smith’s terrific contribution that I decided to get off my duff and respond. What follows also constitutes this month’s edition of “Quick Hits”—consider all songs as A-pluses.

All mp3s will stay active until 7 August 2008.

1) King Curtis, “Memphis Soul Stew” (mp3)

My sweetie La Bella works for a local soul/R&B label and so she’s been educating me on the subjects of Stax/Volt, Muscle Shoals, and the whole Memphis Sound. She started me off with this doozy. I love the concept of a quintessential song as a recipe to a studio sound. King Curtis’s dialogue sells the idea without irony or cheesiness, and it’s one of the finest jams ever put on wax.

2) Vince Guaraldi Trio, “Skating” (mp3)

It’s “Linus and Lucy” that made A Charlie Brown Christmas famous but I prefer this gentle tune. Vince Guaraldi’s fingers are snowflakes falling on the piano keys, and Fred Marshall’s drums are the dry leaves crunching under Jerry Grannelli’s walking bass line.

3) Lyle Lovett, “Up in Indiana” (mp3)

Lyle Lovett can’t quite say he’s in love with Rose—he’s not big on sincerity or sentimentalism in general, which is both his blessing and curse. Instead, he says he does “a little thinkin’” about her, and lets the rousing music pour out his heart for him. It’s not quite country, not quite rock, and all Lovett. It’s a swooping song with at least four perfect, short solos (pedal steel guitar, fiddle, mandolin, electric guitar) and a sound as big as Lovett’s home state of Texas—even if it’s, you know, not actually set there. Funny guy.

4) They Might Be Giants, “Where Do They Make Balloons?” (mp3)

Silly song, good question. And it wasn’t even written by either of the two Johns. (Thanks, Judith.)

5) Bruce Springsteen, “Gypsy Biker” (mp3)

An American soldier who loves his motorcycle comes home in a body bag, which is harrowing enough. But we don’t even see that except in retrospect. Rather, Springsteen dips into several perspectives—the biker’s lover, a friend, his mother—before collating them into the first-person plural as they torch his bike as a tribute to him. We get a sense of the town the soldier lived in, how everyone’s reacting (badly), and how the emotional devastation spreads. Lyrically, it’s the most humanizing, complicated portrait of life during wartime that appeared in 2007. By rights, it should be, from a musical standpoint, some folk dirge or acoustic ballad or something “sincere” and plaintive. Well, plaintive it is, but “Gypsy Biker”’s thundering power comes from its full-throttle ferocity. Four minutes has rarely felt so packed.

6) Massive Attack, “Teardrop” (mp3)
7) José González, “Teardrop” (mp3)

Within each of its albums, Massive Attack produced a definitive trip-hop song that both defines the genre and complicates it. Each of these groundbreaking songs features a female vocalist who sings (usually her own lyrics) about protection, stability (and the lack thereof), and the in/security of love. With 1991’s Blue Lines, it’s Shara Nelson and “Unfinished Sympathy.” On 1994’s Protection, it’s Tracey Thorn blowing us away with the title song. On 2002’s mostly mediocre 100th Window, it’s Sinead O’Connor and the lovely “What Your Soul Sings.” In 1998, the group produced its best album Mezzanine (I’ve written about it before) and, on it, crafted perhaps its most impressive song: “Teardrop.” The directness of the beat/heartbeat and spare music—a harpischord loop, four chords on a piano, just the hint of a bass line, background effects—meshes spookily with Liz Fraser’s gauzy, spider-web vocals. I could never tell exactly what she was singing in the Cocteau Twins, either, and it doesn’t matter. Her beautiful Scottish lilt is in the mix, an element of the song rather than its center. The song’s so distinctly trip-hop, supple, and feminine, however, that I never imagined it being covered by 1) a man; and 2) as an acoustic version. Enter José González. A friend put the González version on a mix CD for me back in January, and it’s been in rotation ever since. It’s just as heartfelt and spare as the original but is more percussive and rougher. I won’t call it an improvement but it holds its own.

The City by the Bay

Study in red and gold. Photographed 22 May 2008.

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

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

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Quick hits (June 2008)

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

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

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

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

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+