Quiet Bubble

“Holiday”

I don’t have any good Valentine’s Day stories, and the one Valentine’s Day that I actually spent in the company of a girlfriend ended with us hissing at each other at a restaurant, her throwing the roses I’d bought her into a trash can, ominous glaring, and an eventual, tear-filled reconciliation that wound late into the night. We still broke up four months later.

Depressed, angry, and alone, I once spent a Valentine’s Day evening in a dark theater watching Brotherhood of the Wolf. The reviews and trailer made it look bloody, action-packed, and completely stupid, which I thought would be a good antidote for all the lovey-dovey in the air that I wasn’t getting. I’d read Matt Zoller Seitz’s insightful review—which thoroughly panned it—and assumed that this France-goes-to-chopsocky-school flick would knock me out of the doldrums through sheer sensation. If nothing else, I’d get to see Monica Bellucci naked. I hadn’t counted on the movie being Makeout Central for smooching teens nor on the movie being so depressingly inept that I couldn’t even enjoy its badness. I got surly. I left 40 minutes into the movie, nerves jangly and frayed.

So.

Mostly, I don’t think about the “holiday.” This year, I’ll be attending an acquaintance’s anti-V-Day party—board games and beer for all singletons—and not worrying too much about the state of my romantic life.

For a good Valentine’s Day story, then, you should read Sheila O’Malley’s account of her best date ever. A terrific story from a terrific writer, it’s romantic, funny, anti-romantic, and honest about the dating life.

Get outta here

Well, it reminds me of the stupid criticism of the films of Whit Stillman, like The Last Days of Disco. They complain that it’s a film about white people, just about white people. Oh, now you’re concerned about “just about white people?” What about when 90% of the movies that come out there are only about white people, that’s okay. When they finally get a filmmaker who understands what race and class mean, they complain. Actually, let me put it better: When they get a filmmaker who understands what white privilege means, then they complain. Filmmakers who just accept white privilege as the natural order, that’s fine. Let’s celebrate that and throw some Oscars at it.

—Armond White, in interview with Steven Boone

January’s been slim pickings around here, for reasons both good and bad. I’ll be back soon, I promise. In the meantime, have you checked out Steven Boone’s site, Big Media Vandalism? If not, what’s your excuse? A cornucopia awaits. In particular, there are two things well worth your attention:

1. Boone and Odienator use American Gangster (the movie, not the Jay-Z album) to riff on the state of black folks in cinema, both in front and behind the camera. The conversation amounts to a thoughtful, often hilarious wrap-up on American filmmaking in 2007.

2. Boone covers the state of film criticism as well. In December, he conducted a three-part interview with provocateur film critic Armond White in which neither participant pulled any punches: Part I, Part II, and Part III. Every line is worth reading, and I’m willing to bet some of it will infuriate you, no matter who you are.

Hop to it, folks.

APB: Short film blog-a-thon

Culture Snob and Only the Cinema are co-hosting a blog-a-thon devoted to short films, from 2-8 December 2007. There’s oodles to read, with more being posted every day. Be sure to check out both sites, as the table of contents will be slightly different at each site.

Lazybones

Sometimes, I feel like Fran Lebowitz. This week, some snippets from “Writing: A Life Sentence” apply well to my life:

How to Tell if Your Child Is a Writer: Your child is a writer if one or more of the following statements are applicable. Truthfulness is advised—no amount of fudging will alter the grim reality.

1. Prenatal
C. When your obstetrician applies his stethoscope to your abdomen, he hears excuses.

2. Birth
A. The baby is at least three weeks late because he had a lot of trouble with the ending.

3. Infancy
C. The baby’s first words, uttered at an age of four days, are “Next week.”

4. Childhood
C. He tells his teacher that he didn’t do his homework because he was blocked.

And so on. It’s notable that procrastination and sleep are perennial subjects in Lebowitz’s (small) oeuvre, which explains her output, which is meager in pages but gargantuan in wit. She guest-stars on Law & Order from time to time; I have no such excuses. I’ll be back next week. In the meantime, I have updated the “Greatest Hits” section to the left, which represents what I think are among the best posts written by yours truly. The blogroll under the “hits” is worth exploring in full. Until Monday.

First!

Here’s an fun time-waster for bloggers, courtesy of Lance Mannion. We’ll let him describe it:

The premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into Google (preferably Google.com, but we’ll take the other country-specific ones if need be), you’ll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

So, here’s mine, as of 28 October 2007.

1. slip on your dancing shoes (from here)

2. the daily grind in dreamland (from here)

3. the invigorating, maddening mess of America (from here)

4. Let the turkeys fend for themselves (from here)

And my favorite…

5. I said more variations of the word “fuck” than I thought I knew. (from here)

What about you?

Popeye the movie man

I liked Robert Altman’s Popeye as a kid, but I couldn’t have told you why. It’s trippy, convoluted, chaotic, and I was sure that either a lot of the jokes weren’t funny or I was just too young to get them. It didn’t look quite like the Fleischer Studio cartoons I would later see, but the movie felt like it was emulating a warm, old, vaudeville fantasia that I liked. There wasn’t enough spinach—although, to Altman’s credit, Popeye doesn’t eat spinach in the original comics; that deus ex machina came only with the cartoons a decade after the strip’s start—but that was somehow okay. The songs were corny, but their almost out-of-tune ramshackle quality made me smile. I was never head-over-heels swooning for the movie, but it somehow worked for me.

It didn’t work, apparently, for lots of people. At the time, critics derided the movie; even Altman supporters—and they were legion during the early 1980s—dismissed Popeye. (Roger Ebert was a rare exception.) The common theory is that Popeye represents the nadir of Altman’s long decline in the late-1970s, from which he would not fully recover—critically or commercially—until 1992’s The Player. Oddly, for all the disparagement, someone liked it—Popeye turned a profit, despite its lavish set (built off the coast of Malta) and gargantuan budget problems.

Lately, though, it’s had a critical resurgence, led in part by bloggers and the online community. But I haven’t seen a better-written, more detailed, wittier, or more delightful defense of Popeye than this lovely piece by Noel Vera. A sample:

Crash and boom. Cut to thunderclouds piled high and visibly boiling. Camera pans down to a tiny orange sunset, all but overwhelmed by the oncoming storm; more lightning reveals Popeye's little rowboat, bobbing in a restless sea. Cut to a closer view of the boat—thanks to Altman’s telephoto lenses the boat is surrounded, overwhelmed, engulfed by row after row of waves, in an endless march towards the camera (Popeye lost in an ocean of waves, the way Altman puts it onscreen, is about as lost as one can get). Cut to a bell tower—think of the church in Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972)—shrouded in shadow; the bell chimes, the tower emerges in sunlight (filters, I suspect), and we hear horns blow the fanfare introduction to the song “Sweethaven.” The entire opening is Altman’s way of saying “this is not the Popeye you’re familiar with—not the Fleischer cartoons, not Famous Studios, not Segar’s strip. And not like any musical you’ve seen before, either.”

And Vera’s evocation of Shelley Duvall (Olive Oyl) singing the ballad “He Needs Me”:

Altman doesn’t go for comic-book flatness here; this is cinema, I submit, working with the simplest elements (the finest way to work, in my opine): a bridge, a girl, a song. The music has an odd, unsteady quality to it, as if the players had taken a swig too much sailor’s grog; Olive peeks coyly from behind a log pillar, then sashays (kind of) onto the bridge. “It could be fantasy,” she wonders, leaning against the bridge’s railing; cut to a closer shot as she turns and exclaims “O-oh!” (may just be me but the precision of that cut, timed to punctuate the languorous quality of Olive’s sigh (you can feel the swell of voluptuous—almost sexually so—emotions in that sigh) sends tingles up the spine. “Or maybe it’s because—”

Cut to a camera slowly swinging into place as she spins away on stiltlike legs. “He needs me he needs me he needs me he needs me he needs me he needs me…” (from where Duvall stresses the syllables you can see the realization rolling like a wave through the sentence—through her, in effect). Later, she walks to the left side of the bridge singing: “For once, for once in life I finally felt that someone needed me—” and turns to the right; Altman responds with a Tati-like shot of a house presented face-on (a full-page comic book spread, practically) its four windows manned by four citizens closing said windows in a hauntingly deliberate manner. The realization is sinking in, she’s saying, and Altman responds with a reminder of just how little the rest of the world cares, how emotionally distant she is from the rest of them (she’s drunk on love, they’re readying for bed).

There’s more, much more. Before you read his essay, be warned that it discusses the plot at considerable length. Even if you haven’t seen it, and I haven’t in two decades (but it’s on the Netflix queue now), read the piece anyway.

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For a crash course on Popeye, start with the reprint volume of E.C. Segar’s original Thimble Theatre comics that Fantagraphics has put out, and then seek out the Fleischer Studio Popeye cartoons from the 1930s.

En garde, avant-garde!

Girish’s avant-garde blog-a-thon is rolling. Read his entry on Joseph Cornell, and scroll down to see who else has picked up the meme. My contribution will come tonight.

New addition

Well, actually an old one. Pretty Fakes has been around since December 2002; one of its writers lives right here in Jackson, MS; Pretty Fakes loves cartoons and comics, as do I--hell, they draw their own cartoons as headers; the proprietors insist that their site involves "pouring bourbon on the line that separates art from trash" and then setting it on fire, which is just my style.

So why hadn't I noticed it until a few weeks ago? I don't know, but I'm glad Prof. Fury and Gorjus decided to inform me of their site's existence. Pretty Fakes is now listed on the left with the rest of the Culture Vultures. Go dig through their archives.

Think global, read local. Or something like that.

Spring cleaning

Attentive readers will have noticed that I’ve added a few items to the blogroll, but here’s a rundown:

I’ve no excuse for not adding Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading to the blogroll ages ago, as I check his site a couple of times a week. A wonderful resource for book links and for Esposito’s own criticism.

The music department has a new addition: In the Wings. She’s an Oakland-based classical pianist who writes beautifully about what she plays, what she hears, and the struggling musician’s life.

In the movies section, please check out the Self-Styled Siren. She’s stolen my heart, and she’ll steal yours, too.

Also there, I’ve added Dennis Cozzalio’s intriguingly named blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Two weeks ago, he started on an amazing project—an encyclopedic, sharply opinionated, and a little bit obsessive take on all of Robert Altman’s feature films. He comments on each movie in chronological order, from the 1960s to the present. It's so thorough that I considered adding it to the “Resources” blogroll on your right, as it’s useful reading for hardcore Altman acolytes, more-than-casual fans (like me), and total newbies. Don’t worry—Cozzalio doesn’t have goo-goo eyes, and occasionally slashes apart some of Altman’s weaker efforts. Here are parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

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Moving on, Karen Joy Fowler wrote an excellent obituary of Octavia Butler. It’s the perfect match of writer and subject. Fowler, like Butler, is a genre-blurring woman, who’s been trivialized by the East Coast mandarins for being a sci-fi writer, and by the genre’s enthusiasts for not being sci-fi enough. She understands why Butler’s writing resists easy classification, as well as the tensions that drove Butler’s work:

In the ’70s and ’80s, when much of the field was out in the clean, sterile sweep of space or jacking into the Web and leaving the body entirely, Butler’s scientific interest was in biology. Her work is all about the body—about disease, about reproduction, about the horrible realities of the food chain. Many of her stories feature graphic depictions of fluid-spilling, flesh-eating, oozing, gooey physicality. There were times as a reader when you might find yourself wishing her imagination and her prose were a little less vivid. In my opinion, she was one of the field’s scariest writers. There was nowhere she wasn’t willing to go in her imagination. There was nowhere she wasn’t willing to take you.

And finally, totally unrelated, I lead you to another lesson in living from Outer Life. I rave about Outer Life all the time, and the preponderance of my praise no doubt bugs you. But here he is, telling a hilarious and all-too-real story entirely in dialogue form. This is an adventure in suburbia that John Updike and Richard Ford wish they could write.

Word of mouth

So, this morning I was reading and cringing at the Cinetrix’s review of David Gordon Green’s George Washington–there will be more on this later today–when I noticed the comments box. One respondent, Lisa Rosman, gave an intriguing comment and linked to her review of Green's Undertow, a movie that spawned a lot of mixed reactions in me. So, I read Rosman's piece.

And then I read more, and more, and more, digging through her archives like a pig sniffing out truffles. And that’s basically how I spent my first hour of work today, furtively reading her sharp, funny, and compelling essays instead of responding to the pile of paperwork that’s sneering at me. Here’s a sample:

We Americans pretty much never shut up anymore. People blither on their cell phones and thumb their sideberries everywhere and always (even during film screenings); blast our ears with programmatic music and blather when walking or running or showering or shitting. There are virtually no moments left when we have to sit still and grapple with the pain that lurks in every modern template. Only a rarified strain of movies compel us to listen by resuscitating the stillness our daily lives so sorely lack. We are lucky that so many have been released this fall. For at their best, they burrow into that quiet and all it holds, allowing us to channel ourselves and our truest selves through them. And even if we don’t know why we love these films, sometimes we still yield to their deeper lessons and pleasures.

So I’m full of blog endorsements lately–sue me. If you care about movies at all, you should be reading her site, The Broad View, regularly. Hop to it, people.