Pick Your Pop Culture

Another Plea For Help

2005-09-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you've probably noticed I haven't had much chance to post these past couple months. So, for the nonce, Pick Your Pop Culture shall be a retired spot in web-land. Maybe someday I'll get the urge and the time to get back into the blogging thing. In the meantime, just read all the great people I've linked to.

And, while you're looking for something to do, consider giving some bucks to these guys:

www.nsalamerica.org

The disaster in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama is beyond belief, and there are a million ways we can help. I'm sure you've seen dozens of pleas for the people of New Orleans, and I urge you to help them, if you can. But, don't forget the animals.

New Memories of Stardust Memories

2005-08-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

Do you ever think it might be interesting to go back 25 years and re-live your adult life again? I mean, take the blueprint that was you as a child and teen, and avoid any mistakes you made after that? Or maybe, just appreciate the possibilities you had which have since passed by?

Nah, I don’t get that way very often, and for the most part, I’m one heck of a happy guy. But, I just watched “Stardust Memories,” the 1980 Woody Allen movie, and I wondered what my 21-year-old self would have done with it back when it was new. At the time, I had no real understanding that women were as human as I was, or to be more precise, I didn’t understand why they acted the way they did even though they were clearly as human as I was. So, I think I would have accepted all of Woody Allen’s views of women as being a lot more profound than they might actually have been.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Allen is a profound observer of the human condition, but all his profundity is in relationship to himself. He knows what it feels like to be a filmmaker looking for deeper meaning than a simple laugh, while his public wants him to stay the clown he once was. He understands the demands of stardom, and the ways the public can intrude on real life. He certainly knows his desires for women, and the mysterious pulls they can have on him, especially when they are being inscrutable, which they mostly are because he looks at them as something he can obtain, rather than as a person as fallible as he is.

I felt a strange twinge of nostalgia watching this movie. I hadn’t seen it before, so the feeling that came over me had to do with who I was when movies like this were common enough to make money in theatres. Obviously, Allen was paying tribute here and there to Bergman and Fellini, moving in and out of storytelling mode and playing around with symbolism, making fun of it by overstating it. And, back when meta-fiction was far more rare than it is today, when it seems as if everybody on any screen knows he or she is being filmed, the fact that the actors and audience are shown commenting on the film itself was charmingly fresh. I would have loved this movie when I was 21, looking to break with convention, dreaming about the nature of women, wanting to be thinking deep thoughts every day of my life.

Remember Me?

2005-08-22T15:11:00.000-07:00

Cat and I drove down to rural Missouri yesterday. I think it was Herculaneum, but I always get confused down there. She knows where she’s going, so I never bothered to learn.

Anyway, what’s happening down there? We went to Buckheit, which used to be a cool department store with some fun things to see. Like, they used to have the coolest toy collection in America, all these little die-cast farm machines and animals, and farm houses. Now, I think they had like two half-shelves full of little toy trucks. They used to have tons of cheap and interesting food products, jars of jellies and jams, and bags and bags of candy guaranteed to rot your teeth into a gapped-up smile. Now, there was only one small display of this sort of thing. Buckheit still sells horse gear, but there wasn’t much else to distinguish it from a pricier and less well-stocked Walmart.

That’s okay, I figured. We could salvage the trip by stopping at the giant Pevely flea market. (Oh, I guess that means we were in Pevely, doesn’t it?) Not only did we have the sticker shock of paying $1.00 admission when it used to be free, but I swear, there were half as many booths and twice as much garbage as I’ve ever seen there. This place used to give me hours of digging through old books and magazines and comic books. Now, we spent fifteen minutes desperately looking for anything that interested us.

The people watching wasn’t all that interesting, either. There was one guy wearing a t-shirt that said, “Hunt Like You Got A Pair,” which I admired in a completely ironic hipster fashion. But, otherwise, the whole trip was a disappointment. I mean, we had fun, but that was the pleasure of each other’s company, rather than anything we happened upon when we got there.

I’m afraid rural America is slowly but surely losing its distinctiveness.

An Update on Many Things

2005-08-09T14:59:00.000-07:00

Returning to the blog world after an absence of nine days is a little scary. I’ve got lots of ideas, of course, so many that I’m terrified of the blank Microsoft Word document. (Unlike in my youth, when typewriter pages truly were white and empty, the Word document always has those little icons at the top, which somehow makes me feel less alone. Doesn’t make it any easier to get started, though.)

Let me tell you what I’ve been up to. I thought I was gonna get a full-time job, but I didn’t. I was working for six weeks at Prison Performing Arts, a wonderful non-profit organization that brings the arts into jail. I didn’t actually go to jail myself. I was sitting in an office, learning new software, developing grant-writing and editing skills, and doing all kinds of interesting (and sometimes mundane) things. But, they chose to hire somebody else full time, and that’s the way that cookie crumbled.

I was going to write a post called “People Who Died” because that’s what seemed to be happening last week. One friend lost his mother, another lost her brother, and a whole lot of us lost a guy named Toast, who was one of those scene-making dudes who seemed likely to be a permanent fixture on the widest periphery of my life. I didn’t really have a clear idea how I was going to do that, though it was going to be based around the old Jim Carroll song and the fact that his birthday was last week.

I didn’t write about going to see Elvis Costello last Tuesday night, or about catching Bruce Springsteen on Saturday. (Or for that matter, about seeing the Bottle Rockets on Friday, or the very end of Sonny Landreth’s set after the Springsteen show.) Sometimes, my mind starts racing after I hear music, and I want to try to explain what I experienced. Other times, I simply enjoy it, as I did all this stuff, and words don’t come to paper.

I’ve seen some movies lately. Buster Keaton in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” and Marion Davies in “The Patsy,” both from the late 1920s, and both full of laughs with lots of magnificent physical comedy and facial mannerisms. The Keaton is his masterpiece, and it contains that scene we’ve all seen a million times in documentaries, when the building falls on him but he stands unscathed, having placed himself directly in the center of the empty upstairs window. I also caught a Frank Sinatra/Groucho Marx/Jane Russell piece of fluff called “Double Dynamite” that showed how the mighty had yet to achieve, or the mighty had fallen, or the mighty was posed as provocatively as the mores of 1951 would allow, depending on which mighty star you’re talking about.

I picked up some new CDs today. (For those of you worrying about my frugality in the face of unemployment, I’ve been trading out some old, unloved music for brand new stuff, figuring out that if I started playing all my albums, CDs, and cassettes tomorrow, at an average rate of say ten per day, it would probably take me a couple years to hear them all.) These I can recommend after one quick listen: The Flamin’ Groovies “Shake Some Action” reissue sounds even more amazing than I remember it, sticking true to the original production while somehow eliminating the murk of the record. Bobby Purify, “Better to Have It,” is a brand new old-school soul gem. Bill Frisell has a two-disc live masterpiece of trio stuff called “East/West” that absolutely blew me away. And Daniel Lanois has a new instrumental album of luscious, barely graspable beauty called “Belladonna.”

I read a great book called “Lost Delta Found” by John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. Ever wonder what the contemporary researchers from Fisk University thought about the blues and sacred music and performers they studied back in 1941 when the whiter and thus more famous Alan Lomax was taking all the credit? This is what they wrote back then, left unpublished for 65 years, and it’s fascinating. I wish I had written something more in depth about it, because this is important new information helping to put that music back into its original context, before any of the people, including Muddy Water (before he was pluralized), became famous.

I’m working on some writing stuff for pay, too. And, I’ve got an opening into a part-time research job. So, while I still look for real work, I’m at least bringing in some money, and learning a lot, and figuring out what can happen next. And, I’ll be blogging more often. Seems like every time I pick up a few new readers, I go through a dry spell.

A Few Paragraphs, Unrelated

2005-08-01T07:26:00.000-07:00

To keep my blogging feet in the door, I’m gonna post a few random thoughts and episodes regarding my weekend. Really, there are book reviews and music reviews and movie reviews coming up, but not today. Nope, today, it’s just detritus, some of it pretty, some of it about as useless as I can imagine.

1) Did y’all see “Six Feet Under” last night? Okay, I don’t usually worry about spoilers, but as this was one of the most unexpected plot developments I’ve ever seen on a major television series, I’m not gonna reveal anything to you. I will tell you that the last three weeks have seen a major return to form for this show, which had been mired in some seemingly hopeless levels of misery for the first part of this season (and, frankly, much of the last one). If you’ve ever enjoyed the show, even if you abandoned it a year or three ago, I think you’ll find this episode to be devastating.

2) I have now officially joined the modern world. This morning, I burned my first CD. Yesterday, I signed up for a downloading service – check it out at www.emusic.com – and I’ve been sampling all kinds of cool indie records at a ridiculously cheap price. Considering they’ve got the entire OJC catalogue, the jazz alone makes the $9.95 monthly fee for 40 downloads pretty reasonable. (And remember, a 15 minute live Sonny Rollins masterpiece costs the same as a 2-minute punk song.) So, this morning, I created an itunes playlist, and am now enjoying a CD containing the Animals with Sonny Boy Williamson, Skip James, the Posies, the Kinks, the dB’s (actually, I downloaded that one from the web site I told you about last week), Bob Mould, the Decemberists, and Sonny Rollins.

3) Saturday, Cat and I got sunburned. Apparently, if you skip two weeks of hanging out at the pool, you lose the immunity you’d gained to the sun. Man, I’ve got new respect for George Hamilton and Zonker Harris.

4) I watched most of the Cardinals game yesterday, and I’m appalled at the strange decisions of Tony LaRussa. I mean, yeah, they won, but why all the bunts? Why take the bat out of the hands of John Rodriguez? Why insist on taking out Julian Tavarez when he was throwing the ball great? Why, Tony, why?

5) We’ve been watching episodes of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” from the season 4 DVD box (loaned to us by our most excellent friend John Wendland). On this show, even when they pushed the death toll to absurd limits – there was a serial killer who was driving from Florida to Baltimore and killing every few hours when he needed gas – the human foibles and qualities of the detectives were never forgotten. One of these days, I’ll have more to say on this subject, but I just want to acknowledge right now that this show was one of the all-time high points of television history.

6) I’ve got to go make lunch now and head in to work. Tomorrow is my second interview at the place I’ve been working for five weeks now. Will they hire me for real, or will the job go to a guy who hasn’t worked there yet? Stay tuned, folks. The soap opera never ends.

You've Got to Hear This

2005-07-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

Click here and check out the brand new mp3 from the dB’s, a typically catchy new :Peter Holsapple ditty. Nothing is more exciting this year than the reunion of the original dB’s line-up – guitarist/keyboardist/songwriter Holsapple and lead guitarist extraordinare/songwriter Chris Stamey, along with bassist Gene Holder and drummer Will Rigby. If you missed them in the 80s, when they were the best band in the United States of America, there’s a new chance to get in on the action. I envy those of you in Hoboken, NJ and Chicago, IL who will get to see the only live shows the band will do this year.

Hey, I'm Back

2005-07-25T07:03:00.000-07:00

I gotta tell you, the best way to hear live music is to sit in somebody’s kitchen/family room, and let the musicians set up in the corner. Thursday morning, nobody in town thought for one second they’d be seeing Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell play Sunday night, but thanks to Marie Arsenault, John Wendland, Roy Kasten, and especially Rick and Nancy Wood, who hosted the event, a house concert was put together on very short notice. I believe the proper phrase here is: “A good time was had by all.”

First, let me just say that Caitlin and Thad are two great singers who sound greater together. Cary came out of Whiskeytown, the Uncle Tupelo tribute band once led by Ryan Adams – and to be fair, which released some pretty good songs back in its heyday. To be honest, I know next to nothing about Cockrell, but the songs I’ve heard from their month-old duet release, “Begonias,” have been enough to convince me he’s got talent.

And now, a digression on alt-country itself. Can we just get over the phrase and acknowledge that something happened fifteen years ago to make it possible for young musicians raised on rock to embrace country music forms and tropes, thus freshening up a tradition that no longer had much of a hold at all on the working class and rural audiences that had loved it for so long? There are a million things you can do with country, just as there are a million things you can do with blues. These forms are intrinsic to the American character, and I have no problem with anybody who wants to come along and play around with them, as long as the end result turns out to be worth my while. There aren’t really any more incompetent alt-country artists running around the world than there are incompetent practitioners of any other genre you’d care to name.

Which is to say, goodness, what is there to complain about when Cary and Cockrell stare into each others eyes and sing these songs of heartbreak and devotion? Cockrell has a high, wispy voice; Cary has a husky, dominating alto. Over the course of twenty or so songs, they explored every way of mixing their respective vocals one could imagine. Blended together into one close, sibling-like harmony; alternating passages as a dynamic tool; belting out individual vocal lines until you couldn’t tell who was singing what anymore. It was all gorgeous, whether on their original material or on incredibly well chosen cover songs such as Percy Sledge’s “Warm and Tender Love” or Lucinda Williams’ “Jackson.”

The backing band was magnificent. The rhythm section, a bassist and a drummer (who looked like he was 15, but turned out to be 25), could move from gentle pulses to r’n’b propulsion. Cary’s fiddle and Cockrell’s subtle acoustic guitar playing were treats, too. But, most of all, Cary and Cockrell turned out to be the latest beneficiaries of one of America’s best kept musical secrets, the very talented Rich Gilbert playing pedal steel guitar. Gilbert, who is equally great on guitar and who once was in Human Sexual Response and the Zulus, now lives in Nashville and signs on with a series of talented people to provide tasty and incendiary playing in a variety of settings. I realized last night that much of the best music being made these days isn’t being recorded, because people are going out on tour with amazing hired hands like Gilbert. Not that there’s anything wrong with Cary and Cockrell’s own record, but I’d love to be able to recreate the experience I heard last night.

The sound in Rick and Nancy’s family room was impeccable. The audience was quiet and respectful. There was no smoking indoors. There was a pot-luck buffet spread that was incredible. Beer, soda, wine, and water flowed copiously. Really, this is now my favorite venue, and while I understand that Rick and Nancy probably would prefer to keep their home to themselves and their two kids – who were sent away for the night – I have a very selfish side that wants a whole lot more musical events held at their house. This was truly a fun time.

Warring Worlds at the Drive-In

2005-07-18T06:31:00.000-07:00

I don’t know from video games, but it seems to me that if you keep on surviving all the levels, and then ultimately win the game because it’s rigged that you can’t lose, you’re gonna think you’ve been cheated. Because, really, where is the challenge?

We went to the drive-in last night to catch “War of the Worlds” and a second screening of “Batman Begins.” I only want to mention that “Batman Begins” holds up a lot better on second viewing than I would have thought. The montage jump cuts while maintaining dialogue during Bruce Wayne’s training sequences with Ra’s Al Ghul were especially impressive. I still have problems with the overall shape of the movie, but the technique is so strong that it carried me along for the ride, especially knowing exactly what was going to happen next.

Anyway, “War of the Worlds” is pretty much exactly like a video game. There is the obligatory modern-day blockbuster action pic ten-to-fifteen minute opening to establish characters, and then we’re off to the races, as the heroes run and jump over a seemingly endless parade of CGI-created frights. The catch is, if you’re playing the role of Tom Cruise in this game, you’ve got nothing to worry about because through no particular effort or strength on his part, save an overwhelming desire to keep his daughter safe, Cruise is incapable of being harmed.

Here’s the set-up. Cruise is a divorced dad with a teen-age son and a pre-pubescent daughter. The son’s character is virtually an afterthought. They figured he should be rebellious, should hate the father for abandoning his family, and yet should be incredibly gentle and aware and loving when it comes to his little sister. Not so gentle and aware that he can’t abandon her from time to time when the writers felt like taking him off screen, but certainly close enough to her that he is the only one who can calm her down – through some sort of family therapy method of finding a safe place – when the situation warrants.

Tom’s ex-wife is pregnant, and she has a new husband, so we’re not going to have a family reunion in this flick. The little girl is alternately wide-eyed Spielbergian innocence and prototypical wise-beyond-her-years smart kid who can analyze her father’s mis-steps in trying to establish a closer relationship with her brother. Then, the aliens attack, so let’s roll.

Metaphorically, it’s impossible to avoid any 9/11 comparisons for this movie. When H.G. Wells wrote the original novel some 100 years back, he was trying to dredge up some nightmare scenario far removed from reality. It was impossible for attacks on civilization to come from out of nowhere. Then, when Orson Welles updated it for his famous 1939 radio broadcast, he wisely moved the story to New Jersey, because America seemed far more impervious to attack at that time than England. Guess what? Now, we don’t feel so invulnerable. So, when we see an army of giant tripods blowing up buildings and frying frightened humans, it’s only natural to ask if this is an act of terrorism. We don’t need to consider sources from off-planet to frighten us. We’ve got our own boogey-men right here, thank you very much.

The problem is, Spielberg doesn’t want to do anything with the metaphor. He has to know he’s tapping into the zeitgeist of Us vs. Them, but he wants to pretend this is just an old-fashioned scary movie, where all we have to do is root for the hero. (And to make sure we root our hardest, the hero has to protect the innocence of his ten-year-old daughter. At least twice, maybe more, he makes sure to cover her eyes so she can pretend something particularly horrible isn’t happening. One of those horrors just might be Cruise’s character killing another human. Of course, Spielberg makes us close our eyes, too, keeping that action off screen as he concentrates his camera on the blindfolded little girl pushing her hands tightly against her ears.)

As Cruise frantically huffs and puffs his way in front of the CGI screen displaying streets falling apart behind him, cars turning to ashes, and really huge alien technology chortling along with some minor key leitmotif, the viewer has to understand this much. Steven Spielberg isn’t going to set up a little girl as the single most perfect representation of humanity without making sure she pulls out of this scrape in one piece, nor is he going to bump off her father. So, all suspense is completely lost once the aliens attack. All we will see is what happens around Cruise, and he will always be just far enough out of range of destruction to keep himself scratch-free. I kept expecting him to pull out a Maxwell Smart line like “Missed me by that much.”

I’ll give Spielberg this. He makes the little girl be a big whiner, and she screams like the dickens every time the blue screen comes up behind her. Cruise redeems himself as a father figure when she asks him to sing a lullabye and all he can come up with is “Little Deuce Coupe.” What? They don’t have “Rock a Bye Baby” in scientology?

Some of the special effects look pretty cool. But, there’s never any convincing reason as to why Cruise and his kids should survive, except that they are the focus of the film. Eventually, the boy decides he has to go with the army to help fight the creatures, but that just means we don’t get to see how he makes his way back to Mom’s house for the happy reunion at the end. (Like I’m spoiling that for you!? This particular Odyssey is all about the trip, folks; the last five minutes is perhaps the most anti-climactic sequence in movie history.)

Hey, speaking of the army, I noticed that a) there were enough troops in America not shipped over to Iraq or Afghanistan, which was probably lucky; b) the army troops were all completely committed to fighting and keeping order, with absolutely no hint of fear or loss of discipline; and c) the troops were, as far as I can remember, 100% white males. In fact, I can’t remember too many African-American, and absolutely no Asian or Hispanic faces in the whole film.

All blockbuster movies are automatically more fun if you see them at the drive-in, but that doesn’t mean I can’t quibble a bit. “War of the Worlds” bugged me on a lot of fronts. I didn’t like the idea that we were supposed to feel good at the end because Cruise and his entire family escaped completely unharmed while millions, perhaps billions of other people were dead and half the world was destroyed. I didn’t like the fact that Spielberg did nothing to update the original microbe destruction of the aliens; Wells was wrong that humanity was immune to all microbes but the aliens wouldn’t be. Why couldn’t the aliens have turned out to die as a result of ingesting, I don’t know, humans who had been taking the AIDS cocktail? This movie could have used an ironic conclusion like that.

I did actually like the idea of avoiding any official explanations for events. The way that people throughout the movie gave contradictory reports of what was going on was nicely ambivalent, and reflected the fact that Spielberg really wasn’t interested in the plot as much as in creating enough video game thrills to get to the end of the picture. He did that, alright. But, I’ve hated this guy since 1977. He’s never struck me as capable of understanding the admittedly nicely composed images he puts on the screen, and he’s not starting at this late date. “War of the Worlds” isn’t devoid of entertainment value, but oh, how much better it could have been with a little bit of thought.

Oh, Daddy

2005-07-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

Can I possibly say anything sensible about a book I finished reading eleven days ago? That’s ancient history, as I’ve finished another one and I’m about one fifth of the way through a third since then.

Yet, the whole time I was reading “Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority,” written by Robert M. Polhemus, I was thinking this was something I wanted to talk about. Because, basically, he’s found a way to turn the Oedipus Complex on its head, and discovered an equally potent mythological tale that’s wound its way through our society for thousands of years. Polhemus is talking about what he calls the Lot Complex, which is to say the tendency for older men and younger women to get it on.

I have to say, when I was growing up in the Church, I never really heard the whole story of Lot and his family. Somehow, the way I learned it, all I knew was Lot was a good man who was saved when Sodom (and Gomorrah) was destroyed, and that his wife couldn’t resist the urge to look back and thus was turned into a pillar of salt.

Here’s the nitty gritty of the tale that they left out in Sunday School classes. See, Lot was hanging in Sodom, and two angels stopped in for a visit. Of course, they didn’t tell anybody they were angels, but Lot was properly hospitable to strangers, so he invited them in and tried to make them comfortable. Now, it wasn’t easy to be comfortable, when apparently every man in the town was gathered outside Lot’s house demanding for these two newcomers to step outside and let everybody fuck them.

As I said, Lot was a good host, and he didn’t think it would be good for his guests to take it up the ass from however many men there were in Sodom. So, he offered up his virginal daughters to the crowd, saying they could be had for the taking if these men would just leave his guests alone. Silly Lot. In a town like Sodom, where apparently debauchery was the rule of the day, nobody got to remain virginal unless very specifically nobody else wanted anything to do with said virgins. So, of course the people of the town said no to the girls, and give us the new guys.

That’s when the angels said, “Okay, you guys are in trouble now, because we’re here from God, and He said we get to destroy your whole town.” (Presumably, there was some roughly similar tale taking place in Gomorrah, but that destruction is relegated to very deep background in the Bible, only being mentioned as happening at the same time, shorn of detail.) The angels were proud of Lot’s very nice gesture of offering his daughters in their place, so they told him he and his family could take off before the holocaust.

Well, sir, Lot, his wife, and his two daughters packed their things and got out of town before the sun rained down and blew up Sodom. The wife couldn’t resist a backwards glance at the life she was leaving behind, which makes sense because it clearly must have been great for this one Godly family to live in such a disgusting place. God, not being one to mess around with those who didn’t stick to the letter of his commands, turned the wife into a pillar of salt.

Believe it or not, now comes the weird part. When next we see Lot and company, it’s a day or so later, and they’re hanging out in a cave, believing themselves to be the only survivors of the human race. (Apparently, the angels didn’t fill anybody in on all the details about Sodom and Gomorrah being the only two truly wicked cities in the whole world.) The daughters get to thinking, “You know, it’s up to us to regenerate the human race, and there are no other men but Daddy.” So, they take turns getting him drunk and “laying naked” with him. It only took one time each for them to get pregnant, and their descendents turned into the races of the Moabites and the Ammonites.

Check this out, though. The Moabites begat and begat until they begat Ruth, who begat some more until begetting King David, who begat and begat until finally we reached the birth of Jesus. So, ultimately, Jesus was a result of this incest. Why did they never tell us this stuff?

The story itself is plenty weird for modern readers to get their heads around, but what Polhemus does so brilliantly is use it as an archetype for the history of women actually moving on to take some power back from men. I’m not saying there aren’t places in this book when I wasn’t a little bit confused as to how he thought that was a powerful thing, but starting from the very thought that the daughters made their own decision to carry on the race while Lot himself needed to be ploughed with liquor to stiffen up and do it, Polhemus actually does have a way of making you think about what he’s saying.

Onward through art, literature, film, and politics, Polhemus puts a new spin on everything from Lewis Carroll to Shirley Temple to the Bronte sisters and on to Monica Lewinsky. Obviously, he’s mostly dealing with symbolic incest, or simply the Daddy/Daughter concept of inter-generational sexuality (which doesn’t even always turn out to include sex). Here’s where the time lapse between reading this and writing about it fails me, because I really can’t give you enough specifics to show what I’m talking about. I can, however, point out that Polhemus is an astoundingly witty and perceptive critic of all sorts of things, and he will make you notice stuff you’ve never noticed before. Read it, folks, and prepare to have your minds blown.

Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson

2005-07-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to see Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson together in a minor league ballpark in Sauget, Illinois, a town just across the river that is best known to us St. Louisians as the site of industrial factories and strip clubs? Somehow or another, there’s something about America being said, but I’m not sure what it is.

I know that Dylan and Willie were looking to get at the all-American small town world by announcing a tour of minor league ballparks. I know that GMC Stadium is a cool little place to see a baseball game, even if the players are several notches below terrific. Do you have any idea how many professional players are above the guys who wind up playing for a team like the Gateway Grizzlies?

But Sauget isn’t an All-American small town where there are Fourth of July parades and sandlot ballplayers and little white dogs playing with girls in cotton dresses. Frank Capra never made a movie about Sauget. The town’s population is something less than 500, unless they were kidding on the sign we saw.

After the concert, we met at the Liquor and Lottery store on the parking lot in front of the strip clubs, and tried to use the restroom. At midnight, there were nothing but sad old guys watching multiple TV screens of horse races, pouring over forms, hoping the next race would be the one that would restore their dreams of success.

And, now that I think of it, that’s kind of a metaphor for going out and catching a Bob Dylan show any time in the last 20 years. The guy wrote some of the most amazing songs in the history of the world, and accessed some level of performance magic that compare to the thrill of winning a large bet on a race, if you could stretch that winning streak over a number of years. But, nowadays, you’re as likely to tear up your ticket in disgust as you are to feel that adrenalin rush in the pit of your stomach that makes you know things are going your way.

Not last night, though. Dylan was as good as I’ve ever seen him, except probably that time in 1988 at the Muny Opera when G.E. Smith was in the band. Oh, his voice is a barely melodic croak these days, though he’s doing amazingly intriguing things with his phrasing. But, he leads an incredibly tight band of mostly unknown guys all of whom were willing to wear identical black and white button-down shirts. Dylan plays the piano these days, but unlike last year, when I saw him at the Pageant, he wasn’t insisting on mixing his instrument up above everybody else’s, and he didn’t seem to be pounding out Monk-on-acid discordant clusters every time you turned around. Instead, he let his two excellent guitarists and the fiddle/steel guitar player hog all the spotlight, leaving Dylan to blow some trade-mark harmonica now and again.

The songs all exist in relationship to the recordings. He mixed classics like “Positively 4^th Street” and “Stuck Inside of Memphis” with more recent material from albums like “Love and Death.” Usually, it was possible to recognize the songs before he started singing, just from the familiar chords, even if the rhythms were drastically different. Then, he would sing, and you couldn’t often understand what he was singing, but luckily you know the songs to some degree, and you could tell he was manipulating the stress of words and syllables in ways that prevented anybody from singing along, but which was pretty cool, anyway. And, it felt like watching a legendary horse come back on an easier track, but winning over a pretty competitive bunch of other horses.

Speaking of legends, I was in awe just standing a 150 feet or so away from Willie Nelson, whose ramshackle magnificence kept me happy for an hour and a half or so. Man, all those songs strung together, all those amazing one-of-a-kind guitar solos and hammering rhythms, and that voice and that phrasing! Like Dylan, and the late Ray Charles, for that matter, Nelson is an American master, a person who absorbed all the strains of American popular music of the first half of the last century – blues, country, gospel, folk, and pop – and turned it into an expression which manages to be simultaneously individual and universal. Nelson is not mercurial, like Dylan. You know what you will get from him, though sometimes you get him going through the motions, and other times, like last night, you get him absorbed in the adoration of the crowd, and desiring to give them something back to deserve their love.

I was wary, but I was out there on that field, surrounded by friends, drinking fucking Budweiser, of all the crappy beers in the world, albeit something that seemed appropriate for the occasion, looking at the stars in the sky, and feeling that this was just about as good as life in this country could get. I mean, obviously, it didn’t solve the nation’s problems, but it was emblematic of the ways in which we can survive. If you can’t learn anything about surviving from Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan playing great music after all these years, well, you can’t learn nothin’.

2005-07-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

Aunt B, over at the very fantabulous blog Tiny Cat Pants, has tagged me with a series of questions bouncing around the blog world. So, let’s take a day off from writing reviews of things, and talk a little bit about me. Come on, it won’t hurt. I’m endlessly fascinating. Just ask me.

1) What are three of the stupidest things you’ve done in your life?

a. There was the time I got all hung up because some girl didn’t like me, and decided, despite the fact that I had only been drunk two or three times in my life before that, to buy a bottle of ridiculously cheap and far from tasty wine, and just drink it at a party. Well, yeah, lots of folks have done stupid things roughly akin to that very thing, but I upped the ante a little bit. I let a friend of mine put lipstick on me, because she was really into putting lipstick on guys that year, and then I decided it would be really funny to kiss the wall. Did you know that lipstick prints are virtually permanent?

b. I waited until a few weeks before my 18^th birthday to get my drivers license, because I was absolutely incompetent when it came to cars. I took drivers education, scored 100% on every written test in the class, and still wound up with a D- grade because I really and truly couldn’t drive. Eventually, I did start to get the hang of it, and my mom took me down to the testing place. When I backed the car out of the parking spot, I scraped it alongside the car parked next to me, and then simply didn’t understand why the instructor decided I had failed the test already. It was only a teeny tiny scratch, really. Nobody was hurt.

c. Just the other day, I was walking the dog, something I’ve done a million times in my life – well, this dog probably has only gone for a thousand something walks, but I’ve walked plenty of dogs in my day. And, even without dogs, I’ve been walking for years and years without incident. But, this time the sidewalk tripped me up, and perhaps in karmic revenge for all the laughter I’ve been giving to slapstick silent comedies this year, I started to fall forwards, caught myself, flailed my arms, continued falling, bent sideways, and finally, after what seemed a full minute, plopped face first on the concrete. I was proud of myself for holding on to the dog’s leash, too.

2) At the current moment, who has the most influence on your life?

a. Well, that’s too easy. It’s Cat, of course, with whom I’ve spent every day but four or five of the last ten and a half years.

3) If you were given a time machine that functioned, and you were allowed to pick up to five people with whom to dine, who would you pick?

a. I remember answering this question in my friend Tim Merello’s old fanzine. Sadly, I can’t remember the name of the zine, which I loved to death, and from which I cribbed many ideas. Any way, who would be on my list today? I think it would be cool to chat up St. Paul, and see just exactly what was going on with that guy for real. So, let’s put the man down for a serious discussion of today’s Christian fundamentalism.

b. I think I’d like to talk to Virginia Woolf, because I love her writing, and I haven’t thought about her in a long time. And, besides, she might have some interesting things to say to Paul.

c. Robert Johnson should come hang with us, too. I bet he could tell some stories, and I could easily get a book and movie deal out of whatever he had to say. And, I wonder if Paul would like the blues.

d. Groucho Marx would liven things up quite a bit, too. I’d love to talk to him about his brothers, but I don’t want to waste picks on three Marxes.

e. My late friend Mick Harris, who passed away about fourteen years ago, just cause I’d like to see him, and I’d like to finally get around to working up those acoustic folk versions of Ramones songs we always intended to do as a joke.

4) If you had three wishes that were not supernatural, what would they be?

a. Guaranteed jobs that we like and that pay us enough for both me and Cat.

b. Heck, I can’t even think of anything else to wish for myself.

c. So, I’ll wish for everybody else that I love to be happy doing what they’re doing.

5) Someone is visiting your hometown/place where you live right at the moment. Name two things you regret your city not having, and two things people should avoid.

a. These are tough questions, because I genuinely love living in St. Louis. I guess I regret that we don’t have another alternative newspaper in this town to tackle truly important issues, and I regret that we don’t have a way of tying the city and the county into one governmental unit.

b. Avoid going anywhere outside the heart of the city/county. In other words, don’t go too far north, west, or south, because it’s all just sprawl and strip malls and giant box stores and pre-fab housing. Well, maybe not all, but most of it. What else should you avoid? Avoid August if you possibly can.

6) Name one event which has changed your life.

a. That night I went out dancing with Cat and another friend, and the way she moved her shoulder caught my eye, and this person who had been a friend for fourteen years was suddenly getting me excited in a new way.

7) Who else to tag? Becker at Occupant’s Journal. It’s on you. And, hey, Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy, I bet you could come up with some great answers.

Betting on an Inside Straight Flush

2005-07-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

Let’s say a young actor or actress gets cast in a period piece movie nowadays. It can be any period you want to name, the result will be the same. Exhaustive research will be performed to make sure that every last detail of the period will be recreated. Hairstyles will be those which were in fashion at the time, furniture will not have been built before the year in question, dialogue will contort itself to use the most familiar elements of slang that have been passed on to our contemporary time, and most importantly, there will be music included which has been certified authentic and accurate to have been created within five years of the period of the movie.

But, you know, one thing that doesn’t always happen is the actors portraying living, breathing human beings who happen to be individuals, not representations of the expectations we have for a particular era of history. It turns out, the more you look into things, the more you realize that people have pretty much always been human beings, full of foibles, quirks, positive and negative actions and thoughts.

All of which brings me to a 1965 flick I’m ready to recommend to y’all. It’s called “The Cincinnati Kid,” and it makes very little effort to convince us that any of these people had a clue what the fashions were in the early 1930s, when the story happens to have been set. In fact, it makes very little effort to convince us that there is any reason for the story to have been set outside of 1965, aside from the liberal use of old Model T Fords and such-like automobiles.

Let me tell you, though, these characters live and breathe, and the actors pay close attention to revealing little nuances of character. Nobody is exactly angelic, nobody is evil. You do root for one guy to come out on top, but that’s just because the story is told from his point of view, not because he happens to be morally better than anybody else.

Ann Margaret and Tuesday Weld look for all the world like the hot-shot young actresses they were in 1965. Their hair, make-up, and clothes do not correspond to fashions of the 30s, at all. But, they can both break your heart with the insights they reveal. Weld is the farmer’s daughter moving to the big city, wanting to be loved for the rest of her life, wanting to be sophisticated, daring, in charge. Margaret is her a few years down the line, bored with the life she achieved, the husband who doesn’t love her, the men who she tries to seduce just to shake things up.

Then there are their men. Steve McQueen was at the height of his powers back in those days, when he could convey more with a strained look or a tilt of his head than many actors can do with pages of dialogue. He loves Weld, but isn’t sure what that means. He is ambitious, wanting to take his skills at poker to the top of the game by beating Edward G. Robinson’s character, the acknowledged Man of the time. Karl Malden plays Margaret’s husband, a straight-shooting card player who takes no chances, who doesn’t want to risk his reputation for honesty, and who refuses to put his wife before his reputation.

Much happens in the two hours of this film. Some of the most tense poker playing scenes ever filmed, for example. A vicious cock fight (filmed back in the day, I presume, before animals weren’t allowed to be harmed in movies, though there is no blood in this battle). A half-hearted seduction. Card tricks to win over Weld’s parents. A very cool chase sequence in a rail yard. Robinson’s masterful understatement as a man who is used to the good life, who is afraid it will end and yet confident he can outwit anybody. Bribery and cheating. Slaps in the face. Punches in the nose.

Just don’t expect anybody to look like its 1933, and you’ll have a great time.

Beginning Batman

2005-07-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

Understand, it was my idea to convince my wife and our friends to go see “Batman Begins” last night. The other option was to see “War of the Worlds,” showing at the Moolah, which I have previously mentioned is the greatest movie theater in town. But, I hate Steven Speilberg, everybody hates Tom Cruise, and Stuart Klawans, my favorite movie critic, had such good things to say about “Batman Begins.”

So, this morning, I feel a little guilty. Not that anybody hated it. But, nobody liked it, either. You sit through this movie, and you come out the other side thinking, “Well, that was a couple hours, wasn’t it?”

Christian Bales makes for a decent Bruce Wayne, and what little he gets to do outside the CGI computer programming as Batman was pretty good. Although, as my friend Deb instantly adapted his ultra-low frequency vocal approach when wearing the cowl, it was silly to hear him speak most of the time.

I think they tried to do too much in this movie. There was the origin story, the explicit commentary on the nature of fear, the use of two relatively obscure villains in separate plots, the intrigue of Gotham City’s corrupt political and law-enforcement regimes, the machinations of Wayne Enterprises Board of Directors, and a love story. That’s a lot to pack into two hours, especially since about one and a half of those hours are taken up with slam-banging action sequences shot with some of the most frenetic jump-cuts and you-are-getting-your-face-kicked-in perspectives I’ve ever seen.

It was all too much, because nothing was developed enough to make me care what was happening. Oh, yeah, it was cool seeing Batman float through the air with his super long cape rustling in the wind like a parachute, and the Batmobile roared through town with some excitement. But, when the big threat is that pressure is building up in the water pipes of town, with the potential of them bursting and thus delivering a potent formula which induces paralyzing fear in all who breathe it, well, let’s just say you don’t gain much by not playing it all for laughs.

The origin sequence, despite merging the tale I remember of Marvel Comics 70s kung fu hero Iron Fist with the long-familiar basics of the Caped Crusader’s early days, was probably the most interesting part of the movie. I say this fully aware that normally I hate origin sequences, because I’m far more interested in seeing what the super heroes are going to do rather than in some crazy-ass justification for their ability to do it. But, I think this part of the movie worked because it was less cluttered. Batman doesn’t need to be overly complicated.

I’m glad I saw it, but I still feel as though I owe Cat, Deb, Roy, and Dana something of an apology.

Talent and Passion and Music, Oh My

2005-06-30T15:26:00.000-07:00

I don’t mean to complain, because I enjoy both the challenge of trying to figure out office systems developed over two years by a previous employee and the income I’m earning by actually going to work five days a week. But, alas, it’s hard to keep up with a blog when you don’t have all that free time. It’s not even the writing so much as finding the subjects to cover. I haven’t seen any movies in the last few days, and I’m slogging through a complicated yet fascinating book as fast as I can, but I’m not done yet. And music has shuttled into the background of my life, so I don’t have anything interesting to say about what I’m hearing.

However, I did go out to Frederick’s Music Lounge again last night to catch Elizabeth McQueen and the Firebrands. Now, that, friends, was what we call a good time. Here’s the thing about young Ms. McQueen. She’s 27 years old, and yet her fave rave music these days is from the olden days of English pub-rock and the folks who followed in that ilk. So, you’ve got a young woman from Austin, Texas covering material made famous by old guys from England who dearly wanted to be playing in Texas back in the 70s. Will the circle be unbroken, I ask you?

McQueen is a pistol of a singer. She does it all with phrasing. Her voice is strong enough to get by, but not particularly distinctive of an instrument. However, she possesses the songs, puts some swing into the way she delivers ‘em, and a whole lot of passion. Believe me, you ain’t heard “Local Girls” by Graham Parker until you’ve heard her entirely un-sassy yet substantive rendition. Well, maybe you’ve heard it, but you ain’t heard it done in a manner so different from the original as to be a new song.

Except, of course, that it’s not a new song. Some of the songs McQueen does are new to me – as enamored as I am of the British scene of the late 70s, I never actually bought any Ducks Deluxe records – while others, such as “Almost Blue” by Elvis Costello, are as familiar as the hair on my head. So, it’s interesting that McQueen puts so much personality into her versions of other people’s songs, and not just any other people. She wants to sing the music of a very specific sort of person, the British pub or pub-influenced rocker.

I know, she’s got a lot of country and swing standards in her repertoire, too, but what’s getting her attention is the pub rock stuff. Still, she’s a full-fledged member of Asleep at the Wheel these days, too, so I guess we’ve got a lot of nuance still to wring from this talented young lady.

My next point has to do with talent. Or specifically, the difficulty of figuring out why I give the benefit of the doubt to some players, but not to others. The problem comes when talking about Jeff and David Lazaroff, whose band opened the show, mostly backed McQueen during her set, and then entirely joined forces with her for a final set of what was billed as the Roots Rock Roller Coaster. I’m going to own up to the obvious fact that I found the second guitarist in Lazaroff’s band to be quite attractive. But, pretty people annoy me musically all the time.

Nope, the interesting thing here was that, as I kept finding other people saying in various ways, she played in a weird kind of slow motion. She looks very young, and yet she obviously intensely studies the guitar licks of country, bluegrass, swing, and rockabilly guitarists. She soloed in every song, and put together impressive collections of classic ideas. But, she never quite delivered them with conviction, or more precisely, with the ease of expression that more experienced guitarists display. (Her counterpart on the other side of the stage, David Lazaroff was only really better at this by comparison; he had a few more original ways of tying ideas together, and he played faster, but he’s still got a ways to go, too.)

The fact is, this never really grew tiresome. Part of it was the great rhythm section behind the guitars; the other part was that whenever McQueen was singing, things were cooking no matter what the band sounded like. Still, I’m not sure how to explain why I found this particular display of the inevitable learning curve so much more promising than a lot of players I’ve heard over the years. There was something about her (and David) that told me they were going to get better some day, and in the meantime, there was the heady rush of making music on a hot night in a small bar in front of an enthusiastic crowd.

Greta Garbo Acts the Whore

2005-06-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

I’ve been haunted by Greta Garbo for a few days now. Well, not just Garbo, also John Gilbert, an actor far less well known today, but who was, in 1926, quite the hunk to be paired with her in a film like “Flesh and the Devil.”

Cat mentioned when I told her the plot of this flick that she didn’t understand why I like these old silent movies, because women are always either whores or angels. Aside from the fact that it’s still a common enough pair of options for female roles in popular culture, I didn’t have an answer that made much sense. I love the silents for the way they tell the stories, for the skills of the actors and the directors, not so much for the cultural values they enforced. On the other hand, there is a lot to learn by looking at cultural values of 80 years ago, especially when considering how they’ve changed or for that matter, not changed.

Here’s the plot this time. Garbo is a whore. But, interestingly, she’s a whore who splits up sex and payment into two different roles. She offers sex to Gilbert’s character, Leo, but gets paid first by her husband Count Van Rhaden, and then by her second husband, Leo’s best friend Ulrich.

Leo and Ulrich are as close to being lovers as 1926 conventions would allow. Flashback scenes show their childhood bond as blood brothers, and every time they meet on screen, there is a palpable sexiness about the way they hug each other and stare into each others eyes. Their mouths come within an inch of each others more than once in this movie. Back in the day, male friendships were often shown as being this intimate; now, intimacy between men starts the libido flowing every time.

Anyway, after early scenes set in the Austrian army camp where Leo and Ulrich serve, which are there to show which one is the top – that would be virile Leo, who literally has the top bunk – and which the bottom – Ulrich, who has to cover for Leo’s AWOL late night escapades, and who tires easily when performing physical labor which Leo can knock out with a smile on his lips – we encounter Garbo, and things get going.

The seduction scene between Garbo and Gilbert is easily one of the sexiest things I’ve seen. The key is Gilbert’s lighting of her cigarette, the symbolic setting off of orgasm. He does it smoothly, without much effort but with plenty of passion. Later, when Ulrich gets a chance to light Garbo’s cigarette, he fumbles with the match and it goes out early. I wonder if there was a Freud passage out there that gave them the idea for this contrast.

Anyway, Garbo and Gilbert are lying in exquisite post-coital satisfaction when her hitherto unrevealed husband shows up. Challenging Leo to a duel, but with the proviso that they pretend it’s over a disagreement playing cards, the Count winds up dead the next morning. Leo is sent away to Africa by the army because of this murder, and Leo asks Ulrich to watch over the Countess.

Three years go by, and Ulrich is now married to Garbo, who needs the luxury he can provide, but who desperately wants the passion offered by Leo. She tries to have it both ways, he tries to avoid her. Leo gets advice from Pastor Voss, an old family friend, who tells him that if the devil can’t get you through the spirit, he’ll send a woman to get you through the flesh. Yep, women’s sexuality freaked guys out back then. (As if it still doesn’t, but there is a little progress given that few would say anything quite this insane, anymore.)

Well, you know what happens. Eventually, Leo gives in, and if there is no indication he actually sleeps with Garbo this time, the intention is there when they agree to run away together. She backs down at the last minute when Ulrich gives her an expensive gift, and then Leo is caught with his pants down (or his bags packed, I forget which). Now Ulrich must challenge his best friend to a duel.

This sets the stage for a climactic scene set on the island where the boys had forged their blood brother bond. It’s winter, so they must trudge across the frozen river before taking awkward strides in the deep snow to set the stage for their duel. Meanwhile, Ulrich’s little sister – I forgot to mention her; she loves Leo, but has remained a virgin, and is thus the pure, good angel sort of woman – begs Garbo to get out of bed and go talk them out of this duel by telling Ulrich she was really a whore.

Hertha – and I do love that name – has her prayers answered. Garbo gets up, and starts trudging across the ice just when the duel is about to begin. Do you know what happens when you cross ice too often in a movie? It’s kind of like when you see a gun in the first scene, you know it’s going to go off. Well, just when she falls in and drowns, a light goes off in the male heads, and they realize they can’t kill each other after all. Cut and print.

Apparently, there was an original ending which showed Leo talking to Hertha after they got back home, but I much prefer this sudden stop, with Leo and Ulrich being miserable yet alive, and a final shot of the water bubbling slightly where Garbo fell in. It’s way bleaker, and offers no chance of redemption, which would just be a snore after all this drama.

In 1926, women had to be punished for desiring sex. The only way to imagine them desiring sex, in fact, was to imagine them desiring evil in general. They were agents of the devil, because sexual pleasure was a sin. This particular pattern has subtly shifted since then, and if I didn’t have to go to work right now, I’d look into it. Feel free to comment on what’s happened over these last 80 years in this area.

Forty-Eight Hours Since Last I Blogged

2005-06-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

Some days I just don’t wind up with the energy to write even a couple paragraphs. And yet, I have lots of energy for experiencing things worth mentioning. So, here we go with a small number of comments about a lot of things.

1) I don’t know where in the country you are, but it’s ridiculously hot. Everything I do is tempered by the fact that I live in a house where we only have one room of air conditioning.

2) Wednesday night, I went to Frederick’s Music Lounge to catch Tim Easton and Kevin Gordon. Both these singer songwriters were in fine form. Easton played solo (with the occasional aid of a local violin player named, I think, Kevin Buckley), while Gordon rocked with a crack team of Nashville session players who were channeling lots of Memphis soul. Yeah, that’s all I got, except to say you really should listen to these guys.

3) We caught up watching last week’s episode of “30 Days,” the new cable series by Morgan Spurlock, the guy who did “Super Size Me.” This time, Spurlock and his fiancée agreed to live for thirty days on minimum wage jobs (or more precisely, jobs they could get without prior experience). Watching them deal with the hardships imposed by such tight financial constraints was further proof, as if it were needed, that this country is surviving off the backs of its working poor in ways that are simply unconscionable.

4) Wednesday afternoon I watched Fatty Arbuckle in his 1921 movie, “Leap Year.” This was the last movie Arbuckle made before the scandal which ended his career. Arbuckle was completely exonerated by judge and jury of any involvement in the young starlet’s death which happened at his party, but he was kicked out of Hollywood anyway. Too bad, because this nutty comedy of a guy who can’t stop getting fiancées through no fault of his own was quite a hoot.

5) A 1926 Lon Chaney flick called “Tell It to the Marines” was the first movie ever made with the cooperation of the United States Marine Corps. If you’ve ever seen any of the dozens of military boot camp films which followed in its wake, or for that matter “Gomer Pyle, USMC,” you’ve got the basics. A boy comes in to the corps green as can be, and they make a man out of him. The pleasures of this one are mostly in Chaney’s complex sergeant and the enthusiasm of William Haines as Skeet Burns, the young recruit. On the other hand, Haines is quite the asshole to his supposed love interest, whose only regret about the night he practically raped her was that she tattled on him.

6) Speaking of slapping women around, last night Cat and I watched James Cagney in “Picture Snapper.” Oh, the guy is engrossing as all heck, pushing his way around as the eager young reporter who wants to go straight after his years in Sing Sing. But, that doesn’t stop him from pushing his hand hard into the face of the bimbo who never catches on that he isn’t going to go to bed with her. See, it’s violence against women because Cagney’s character is truly in love with another. Of actual interest, the complex series of reactions by reporters to witnessing an electrocution execution was rather impressive in an era when nuance concerning law and order wasn’t all that common.

7) I’ve been driving around listening to Duke Ellington’s “Piano In the Foreground,” a trio album re-released last year. Since most of the hundreds of Ellington albums in the world feature him leading his amazing big bands, it’s a rare treat to hear him just sit and play the piano. He had an elegant, minimalist style at the keyboard. He liked to stick to the melodies and riffs of the song, with little ornamentation, but plenty of variation.

8) I gobbled up “The Essential Doctor Strange Vol. 2,” one of those giant 500-plus page collections of black and white reprints from Marvel comics. The first half of the book gives us the 1968-69 issues of Dr. Strange’s own comic book, which lasted for a short time after years of sharing half of Strange Tales. The Gene Colan artwork is absolutely gorgeous, but Roy Thomas didn’t put a lot of thought into the meandering tales. Fast forward a couple years and we get the revival of Dr. Strange as featured originally in the omnibus title Marvel Premiere. With a revolving cast of artists, most of them really good but one, whose name escapes me right now, as hideous as any professional comic book artist I’ve ever seen, veteran scribe Gardner Fox got Strange involved in a hooey-ific bunch of Robert E. Howard gothic monster nonsense. But Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner rescued him, and the last five stories in this book are philosophical, complex, and downright powerful things.

9) Next week, I start a two-week temporary job. Should be interesting going on a regulated schedule.

10) Did I mention it’s hot?

No Fandango In Scaramouche

2005-06-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

Damn! They knew how to make movies in the 20s. I caught the 1923 version of “Scaramouche” yesterday, and was enthralled for about two hours. Oh, the plot is kinda silly, but the sheer energy of it all keeps things moving.

Here’s the story. Young man is in love with young woman. Young man’s friend gets killed defending the ideals of liberty in a duel with young woman’s “noble” suitor. Young man vows revenge, but can’t get satisfaction. Young man joins a traveling troupe of actors, develops a talent for scripting, directing, and acting. Young man tries to lead revolutionaries in an assault on “noble” suitor from the stage, but suitor and woman escape. French Revolution begins, young man plays leading role. Despite urgent need to kill the noble class, young man pleads to save his honey and another noble woman, who turns out to be young man’s mother. Bet you can’t guess who’s the father.

I love the way the ideals of the French Revolution get subsumed in this bizarre tale of love and family. Somehow, once everybody knows they’re related, all their troubles get swept away. I also love how the main character is capable of excelling at whatever he does, from acting to becoming, on short notice, a master swordsman.

The scenes of the Terror are pretty riveting, and the jump cuts to the ladies in peril do add a nice touch of tension. I know, it’s only a hair removed from watching a train bear down the tracks towards the place where the heroine is tied up while the hero races to her rescue, but it’s still pretty cool.

Oh, by the way, the play the hero writes is called “Figaro de Scaramouche” or something very similar to that, which helps to explain at least two words of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I did keep expecting somebody to try to do the fandango, but it never happened.

As Though La Dolce Vita Can Be Discussed in 1200 Words Or Less

2005-06-22T08:58:00.000-07:00

“La Dolce Vita” isn’t exactly an action flick, but it’s plenty engrossing. Fellin’s 1960 acclaimed masterpiece tells the story of Marcello (played by the incomparable Marcello Mastroiani), a tabloid journalist who can’t quite figure out why he is no more happy than all the bored and jaded celebrities he spends his life observing. The film moves through a series of encounters Marcello has with different women, until ultimately he is cut off from the only woman who represents hope to him, thanks to a loud wind and just enough of a tidal basin to keep them apart.

You know me, I’m gonna wind up focusing on the representation of women in this movie. Fellini seems fixated on three possibilities for women – they are empty whores, boring housewives, or virginal angels. Obviously, the only life option for the angels is to empty themselves out one way or the other through sex; there’s not much hope for young women to grow up into a life with depth.

Marcello hooks up with a bored and rich socialite who picks up a streetwalker for the thrill of being taken to her house to have a strange location for sex. The prostitute is paid only for the use of her bed, not her body. Marcello goes along for the ride, willing to make his friend happy, but not caring if she isn’t. He asks her if she wants sex, she says no, and then they do it anyway.

Much later, this same woman tricks him into revealing one of only a handful of actual emotions shown in the whole three-hour movie. Why does she trick him? Because she is a slut, unable to resist the lure of another cheap and tawdry thrill, making love while humiliating a man.

Meanwhile, Marcello lives with Emma, a boring housewife in circumstance, if not in name. Her only interest is in marrying Marcello, and since he is sleeping around on her, she tries to kill herself. That’s when we see another emotional side of Marcello, who cries at her side in the hospital. Of course, he does leave her to make a call to the socialite, but he comes back when the phone isn’t answered. (As an aside, it’s very interesting to see the sheer number of telephones in this movie, and to realize the difference between our current cell-driven world and the time when all conversations were limited to the length of a wire from a wall. Fellini definitely emphasized the telephone connections and distances here.)

After Emma comes Anita Eckberg, the brainless, sensualist (clearly shown to be at the very least a tease, which is a virtual slut in Fellini-land). Impossibly beautiful and possessing a chest that would make Lara Croft jealous, Eckberg steals the film with her sequences. Laughing and posing in her press conference, then dancing with a series of men, Eckberg flies off the screen with an ease and grace. But, while Marcello expresses an interest in her – out of habitual lust, I suspect, more than any real connection – she is far too flighty for him. Again, a woman serves only as something to be gotten or forgotten.

Emma figures in the next sequence, a visit to the countryside where two children claim to have seen the Virgin Mary. Here, Marcello tries to keep his partner safe – housewives must remain on a pedestal, where they cannot participate in life – while he investigates further. Chaos reigns in one of those amazing Fellini crowd scenes I’ve come to love. Nobody ever knew how to get more humanity into a large group of people than Fellini did. Eventually, somebody dies, and we move on.

After this comes the center of the film in Fellini’s mind, I suspect. Marcello sits briefly in a nearly deserted café. The fourteen-year-old girl who works there is enjoying the music on the jukebox, but he asks her to turn it off. She does, and engages him in conversation, instead. Somehow, we are meant to believe this is a real connection, though the film stops just short of being creepy and having Marcello make a pass at her. But, this is the only time that Marcello finds himself engaged by a female on a level other than one of disinterested sexuality.

A party at an old friend’s home gives us a chance to see Marcello dream of a different life. Steiner is a real writer, with intellectual friends, a wife, and two beautiful children. Eventually, he kills himself. But, that comes later. Marcello tells Steiner of his jealousy, and Steiner tells him that life is not any more interesting for him than it is for Marcello. I think Fellini believed people were pretty much trapped inside themselves, forced to go through motions they didn’t enjoy, even when they were rebelling against the conventions of society. At any rate, this is the first step in Marcello’s slow decline towards degeneracy himself, as he learns that his aspirations towards higher quality literature might not save him from the boredom he feels with the world.

Then, he runs into his father, whom he rarely sees. This is the most bittersweet section of the film, with Marcello wanting desperately to connect to his father in the same way he had connected to that girl. But, of course, another woman comes into the picture, a dancer in a nightclub who, of course, is slutty enough to keep the old man company and take him home for spaghetti Conroy (is that what they called it back then?). Here, at least, even though yet another woman is available to him, Marcello doesn’t even feign lust himself. But, from our point of view, we’re still seeing women as whores (or, in the offscreen presence of Marcello’s mother, a boring housewife).

One more woman to meet and it’s over. That’s Nico, later famous for “singing” with the Velvet Underground. Her bubbly bemused presence doesn’t exactly equate to any of the potential roles for women in the rest of the film, but she does lead Marcello to the party where he gets demoralized by the socialite mentioned above. After this, Marcello gives in, and leads the action of his social circle, rather than chronicling it. Things get really ugly in the final party scene before everybody goes out to the beach and views a freshly caught monstrous fish which keeps on staring out at them. As if the monster were outside them after all!

“La Dolce Vita” is so full of powerful imagery, constant and invigorating movement, overlapping dialogue, and creative genius that it can be an overwhelming experience. Marcello is the focal point of it all, the man who attempts to observe life yet can’t help but be hurt by it. It’s not as though any character other than Marcello is developed beyond a few simple characteristics, but the men all seem defined by things they do, while the women are trapped in relation to what they do to men. An interesting project for some ambitious young feminist writer might be to retell this movie from female points of view. Perhaps the socialite has gone through the same downward spiral as Marcello. For now, we are only left to wonder.

A Few Words About Jeff & Vida

2005-06-22T06:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve been listening a lot lately to an album called “Loaded,” released a year or so ago by Jeff & Vida. It’s not exactly been a coincidence. Vida sent it to me (along with their first album from a couple years back) in hopes I’d promote their concert appearance last night at Frederick’s Music Lounge. I couldn’t get a piece in the paper, but I played them on the radio, so I did what I could. That wasn’t enough to bring more than about 20 people out on a Tuesday night, I’m afraid.

The opening act, Ninth, didn’t come all the way from Norway just for me to insult them, but I’ll give it a try, anyway. These kids brought a Marshall stack into Fred’s, and wanted their bass drum to have a microphone. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in Fred’s, but the square room isn’t much larger than the average suburban dining room, so there isn’t much need for that level of volume.

But, never mind the attempt to spread tinnitus. Musically, these guys didn’t have much going for them. I guess the best way I can describe them would be to ask you to imagine some sort of unholy cross between Duran Duran’s funk and I, don’t know, the prog rock of Gentle Giant. I said it was unholy.

Anyway, those of us who had repaired to the patio during their mercifully brief time on stage returned to the parlor to catch Jeff & Vida. Vida sings lead with a smoky curl of a voice that has appropriated more than a couple mannerisms from a young Wanda Jackson. Jeff sings harmony beautifully, and live, switches between acoustic guitar, banjo, and his best instrument mandolin. (On record, he’ll also play a mean electric guitar, lap steel, and dobro.) They meander around the intersection of country, bluegrass, and the occasional pop/rock/jazz inflection.

Normally, Jeff & Vida play live with an acoustic bass player – they have two, but this gig found them in between leaving the one and meeting the other – but I never felt anything was missing. On record, they have all sorts of musicians, including drums, which of course makes for a fuller sound, but live, they are so engaging and loose that further musical augmentation isn’t really necessary. If only they’d been the opening act, I would have thought this was a perfect evening.

Holding Steady With the Hold Steady

2005-06-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

On the advice of my fellow rock critic Roy Kasten, a bunch of us went out last night to catch a band called the Hold Steady. Interestingly enough, the reaction of our little crowd ranged from manic enthusiasm to supreme disinterest, which just goes to show the wisdom of Tom Ray’s immortal line about musical taste, “That’s why they make menus.”

Me, I found them to be very good. Basically, this is a four piece rock band – guitar, keyboards, bass, and drums – with a front person who makes all the difference. The musicians are terrific, especially the rhythm section, but they would probably be a fairly ordinary band without the vocalist, who declaims rhythmically in a wildly exhortatory manner. What few lyrics I could make out were intelligent, witty, dark.

The comparison that struck me was that these guys are doing something akin to what Patti Smith did back in the 70s. Here’s a poet delivering his lyrics in a musical style, and taking advantage of his understanding and love for rock’n’roll. His style isn’t the same as what Smith uses, nor is his band the same as hers. But, the spirit, albeit infused with a greater ironic distance, was similar.

A word about irony, because this was something of a dispute among my party. Cat thought the Hold Steady were entirely too ironic, and Roy insisted they weren’t ironic at all. Me, I thought they used irony to cut the hearts-on-their-sleeve rock approach that would have made these guys forgettable without the vocalist. Because they could and did pump up the emotional rhetoric with forceful guitar riffs, percolating bass lines, swooshy organ chords, and pummeling drums, I think the Hold Steady know the tropes of rock’n’roll quite well. But, because the vocalist was both drawn to the release of the music and insistent on delivering his words where they needed to fall, and because, frankly, he wore glasses and a perfectly ordinary polo shirt which can’t be taken as anything but an ironic comment on rock star couture, there was always a tension between ironic distance and direct communication. That was the key to this band, for me, and I want to hear more of their recorded music to see if it holds up.Ho

A Summer's Idle

2005-06-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a beautiful, sunny, warm day with no humidity and nothing in the weather to cause suffering, was a great day to lay out by the pool. Somehow, Cat taught me in the last couple years to look forward to the time we spend at public pools. A baseball game on the radio, a good book, some sunscreen to prevent pain, and the occasional dip in the water add up to a lovely way to spend a day.

If I were the type who embellished my tales to achieve thematic coherence, I would describe massive splashes of water pouring over me as I read “Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies” by Alan Dale. I imagine the scenario thusly. First, I would have serious difficulty with the lounge. As I attempt to align the back to the proper level of comfort, the front of the lounge would collapse. As I lean forward to pull that part off the ground, the back would fall on me, and I would be trapped in the middle. Eventually, I would throw my captor off and stand with my hands on my hips, a slow burn on my face as I attempted to regain my dignity.

Once I did get myself seated, I would begin reading leisurely about Preston Sturges. As I turned the page to begin the chapter on Jerry Lewis, however, a very large young boy would suddenly come running towards the pool in front of me, and approximately fifty gallons of water would be displaced after he performs a triple axle and lands with a giant splash. I would sputter, and then the chair would collapse again.

You gotta love slapstick, and Alan Dale loves it more than anybody I’ve ever encountered. This book is full of analysis of the greats – Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton, Mabel Normand, the Marx Brothers, Sturges, and Lewis – and it adds to the appreciation I already have for the movies. As much as I enjoyed further breakdowns of Marx scenes I’ve memorized over the last 35 years, I was intrigued most by Dale’s postscript, in which he extends the legacy to the work of Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy. Let’s see a second volume, dude!

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

2005-06-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

Now I can finally say I’ve seen “The Jazz Singer,” the movie that changed everything. It wasn’t exactly the first talking picture ever made, nor is it exactly a real talking picture. But, it was the film that signified the future in 1927, the one that made sound an integral part of the motion picture experience. So, I’ve always wanted to see it.

It’s not very good, and yet, I’ve been thinking about it for two days. I find it interesting on a lot of levels. Basically, the story is about a generational divide, between the immigrant Jews who held on to their traditions, and the Americanized youth who need to move on, to build a new culture. Al Jolson plays the jazz singer, the youth who turns his back on his parents in order to, well, frankly, rip off African-American culture.

Why is he in black-face when he performs on stage in this movie? His big break comes when he snags a role in a Broadway revue, but for some reason, he corks up his face and puts on a close-fitting, African hair wig. I guess it completes his transformation, his assimilation into a world far removed from his own, while symbolizing that Jews weren’t the lowest of the low in 1927. At any rate, it makes the whole picture more problematic than the flimsy story and uninteresting directing deserves.

Jolson was described by Gilbert Seldes, America’s first popular culture critic, as an unstoppable, larger-than-life force, as essentially the triumph of vulgarity. And, you can definitely see that the guy was a bundle of energy, and capable of “jazzing” up popular ballads of the day. The movie makes a big point of saying he has a “tear” in his voice, the same as his father, the Jewish cantor. I don’t know much about cantors, but I know that the vocal sung by the father (actually portrayed by Warner Oland, who later went on to play Charlie Chan in many movies; I don’t know if that’s really him singing) was profoundly moving, while Jolson’s vocals are at best diverting.

See, I do know about jazz, and I know that Jolson wasn’t doing anything half as interesting as Louis Armstrong or Bessie Smith were creating at the time. It’s interesting that the 20s were known as the “Jazz Age,” but that was because white audiences accepted a remarkably watered-down version of what blacks were inventing. I suppose it was progress to try watering the stuff down rather than making it seem ridiculous, as minstrelsy had done for decades before. But, it’s impossible for us now to take Jolson’s vocals seriously, as either emotionally powerful (when he sings the pathetic songs about motherhood) or sexually liberating (as when he bounces around like a meth addict on “Toot Toot Tootsie.”)

On the other hand, I can’t think of too many depictions of actual Jewish experience on the big screen in the years between 1927 and, I don’t know, whenever Woody Allen discovered Ingmar Bergman. So, as a window on a lost world, “The Jazz Singer” holds some moderate levels of interest. The footage of the ghetto’s hustle and bustle was interesting, and the shots of services in the synagogue were fascinating, and beautiful. When Jolson’s parents are concerned he may be taking up with a shiksa, his papa reassures mama that many of the world’s actors are Jewish with stage names made up to cover up their past. That seems like a remarkably honest point to have been made onscreen at a time when changing names seemed like a necessary part of having a career.

So, I’ve seen it, and I can go on. If it’s hard to see exactly why audiences at the time found this superior to the silents of the day, which had reached a remarkable level of artistry throughout the 20s, it’s easy to understand the lure of novelty which caused talkies to so thoroughly take over the market so quickly. For better and for worse, “The Jazz Singer” was the movie that brought us into the modern world, the one where innovation would be seen as more important than invention.

A Few Words About Neil Young's Movie

2005-06-18T09:16:00.000-07:00

Nine years ago, Jim Jarmusch took a crew armed with Super-8 cameras to a couple of Neil Young and Crazy Horse concerts. The results, mixed with some hotel room interviews and some rare backstage footage from 1976 and 1986, were released in 1997 as “The Year of the Horse.” I finally got around to watching this documentary yesterday.

The backstage and interview footage, while mildly interesting, is rarely revealing. I suppose the best part was when Neil called guitarist Frank Sampedro to his room to fix a computer problem. Although the 1986 scream-fest between Neil and bassist Billy Talbot over a backing vocal mix-up was fascinating, I’ve since been told this was edited from a much longer fight which had been shown before.

Anyway, you won’t care much about the talking, but the music soars. In 1996, Neil Young and Crazy Horse were touring behind “Broken Arrow,” which is not one of their best records. But, live, they were coming together stronger than ever, and the concert footage is absolutely glorious. An incandescent version of “Fucking Up” starts things off, and while none of the other songs hit that righteous level of fury, they are damn beautiful. Watching Neil and Sampedro stare straight into each other’s eyes is a treat as they drive that rich, overloaded guitar sound into one glorious burst of passion. The last part of the movie welds footage from a 1976 performance of “Like a Hurricane” onto two or maybe three different 1996 versions. I could live without the Sonic Youth-inspired free form noise at the long end, but the actual song is still gorgeous.

If perhaps you have the live album “Year of the Horse,” be advised that none of the songs in this movie are on the record, and vice versa. I don’t know why this movie stayed out of my sight for so long, but it’s a pretty cool thing to have finally seen.

Robert Plant and Joshua Redman, Not Together

2005-06-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve been listening to a lot of music recently. Though I don’t always have time to really work up a good review, I’ve decided to start at least giving out a little bit of thoughts on these records. So, watch for the occasional paragraph or two on various recent releases.

Robert Plan and the Strange Sensation, “Mighty Rearranger,” Sanctuary Records. I was never a fanatic about Led Zeppelin, though I have had plenty of moments when I’ve been awestruck by their bludgeoning powerhouse of rock. Frankly, I think I’ve had almost as much fun hitting the high points of Plant’s solo career, which with this new record has reached a new apex. His long-time fascination with middle-eastern and northern African melodies and harmonies, combined with the blues he’s been assimilating since he was a boy, and an influx of some creative modern dance rhythms here and there, makes for one satisfying record. Every time I play it, I’m struck by something different. Do I love it for the intricate layers of guitar, for Plant’s controlled vocal delivery, for the melodic inventions sprinkled in between the blues forms? All of the above.

Joshua Redman Elastic Band, “Momentum,” Nonesuch Records. There are things happening in the jazz world these days, and I only get to hear the tip of the iceberg. This is a mighty fine tip, though. Redman is working out some funk here, mostly in a trio format of himself on tenor saxophone, Sam Yahel on bass synth, ambient synth, and other keyboards, and Jeff Ballard or Brian Blade on drums. I’m particularly enamored of Sheryl Crow’s “Riverwide,” which sounds like a nice follow-up to Miles Davis’s “In a Silent Way.” But, that’s one of the only quiet moments on this record. Mostly, Redman and company are slamming down rhythms and riffs, building intricate edifices out of danceable movements.

How Now Joe E. Brown

2005-06-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

Joe E. Brown cranked out the movies back in the late twenties and early thirties. A quick scan at the indispensable www.imdb.com shows he starred in 39 movies between 1928 and 1939. I hadn’t seen any in thirty-some odd years until catching “Fireman Save My Child,” and “You Said a Mouthful” in recent weeks on TCM.

Brown’s most famous role was many years later, a bit part in “Some Like It Hot,” in which he wooed Jack Lemmon’s female persona. But, in his younger days, Brown was a physical comedian with an aw-shucks personality and a signature way of hollering that starts out quiet and builds to a loud wail. Any of his old movies feature this holler about two dozen times, and it’s pert near always funny.

They didn’t spend much time on the plots in these films. “Fireman” is about a baseball pitcher (employed by the St. Louis Cardinals, of all teams) who’s also a great fire fighter, and who gets distracted when he hears sirens. “Mouthful” is a strange confusion of identity picture in which Brown’s character gets mistaken for a champion marathon swimmer. Urged on by his new ward Farina (from Our Gang), Brown wins the heart of a very young Ginger Rogers by actually managing to win the hours-long marathon despite never knowing how to swim before he got there.

It’s not logic we’re looking for here. It’s Brown’s huge gaping maw of a mouth, a hole larger than anything not drawn by Jack Kirby in the 60s. It’s his wind-up toy awkward movements, his ability to create strange patterns with his arms, head, and legs which he can duplicate several times in each movie. It’s his ability to be seen as foolish yet unbeatable at the same time. There is no suspense in these films, no real connection between sequences. It’s just a series of gags interrupted by half-hearted romance. These are not guffaw-inducing comedies, but they’ll put a smile on your face and a warm feeling in your belly. And, hey, two down and 37 more to go.

The Naked Truth About Naked Lunch

2005-06-14T11:34:00.000-07:00

I’ve always felt I should dig William Burroughs. I mean, the guy is from St. Louis, all kinds of my friends worship him, and he was always cool as hell when he’d appear on TV, in movies, or on records. I met him once, too, and he sounded exactly like himself when he talked, which, for some reason, impressed me greatly at the time.

But, you know, I’ve never read much of his stuff. Just “Junky,” and some excerpts from other, more formidable novels. One thing I know about his writing, though, is that it is in love with language. It may be the kind of love that borders on hate, but ultimately, language is always held to be the highest, most perfect part of life.

So, watching David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” last night, it occurred to me that it was odd how little love for language was in there. Cronenberg loves visuals, of course, and there were plenty of oddball ones in the flick. All those typewriters turning into bugs, and the pure ickiness of the mugwomps, you know. The music was cool, lots of Ornette Coleman sax solos floating in and out of the background. The actors, especially Judy Davis, had some fun with their roles. But, they didn’t get to talk much in those Burroughsian rhythms that make him such a major force of nature.

I hadn’t seen this in about twelve years, so I’m glad I gave it another chance, but ultimately, I’m just not sure “Naked Lunch” works that well as a movie.

Discussin' Fat Possum

2005-06-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve always suspected an element of racism in the mania for Fat Possum blues artists over the last ten or so years. All these young white kids who had no interest in or knowledge of the form of the blues were suddenly cheering on these old black men missing teeth and meandering off and on the norms of pitch and intonation. I’d hear the occasional mildly interesting song, but it was hard to get past the fact that I knew so many better blues records.

There is a myth of authenticity that permeates our culture. Somehow, people expect a purity to exist, a Platonic version in reality. The ideal is often rooted in the past, at a time when things were simpler – and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, when African-Americans (or for that matter, women, gays, Native Americans, etc.) knew their place. So, the belief that blues performers who remained undiscovered, who were barely if at all tainted by contact with the mainstream of the genre, would inevitably be more pure than the slicker performers these people never heard in the first place.

I watched the documentary “You See Me Laughin’,” which is built around the Fat Possum empire, such as it is. I have to admit my admiration for these guys – R.L. Burnside, Cedell Davis, T Model Ford, Junior Kimbrough, et al – did grow as a result of the movie. Each of them does have a distinctive style, a personal version of the blues, which is all you can ask of a musician. Burnside, in fact, has a lot more chops than I thought he did, and a greater orientation towards creating a throbbing, propulsive groove. I suspect the live footage, whether intimate performances in living rooms, or loud, rockin’ performances in juke joints or at festivals, engaged me more than the records, which I recall being sloppy at times to no purpose. But, it’s also the genuine warmth of these individuals on screen, and the stories they had to tell which amplified their music. Maybe I was too quick to dismiss them, or maybe I just needed to see them as people first, before I could enjoy their music more. (On the other hand, Jon Spencer comes across as a nice guy onscreen, but the Blues Explosion stuff with Burnside remains unlistenable.)

This got me to thinking about the relationship between personality and music. I rarely get to know national recording artists. The ones I have met have been in mostly artificial circumstances, formal interviews or meet and greets. (That’s why I remember most fondly the Meat Puppets, because we actually hung out all day once, or the Long Ryders, because we went up in the Arch together.) But, I sure do know a lot of local artists. Some of them are enormously talented, some of them less so. I try to maintain a critical distance from my friends and acquaintances, but I do occasionally find myself giving the benefit of the doubt to musicians I’ve met. Somehow, knowing somebody has a sense of humor makes it easier to take it when a guitar is out of tune, or a vocal line only hints at an obviously intended melody.

But, then again, some things are just plain bad.

Hurrah for Marah

2005-06-14T11:08:00.000-07:00

Serge Bielanko lifts his head up high, closes his eyes, and delivers all the passion and energy of his body through his hands as he strums his guitar. His brother Dave is barking into the microphone, picking riffs on the banjo, and channeling the mood of the crowd into the music. The non-Bielanko members of Marah are just as excited to be there; the rhythms are furious, powerful, irresistible.

I know, I know, Nick Hornby has already gone on and on about how Marah is the greatest live band in the known universe, and one of the few that’s been worth anything in the last ten or twenty years. I’m not going to make a claim like that. But, I can tell you that seeing them last night at Off Broadway was one of those experiences that can completely recharge any tired batteries I might have had going in. This is what rock’n’roll is supposed to do – connect musicians and audience into a communal ecstatic frenzy, all grounded in basic, elemental structures and solid craftsmanship.

It’s not as though I’ve grown tired of music. I listen to it all the time, I go out to see bands week in, week out. When I meet people away from the music scene, and I tell them I go to only about fifty concerts a year, they seem shocked at how high that number is. I’m just comparing it to my peak years of 150 shows attended annually, so it seems as though I’m being conservative.

I have good experiences all the time, but shows such as last night’s Marah performance remain magical. I saw these guys three times last year, and only the first time was better than this one. I can’t honestly say whether or not I remember it as being better because a) I had absolutely zero expectations, having never really heard more than a song or two from them, so all the good of the show seemed remarkably better; b) the mixing in of a greater number of Serge Bielanko vocal songs, as well as a larger influx of r’n’b, really made for a more powerful show because of the variety; or c) Cat, Karen, and I had downed a lot of wine before the show, and we weren’t ready to stop drinking once we got there.

At any rate, last night I imbibed only moderate alcohol, so my mind is clear. This was a show of pure joy. It’s funny how Marah’s lyrics are generally bleak, but their live shows are so gosh-darn happy. But, that’s what they do, and when they are feeling completely comfortable, as they were last night, Marah really can be just about as good as rock’n’roll gets.

The Comeback Brings Back Memories

2005-06-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

Watching Lisa Kudrow absorb every disappointment possible on her new series “The Comeback” is becoming the most wince-inducing pleasure of the year. I’m laughing, but my stomach is churning just thinking about this show. Last night’s episode was full of pain and brought back bad memories.

When I was a junior in high school, I remember not having any friends with whom to sit at lunch. So, the first couple of days, I sat alone, enjoying my deviled ham sandwich, bag of chips, and Ding Dong. Or maybe I bought a slice of pizza. I don’t remember exactly, but I know it was something healthy like that.

On the third or fourth day of the week, some boys I knew, but didn’t know well, invited me to join them at the next table. So, I gathered my lunch up, walked over, and pulled out a chair. Mike Pappert said, “Pick, I wouldn’t sit there if I were you.” Not understanding that he was actually trying to give me good advice, I assumed it was some sort of ribbing. I was used to people making fun of me, you see, even though I’d never had any of these guys do it.

“Pappert,” I said excitedly. “I’ll sit anywhere I please. This chair looks good to me, so I’m sitting here.”

Then I looked down, and saw that, for whatever reason, the chair was full of water.

Oh, boy, did that ever hurt. Sheepish, I pulled out the next chair, and sat with that group in awkward silence.

On “The Comeback” last night, Kudrow’s character is flown to New York for the upfronts – and thank you, Entertainment Weekly, for reporting a couple weeks ago on this phenomenon, so I could appreciate what was happening. This is where the networks preview their new shows to affiliates and sponsors. It’s a big deal, of course.

“The Comeback,” you may or may not recall, is a sitcom about a reality show being filmed about a sitcom star. It’s shown entirely from the point of view of raw footage for the reality show. Kudrow’s co-stars on the new show are introduced, but she is not. So, she is hurt, and begins lashing out at the stage manager. During her tantrum, we here the announcement regarding her reality series, and we realize that they intentionally didn’t mention her for the sitcom, waiting to give her a bigger introduction on her own.

Ouch! It’s funny, I knew that moment on the show hit me hard, but I didn’t realize why until I started writing this. It’s probably one of the worst types of embarrassments, when we attack at the time of being helped.

Last Day of Twang

2005-06-13T09:02:00.000-07:00

The last day of Twangfest 9 seems like a blur to me now. Images mix up in my head. There’s Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash dueting on the same song Armstrong recorded in 1930 with Jimmie Rodgers. Here’s the Bottle Rockets playing the tightest, most power-packed set I’ve ever heard from them (going back some 18 years to their Chicken Truck incarnation). And now, it’s 2 in the morning and some 5’6” girl at the bar wants to see how tall she is compared to my 6’8” frame.

I sat in the Schlafly Bottle Works for three and a half hours watching the amazing collection of vintage films and TV transcripts called Twangclips. Barry Mazor, senior editor of No Depression, runs this part of the program. There were technical difficulties aplenty, and the people in the room were talking louder than the music – can you believe they could make more noise than the Dream Syndicate in their Paul B. Cutler guitar shredding prime? – but it was a blast seeing images of Bob Wills, Patsy Cline, Green on Red, Loretta Lynn, and many, many more.

Meanwhile, Undertow Records was hosting a party out on the parking lot, spotlighting a number of their bands. I didn’t get to catch much, though the last couple songs played by Steve Dawson (of Dolly Varden) were exceptional. I think this guy is a songwriter to watch. He’s written some really interesting stuff already, and the bits I’ve heard from his forthcoming solo album are really cool. Finally, Adam Reichmann (formerly of Nadine) played a half dozen lovely songs all by his lonesome, ending just before the rain started coming down hard.

That night, Twangfest moved from the comfy confines of the Duck Room to the large space of the Pageant. With hundreds more people in the club, it was much harder to spot all the friends I know from previous nights (and years), but I got plenty of socializing in. The Townsmen from Columbus, Ohio opened the show with a nice bit of R.E.M./Jayhawks jangle pop. I really liked the drummer a lot, and the guitar solos had some teeth to them. The guy from Slobberbone followed, and did nothing for me. It was raunchy country-based rock that never quite coalesced into anything with a personality.

The Bottle Rockets, however, had personality to spare. For many years, Brian Henneman has been the focus of this band, and if he was in a bad mood, there was no hope for the show. Now, while he’s still the driving force, he is surrounded by excellent musicians. Long-time drummer Mark Ortmann is locked in with brand new bassist Keith Voegele, and somewhat recent additional guitarist John Horton can give Henneman a run for his money in the lead guitar race. It’s great to see a band come together better than they’ve ever been after all these years. They played old classics and a few new songs which should be recorded by next spring. I’ve always thought the Bottle Rockets were the best of the original alt-country triumvirate (along with Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks), but now they’re truly great.

I wish I was as excited by Neko Case, the final act of this year’s Twangfest. I love her records, but somehow, when I see her live, things never quite reach the apex of excitement I expect from her. She sings beautifully, but seems detached from the music. This doesn’t happen when she’s in the New Pornographers, where she seems to be having a ball. But as a front person, she comes off as too serious, and perversely deflects the serious beauty of the songs. They sound not exactly clinical, but far from emotionally true.

After the Pageant kicked us out, we repaired to the Halo Bar for further drinking. Much fun and hysterical conversation occurred, very little of which would make sense to anybody reading this. But, on a personal note, Cat and I achieved a new milestone. After getting to sleep near 4 in the morning, we didn’t wake up until after 11 am. Normally, we tend to arise before 8, no matter what we did the night before. What will this mean for our future weekends?

Twangfest Update

2005-06-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of Twangfest, so here’s an update on what I’ve seen so far. Wednesday night’s opening festivities were a lot of fun. Three bands played. Milton Mapes were a lot more powerful live than they are on record, albeit somewhat less melodically interesting. Or maybe the livelier rock sound overpowered the subtlety of their tunes. I don’t know. I liked them, but I can’t recall too much of what I heard two and a half days ago.

Not so with Jon Dee Graham. Here’s a guy who’s flown under my radar for a long, long time. I saw him with the True Believers something like 19 years ago, but I didn’t remember him specifically being so good. I remember loving the show, but there were three guitarists. Well, he’s a world-class level player, roughly akin to a country-influenced Richard Lloyd. And, he can’t sing any better than Lloyd, so those comparisons rang in my head all night. Still, I vow to never miss this guy again, because that performance was absolutely spectacular.

The raunchy good times of the Meat Purveyors ended the night. This band is just plain fun, with an acoustic guitarist/songwriter and a mandolin player who are functional, yet completely overshadowed by the larger than life vocal presentation of Jo Walston, and the in-your-face stand-up bass playing of Cherilyn DiMond. The originals are catchy, the covers – notably the Madonna medley – brilliant. This is music that’s as close to good-time back porch party sounds as you’re ever gonna see on a stage. I do think I liked them better at Frederick’s Music Lounge, where you’re literally about ten feet away from the stage at all times, but I’m not going to begrudge them a chance to play in front of a larger crowd.

We skipped Thursday night, since neither Cat nor myself are fans of Supersuckers or Richmond Fontaine. The band on that bill we do love, St. Louis’s own Rough Shop, apparently put on the best show of its life, according to at least a dozen people we saw yesterday.

Friday afternoon, we visited Twangpin, the party held at the Maplewood Lanes bowling alley. There, the Bowling Stones, an amalgamation of Twangfest organizers and friends, played a fun set of country and rock covers. It was somewhat under-rehearsed, but full of passion and intelligent arrangements. Bet you’ve never heard “Teenage Kicks” played on a dobro, have you?

Friday night, it was on to the Duck Room for the night I most anticipated. I forget the opening act’s name, but that’s all right since I didn’t like him much. Nora O’Connor, however, was a delight. I enjoyed her more a few months back at Off Broadway, because there were only ten people in the crowd and we could concentrate on her impeccable vocal skills. She uses a lot of dynamics, moving closer and further away from the microphone as she raises and lowers her voice. In a big room, with 150 or more people talking over the quiet performance, it was hard to hear. But, it was terrific. I just wish she had brought a drummer along to pump up the crowd a bit.

Moot Davis had no such problems. What a band he’s got, led by the astounding guitar stylings of Pete Anderson (you know, the guy who worked with Dwight Yoakam for more than 15 years). This is honky tonk music on amphetamines, pumped up to warp speed without ever sounding punk. That’s because Anderson and the rhythm section insist on staying true to the groove, even if they infuse it with extra power. Davis is a great singer, and his songs are often catchy. I do still think if he ever loses Anderson, his meal ticket will be gone for good, but right now, this is as solid a country act as you’ll find.

Finally last night, we had a party with Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys, one of the great country/western swing/r’n’b party bands of the last ten years. Sandy can sound absolutely like a young Elvis Presley, with that eager, look-at-me-I’m-a-singer tenor. And his band is a pure delight, especially the pedal steel player who joined him about two years ago. I hadn’t seen these guys in seven or eight years, so it was a real treat to remember just how great they are.

Today, we have Twangclips, and then tonight there’s Neko Case and the Bottle Rockets at the Pageant. Tomorrow is a day of rest, then Monday night, Marah is playing at Off Broadway, in a show not even related to Twangfest, but which we have to attend, anyway. With this much live music to entertain me, who needs a job? (Well, maybe eventually I’ll need money to pay for going out, won’t I?)

The interview

2005-06-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

Forty-eight hours have passed since I sat in the office of Professor John Baugh. A very interesting experience. All the nervousness passed within thirty seconds of walking into the room. We had a pleasant conversation, discussing my experience as a writer, and my experiences editing way back in the days of Jet Lag.

The primary aspect of the job is editing, which is the hardest skill for me to prove. In fact, the only way I can see to prove it is to take a test. All the editing I’ve done in my life has been done without thinking of posterity. I would clean up writing of others at Vintage Vinyl, or I would make suggestions to writers for Jet Lag. It was done on the fly, to get something accomplished. I never thought it would be something I’d want to recall years later.

I remain very interested in obtaining this job. I think it would be fascinating to be in the halls of academia, reading early drafts of whatever the various professors in African and Afro-American Studies are developing, and trying to help them achieve the best work they can. I’ve always enjoyed my visits to college campuses. There’s something about breathing in the atmosphere of a place devoted to learning that just gets to me. So, fingers remain crossed, but the rest of me has to keep on keeping on with the search.

Speaking of which, I applied for one job recently that I thought I could do well, but that I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about doing. I actually wavered for three days as to whether or not to send in a resume. Interestingly enough, they were the only company of the twenty or twenty-five with which I’ve applied to send me a rejection letter. And, I love the phrasing: “Thank you for applying. However, our search goes on.” However, our search goes on! Not, we’re sorry, you don’t meet our qualifications or anything focused on me. It was all about them. You almost feel sorry for them that I wasn’t what they wanted.

Next week, it’s back to seeking contacts and talking to people. I only wish I could make a living doing that. It’s a lot of fun just getting together with people in different walks of life. Everybody is just so nice and willing to help. I’m gonna get a job yet.

Nerves and Distractions

2005-06-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

I hate being nervous. I hate the fact that once I experience the thing I’m nervous about, it’s not going to seem like all that big a deal. I hate the gnawing in my stomach, the deadening of my brain and body, the dryness of my mouth. I hate the waiting, and the ways time slows down dramatically every second you can’t find something to serve as a distraction.

In 24 hours, I’ll sit in a job interview, trying to impress somebody I don’t know. That’s never been my forte. I realize, once I meet somebody, I can talk with them without any problem. But, how often do I meet somebody who holds such power? The ability to end my search, to give me certainty, a regular income, benefits, the whole nine yards? And, at the same time, I have to be probing him, to make sure this is a job I really want. What if I can’t do it? Not the job, because I know I can handle that. But how do I determine from an hour’s conversation whether this person is somebody I can trust to lead me through the job?

I know that most studies show that the first job interview in a search is rarely successful. And, I haven’t exactly stopped my efforts at getting elsewhere. But, I want this right now, because I think the job is really interesting, from what I’ve seen, and I’m putting all kinds of thought into just this one. It’s like setting myself up for a fall, but I can’t stop myself. And all this just goes to make me nervous.

I’ve got a lunch meeting today, which will help. And Twangfest starts tonight. There’s some good music to catch, especially Jon Dee Graham and the Meat Purveyors. The trick there, of course, is to avoid staying out too late and giving up a small edge to my game in the morning.

VELVET GOLDMINE. My distraction yesterday afternoon was this 1998 flick directed by Todd Haynes and starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Ewan McGregor. Yes, they kiss, and lie in bed naked together. These facts alone don’t make the movie great, but they didn’t hurt it, either.

The idea is confusing to me, taking a glam rock approach to “Citizen Kane,” and finding an ultimately emptier mystery than that of “Rosebud.” Because Brian Slade (Rhys-Meyers take on Bowie) didn’t actually die, he just disappeared, after his fans turned on him for a fake death on stage publicity stunt. McGregor’s Curt Wild fulfills all his Iggy Pop mirror fantasies, except that he is a) entirely too beautiful to play an Iggy clone and b) has all the sexuality and virtually none of the danger necessary for the role.

So, glam rock was empty role-playing, we’ve heard that before. But, Haynes seems to want it to have fallen down because it met a true homosexual love it couldn’t bear. Slade can’t resurrect Wild’s career in the way that Bowie did for Iggy, but he can give up his own success in a futile attempt to show how much he loves him. Meanwhile, our intrepid reporter, Arthur Stuart (played by Christian Bale) stands in for all the gay teens who had their lives turned around by the sudden short-lived wedding of bisexuality and rock’n’roll. His love for Slade and Wild is unrequited, but he seems to be connected to them for the rest of his life, anyway.

The actors do a great job, the imagery is usually pretty cool – the starship bits don’t quite work for me – and the songs, sometimes originals written in glam style, sometimes old classics sung and played by new people, are really good. I just can’t figure out why so much of Bowie and Iggy was welded into these new characters, only to have their fictional changes be less interesting than the real ones.

SIX FEET UNDER. The new season has started, and the race is on amongst the Fischer clan to see who will get to have the most miserable life. Last year’s winner, David, seems remarkably stable so far, as he and his lover Keith figure out how they will wind up becoming parents. Nate seems pretty messed up, doing nice things for all sorts of wrong reasons, so I’ll keep my eye on him. His new wife Brenda definitely has a horrible time of things in this episode. Claire is living with a ticking-time bomb, the long-time nutjob Billy. Ricco, honorary Fischer, is dating and finding every woman unsatisfactory simply because he won’t give them a chance. But, the smart money right now has to be on matriarch Ruth, who has had her dreams of happy golden years shattered by the mental illness of her husband George. The opening death in this episode, by the way, neatly encapsulates what has become a perennial theme with this show: You should get out there and open yourself up to experiences, because whether you do or you don’t, you’re gonna be screwed over by illness or death.

THE NEW REGIME

2005-06-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

You know what Peter Brady said, right? When it’s time to change, you’ve got to rearrange. While I certainly enjoyed the blogging method I was employing these past few months, the concept of putting together regular essays for no compensation was becoming a bit of a drag. You probably noticed the number of entries shrinking in past weeks. I’d have ideas, but then I tried too hard to make them work. Or, I’d be afraid to think at all about something, for fear of having to create an entire essay on a subject.

So, herewith I present to you Pick Your Pop Culture phase two, in which I just tell you what’s going on in my world as often as possible. This doesn’t mean the abandonment of essays, because sometimes, I’ll start writing and giant spews of thought fountains will come out. But, there will be short subjects interspersed here and there, as well.

THE JOB HUNT. I’m still looking. I have an interview on Thursday, my first job interview since, I don’t know, 1979 or something. I’ve conducted interviews, so I have some idea what to do, or even better, what not to do. The job seems interesting, anyway. It’s an editorial assistant to the new professor in African-American studies at Washington University. His name is John Baugh, and his specialty is linguistics, particularly African-American speech patterns. His last book, which I’ve tried to find in two college libraries, was “Beyond Ebonics.” Failing in my search for that one, I did read a much earlier work, “Black Street Speech: It’s History, Structure, and Survival,” published back in 1983. The subject is not one that I’ve studied extensively, but it is fascinating.

Meanwhile, I spend a lot of time meeting people, looking for contacts, seeking out ideas for how to find gainful employment. I have a mix of skills from my days at Vintage Vinyl that most people seem to agree are transferable to other areas. I know how to manage people and companies, I have a strong data analysis and financial planning and interpreting background, and I can write. I’m looking hard at arts and other non-profit organizations, and university employment, but I’m open to other suggestions. And, I’m looking for more freelance writing opportunities. If anybody has any ideas, let me know.

VIC CHESNUTT. I’ve been driving around the last couple days with Vic Chesnutt’s new album, “Ghetto Bells.” A quiet, sometimes mournful, sometimes delicate record like this wouldn’t seem to make a good driving companion, but I like the way this thing fills up my car. Chesnutt has written a bunch of powerful new songs, including a grim analysis of the last presidential election called “Little Caesar.” The one that stops my mind from racing every time I hear it, though, is called “Rambunctious Cloud.” First of all, there’s a personal connection for me with the word “rambunctious,” which was something my father said virtually every day of his life around me, as far as I can remember. Beyond that, though, the song is by turns funny, thoughtful, banal, and moving. It’s about the connections between rain and life, over time, and across space. It, along with all the other songs here, also benefits from some exquisite Bill Frisell guitar work. His solos on this cut will break your heart.

LA STRADA. Usually, I work pretty hard on job hunting, especially on Monday, but yesterday, I had some writing to do in the morning, and I wound up spending most of my afternoon watching movies. I think I had seen this Fellini masterpiece once before, but aside from a few images of the incandescent Guilietta Masina and her delightful body language, I didn’t remember much about it. Masina and Anthony Quinn are both unbelievably great in this movie. Quinn plays a traveling circus performer who buys Masina from her family to be his assistant and mistress. He is not kind to her, but she wants so much to please him, and more, to please people in general. Nobody has ever shown more rapidly shifting emotions with just facial expressions than Masina.

WELCOME DANGER. Harold Lloyd’s first talking picture, from 1929, was remarkably funny, especially considering I don’t think I’d ever run into it before. His voice perfectly matched his image, and even though some of the movie suffered from unbearably bad dubbing of scenes shot when the film was originally intended to be silent, he did a great job integrating sound into his world view. The plot is, of course ridiculous, involving Lloyd the botanist/police detective in a complicated Chinese gang war battle, interweaved with a strangely sweet love story. The long scene when Lloyd thought his sweetie was a boy was odd, putting him in an uncharacteristically mean-spirited light. But, once Lloyd and his street-beat-walking cop friend Clancy get locked in the basement of the Chinese flower shop, hilarity ensues. You’d never think there was so many ways to get laughs from such a stock situation. Bonus points: I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the 3 Stooges learned to squeeze heads in those old-fashioned presses by watching this movie.

THE COMEBACK. Lisa Kudrow has a new series, and it’s got a lot of promise. At first, I was worried it was a little too much like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” lite, but there is a lot more depth in this half hour than I expected. Kudrow’s character is a former TV sitcom star who’s now working in a small role in a new sitcom, while filming a reality series about her comeback. The series shows the way in which reality shows are filmed, as well as the way in which sitcoms are filmed. Kudrow has the bark expected of a relatively successful Hollywood star, but much more than that, she shows the fears and the nuanced power struggles that go on among the folks we see as so successful. It ain’t easy to be rich and famous, we all know that. It may be even harder to empathize with the ways it ain’t easy. Good laughs and the occasional punch to the gut emotionally.

The Numbers Game

2005-06-01T07:57:00.000-07:00

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline in the sports section read, “The Most Indispensable Player on the Cardinals.” The story made the claim that Jason Isringhausen is the one guy the team can’t live without. Move over Albert Pujols, the second greatest player in all of baseball over the last three years by any measure you’d care to name. Nope, the daily paper thinks the most important player is a guy who pitches in less than 70 innings per season. That’s 70 out of a minimum of 1438 innings for the whole team.

How did this happen? How does conventional wisdom overtake reality again and again? It’s not just baseball, you know. Check out how many people still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Evidence is not as important as one would think it might be. I mean, I’ve lived my whole life ready to change my opinions of something if proof comes along that I was wrong before. But, apparently, this is not common.

Baseball leaves behind the clearest trail of proof that has ever been assembled in human endeavor. You can tally up the numbers, and see just what each player has contributed to his team’s success. Everything is a zero sum game. For every out recorded by a pitcher, there is an unsuccessful at bat for a hitter. And vice versa. And, outs are the most precious commodity in any baseball game. Each team has 27 and only 27 of them to work with (unless there are extra innings, and then each team gets an equal number again and again until one team wins). So, anything that prevents outs should help one team while hurting the other.

And yet, for some reason, the vast majority of baseball fans – led by the astonishingly simple-minded sportswriters and broadcasters of the world – cowtow to statistics which don’t reflect this simple rule. There is no less useful statistic in all of creation than the number of saves tallied by a pitcher during a season. It tells us absolutely nothing other than the fact that this pitcher makes more money than all his peers in the bullpen, and he makes that money because his manager puts him there.

I wanted to read “The Numbers Game,” written by Alan Schwarz, when it came out last year, but I wound up waiting until it recently hit the paperback market. Schwarz has done an excellent job of researching the history of baseball statistics and he’s uncovered some fascinating stories. I was impressed to find there were at least a few people in the 19^th century who understood that batting average, and runs batted in, were misleading numbers. And, yet, ask a modern-day baseball fan who are the best hitters in the game, and these will be the two stats they use to tell you.

Saves weren’t invented until 1969, and prior to that, pitchers were never employed exclusively to pitch the 9^th inning. In fact, before the mid-1980s, when Tony LaRussa hit upon the bright idea of putting Dennis Eckersley into the role of what we now call a closer, the best relief pitchers were brought in when the game was on the line, which may or may not have been the 9^th, and which may or may not have been for only one inning.

Schwarz looks at statistics from a wide variety of angles, but it’s clear he’s on the side of the mathematicians who have expanded the science of baseball study over the years. Not that there’s anything wrong with people who have come up in the game without knowing the exact percentage of runs which can be expected to score with runners on 1^st and 2^rd and one out. It’s just a little more fun to have that tidbit in your back pocket while you yell at the manager for deciding to bunt in a situation which is already likely to lead to good results. Trading an out for a miniscule increase in the likelihood of scoring a run is just silly.

So, yeah, I was talking about saves. The rule states that a pitcher who gets the last three outs of a winning game, as long as he enters the game with his team ahead by three or fewer runs, or if he gets fewer than three outs yet faces a batter with the tying run in the on-deck circle, is credited with a save. It doesn’t matter if the last three hitters are the bottom three in the order for the worst hitting team in baseball, or if the three previous hitters, retired by another pitcher, were the three most dangerous hitters in the game. Saves only measure who gets the last out, whether or not that out was the most difficult out.

Watch Jason Isringhausen pitch sometime, and prepare to chew on your knuckles. I mean, the guy is a decent relief pitcher, but he has a nasty tendency to put people on base in tight situations, unless he’s facing the real bottom of the order. In that case, he’ll blow people away. He’s had a lot of saves in his career with the Cardinals because the Cardinals have won a lot of games while he’s been here, not the other way around. I’m glad he’s on the team, though, frankly, I wouldn’t pay him the huge salary he commands if I were in charge. But, the most indispensable guy on the Cardinals, a team that has three of the ten or so best hitters in the game today – that’s Pujols, Edmonds, and Rolen, if you don’t already know? That’s just crazy talk. It’s the equivalent of believing false evidence without bothering to examine the correct evidence right under your nose.

“The Numbers Game” is a blast to read. It’s like watching the race to discover the atomic bomb or something, as formulas come into existence which destroy conventional wisdom. I find baseball to be infinitely fascinating, of course, but it’s even more so when you realize just how much there is to still be learned about it. I do worry about the concluding chapter of the book, though. Schwarz seems convinced that a new computer software and hardware package called Tendu will revolutionize baseball statistics. By next year, if all goes well, we should have access to every data point from every major league game, which, I think, will confuse the issue.

Baseball becomes clearest when the most data is crunched. Until you have hundreds or even thousands of examples of situations, randomness will infect what you see. Any twenty or thirty at-bats can result in any sort of situation. There’s little that annoys me so much as hearing announcers prattle on about how Roger Cedeno is 6 for 9 against a certain pitcher, as if that makes it very likely he’ll get another hit. The fact is, Roger Cedeno isn’t a very good hitter at all, but he’s still a major league ball player, and thus is capable of getting six hits out of any random nine at bats in his career.

Tendu will oversaturate us with data that is essentially random noise. Want to know how many times Albert Pujols pulls the ball with an 0-2 count and the temperature 75 degrees? Well, we’ll know, but so what? What will that mean to our understanding of the game? I fear micromanaging by insane statistics in ways that will make Tony LaRussa look like Homer Simpson.

Of course, ultimately, we’ll be able to use this data in ways much more interesting. The more information we have, the more likely we’ll be able to know what’s going on over a larger number of events. And, the beauty of baseball has always been that for all the joy of each individual game, it’s the lifetime of experience with the sport which makes it something to love.

Trial and Passion

2005-05-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

What do I know about Catholic saints? Nothing? How much do I remember about Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”? Only a vague sense of confusion, fear, and doom. So, let’s start talking about two movies, both regarding accusations and innocence. “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,” filmed in 1928, tells the tale of the trial and execution of the famous St. Joan, while “The Trial,” directed by Orson Welles in 1962, gives us an adaptation of Kafka’s novel.

As I understand it, Joan of Arc was declared a saint only eight years before this silent classic was made. The director was full of reverence for her suffering, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t also full of the 1920s dictum that art should be extraordinary and extreme. Sets were designed by the same dude who did them for “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” and though these aren’t nearly as Max Beckman-esque as were those expressionist backgrounds, they aren’t exactly realistic, either.

Carl Theodor Dryer was in charge of this film, smack in the heyday of a long and varied career of art films nobody I know has ever seen. He sets the camera roving close-in on every oddball, rancid, and downright ugly face he could find to fill the huge peanut gallery around the court setting for Joan’s trial. Then, ultimately, he moves in to the incandescent face of Renee Maria Falconetti, in the only film role of her life, and one which has occasionally been called the greatest single performance in the medium’s history.

Great is a big word, of course, and greatest is even bigger, but I’ll tell you what, this woman made you feel like she was going through a war inside her head because of the price she was paying for serving her God. Dryer clearly believes she was holy, but you don’t have to accept that the Lord was taking sides in a long-gone grudge match between France and England to at least recognize suffering when you see it. She could be incredibly stubborn for no real reason at all, but she isn’t going to betray her principles, no matter how much it hurts.

And, oh, how it hurts. The judges, all high muckety-mucks in the Church of the time, aren’t taking “I served my Lord” for an answer. So, they, each line a valley in their ancient faces seen in these tight close-ups, spit out question after question at Joan, trying to trip her up, trying to catch her in denying the role of the church. Here’s where my lack of Catholic history training holds me down, because I really can’t figure out what she did to piss off the priesthood. Other than dressing like a man, which was such a dreadful sin in her medieval prime that she wouldn’t be able to ever get communion without agreeing to wear a dress. (Or, waiting until she was about to be burned at the stake; I’m not giving away the ending unless you’re even less informed about Joan of Arc than I am.)

Falconetti was apparently mistreated by Dryer in the course of making this film. Or, as film buffs like to put it, she was made to feel Joan’s suffering in a personal way, forced to remain on her knees for hours at a time, or deprived of water and food so she could know what it’s like to be this miserable. Her genius, however, seems to be not that she could look like she was staring Satan in the face, but that at the same time, she could look as though she was watching him get his ass whupped by God. She went through doubts, of course, but her convictions were always strong, right up until that long, arduous burning at the end. Well, except for the time when she did recant, and the priests told her because her crimes were so egregious, she would still have to spend her life in prison. But, she couldn’t even last a few hours with the knowledge she’d grow old before she had to admit her mistake, and tell them that, no, she really did know what God wanted her to do.

The look of this film is like nothing I’ve seen from 1928, let alone anything I’ve seen until at least the late 50s. All the tight close-ups, the lack of make-up, the constant cutting in point of view, the strange sets, the decision to make the prison guards wear World War I military garb, it all serves as a template for much later work. I’m thinking Bergman, Goddard, and Herzog. At any rate, it’s a haunting flick, made even more powerful by the accompanying soundtrack written for it in 1985 by Richard Einhorn.

Joan was accused of something I couldn’t quite understand, but which she was certain she had not done. Joseph K, on the other hand, is merely accused in “The Trial.” Not accused of anything, just accused. And that’s the genius of Kafka. Welles, a sort of genius of his own, took that foundation and ran with it, albeit ultimately mucking things up and creating a slightly less chilling movie. Still, that there is any film in existence that even begins to capture Kafka’s work is impressive enough, and something I didn’t know until I stumbled across this one the other day.

Anthony Perkins is perfect as Joseph K. He’s an ordinary man, an assistant manager in an enormous company of virtually interchangeable accountants. Things happen to him in this movie, just as in the book, and his befuddlement and frustration with events beyond his control is the story we are here to watch. As the world becomes more divorced from the expression of human individuality, we find ourselves trapped, accused of crimes we don’t even know.

Welles managed to find a crumbling railroad station in Paris back in the early 60s for filming, and this gives the film an amazing ambience. The vast spaces, the nooks and crannies, the steel limbed skylights, all very cool stuff to see. Where I think he went wrong is with the introduction of a sexual desire in Joseph which I simply can’t remember from the book. I mean, I think Kafka was afraid of women, and he probably gave Welles the blueprint for their sexual predation roles, but for some reason, Perkins keeps pushing his own interest in these women. He’s alternately shy and virile, in ways that distract from the story itself. I don’t want Joseph K to have any power in the world, and this sexual power is especially wrong.

That said, there are some other brilliant updates. By 1962, the corporation man was a much more familiar concept, and Welles played it up. I loved the three co-workers, all dressed alike, but one of them being over a head taller than the other two. I enjoyed the computer in Joseph’s company, an enormous, mile-long string of giant machines all spewing out data and still unable to help him find out of what he has been accused. The massive amount of useless paper assembled in the home of Joseph’s advocate – played with suitable insanity by Welles himself – was a delicious touch.

In the novel, Joseph is killed, though I don’t remember the exact tale. I know he was never able to understand what was happening to him, and we were never able to completely declare him free of guilt. Not that he did anything any more wrong than his accusers, but he was complicit in the same society they were running. He wanted to be accepted by them, which made him a more pathetic choice as someone accused of any transgression against them. As I said, I don’t remember the exact ending, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t a nuclear explosion. On the scale of nuclear explosions ending movies, I have to put this one well below the classic “Dr. Strangelove,” and perhaps a notch or two above the hilarious “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.” I’m not sure where Welles was going with this, other than to remind us of the existential terrors of the time. At any rate, he was reaching for a bigger statement than he could make. A “rosebud” this was not.

Trials are supposed to determine guilt or innocence, so it’s interesting to see these two movies which make no such determination. The real people on trial, I suppose, are the inhuman accusers. The church fathers of medieval times, the faceless modern machine-styled society, both systems which denied the freedom of individuals to live and breathe without conforming. Remember, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Just ask Joan, who believed she had her eternal soul to lose, or Joseph K, who had nothing in the first place.

Race and Gender and You and Me

2005-05-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

We are all the other. A simple idea, I suppose, but one that’s very, very hard to forget.

My life is different from yours. We may have some similarities, of course. Maybe we have the same hair color, or the same religious opinions, or a common ability to be turned on by the same famous actor or actress. But, no matter how many things I’ve found to mark us as similar, there are many, many more things to show us to be different.

That’s because what I know of me that makes me unique is much more than what anybody else knows of me. My wife knows a heck of a lot about my individuality, and I know a lot about hers, after more than ten years of being with each other every day. But, even here, we have much more to discover about each other than we can ever know. We are bound to be surprised by something no matter how much we’ve invested in the experience of each other.

So, if even two people as intimately connected as me and Cat can’t possibly know everything about each other’s essential state, why is it so easy for most people to assume we know something essential about other people based on a very small sample size of data? That person is black, this one kissed somebody of the same gender, that one is well-to-do, this one is a transsexual. Each of these phrases puts us in mind of a clichéd response or two, doesn’t it? And each of those clichés is more likely to be wrong when applied to an individual than it is to be right.

I’ve just finished reading “S/He,” a book by Minnie Bruce Pratt, and I just saw the movie “Crash,” written and directed by Paul Haggis. This is one of those happy bits of synchronicity, because the book and the movie complement each other. They’ve both got me thinking about the ways we think we know people, and the ways individual humans continue to surprise us. They’ve also got me thinking about the ways stereotypes and bigotry instill fear in people on both sides of the issue at hand, and the ways that fear affects individuals.

“S/He” is a series of vignettes by Pratt, normally a poet but whose skills translatebeautifully to prose. Pratt is a femme lesbian with a female transsexual partner who is not undergoing surgery. In other words, Pratt’s partner, the “s/he” of the title, is someone for whom we haven’t built up many stereotypes. Or worse, it’s someone who becomes the victim of multiple stereotypes, from male heterosexual to female homosexual to butch homosexual to transsexual of any type. Pratt tells of fears waiting for her partner to return from a simple visit to a public restroom, where any number of possible reactions to hir presence could occur.

There is an abundance of love on display in “S/He,” a full plate of erotic moments and mundane delights. Pratt’s descriptions of events in her life with her partner, and her life before it, constantly make great leaps into insights unknown. I am incapable of living as Pratt does – I suppose the equivalent would have to be me becoming considerably more jockish and then falling in love with a male to female transsexual who has no intention of being surgically transformed. But, I feel connected to her experiences now. Pratt delivers the essential feelings of falling in love, the moments which take your breath away no matter what gender or sex you may be. And, she delivers the feelings of being different, of being hated for who you are, or who people think you are, and of being proud that you aren’t afraid to be who you are.

Sexuality is a lot more complicated than most people want to assume. Most discussions of it tend to place it in binary categories. You’re either straight or gay, male or female, moral or immoral. Yet, people themselves tend to fall all over the continuum between these points. And, depending on one’s individual experiences, and one’s opinion of one’s experiences, judgements about the acceptance of other possibilities tend to get hardened. (By that I mean, people who have encountered multiple sex and gender possibilities are more likely to accept them, unless, of course, these encounters included sexual delights which strongly contradicted one’s own moral code; thus you get supposed heterosexuals railing against homosexuality as much as anything because they fear it in themselves.)

So is race. Growing up in the Midwest in the 1960s, I pretty much understood two races. There were whites, and there were blacks. Oh, I’d heard something about Asians (we knew them as Orientals then), but I don’t think I would have understood Hispanics as another race, or Africans, or Arabs. I would have seen them as grouped in one or the other of the three divisions I knew.

Of course, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Like sex and gender, race is an arbitrary construct, a naming of something based on surface elements. Skin color, primarily, but cultural background is important, as well. Genetically, there are no important differences between Caucasians, Africans, and Asians. What we see as differences are trivial in the grand scheme of things.

“Crash” hits hard at the way we see these differences, which is decidedly not trivial. By taking people from wildly different backgrounds – African-Americans both lower class and upper middle class, upper middle class whites, lower class Hispanics, and lower middle class Iranians – and watching what happens as their lives intersect, we see stereotypes revealed to be both true and false. That’s what makes things more complicated. Two lower class African-Americans walking in a ritzy white neighborhood are possibly there to pull a carjacking. Pampered middle aged white wives of district attorneys could turn out to be incapable of connecting to other people.

Haggis doesn’t do a perfect job with the script. He tends to have characters tell us who they are and why they think the way they do, which saves time, but doesn’t make things quite as believable. But, once we’ve established the basics, he does make sure to keep us surprised. Almost all of the many characters in this film are revealed to have completely unexpected, yet very reasonable, facets. They learn from their experiences, yet they don’t become perfect human beings.

Oh, yeah, there is some incredible acting in this flick. Don Cheadle is magnificent in a difficult role as a police investigator who is trying to find a way to do the right things in life, and not sure how to relate to the people he loves. Matt Dillon’s role as a largely despicable yet still heroic cop will make your skin crawl at times. Sandra Bullock handles the bitchy DA wife part nicely, and is smooth when it’s time to become dependent on others. Still, the roles played by Ludacris and Larenz Tate, two car thieves who set the plot in motion, are my favorites. Yeah, it’s obvious Haggis is stealing from Quentin Tarantino in “Pulp Fiction” when he has them talking so much philosophy about their criminal actions, but they display very human reactions to the events around them.

Race, sexuality, whatever! There is something about each of us that scares the living daylights out of other people somewhere. Keeping that in mind would seem to be a first step in making things better. Read “S/He” or watch “Crash” or do both. The world is full of differences dancing around similarities.

The Carter Family and Shaky Hands

2005-05-14T14:50:00.000-07:00

Music documentaries tend to piss me off. For example, let’s talk about this American Experience TV show run on PBS this past week on “The Carter Family: Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Now, I love the Carter Family, and I always have. So, I was pretty excited to sit down and see them praised on national TV for a full hour.

But, let’s start with this. The best reason to love the Carter Family is the music, not the influence. I mean, yeah, sure, don’t pretend the influence, which is as great as any 20^th century figure this side of Louis Armstrong, isn’t there, but talk about what makes the music so great. In this documentary, only Barry Mazor (No Depression contributing editor and the curator of Twangclips, the annual collection of music film history at St. Louis’s Twangfest, coming up in early June) and Gillian Welch (singer/songwriter with a decided Appalachian feel) give much of an effort to talk about the music itself.

In fact, Welch’s demonstration of the difference between playing the bare chords of “Wildwood Flower” (aka the way I did it back in my band days, when the other guitarist in 60 Hz Hm did the good parts) and playing the melodic approach to them that Maybelle Carter took, was the kind of thing that should be done more often. It’s pretty basic musical information, to be sure, but it’s rarely recognized by average listeners because nobody takes the time to point it out. And then, when she pointed out the bounce of Maybelle’s strumming, we found yet another way to listen to these records. That’s one of the benefits of analyzing music; it should give you something new on which to focus your attention.

Then there’s the question of hiring actors to play the Carters in soft-focused recreations of events in their lives. Really, was the guy walking along the railroad tracks with his hand twitching such a strong visual that it couldn’t have been replaced with some more Depression-era rural footage? And, the lip-synching in the studio stuff was kind of spooky, although I guess it was interesting to see A.P. Carter leading his partners by keeping the rhythm with his hands. Worst of all, though, was probably A.P. at the typewriter, his hands shaking again as he tweaked the lyrics of old mountain songs to fit the contemporary demands of copyright.

A.P. Carter did us a few valuable services, no question about that. He single-handedly collected a body of folk songs that would otherwise have been completely lost to the ages, and many of them turned out to be things I couldn’t imagine living without. Like “Wildwood Flower,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” or “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” to name just a few of the most obvious. He also figured out that his wife and her cousin were enormously talented, and that pushing them into show business could make them all wealthier than they ever dreamed, which is great for us now because we have hundreds of recordings to enjoy.

But, he did this on the backs of the people who gave him the songs. Nothing in this documentary mentioned payment for them, merely his untiring search for more material. And, there was a black man who helped him, shown briefly in the documentary, but I can’t remember his name precisely because that guy never got any credit (and presumably no royalties) for his role in the act. On top of this, he didn’t make Sarah, his wife, happy.

The story of the documentary was from A.P.’s point of view, and it attempted to portray him as a visionary determined to succeed, while throwing in some tragedy at the end when his very success was achieved at the cost of his happiness. (Along side this, there was the ironic tale of the Carters being bumped from the cover of Life magazine, the most widely read weekly in the country at the time, by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, thus preventing further musical dominance for the group.) I’m sorry, but I don’t know that A.P. Carter was driven by much more than an interest in making some money without having to work too hard. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I don’t buy his interest in preserving his family legacy, which seemed to be the implication of this program.

Sarah’s voice and Maybelle’s guitar were the strokes of genius in the Carter Family. A.P. Carter was responsible for giving them songs and giving us the records. The legacy has been huge – much of country music was built on the Carter bedrock. I’d have liked to get more insight into why that legacy happened, what was it that made the Carters songs get preserved, while most of their contemporaries have faded into the dust? Oh, and as always, I’d like to hear more full-length performances without talking over them. Admittedly, the original Carters weren’t filmed together, but the live material that was shown – including a rare 1960s reunion between Sarah and Maybelle – should have been given to us in its entirety. Maybe they could have sacrificed the talking head who pointed out that “A.P. needed music probably the same way he needed air to breathe.” That’s the kind of line that makes it into too many documentaries about music.

I’m glad there’s some attention being paid to these old records again on account of this show, though. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to have seen this. The Carter Family’s music is absolutely glorious, and this documentary only hinted at that fact.

The Kid - Chaplin, Coogan, Fun

2005-05-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching a lot of silent movie comedy lately, having recorded a number of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin flicks off Turner Classic Movies, the most indispensable channel on any television package. My interest in these goes back to childhood, when I read every book I could find in the library on the subjects of popular culture. Back then, of course, there was no cable TV, no home video, and for the most part, no opportunity to actually see the antics being described so lovingly.

I must have seen a couple dozen pictures of little Jackie Coogan sitting on the front stoop of his apartment as “The Kid.” All I knew about it was that Chaplin’s Tramp adopts this orphan child and that the movie is generally considered to be Exhibit A (or maybe B, after the scene in “The Gold Rush” when he cooks the shoe) in charges of Chaplin’s sentimentality crimes.

I’ve just finished watching it, though, and while “The Kid” is sappy as all get out, I just can’t hold it against anybody concerned. That’s because of three things.

First, Coogan is absolutely adorable, possibly the most completely charming and natural child actor ever in the history of cinema. I have absolutely no interest in ever having a child of my own, but if I had one like him, at least I’d have some smiles and laughs now and again. His ability in this movie to be captivated by whatever diversion life gives him is pure and lovely. And, it’s also fun to see him full of deviltry, helping Chaplin by breaking windows with rocks so that the Tramp can come along to repair them for money.

Secondly, Chaplin is the kind of thing you just can’t help loving, like chocolate, puppy dogs, and baseball. He moves so perfectly on film, with those little shoulder shrugs, the comic walk, and the exaggerated arm movements. He’s funny, no question about it, though he holds the levity down to serve the sentimentality in this film. It doesn’t matter. Every time he turns on a dime to go in the other direction from a police patrolman, I laugh.

Thirdly, Chaplin is a twisted genius, and he was never afraid to just throw things in to a movie because an idea occurred to him. For example, with one reel left at the end, and nothing to do but reunite the kid and the Tramp, he gives us a dream sequence that was never mentioned in any of the summaries I read back in the day.

The Kid and Chaplin are angels, wandering around in a crowd of winged, white robed folks dancing, playing lyres, and generally enjoying themselves. But, this isn’t Heaven, because devils pop in and out to provide temptation. Chaplin encounters a lovely young woman angel, whose husband/boyfriend has left her alone for a few minutes. They seem to like each other, so the devil comes along and urges her to “vamp” him.

A word on vamping, a convention of silent movies and apparently a major fear of early 20^th century American men. It’s not as though this fear is gone, as most recently it has been resurgent in Texas, where legislators have suddenly realized the horrible fate which awaits men exposed to the sexually inviting gyrations of high school cheerleaders. Yes, vamping is the expression of female desire aimed at a man for one purpose, to corrupt him by luring him into lust outside of procreative intention. Without this effort on the part of women, heterosexual men would never think for a second of sex.

So, the female angel starts playing coy, and Chaplin can’t resist. The flirtation continues, and eventually they are beginning to touch each other. That’s when her beau comes in, and he simply smiles and watches as the Tramp and his conqueror kiss. It takes another appearance by a devil to make the husband jealous. He starts a fight with Chaplin, and winds up shooting him dead.

Theologically, I don’t know what’s going on here. We’re in a realm of angels subject to temptation and capable of being killed, not to mention killing. Naturally, young Coogan discovers the body and bawls his eyes out.

Don’t worry, though, because it’s after this that Chaplin wakes up, and gets escorted back to the arms of his young charge, who is also reunited with the mother who gave him up after his birth. Interestingly enough, though beginning from unwed motherhood, she has managed to become a big theatrical star and a major giver of charity to poor children. Presumably, she will make life better for both Chaplin and the child, as she does live in a mansion. And, remember, it’s eight whole years before the stock market crash and everybody becomes miserable again.

“The Kid” is a tearjerker, but it’s a tearjerker with so much humanity, and so much heart, that you can easily gulp your way right past the parts where your emotions are being too tightly manipulated. Instead, just enjoy the interaction between a genius, and a precocious six-year-old kid. And, while you’re at it, enjoy the fact that this very same little boy would one day be Uncle Fester on “The Addams Family” TV show.

My Weekend of Culture

2005-05-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

None of these events led to any full-blown essays, but I figured each was worth a little bit of comment.

Friday evening: “The Interpreter” at the Moolah Theatre. Sit in the front row couches about twenty feet away from the gigantic enormous screen at St. Louis’s coolest theatre, and you are practically in the movie. I could have climbed right into Nicole Kidman’s nostril or Sean Penn’s ear lobe, and ridden along as they danced around each other’s plot twists.

It took my wife and most other people who have seen this about thirty seconds to point out a half dozen possibly fatal flaws, but I was absolutely spellbound by this movie. It’s a riveting thriller with some incredible acting, and directing that doesn’t detract from the story in any way. Sydney Pollack is a pro, and he knows that all he has to do is let Kidman and Penn run with their roles. They’ll give you all the nuance you need.

All right, so he can’t resist throwing in some sentimental bits here and there, and the hint of a possible romance could be taken as overkill. (I chose to read that, though, as two people attracted to each other in the wrong time and for the wrong reasons, and aware that it would not be a great idea to pursue it.) But, really, if you just throw your head back and let it all flow over you, you’ll be far too tense with the action to worry about any of that. Either that, or I was too drunk to worry about it.

Saturday morning: “Hero Hawk and Open Hand,” St. Louis Art Museum. I knew enough to be aware there was a great Native American civilization at Cahokia, just a few miles up river from St. Louis, which flourished some 800 to 600 years ago, but which was pretty much gone by the time Spanish and French explorers arrived in this neck of the woods. But, I had no idea that Cahokia was just the epicenter of a whole bunch of mound-building towns that stretched as far west as Oklahoma, as far south as Texas, as far north as Ohio, and as far east as the Carolinas.

This exhibit collects hundreds of pieces from a number of sites around the country, ranging from arrow heads to vessels in the forms of animals, from round spherical throwing objects to intricately carved images on large sea shells. Most of these items served useful functions, though quite a few were ornamental variations of useful items.

I was struck by three things. First, the astounding depth of what has been left behind by these people, the signs of individual personalities in a variety of cultures which has survived over the centuries, was simply breathtaking. I hate the overuse of the word “awesome,” but I was truly in awe in the presence of these objects. Not because they were sacred, though some of them clearly were, but because they were so overwhelmingly, obviously human.

Second, these objects were stunningly beautiful in ways I’ve never encountered before. I read an article online the other day – and I’ve forgotten where, so I can’t link to it – about the often overlooked ability to simply bask in the presence of beauty. I was basking my ass off at the Art Museum, though. The shapes, the colors, the forms, the imagery, the patterns, holy moley! Very little of this bore any relationship to the arts and crafts of Native Americans I’ve seen over the years, but all of it was gorgeous.

Third, though not for the first time, I realized how fragile cultures can be. These people lived, loved, laughed, fought, killed, hunted, farmed, traded, built, played, worshipped, and passed time believing they were carrying on in the way things had always been and would always be. And yet, over the last 2000 years, whole civilizations would come and go again and again in the parts of the world where these artifacts were found. It can and will happen again to us, of course, which only makes the lives we lead all that more important to us as we live them. We’re walking in some amazing footprints in this part of the world. It’s sobering to realize we weren’t first, and we won’t be last.

Saturday night: “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” After a morning encounter with the sublime, it was time to look at some excellent idiocy. We rented this flick after hearing nothing but rave reviews about it. While not quite as perfect as “Dude, Where’s My Car,” this definitely ranks up there with the great stoner movies of all time. It’s a buddy movie and a journey movie, but the buddies are stoned, and their goal is merely to get to White Castle. Along the way, they encounter many mishaps, and learn much about themselves. But, really, they mostly just act crazy, and refuse to let anything get them down. We watched this while drinking wine, which seemed to put us in just as much of a giggling fit as pot would have.

Sunday night: Wayne Hancock at Beale on Broadway. It was my friend Heather’s birthday, so we joined her and a whole lot of other people in this funky little (literally little) bar down by Busch Stadium. I’d never seen Hancock before, but I’d always liked what I’d heard on the radio. This guy somehow managed to get ahold of the preserved vocal chords of Hank Williams and get them implanted in his throat.

The songs were great, a mix of classic honky tonk and hillbilly stuff with Hancock’s own derivations on same, his singing was unbelievably perfect. But, and this is the reason I mention this show, I was especially blown away by the lead guitar playing of Eddie Biebel. I don’t know much about him except that he plays with Hancock as often as possible, which means if you like Telecaster players with the cleanest, richest tone you’ve ever heard and an imagination that links together every idea ever played on a guitar in Nashville between 1945 and 1965, you owe it to yourself to catch this guy in concert.

Dipping My Toes In a Meme

2005-04-27T15:21:00.000-07:00

I haven’t tried one of these before, but my online friend Aunt B over at Tiny Cat Pants did it the other day, so why not? It looks like fun. For those of you playing along at home, follow the instructions, and post it to your own blog or to my comments or just pass it along on the internet.

Answer the question "If you could be ---____ . Choose five titles from the list [below] and answer the question for each of them. Add a job title to the list when you are done, if you would like, but you can't choose your own newly added job title.

Scientist - Farmer - Musician - Doctor - Painter - Gardener - Missionary - Chef - Architect - Linguist - Psychologist - Librarian - Athlete - Lawyer - Innkeeper - Professor - Writer - Llama rider - Failed actor gone political - Moonbat - Street Performer - Pro Bowler – Psychic – Skipper

1) Professor. Well, I guess I’d be a Professor of Improved Common Sense. I’m not sure how many people I’d get to sign up for my classes, but the idea would be to get people to forget all about their beliefs that they have common sense, and to instead try to look at the ways their beliefs may differ from people with different backgrounds. Then, after careful studying of a variety of different belief systems, each class would end with a project attempting to create new and improved common sense capable of being applied across vastly different circumstances.

2) Scientist. I’d want to be one of those science popularizers, like Stephen Jay Gould. I’d particularly love to find a way to make evolutionary theory so easy to understand that not even the most fundamentally fundamentalist could poke a hole in it any more. And, while I’m at it, I’d like to make science fun and exciting to the general public to counteract all the misunderstanding that has become so much a part of the American concensus.

3) Librarian. I’d love to be in charge of the Library of Congress, with the special task of finding one previously neglected interesting tome per week and writing a USA Today column on it. Who knows how many fascinating novels and works of non-fiction are sitting there in Washington gathering dust? As an aside, I’d make it my special mission to explain Library of Congress alphabetization rules, so that people who work in record stores will forever understand things like the reason Los Straightjackets belong in “L”, not “S”, or the logic behind putting short words before longer ones in alphabetical order.

4) Lawyer. If I’m gonna go to the trouble of becoming a lawyer, I’m damn straight gonna be a Supreme Court Justice. It’s my fantasy, and I’m taking it all the way to the top. My first joy would be arguing with Scalia and Thomas day in and day out, knocking them sideways with my encyclopedic knowledge of cases and precedents which would make all their horrific ideas seem like the work of kindergartners. Then, I’d set to work on protecting the rights of all Americans as they’re supposed to be protected. Ain’t no overturning Roe V. Wade on my watch, either.

5) Athlete. As long as we’re just playing, I might as well say that I really would love to be a professional hockey player. I had a few skills in the street hockey world, but I was prevented from pursuing a career in the NHL (and thus losing all my teeth by the age of 25) because of an irrational fear of attempting to move while wearing ice skates. So, I’d like to have the chance to get out there and stop Brett Hull from getting any shots on goal.

There you have ‘em, my dreams for the day.

Sin City Sincerely Silly

2005-04-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

When I was eight years old, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to turn my favorite comic books – specifically, Adventure Comics #350 and #351 – into a live action movie which recreated every single panel and word of dialogue and narration. At the time, my only hope was to will myself to sleep at night with the attempt to force such a thing to at least take shape in my dream.

Now, while I still think it would be a hoot to put the Legion of Super-Heroes onto the big screen – I’m thinking Matter-Eater Lad, the hero who could eat and digest anything and Bouncing Boy, who could, well, bounce, could set new standards for CGI – I’ve long since realized the differences between comic books and movies are pretty damn important. Obviously, there are similarities, but remember, movies move, and comic books split time into discrete elements with each individual panel.

So, when comic book creators borrow from motion pictures, they do so by turning one aesthetic into a series of short hand references. Because of the static nature of comics, you can jump all over the place in point of view without freaking out the reader. In movies, you need to maintain perspective long enough to give the viewer a chance to understand what’s going on. And, vice versa is important, too. Comic book writers don’t have the luxury of attempting to be too naturalistic in dialogue. They’ve got to move the story along with a minimum of verbiage, or the reader will just go look for prose.

What I’m leading up to is pointing out that “Frank Miller’s Sin City” is a load of crap as a movie. I suspect it may be a load of crap as a comic book, too, but I have to confess I’ve never read it. I’ve read enough of Miller’s “Daredevil” and “Batman” work to recognize his stylistic and aesthetic quirks here, though. This guy just views the world as a completely untrustworthy collection of morally empty individuals. And, though he at least allows men to be relatively differentiated containers of individual tics and tactics, women are a) video-game beautiful (not that that’s my concept of beauty), b) sexually available in exchange for payment or services, and c) angelic innocents who induce perfect love for the barest of plausible reasons.

Apparently, Robert Rodriguez got thrown out of the Director’s Guild for declaring Miller to be his co-director – somewhere in there, Quentin Tarentino wound up getting a share of credit, too. But, really, there’s nothing in this movie that doesn’t bear Miller’s stamp. Every word of dialogue, every narrative explanation, every camera angle, everything that makes up the whole picture is lifted straight from “Sin City” comic books. As such, you’ve got a whole lot of crazy-quilt camera angles, smoky, shadowy lighting, idiosyncratic effects of color and the use of blank whiteness to represent spurts and splatters of blood (unless, of course, the blood is on somebody’s face, in which case it’s bright red), short, declarative dialogue, all the stuff that a talented comics artist can use to make his work stand out, but which a director ought to be smart enough to realize will simply look and sound silly on the screen.

“Sin City” wants to be an homage to film noir, albeit with modern-day cynicism and violence toleration making the 1940s flicks seem like episodes of “Sesame Street”. The mood music that permeates the background is clearly meant to echo that era, and tie in with the mostly black-and-white look and seedy underworld setting. But, by making all his characters hyper-human – multiple bullet holes don’t necessarily kill people, requiring excessive limb and head chopping to make sure somebody is really dead – Miller pretty much removes any reason to care about individual scenes of violence. It all seems pretty random, and while some of these scenes may have been ghoulishly funny when read in thirty seconds in a comic book sequence, they just seem interminable when taking up precious minutes in between plot developments.

But really, it was all the “angel” and “whore” references that drove me craziest. Yeah, all the actors do great jobs chewing up the stilted dialogue, but I just couldn’t stand to hear Mickey Rourke’s character go on about how one particular prostitute was so perfect simply because she was the only woman who ever had the courage to fuck him despite his especially ugly latex-provided kisser. And, why did the camera linger so lovingly on her “perfect breasts which were no longer moving with her breath” after his Goldie was dead?

We go to Old Town for extended sequences, and learn that the Prostitutes have struck a deal with both the police and the mob to allow their services to be performed without need for pimps or fear of arrest. In other words, we are supposed to believe that women will empower themselves most perfectly by taking complete control of their ability to be whores. In doing so, they seem to have artificially inflated standards of beauty by making sure that nobody gets to join the sisterhood without being capable of fitting a Charlie’s Angel-styled silhouette. And, we are shown that despite the sistas doing it for themselves nature of their ability to fight as warriors in between giving blowjobs and gang bangs for money, these ladies are also capable of getting all gooey and googly when they see a man kill bad guys, too.

Miller does have a way of inventing amusing minor characters, like the guy who stands around with an arrow in his chest trying to decide if somebody should call a doctor, or the villainous henchman who talks as though he’d swallowed an entire American Heritage Dictionary. And, I had to admire the occasional excessive limb hacking just for the sheer practicality of it as a killing or torturing method. But, mostly, I just kept waiting for this thing to be over. In “Sin City,” the deadliest sin is boredom.

Another Baseball Book

2005-04-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

You can’t argue with success, or maybe you can’t successfully argue with somebody who has achieved success. At any rate, arguing isn’t on Buzz Bissinger’s mind anywhere in his new book, “3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager.” Nope, instead, Bissinger wants to worship Tony La Russa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals for the last ten years. Bissinger bows down and prays to every tidbit of wisdom from the mind of the man who has one more games than all but a handful of managers in baseball history.

I’m not trying to say Bissinger doesn’t perform some useful functions here. Any baseball fan, especially any Cardinal fan, will find plenty of fascinating insights and tidbits, as Bissinger was basically around on a day to day basis for long stretches of the 2003 Cardinals season. He does seem to have won the trust of La Russa and many of the players, and as such, he paints a portrait of human beings, with individual foibles, skills, and instincts they trust above all. And, Bissinger doesn’t shy away from revealing disagreements between players and manager.

So, yeah, it’s fascinating to follow the interaction between La Russa and Kerry Robinson, the St. Louis-bred backup outfielder who was convinced he would be a star performer if given a chance to play, despite offering no evidence of the necessary skills to excel in such a role. La Russa thought Robinson was a useful cog in the makeup of his team, but he got frustrated when Robinson tried, as he often did, to move outside his talents, and to play for himself rather than for the team. Because baseball is a game which allows anybody to be a hero on any given night, Robinson’s game-winning home run in the third and final game examined in this book is a stroke of irony Bissinger which must have left him excitedly scribbling down the structure of the whole project.

The book is built around a three game series between the Cardinals and Cubs in August, 2003. At the time, the two teams were running neck and neck in the standings, so the series had both pennant-winning meaning and the traditional rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago to add drama. But, Bissinger doesn’t just talk about individual events within each game, though he does describe some of them in great, and insightful detail. Rather, he jumps around in the minds of the players and La Russa, and talks about previous events in their lives (both personal and on the field) which help to explain what is happening in these games.

For example, there is a fascinating side trip down the history of baseball pitchers throwing at the heads of the best players on the other team. La Russa is aware of how badly players can be hurt as a result of this risky course of action, and he hates more than anything – or so he convinces Bissinger – to retaliate. But, he knows he cannot command the respect of his players if he allows the opposition to hit his stars without ordering his pitcher to do the same. So, he has come up with an elaborate schema for when and how to do such a thing, and he refuses to allow his players to act on their own in such a situation.

Elaborate schemes and La Russa seem to go hand in hand. Whenever a chance is given, La Russa refutes the claims of baseball analysts who use statistical studies to contradict the conventional wisdom within the game. Bissinger treats these refutations as proof of La Russa’s hard-earned genius, despite never once allowing the arguments to be discussed in depth. “It’s also why he gave his little conspiratorial laugh in spring training when he heard of the Red Sox plan, based on analysis by statistical guru and team consultant Bill James, to have rotating closers instead of one designated pitcher. James, in part because of what he felt was the inflated statistic of the save (you get one even with a three-run lead), believed that it wasn’t always necessary to bring in a classic closer to pitch the ninth. La Russa respected James, but based on managing nearly 4,000 games, was convinced James was wrong. La Russa was also right: the Red Sox ultimately dumped the idea when it became clear that closer-by-committee was no-closer-by-committee.”

Well, let’s see. James and most sabermetricians have argued that the single closer idea is an inefficient usage of resources. If theoretically a closer is the very best relief pitcher on the team, why should he be used only in the ninth inning, whether or not that is the time you most need your best pitcher? If, as happened in Saturday’s Cardinals game, the opposing team has its best hitters due up in the 8^th inning, why would you use a theoretically lesser pitcher to face them, and save your best pitcher for the lesser hitters batting in the ninth? And, what if the most dangerous part of the game comes in the 7^th? Why should you leave your best pitcher on the bench until other pitchers have given up runs which could have been prevented?

The Red Sox did indeed try to change the pattern of usage in 2003, but, alas, they did it with pitchers who weren’t good enough to use for the experiment. And, because this led to the Red Sox losing some close games, the conventional wisdom acts as though this one example has destroyed any chance of trying it again. Never mind that the single closer method leads to many lost games, too. It’s engrained in everybody’s mind that this is the only way the game can be played. Which is amazing, because La Russa himself only invented this method twenty years ago.

For a man who distrusts statisticians, La Russa relies on statistics more than most managers. He prides himself on basing decisions based on the individual performance of each hitter against each pitcher. But, most of these examples are built on the smallest of sample sizes. If a hitter has made nine outs in ten at-bats against a particular pitcher, there is no reason to believe this performance will continue. Any random ten at-bats in a baseball player’s career can be found with similar results, but no major league player can stay in the game with a .100 batting average.

Tony La Russa knows how to manage major league baseball teams. There are many different paths to success, and we can’t argue that La Russa isn’t capable of picking some that work, because he has won again and again throughout his 25-year career. But, Bissinger, in his rush to elevate La Russa to a solitary, poetic figure, missed an opportunity to truly challenge his subjects ways of thinking. (Look at the cover, with La Russa standing in the shadows at the top of the dugout, his back to the camera, the brightly lit field he tries to control stretched out before him.) I find it interesting that everybody in St. Louis refers to this as La Russa’s book. While clearly Bissinger makes it his own tale – the overwrought writing style wears thin whenever the subject under discussion becomes overly familiar – he does so without argument.

I gobbled this book up in a couple of days. The subject itself was too near and dear to me to do otherwise. I detected much more of the human element within the players, coaches, and managers than I’m used to noticing. But, ultimately, I found Bissinger’s tone to be too pretentious – this is the guy who wrote “Friday Night Lights,” which I haven’t read – and not contentious enough for my taste.

Doing My Jury Duty or: The Longest Post Ever

2005-04-15T15:18:00.001-07:00

The idea was to accept jury duty as a break in my routine at work. But, as I mentioned, there is no job, hence no routine. In fact, after going to the Civil Courts Building the first four days of this week, I think I’m now going to miss a new routine already.

I’ve always been a strong supporter of the jury process, so there was never any question of trying to avoid the duty. I believe in the principles of our legal system, even if there are chinks in its armor of execution now and again. And, I’ve watched about a million TV shows with courtroom sets, from Judge Judy to Perry Mason to all the Law and Orders to my late, lamented Murder One. I’m at least somewhat familiar with the processes.

Four days of jury duty, including sitting on a trial, netted me $72, which is more than I earned the previous week. Alas, my new job will have nothing for me to do for at least another 3 and one half years, which means I’ll probably have to start searching for something else in the interim.

DAY ONE:

Monday morning, armed with a big thick novel and a giant cup of iced tea, I marched into the waiting room figuring I’d be sitting there all day long just like the last time I was called back in 1990. That time, I had not brought anything with me, and I was bored out of my skull waiting for my number to be called. Of course, this year, I was put on the first panel called at 10 am. That had still left me two hours to read, and enough time to finish my tea before going up to the court room.

The St. Louis Civil Courts Building is a beautiful old skyscraper dating back, I believe, to the late 1920s or early 1930s. One of its best features is the grandness of the courtrooms themselves. They are large, with tall windows, high ceilings, and plenty of room for all the participants in the trial. I felt filled with awe walking into the room, seeing the lawyers seated at their tables, as well as the defendant.

Unless you watched “Murder One,” you’ve probably never seen the voix dire process on TV. That’s where the lawyers question the panel of 48 potential jurors seeking to weed out the ones who would be prejudicial in advance of hearing evidence. From 10:15 or so, when the judge actually arrived, until 3:30, that’s what we did. Well, except for the many hours of non-consecutive recesses we had.

The prosecutor on this case did her best to put everybody at ease. She told us this was a trial in which the defendant was accused of kidnapping, forcible sodomy, attempted rape, and one other charge I can’t remember. Many questions followed, with way too many answers. One thing I learned about this process. Citizens take their personal experiences seriously, and want to tell lawyers and judges about them in excruciating detail.

I was impressed to find another guy on the panel whom I had gone to high school and college with. I hadn’t seen him since 1979, and wouldn’t have recognized him at first if she hadn’t said his name. We had a grand time chatting during one of the interminable recesses.

The defense attorney was completely different than the prosecutor. Where she tried to be friendly, he tried to appear intense. He told us that he and his client didn’t have to do anything, and could sit and play cards during the trial if they wanted, because the burden of proof was on the state, not on the defense. He also told us he would act like an SOB when questioning the victim of this crime, because that’s what he would have to do to defend his client. I was torn at this point, because I understand the need for a vigorous defense, but I am generally offended when victims get blamed for rape. I was curious to see how that trial would have gone, but not especially sorry I didn’t get picked for it.

Back downstairs at 3:30, and by 4 pm I was on another panel in another courtroom. The judge read instructions, and introduced everybody, but that was it for Monday.

DAY TWO

Another day, another voix dire, this one longer and more painfully detailed. I was shocked at how many people out of a randomly selected group of 48 had been victims of crimes, had relatives who had committed crimes, or had committed crimes themselves. I could hear individuals on the panel talk themselves off the jury as we went along. One guy, when asked about opinions regarding firearms used in a crime, told us he has co-authored legislation which will be introduced in the Missouri Senate which will give mandatory sentences of something like ten years for any crime committed with a gun, and as if that wasn’t Draconian enough, to purposely separate the criminal from his or her family, their sentence would be served in another state. It was scary watching his eyes widen and his cheeks puff up as he told this story.

The prosecutor in this case reminded me of a taller version of the guy who played the prosecutor on early seasons of “Homicide: Life on the Street.” The defense attorney looked like a taller version of a friend of mine, so much so that I was convinced Tony Patti was sitting at the table when I walked in on Monday. I suspect that my friend Tony could have mounted a stronger defense than this guy wound up presenting, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The defense attorney told us the robbery in this case involved a dog who was taken and never returned. This served to weed out even more jurors. Strangely, he only asked opinions of people who currently own dogs, ignoring the possible strong views of people who either have recently lost their dogs, or who just love all animals so much they would be even more prejudiced against a criminal who caused harm to come to one. My view on this was that, while I would certainly be angry about the animal’s involvement, I would still be able to judge the facts in the case impartially. If he did the crimes – which were bad enough even without the dog – I would find him guilty. If there was no evidence that he did them, I would vote not guilty.

After all the questions had been asked, the attorneys and the judge gathered around to consider strikes for cause. I was familiar with this process through “Murder One,” though I assume in California courts, the strikes take place as the questions are answered, rather than at the end. At any rate, this time we waited forty-five minutes as juror after juror was removed from contention. At that point, I realized my odds had changed from twelve in 48 to about one in two of making the jury.

Yup, I was seated in the box along with eleven other individuals. And, soon enough, the attorneys were making their opening statements. The prosecutor was telling us that the defendant stole at gunpoint a 2000 Lexus from a man who had just parked in front of his daughter’s home to deliver her some White Castles. This was in February two years ago. Three weeks later, he robbed a purse, again at gunpoint, from a woman as she was walking into her parents home. The defense attorney asked us to carefully listen to all the evidence, and to agree that his client couldn’t have done these crimes.

Then came the first witness, the detective who caught the defendant. Evidence was entered, as the detective explained that he showed the two victims photographic line-ups, a set of four pictures which could have included the perpetrator, though they didn’t have to. The victims each picked out the defendant. Then he told us about the physical line-ups, each of which led to the same identification. The defense attorney objected to the introduction of every bit of evidence regarding identifications. I began to think he was playing for an appeal, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was wrong with this evidence. Time then to go home.

DAY THREE

In the morning, we heard from the two victims in this case, both of which clearly and firmly told their stories in detail, and seemed absolutely certain that the defendant was the man who robbed them. He definitely has a memorable face, and I think his features would have been seared into the mind of anybody being held up at gunpoint by him.

But, still, I want to presume him innocent, and I wait for the defense attorney to poke holes in the evidence. Instead, he fiddles around trying to convince us that one of the line-ups wasn’t good, because the robber wore a black hoodie, and in the line-up, the defendant was the only person wearing a black hoodie. He hammers on the fact that when questioned after the robbery, both victims mentioned the robber had gold teeth, and the defendant doesn’t have gold teeth. He talks again and again about different hairstyles of the robber and the defendant, even though hairstyles can be changed. In short, he has nothing that can create any doubt about the testimony of the witnesses.

That afternoon, the defense presented their case. First, came a witness who lived with the defendant at the time the robberies were committed. He was the boyfriend of the defendant’s mother. According to him, the defendant would generally do the following during the last two weeks of February, 2003 (which would include the specific date of the second robbery, though not the first): he would sleep until 3:00 pm, then get up, listen to his radio, and get on his computer until 3 or 3:30 in the morning. He could not say anything specific about the actual date the crime was committed.

Then came the defendant himself. If I’ve learned anything from watching crime shows on TV, it’s that this is almost always a bad idea, and this real life example was stunning in proving the adage. First, his alibi differed from the one his mother’s boyfriend had just tried to give him. He would either be at work at McDonald’s during that time – though he was off on the day of the crime – or at his friend’s house two doors down the street, or at home watching videos on TV or on the computer. He was always watching videos.

The defense attorney asked him about gold teeth, which was a huge mistake on his part. The defendant did say he had one in the back of his mouth, but none others, and that he had never worn temporary gold caps.

Uh-oh. What’s that glinting in the prosecutor’s mouth? I don’t remember him having any gold teeth before. On cross examination, the prosecutor asked if the defendant could see the gold in his mouth. Then he popped it right out in two seconds, destroying any question that gold teeth mattered at all. This was as good as any TV lawyer I’d ever seen.

From there, the defendant fell apart. “Do you remember what you were doing on February 2, 2003?”

“Wait, on what day, now?”

“What day? You’ve been here for three days, you’ve heard us mention the date many times. This is your trial! How can you not know what day we’re talking about?”

Further questions started bringing a combative attitude towards the prosecutor. Twice, the defendant actually asked, “What is your point?” before the judge cautioned him to answer the questions, and to avoid asking any himself.

That was it. That was all the defense had. No further witnesses, nothing that could counter the credibility of the prosecution, no hint of doubt that we could grasp in that jury box.

The judge asked if we wanted to go ahead and hear closing arguments and retire to the jury room for deliberations. I was in favor of it, but the vote in the jury was five to five with three abstentions, so we adjourned one more time.

DAY FOUR

Remember that book I mentioned on Day One? I was up to page 379, reading whenever there was a break in the action, just thirty pages away from the end when we were finally called in to the courtroom, forty-five minutes after schedule. I’ll tell you about that book one of these days.

Closing arguments were presented. The prosecutor was boring but strong. He pointed to each of the elements of the charges, and told us how he had presented compelling evidence that the defendant had done as the charge read. The defense attorney wandered all over the place. He started talking about how the witnesses never gave a physical description of their robbers, though we had no way of knowing this, since he never asked them about such a thing. He focused on gold teeth as a ridiculous method of hiding one’s identity, as if that was ever implied to be the reason the caps were worn in the first place. He tried to imply that the two crimes were done by different people since they were different sorts of crimes. In short, he did his client no favors at all.

On to deliberations. I was firmly convinced, as were nine of my fellow jurors, as soon as we walked into that jury room, that this guy was guilty on all four counts. (He was charged with armed robbery in each incident, along with the additional charge of armed criminal action for each. Now, philosophically, I don’t think I feel comfortable with a crime existing merely for the purpose of adding a mandatory sentence to a different crime, which is what we’re talking about here. If you’re convicted of a crime involving a deadly weapon, then you have to be convicted of this additional crime, too. But, mine was not to be philosophical, but to determine the facts, and he was guilty.)

The doubts that existed were minor. One guy was not at all pleased about the line-up with the black hoodie. I agreed this was a serious mistake on the part of the police. To be fair, a line-up should not be set up in a way that could call extra attention to the person who was under suspicion. But, the line-up was only one of three identifications of this suspect for this crime; the other two seemed pretty clear-cut.

Two other jurors were concerned about being wrong, even though they were leaning towards believing his guilt. Thus, we took about an hour with everybody offering opinions about the case. There was a lot of serious discussion, with some very interesting viewpoints, though sometimes it could veer off into paths far from the topic. I remember somehow there was suddenly talking about the roles of parents in modern society.

Eventually, the votes were in, and we were brought back down to reveal the defendant’s fate. This 19-year-old kid, who was 17 when he was first arrested for these acts, was found guilty on all four counts, and he burst out crying when the third one was revealed. It was heart-breaking, and I certainly understood the sickening feeling described by some of my fellow jurors. Still, I knew we had done the right thing, as hard as it was to consider the results of our decision.

The judge came back to talk to us after the trial, and he actually told us about some of the issues discussed at sidebar, which was fascinating. I very much appreciated that he was opposed to mandatory minimum sentences as well. He seemed like a very sensible, prudent, and liberal judge.

Finally, after lots of chit-chat from the bailiff, who I liked but who loved to talk about her job more than anything else in the world, there was an opening to get out of there. I was ready to go home for the first time in days (I wasn’t spending a whole lot of waking time at home Monday or Tuesday night, and Wednesday I had gone out).

The experience was fascinating. I wouldn’t call it pleasant, though I did tell my fellow jurors it was a pleasure to share it with them. I think it was the strenuous efforts by all concerned to be fair, to really deeply consider what we were doing, which impressed me the most. I know for a fact that the twelve of us came from dramatically different backgrounds, that we had very little in common socially or politically. But, when given an opportunity to weigh facts, we were able to come to a common conclusion with little or none of it based on our backgrounds. In other words, it showed me that people are better than they’re often given credit for being.

Hey Kids! Comics!

2005-04-08T08:31:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I loved comic books more than anything in the world. By the time I outgrew them – and it took me longer than it took most people, since I was 21 when I sold the collection in exchange for enough money to buy a camera and a trip to Columbia, Mo. to have sex with my girlfriend – I had amassed some 5000 of the darn things. Even now, 25 years afterwards, I can perfectly recall details from hundreds of specific issues of the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Doom Patrol, Justice League of America, and many more.

I do remember the growing pains caused by being mad about those comics while all my peers were moving on to teenage concerns. Here’s the crazy confession, though. At the time, I was absolutely convinced that the problem was in the form, not the content. I actually went around telling anybody who would listen that I would prefer to read the same stories in prose, but the only way to get them was in these four-color, skinny little pamphlets.

This was years before the culture came to accept comic books. Between the Batman TV series in the mid-60s and the Superman movie in the late 70s, there was no conventional belief that comic books were anything but trite, if thrilling, trash. That was my era, and I believed that comics were the greatest literature in the history of the world. Who was the best writer, Shakespeare or Steve Englehart? It was no contest for me. And nobody could try to tell me that Rembrandt was a better artist than John Buscema, either.

As I said, eventually I wised up, and realized that while there was some really cool stuff in those books, they weren’t uniformly good enough to keep spending so much time and money on them. Music had taken over so much of my free time after I reached college, anyway, and I was also realizing that this Shakespeare guy actually did have a way with words, and he wasn’t the only literary master who could provide me with better, more consistent reading rewards.

Time kept marching on, and I occasionally dabbled in the passions of my youth, but never very extensively until the mid 1990s, when deluxe books reprinting seemingly everything I’d ever owned or wanted to own as a lad started being published. Now, with an adult’s eye, I could see the value of the form itself, the methods of telling stories, the ways in which time was manipulated through panel breakdowns, the intricate relationship between words and pictures, the method in the approach to pictures not necessarily meant to be seen as realistic. I could see that often, the pressures of cranking out multiple tales each and every month meant that even my favorite writers and artists missed as often as they hit, but I was glad to see that sometimes those commercially produced comic books really did have some nice little artistic touches.

Meanwhile – there’s a word I read about a zillion times - the comic form started being used for a whole lot more concepts than just telling superhero and funny animal stories. (And, the original genres were being reinvented every time you turned around, too.) A whole generation of younger creators – usually writers and artists combined in the same human being, which was not the norm when I was growing up – were tackling everything from the Holocaust to punk rock lifestyles.

It costs a whole lot to keep up with all that stuff, though, so I’ve only encountered it now and again. But, now, on your bookshelves for something around $25, you can buy an excellent single volume compilation of work by many of the most interesting and frequently exciting new comics artists around. It’s the new McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue No. 13, edited by Chris Ware. (McSweeney’s is a publishing concept which deserves a whole lot more attention maybe some day down the line; for now, suffice it to say, they publish books as if they were magazines.)

You’ll laugh, of course, because a lot of the artists today are full of yucks, applying a frequently, though not always cynical update to the classic tropes of ancient newspaper comic strips. You’ll cry, because many of these artists are capable of telling the most intimate details of human pain and misery. You’ll sometimes flit back and forth between both emotional extremes. But, mostly, you’ll just find a lot of pleasure.

There are interesting articles (and some old rare sketches and published work) about comics artists of the past, but mostly, you get contemporary work, gathered in no particular order. Honestly, I liked pretty much everything in here, though there were a few pieces which stood out especially. Chris Ware’s story was a major highlight, for example. Ware, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” was one of the most successful comic book collections of recent years, tells a particularly touching, riveting tale of a woman who lost a leg as a young girl. She meets a man, falls in love, and lives without him later, and the whole story is pretty much told through scenes set in the bedroom in which she grew up. It’s truly beautiful stuff.

(Here’s an incidental paragraph wondering why Ware has to draw such teeny-tiny panels all the time. He loves small print, that’s for sure. We old folks have to squint quite a bit to read his stuff, and for that matter, the work of several other artists collected here. It does make each individual page look stylish, but I’m still gonna complain anyway.)

Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, the brothers responsible for “Love and Rockets,” one of the greatest comic book series in history, contribute a few recent stories. Some of these were ones I’d read before, but they still hit me with the poignancy of their ability to pull the largest truth out of the smallest events. Gilbert’s episode of “Julio’s Day,” his series showing events from different periods of his title characters life, in which little Julio goes from the joy of learning on his first day of school to the pain of being bullied afterward is absolutely unforgettably sad.

But, enough about the people I already knew (though, of course, Linda Barry has a wonderful piece, and I had the usual mixed emotions about R. Crumb, he of the major talent and the major issues with women). I discovered artists I’ve never encountered before, too. I loved Marc Beyer, who harkens back to Winsor McKay (the turn of the 20^th century artist who drew Little Nemo in Slumberland) with his whimsical approach to each panel of the ultra cynical “Amy and Jordan” strips. Richard McGuire takes a bird’s-eye-view approach to the world, and uses bright, plain colors devoid of shadow to tell a mysteriously amusing story with at least one major surprise on every page.

Debbie Drechsler meshes mundane reality with intriguing dream images in her tale of a woman getting an abortion. Kim Deitch offers a comics-as-journalism tale with “Ready to Die,” an examination of one particular death row inmate, his death, and the people who knew him. Joe Sacco shows the life in Sarajevo after the recent war in excerpts from his long work, “The Fixer.” It’s full of compelling, frightening details.

I’m not ready to return to my old obsession full time, but it’s nice to see that the possibilities of the comics medium are being so thoroughly explored. There’s also an essay by John Updike, who apparently dabbled in cartooning before he turned to prose, that as much as anything I’ve read provides insight into the way comic stories are created. All in color and black and white for a whole lot of dimes!

Stand-in - The Unemployment Line

2005-04-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

You never know when watching a movie will resonate with real life. Sunday afternoon, I set up the DVR to record “Stand-In,” a 1937 flick starring Humphrey Bogart, Leslie Howard, and Joan Blondell, who bears a sweet resemblance to my wife. Sunday evening, I lost my job. Monday evening, I watched “Stand-In,” a comedy of sorts, and suddenly came to the part wherein Howard’s character loses his job. So much for escapism.

In September of 1984, I was hired by Vintage Vinyl, and I couldn’t have been happier. I was leaving a record store that was only a few months away from going under, and heading to the coolest place in St. Louis. I spent half my spare time in that little shop anyway, so it seemed the perfect place for me to earn some cash.

At the time, it was hard to earn a living. I was 25, in my first apartment, and broke all the time. But, I was soaking up so much knowledge from the people who worked at the store with me. And, I was often working alone, so I could play any open record in the store, and learn even more. If it weren’t for that time in Vintage Vinyl, I don’t think I would know a tenth of what I know about music.

Over the years, business kept getting better, and I worked my way up through just about every job that could be had there. I worked with hundreds of different fellow employees – heck, I hired dozens of ‘em myself. I kept on learning, not just about music, but about inventory levels and balance sheets and financial projections and managing people and computers and spreadsheets. I figured, for the longest time, that I would work there until I died, or at least retired.

The strength of Vintage Vinyl was always in its people, but the strength worked best when times were good. The record industry has taken some hits in recent years. I’ve never believed for one second that these hits were caused by file-sharing. To me, the problems are more cultural than that. Music doesn’t mean to kids now what it did to people of my generation. Oh, they like it alright, but it’s just one of many entertainment distractions. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anybody would want to waste ten seconds with a video game – well, maybe the baseball or hockey ones, if I actually had any hand-eye coordination. But, that’s where the big money is now.

Something had to give to keep Vintage Vinyl going, and I was the sacrificial offering to the retail gods. Now, I’m sitting here terrified and thrilled about the future. I can envision equally living in the gutter and living an even more comfortable life from here on out. Legally, I get to stay on the company bought medical insurance, though I have to pay for it now. That won’t last forever, but it’s a big deal. If I have to buy my own insurance, I think I have to deal with pre-existing conditions clauses, and that’s not a good thing.

I’ve got skills I haven’t even thought about, and my next step is to figure them out. That’ll come in a day or two. You’ve got to take some time to mourn, and some time to distract. Big life decisions shouldn’t be made while you’re in shock. But, they will be made, and I hope I’ll be alright.

Hey, did I mention my wife is losing her job this year, too, because of a corporate merger? Oh, yeah, scary and thrilling, you betcha.

Now, about that movie. “Stand-In” was one of those 1930s b-pictures that didn’t quite know what it wanted to be. The character actors ham things up about as much as any I’ve ever seen, especially Jack Carson with his motor-mouth fast-talking and his loud, high-pitched laugh. Bogart has a blast playing comedy, though he doesn’t get nearly enough funny lines. Howard carries the picture, playing a prim, prissy stuffed shirt who only understands numbers and doesn’t even know who Shirley Temple is. Naturally, he saves the movie studio and gets to marry Blondell.

This movie reveals a whole lot about the back-stage maneuverings of motion picture studios. There is dirt on the content of star contracts, on their vanity, on the incompetence of some directors, even on the sexual shenanigans of some serial polygamists. There is also a lot of technical information shown of how movies could create believable scenes right on the studio lots.

I thought that was unusual for the time, but then, near the end, the movie transforms into a battle between labor and capitol, allowing for the nuanced view that even the man in charge can be an employee at the same time. When Howard is fired, he rallies all the studio workers to keep working for two days so they can finish the re-edited picture that can keep the company out of the hands of a speculator who buys movie studios so they can be shut down. Just try to imagine a movie being made nowadays which shows that the workers actually have and deserve some power.

I didn’t have that option, but it was kind of fun watching somebody do it.

Freethinkers Rule OK

2005-03-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

I left the church behind a long time ago. It seemed like the most sensible thing to do, once I realized just how similar the fundamental stories of Christianity were to all the other stories ancient peoples used to explain the world and their role in it. The imagination of humankind isn’t really infinite, even when creating infinite beings.

To remain a Christian seemed to me to require one of two approaches. I could either stretch the concepts I was learning to be true around the strong central beliefs of the Bible, or I could wrap myself inside the cocoon of what I had been taught, and decide that the rest of the world was wrong about everything that mattered to them.

Neither approach seemed worth the effort. Christianity had some beautiful stories, and several beliefs which set the basis for my own humanist approach to life. Love others as you love yourself. That seemed pretty simple. Why did I need to deny all that was implied by that simple sentence in order to maintain belief in a knowledge system which was contradicted by every alternative belief system, including the seemingly hundreds of different Christian sects?

I’ve always remained fascinated by religion, however. I mean, I went to Lutheran schools for 13 years, so there’s a big part of me that’s been influenced by these beliefs. Read a little about the history of any religion, and you’ll see the enormous role humans play in their construction. Just look at the difference between the Gospel as preached by Jesus in the decades-later reconstructions of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the fire-and-brimstone restrictions on behavior thrown out there by Paul in all those letters that end the New Testament. Basically, Paul created Christianity as we know it. There’s very little in what Jesus said that leads to the concepts of Paul.

You may have noticed we’re involved in something called the Culture Wars, with the battle lines being drawn between fundamentalist Christians and, uh, everybody else. It seems as though the Christians are winning, though not if you listen to them whine about how persecuted they are. But, that’s probably because their definition of the battle is rather different than mine. How do you fight a war when one side says, “Okay, you guys believe whatever you want to believe, and act in whatever way you need to in accordance to those beliefs, as long as you don’t mess around with my right to believe and act differently” while the other side says, “Uh, uh, you don’t understand, we know absolutely what is correct (and just ignore the fact that historically we’ve erred on the side of knowing the wrong thing quite a few times) for all peoples in all situations, so you can’t do what you want.”

I understand that it’s not every Christian, or every sect of Christianity, or, for that matter, every person of any faith who’s fighting me in this regard. Many people realize that the United States of America has been built on a diversity of opinion, of resistance against both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority. There is no special power given to members of any one creed, and this allows all of us, even those of us who don’t believe in any God, to contribute to the good of the whole society.

It turns out the division between a secular view of the United States and a Christian view is nothing new. I’ve just finished “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” by Susan Jacoby, and I’ve learned a few things, let me tell you. For instance, you know the canard that America was founded by Christians, and thus this country was always meant to be a Christian nation? Guess what? It conveniently lets out the fact that they very specifically argued over the question of whether or not God should be mentioned in the Constitution, and they decided that it would be better not to do it. These people knew what happened when specific religions were aligned with a state, and they didn’t want to see that happen here.

Jacoby covers a lot of ground, but she gives some pretty good stories about the fears of none other than Baptists and Presbyterians that the more numerous Episcopalians would foist their world views on these poor innocent believers of somewhat different faith. She greatly admires Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense,” whose role in spearheading the American Revolution is well known to us even though it was white-washed out of history for 100 years because he followed that one up with trying to talk everybody out of belief in God. She covers the intersection of feminism and abolitionism with the freethought movement, and doesn’t shy away from the ways in which both pushed aside the atheists and secularists in order to try to achieve their more narrow aims. Robert Ingersoll, perhaps the nations greatest orator in the 19^th century, gets plenty of ink as one of the heroes of the last age in which Americans of vastly differing opinions on religion could at least stand a chance of getting a fair hearing.

Into the 20^th century, she places the start of our contemporary version of the Culture Wars back to the Scopes Monkey Trial. From that point until the Roe v Wade decision of 1973, secularists assumed they were on the path of ultimate success. This was something of a legacy from the previous century, when progress seemed to be the favored storyline. It was so easy to watch success after success and decide that the other side would inevitably give up and accept the truth.

Of course, religion is a fundamental need of humans. I mean, you can get past it, if you spend enough time thinking about it, but it’s been so deeply ingrained in so many cultures across the globe throughout history that we have to assume it’s not going anywhere. I’ve gone back and forth between thinking it needs to be completely eradicated, and thinking it could serve a harmless role in society. I see the overwhelming Patriarchal controls of Christianity as it has been historically practiced, and I wonder how it can ever be reformed. And yet, there are Christians who attempt to democratize their religion, who are compassionate towards all people, even those who are remarkably different from them.

Jacoby tells of the many fundamentalist Christian churches, and even some of the more mainstream churches, in the 1950s and early 1960s which played such a horrible role in supporting racism against the Civil Rights Movement. There were fears of the unknown, hatred of those who were different, and a determination to keep things the way they had been for as long as anybody could remember. The parallels between this and the current anti-gay zeal of many Christians are obvious to me. And yet, to the other side, it is just as obvious that gays truly are sinners beyond redemption, or at the very least, sinners capable of leading society down a path that takes us all beyond redemption.

How can we compete with beliefs which insist that abortion is murder? That Terri Schiavo isn’t really brain-dead? That evolution never happened? That sexual desire can simply be ignored outside of marriage between males and females? These are absolute opinions, based on interpretations of the Bible which are not even the only ones possible to people who believe in the truth of that book. There is no compromising with these beliefs. There is no live and let live.

“Freethinkers” does nothing to provide hope that this war will ever be won, though it does offer enough history to prove that individual battles can be fought to protect the rights of Americans to differ. At the very least, it shows that we didn’t just suddenly get this way. I don’t know if the country is ready for another Robert Ingersoll, but until we get one, the rest of us have to stop holding our tongues, and argue with the forces attempting to ignore what has been learned through hard work, study, and experience.

Mary Gautier Makes My New Favorite Record

2005-03-29T14:50:00.000-08:00

Every time I sit down to write about music, I get stuck trying to describe the sound of it. But, that’s the great big gigantic elephant inside the whole thing. Sure, the lyrics and what they mean are important, and yep, you can’t argue with basic genre and form discussions, and, naturally, the harmony/rhythm/melody standbys are necessary, and of course, there’s always the emotional element to think about. But, music is something you listen to, and the most basic thing differentiating one record from another is the sound of it.

Mary Gautier’s brand new “Mercy Now” has a sound I want to swim around in. Or maybe lay on it spread across the floor like a comforting mattress. Or perhaps I want to wrap this whole thing around my body, or at the very least my head, and feel the warmth of it all. It’s a sound that resonates, with plucking acoustic guitars, gently tapping bass notes, swirling Hammond organ chords, insistent yet perfectly balanced drums, throbbing electric guitars, and most of all a voice that sounds just tired enough to be sick of what’s ailing her yet determined enough to make it obvious she’s not giving up yet.

But none of that tells you what to expect, really. Gurf Morlix produced the record, and if you’ve heard his classic work with Lucinda Williams – “Lucinda Williams,” “Sweet Old World” and “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” – you’re going to be in the ballpark. Yet, producing another Southern singer/songwriter with poetic ambitions and distinctly simple melodies created a challenge for Morlix to make sure he could differentiate Gautier from Williams. And, he does. This music is darker, less immediate, and less pop-aspiring than that of Williams.

Williams is a more obviously autobiographical writer than Gautier. Her best work is richly detailed, evocative, and touched with truth drawn from experience. Gautier is less revealing of her song sources. She may be writing from heartbreak, but the details in each song are always a little bit more general. Or, if she conjures very specific imagery, as in the wonderful “Wheel Inside The Wheel,” it’s a list of occurrences from a lifetime of hearing about Mardi Gras, not any actual remembrances of things she saw there.

See, I’ve already moved away from the sound of the record, though thematically, I figured once I’d brought up Williams, I’d better finish off the ways in which she’s different from Gautier right away. I suspect there will be a lot of lazy writers going on about the similarities and not getting into what makes Gautier so special.

“Mercy Now” is an interesting album, a set of ten songs perfectly constructed to move towards an end. Of the first four songs, three are essentially recited over grooves and sound effects from the band. Sound effects is a bad thing to say. The guitars, harmonicas, banjos, et al are there to color the mood, to react to the words and to add to the imagery of the songs. The narrarator of “Falling Out of Love” feels more hemmed in by her experience when mournful harmonica lines and thick electric guitar chords meander around her story. And “Wheel Inside the Wheel” flirts with New Orleans second line rhythms turned inside out, and a deliciously picked banjo line that weaves throughout the song, adding to the Carnival feel without ever putting you inside it, making the song feel like it’s outside time, outside the experience itself. “I Drink” hits the nail on the same kind of head John Prine has pounded on for years, telling the story of a man caught inside the destiny he’s well aware of. Ian McLagan’s organ holds the narrarator to the floor where the bottle lies.

The title track, “Mercy Now,” is interesting. For one thing, it appears to be directly autobiographical, albeit without telling us much of anything about her life. We know she feels her father has worked hard all his life for no reward, and we know her brother is going through something serious. Also, we know that Gautier is of the church, and she feels her church and country need some help. This song is made beautiful and precious by the sound of it. The theme – everybody could use some mercy – is a little trite, but you can’t help but be swept up by its quiet, peaceful delivery and the tone of her voice with its rich Southern accent.

Gautier sings most of “Mercy Now,” but she stretches her voice more on the other six songs. Harlan Howard’s gorgeous “Just Say She’s a Rhymer” and Fred Eaglesmith’s sadly mysterious “Your Sister Cried” show how she can just cut the prettiness from a lovely tune, and add to the emotional power of the words. Her own “Prayer Without Words” is the album’s fastest song. It’s not a rocker, by any means, but her words fly by almost before you can understand them. Again the sound of her voice is the most important thing here.

“Empty Spaces” and “Drop in the Bucket” are both ballads describing a time past the end of a relationship. They’re both enormously beautiful, mournful, and strangely settled. Each benefits from the lovely harmonies of the very talented Patti Griffin, who drops in to help out. Other songs feature harmonies from Gurf Morlix, and I enjoy the way he and Gautier stay so far from each other’s phrasing, but I would love to hear more of the blend with Griffin.

Finally, the album ends with my favorite cut, “It Ain’t the Wind, It’s the Rain.” After all that’s gone before, we come to a song that probably pushes the metaphor of its title a little too far, but which feels, again because of the way Gautier spits out the words, and the thumping power of the drums, and Morlix’s perfectly textured guitar parts, as if it’s liberating. Pain is brought by the rain, but it’s washed away, too. I turn this cut up louder every time I hear it.

This is the record I want to play over and over right now. It’s so warm, so perfectly pitched, so full of depth and openness and spirit. I like it more and more every day. I just can’t really put into words all the ways in which it fills me with sound itself.

Tis the Season

2005-03-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

I just got in from walking the dogs. Ugh. It’s cold, wet, gloomy, and generally no fun to be outside. And in something like ten days, baseball season begins.

There’s nothing I look forward to more than opening day, because that’s when the rhythm kicks in. You’ve got a game almost every day or night to either watch, hear, or read about. And that’s just the Cardinals. Thanks to the miracle of fantasy baseball, I also get to care about lots of other games, too.

I’ve gone through periods of intense devotion to baseball, and intense disregard. I have virtually no nostalgia for the Whitey Herzog era of the Cardinals, because I didn’t pay any attention between the end of the 1982 season and the beginning of the 1994 season. Now, I think I’m at a perfect middle ground, liking the game without worshipping it.

The more I’ve learned to appreciate how the game is played, the less I can stand hearing any of the so-called experts in the media talk about it. Baseball announcers are virtually incapable of saying anything that contradicts either the home team spin or the conventional wisdom clichés we’ve heard a million times before. And, sportswriters aren’t interested in figuring anything out, either. They tell us the score, they describe a play or two, and fill their space with quotes and conjecture.

Baseball, more than almost anything else ever devised, lends itself to analysis. Because seasons are so long, because players have so many opportunities to do what they do, there is enough of a sample size to look at statistics which actually explain something about the quality of each player’s contribution to his team. But, because people remember some things more than others, and because few people like to contradict what they learned from their father at an early age, the truth which can be unearthed is often ignored and frequently denigrated.

Which brings me to “Baseball Prospectus 2005,” the latest massive tome of truth and analysis. It’s a book which has expanded beyond its annual 500 pages to a daily updated website with thousands of words per week expended on this game which holds such fascination for me. (To read most of www.baseballprospectus, you need to pay a small annual fee, but there are a number of articles put up for free to entice you to buy more.)

There are things most baseball fans insist upon which Baseball Prospectus consistently denies. But, Baseball Prospectus only makes claims which can be supported by evidence. Does it make sense to have a batter with anything more than a .200 average bunt to intentionally make an out while allowing the runner on first base to move up to second? I forget the statistics from the study they conducted last year, but it most clearly did not make sense. Unless the hitter is completely hopeless, the odds of scoring a run actually go down slightly when the bunt is successfully executed. So, almost every time you hear an announcer go on about how great it is that so and so gave himself up for the team, it turns out that he gave himself up for no reason.

You see, the most precious commodity in baseball happens to be outs. You only get 27 of them per game, 3 per inning, and once you’ve used them up, you can’t score. Anything that does not produce an out increases your chance of scoring. They’ve shown tables which let us see exactly what the statistical odds are of scoring a run in every possible situation of the game. And, in almost every one of those situations, the odds go down if you give up an out.

Speaking of batting average, guess what? Who cares? Well, not really, but who cares in a vacuum? Again, what matters is not how many hits one gets, but how many outs one makes, so in that respect, a walk really is just as good as a hit. Those of us who couldn’t hit a lick remember coaches and fellow players telling us that all the time when we were younger. But, really, on-base percentage and slugging percentage tell us a lot more about a player’s contribution to the team performance than batting average does. Hitting .300 without any walks and without any power is actually pretty poor performance, and, it turns out, average is about the least predictable element of the game. Players with good on-base percentage and good slug tend to repeat themselves; players with good batting average can move all over the map. This makes sense because a) a small number of balls falling in exactly the right or wrong place per year can cause a major fluctuation in batting average and b) official scorers can make odd decisions.

Reading the book is a joy. “Baseball Prospectus 2005” is filled with extensive analysis of what went right and wrong for each team in the 2004 season, along with speculation about what to expect in 2005. And, there are complete statistics for every player in the majors, and all the key players in the minors, over the last four years, with witty and insightful analysis about each.

So, you’re wondering about this upcoming season. Can the Cardinals repeat as National League Champions, and can they win the World Series this year? (I’m sure every truly decent human being roots for the Cardinals, right?) Well, first of all, let’s point out that despite what the conventional wisdom likes to blather on about heart and guts and dynasty and all that, becoming either the National League or the World Series champion is something of a crapshoot. Any team can win any four out of seven games. The worst teams in baseball tend to win 65 games out of 162, so at any time, they can win four out of seven. And, the teams that make the playoffs tend to be among the best teams in any given year, which makes the chance of a random winning streak even greater.

That said, according to Baseball Prospectus, the Cardinals have one of the best four-man hitting line-ups in baseball history. That would be Larry Walker/Albert Pujols/Scott Rolen/Jim Edmonds. Riding the backs of these four hitters can take a team very far. The starting pitching is questionable but plausible cases can be made that it will hold its own. The bullpen should be good, but not as good as last year. Losing Tony Womack and Mike Matheny is always a good thing, even if their replacements are not guaranteed to be better. Losing Edgar Renteria was sad, but not as terrible as you might think, especially considering the money he wound up commanding. And, the Cubs are worse than last year, and the Astros are about to dive-bomb into mediocrity.

This means the Cardinals will almost certainly go to the playoffs, barring a major injury to any of their best players. There is, of course, no real certainty, only odds. Baseball Prospectus can teach us to understand the odds way better than we did when we thought good and bad seasons were flukes.

Bring on the season. This should be fun.

Ben-Hur - Of Hard Bodies and Chariots

2005-03-23T16:04:00.000-08:00

In 1925, 80 years ago, without the aid of computerized images, somehow or another, they put the camera down in the ground and showed you those horse-drawn chariots roaring straight at your face and moving at goddam unimaginable speeds. In 2005, thanks to Turner Classic Movies, I sat in my living room and ducked, convinced I was about to be run over.

“Ben-Hur” is one of those stories I’ve always kind of known through the cultural zeitgeist, not because I’ve ever actually watched the movie. And, by the movie, I’m referring to the 1925 original, not the 1959 Charlton Heston-starring remake. Nosirree, we don’t need no talking, just spectacle, thank you. Well, spectacle and some fine homoerotic subtext.

I love the fact that this movie was called “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.” That’s kinda like saying “Forrest Gump” should’ve been subtitled “A Tale of John Kennedy.” Only, actually, it would be better if Kennedy’s face hadn’t appeared in “Gump,” just his arm.

Somehow, a wild action movie got lumped in with a few scenes from the Bible, and the 1925 audience could take this as an uplifting message film. I have to admit from the perspective of today’s vanishing separation of church and art, I was at least impressed that the final scene didn’t bother to indicate Christ was resurrected. “He’ll live forever in the hearts of men,” is a considerably different meaning than “That tomb is empty, people.”

Still, we’re talking about a flick filled with miracles, as that Heavenly arm can cure anything it touches. Turn a floppy baby doll into a living breathing kid? No problem for the Christ-finger. Cure two lepers who fought their way through the angry crowd in order to achieve a happy ending for the main character, even though you’re carrying your cross and on your way to Golgotha? Touch that bright shining arm, and all will be made well.

On the other hand, Judah, Ben-Hur spends most of the movie looking for a) revenge on his ex-lover, the Roman soldier Messala and b) looking to support a leader who will bring his Jewish people out of their oppression at the hands of the Romans. Oh, and showing off his legs (and frequently the rest of his very well-shaped body.) (Note: There is no direct textual support for my contention that Messala messed around with Judah, but it looked pretty obvious to me when they saw each other for the first time in years, and came as close as two men in 1925 could be allowed to kiss on screen.)

A word should come from my voyeuristic mind concerning movies of the 1920s. The sex was sublimated, but it always catches my eye. Both women and men could wear outfits which cling in some places, and leave lots of skin showing in others, and I’m proudly going to cop to a love of that sort of thing. The scene in “Ben-Hur” when Iras, the Egyptian vamp, comes within an inch of seducing our hero, is one of the great sex scenes of all time, and they barely touch each other. You can just feel the heat between them.

Alright, let’s move back to the spectacle for a minute. In this two and a half hour movie, you’ve got about twenty minutes of Jesus stuff, with a whole lot of this spent on the Nativity. (Which reminds me, how impractical was it that Rome tried to make every single citizen and subject go to the city of their births to be taxed (thus allowing Jesus of Nazareth to be born in Bethlehem, where his father and conveniently his great grand-sire David were born)? The scene wherein all the inhabitants of Jerusalem – apparently an ancient world version of Los Angeles, where nobody was actually born, but everybody lived – are running hither and thither to get home in time to be counted, was pretty chaotic. And, how did they know if they got things wrong? It’s not like there were any ways to prove anybody was who they said they were.)

There’s about forty-five minutes of blither about love and honor and family, and maybe another twenty minutes of assembling an army and finally having Judah meet Jesus, only to learn God don’t want no war. That leaves two very long and very, very thrilling sequences that remain among the greatest feats of movie making even after all these years.

The first is the sea battle between a fleet of Roman galleons (including the one upon which Judah is enslaved at the galleys) and a bigger fleet of pirates. Holy moley! First of all, I’m guessing they had to actually build at least some of these ships, and then wreck them during the fight sequences. Secondly, they obviously had hundreds of men running wild all over the screen during the battles. Could it possibly have been choreographed, or did they just give everybody fake swords and tell them to go out swinging? The carnage is amazing, with men being killed horribly, and others diving into the sea in a desperate bid for survival. All this and Ben-Hur wearing only the flimsiest little cloth covering in the mid-section? I know how that sublimation thing worked in the olden days.

And, I’m guessing you’ve heard about the chariot race, but I’m equally guessing you’ve no real idea just how incredible that scene is. Again, they obviously built an enormous, detailed set to portray an arena in Antioch in 30 A.D. Then, they turned about a dozen teams of horses loose, and set the cameras where they could bring you the most action. Constant cutting builds greater and greater excitement from close-ups to wide shots to high shots to low shots as the speed builds up, as horses and men drop to the ground, and as Ben-Hur and Messala race to the death. I’m getting short of breath just thinking about it again.

What do I know about Fred Niblo, the director? He had a long career, mostly in silents, but he lasted a few years into the 30s. He obviously had an incredible eye, and a strong sense of pacing, not to mention a Griffith “Intolerance” level feel for building gigantic sets. It’s amazing to see how big the walls and buildings could be compared to the tiny size of human beings.

The actors were also mostly unknown to me. Apparently Ramon Novarro was second only to Valentino in the great Latin heart-throb standings of the mid-1920s. It was easy to see why. May McAvoy plays Esther, the virginal love interest, but I much preferred Carmel Meyers, who played Iras, the Egyptian sensualist. I’ve seen enough silent movies now to be used to the oversize acting conventions, but these people did occasionally move a little more naturalistically than you might think.

I’m still trying to figure out how they filmed from underneath those horses. Wow!

1950 Crime Spree

2005-03-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

If you watch any of the “CSI” TV shows, you know how science kicks criminal butt every time. There’s hardly any way to kill somebody without leaving traces of evidence behind, no matter how hard you scrub the blood away. DNA is everywhere, and there’s an army of virtually infallible criminologists eager to use the latest machinery to solve crimes and put the perpetrators behind bars for a good long time.

Heckfire, this isn’t new shit at all. I watched this 1950 movie on Turner Classic just the other day called “The Tattooed Stranger,” and it was like a 1950 prototype for “CSI:New York.” Just as we’re so used to seeing on our TV screens, the city is a backdrop wherein a regular citizen and his dog find a body, and immediately the forensic team is poring all over the crime scene.

The details were different, as DNA hadn’t quite been mapped – or even discovererd – yet. There was a lot of stress put on fingerprints and footprints, and even a thrilling scene wherein one of our heroes figured out how tall the killer had to be from the position of the moveable car seat, presumably still a relatively new invention at the time.

It was also interesting to see the veteran cops not quite convinced that the college boys knew what they were doing. “Things are different now, Corrigan,” explains Capt. Gavin. “It’s not like when we were chasing bootleggers down Bleecker Street.” But, don’t worry, 90% of investigation is still done with the feet and with the head.

I don’t know that this 64-minute flick would be of much interest if not for the documentary aspects of it. It’s filmed all over New York, with spectacular shots of the 1950 skyline, Central Park, the Bowery, and Brooklyn, as well as close-ups of 1950 police and tattoo equipment. The plot is about as believable – and for its time, sordid – as your average TV crime show today. The woman found dead has a tattoo on her arm, which leads the cops to find she’s been married repeatedly in order to collect insurance, and one of her husbands wasn’t dead. The sordid part came because she mostly married marines during World War II who weren’t likely to return to her.

The actors were not exactly a-list. John Miles played Frank Tobin with only two possible facial expressions – grim determination (used mostly during gun battles) or the goofball grin of somebody who gets a private joke whenever anybody else opens their mouth. Walter Kinsella’s Corrigan was a character who seemed a little more suspicious and weary of the world, but not much was done with him aside from allowing him palpable disgust at the sight of a heavily tattooed man. Patricia White played the beautiful botanist Dr. Mary Mahan, whose help was indispensable to cracking the case.

I wonder if the various “CSI” shows will ever mean this much to future generations. I doubt it, because these shows spend less time explaining and more time showing off the brilliance of the characters. Corrigan and Tobin weren’t always right, though they got their man in the end. And despite the “CSI” use of various city locales to differentiate between themselves, they don’t devote half as much loving footage to real places in the world. Even a b-movie like “The Tattooed Stranger” felt like it was about people, wooden, barely caricatured people, but people nonetheless, set out in places that actually existed.

Even more impressive was my viewing the other day of another 1950 movie, “The Asphalt Jungle,” which did what rarely happens in modern TV or movies, and that is told the story entirely from the point of view of the criminals. This one was directed by John Huston, and it starred Sterling Hayden, James Whitmore, and Sam Jaffe. It took the Hollywood regulations of its day – that none of the criminals could escape unpunished – and tried to turn it into a multi-character modern tragedy. It might have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids – I mean, a limited amount of time to devote to each person’s fate.

Jaffe played Doc Erwin Riedenschneider, a German émigré with master thief credentials. He plotted some of the biggest capers of the 40s, though he had been in jail for several years before the start of this picture. But, time spent in the clink was time to plan his biggest job ever. All he needed was a driver, a safe cracker, a hooligan, and a backer to pay everybody.

Whitmore was the driver, Anthony Crusoe was the safe cracker, Hayden the hooligan, and Louis Calhern the backer. Marilyn Monroe played a small but wonderful role as Calhern’s mistress. Every one of these characters had depth, and it felt like the real intersection of different lives. None of them were portrayed as ruthlessly evil, as anything other than humans who weren’t quite capable of living in the path of the straight and narrow. They had their reasons, some decent, some terrible. They had dreams of leaving the life they were living, and this caper was to be their ticket out.

Of course, you know the best laid plans – and this plan was laid pretty well – can go to pieces pretty quickly. Halfway through this movie, things start to unravel, and the criminals almost start to catch themselves. The policeman most often shown here is actually on the take from Marc Lawrence’s brilliant character Cobby Cobb, the man who ties all the criminals together. Even the law is not shown to be perfect in this film, though eventually a speech is given that explains that most policemen are good, even if one in a hundred might not be.

You can’t exactly root for any of these people, but you can be touched by each of their dooms. I was particularly blown away by Calhern, who has just told Monroe they can go away together when he is arrested. The look of broken-hearted sorrow on his face is priceless when he realizes a) he’s been nabbed; b) his dreams are all gone; and c) the woman he was willing to take with him was as dim as she was beautiful. And, oh, when Jaffe is caught because he took too long watching some kids dance to swing music on a café jukebox, you just about want to weep.

Crime dramas on TV always show criminals as being devious plotters with virtually no goodness in them. They have their motives, of course, but these rarely have anything to do with humanity. We don’t see them do anything but lie after the crime has been committed, which makes it easy for us to believe the law is always right. In 1950, we were given the option of seeing things from both points of view, and at the time, I don’t see how I would have had much patience with “The Tattooed Stranger.” But, in retrospect, pairing it with “The Asphalt Jungle” makes for a perfect double feature. There are men and there is science; there are lawkeepers and lawbreakers. Times have changed, to be sure, but crime always makes for good stories.

A Modesty Blaise Proposal

2005-03-10T14:30:00.000-08:00

I was one of those guys who laughed at “Austin Powers” without really getting all the jokes. At least, anything that had to do with specific references to James Bond went straight over my very tall head. I’m here to tell you that I have no opinion as to which actor made the best movie Bond because I’ve never seen an entire 007 picture.

When I was a kid, I do remember a playground conversation with a guy my age whose mother let him go to Bond movies when he was around 10 or 11. To this day, I can hear the tone of his voice, halfway between blushing confusion and manly pride, when he said, “Of course, she tries to make me close my eyes during the good parts.” Said good parts, I was led to believe, contained oodles of naked female flesh.

You see, the 60s were many things, and one of the things they were was an era of absurdly male-centric sexuality. It was a time where sophistication and sex went hand in hand, but only if you assumed sex meant young, preferably buxom women at the beck and call of older, normally well-off men. The thing is, if you do go back and pick up some of that decade’s porn, Playboy or less familiar mags like Cavalier, you’ll find that it was pretty much worth it to read them for the articles. Not that I’m gonna pretend that’s what I did when I visited my Uncle in Bloomington, Illinois and found ten year’s worth of subscription copies lying around in his basement bathroom.

Anyway, the ethos of this particular approach said that sex was something to be enjoyed between two people who liked each other, but that it wasn’t anything to tie two people together for life. This, along with a love for jazz, fine liquor, and the novels of Norman Mailer, was the sign of the good life. And, frankly, jazz, fine liquor, and sex with or without commitment really are things I recommend highly. Norman Mailer, however, was an asshole.

A far better read, though one which was undoubtedly dismissed as trash at the time, would be the paperback novel “Modesty Blaise,” written by one Peter O’Donnell back in 1965. (Those of you wondering what else I bought the last time I went to the thrift store can now exhale.) Modesty Blaise was an English comic strip about a female Bond who had a propensity for being naked from time to time. (Again, a childhood memory: my only contact with this strip was a single reprinted sequence in “The Penguin Book of Comics,” on the same page as a panel from “Barbarella,” and boy, did I look at that page a lot.) O’Donnell was actually the author of the strip, though not the artist.

This novel was actually adapted from O’Donnell’s original screenplay for what was apparently a thoroughly butchered motion picture which came out at the same time. It was successful enough to launch a regular series of novels, though I’ve certainly never seen any of them turn up in my pawing over used paperbacks.

I have to admit, I was surprised at how entertaining this book turned out to be. I was expecting kitsch, and kitsch I got, but it has a fairly elaborate caper plot with superb pacing. Believe me, I may not know spy stuff very well, but I know pulp fiction, and this comes in at the top of the pulp game.

Is there sex? Well, how else is this book going to become sophisticated? It’s about two retired criminals working on the side of the law striving to prevent an international gang of thieves from stealing $10,000 in diamonds being shipped from South Africa to the Middle East. Why wouldn’t you take time out, on page 80, for the following passage? “In love, she used her splendid body to give joyously and without restraint, ranging from glad submission to urgent demand. The happiness in her giving touched his mind with a glowing warmth; but more than that, she received his own gifts with the same unfettered joy as she gave, and this above all stirred the deepest wells of his being.”

A couple chapters later, Modesty’s lover, Paul Hagan, walks in on her while she’s doing yoga, and gets completely freaked out. Ms. Blaise is the epitome of 1965 young girl super-spy sophistication. Of course, because it’s 1965, we also get this, two paragraphs after thirty or forty pages of twists and turns and physical exertion between Blaise and her partner Willie Garvin against the bad guys:

“ “Why the hell do I do it?” she said helplessly. “Why do I always have to . . . to snivel once a job’s over?”

“Not always, Princess,” he said reasonably. “Not often. Only after the rough ‘uns. And we’ve been right up the sharp end for a long while this time.” He eased himself to a sitting position. “I think it’s nice meself,” he said simply. “Honest I do, Princess. It’s nice an’ sort of . . . womanly.””

Ah, it’s too easy to focus on the sexist bullshit, which is held to a mid-60s minimum, to be honest. Blaise only threatens to use her secret weapon, the Nailer. What’s that, you ask? Probably the stupidest name ever given to any secret weapon in the spy world, because it refers to times when Blaise would take off her shirt and walk into a room of bad guys. The few seconds they would waste staring at her perfect breasts would buy her, or her partner, enough time to strike first. Apparently, no concerns occur to anyone that the villains could possibly be gay.

This sort of stuff aside, Modesty Blaise was an interesting creation. In a lifetime of reading pulp novels, comic books, and the like, and watching TV and movie action heroes, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone who worked so hard in a fight, and who suffered so much pain that she had to rest for a while after it. By holding her back from being a superhuman being, even if the only reason was because she was a woman, O’Donnell vastly increased the tension. I loved the fact that Modesty Blaise is not infallible, but that she keeps on fighting anyway.

Yeah, there are ultimately way too many cheap disposable deaths of the villains, and a few really unbelievable yet entertaining weapons hidden in various articles of clothing (including, of course, Modesty’s bra). But, I devoured this book for the cheap excitement it was meant to give. In fact, I found it a damn sight more thrilling than any episode of “Alias” I’ve ever seen, and quite possibly less demeaning.

Considering Ellen Gilchrist

2005-03-08T15:24:00.000-08:00

From the author’s note to Ellen Gilchrist’s collection of short stories, “I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting With My Daddy,” specifically referring to the fact that her story, “Gotterdammerung, In Which Nora Jane and Freddy Harwood Confront Evil in a World They Never Made” was written a full year before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: “I wish evil did not happen in the world. I wish the world could be populated by people like Nora Jane and Freddy Harwood, fortunate, caring men and women, watched over by a writer who would never let them come to harm.”

I’d never thought it was the writer’s job to prevent her characters from coming to harm, so this point struck me as interesting. Now that I’ve finished about three weeks worth of lunches with Gilchrist stories (in addition to this collection, I read her previous “The Cabal and Other Stories”), I realize that she really does take this injunction seriously. Oh, bad things can happen to people, but there’s nothing they can’t deal with.

I read a few books by Gilchrist back in the 80s, and then I lost track of her until I picked up these two collections on a remainder table at a store that was having a half price sale because they were going out of business. I’m saying I got them cheap partially to emphasize my own guilt for forgetting how much I like Gilchrist, and partially to realize the value of picking up cheap books now and again, because they can point you in directions you may otherwise avoid.

I remember tales of Rhoda Manning, though I must confess to forgetting the details from so many years ago. “I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting With My Daddy” gives us five stories featuring this character whom Gilchrist obviously loves above all others. She returns to Manning again and again, but not in chronological order. Gilchrist has created a richly detailed universe of the extended Manning family, in which virtually any era can be explored without ever slipping in a contradictory detail. It’s a creation which is as fascinating as it is impressive.

Gilchrist characters, Manning or not, are mostly Southern, mostly well educated, mostly upper class, mostly interested in the arts if not literary or theatrical creators themselves, and mostly good. They are, however, full of facets and flaws. Gilchrist can say something revealing about a minor character with a beautiful sentence or two, which explains her ability to return to them at greater length in other stories. Here’s Rhoda in the 1970s watching her youngest son: “Teddy looked so cute, standing in front of my stereo listening to music and shuffling his feet. I wanted to give him a big hug and a kiss but he didn’t like to be interrupted when he had started something so I left him alone.”

Not much really happens in any given Gilchrist story – except possibly “Gotterdamerung,” a virtual thriller in Gilchrist world, albeit a thriller with some characters who strike me as living in the building of Frasier Crane if that were in New York – but the characters experience a lot. This is what she does so well, gets us into the heads and the hearts of real human beings, all of which Gilchrist loves.

Me, I found myself loving even more the bunch of folks populating “The Cabal,” a 132-page novelette. (Some of them also turn up in “The Sanguine Blood of Men” and “Hearts of Dixie” from the same book.) Here is the plot, a series of events with little purpose other than to reveal the characters around whom things happen. Caroline is returning to the South to teach literature at a small college. Her gay male friend introduces her to his local theatre group cronies, all of whom have at one time or another been on the couch of psychiatrist Jim Jaspers. Jaspers has flipped his lid, and everyone is worried about their secrets being exposed. That’s pretty much all that happens, but it happens with flair, with wild determination and vivid excitement, with passion and discovery.

It’s not that Gilchrist draws only characters who are likeable. Many of the folks in this town would drive me crazy in real life. But, Gilchrist does give each of them a chance to make their case for being in the world, and small kindnesses can intercut pompous declarations to soothe any anger from the reader. In “The Abortion,” Gilchrist gets inside the heads of characters from half a dozen distinct vantage points, and makes them all seem sympathetic, no easy task on such a subject.

I wonder how much Gilchrist sells. She’s got something like 18 books out, so she must do all right, but I also think I’ve seen many others on remainder tables in my time. Do they consistently print too many, hoping for another “Victory Over Japan,” her 80s respectable seller? I don’t understand the book business the way I understand the record industry. But I understand I’m not done reading the work of Ellen Gilchrist.

Now, as for whether you may wind up enjoying this stuff or not, I suppose it depends on your ability to be satisfied with the concluding sentences of “Light Shining Through a Honey Jar,” the final story in the “Rhoda Manning” book. “Of course she fell asleep in my arms. I covered her with a knit coverlet my aunt Lily made years ago in Boutte and then I tiptoed into their room to see what the twins were doing. They were asleep like spoons, side by side as they were in the womb. Such is love. Such are the moments of our lives. Breathe in, breathe out, go and watch a sunset.”

40 Years of a Century's Worth of Drama

2005-03-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

I love to go poking around in the past every now and again. Nothing too organized, you understand. I prefer digging through the detritus at estate sales, looking for family photos or diaries. (I once scored a set of mid 1920s diaries of a teenage girl living in a small town in southeast Missouri, my all-time fave discovery because nobody but me cared about them.) And, I enjoy poring over the books on sale in thrift stores, where you never know what might catch your eye for less than $1.00.

A couple years ago, I stopped accumulating books beyond what I could read inside a month. This made thrift store book shopping slightly harder, because so many of the things I’d see seemed more interesting while bending over in an aisle than they do when stretching out on the couch and actually spending time with them. So, unlike 20 years ago, when I might pick up two dozen books at a clip, I’ve pretty much stuck to one or two oddballs from the olden days now and again.

Another thing I like to do is to occasionally read something about which I know next to nothing. Oh, and I dig reading criticism, because the process itself fascinates me. (Sue me, it’s what I do.) So, when I picked up a cute little hardback called “Twentieth Century Drama,” first published back in 1962 and written by some goober named Bamber Gascoigne, all the synapses were firing. Aside from three years in the early 90s when I was inexplicably allowed to write about theatre for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, my knowledge of the stage is limited to what I picked up in general survey English courses back in high school and college.

Back in the early 60s, you could write a book about 20^th century drama and really only have it cover 40 years, and eliminate all but European and American playwrights. So, I settled into that world of certainty and proclamation, where young Mr. Gascoigne could actually imply at one point that it was a fault of a certain playwright that his work was better suited to be seen on stage than to be read. Now, that’s some old-fashioned literary criticism, folks.

You can divide Gascoigne’s book into two parts. The second turned out to be less interesting than the first; he picked eight major writers and told us what he thought about everything they did. Aside from some interesting points about the work of Arthur Miller which countered the thoughts I’d read in January by Robert Warshow, my lack of familiarity with the plays made his insights fairly irrelevant to me. I do think I want to read Sartre’s “The Flies” now, but that’s about all I got there.

However, the first half of the book was much better. Here, he surveyed the major plays from the 20s to the 50s, and came to general conclusions about each decade. Thus, the 20s were a time dominated by theatre of inaction, when “an amazed and disapproving Why?” was the major theme. And the thirties was a time of solutions to problems, a theatre of action. The forties “could be described (pedantically) as an analysis of the implications of action, from the point of view of the agent.” (And, I love that use of pedantically as ironic distance from his own approach.) The fifties return to the implications of inaction, but now the emphasis is on people. The question is no longer why so much as what happens to people.

I’m enjoying this little shortcut through theatre history, and trying to map it onto what I know about pop culture. The 20s strike me as a time of wildness, a time when life was a giant party and we were going to push everything to the limits. I hear the jazz of Louis Armstrong, I read the comic strip Krazy Kat, I see films with avant garde sets and actions, I read novels like “The Great Gatsby.” Obviously, there were downsides to the party – bringing Gatsby into the discussion probably shoots down my theory – but in some ways, the stuff I think of in the 20s is more about “Why ask why?” than “Why?” itself.

The thirties, however, did seem to be about rolling up the sleeves and getting to work. Jazz was turned into an industry – the big bands were efficient machines capable of making swing out of anything. And Woody Guthrie started roaming the land. The comics turned serious – Buck Rogers and Dick Tracy could solve problems, and eventually, by 1938, we had Superman. The movies were probably a little more distant, but novels were like “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Onto the 40s, and we’re looking for the implications of action. Well, the big bands broke up, and a thousand independent voices started to make some noise in the music world. The comics didn’t seem to take themselves too seriously, and the films seemed divorced from reality. I’m losing my focus on this theory with this decade.

But, back to the the fifties, and I’m there. It’s all about individuals caught up in a cold, cruel world. What is James Dean but a guy who can’t do anything and yet feels the weight of his inaction? And Elvis certainly seemed capable of action, but ultimately, he and all the rock’n’rollers were pushed back into a much more narrow straight-jacket. The comic books turned to crime and horror stories, where innocent victims were hurt through no fault of their own.

So what happened to Gascoigne after this book? Well, he wrote lots of other books including “The Encyclopedia of Britain,” and hosted a popular British quiz show called “University College.” I found a website called www.historyworld.net which seems to have been founded a couple years ago by the guy. Who knew?

So You Say You've Got a Bad Education

2005-03-01T14:25:00.000-08:00

“I liked it all the way until the last fifteen seconds.” I had just told my friend Mark that we had gone to see “Bad Education,” the new film by Pedro Almodovar. He was referring to the trite boxes of text pulled out of the frozen final frame, detailing the fates of the main characters in the years after the 1980 date of much of the action. “American Graffiti” this wasn’t, and we really didn’t need to speculate about the future, let alone be given any definitive take on it.

But then again, nothing in “Bad Education” can be seen as an accurate rendering of the truth, so why should we believe that Almodovar is doing anything but having a little fun at the ending? This is a movie about a movie director who reads a story (and films a movie based on it) about a short story about events in the life of the director and the writer, with all the mirror images spiraling inward upon themselves that this might imply. It is also about the unreliability of memory, and the ways in which we use our tales of what happened to change what happened. Oh, yes, and it’s also about obsession, a powerful impulse often confused with love, and in Almodovar’s universe, something which can be turned on and off at the first sight of a new piece of ass.

Enrique Goded (played by Fele Martinez) is a successful director combing through the tabloids desperately in search of a story idea for a new film when he is visited by an extremely beautiful man (Gael Garcia Bernal, last seen in “Y Tu Mama Tambien”) purporting to be his childhood school chum Ignacio. And we are off and running. Ignacio was Enrique’s first love, we learn, after this man, now calling himself Angel because he has become an actor, hands over a story which could inspire a movie. “The story is based on our experiences at school,” Angel says, “And then the adult experiences I made up.”

School was dominated by Father Manolo (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), a nasty little priest who, of course, attempts to sexually abuse Ignacio. The boy manages to resist his advances, though the father, not quite brazen enough to successfully use his powerful status to complete the seduction, keeps giving it the old college try. Ignacio and Enrique begin some bumbling efforts towards their own sexual experiences. When Manolo catches them, Ignacio, unbeknownst to his friend, agrees to give in to what the priest wants him to do, if he won’t expel Enrique. Unfortunately, Ignacio gets fucked twice over, since his first love gets sent packing anyway.

This back story gets told fairly clearly, but not much else afterwards is so straightforward. In Angel’s story, Ignacio grows up to be a drag queen who threatens Manolo with exposure of their past – all written down in a story within the story – but doesn’t quite have the skills to pull it off. He leaves without a resolution. When Enrique decides to film the story, he changes the script to have Ignacio killed by another priest trying to prevent the blackmail from occurring.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we learn that the real Ignacio has been dead for three years, and that Angel is his younger brother Juan. (This explains why the lovely nudity of Enrique isn’t enough to seduce Angel when they go skinny dipping together, in a hot scene of sexual frustration and beauty.) Then we learn that Manolo is no longer a priest.

As Juan/Angel portrays his brother’s drag persona Zahara in the film, Enrique meets the very ill Manolo, who tells his tale of the two brothers. Now, we see the adult Ignacio not as a transvestite, but as a junkie transsexual with two enormous fake breasts and not much else in the way of surgery. He is bribing Manolo, but the ex-priest has become obsessed with Juan, who is not above stringing him along with sex in exchange for gifts. (The scene wherein Juan uses his new Super 8 camera to film one of their trysts – remember, this is 1977, a time not only pre-AIDS, but pre-video recorders – is a hilarious and mildly disgusting bit.)

Juan decides Ignacio has to die because he is ripping off his mother, and Manolo, who doesn’t have enough money to pay off both brothers, is ready to go along. So, Juan scores some extra-pure heroin, and Manolo gives it to Ignacio, who falls onto his typewriter in a particularly juicy neo-Hitchcockian death. (Hitchcock’s ghost was almost certainly hanging out in Almodovar’s studio when they filmed this flick.)

Who are we going to believe? This looks like the truth, and everybody pays the consequences as if it were the truth. Enrique loses his obsession with Juan and Ignacio; Manolo has no more chance of ever getting Juan back (as if he ever did), and Juan has nobody left in his corner but the make-up girl who, in the postscript, he eventually marries.

I’m leaving out so much of what makes the film great, because I haven’t mentioned the Bernard Herrman style score mixed with Spanish music (including a cool rock’n’roll cut from the 60s), the spectacular splash of bright colors, the extravagant cutting between odd long shots and tight close-ups, the bits of humor, the juxtaposition of erotic scenes with attention to other details. If I see this again sometime, I’ll look to see if there are obvious clues to the shifting points of view; the first time through, I was too dizzy just keeping up with the delirious motion of it all to catch anything subtle.

Another way of looking at the ending is to see it as a way of balancing the beginning. Enrique and Juan have just definitively parted, and nothing can move in this film without their relationship. The opening shot, appearing at the tale end of some of the coolest film credits I’ve ever seen, is a closeup of one of Enrique’s movie posters. The only motion in the first few seconds is of his hand cutting out a newspaper story. Then Juan arrives at the door, and the motion begins. When Juan leaves at the end, everything stops, and we are left with words, just as we were when he was not there. (In the middle, after Juan couldn’t bring himself to sleep with Enrique (yet), and he left town, Enrique was back to cutting out another story; he cannot move without this object of desire.) These words are not necessarily any more believable than the tabloid stories; in fact, the most unbelievable of them all may be that Enrique went on to make more movies.

So, did Almodovar discover this tale in a tabloid clipping? Or is it autobiographical? Or is he playing around with the sources of artistic inspiration? Can a film spring fully formed from the stuff of life, or does it need to be blended with seeds of other sources of imagination? Good questions all, and while I have my own versions of the answers, I’m not sure they’re the only ones possible after watching “Bad Education.”

Listening to Miles

2005-02-27T12:32:00.000-08:00

Mostl of what people say about Miles Davis concentrates on his place in the history of music. You know, he was there for the earliest recordings of bebop, for the birth of the cool, for the invention of modal jazz, for the beginning of fusion. The guy was so mercurial, so forward-thinking, so determined to keep pushing the music in new directions.

All that’s important to know, but it can be easy to forget that in between all those high water marks, Miles Davis simply made breathtaking music. Jump back to April 21, 1961. I was 2 and a half years old at the time, but luckily, the tapes were rolling at a little jazz club, and I can listen to “Friday Night: Miles Davis In Person at the Blackhawk, San Francisco Complete” any time I want. (There is a Saturday Night release, too, but I can’t listen to that one until I actually buy it.)

This was a couple years after Miles made history with “Kind of Blue” and a couple years before the classic mid-sixties Quintet pushed his acoustic music as far as it could go without going electric. In other words, this was as non-historic a period for Miles as we can ever find. Most short histories of jazz skip right over these years, as if they didn’t exist. (In fact, most histories of music in general like to ignore the years between 1959 and 1963, mainly because the stuff you can actually listen to from that time has a nasty tendency to destroy every neatly structured theory of stop and start musical history you’ve ever read. That period was no more dead and empty than any other. It wasn’t all Fabian, you know.)

While John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman were taking all the great leaps forward, Davis was, well, not exactly consolidating his gains so much as simply seeing how far his ideas could go. Listen to “Walkin’,” one of his most famous tunes, played here at a speed much more akin to serious runnin’. Miles jibs, jabs, punches, ducks, dances, and basically uses all the other boxing metaphors I don’t know because I don’t follow that sport. Now, you can say a lot of things about most of the music Miles Davis made in his career, but you won’t very often say that it sounds like he’s having fun, that it’s really all in the spirit of playfulness. On this performance, he sounds downright giddy with the things he can do.

I can’t forget to point out that his interaction with the rhythm section of pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb, honed by several years of live performance, could make anybody giddy. The swing never leaves this thing, even as Chambers and Kelly bounce ideas off each other, prod Davis and in turn are prodded by him, and generally zip in and out of the forefront whenever he gives them a chance. Tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley – one of a string of major-league players who sat in the chair in between John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter – may not have been with them as long, but he’s clearly inspired by the company. His solo on “Walkin’” is blistering and hard as a feather, if that makes any sense. He’s not boxing. It’s more like he’s throwing a javelin for several miles, and playing notes that follow its flight path up and down in the air.

Davis was recording a lot more modal material, but live, he was sticking to familiar hits and standards. That doesn’t mean he was sucking up to the crowd. Take the version of “Bye Bye Blackbird” from the same show. Right from the beginning, he assumes the audience knows what he’s playing because the arrangement is lifted from the studio recording he’d done a couple years before. So, he doesn’t bother to play the whole melody. The empty space at the end of each line, the part where you would be singing “Bye Bye Blackbird,” is startling at first, then riveting. What will he replace next? Once the solo starts, you’ll know he’ll replace virtually anything and everything, with a soaring burst of muted notes that recall the rhythm of the original melody, but not often the tune. He and Kelly are virtually mind-melded on this one, too, which makes Mobley’s brief contribution even more remarkable, as he shifts gears to a harder feel and Kelly is right there with him.

Two CDs capture the complete performance of three sets from this band on this night. The release about two years ago is part of Columbia Legacy’s ongoing amazing remastering of Davis’s catalogue. Back in the 60s, when these albums were originally released, they were cut out of sequence, and missing many of the tunes performed. Now, you get tremendous sound and every bit of the music. My recommendation is you avoid any Miles Davis CD issued before 1999, and snap up every one of them issued after that. Learn the history because it’s fascinating to know how one thing led to another. But, listen to all the music because it’s so full of pleasure, and spirit.

Roddy Doyle's Latest Novel

2005-02-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

I can’t imagine Louis Armstrong driving a car. I’ve listened to his music all my life, I’ve seen him on TV, I’ve read enough books to picture what he looked like on stage, in the studio, eating, sleeping, talking with friends, smoking reefer, even having sex (with some discrete fades to black in my imagination). But, driving a car, a mundane action that all of us do, is beyond my comprehension. The Louis Armstrong of my mind never performed any mundane actions.

Roddy Doyle’s latest novel, “Oh, Play That Thing,” includes scenes of Louis Armstrong driving. They’re actually rather comical scenes, with Armstrong running all over town trying to dump his no longer useful friend at a place he can at least be welcome. He hits a woman with his car, as if his eyes can’t even picture the action of driving, either. Don’t worry. We aren’t faced with the image of the 20^th century’s most important musician being charged with manslaughter. She’s fine, though he comes close to hitting her a second time.

Doyle is still most famous for having written “The Commitments,” from which the motion picture of a few years back was made. But, I’m better acquainted with his previous novel, “A Star Called Henry,” of which “Oh, Play That Thing” is the sequel. In the last book, we followed the complicated life of Henry Smart from birth through his 24^th year, and found him participating in the chaotic convulsion that was the Irish Republican revolution. Henry killed, not necessarily out of conviction, but because it was the role he filled most easily. He was a character who could not be resisted, so naturally enough, Doyle kept telling his story.

Unfortunately, Henry Smart makes a far more believable representative of Irish history than American. Part of that, I realize, is my lack of familiarity with the Irish experience. I know a heck of a lot more about bootleggers, jazz, and the Depression than I do about the origins of the Irish state at the end of World War I. So, I can spot the coincidences, the unbelievable bits, the Zelig moments which seem forced just for the sake of having something famous come into Henry’s life.

That doesn’t mean this novel is unreadable. It’s actually a lot of fun in a lot of ways, especially once you decide to toss realism out the window. If Henry Smart and Louis Armstrong are going to turn to a life of crime, breaking and entering into Chicago mansions to steal silverware which can be easily fenced for cash, why shouldn’t they very soon stumble into a home where Smart’s long estranged Irish wife and daughter happen to be employed as live-in help?

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. The first two sections of the book are the strongest. Henry’s attempt to establish himself as a plucky young entrepreneur, with a business in advertising via sandwich boards, in the New York City of 1921 is both riveting and hilarious. It’s not his fault, exactly, that he gets involved in the death of carrier pigeons owned by Owney Madden, one of the most notorious gangsters of that day and place, but there it is.

Escaping to a small town with a character mostly known as “The Half-Sister” (not his, but that of another minor character), the story shifts to detailing confidence games. She is a fortune teller, he is a water seeker and dentist. With no experience behind him, Henry applies the same pluck which made him so successful as a hit man, and pulls teeth with wild abandon. Oh, this section is enough to make you sick, but it’s really, really funny, too.

Then comes Chicago, and suddenly we’re out of the realm of Henry Smart making his way in the world, and into the realm of an Irish immigrant falling in love with African-American life and music. Yeah, maybe it could happen, but I doubt it. Too often, Henry’s descriptions of Armstrong’s music read too much like the work of modern jazz critics, and not at all like the less intellectual readings of those on the scene at the time. As brilliant as “West End Blues” is in retrospect, I’m not convinced anyone on the scene knew it was so much better than everything else that had come before. Of course, Henry becomes Armstrong’s right-hand man, the White man he needs to give Armstrong a chance to move tentatively into the white world.

From there, the coincidences flow, and Henry becomes re-involved with characters from “A Star Called Henry” and the earlier sections of this novel. Reunions and loss are the stuff of Henry Smart’s life. (For those who remember the original novel, there are even ironies such as Henry ending up losing a leg while saving his son from death; Henry’s father only had one leg.) Eventually, he ends up ready to die, only to find himself at the feet of a great American mythmaker. We’re supposed to see Henry’s American experience as leading inexorably away from control of one’s life as an original on to becoming a part of the great American imagination of itself as something big, huge, constantly expanding, and good. But, we know it’s a myth, we know his role here is to be near death portraying a dead man in a story improving on the reality of the past.

(I once said I’d always be a spoiler in these reviews, but I can’t bring myself to name the mythmaker. How about I just say he’s a famous director of Westerns?)

I’ll read more Doyle, but I hope he doesn’t return to Henry Smart. I don’t think this character could do anything else; he barely makes it to the end of this book, by which time he’s close to 50 years old. We’re already close to a historical Forest Gump, albeit one with some street smarts. Unless Doyle intends to have Henry meet Gump, let’s leave any plans for a third volume on the drawing board.

By the way, there is a fascinating bibliography at the end of all the books Doyle referenced to assemble the accurate details of American life in all the places depicted here. I think there are several listed here I’d like to check out myself, in addition to the half-dozen I’ve already read.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit

2005-02-17T16:04:00.000-08:00

How much outrage do you need?

1. A fifteen-year-old girl has sex. Okay, that’s something we don’t like to see, but it’s fairly common. Just digging around quickly on the net, I found a study in England that said 18% of girls under 16 had had sexual experiences, and one in the U.S. which said roughly 25% of all students in their 10^th year of school (presumably that’s sophomore year in high school) have had vaginal intercourse.

2. A fifteen-year-old girl hooks up with several different boys around her age for sexual experiences without relationships. Now, this one is something that gets people riled up, but I’m not personally convinced it’s really happening much. TV crime shows have used it several times in the last year or so, though, and I’ve heard people gossip about it. It’s always been common for teenagers to exaggerate their sexual experiences, and it’s unfortunately been even more common for teenagers to really exaggerate the experiences of other teens, especially girls. How many of you heard about the girl in your high school who was intending to fuck every boy in school before the year was over? The same survey I cited above said that for 2/3 of the teens having sex, their last encounter was with their regular boyfriend or girlfriend. I’m not saying “One Tree Hill” is the most in-depth reporting on any subject you could find, but the recent experiences of Brooke and Felix attempting the “friends with benefits” plan showed that it’s quite capable of being one-sided even if it does happen.

3. A fifteen-year-old girl, after learning that sex really doesn’t mean much, moves on from hooking up with boys her own age to trading blow jobs on older men for expensive clothes. I’m not saying there aren’t men out there who would do it, but I think they’re a lot rarer than you’d think. I suspect that, no matter how provocatively a teenaged girl dressed, she’d have to hit on dozens of men before she got a bite, and even then, the man’s ego would probably turn for the worse as soon as he realized she wanted him to spend $800 on a dress for her. And never mind the insane idea that a middle-aged man working in a clothing store would pop into the dressing room for a quickie (or even more absurd, whip out his dick in the back room for a blow job while purportedly doing inventory). Guys are pigs, don’t get me wrong, but there is a point beyond which the penis can’t take most of us. At least not without liberal doses of alcohol, which are hard to come by in shopping malls.

4. A fifteen-year-old girl moving up the trick-turning ladder to become a full-time hooker charging $1500 per act while being pimped by the desk clerk of a classy hotel. You know, it never really occurred to me to ask a desk clerk for anything other than the location of the ice machine, but I’m fairly convinced prostitution does occur in many hotels. Still, it’s probably a ridiculously stupid clerk willing to pimp out somebody who looks less than 25, because a certain level of discretion is necessary to pull off that sort of transaction in the first place. With customers willing to shell out that much cash for an orgasm – and really, how could one be worth even half that amount? – you’re looking at a glitzy operation that doesn’t allow the sleaze to get too dangerous. But if they did, boy, I could get pretty worked up about that.

5. A fifteen-year-old girl who manages to get one of her johns, a doctor by trade, to fall madly in love with her, move to her city, diagnose her with AIDS (from all the dangerous sex she’s had in the last six to nine months), and provide her with medicine. Now we’re getting into some truly outrageous territory, and I don’t see how we can get any worse.

6. Fortunately, the producers of “Law and Order SVU” were able to see further than my limited mind, and add the final outrageous twist, the level of hell which did indeed lead to this young girl getting killed in this week’s episode. How about a 15-year-old girl who has done all the above being recruited to film pornography and thus potentially infecting other actors which leads to the director bashing her over the head with a tripod? Parents, don’t let your children grow up to be sexual. This is the inevitable result. We should all be very, very afraid.

All the crime shows these days have to trump each other in the outrage department, and they do so by piling twist after twist, miserable level of depravity after miserable level of depravity until we feel that everybody in the country is at risk. (Actually, mostly, the people at risk on these shows tend to be upper class, which is something I find interesting; I guess, however, that Americans love to imagine themselves better off than those who have all the bucks. Even if we still fear the same fates, we at least can comfort ourselves with knowing that all that money couldn’t help them.)

“Law and Order SVU” is particularly guilty of pushing sexual fears on an unsuspecting public, and spends an inordinate amount of time convincing us that children are in terrible danger. If they’re lucky enough to escape being molested, they have to worry about their own lack of control regarding sex. The episode this week drove this point home about as far as it could go.

One of the favorite techniques in this kind of fear-mongering is to show the surviving friends of teenage sex victims acting in a cavalier manner. Actually, all crime shows have agreed that virtually nobody interviewed by the police on TV should ever exhibit any fear or concern beyond a desire to move quickly through the experience and get back to their real job or class. Even more, I suppose for the purpose of making it harder for us to know what to believe, every single person interviewed on a crime show is a liar par excellence. They can come up with perfectly believable stories spun at a moment’s notice from whatever question the police ask, and even, if necessary switch to a back-up plan if the cops dig and find out the last story was a lie.

So, the dead girl had a best friend, who did everything except the porn career and maybe the AIDs. (After going through all that, she decided she had to draw the line somewhere, worried about what people might think if a movie was seen years later. I guess it’s good to plan ahead a little bit.) The day after her best friend was found dead, this girl was found in the back of a clothing shop with the aforementioned middle-aged worker giving him the aforementioned oral sex. Hey, I guess a girl needs something new to wear to a funeral. The rest of the episode, she leads the detectives to the truth a step at a time, as they wear down her repeated promises that “Really, this is what happened.”

The idea was to establish not the specifics of the case on this episode. Instead, we should all worry about our kids, even those of us who don’t have any. It’s not like when we were young, nosirree. Kids today have no morals, no ability to discern right from wrong when it comes to sex. Everything is meaningless to them. Once that Pandora’s box is opened, there’s nothing possible but pain and heartbreak for the parents.

This sort of message gets hammered at us all the time on these shows. And yet, I keep watching, because I find the actual mechanics of it all entertaining. I enjoy the intensity of the chase, the interplay of Detectives Stabler and Benson, the witticisms of Finn and Munch (though I do bemoan the way Richard Belzer’s character has been watered down since the glorious days of “Homicide: Life on the Street”). And, I guess I tell myself that I can see through all their bullshit, and know that sex really isn’t as bad as they make it out to be.

I wonder if we’ll ever get to move back towards nuance and realism in crime shows. We’ve become so used to the constant twists and turns, the spectacular nature of evil on display, and the infallibility of the detectives who always, through hard work and determination, capture the bad people. That stuff is fun, of course, but it would be nice to have it not work so hard to scare us away from understanding people’s real needs and desires. Convincing us that teenagers are a sexual thought away from multiple partners, AIDs, a porn career, and death is not a necessary corollary to making an exciting TV show.

Fellini, Doris Day, and Making Babies

2005-02-16T14:53:00.000-08:00

Digital video recorders (already Kleenexed into the world as Tivo, no matter what brand you may have) are the greatest things in the world, except when they aren’t. I don’t blame the technology so much as the damn TV networks looking to regain control by running shows just a couple minutes longer than they say they will. And that’s the reason I missed the ending of “I Vitelloni,” the 1953 masterwork by Federico Fellini. I set up to record the movie as scheduled, and it ran long. How much longer it had to go, I can’t say, though I know for a fact that I missed the final scene.

Here’s the capsule summary as found on the otherwise incredibly useful Internet Movie Database site (www.imdb.com): “A sensitive character study of five young men trapped in a small town on the Adriatic. Their discontentment and restlessness lead them into a variety of activities, not all of them admirable.” That’s remarkably like summarizing “Julius Caesar” as “Emperor and his subjects don’t always agree, and ultimately there is war.” Yeah, that’s what happens, but so much is left out.

I’m not at all familiar with Fellini’s pre-“La Dolce Vita” output (though I think I saw “La Strada” once, but I don’t remember). This is a much more naturalistic movie than I usually expect from him, but there are plenty of trademark wild crowd scenes thrown in. The opening ten minute sequence is full of herky-jerky cuts, tight close-ups as people move rapidly around the central figure, long shots of frantic dancing, and plenty of overlapping dialogue. And, then, there’s the Carnivale sequence a little more than half-way through, when the same sort of thing happens with costumes and masks and giant papier mache heads. Nobody can capture frenzied party scenes like Fellini.

Today, we easily recognize these young (at least young as defined in 1953 Italy; at least one character states his age to be 30) main characters as prototypical slackers. Nobody works hard, save Leopoldo, the playwrite dreamer. Instead, these guys drink a lot, wander the streets, flirt with girls when they see some, and occasionally dream of leaving their small town for the glories of Rome.

Fausto has the most ambition; he seems to get excited by every woman he meets, and sets his goal to have sex with each one in turn. We first meet him putting the moves on a young lady who rejects him. Then, we find out he’s impregnated Sandra, the sister of his friend Moraldo (apparently Fellini’s autobiographical stand-in). Their shotgun marriage doesn’t end his womanizing, and in fact, the connecting thread of the movie is his constant attempts to regain favor in his wife’s eyes. Assuming I didn’t miss much at the very end, all does seem to be forgiven when the screen finally goes blank.

There’s lots more, of course. Riccardo (played by Federico’s brother Riccardo), is the most pathetic character, living off his sister with his mother until the sister leaves with a shadowy married man. His drunken ramble at the end of the Carnivale sequence is gut-wrenching to watch. Leopoldo has an encounter with a homosexual actor which is painful, as well. At first, he thinks he’s finally being taken seriously as a writer; eventually, he realizes he’s only being taken seriously as a cute young man.

Richard Linklater would have liked these guys, I’m sure, but he wouldn’t have invested such energy in telling their story. As with any Fellini flick, the fun is in the camera work and the acting, not to mention the pacing, which can roll along at an ambling speed before shifting into whirlwind mode at any time.

Because my viewing ended at the moment when Sandra forgave Fausto, I was left with the impression that lying to his wife worked for the guy. So, imagine my surprise when later that night, we watched “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out,” a 1968 sex/corporate culture farce, and darned if the same thing didn’t work for Doris Day’s husband.

You’ve seen these mid-to-late 60s comedies starring Robert Morse and an interchangeable cast, right? They’re all a blast, thanks to the set-em-loose while the cameras are rolling professionalism of the veteran actors. They’re all equally among the most blatantly misogynistic movies ever made. You’ve got to appreciate Doris Day’s magnificent body language – nobody ever walked in a huff with more flustered huffiness – at the same time you’re wondering why her character never read any Betty Friedan. Of course, in the moral universe of these strange flicks – all of which, by the way, seem to have the exact same artless direction and semi-hipster musical score, not to mention, at least one short sequence with the kind of hippy Jethro Bodine hung out with when he smoked crawdads – even if they had a feminist inkling, the women would end up pregnant and in love with the guy who did it to her.

So, here’s the set-up. Never mind the tie to the 1965 New York city blackout which gave us the title, and which is barely used as an excuse to set plots in motion. Just enjoy Morse, the treasurer of a large corporation who embezzles $2 million in cash and has to get out of the country with the money. And Day, playing an actress married to an architect played by Patrick O’Neal, who is still seen as a Constant Virgin (the name of her hit Broadway play). When O’Neal cheats on Day with a woman reporter who had been in her Manhattan apartment to interview her, Day heads to their Connecticut home. Morse’s car breaks down outside, and the farce proceeds apace.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the astounding Terry Thomas, playing a Hungarian theatre director without bothering to change the Englishness of the only character he ever really played in any movie. O’Neal catches Day and Morse sleeping together – they each drank sleeping potion – and the long path to conclusions is quickly breached by a leap. Thomas needs to split Day and O’Neal up, so he can take her to Hollywood and make lots of money. He bribes Morse to convince Day they did sleep together, because despite the obvious infidelity of her husband, she’ll only divorce him if she thinks she cheated on him. How’s that for logic?

It’s all as perfectly pieced together as any jigsaw puzzle you’ve seen, and ultimately, all is made well. Morse returns to the corporation from whence he had stolen, and in fact becomes company president. Day and O’Neal reconcile, and nine months later, have a baby. Which, I guess, leaves Thomas stuck on Broadway looking for a way to Hollywood.

Both “I Vitelloni” and “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out” feature women who are completely virtuous and incapable of staying mad at their philandering husbands. Both women seal their marriage by having babies. Sandra, of course, only gets her man because she’s pregnant; Day keeps hers that way. Motherhood is the holy fate of women which locks their men to their side. It has nothing to do with love or respect, that’s for sure. Fausto and O’Neal are equally shown to be incapable of resisting the allures of other women, and incapable of seeing their own women as anything other than the stability they need to enable them to concentrate other attention on their horniness.

It’s amazing to me that this vision of male-female roles could have been so blatant. I mean, we’re all still used to happy endings and love conquering all, but in our new moral universe, Fausto and O’Neal would each have been punished, and their women would have found a knight in shining armor who would truly respect them and love them for who they are. Instead, the women who have given their men total devotion get trampled on by men who fear that devotion and feel trapped, and their only out is to tie the men down further by giving them children to raise. Yeah, that should keep those male eyes from wandering. I think they’d have been better served letting their own bootheels start wandering.

Grand Hotel

2005-02-10T15:28:00.000-08:00

Greta Garbo had so much charisma that even in a movie generally considered to feature the first all-star cast in Hollywood history, she cannot come on screen until after all the other characters have had enough time to establish themselves in our minds. For Garbo dominates “Grand Hotel,” a movie which tries hard to resist domination.

What stays with us after it’s over? Garbo, head held high – several inches higher, in fact, than virtually every other member of the cast – and striding purposefully across the lobby of the hotel. Garbo, wearing that impossibly over-sized tutu, shrinking down into a ball on the floor. Garbo, beaming with post-coital glow, dancing around her hotel room in love with everything that could happen next. It’s Garbo’s movie, and everything else that’s great about it – which is to say, everything else that’s in it – is greater because she is there.

In 1932, all the major players in “Grand Hotel” were big stars. Lionel and John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, and Joan Crawford, along with Garbo, were all guaranteed box office attractions. Today, however, we are less familiar with them. It’s not as though we don’t recognize them, but they seem little more than character actors to us now. Well, character actors and drag queen progenitor/mommie dearest. It’s funny to see how sexy Joan Crawford was before she transmuted into a caricature of womanhood.

But Garbo transcends her roles. She acts, to be sure, but she is always Garbo at the same time, a quality she shares with the biggest stars of all time. She is regal, commanding the attention of the camera, daring it to come closer and closer, to contain her body, her smile, her movements in the frame. It ain’t easy, folks, because she wins every one of those dares. Garbo may over-act from time to time, but even when she’s being subtle, she’s bigger than whatever action she’s performing.

Five years after sound was introduced, yet only two years after Garbo deigned to speak on screen, “Grand Hotel” was populated by a roster of actors who had learned their craft without using their voices. Thus, we modern viewers are astounded at the incredible range of emotions revealed through facial expressions, body language, and simple movements through space. Just to pull one example out of dozens, the look on Crawford’s face when John Barrymore asks her to dance with Lionel can crush you. We’ve known for half an hour that she would be disappointed, since John is in love with Garbo, but we didn’t know how far and how fast her face would fall, or how quickly she could put on a smile to fool him into thinking she’d never thought he meant anything to her. Another example? Every single moment Lionel Barrymore is onscreen.

Five characters revolve around each other in the enormous, luxurious Grand Hotel of Berlin, approximately one year before Adolph Hitler will take over as Chancellor of Germany. This latter fact adds a level of unexpected irony to the tale; none of them know how soon their world will irrevocably change.

I said they revolve around each other, but mostly, the revolve around Baron Felix von Geigern, played by John Barrymore. Von Geigern has fallen on hard times, and become a thief. His goal, to pay his gambling debts, is to steal a pearl necklace from the fading Russian star ballerina, Grusinskya (Garbo, duh! And at the age of 26!). While casing the hotel where she is staying, he befriends Otto Kringelein (his brother, only four years older in real life, yet playing at least 30 years older), a dying accountant who has decided to go out in high style by spending all the money he’s saved his whole life. Kringelein worked for the giant corporation owned by Preysing (Berry), who is in Berlin to attempt a last-ditch effort at salvaging his company through merger talks with another. Preysing has hired a stenographer, Flaemmchen (Crawford), who is flirted with by von Geigern and befriended by Kringelein.

None of these characters are perfect, though Kringelein, so full of joy at the littlest new discovery of the pleasures available in life, is the most sympathetic. Give that man a Louisiana Flip, please. He has held himself down all these years, thinking that playing by the rules, scrimping and saving cash along the way, would lead to a reward at the end of his life. Now, he’s there, and he’s learning that the only rewards he’ll ever get are the ones he pays for, and his past methods have left him enough cash to pay for whatever he wants. In the end, he gets a girl, Flaemmchen, though as much for the money she wants as the fact that she likes him.

Preysing has adhered to his own moral code his whole life, as well. He has been honest in all things, business as well as in his marriage. Oh, sure, he’s been blissfully unaware how he has made his fortune by paying as little as possible to people like Kringelein, and taking advantage of whatever he can get out of labor and suppliers. But, he has never lied to anyone, merely been ignorant of effects. Now, in order to save his business, he is forced to lie, and finding that the world didn’t end, he decides he might as well hire a woman to sleep with him while he’s away from home.

Really, though, with ankles like Crawford’s, sitting there in front of a typewriter pounding away the words he dictates, how can he resist temptation? Especially when she shows him an art magazine with life pictures of her presumably nude body? When Flaemmchen decides she likes von Geigern, she slides her finger across his chin and says, “You’re nice!” The discovery is palpable, because it’s clear she’s never thought men could be nice. Their flirtation is both touching and a neat red herring, because it leads us to think theirs will be a romance, not the one we actually get. Anyway, Flaemmchen is a survivor who will do anything, all the way up to prostitution, for money. In between performing acts of kindness with Kringelein, she sells herself to Preysing. Of course, in the course of the movie, she never quite consummates the deal because Preysing kills the Baron.

Von Geigern, as I said, has to get money fast, and he sees his chance when he notices Grusinskya leaving for her performance without her necklace. In a feat of derring do that Harold Lloyd would have turned into farce, he crawls along the building ledge several floors up, and sneaks into her room from the balcony. Of course, Grusinskya returns early, and the two fall in love. He talks her out of killing herself, and even gives her back the necklace before a convenient fade to black which later finds them lying on the bed talking about breakfast.

As it turns out, von Geigern is the worst thief in the world simply because he really is nice. He really does love Grusinskya, when everybody else merely wants to keep feeding off her career. Her handlers routinely lie to her just to keep her performing, and thus keep their money flowing in. And, this being 1932, he refuses to take her money so they can leave Berlin together and live happily ever after. Nope, he’s the man, and he’ll find somebody to steal it from.

But, he can’t. First of all, he has to spend a lot of hours thinking about it. Then, he has to keep his date with Flaemmchen so a lot of powerful interactions between all the characters save Garbo’s can take place. Hitting upon a brilliant idea, he gets Kringelein to seed him a small amount of money and to start a game of baccarat, only to find he’s made his friend even richer. When Kringelein falls ill from drinking too much, von Geigern even tries to steal the old man’s pocket book, but he can’t bring himself to keep it when he sees how much it means to him. Finally, while attempting to rob Preysing’s hotel room, his shadow is observed and the businessman winds up killing him with his bare hands.

All of this has gone on, and Grusinskya knows nothing but bliss. She had been ready to retire, because the crowds were smaller and smaller, the applause less and less. But now, thrilled with love, she sees nothing but beauty everywhere. And, her managers conspire with all the hotel employees to make sure she learns nothing of her lovers fate. How they think they’re going to deal with her when they get to Austria and he’s still not there is beyond me! I’m too busy dealing with the lump in my throat and the knot in my stomach when I see her face looking around for him, trying to ask where he is, and yet confident that she is loved and in love.

“Grand Hotel,” says Lewis Stone as the war-wounded Dr. Ottenschlag. “People come and people go, but nothing ever happens.” Nothing, I guess, but one of the greatest movies ever made.

Reading Sula

2005-02-09T16:08:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t really expecting everybody to die. To be fair, at the very end of “Sula,” Toni Morrison’s second novel, published back in 1973, there are three characters still alive. One is a fool, one is an old woman madder than she ever was before, and the third has wasted half her life. The deaths of everybody else comprise the narrative.

Well, alright, their lives are pretty interesting, too. If they hadn’t lived, they couldn’t have all wound up dead in such unexpected manners. (Now that I think of it, one or two of them just leave town, which makes them as good as dead.) “Sula” is a tightly constructed novel, best read in a single setting. (It’s only 174 pages of fairly large size type, so it’s entirely possible to do so, even if I wound up dividing it into three chunks over a few days, when I had some spare time on my hands.) There are so many big things happening that you might forget some of the smaller ones which come back to prominence many pages (and years) later.

I once heard Toni Morrison read from what was then her unfinished novel “Beloved,” and she was enthralling. Her voice is barely above a whisper, but it commands attention. Ever since then, when I’ve read Morrison – and I confess that for some strange reason, I haven’t done it nearly enough – I hear her voice in my head, especially on her most matter-of-fact descriptive passages.

“Sula” tells the tale of the black community which inhabited the ironically named Bottom (because it was at the top of a hill) of Medallion, Ohio, a small river town. The story runs from 1919 to 1965, and focuses most of its attention on three generations of women. There’s Eva Peace, the one-legged matriarch who loved her children more than their lives were worth. Her daughter, Hannah, is really more of a symbol than a character. Sula, of course, is the center of the book. She is Hannah’s daughter, and she is treated as a devil by everyone in the town. That she actually commits and omits sins now and again is important, but not the reason she is feared.

Actually, there is another woman very important to the story. Sula’s best friend Nel is the only one who connects with her. They participate in horrors and pleasures together, and can take up their friendship after a long passage of time apart. The book turns on their relationship, though not always in the way you expect.

Morrison constantly caught me off guard, with events coming out of nowhere. Death is a simple fact of existence in Medallion, even when it is highly symbolic. You can be reading along enjoying intense conversations followed by amusing anecdotes , and the next thing you know somebody’s burning to death and somebody else is jumping out of a window. In Morrison’s world, there is life, the nuts and bolts of day to day existence (which very much includes sex) and there are Events, things which happen and which cannot be taken back (which sometimes include sex).

Ah, yes, sex is all over “Sula.” Both Hannah and Sula refuse to live without it, even though only the former ever has a husband, and him not for long. Mother and daughter both take turns with the married men of the town (not at the same time; Sula is too young when her mother parts from the world). It is Sula’s attitude towards sex which creates the center of the novel, the thing which leaves her totally alone. And, since she views sex as an entrance to pure loneliness, this Event makes perfect sense.

Much later, Sula finds a man she can love, or at least be comfortable with, physically and psychically. So, naturally enough, the very act of wanting such a thing, which she had never even glimpsed before, leads to it all going wrong; the juxtaposition of this scene with Sula lying on her death bed reinforces the sense that wanting something often leads to the opposite.

I haven’t even mentioned Shadrack, the man who went to fight in World War I and lived the rest of his life with virtually no human contact. He is the fool of the novel, the man who seems (emphasis on seems) to know more than he does, who makes things happen, but who ultimately never changes after his experience overseas. The War to End Wars was the Event which ended his humanity. But, he is one of the three characters to survive to the end of the novel, which has to count for something.

Morrison would later write richer novels, would get even better at integrating real life with symbolic passages, would show more often than she tells us what is happening. But, “Sula” is not exactly a minor work. It’s the story of a certain kind of African-American experience, of the ways in which survival depended on living without worrying what could happen next, lest you wind up worrying without living. Reading it is like getting an extrapolation of the blues, the sense of meeting problems head on, of describing them to make them survivable. That doesn’t mean these characters are nonchalant – their pain and suffering is palpable. But, there is strength in their experience, and a strange, sad beauty in the telling.

Listening to Jill Sobule

2005-02-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

“Dude, she kissed a girl.” Ten years ago, Jill Sobule must have been flabbergasted to find herself the icon of lesbian chic with a song displaying a sense of joy at the discovery of sexual options hitherto unrevealed. How did that become a hit? Well, the boys were getting off on the frisson of lesbian sex for their amusement, and the girls were thinking, hey, maybe that might be something I could try. At any rate, Sobule was on her way to one and a half-hit wonderdom.

The other half a hit was “Supermodel,” but really, I don’t even remember that one. After all these years, mention Sobule’s name and you get a reference to “I Kissed A Girl.” She’s viewed as a novelty performer, which is funny because the song itself was only novel by virtue of having no predecessor in pop. It wasn’t novel because it was meant to be a goof. It was a delightfully catchy dream of a chorus propelling a tale of wonderment, delirium, openness to new possibilities. Suddenly, the world changed, and the rules of sex were tossed out the window.

It probably didn’t convey a serious impression that she has such a wisp of a voice. Sobule is 42 years old – she was 31 when “I Kissed a Girl” hit – yet sounds like a teenager on the cusp of adolescence. She breathes lightly, and lands directly on notes without any hint of bravado, coloratura, or any adult vocal technique. She’s learned to write effectively for her basic vocal package, but that’s not apparent unless you listen to her songs closely. At first, you think you’re getting an underdeveloped performer.

All of this is cultural baggage. My own reasons for avoiding her for too long are wedded to them. I certainly liked the fact that she wrote a song about what I heard as supporting bisexuality, but I didn’t pay enough attention to it at the time to realize how sweetly she described the thrill of it. I saw her play a few years ago, opening for Lloyd Cole (and performing in his band), and was only impressed enough at the time to think she was pleasant. If you don’t devote full attention to Sobule, her songs will float right past you; you’ll hear hooks, but her delivery isn’t going to force you to feel anything more than the equivalent of a light breeze against your face.

Finally, a few months after its release, I slapped Sobule’s 2004 release, “Underdog Victorious,” into the car CD player, and found myself fully engaged with a songwriter of simple, yet firm melodic and descriptive abilities. Nothing on this album is overdone, nothing is underdeveloped. Sobule puts light guitar strumming when a song needs to be quiet; she builds thick slabs of beats, vocals, piano, and more when the song calls for a deeper bed upon which to rest its soul. She’s funny, poignant, nostalgic, strident, sorry, proud, and in love. Sobule is examining the pieces of the life which formed her, whether they were thirty years ago or last week. There is a sense that it’s all worthwhile, the good and the bad, the times she laughed and the times she acted like an asshole.

Every time I’d get out of the car, a different song would be humming in my head. First it was “Jetpack,” a cute, light fantasy about wanting to get to her lover on the other side of town, with side-trips to hover over the stadium to watch her team win. “Underdog Victorious” is a big, rolling chorus, with lots of background vocals and as close as Sobule will ever get to a wall of sound; the song tells the tale of a little boy who grows up gay. “Joey” is a haunting number, with an effective placement of the title character’s first name as hook; oh, yeah, I guess it’s pretty important to point out the title character is actually Joey Heatherton, and that her tale is particularly sad. The un-named bonus cut is a fun, rumbling country number with the incredible tag line, “I met a cop and she pulled me over/Now I’m really finally over you.”

But the song that really gets me is “Tel Aviv.” Unlike the other songs, which all lend themselves to one-line descriptions, this one is complex, mysterious, inordinately sad. Is it autobiographical as so many of her songs seem to be? The narrator is in Israel, and is apparently desired by a man who wants her virginity, and who may actually get it (or at least the illusion of it). She is lying to her family about what she is doing in Israel, and disappointed at the lack of the excitement she’d been promised. During what seems to be a rape, she’s thinking of better times, and wanting desperately to go home. All of this occurs to a matter-of-fact melody, with a nearly winsome chorus of forced hope. “Somebody’s missing me/Somebody’s missing me/Somebody come get me.”

Jill Sobule is so much more than what I had thought she was. I’d had opportunities to discover this before, but sometimes, as when she kissed that girl, everything just falls into place at the same time. “Underdog Victorious” is a record worth devoting 45 minutes of attention to. I’m sure glad I did.

Talkin' Bout Penises

2005-02-03T19:31:00.000-08:00

I got an erection the other day. Let me tell you what happened. A couple ounces of blood started pumping into that tube, and was quickly absorbed by the now relaxed smooth muscle tissue of the corpora cavernosa inside. What relaxed that tissue? Well that’s the hot part. It was an increase in the levels of cyclic guanosine monophosphate, caused by the nitric oxide inside the blood that pumped in there. Thankfully, there was no reason to let the phosphodiesterase-5 enzyme go to work to break that cGMP down, so I was able to get as busy as I wanted to be.

I love penises, so as soon as I saw a book called “A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis,” I was sliding my hands up and down it and wrapping my lips around the words, “I’d like to purchase this, please.” David M. Friedman’s book appeared on the shelves in 2001, but I never heard of it until a couple weeks ago. It’s a fascinating introductory course to the ways penises have been helping to shape history, and occasionally into the ways history has helped to shape penises.

Friedman divides his examination into six areas, roughly corresponding to chronological order. Chapter 1, “The Demon Rod,” is all about dicks in religion. We’re all familiar with the right wing conception of sex as original sin, but Friedman runs us through the different ways its been viewed throughout the centuries, and in different (admittedly European and American) cultures.

Here’s where I learned two of my favorite etymological facts. For the ancient Hebrews, the penis was such an awesome organ that oaths to God were made by cupping another’s package. This custom, long since faded from practice, gave us our modern word “testify.” Later, in Rome, boys were given a locket containing a replica of an erect penis called a fascinuum, which they wore until they became old enough to be considered men (i.e. when they had real life erections usable for sex, apparently.) Now, whenever we refer to something as being “fascinating,” we really mean it’s “as powerful or intriguing as an erection.”

Of course, that’s lots of fun, but the chapter on religion hits its stride when it gets to St. Augustine, the man who single-handedly did more to fuck up people’s sexuality than any other in history. He decided that it wasn’t his fault all those years he kept sleeping with every woman that would have him. He was a sinner because he was born that way, and the sign of that in-born sin is the lust that springs from the penis. So, to Augustine, we were all supposed to control our lust, and shape it to whatever the church decided it was meant to be, which, it turns out, was a few lines here and there about men cleaving to women and sowing seeds into the next generation. It’s amazing, but this sort of tripe caught on, and for 1500 years or thereabouts, western civilization has been all about keeping penises flaccid and vaginas dry as much as possible.

On to Chapter 2, “The Gear Shift,” in which we learn the many ways science misunderstood what was going on with that knob. Naturally enough, since all the philosophers, scientists, priests, and other folks in power were men, there was a lot of curiosity about the penis and how it worked. Sadly, much of that curiosity was applied to preventing masturbation, especially after the 18^th century when self-abuse started to be seen as a particular waste of energy (literally, to those minds). Still, there is a lot of medical progress strewn about in between the false starts and vicious attacks.

Chapter 3, “The Measuring Stick,” takes a look at the history of racism as viewed through the lens of the African penis. From the European and American perspective, the black penis was a thing to be especially feared. I think Friedman’s stretching a point to make it such a focus of racial animosity, but there’s no denying the horrifying impact of his collection of stories revealing the myriad ways in which whites have cut off, patronized, and sometimes even glorified the phalluses of the men they enslaved.

Friedman seems particularly animated in Chapter 4, “The Cigar.” Here we come to Sigmund Freud, the man who took the penis and placed it squarely at the center of every emotion known to humans. That he was obviously completely nuts in this regard doesn’t change the real breakthroughs he made towards helping people with neuroses. But, my goodness, what must have gone through his mind leading him to believe that every little boy is afraid of losing his penis and every little girl wants to have one? Here was a guy who clearly thought too much, and the only way to forgive him his sins is to acknowledge that there just wasn’t enough being thought about in this regard. That he was so often wrong doesn’t take away his progress at asking questions. Friedman lets us in on the secret karmic kickback to Freud’s constant cigar smoking, too, a mouth cancer so severe he was forced to wear permanent dentures amid pain which made it very difficult for him to speak during the last two decades of his life. Sometimes a cigar is just a carcinogen.

Then comes the maelstrom, a flurry of far too short takes on feminism and the penis in Chapter 5, “The Battering Ram.” It’s not that Friedman isn’t fair here. He does a decent job giving an introduction to the thoughts of dozens of feminist and anti-feminist thinkers, and he even goes to the trouble of meeting Andrea Dworkin for lunch just so he can assure us she seems like a decent sort. But, as much as I enjoyed the anecdote from a pre Ms-magazine Gloria Steinem about Norman Mailer’s lack of potency during their encounter, I had to say my head was spinning a lot in this chapter. As with any survey as broad as this one, the closer we get to my own experience, describing the modern world, the more I’m aware is being left out. Friedman does a great job of showing how complicated and various the many strains of modern feminism have been, but he leaves us with more questions than answers here.

Chapter 6, “The Punctureproof Balloon,” however, does the same thing on purpose and provides compelling tales of the ways in which science has learned to give men control over erections. Here’s where I learned what happens inside when I start thinking nasty thoughts. (Damn you,Augustine, there just isn’t any better way to say that and still be cute.) And, there’s a whole lot more detail than what I put in the first paragraph. The story which led up to Viagra and Cialis and beyond is really a lot more interesting than I ever thought it would be. There is a nasty zone war between the drug and surgical approaches to curing impotence and the mental health interests. While of course it’s great to have a drug which can make erections happen (though Friedman makes sure to point out that we still have no idea what the long term effects of these drugs might be), there should probably be a much stronger alignment between physical and mental reactions. Everybody likes to say sex is 90% mental, but it’s probably more likely to be 50/50.

The odds are virtually non-existant that anybody out there knows everything that Friedman covers in this breezy, frequently funny and occasionally horrifying 307 pages. So, if you like penises, or you like people who like penises, or you just want to find out how penises relate to our history, you’re not likely to find a better source than this book.

Cracking About Pavement

2005-02-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

“I don’t understand what they mean/And I could really give a fuck.” There it is, the explanation for my dislike of Pavement, smack dab in the middle of the third verse of their second most likeable song.

Pavement came along as the kings of reflexive irony at a time when that shit was just all over the place. You couldn’t tell what anybody listening to alternative rock was really thinking about anything, because there were so many layers of “This is so cool it’s meaningless because it acts like it means something which means nothing so it’s sincerely empty because it looks like it should be cool.”

Start with the attitude that meaning could be no more and no less important than pitch or rhythm. That’s what drove me crazy about Pavement. They sold and sold, they were lauded by every rock critic under the age of 30 back in 1994 (and a lot of them older, too), but they stood in stark opposition to everything I loved about music. I could handle irony as a method of expression, but irony as a preventative measure to avoid reaching a conclusion? This was something I couldn’t stomach.

And then, that song about the haircut came on the radio every hour or so. This was back in the day when I listened to the radio because I hadn’t yet encountered a CD player for my car, and it was back in the day when the Point, St. Louis’s first alternative rock station (which at the time was so scared of our town’s predeliction for classic rock that it refused to allow Vintage Vinyl to pay to welcome them as an alternative rock station) hadn’t yet squeezed its playlist into a narrow range of testosterone rage songs. Somewhere about the 58^th or 59^th time I heard it, I finally understood how brilliant it was to have a catchy sing-along about a pretty nice haircut. I’ve since mostly forgotten how brilliant that was, but I did love it for a few months there.

I would always give Pavement, and eventually singer Stephen Malkmus’ solo projects, a chance to affect me, but they never did. Until the other day, when I suddenly understood not the brilliance, but the beauty, at least, of “Range Life,” a song from Pavement’s breakthrough LP, “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.”

I’m saying it’s their second most likeable song because I haven’t enjoyed it nearly as long or as often as I did that haircut number. But, I just played it three times in a row, and it keeps rattling away in my brain as I type, keeping my thoughts as lilting as the bass-and-drums 2/4 backbeat that throbs its way throughout the record. Above that alt-country 101 rhythm track are layers of guitar and piano which sort of go along with the program, and sort of don’t. The piano is probably most closely aligned with the bass, tinkling away and occasionally coming to the forefront for a proper turnaround emphasis. But one guitar is strumming counter to the beats, and the other is playing a staccato melody with pitches just out of the key of the song. Strangely, it’s all gorgeous. I think I was so used to records being out of tune back in the early 90s that I missed the fact that this was done on purpose and to lovely effect.

Or, perhaps, I was still put off by Malkmus, who is off pitch because he simply can’t carry a tune very far away from a few notes in the middle of his range. In “Range Life” he mumbles at the bottom end of his register, and whimpers at the top. And he sings about skateboarding, and being off-stage while on tour, and throws in some elliptical comments about more well known bands than his own. The third verse finds him in combat with oddball sounds jumping out of the mix, until his vocal virtually disappears after the quote from the top of this page.

I don’t know much about skateboarding. I stood on one once, and jumped off fast when I realized that sucker was gonna move without me knowing how to control it. But, I know what I imagine it feels like to soar around on one of those things, to be in motion without a care in the world, without any thoughts of meaning beyond the moment. And, that’s what this song feels like, right down to the inevitable realization that something out there is going to make you stop and rejoin the rest of humanity. “Range Life” which purports to be about what? moving to a home on the range, could also be heard as “I want to arrange life,” which at least hints that you want things to be under your own control. This song feels like that, like everything is in the place the band wants it to be, until, slowly but surely, control ebbs away.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not gonna run right out and buy Pavement albums or something. I’m still awfully suspicious of these guys. But, at least for this one song, they managed to achieve a unity of expression that’s not as detached from life itself as I had thought they wanted to be. That’s a nice enough discovery to make eleven years later.

The Emperor's New Company

2005-01-31T15:13:00.000-08:00

I have seen the future of movie theatres, and it is the Moolah Theatre (http://www.stlouiscinemas.com/) right here in St. Louis. The screen is big, the seats are comfortable, plush love seats, couches, and armchairs (unless you want to sit in the back or the balcony, where seats are more traditional), and there’s a full bar, not just a concession stand. We bought a bottle of wine, were given two real wine glasses, and we sprawled out on a love seat in the second row center as if we were on our own couch at home. But, with a real movie showing in front of us.

The movie in question yesterday – and I swear, I’ll go see just about anything the Moolah wants to show – was “In Good Company.” It has one of those plots that can be described in a couple sentences. Dan Foreman is 52 years old, has a wonderful family life, and has sold advertising for Sports America magazine for years. Suddenly, the magazine is bought out, Dan is demoted from manager, and his new boss is 26. The new boss needs a father figure, so he leans on Dan, but also manages to fall in love with Dan’s 18-year-old daughter. People are no longer happy until eventually, from out of the sky, a new corporate purchase restores the status quo ante bellum.

So, what we have here is a fable, roughly modeled on “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” but roughed out a little to make for a two hour comfortable stretch on the love seat. Herein, the Emperor is Corporate America divided into two roles – youth and synergy. Each are set against the “old” values, which uniquely play the role of the little boy who tells truth to power while everybody else talks about how beautiful those robes look.

Dan Foreman is played by Dennis Quaid, who embodies the Hollywood image of successful middle management fathers. We’ve seen this sort of thing a million times – you wonder if the same architect designs all these two-story giant houses these guys live in. Quaid is terrific, though, bringing nuance and weight to the character. He loves his job, loves his family, and probably hasn’t thought much about changing anything in years. Of course, as in all movies featuring such men, a change is gonna come.

Carter Duryea is Dan’s boss, played by Topher Grace. (I was amused that Grace played somebody who had to call somebody else “Foreman,” since he has that name on “That 70s Show.”) This kid can act. His shifts between confidence and fear, his attempts to reach out for human contact, his ability to let down his guard in the presence of Dan’s daughter, were beautifully human. Though all the other corporate big-wigs were played as caricatures, Duryea was not.

The third true character is Alex, played by Scarlett Johansson in yet another excellent turn. As written, Alex is a series of empty sketches. She’s a good college tennis player who wants to switch to creative writing, who loves her dad but wants independence, and who symbolizes same by sleeping with her dad’s admittedly cute boss. I imagine if I read the script, Alex would be completely forgettable and confusing, but Johansson simply can’t do anything but flesh out lives by the way she moves and talks and looks at people. She’s worried about her future, she’s attracted to Carter yet aware it’s not the best idea yet determined to enjoy him anyway. She’s willfully ignoring his attempts to make their relationship into something serious.

So, that’s what we’ve got, masterful acting in a movie that wants to reinforce our belief systems. We want to believe that the contemporary corporate world is destroying a much better one, despite the fact that we’ve been pretty much shown for decades that corporations are destroying ways of life. There’s nothing new here, except for the obviously shallow language as typified by “synergy,” and the extreme toadying towards the man at the top. (The fetishization of the name “Teddy K,” the CEO of whatever corporation it is that Carter is in, is a constant trope.) But, Dan, a salesman, has obviously never seen Arthur Miller’s play, or even that movie about ten years ago with all the cussing. He’s a simple guy, a human guy, a guy who wants the right thing for his clients. And Carter is just trying to meet some numerical targets from his bosses.

Eventually, Teddy K comes to Sports America, and Dennis Quaid gets to stand up for the humanity which has been taken from his universe. He asks Teddy K (played by Malcolm McDowell in a deliciously creepy manner) what all this stuff really means, and how it really helps anybody. He exposes the nudity of Corporate Synergy. This almost costs him and Carter their jobs, but after a quick run to an old waffling client who will order extra advertising because Dan had punched Carter in the eye, the company is sold again, and Dan regains his old position while all the new blood is on the street.

Oh, yeah, the eye-punch thing. When Dan finds Carter with Alex, he gets furious, and punches him in the face. Here we have all kinds of things tied up in one sock. Fathers who want to control their daughters sexuality, older people who want younger people to be seen but not heard, or at least not in control of their livelihood, workers (even managers) who resent their bosses, the old ways taking on the new. Because this is a fable, Carter even comes to respect Dan a little more as a result of this punch. It’s part of the road to Carter’s great insight, that he needs to have passion in his life, he needs to feel what he does is important. Dan has that; Carter has nothing but empty ambition.

There’s a weird way in which this whole thing reminds me of our political situation. George W. Bush is Teddy K, the man with all the glib – well, whatever word you can use to describe how Bush puts things – words and a following looking to curry favor where it can be found. And Dan is the good man, the one who can restore our country’s greatness with just some well chosen questions and a commitment to human values. I mean, obviously, this is a fable we’ve all wanted to believe, that if we just speak past the empty phrases, we’ll make everybody see the way things ought to be. I know if I’d seen this movie before November, I’d have been even more convinced Bush was gonna be thrown out on his ass.

As we now know, though, the Emperor doesn’t have anybody thinking he’s only wearing one lovely suit of clothes. Nosirree, whether it’s the President or the corporations who put him there, today’s well-dressed illusionists are pushing an entire wardrobe of exquisite designs, and as fast as you can point out their flabby guts are showing, they’ve got a new outfit described to the public, which clamors even more. “In Good Company” is a feel-good movie about something which can’t possibly happen, and which really should only feel good by comparison to how bad things have become. It’s all the more tribute to the powers of these actors that we believe, at least until the wine glasses stopped coming, that it is worth trying, anyway.

Damned Lies About Statistics

2005-01-25T16:09:00.000-08:00

I had to watch it when I saw the commercial. Some guys are watching Shawn Green of the Los Angeles Dodgers (well, last year, anyway) at bat. One says, “He’s gone 0 for his last 4 games. He’s due.” The other guy says, “There’s no such thing as due.” And then comes the home run.

Baseball has me thinking about statistics and numbers all the time. Well, baseball, and my job analyzing statistics and numbers at a record store. I’ve picked up quite a bit about the way numbers work, but one of these days, if I ever do anything, I’m going to take a class on this stuff, so I can understand regressive analysis and other fancy things like that.

Anyway, as you may have gathered by now, I like to watch crime dramas on TV. (I like to watch other things on TV, too, but crime dramas do seem to spark more essay ideas, at least lately. I mean, I’d love to tell you all about the delights of “Hope and Faith,” America’s most under-rated sitcom, but so far, there ain’t no organization to those thoughts.) So, there’s a new show in town, the ridiculously titled “Numb3rs,” which is kinda like a cross between “CSI” and “Good Will Hunting.”

Well, not really, but there are chalkboards and grad students, so there’s something akin to “Good Will Hunting” going on. The pilot episode, shown Sunday night on CBS, was more or less like “Silence of the Lambs” without any of the psychological tension. Here we go again with the serial criminals, this time a rapist who burns a brand onto his victims and has now escalated to murder because, well, murder is the ultimate possession.

Did you ever wonder how these top cops let serial criminals put up such big numbers before dramatically breaking through and catching them in a one hour episode of constant plot twists? I think this guy had put up 12 rapes before he killed number 13, and, despite enormous manpower and lots of pictures of victims on the walls of the FBI headquarters, no headway has been made in the case. The FBI, the same agency which employs Mulder and Scully and I forget who else, can’t discern any sort of a pattern to the actions of a guy who has committed 12 virtually identical crimes in a very short (albeit unspecified) period of time.

I’m not one of those guys who spends his life researching serial killers, but I seem to recall that, with a few very famous exceptions like John Wayne Gacy and the like, most of them go months between crimes, and that’s why it takes a long time for authorities to figure out that the same person is doing it. They also don’t tend to be as methodical and consistent as the ones on TV. But, we love to be afraid of masterminds, don’t we?

One kind of mastermind we’re always afraid of is the mathematician. Those who think numbers have anything to say to us are derided as nerds, as outcasts, as braniacs, as people unwilling to see the obvious. A simple thing like the statement that a batter is due to get a hit after going so many times without one is accepted without question, despite the fact that statistically, it’s as much a lie as anything you could ever pull out of your lips. Over time, batters will regress to the mean of their statistics, yes, but that doesn’t mean that any individual at-bat bears any relation to their other accomplishments. If you say he’s due to get a hit enough times, eventually he will get one, and you’ll feel vindicated, despite the fact that you have to completely ignore the number of times you said it and he made an out.

So, it’s interesting that the twist on “Numb3rs” is that a mathematician can solve crimes that regular police can’t handle. But, in practice, this guy isn’t all that different from our friend Alison Dubois over on “Medium.” As far as we and the FBI can tell, young Charlie Eppes (David Krumholz) is pulling answers out of thin air. That’s why they get so pissed at him when it turns out he wasn’t 100% correct the first time.

Oh, well, Charlie gets to do some serious cipherin’. You can tell it’s serious because he puts a squirreled-up expression on his face, and starts scrawling across the chalkboard faster than most of us can type. Computer generated formulas fly over the screen sometimes, just to add to the excitement. Here’s a fact. Working mathematics isn’t really all that visually cool, and the way they try to pump up the testosterone here just makes me cringe.

Further upping the nerd factor, they make sure to show Charlie as being absent-minded, and they have him and his mentor, the guy who used to be on “Ally McBeal,” talking about solving fancy shmancy theories together. Oh, and they give him a hot, sexy grad student he gets to use as an assistant, and she obviously likes him but he doesn’t notice.

Charlie’s brother, Don (Rob Morrow, who used to be on “Northern Exposure” but I didn’t even realize it was him until I asked my wife Cat halfway through the show whether he’d done anything else) is the FBI guy in charge of investigating this rapist. He leaves his map of the rape locations on the dining room table, and Charlie can’t resist trying to solve the problem. His number-oriented mind sees 13 dots on a map and knows there has to be a way of narrowing down the home base of the mastermind. My baseball numbers oriented mind knows that 13 is a small sample size. But, I don’t know how to make fancy equations like Charlie does, so maybe it’s enough to get us to where the story takes us.

Several false starts later, the brothers are tipped by their dad (Judd Hirsch) that maybe the bad guy’s home base is where he works, not where he lives, so Charlie re-does all his work and narrows things down to a couple of office buildings. Don runs a check on everybody who works there, and comes up with a convicted rapist who’s done his time, who, we realize, has to be the guy because, well, there’s only a few minutes left in the show. No possibility that it could be one of the thousands who work there without any prior convictions, and no recognition of the fact that this guy didn’t seem to have performed the same patterns when he was raping before.

I’m not even going to talk about the breathless rescue sequence as the FBI heroes get to the villain just before he kills again. Instead, I’ll say that “Numb3rs” bears watching, just to see where they go with the math angle. I’m an eternal optimist, and I see a slight chance that maybe, just maybe, this show could make a very slight dent in America’s fear of numbers. Or, maybe we’ll start a drinking game for every time Charlie says something along the lines of “Numbers are everything.” Either way, I think we’re due.

Gene Santoro and Tangled Roots

2005-01-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

Gene Santoro, the music critic for the Nation and several other publications, looks at music as a folk art. He loves the way musical genres grow by overlapping with others, how artists build on what has occurred before to create something new, something which speaks to the cultural moment of its creation, something which reveals truths about the culture before, during, and after. For Santoro, music is best when it is authentic, and it is most authentic when it rejects old rules and seeks the new.

I come at music from pretty much the opposite perspective of Santoro. I’ve always looked at music as a high art, as creativity functioning to express individual concerns, as a way of telling us what one person (or a group of persons) sees in the world. I tend to disregard genres, and have been known to overlook combinations of different backgrounds until I’ve read about them in the work of other critics. I don’t care one whit about authenticity, I don’t require music to be new, though I do expect it to be fresh.

And yet, Santoro and I meet in the middle on so many things. “Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock & Country Music” collects (and revises) columns and features Santoro has written over the last dozen or so years. Despite the expected differences of emphasis, I do enjoy almost all of the music Santoro covers in this book. And, I cannot argue with Santoro’s attention to details I have overlooked for years. He points out subtle nuances, combinations of techniques, emotions, key lyrics, which make me want to hear songs I had long ago enjoyed and almost forgotten.

Our differences, at least in the context of this book, are most apparent in chapters on the Grateful Dead and Ani DiFranco. I mean, I love Louis Armstrong, Woody Guthrie, Sonny Rollins, the Band, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Cassandra Wilson and dozens of others over whom Santoro rhapsodizes. (I disagree frequently with his choices of high points and low points, though – Santoro cannot forgive talented musicians who fall into what he feels are formulaic traps, but I have no problem recognizing the beauty, say, in the 80s and 90s work of Harris, or, for that matter, the exceptional professionalism and artistic strengths of Motown classics.) But, the Dead and DiFranco, I think, can only be admired for their ideas of merging musical forms. When it comes to execution, they fail far more often than they succeed.

Any damn fool can tell that the Dead are trying to mix Coltrane-styled improvisation with folk and rock idioms in “Dark Star,” but that doesn’t make Jerry Garcia’s sputtery tone or rhythmic irregularity any more listenable. And DiFranco can make for a great story – rugged independence, strong feminist conceptions, mixing of hip hop, folk, and rock traditions – until you actually remember that her songs lay flat when they come out of the speakers.

It’s interesting that in a book which starts with Armstrong, as the inventor of 20^th century popular music because of his proof that the folk traditions of jazz group improvisation can be converted to individual expressions of high artistic value, and Guthrie, the man who re-invented folk music in America as a rebellious union of man and subversive guitar (his machine killed fascists, remember) should end with DiFranco. Santoro wants her to be his hope for the future, though he acknowledges repeatedly that 21^st century America is a land of cultural subdivisions sprawling all over the place and only occasionally butting into a receptive listener of different background and interests. This land is my land, that land is your land, and yours was made for you, and mine was made for me.

DiFranco has done plenty to energize a political base, but she is never going to speak to those who don’t already agree with her. That’s fine. It’s what we’ve got to work with, and Lord knows I’d rather hang with an army of DiFranco fans than anyone who loves Toby Keith. But, she’s not making a difference in the world, she’s no more a sign of the future than the series of jazz artists collected in the second to last chapter, “New Jazz Fusions.” Here, with quick studies of Jason Moran, Bill Frisell, Greg Osby, Matthew Shipp and others, Santoro is at least on more solid conceptual ground. He has correctly noted that the most interesting jazz artists of the last decade and a half are reaching out across the dividing line between contemporary pop cultures and jazz. Mainstream jazz, as typified by even as talented a creator as Wynton Marsalis, is trying to calcify, to restrict itself from connecting to the current world in which we live, and yet there are many younger musicians finding ways to make improvised music new while remaining true to its traditions.

I’m down with all that, though the reasons I love these players has little to do with their attempts and everything to do with their success. Find me a more soulful guitarist than Frisell, a more muscular yet lithe saxophonist than Osby, and I’ll love that music, too, whether it’s strictly traditional or ultra-modern.

Santoro deserves credit for making a name for himself in the world of pop criticism while remaining staunchly outside the mainstream tendencies of so many others. It’s rare enough to find contemporary critics equally insightful in jazz and pop forms, and rarer still to find one so completely immune to the contemporary flavors of the month. He will infuriate and he will illuminate because his passions and his knowledge run so deep.