Dilettante's Notebook

On Quentin Tarantino

2010-01-21T12:51:00.000-05:00

Quentin Tarantino traces the birth of his aesthetic back to the day, many years ago, when he read Pauline Kael’s review of Band of Outsiders. In particular he cites the passage wherein Kael likens Godard’s film to “a reverie of a gangster movie as students in an espresso bar might remember it or plan it….It’s as if a French poet took a banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines…” “And when I read it,” Tarantino told an interviewer later, “I said that’s my aesthetic, that’s what I want to do, that is what I want to achieve.”

It should be noted that it was in a diner that Tarantino first read this review, since the review compares a film that partially takes place in a diner to something that was first conceived in a diner, and also since Tarantino (who loved to hang out in diners) would make similar diner-inspired movies that also take place partially in diners. (Tarantino’s production company, A Band Apart, is also a vulgarization of the French formulation of the title of Godard’s movie.) One part of Kael’s review that Tarantino doesn’t publicly identify himself with is where she claims that young filmgoers, some of them, “are so proud of how compulsively they see everything in terms of movies and how many times they’ve seen certain movies that there is nothing left for them to relate movies to. They have been soaked up by the screen.” It’s as if she were eloquently stealing the words, preemptively, from the mouths of all of Tarantino’s eventual critics.

It’s true that there not only doesn’t seem to be a terrible film extant that Quentin Tarantino hasn’t seen, but that there doesn’t seem to be a terrible film extant that Tarantino hasn’t admired, and that hasn’t somehow informed his work, in a fundamental way. Each one of his films is a high-gloss tribute to some hackneyed old genre: heist, gangster, grindhouse, blaxploitation, and kung fu. Recently, he even went to war—with the Greatest Generation, no less—and twisted military history until it fit his purposes. There are plenty of other genres left to rescue and elevate, and we can be sure that before he reaches his anticipated retirement age of 60, Tarantino will have stayed up somewhere all night and told us all about them.

On Ted Turner

2010-01-15T09:53:00.002-05:00

Even before he became rich, Ted Turner had been rich. He had come from money long before he made money come to him. That was his leg up, but it wasn’t what made him. When his father took his own life, he left his billboard business behind, whereupon Ted immediately converted it into a multimillionaire’s enterprise. After he became so rich that he owned a couple of sports teams, he had to have someplace to put them where the whole country could see. That’s how he got into the TV business, with TBS, and now he owns more land than could fit inside of Delaware and Rhode Island, combined and literally. When he founded CNN and made the news something that happens 24 hours a day, he changed nothing less than the way the world saw itself. By changing journalism, fundamentally, he changed everything. That’s how the world came to have to reckon with what it meant to live in a planet inhabited by Ted Turner.

On Henry Shrapnel

2010-01-06T18:12:00.001-05:00

At the time that Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel first started working up his invention—a shell full of fragment shot, carefully packed to find its target when the casing did—he was a British army officer attached to the Royal Artillery. His invention gave him both fame and professional promotion, eventually to the rank of major general, for what it allowed his fellow soldiers to do to their enemies. Because of the “remaining velocity” resultant from the shell’s momentum, a casing that once travelled effectively at a range of 300 meters now travelled at an effective range closer to 1100 meters, and when it reached its object, the increased resultant damage was considerable. In 1852 the shrapnel shell was patented under Henry’s very own name, and although many people improved upon it and refined it from there, all that fragmentary advance emerged from one unified point, with a definitive shape and a definitive name.

On Merle Haggard

2009-09-08T10:28:00.001-04:00

Johnny Cash may have sang the “Folsom Prison Blues,” but it was Merle Haggard who actually lived them, at San Quentin in the 1950s. He was right in the middle of living them, in fact, when Cash came to Quentin to sing them. Changed his whole damn life, pretty much. Before making it to the big house, his crimes had all been juvenile offenses—truancy and larceny and the like—but at the age of 20 he held up a bar in Bakersfield and got three years max-security. That’s when he heard Cash sing in a way that changed him all around. He had direction, now. Some of the guys were intent on breaking out, and offered Haggard the chance to go along with them. He said thanks but no thanks, because he already had a different kind of escape plan cooking. Once he was free, he finally took it, and they still haven’t called him back there.

On Estes Kefauver

2009-07-14T08:48:00.005-04:00

One of the certifiably great spectacles in the countless-ring circus that is political life in America, the Senate committee investigation hearing, as public absurdity, has been around precisely as long as television has, for reasons that are obvious and not at all coincidental. When the U.S. government decided in 1950 to look into just how it was that organized crime got itself organized, it was Estes Kefauver who headed the hearings. The Kefauver Committee was born when television was born, and they grew up together with all the same modes and moods of adolescent dysfunction.

If the hearings could never give Kefauver the boost he needed to reach the presidency, at least they gave him something nearly as valuable in a world where celebrity is the coin of the realm: they gave him fame, and not necessarily in the sense that the Greeks meant. The whole debacle looked like a casting-call for pre-Code Warners, with Kefauver as the casting director, and America getting to gawk along in their living rooms. A rival in the Senate of the venerable Albert A. Gore, also of Tennessee and the Democratic persuasion, Kefauver functioned in a style at least as enigmatic as his consummate doppelganger’s, albeit in ways entirely different. David Maraniss, biographer to both Bill Clinton and to Albert Gore’s son, claims that Kefauver was to Gore what Clinton would later be to Gore, Jr.— similar in ideology but not at all in personality:

“Kefauver’s eyes were as soft as Gore’s were hard. That those eyes might have been softened by excessive alcohol (Albert, in contrast, did not drink) was less important on a superficial level than the fact that they seemed inviting and friendly, not distancing. If Kefauver became perhaps too close to some of his female constituents, as historians later documented, his ability to connect on a personal basis with the average voter was striking, and in direct contrast with Albert Gore….Kefauver understood, as Bill Clinton later did, the powerful effect that a soft personal touch could have on voters.”

And, Maraniss might have added, on viewers as well, which were becoming increasingly indistinguishable as one and the same. When mobsters had to sit before the all-too-organized criminals who comprised their federal government and then answer for their deeds, a star was born in America, and so was an entire way of political life.

On Iron Maiden

2009-07-13T20:54:00.001-04:00

The thing about cover art is that it graces only the cover, and you can use it to judge the album no more than you can judge the book by it. That said, sometimes the cover art penetrates deep into the work in insidious ways, and nowhere is this truer than in the case of Iron Maiden’s work. All that heavy-metal cartoonery, their mascot Eddie always inhabiting a different environ consistent with the album’s thematic conception—it goes to show that, contra Kiss, a band can use visual art to enhance good music, not simply as gimmickry to distract from music that is less-than-good.

In grade school in the mid-1980s, all the older kids wore Iron Maiden shirts—it was how one signified one’s edginess as a high-school grown-up. But kids too grow into high-schoolers, and sometimes they graduate, and then, rarer still, they actually behave as if they have graduated. And the appeal of Iron Maiden not only endures but enhances. All those songs based on literature sometimes achieve a state of literature themselves (“Brave New World,” “The Wicker Man,” “Lord of the Flies”). And even when they’re nothing more than mere transcriptions of someone else’s literature (“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), they can transcend the literature from which they borrow, because they’re literature set to music. It’s literature that fucking rocks, and that’s a rarer thing altogether to behold. Meanwhile, history goes neither forgotten nor ignored, and the student of the past (high school or otherwise) can learn more from a song like “Alexander the Great” than from all the bloodless lectures ever delivered—to say nothing of an irresponsibly elided film like Oliver Stone’s Alexander.

The cover art wasn’t just neat, cool, or awesome; it was conceptual. It was concept art made to adorn concept albums, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that one particular artifactual representation of it—specifically, that of Powerslave—I’ve found striking enough to wear not only on a T-shirt, for my body, but on a banner-poster, for my wall. There are plenty of examples of this vivid imagery contributing to packaging as an enhancer of content: Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Piece of Mind, Somewhere in Time, Fear of the Dark. Just because school’s out doesn’t mean you stop appreciating the high finer things. Usually it can mean the very opposite. What a concept.

On Nelson Rockefeller

2009-06-09T06:48:00.002-04:00

Way back in another millennium, before the Democrats became the official party of Civil Rights and the Republicans became the official party of their suppression, Nelson Rockefeller was able to sneak up from behind Jack Kennedy and make a move to outflank him on the left. It wasn’t the first or the last time Kennedy would leave himself open from that angle.

The occasion was Kennedy’s introduction of a voting-rights bill, in 1963, and Rockefeller, who fancied Kennedy’s office and was then showing incipient signs of aspiration towards its attainment, spoke out as governor of New York at an NAACP rally upstate. Taylor Branch sketches the scene in his Civil Rights chronicle Parting the Waters: “Trenchantly, Rockefeller attacked Kennedy’s much-publicized plan to make racial progress through presidential appointments, charging that the President’s most critical appointments had been four Southern judges of well-known segregationist views….The best civil rights judges in the South, and indeed the department’s only hopes for racial justice through the courts, were Eisenhower appointees; the most egregious segregationists were Kennedy’s, and they were more than four in number.”

That Rockefeller could even pull this political stunt says a lot about Kennedy, of course, but it says just as much about Rocky and his beating if not bleeding liberal heart. It’s almost enough to forgive him the crime of having been the one to bring Henry Kissinger into the realm of public policy. He supported the arts, conserved the wildlife and its environs, funded public transportation (with revenue obtained at bridge and tunnel tolls), and even opposed the death penalty (except in cases involving the murder of police officers). Rocky was all about law-and-order, sometimes at the expense of everything else, as would later be fully demonstrated at Attica.

Parenthetically, this may be the place to note that none other than Ted Bundy ran his campaign in Seattle during the presidential quest of 1968. That quest went cold, just as the quest of ’64 had gone cold when his bitter divorce made headlines. But such a taint didn’t prevent the nomination of Adlai Stevenson some eight years earlier. That was a different party, though, with different values from the Republicans even back then. That’s only further evidence that Nelson Rockefeller had been running on the wrong wing all along.

On Clancy Martin

2009-05-15T10:29:00.006-04:00

It’s not unheard-of for a professor in the hard humanities—the theoretical-logical humanities—to make a jump into the realm of fiction-writing and to succeed there. In our own era, we’ve been blessed with the dense and elaborate puzzle palaces of Stephen L. Carter, professor of law at Yale, whose success, artistic and otherwise, at creative writing would seem to be at odds with the demands of his day job. Now there’s Clancy Martin, a professor of philosophy specializing in existentialism, who’s penned a hard and compact bildungsroman, How to Sell, about coming of age in the luxury-jewelry trade—at just over 300 pages a brief vivid burst of American fever-dreaming by way of Canada. What the hell does any of this have to do with the study of existentialism? As it happens, just about everything.

The novel’s details, so carefully chosen and perfectly arrayed, come plucked from the tray of Martin’s own hard experience. It was existentialism, as both way of life and academic pursuit, that saved Martin from the jewelry business, which he had entered and re-entered, between stints at school, at the urging of his older brother in Dallas. By the time he was ready to write his doctoral dissertation, under Robert Solomon on Nietzsche’s theory of deception, he had learned more about the subject in practice than perhaps anyone ever should.

That education is the subject of the current novel—which is, after all, just that. The base of Martin’s experience has been melted down into a different kind of alloy, with more than just the narrator-protagonist’s name being altered. Yes, Bobby Clark leaves high school and Canada at age 16 to join his brother in Dallas, whereupon sex, drugs, and violence ensue, but beyond that we’d do ourselves a favor to read the book under the conditions its author has intended. Changes have been made not just to protect the innocent, the semi-innocent, and the not-at-all-innocent, but also to protect the interests of narrative, of story, of the kind of serendipities and suspense that the fiction-writer will lend to his work when he’s writing not to be admired but to be enjoyed—and is hence admired all the more for his efforts.

That’s the kind of novel that How to Sell is, just as it’s the kind of novel that Carter’s are. Seemingly incongruous at first, this phenomenon makes all the sense in the world when considered a certain way. For How to Sell is, of course, not just about how to sell, but about all those metaphorical moments wherein lying, cheating, and stealing stand for the same thing—stand for selling by dire means. Martin’s achievements, as a philosopher and translator, are already substantial—as chair of his department at the University of Missouri – Kansas City, as translator of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, as the author of many existentialist texts respected in their field. There was no move left to make except to tell his story in the best way he knew how, even if that meant telling it in a way that rendered it, in its particulars, a somewhat different story. Existence is what happens when we’re existing, and all the apparatus of post-modern fiction and epistemological philosophy at some point has to come to terms with the pure product of this experience. It’s amazing how many kinds of training are required before we come to this realization.

On David Lynch

2009-04-21T19:40:00.003-04:00

When David Lynch writes, in Catching the Big Fish—his meditation on meditation, and the artistic bounties it can bring—that the magic of a film lies in obfuscation and confusion (though not in those words), it’s hard to know if he’s evading his own responsibilities on purpose or by accident. “A film should stand on its own,” he writes. “It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words. The world in the film is a created one, and people sometimes love going into that world. For them that world is real. And if people find out certain things about how something was done, or how this means this or that means that, the next time they see the film, these things enter into the experience. And then the film becomes different. I think it’s so precious and important to maintain that world and not say certain things that could break the experience.”

It’s almost as if he’s been paying a penance, all these years, for having started life in the cradle of conformity, his father a D.C. bureaucrat and then himself an Eagle Scout who ushered at Kennedy’s inauguration. Adulthood, meanwhile, has been all about making films of defiant incoherence and solipsistic preciosity, as if to put a lucid sequence up on the screen would be a kind of artistic death, a suffocation of the soul. He’d sooner cast a part for a real woman, with qualities distinguishing her from all the other women in his films, and who didn’t get brutalized in the beginning, middle, and end of the picture.

But it’s not the misogyny that’s always bothered so many who admire Lynch’s genius but disdain his incoherence. It’s the dreaming, the surrealism, the bleeding of fantasy into the on-screen actual so that the two become entirely indistinguishable. By refusing George Lucas’s offer to direct Return of the Jedi, he deprived the Star Wars franchise of what could have been only its second, and last, masterpiece. Look at what Irvin Kershner was able to do with Empire. But Lynch foresaw irreconcilable artistic differences and refused to take the plunge. It’s a shame. Someone else would have provided the story—with which Lynch has always been so weak and irresponsible—while all Lynch would have had to provide is the magic. It couldn’t have been any worse than cranking out episodes of Twin Peaks for ABC.

Speaking of which: Where was all his high-minded artistic purity when the network suits came to him demanding that he identify Laura’s killer at the end of season one? Even the hackingest of hacks knows that you don’t give up the murderer after only the first reel. Lynch’s masterpiece—and it was a masterpiece—was ruined. The second season couldn’t even come close to saving it; it only made things worse. Lynch betrayed his own principles when he caved in and gave away so much more than any first-time viewer could possibly want to know. This is the same man who insists that his fellow directors are saying too much when they respect their audience enough to actually let them in on what’s happening in the film he’s put before them. It’s preposterous. It’s absurd. It’s so surreal you have to ask yourself if it’s really happening, or if the whole thing is just one big bad dream sequence. Then you stop asking yourself the question, because eventually, by then, you realize you’ve already stopped caring.

On Ross Perot

2009-04-17T15:19:00.001-04:00

America’s chance for a third-party presidential triumph didn’t end with Ross Perot’s loss in 1992. It ended with Ross Perot’s dropping out of the race earlier that same year, before getting right back in it again. How can Americans believe in a phenomenon that doesn’t believe even in itself? And for all those who mourn the damage wrought by Ralph Nader eight years later, it’s important to keep in mind that were it not for a third-wheel spoiler in ‘92, in the form of Perot, America would have gotten a Bush for president again that much sooner. The third-party sword cuts two ways, in other words, and is incredibly dangerous for any interested party not wielding it. But Perot shook things up a little before he left, and that was all to the good. He chose as his running mate one of the few admirable men to ever run for that job, and was the first to buy up a televised forum for his message in blocks. Barack Obama, recent events reveal, understands the importance of both those strategies. We’ve all learned lessons from Perot. If his candidacies in 1992 and 1996 only suggested those lessons, the candidacy of Nader in 2000 would do the rest of the work in confirming them. Right-wingers and left-wingers alike who know what they believe and why they believe it owe a debt of gratitude to these true mavericks. Let’s hope we never have to see their like again.

On Bill Walton

2009-03-31T11:50:00.001-04:00

Some guys have all the luck. By which, I really do mean all of it—the bad as well as the good, not to mention the terrific luck, and the terrible luck. No athlete, probably, has ever seen more potential for greatness interrupted by injury. And yet, it’s commonly forgotten that before the truly career-abbreviating injuries of Walton occurred—those shattered and shredded feet, knees, and ankles—he had already fulfilled some of his promise as a pro, by winning both an NBA championship and the League MVP, with the Portland Trailblazers in 1977. This was the cherry on top of his stellar college career, where he had been a large hand in helping the UCLA Bruins maintain their monopolistic dynasty under John Wooden. The player in whose footsteps he was following at UCLA, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was one he would face in the Western Conference Finals on the way to winning his NBA championship, and in that encounter, Walton came off not at all unfavorably. If his career had ended after that series—or even before playing a single game as a pro—he would have been a lock for the Hall of Fame.

As a college player, he had acquired a well-earned reputation for Southern California oddball iconoclasm, and it was his good luck that Coach Wooden tolerated, however grudgingly, his chronic cannabis-smoking. The law never interfered, either, and so Walton went blithely on, until the hard injuries came and the cannabis was replaced by, or at least supplemented with, addictive painkillers. Walton picked up the addiction. Good luck had rotated to reveal bad. Some would say it was also bad luck that forced his hand and sent him packing away from the team he had won a championship with up in Portland, but the place he ended up was his very own hometown, sunny San Diego, where he played with a cast of a characters so eccentric, they made Walton look almost conformist by comparison.

Even though he’d grown up in California, and spent pretty much his whole life out West, the Celtics were his favorite team, and that should surprise no one—for even though Walton had the good luck to be naturally laid back, he had the bad luck of being a rabid and restless competitor when the game was on, and what team, during Walton’s lifetime, was more competitive than the Celtics? He went shopping for a team that might win the championship, and when the Celtics expressed interest, he was only too happy to go hobbling East. It was Walton’s good luck to win another championship, but it was his bad luck to play, due to lingering injuries, a rather limited role.

After playing came broadcasting. Stuttering may have been a curse of his, but personality and passion, not to mention literacy, were some of his blessings. He became a sensational broadcaster, a kind of icon in his own time in this second career of his. He continued travelling as a tie-dyed Deadhead, too, and saw his favorite band in concert some 600 times. He had a wife and four kids, and one of the kids, Luke, ended up playing for the Lakers against the Celtics for the NBA championship. Walton called the series for NBC. Although blood runs thicker than Celtic green, Walton had a job to do, and anyway, why did his son have to be playing against Walton’s beloved Celtics? It almost wasn’t fair. Fat clouds of luck had gathered overhead; nourishing rain fell to Earth accompanied by punishing thunder. When it came time for Walton to predict the outcome, he understood that it was the penance he had to pay for so much flip-side fortune. He professed that the Celtics would win in six, and that’s precisely what happened. Bill Walton, once again, was vindicated.

On Tiger Woods

2009-03-21T13:22:00.001-04:00

If Chris Rock’s joke from several years ago is true enough to be funny-because-it’s-true—that the best rapper is white and the best golfer is black, and how fucked up is that?—then it might be worth noting that one is much more significant than the other. (And that’s not even going anywhere near the more recent developments in electoral politics.) As Woods likes to remind the public, his racial identity is sliced several different ways (he calls it Cablinasian), while Eminem’s is decidedly monochromatic. But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is what they’ve done for their respective sports. Eminem has made more than a few converts out of those not otherwise inclined to appreciate rap, but there’s nothing that Tiger Woods, or anyone else, could possibly do for golf that would make watching the game—in person or on TV—a viable entertainment option to anyone never in receipt of a frontal lobotomy (or who doesn’t already carry the equivalent of a lobotomized brain). Its rules, its modes of play, are designed in such a way that forbids significant embellishment. He may be the winningest golfer of all time, but no matter how many tournaments Woods continues to win, his greatest contribution, outside of his ample charity work, will always be to the world of beverages. Because of his fame, nominally earned through his golfing, Gatorade enticed him with a licensing deal, the first of his career that he ever agreed to. And it was under the cover of this licensing deal that they released their Tiger Focus line of sports drinks. It’s been written elsewhere in this Notebook that the flavor of these drinks is unsurpassed. And to think that it was a golfer who made it possible: how fucked up is that?

On Buzz Aldrin

2009-03-20T10:32:00.002-04:00

Even if they’d only done it alphabetically, Aldrin should have been first—and what are the odds of that, given the other guy’s name was “Armstrong”? There are many explanations, theories, and narratives concerning how the decision was made to have Armstrong be the one and only First Man on the Moon, and Buzz the Second, but one of them has it that Buzz Aldrin’s ego was the cause. His ego. Well, by the time NASA got done with him, there wasn’t much of that left to get in the way.

This was a man, Buzz Aldrin, who had shot down MiG’s over Korea. He controlled the planes he flew and saw with his own eyes (and the eyes of his camera) the planes that he took out. He was master of both his domain and his destiny. NASA thought he was such an outstanding pilot—with a surfeit of all the requisite Right Stuff—that they put him in a capsule and sent him hurtling universeward. He may have come back, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t gotten lost out there. This man who had once touched the Moon now found it a challenge, some days, just to touch the floor underneath his bed. He would break down weeping. The tension he felt became physical. He went numb for spells. In a book he wrote about his mental dissolution, Return to Earth, Aldrin wrote that “I could see no hope, no possibility of controlling anything.” Hysterics, helplessness, and hospitalization, followed by therapy and Thioridazine. He left the space program, found a different capacity for his life.

It’s no wonder that years later, in 2003, he would punch a guy in the face for challenging the veracity of his Moon landing; the only wonder is that he didn’t do worse. If there’s one thing Buzz Aldrin had earned, it was the right to say how far out he’d been. He’d been about as far out as you can possibly go, in a about as many ways as you can mean it. It was caught on camera, of course, all of it: the combat kills over Korea, the Moon landing, even the punch. Buzz had the pictures like proof, verifiable. I mean, the blast into space—a monkey could do it (and, of course, a monkey already had). But that doesn’t matter anymore; Aldrin has already come back and seized what control is man’s for the seizing, here on this side of Earth’s atmosphere and envelope.

On Larry Bird

2009-02-22T11:30:00.008-05:00

When Larry Bird was on the court, the basketball itself seemed to take on a different set of kinetic properties, a whole other range of potential places it could go and ways of getting there. One quick tap off the dribble could send it sharply into the hands of an open man cutting toward the basket. Or maybe Bird would simply flip it behind-the-back to finish off the fast break. Open on the baseline, instead of taking the easy shot at 20 feet, he might put the ball back on the floor, step back, look down to make sure his feet were behind the 3-point line, and then let it fly. It was as if the opponent didn’t present enough challenges; Bird had to go and create a few more on his own just to keep things interesting.

It was a way of talking trash without even opening his mouth. Bird was a master of these subtle and not-so-subtle little psych-outs: the choke sign, the word of warning, the well-placed taunt. Sometimes, with the 3-pointer hanging airborne in the middle of its arc, Bird would turn around and head back on defense, the shot already completed as far as he was concerned. He knew when the shot was going in.

He also knew when it wasn’t—both his own shots and others’. It was the source of his mastery as a rebounder. Not only did he know when a shot would miss; he knew the precise angle, distance, and velocity at which it would return off the rim or backboard. Positioning himself accordingly before anyone knew what was happening allowed him to always make it there in time. When you think three moves ahead of the opponent, it’s often possible to get away with being three times as slow.

And yet, he could sometimes be alarmingly quick, for someone of his size, complexion, and reputation. In traffic on the break, he moved through the lanes with agility and speed. Rightfully regarded as someone cool in the clutch, the go-to-guy with the game on the line, it’s important to remember that perhaps his most significant clutch play, against the Pistons in the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals, was a feat of defensive athleticism (and anticipation): a running-lunging steal from an inbounds pass and then the no-look assist.

All of these attributes were grounded deeply in the fundamentals. That’s where his roots were. He wasn’t the first. Plenty of players had already taken the fundamentals and made them flashy. It took someone like Bird to come along, seize the flash, and then make it nothing less than fundamental, in some of the places in the game where you’d never expect it.

On Stevie Wonder

2009-01-29T19:40:00.002-05:00

Little Stevland Hardaway Morris wasted hardly a minute in this world before he began mastering all the instruments he would have to master on his way to Wonderhood. First came the piano, at age 7, and then the vocal chords (perhaps most important of all), followed by the harmonica and drums, bolstered and backed by the bass underneath. He was already blind by this time; it had happened at birth when his retinas detached due to complications resulting from a premature birth. His birth as a musical phenom was also premature, but given how sane, productive, and adaptable he’s been in spite of that, you might say that he was signed-sealed-delivered right on time.

Wonder’s status as Motown’s mascot early on was almost entirely a function of his extreme youth. He was only 11, after all, when he got his start, but as he matured he began to compose songs on his own, and this level of involvement advanced a step higher when he was composing songs for artists known as composers in their own right. Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown” is hardly ever acknowledged for being a Wonder composition, but that’s precisely what it is, even though Robinson was a preferred and prolific composer on his own in those days. I guess you could say that Stevie Wonder was the composer’s composer, in more ways than just the one, even when he was still only a kid.

At 21 he was finally free of Motown’s artistic restraints. No longer the mascot, he was now a renegade, insistent on his right to employ synthesizer sounds and socially conscious lyrics. To make his case he even left the label for a while, and when he came back the rest of Motown was liberated as a result. But it was Little Stevie, not so little anymore, who arguably made the most of the opportunity. The string of albums that came during this period, from 1972 to 1976—Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingnesses’ First Finale, and Songs in the Key of Life—haven’t been equaled. Not by Wonder but not by many others, either. As a consequence, they cast a weird and wonderful light over everything that’s come before and after.

The voice is still as strong as it’s ever been, as we had ample occasion to notice during the recent campaign and inauguration of Barack Obama. Even though the material that’s been on his latest albums is uneven, when the best of the batch is finally gathered and anthologized, it will comprise on its own a work of alarmingly high quality. It will move from the bittersweet sublimity of Jungle Fever to the similar standout songs from Hotter Than July and Conversation Peace. Most of us will be left to wonder where it came from, but Stevie won’t. Stevie, as always, will have seen it happening all along.

On George Foreman

2009-01-19T09:19:00.000-05:00

People have come up with all kinds of ways to describe depression—as many kinds of depression, it seems, as there are people depressed. What George Foreman described having visited him, at the end of the first phase of his boxing career, is an emptiness—all around him nothing but a vast void. In the arts of anger, he had had two of the best teachers a person could ask for: the streets of Houston and Sonny Liston. With teachers like that, it’s a wonder he ever unlearned what they had taught him. Instead of trying to fill the void, though, what he did was let the void fill him. He embraced the emptiness, the ultimate wisdom. Then, when he came back to boxing, he had more, not less, stamina than before, because all that energy that had previously been converted into anger was now being deployed in the service of fighting. In his younger days, George Foreman may not have even seen that there was a difference, between anger and fighting, but when he won the heavyweight title back, at 45, he must have been left wondering if the two really had anything worthwhile in common at all.

On Lorne Michaels

2009-01-03T18:54:00.004-05:00

There was a period of about five years, barely remembered and in the early 1980s, when Lorne Michaels was not affiliated in any way with the iconic program that he had founded in 1975, and that has continued under his helm since 1985, becoming more legendary every year, somehow always discovering and showcasing the best unknown comedic talent in America (with occasional forays into Michaels’s home territory of Canada). What makes them known is being on SNL, a Triple A farm club that repeatedly outslugs most of the major-league motion pictures its players advance to.

It was after the initial cast had turned over that Michaels figured he might as well leave, too. The original Not-Ready-for-Primetime Players—Belushi and Ackroyd and Murray and Radner and Chase and Curtain and Morris—were looking impossible to replace. Nobody knew what was ahead. Nobody knew that Saturday Night Live would even endure in their absence, let alone thrive and snowball its legendary status with each successive generation.

The years without Michaels are considered the show’s dark age, and with good reason, even if that period in the show’s history seems so mysterious and intriguing in retrospect. Even back in ’75, Michaels had been about half a generation older than the original cast, and in spite of his countercultural sympathies and leanings, something of a buttoned-up corporate square by comparison. Now, with the new cast at the helm, he figured he was an anachronism within an anachronism, and moved on to develop other projects elsewhere. Jean Doumanian took over, and when she unceremoniously left, Dick Ebersol assumed the helm. Something had to be done, and that something was Lorne Michaels, once again.

That’s when the show rediscovered its energy, caught its second of many winds, and arguably started moving stronger than ever. Dennis Miller, Dane Carvey, Phil Hartman, Chris Rock, Kevin Nealon, David Spade, Chris Farley—this is the core cast that Michaels came back at them with. Things just accelerated from there, as SNL became the most reliable perennial report on America’s cultural insanity, broadcast live and then time-capsulized for posterity. Lorne Michaels never saw it coming, but neither did anyone else. He was just making it up as the country went along, figuring the whole thing out in real-time.

On Weird Al Yankovic

2008-12-21T09:54:00.004-05:00

As long as people are making music, however loosely defined, Weird Al Yankovic will be making music that makes fun of that music. And almost invariably, with very few exceptions, the parody will be infinitely more ingenious than the thing parodied. One-hit wonders will come and go, and as they do, Weird Al will seize their one hit and make a wonder of his own, of an entirely different kind.

He’s been doing it professionally for nearly three full decades now, since 1979 when he wasn’t quite yet a senior in high school. The Knack liked his spoof of “My Sharona” so much that when they heard it on Dr. Demento’s radio program, they arranged for Yankovic’s first recording contract, with their own label, Capitol Records. He was in college by that time, but architecture’s loss was comedy’s gain. It was music’s gain, too, as Al folded up his accordion and set out to see how much he could make it make fun of. It’s doubtful that even Weird Al could have guessed at the awesome immensity stretched before him.

The Knack liking Yankovic’s parody of their own song is not the exception; it’s almost exclusively the rule. Weird Al ensures that this is the case by asking the artists’ permission before recording. They usually feel, as Nirvana did with his parody of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” that the Weird Al imprimatur means they’ve finally made it. The results don’t just satisfy and amuse; they usually honor and enhance the original recording, and hence the original artist.

After already granting Yankovic the right to shoot the whole thing, Eminem refused Weird Al the right to air “Couch Potato,” Yankovic’s parody of “Lose Yourself”—not because he was offended by the final product, but because the original was such an importantly powerful personal statement. Eminem knew that Weird Al’s own personal statement, in such vividly graphic form, would at the very least eclipse his own.

You could even say that the better the music, the more readily it lends itself to parody. The more powerful the personal statement, and the more sublime the original instrumental track, the more easily it can be turned in on itself. This is the kind of opportunity that Weird Al specializes in seizing upon, with a poignancy of wit and a range a reference that are simply jaw-dropping. (Yes, he writes all his own stuff.) In a more imperfect world, there’d be nothing but imperfect music. And that imperfection would be compounded once over again, because then there’d be no room for Weird Al to do what he’s done peerlessly for thirty years: create a new kind of perfection that takes nothing too seriously except its own excellence.

On Ted Koppel

2008-11-23T12:41:00.005-05:00

It was 1979 and America was held hostage, at home and abroad. In Iran, it was the Iranians, keeping captive the occupants of the U.S. embassy there. And in America, it was Johnny Carson, forcing you to either yuk it up with him in late night or turn off the tube, even on those nights when there was little to yuk it up about. Someone had to free Americans to be serious and well-informed, even at bedtime. That’s where ABC News came in, and they brought Ted Koppel along with them.

Originally, Nightline was just supposed to be a miniseries devoted to the hostage crisis, reality TV at its most extreme and serious. But young Ted Koppel, then ABC’s correspondent at the State Department, did such an effective job with “The Iran Crisis—America Held Hostage: Day [Fill in the Blank],” that ABC decided to allow him to make a permanent safe haven for all those who wanted to escape from Johnny and Ed and the canned celebration of everything ephemeral. Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, is the one whose idea it was. In his 2003 memoir Roone, published shortly before his death, he gave the good reasons why Koppel was the man for the job:

“He had the ability to cut through obfuscation without being obnoxious; he was sharp but polite, opinionated but not doctrinaire. He was also spooky smart and wasn’t bashful about saying so, but he wore his cockiness well. He also knew how to ingratiate himself with others—I was the only person he’d ever known, he would say more than once, who was smarter than he was—and the fun he poked at himself was part of the same trick. You found yourself not only admiring Ted Koppel, he made you like him, too. And that perhaps was his most formidable ability.”

In 2005, with his very last “Closing Thought,” he was as likable as ever, allowing for the record that the guy who reads the news isn’t really as indispensable as too many people make him out to be: “Trust me, the transition from one anchor to another is not that big a deal. Cronkite begat Rather, Chancellor begat Brokaw, Reynolds begat Jennings. And each of them did a pretty fair job in his own right. You’ve always been very nice to me, so give this new anchor team for Nightline a fair break. If you don’t, I promise you the network will just put another comedy show in this time slot. Then you’ll be sorry. And that’s our report for tonight. I’m Ted Koppel in Washington and from all of us here at ABC News, good night.”

On the Smothers Brothers

2008-11-19T16:13:00.000-05:00

Comedy was what made them successful; it was what they did. But it was through music, the music of others, that they became iconic. Before Tommy and Dick began providing a primetime venue, via The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, for the countercultural musical acts of the moment, performers like Joplin, Baez, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix, the Doors, and the Who rarely had a chance to make it on TV, let alone in primetime. (And the Beatles may have made a revolution by producing what would come to be called music videos, but it was because of the Smothers Brothers that they had a place to show them.) This wasn’t just canny business on the Smothers’ part, either—quite the opposite. It’s this kind of defiance that led to their show’s demise. You can only piss off the networks and the advertisers so much, for so long, without having the plug pulled on your whole circus. But they kept it up, right to the very end, with the music and the irreverence and, more significantly than anything, their defiant protests against the war in Vietnam. They knew what they were talking about. Their father had died as a prisoner of World War II. Their insight into what the war cost was greater than that of the best and the brightest who were running it. It was only appropriate that they should host the soundtrack beneath which the whole thing played out.

On Billy Graham

2008-11-16T11:40:00.001-05:00

In the beginning there was Billy and little sis Catherine and then father, who force-fed alcohol to the both of them, making them purge until they puked and swear they would never touch the stuff ever again. By becoming a hollowed-out vessel of sobriety, Billy allowed himself to be filled with the Lord’s intoxicating spirit. He took it out on the road, starting in big tents in Los Angeles, running revivals and recruiting converts. William Randolph Hearst mysteriously swooped in with his endorsement and his cash, seeing in Graham a fellow traveler on the road to anti-communism, giving Billy the funding that would initially allow him to become a success. Billy Graham was on his way to becoming the phenomenon we know today.

For every anti-Semitic slip on the Nixon tapes or failure to oppose America’s Vietnam involvement, there is, from Graham, a stand against segregation and other injustices. (He was one of the very few people whom Martin Luther King allowed to call him “Mike.”) Now he’s on his way out, at the same time fundamentalist Christianity is, the whole thing being a circus more easily associated with violence and intolerance than their opposites. I’m sure Billy Graham understands: you keep forcing the blood of Christ down people’s throats, it’s only a matter of time before they spit it back up in your face.

On Leonard Nimoy

2008-11-11T07:17:00.000-05:00

Just by calling his first memoir I Am Not Spock, in 1977, Leonard Nimoy invited the ire of all those Trekkies who believed, or at least hoped, that that’s precisely who he was. They took it as a finger in the eye and a smack in the face, but you can’t blame Nimoy for wanting to stay at an arm’s-length remove from that kind of typecasting, the kind that inevitably plagues any actor who finds himself playing an iconic character in a popular series. He was, by that time, an actor and director whose range went well beyond the boundaries of Star Trek, and whose achievements outside of film and television should serve as an inspiration to dilettantes everywhere: poetry, photography, even singing. But how many of these professional opportunities would have arrived for Nimoy if it hadn’t been for the popularity of Dr. Spock and Star Trek? He seemed to concede the point by naming his next memoir, in 1995, I Am Spock. It wasn’t a corrective to the assertion made by the previous book, so much as a balancing of the reality. You see, he was and he wasn’t. After playing a hyper-rational character on TV and in the movies for so many years, the least he could do, in life, was look at this situation rationally. He had been swept away by the Starship Enterprise and carried off to this world many years ago. Resistance was futile, submission the only logical move to make.

On Gatorade

2008-11-01T11:26:00.004-04:00

The evidence I have is merely anecdotal, but here’s what I’ve concluded: Gatorade works—not just placebo-syndromically, but that it really does work. Here’s an example, one of many. The best cross-country race I ever ran came under its influence. I had been loading on it all during the walk-through—it was Grape, I remember, even all these years later—and when it came time to actually run the course, I had literally more energy than I knew what to do with. I wasted it. I squandered it. I hot-dogged in one of the only ways available to a distance-runner prone to hot-dogging, with sharply pattering feet coming up behind my opponent as I passed him. My legs almost tingled with newfound energy. When Michael, in The Office, carbo-loads with pasta just minutes before the big company race, he was being only half-ridiculous: it’s okay to carbo-load that soon before the race, as long as the carbs you load yourself with are Gatorade’s.

Because the electrolytes, you see, really are more than just a marketing gimmick. They’re glucose and sodium concentrate, regulating the way the organs process minerals, flushing out impurities, preventing diarrhea, stimulating the body in its pursuit of excellence. Gatorade was on its way in when Elvis was on his way out, and the King liked to drink it to help keep him going when the drugs wouldn’t. He told an audience once, in a moment immortalized on recording, “It’s supposed to work twelve times faster than water. Looks like it’s already been used to me.” I like to think that, were it not for Gatorade, Elvis would have died even sooner. Instead, the glorious spectacle burned on.

If the characters in Mike Judge’s horrifying comedy Idiocracy, about evolution run backwards, take the properties of electrolytes far too seriously, that’s not Gatorade’s fault. No one ever said you should water your crops with the stuff. But when it comes to watering the body, there’s nothing that’s been invented that works better. The man who called for its creation was one of those overbearing, insufferable, bean-counting, number-crunching football coaches, for the Florida Gators in the late 1960s—hence the name Gatorade—and never has that insufferable breed of mammal ever made such a case in justifying its existence.

The original Lemon-Lime remains, for me, the default flavor, but you owe it to yourself to give them all a try. Recently they made a great leap in the direction of hydrated lightness with the Rain line of flavors, but what Rain took to just the right place, the G2 line took entirely too far, diluted down to a kind of flavored water. Then Gatorade doubled back its efforts, bringing out three flavors with a candy-like smoothness—neither sweet nor tart—under the Tiger imprint, for Tiger Woods. It just goes to show that Gatorade, after all its successes, still hasn’t given up on the pursuit of further excellence. The least we can do, by way of honoring that effort, is refuse to do the same with ourselves.

2008-10-30T09:32:00.002-04:00

On Alfred Russel Wallace

2008-10-23T00:19:00.003-04:00

Functionally, Alfred Russel Wallace was to evolutionary theory what John Brown was to the Civil War: someone who accelerated the inevitable. If Darwin hadn’t, in all innocence, received a letter written by Wallace, also in all innocence, explaining to Darwin his hunches about adaptation and transmutation, Darwin still would have kept on cooking up the scheme, already boiling, that he came to call On the Origin of Species. But he wouldn’t have finished as quickly, propelled as he was by the anxiety of urgency.

Janet Browne was shrewd enough to open the second half of her biography of Darwin with his receipt of Wallace’s letter. It’s the kind of crystallized defining moment that biographers dream of. Much more powerful in the scientific community than Wallace, and a man of many moral scruples, Darwin was genuinely torn as to how to go about reacting to Wallace’s letter. Someone had been chasing the same trail that Darwin thought was his alone. Wallace had sent the letter, along with his theory worked out in a couple of scientific papers, to Darwin in the hopes that he would pass it along to be vetted by Charles Lyell, who, along with the equally eminent Joseph Hooker, arranged for the two theories—Wallace’s and Darwin’s—to be published and presented simultaneously.

This arrangement seemed to work out well for all concerned, and Wallace seemed to placidly go along with it. Darwin was his elder after all, and had always been something of a hero to Wallace, who dedicated his first book (and still his most famous), The Malay Archipelago, to Darwin. In fact, when it came time for Wallace to publish his own book on evolution, following Origin of Species, he actually decided to call it Darwinism, in a move that seems counterintuitive, and which perplexes all understanding—even if Darwin did work hard to get Wallace a lifetime pension.

It perplexes understanding not just because Wallace had already given Darwin his due, along with the benefit of all doubt, but because his evolutionary views were different from Darwin’s, and not just in the small esoteric ways best explained by specialists. Wallace, for much of his life, was a spiritualist, and his theory of evolution allowed for a spiritual agency at work behind it all, giving his theory much more in common with what we today call intelligent design than with anything espoused by Darwin. Darwin came from religion—he was a born-again atheist—and he fretted about what his theory would imply to those among his family, friends, and general community about the God that most of them believed in. Wallace had no such worries; for him, just because it happened on earth didn’t mean it wasn’t governed by the stars. He was someone who believed in and understood the natural world to its core, but he was also someone for whom the natural world wasn’t nearly enough.

On Wes Anderson

2008-10-22T11:08:00.006-04:00

Wes Anderson is too young to be washed-up. That’s the necessary idea that’s not getting across the frontal lobes of those who would dismiss his recent work as a fall from greatness and grace which mirrors, in its fashion, the same fall that’s experienced by those royal Tenenbaums as well as Zissou and the gang. Wes Anderson is neither a has-been nor a never-was; he’s a still-is, because he’s still out there working, evolving, making mistakes, honing his instrument, and occasionally, achieving that thing called art.

The temptation here is to treat as irrelevant the terse entry on Anderson to be found in David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, but how can you treat as irrelevant such a smugly ignorant and lazy dismissal by a great critic? You’d have to be as smugly ignorant and lazy as Thomson himself has become (speaking of falls from greatness and grace), and I’m neither old enough nor successful enough to let myself go like that. The entry I’m talking about (notorious in the circles that pay attention to such things) reads: “Watch this space. What does that mean? That he might be something one day.” That’s it; that’s the whole thing, and it does a much greater disservice to its author than to its subject, even if it was composed prior to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

The Life Aquatic was a fine movie, maybe Anderson’s finest, although I’m certainly in a minority with that opinion. Certainly this is an opinion not shared by Anderson’s most perceptive critic, who believes that all the films since Bottle Rocket, his first, “have been good fun but somewhat disappointing—perhaps increasingly so.” The critic I’m talking about, of course, is Steely Dan—you know, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—who posted on their Web site two summers ago a very strange letter (on stationery from the Chicorydee in Atlanta) addressed openly to Wes Anderson, or “Maestro.”

The letter, obviously a prank and a publicity stunt, feigns concern for a “malaise” currently being experienced in Anderson’s career, although it’s rimmed on all sides by an admiration for Anderson’s “genius”—for “an artist of your stripe could never be guilty of the same sort of willing harlotry that befalls so many bright young men who take their aspirations to Hollywood and their talent for granted. You have failed or threatened to fail in a far more interesting and morally uncompromised way (assuming for a moment that self-imitation and a modality dangerously close to mawkishness are not failings, but rather symptoms of a profound sickness of the soul.)”

This letter reveals many interesting things, not the least of which is that Steely Dan is not nearly busy enough when on tour. It also reveals—to me anyway—Anderson’s propensity for “a modality dangerously close to mawkishness,” a propensity that he has always managed to mask through irony. This propensity, of course, is very similar to Steely Dan’s own approach to irony and sentimentality—a modality that I see as neither a moral failing nor a sickness of the soul, but rather a genuinely bittersweet approach to human affairs. It’s a lot more wised-up and sophisticated than Steely Dan’s most famously mawkish song, for Wes Anderson has never written (for public consumption anyway) anything nearly as shameless as “Deacon Blues.” Sue him if Life Aquatic plays too long; he may have cried when he wrote that song. In light of this, is it any wonder that through the members of Steely Dan, Wes Anderson has finally received the tough sort of high-end criticism he’s always deserved?

On Richard Francis Burton

2008-10-18T13:56:00.003-04:00

Captain Richard Francis Burton spoke roughly thirty languages fluently—give or take a few, accounting for dialects and the vagaries of fluency—and it’s this proficiency with native tongues that served as his true passport into all kinds of strangeness. He found strangeness wherever he went, even when he wasn’t looking for it, although usually he was. He found it when he journeyed to Mecca in full disguise and under terror of being found out. He even took care to circumcise himself, going method all the way, except for that one night when he took a piss standing up because he thought no one was looking. Anyway, he made it home alive, where his fellow Englishmen—more than a century before “wigger” entered America’s slang lexicon—liked to call him “White Nigger” for the way that he sometimes dressed and spoke, all manner of manners, as well as his complexion, and most of all his tendency to go all the way native when he visited the darker cultures.

He found strangeness when he went to East Africa and had a spear thrown straight through his mouth from cheek to cheek. Then he found strangeness in Africa again, when he went with John Speeke looking for the Nile’s source. He found the source of the Nile but as always he found the strangeness, too. Of course, there are those who claim he didn’t find quite as much strangeness as he claimed, in his published accounts, to have found. Some said he didn’t even find the Nile’s source, for all that, although we now know that Lake Victoria is precisely what Burton and Speke said it was, so how could they have known otherwise?

It must have been some wonderful kind of triumph for Burton to get knighted by the same Victorian establishment that he was always making uncomfortable with his sexological findings, reporting back from the world’s nether regions about unusual practices—or at least unusually spoken of in public—up to and including homosexually, pederasty, and some things that no one had ever even come up with names for yet. He brought the Kama Sutra to the West, helping to shepherd it into a language that made its meaning as plain as its intentions. He also translated that adult’s book of bedtime stories, the work that now usually goes by Arabian Nights and which Burton called The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night. Many people, including Jorge Luis Borges, would swear by the quality of Burton’s rendering, but even it was a scandal, thanks to the then infamous “Terminal Essay” section, which dealt (as so much of Burton’s own writing did) with pederasty.

But at least it, along with the Kama Sutra, was published at all. That’s why it’s around for us to argue about today. Burton’s wife, Isabelle, wrote an intimate biography of her husband but then nullified this service by burning his journals, notebooks, and other manuscripts unpublished, and then claiming, rather dubiously, that she was only carrying out her husband’s dying wishes. Scholars know better, and so does anyone else with even a basic understanding of how determined Burton was to have his legends—the true, the somewhat true, and the not very true at all—spinning on perpetually out there like a thousand-plus points in the firmament.

On Tim Burton

2008-10-17T06:35:00.003-04:00

Probably no director in America has ever made it so far, for so long, on the sheer oxygen generated by his own atmosphere. Not to say that Tim Burton is all atmosphere, but it’s served him well, ever since he started making his own features when the stuff he’d been doing for Disney was deemed too scary for small children. He’s always worked best with his own creations, with Beetlejuice and Scissorhands and the Corpse Bride, along with The Nightmare Before Christmas, but he did manage to revitalize Batman, once, and then kept him alive a second time, and in doing so he managed to revitalize superheroes as an entire genre. But he also managed to botch Planet of the Apes and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in a way that only a genius could, and his Sweeney Todd and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were also great ideas that never quite made it.

Even if he’d done only Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Batman, I’d owe him a sincere debt of gratitude for the strange texture he helped lend my childhood. Any other distance I’ve gotten out of him is just bonus mileage. With Ed Wood he paid fond and ingenious tribute to one of the many C-picture schlock-meisters who gave birth to his own aesthetic, the same aesthetic that has kept him afloat in his most dire moments artistically. (Another signature influence, Vincent Price, Burton was able to pay homage to by casting him as the man who created Edward Scissorhands, if not the man who created Edward Scissorhands.) I used to wonder why there are so many lethally sharp objects flashing about in the work of Tim Burton. Now I feel satisfied that I know the answer, and that it’s because of the way the blood looks when it’s gushing red and sanguinary from all those gothic grays and moody blacks. Sometimes that’ll get you by when everything else fails.

On George H. W. Bush

2008-10-15T23:54:00.012-04:00

A couple years ago I was on the phone with a friend of mine, with whom I once served on an aircraft carrier named after a racist senator from Mississippi.

“Did you hear about who they’re naming the next carrier after?” he said. “George Bush Senior. What the fuck? It’s like they’re just naming carriers after all the presidents now, just because they were presidents.”

“Well, you know,” I said, “he was the youngest pilot in Navy history, at like 19 or something. He crash-landed in the Pacific and almost died. He’s a fucking war hero.”

“Hmm….Well, when you put it that way, it sort of makes sense.”

On Richard Wagner

2008-10-14T23:55:00.004-04:00

In senescence and repose, the estate he inhabited was called Wahnfried, meaning a peaceful retreat from the madness that delusion hath wrought. The name couldn’t have been more appropriate, and it was Wagner who chose it. What he chose to call the place he retreated to psychologically, however, throughout his life, was Gesamtkunstwerk, and it was a name even more appropriate still. “Total artwork,” by which he meant the audiovisual gamut and gauntlet, but with more soul than that sterile word—audiovisual—can ever hope to capture. He would synthesize poetry, music, and drama, along with enthralling set-design and an infusion of the great philosophical fire-breathing inspired by his friends Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. It would be art of the most encompassing and entertaining kind imaginable, an Uber-Art, one Ring to rule them all. Today we might give such a phenomenon the name of film, a ravishing art-form available to everyone, but back then it was more like “The Art-Work of the Future,” which is precisely what Wagner entitled his essay on the subject. At the end of the 26 years spent fashioning The Ring, he had nowhere to go but around and around the same circumference. The whole thing, just to perform, took 15 hours. What had recently been the art-work of the future was now the art-work of the present. Wagner had made it; now he had to live in it.

On Winston Churchill

2008-10-12T12:21:00.001-04:00

Born two months premature, as if he couldn’t wait to hit the ground running: there was just so much he’d been dying to do even before he came fully to life. When he fell out into the world he found the Black Dog already waiting for him, jaws drooling.

The Black Dog—that was his own personal name for depression; and as experienced by Winston Churchill, depression would always be a ferocious beast. As a soldier, they say he volunteered for the front lines simply because that’s the one place where a fighting man was authorized to drink it up on the job. To supplement his army income, he flew dispatches like kites to the newspapers and magazines of London. He was taken prisoner of war, and when he managed to escape, the place he escaped to was not the bosom of Mother England, but rather he fell briskly back into ranks, in time to help his army take Pretoria.

Like his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, of whom Winston wrote a two-volume biography, Winston became a successful politician, converting literary acclaim and wartime heroics into electoral currency, which he in turn converted into titanic godhood, as Representative Man of one of the great Second World War superpowers, to stand as a statue in a hall that held Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt.

When he wasn’t making history, he was writing it, and he wrote it so well that the Nobel committee felt obliged to bestow upon him their prize for literature. But the Black Dog was still after him. He continued to drink, enthusiastically, unstoppably, and he painted. He created some 600 paintings, and according to experts was particularly skilled as a colorist, as though he could neutralize the Black Dog by changing its hue. “If it weren’t for painting,” he said on one occasion, “I couldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the strain of things.”

Never an alcoholic in the most extreme and dire sense, he nevertheless lived long enough to see one of his daughters become precisely that. He always managed to stay at least a length and a half ahead of suicide’s watery fangs, but another of his daughters could not. He was estranged from his son. It seemed the longer he outran the Black Dog, the faster it got. He managed his sprint for no less than ninety years. That has to be some kind of record.

On Clichés

2008-10-11T13:38:00.001-04:00

Most clichés got that way because they’re true.

If you’ve heard this maxim—or various variations thereof—many times before, it’s because it’s a cliché. And also because it’s true. It’s a hell of a cycle (why, you might even call it vicious). That’s the problem with truth, and why it so often becomes cliché. Which reminds me: What is truth, man?

The nature of truth will not be discussed in this essay, because, really, who cares? I’d much rather discuss clichés. Isn’t it amazing, the contortions people will put themselves through in order to avoid them? They’ll rifle through thesauri and even alter the meaning of their message—the nature of their truth—in order to, yes, steer clear. And yet so few seldom do. It’s unavoidable. In fact, just four sentences ago, I took care to write, “the contortions people will put themselves through,” rather than, “the hoops people will jump through”—in an attempt to do the very thing that I was writing about: avoiding clichés. I failed. Miserably.

That being said, I invite anyone who should encounter this Notebook to hold me vigilantly to the highest standards of freshness, in both thought and expression—because although there’s nothing new under the sun (it’s true), the sun still shines, sometimes, in odd and curious ways.

On Leonardo da Vinci

2008-10-10T04:25:00.003-04:00

Loyal readers of this Notebook won’t need to be reminded that whenever someone of honest training sets out, in his doodling, to achieve some sort of fresh understanding, the results are often more illuminating than the most contrived and overgrown masterpiece. All that bloatedness only obscures the message, like the excess fat that laces the athlete’s natural muscle. So it is that when Leonardo, late of Vinci, set out to put into practice the fruits of his apprenticeship in Florence, it was in Codex after Codex that he put some of his best art, and nearly all of his best anatomy and engineering, in the form of sketches and speculations.

The anatomy and the engineering were themselves art, of course, but you know what I mean: they weren’t art merely. In full-sized frescoes he had captured with ravishing subtlety the enigma of Mona Lisa’s smile and Jesus on the eve of his betrayal with his betrayers—he took life and made it more lifelike than life’s like. But in the Codices is where he speculated on the strictly tactile, and on man’s potential for transcending it until it became new, became even greater in its tactility, and became a different and arguably greater kind of art in itself. That was where all the skills of his early apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s workshop came into intensive use: chemistry, drafting, metallurgy, modeling, metal-working, sculpting, mechanics, drawing, carpentry, leather-working, painting, and plaster-casting. They all informed the Codices in significant ways, even if some of them didn’t contribute directly to their creation.

Helicopter, tank, and solar-powered energy, as well as a geology shaped by its own shifting plates—long before the scientists had proof, Leonardo had a hunch. It doesn’t matter that, like many of the 15th century, Leonardo believed Earth to be fixed at the center of the cosmos. Unlike the rest, his imagination had travelled far enough to see Earth as the container of a cosmos of its very own.

On R. Crumb

2008-10-08T03:03:00.001-04:00

By doing card designs for American Greetings before he became a countercultural icon, R. Crumb, quite characteristically, violated what would become the typical sequence: first you become a hippie, then you sell out. It was as if Crumb wanted to get all his selling-out out of the way, up front and in the beginning, so that it wouldn’t have to impede his progress later on.

And of course he was never much of a hippie anyway, to put it mildly, even though that’s the movement that made him famous, and with which he’ll always be identified. He made his underground name with Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad spinoff Help!, a significant magazine that also recognized the formative talents of Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem. Then he segued into creating those iconoclastic icons Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, among others, for Zap Comix in the 1960s, whereupon his following tended to create itself and then follow him, wherever he went. It followed him out of the underground and into the mainstream, even as the drawings he drew became sicker and sicker, the product of a twisted and mutilated imagination, discharge and runoff from a diseased brain. It’s possible to describe that work in those terms without being a prude, just as it’s possible to admire that work in effusive terms (and in the same breath) without being a pervert: vibrant and reckless in the sheer energy of its imaginative life, no one has ever mistook R. Crumb’s work for that of anyone else. He had the courage of his immoral convictions, a liberated and liberating irresponsibility to the mores of his mileau; he enjoyed nothing more than sticking a finger in the face of all those insufferable hippies, who in their self-righteousness and tendency to travel in herds, were barely distinguishable from the capitalistic pigs they’d liked to have roasted on a spit for the same crimes.

Misogynistic to his fingertips, the only real question, concerning his prejudices, remains “But is R. Crumb a racist?” And the question could not be less interesting. He may have turned down big bucks and high prestige to do an album cover for the Rolling Stones, but the great blues, jazz, and country artists of the past, who have always inspired his fevered imagination, are musicians he has always painted, for a relative pittance, with fine dignity and high style, bringing that acoustic sound and its makers out of the dust-dry analogue soundtrack of history, and letting them live in stereophonic color on the page. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Big Bill Broonzy, or no less a feline feminine than Memphis Minnie, in all her hand-on-thrust-hip attitude, R. Crumb always gives exquisite care to the dark lines that provide substance, structure, and shape to what’s cartoonish and colorful.

On Charles Darwin

2008-10-07T11:59:00.001-04:00

Born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln—February 12, 1809—Charles Darwin held views on slavery that were not unsympathetic with those of America’s Union cause. So much has been said about this divinely inspired date of two births, but not nearly enough has been said about the evolved and evolving human character that proceeded from that date. It sounds like as good a date as any to begin the trace of man’s final rise to wide-awake autonomy.

“Slavery inflamed all [Darwin’s] most passionately held beliefs about human nature,” Janet Browne writes in her magisterial two-volume biography. “It was the one social issue to upset and annoy him throughout his long life. He had no problems with the idea of self-interested commercial expansion through plantation crops, for example, or the grinding poverty, factory children, and indentured servants to be found at home. Like the majority of people he knew, he bowed to the capitalist ethos of the British ruling classes without a qualm. But the actual state of slavery agitated profoundly humanitarian instincts in him. He could not think about it, let alone see it for himself, without boiling over in righteous anger.”

Darwin’s first encounter with slavery, albeit second-hand, came during his Beagle voyage, when dining in Bahia harbor with the captain of another vessel, along with the captain of his own vessel, Robert FitzRoy, who reckoned he was rather keen on the idea of slavery and its practice. Later that night Darwin reported his repulsion in the pages of his diary. It was neither the first nor the last transformative experience Darwin would undergo aboard the Beagle; and like most of his own profound personal evolutionary stages at this time, it happened in direct opposition to the man who had brought him aboard.

It wasn’t as a naturalist that Darwin was selected by FitzRoy to sail with the Beagle; they already had one of those. Darwin was brought on more as a gentleman companion, sort of a gigolo of the intellect, someone from the more highly educated classes of society with whom FitzRoy could discuss Big Ideas during the lonely nights afloat and adrift. Nevertheless, Darwin served as de facto naturalist anyway, of course, upstaging the official naturalist with his extensive and elaborate collection of specimens. It was in recording these collections and travels that Darwin honed his famous industry and attention to detail, and developed the rigorous methodology later responsible for explaining the human animal to himself.

“This plethora of written material,” writes Browne, “was one of the unsung achievements of Darwin’s activities on the Beagle voyage. In keeping such copious records, he learned to write easily about nature and about himself. Like FitzRoy, he taught himself to look closely at his surroundings, to make notes and measurements, and to run through a mental checklist of features that ought to be recorded, never relying entirely on memory and always writing reports soon after the event. Like FitzRoy, he became accustomed to thinking about himself as the central character of his text—the captain of his personal natural history travels, the man responsible for planning and executing collecting trips—and accustomed to explaining his course of action, even if it was only a half-hearted justification of money spent on some expedition into the interior. Although this was ordinary practice in naval affairs, it was for Darwin a basic lesson in arranging his thoughts clearly and an excellent preparation for composing logical scientific arguments that stood him in good stead for many years afterward.”

So there you have it. I quote from Browne at length because to not do so would be stupid. If lengthy quotes from Janet Browne bother you, I’m afraid you’re reading the wrong essay and should pick up another one instead. Better yet, pick up the books themselves—Voyaging and The Power of Place—for no one I’ve read, not even Stephen Jay Gould, has done a better job capturing the essence of Darwin’s character, his many agons and eccentricities. If e-mail had been around in Victorian England, we may never have been privy to Darwin’s theory, so avid was he in his correspondence. He had a mirror at his writing desk, tilted at an angle that allowed him to see the mailman arrive, whereupon Charles Darwin would race to riffle through his letters and answer his many pen pals, from very nearly every discipline of human endeavor:

“Conducting his scientific life through letters suited his habits very well—he could keep people at arm’s length, encouraging or dropping contacts as he wished, carefully choosing whom he wanted to interact with. He could pursue his researches just as readily with someone like [Joseph] Hooker on the receiving end of a letter as he could with a book in hand, probably more efficiently than by taking the train up to London and sitting in the British Library or the Geological Society. Nor did he have to depend solely on the people he already knew for this sort of private information. His Journal [of the Beagle] and other writings made him sufficiently well known that he felt justified in hunting out useful correspondents. He expected people to try to do as he asked. If not, he learned to move on fast if nothing came of it. Writing letters freed him from many of the usual encumbrances of scientific society: the interminable council meetings, the parties, the small talk over coffee and tea. Letters were safely impersonal. More than this, they were useful. They became his primary means of interaction with the outside world.”

Darwin wanted to know what everyone knew, because he understood that knowledge was the surest way out of spiritual slavery. So he comprised a meta-text about evolution that was itself constantly evolving. It was by seeing and hearing from all angles that he composed his great heroic argument. Anyone who’s ever met a creationist from Kansas can understand perfectly well why he might not be inclined to believe in evolution. Someone should make these Neanderthals sail amid the world’s awesome immensity, and refuse to unchain them until they decide they’d rather be free.

On Don DeLillo

2008-10-06T10:03:00.004-04:00

Everyone, according to his own individual sensibilities, is entitled to admire at least one overwrought, bulging masterpiece of a novel. So many ingredients go into making a work of literature appealing, it only naturally follows that the more ingredients there are, the greater the possibility for the recipe as a whole being unappealing. I think about this whenever I think of my own longtime admiration for Don DeLillo’s Underworld, its jaw-dropping majesty, and how so many people feel as resistant to it as I feel toward Don Quixote, War and Peace, Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, or The Magic Mountain. A work of literature taps into something personal; or else it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, then it’s like a frozen currency in a foreign country, or a medicine for a disease you don’t even have. You might as well not even waste your time.

Back when the disease I had was adolescence—and a particularly nasty and late-lasting strain of it, too—it was Underworld that helped cure me. By going down deep beneath the surface, DeLillo showed what possibilities await those willing to make the plunge. His underworld was a place populated by the cultural ghosts of an America in the homestretch of the millennium, the very place and time from which I happened to emerge. There was something about the book--its greedy inclusiveness--that made me hunger for experience, a larger experience with larger parameters, and a larger potential for danger. At 21 and with no college degree, I went aboard an aircraft carrier, San Diego Subterranea and Southern California Strange, thereby beginning what’s passed for my adulthood, and I did so under the fever and the spell cast by DeLillo’s large dark edifice, standing just as tall and premonitory as those “twin-towering” structures on the book’s cover.

In the history of human affairs, it’s a small thing, to be sure, but by the scale of one’s own personal history, it’s about as large as it gets, and that’s what DeLillo is after in his books anyway, particularly this book—the way the macro alternates with the micro, no valid currency with only one side of the coin. When Nick and Klara brave late-night Manhattan in the 1970s to go see a long-lost Eisenstein film of DeLillo’s fancy, the title comes up on the screen as Unterwelt, and you don’t have to be Clancy Martin to translate from the German. Like DeLillo’s book of the same name, it’s to be a work “riddled with mannerisms, whatever the level of seriousness. At least you hope so. Didn’t Ivan the Terrible contain scenes so comically overwrought, amid the undeniable power of the montage, that you laughed and caught your breath more or less simultaneously?” And amid DeLillo’s own hyperkinetic montage, the same dynamic occurs, even if it’s a kinesis that, according to some, works too hard by half and overstays its welcome by longer than that. Myself, I was sorry to see it go, regretting that I’ll never be able to read it for the first time again. Like Nick Shay holding the baseball that Bobby Thompson once hit out of the ballpark of his own boyhood, DeLillo’s Underworld is what I keep close by in the night, allowing me whenever I hold it to see deep into the long tunnel of time and how it changes you before you reach the other side.

On Mike Tyson

2008-10-02T13:52:00.002-04:00

Pay-per-view television never met a stranger bedfellow than Mike Tyson. When my cousins and I were growing up in the 1980s, we would order those first title fights eager for bloodsport, and like everyone else who came up with the cash that made Mike Tyson rich, we got our bloodsport but we got it condensed down to minutes, minutes that could best be measured in seconds rather than rounds. At first the quickness of the performance was seen as an impediment to spectacle, until that very quickness—its here-and-now path of tornadic destruction—became the spectacle itself.

It was spectacle as anti-spectacle, Tyson coming down to the ring wearing nothing but the trunks, gloves, and boots that he would box in—mentally, physically, and sartorially ready for battle—accompanied by Public Enemy over the loudspeaker rather than the usual musical sentiments. We loved PE. We loved the Nintendo game Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (both the home and arcade versions). We loved it that Tyson talked with a lisp like that. We loved Mike Tyson and his myth—shit, we were downright susceptible to it. With every fighter who fell—every Tyrell Biggs and Larry Holmes, every Tony Tubbs and Michael Spinks—the myth did not decrease in stature.

And the lisp wasn’t incidental to Tyson’s success as a boxer, either, because it was the lisp that occasioned most of his early street-corner practice in fighting. On the streets of Brownsville, borough of Brooklyn, he would attack all who teased him for it. This kept him very busy, but hard crime kept him busier, stickups and stealing: he was arrested 38 times by the time he was 13. Then it was Cus D’Amato, famous as a trainer long before Tyson, who took Tyson under his tutelage, taking the raw makings of a fighter and shaping them into a boxer, perfect in refinement and purpose.

The championships followed quickly after that. Before he was old enough to legally drink, he had his first heavyweight belt. After that it just seemed like momentum had taken over, but of course, it’s never really that simple. Cus D’Amato died, and then the troubles started. Who knows how many of those troubles would have been avoided if Cus had hung on a little longer? The most insane televised spectacle involving Mike Tyson did in fact happen in the eighties, but it wasn’t on pay-per-view. It wasn’t even on cable. It was on ABC’s 20/20, when Robin Givens told Barbara Walters that life with her husband, seated right beside her, was “torture, pure hell, worse than anything I could possibly imagine.” If you could consistently bottle that kind of spectacle and market it, it’d be well worth the price of pay-per-view and then some.

A couple years later, my cousins and I were watching Tyson take on Buster Douglas, flipping back and forth between the fight and the NBA three-point contest. By that point, we’d come to see another Tyson victory as inevitable as another Larry Bird three-pointer—more inevitable, in fact. So you can imagine our shock when we flipped back to the fight to see Tyson get knocked to the mat. That the whole thing was happening in Tokyo, rather than the States, only added to the surreality of the spectacle, as if it were taking place in another dimension. It would almost have to be.

After that the spectacles got only stranger, balling up as they rolled along into one giant spectacle: the spectacle of Tyson himself. There was rape, prison, and a conversion to Islam. There was biting off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear. There was knocking a referee to the floor. There was threatening to eat Lennox Lewis’s children. There was assaulting civilians in traffic incidents. There was a tattoo on his face and raising pigeons and bankruptcy. There was Tyson looking back on it all and saying, “My whole life has been a waste—I’ve been a failure.” But anytime a paid entertainer provides that much entertainment, it’s never a waste; it’s never a failure. We paid our fee; we finally got value for dollar. Tyson paid a fee, too, but isn’t that a part of giving us what we all came to see?

On Alex Trebek

2008-09-23T07:40:00.000-04:00

This television personality has been hosting the same quiz show for 22 years consecutively, and for 22 years prior to that, he had intermittently hosted a variety of other quiz shows. At one point in the early 1980s, he was hosting no less than three daily quiz shows simultaneously, in two different countries. He takes a competency quiz each year to enhance his credibility as host of Jeopardy!, and vows that he will step down as host if he ever performs unsatisfactorily on this quiz. In 2004, he was in a near-lethal car crash, asleep behind the wheel and flying 45 feet over an embankment. The next Tuesday he was back at work, quizzing contestants.

Who is: Alex Trebek?

On Larry Hagman

2008-09-19T04:49:00.001-04:00

You can sit around all day long and try to figure out when it was, exactly, that Dallas jumped the shark, but the fact is, they had the shark laid out in the very first season and never stopped looking for new and ingenious (and, inadvertently, ever more ridiculous) ways to make that leap. It was usually, almost always, J.R. who did the jumping, of course, from the very beginning, when he tried to prevent Pam and Bobby from marrying in the first place, to season seven, when he somehow managed to engineer their divorce. Then there were all the shady Machiavellian business machinations between and after; all the duping of Cliff Barnes; all the betraying of Sue Ellen. Sometimes, even Miss Ellie couldn’t help but express her disgust, much as she loved her eldest boy.

If Americans didn’t love him, exactly, they certainly loved to hate him, and before TiVo or even (in the show’s beginning) the VCR, they made sure to tune in and do their hating in primetime. Larry Hagman was one cast member who actually came from Dallas, so he brought substantial Texas authenticity to the show, and not just what he could manage to carry in his accent, either. Not to mention, he was much more believable as the villainous J.R. than he’d been as the decent Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie. That doesn’t mean he’s not one helluva swell fella, which I’m sure he is; I’m just saying, he really knew how to play that one. And even if you were innocent of the knowledge that he routinely drank four bottles of champagne a day on Dallas’s set, you would know, looking at the puffy-eyed meanness of J.R., that Hagman did much more than just play a drunk on TV.

Dallas was originally supposed to be about Pam and Bobby—it was supposed to be Victoria Principal’s and Patrick Duffy’s show—but it took Hagman no time at all to hold up the joint and assume ownership for himself. When he wasn’t getting the money he felt he was owed, he resorted to patently J.R.-like means to get the cash coughed up, holding out until the fan protest reached such a pitch that the show’s producers had no choice but to honor his demands. Larry Hagman by that time was Dallas, pretty much, and the great dark joke running underneath the mystery of who shot J.R. was that it could have been anybody—they all hated him enough to pull the trigger. It was how he thrived.

On Starbucks

2008-09-11T21:33:00.000-04:00

In Austin Powers, it served as the very headquarters of evil, but in real life, it can only hope to be that interesting. Me, I’ll always regard as sinister anything that’s served hot enough to give third-degree burns, and then, three lip-blisters later, is finally ready for staining one’s teeth. At least Starbucks goes gourmet, and tries to give some rich reward for all the injury and waiting around.

Hearing the news recently that 600 locations were shutting down was like hearing that someone had plucked a pinecone out of the forest. And yet Starbucks, by all reports, is one of the few food-service franchises that actually makes pretensions toward treating its employees like human beings, with full health insurance and 401 (k) options for those who work over 20 hours a week. They even comp with free product, which is especially nice when you have product that’s at least worth giving away.

One could also mention the way they eco-conscientiously handle their waste, but in addition to not being very interesting, this would be offset by their tendency, as a corporation, toward monopolistic maneuverings that are downright Gatesian in their ruthlessness. Too far to one side to be all good, too far to the other to be all bad, what they really occupy is the road’s dead center. If the whole enterprise is just too hot for you to handle, you might as well do yourself the favor of staying out of the way.

On Billy Joel

2008-09-08T09:09:00.002-04:00

Bullied as a boy for his music, breathing through a nose busted by boxing, draft-dodging the Vietnam War, wrecking his own motorcycle, Billy Joel came through it all looking not nearly as tough as he always so desperately tried. Don’t forget the strangely belligerent bouts of drinking, those automobile crashes that came under the influence, the stays at Betty Ford, and the falling off a piano stool that he shared with Elton John, before an entire stadium of spectators and at least one perfectly positioned photographer.

It’s hard to blame anyone for wanting to stay out of Vietnam, and by composing and then recording “Goodbye, Saigon,” one of the most moving borne witnesses to that conflict in all of American culture, they should have given Joel some kind of medal. Shit, they should have made him an honorary general. What they gave him instead was good grief for his pretensions. All of his tough-guy posturing, though, no matter how excessive it sometimes seems, will never come anywhere near the preposterous proportions of his Beatles Complex.

Performing the second-side medley from Abbey Road has always been a favorite standby of Joel in concert, but not until a recent reading of Mark Bego’s Billy Joel: The Biography did I come to understand just how far the Beatles Complex ran in Joel, and how broadly it extended. “If I consciously try to emulate anybody,” he once said, “it’s the Beatles.”

His band had been turned down, very early on, by producer George Martin (whom Adam Gopnik once deliciously classified as not the fifth but the third Beatle). A few platinum albums later, Joel and the guys all ran into him at the airport, and saxophonist Rich Cannata recalls Martin saying, “I made a mistake, didn’t I?” Billy Joel, for his own part, must have been singing soprano inside.

The Beatles may have been the first to print their lyrics on the album cover with Sgt. Pepper, but Billy Joel, for all his formidable songwriting talents, was having none of that: “I’ve never wanted to print my lyrics on my LPs because the lyrics are not poetry; they’re part of songwriting, they’re coloring, and they have to be heard the same way as the music.”

He almost moved into the Dakota, long before John Lennon, whom he very nearly, but not quite, once met, and on “Scandinavian Skies” he sang like Lennon, because Lennon had just been murdered, and Lennon’s spirit worked its way into Joel’s voice, more prominently than before, all throughout The Nylon Curtain. “I didn’t even realize I was doing it and I was writing these songs that I pictured John Lennon singing,” Joel says. About “Scandinavian Skies” in particular, his producer at the time Phil Ramone said, “You’re really singing it like John Lennon too much.” Billy Joel, in a later interview, didn’t try to argue:

“I’d always thought of Paul McCartney as a bigger influence, but when John Lennon was killed, I realized he was the one who was kicking in more soul. I thought about it a lot, and when I heard my vocals in the playback booth, the similarity to Lennon seemed weird, because the resemblance wasn’t intended. But my producers and the guys in the band said, ‘Leave it, it’s right, that’s the way you felt.’ The Nylon Curtain wasn’t an easy album to make.”

About The Nylon Curtain elsewhere, Joel says, “I thought of it as my Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, although I didn’t intend to copy the Beatles.” He thought of it that way because it was “an elaborate studio album that took a year to make and whose songs were difficult to play live.”

When he toured Russia he played, inevitably, “Back in the USSR,” and he once retained McCartney’s brother-in-law as his lawyer. When confronted with his sometimes confusing tendency to alternate the hard with the soft, he once retaliated by saying, “If the Beatles had been typecast by radio after ‘Yesterday,’ would we have ever been able to hear ‘Helter Skelter’? I’m sick of these rabbis and priests. Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.”

The classical pianist Richard Joo has said that Joel “has always been a classical composer to me. Schubert and Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin are definitely his grandfather and Lennon & McCartney his distant cousins.” Early in his career, before it had yet to become quite that exactly, Joel wrote a letter to the Beatles “to ask what they were thinking when they wrote certain songs, and then I got this brochure back.”

Joel has spent his entire career re-writing that brochure, to his own specifications, and so it should surprise no one when he’s able to talk with sublime eloquence about what his favorite Beatles song is and why:

“Of all the Beatles records, I enjoy ‘Strawberry Fields’ the most because it contains many of the elements that made the Beatles’ music so enjoyable and innovative. It is both sardonic and naïve, melodic and dissonant. There are a great many liberties taken with the time signature, and the listener is never left out of the whole musical process. It is almost as if one is being allowed to peek in on the recording session itself. Although ‘Strawberry Fields’ features one of Ringo’s finest performances, you can hear each of the Beatles’ individual and distinct contributions come together in a unified musical work. The production of this record contains just about every excess that the Beatles were accused of in their psychedelic era (e.g., tapes played backward, overabundance of chugging strings and multi-tracked drums). And somehow, it worked, probably for the last time ever.”

On Martha Stewart

2008-09-07T02:31:00.000-04:00

Ignorance of insider-trading laws is no defense against charges of breaking those laws, especially if you used to be a high-powered stockbroker on Wall Street, pre-homemaking but post-modeling days. In the story of Martha Stewart, irony abounds all over the place. When she first moved to Westport, Connecticut, she took up residence in a house so famously dilapidated and decayed, it’d take a Martha Stewart to fix it up. And a Martha Stewart is precisely what it got, before the world even knew what a Martha Stewart was. There have been precisely two biopics made about her life, and in both of them she was played by no less than that supreme avatar of Bitchhood, Cybil Sheppard. She constructed an entire identity, not to mention a billion-dollar corporation, on her talents as a homemaker, and yet the same greed that had gotten her to where she was, is precisely the same greed that got her to where she was going: to prison for five months. You don’t have to be Martha Stewart to make a cell look homely for forty-five grand, so if she wanted to be frugal, she could definitely have done it. That’s the amount she fought so hard to save by dumping her ImClone stock. By the time she perjured herself for doing so, however, she was fighting for something else entirely, and only part of it was decorative.

On Spike Lee

2008-09-01T00:29:00.001-04:00

For those of us who’ve already received the bulletin that Racism is Wrong, there isn’t much in Do the Right Thing worth lingering over for very long. The most heroic thing about the movie, as in all Spike Lee Joints, is Spike’s willingness—his seeming eagerness—to cast himself as some of the most distasteful characters in his films, as if he’d created them precisely in order that he could be the one to inhabit them. Be it Mookie in Right Thing, perpetuating ignorance and hatred in Bed Stuy; or Giant in Mo’ Better Blues, gambling away Bleek’s earnings and nearly getting him killed besides; or the round-the-clock drunk in Clockers, standing apathetic before murder scenes, 40 in hand; or Cyrus in Jungle Fever, ratting out his boy Flip for sleeping with that white bitch; or Snuffy sniffing glue in Crooklyn, straight out a paper bag; or, of course, as Shorty in Malcolm X, running around Boston doing dope and getting his hair conked with Malcolm “Red” Little in his Pre-Enlightenment Years. Those are just the examples that pop readily to mind. In Summer of Sam, when he ventures into the ghetto as a local television news correspondent, trying to get the “Darker Perspective” on the Son of Sam killings, one black woman yells out to him, “We didn’t even know you was black,” and everybody on the corner cracks up.

We’ve become accustomed to several virtuoso effects that stamp a picture a Spike Lee Joint: the saturated-color cinematography, the bluesy Terrance Blanchard score, and of course, that drifting dreamy dolly shot from underneath, of characters as they walk-without-walking—in addition to the cameos by Spike himself.

His career has been one lengthy and eloquent demonstration of his insistence that blacks in the movies deserve something more than Forty Ounces and a Tool. And yet, some his best work has been about whites. Summer of Sam, with so much kinetic visual and sonic imagery, and a complete absence of any leaden Message, is one of his true masterpieces, an exhilarating feat of filmmaking. In Clockers, it’s Harvey Keitel’s bigoted Detective Rocco who turns out, in the end, to be one of the only people who gives a fucking shit about the yos in the neighborhood. And then there’s 25th Hour, a movie so white it snow-blinds, and its final dream sequence imagining how Monty Brogan can start his life over from scratch if he really wants to. It’s as promising a moment of redemption as I can think of in any movie, and it’s about a white man.

Not nearly enough can ever be said about Malcolm X, and yet it seems like too much has been said already. Spike rolled this one fat and managed to stuff it seedless. It’s three-and-a-half hours that races, that lets its story tell itself, basking and languoring in its nuance and managing to remain free of all preaching from the filmmaker. It’s the supreme demonstration of what Spike Lee demonstrates in all his best work, when he proves himself willing to make the absolute best film possible, by any means necessary.

On Kevin McHale

2008-08-28T00:30:00.002-04:00

Even if the Celtics hadn’t gotten Robert Parish in addition to Kevin McHale, their dividends received in exchange for Joe Barry Carroll would have gone down as one of the great Auerbachian draft-day sleights of hand in the history of the NBA. A hyper-literate free spirit with an iconoclastic streak (he came from the same Minnesota small town as Bob Dylan, which may very well just be a coincidence), McHale was initially making noises about going off to play in Europe instead; he didn’t like what Red Auerbach was offering on his rookie contract. When the Celtics and McHale finally came to terms and McHale came to play, it was one of the most auspicious seasons a rookie had ever had. It still is, and the reason it’s worth remembering now is that McHale kept on improving. He wasn’t as obsessed with basketball as his teammate Larry Bird, but even Larry Bird had to admit, in his 1999 autobiography, that McHale was the hardest worker, next to himself, on those 1980s championship teams, that he always worked as hard as he could during games and at practice. It’s not that McHale didn’t care about his development as a basketball player; it’s just that he cared about other things, too.

The basketball player he eventually developed into was one whose unusually rangy arms for someone his height, 6’11”, conspired with swift and sure defensive instincts to create one of the sights offensive opponents least welcomed seeing in their way. (And this was before his notorious and probably more-vicious-than-intended clothesline of Kurt Rambis in the 1984 NBA Finals.) On offense his ability to inflict damage was of a different order entirely: the up-and-under, the pump-fake, the fadeaway, and the good clean aggressive assault to the hoop—it was all part of one of the more effective arsenals ever assembled for the purpose of scoring points on a basketball court.

I was at the old Boston Garden to see what turned out to be the last home game he ever played, a low-round triple-overtime affair that McHale kept putting into extra innings, and eventually winning, with his cool and languid style of attack, both aggressive and reserved, slippery-deceptive, like a long knife blade or an insidious gas that you can’t quite detect. He would employ a variety of fakes, contortions, and elusive fades, hitting clean baseline shots from five, ten, fifteen, and then twenty, stretching it out, and brining it in close. I was behind the Boston basket, high up in the rafters trying to catch it all through my steel-beam-obstructed vantage. It was intense in its suspense, and only in retrospect does it all seem as inevitable as gravity.

On the Moon

2008-08-22T11:10:00.001-04:00

They say the Moon was formed when a giant asteroid struck the Earth and knocked all that debris swirling into the galaxy, whereupon it melted and molded into the great glowing globe of reflected light that’s been with us ever since. Time being relative, it wasn’t too long after our species managed to crawl out of the primordial ooze that we were putting together machines that could take us all the way out there, and then land there. A lot of people called it then and call it still a fruitless endeavor, flying to the Moon, but anytime you take a trip that far out, it’s never not worth it. It’s never fruitless, however crazy it might be.

So it makes sense, in a crazy sort of way, that the Moon would be responsible for giving us some of our very language for craziness, since some of the craziest dreamers among us are so susceptible to the Moon’s beautiful mystery. By way of Nietzsche, Zarathustra spoke thus: “When the moon rose yesterday I thought it was about to bear a sun: so broad and pregnant did it lie on the horizon.” Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, John Coltrane’s Crescent—this is music that evokes beautifully and hauntingly the estranged majesty of that far-off rock glowing in the dark. Spin the CDs sometime and see if you can’t gaze out there clear to the other side, the far side. It’s not insanity; it’s just lunacy. Man has been guilty of worse.

On Fridtjof Nansen

2008-08-20T00:39:00.001-04:00

For more than a year Fridtjof Nansen sailed aboard the Fram, waiting patiently and not so patiently for the drift ice to carry him toward the North Pole. Named after the Norwegian word for forward, the ship had been built to specifications in the rounded shape of a bowl, so that when the sea froze, the ship would rise rather than snap and crack, and the slushy-frozen waters would carry it forth toward Earth’s top tip.

That was the idea, anyway. When it became obvious that the ship would not bring them forward fast enough to reach the Pole, Nansen and a member of his crew, Hjalmar Johansen, jumped ship and beat feet on skis across the arctic continent. Although they knew the Fram would not be waiting for them once they reached their destination, it was a decision they made nevertheless, and it was followed by complications that only a real pessimist could have foreseen. Their chronometers swung all out of whack and went wildly unreliable. They were lost in a bitter nowhere but they inched in the direction of their goal regardless, or suspected as much; they couldn’t be so sure. They hunted bear and slept in makeshift tents. They fed their sled-dogs to one another to keep their sled-dogs alive. When the time finally came to shoot their two most trusty dogs, they each did the other’s, hoping to spare themselves some of the trauma. That doesn’t mean they didn’t cry.

This was a strange place for a gentleman to be. A zoologist and neuroscientist who had contributed greatly to our understanding of how neural cells work, Dr. Nansen had also been a champion skier who once skied across the whole of Greenland for his country’s honor. His country had paid him back handsomely but he was still out there braving the polar vastness, hoping now to end up as the first man to reach the North Pole.

Nansen didn’t reach the North Pole but he came close, significantly closer than anyone had before him (although, it should be said, not much closer than the Fram eventually did, just by drifting). By sheer cosmic coincidence, he and Johansen were rescued on their return by another polar party, which happened to share their general location. There is absolutely no logical reason on Earth why they shouldn’t have died, stranded and abandoned out there, but the gods of illogic were with them. Nansen returned home, a hero once again and still, and wrote a classic account of his adventure called Farthest North—which, as the title of a book, doesn’t sound quite as good as North Pole. But it sounds good enough; Nansen, as a polar explorer, was done.

Always restless for further achievement, he made tentative plans to go back and look for new latitudes, but he never did. His wife, before she died, always talked him out of it, and he was often satisfied to serve as paternal dean to the new generation of explorers: everyone from Shackleton and Scott, to his own countryman Amundsen (with whom he had a particularly complicated relationship), to Peary and Cook and Byrd and plenty of lesser lights. He wasn’t just an eminent figurehead, an inspiring example from whom one could draw strength; his practical methods for cooking, camping, dressing, and sledding, among much else, had advanced the field of polar travel in ways not easily measured with a chronometer.

One of the more unfortunate tales Roland Huntford tells, in his biography Nansen: The Explorer as Hero, has Nansen carrying on an affair with Captain Scott’s wife, Kathleen, while Scott froze to death in a tent near the South Pole. Well, they say it takes two to tussle, and Scott was no innocent himself. Anyway, when Scott didn’t make it all the way back from the Pole, Kathleen was consumed with grief at her husband’s suffering, and Nansen wrote her a consolation that he hoped would assuage her guilt:

“You should not think so much of that….I have some experience and the fact is that the brain becomes soon so numbed, as you say, that one does not feel so very much. One gets so tired and weak and worn out that one becomes more or less indifferent to physical as well as mental pain. And then at last one falls asleep and does not wake again.”

Although their affair soon died a natural death, it was Kathleen Scott who served as his entrée into the world of diplomatic affairs. For his work with the League of Nations in feeding Russian refugees and allowing them passport for travel, he was lauded once again, with a Nobel Peace Prize. He did oceanographic research, and invented what we still call the Nansen bottle, used for obtaining aquatic specimens. A friend of his did a book on the gods from Norse mythology—a book on which many subsequent books have been based—and when he needed ideas for how exactly to go about illustrating the great St. Olaf, he looked to Fridtjof Nansen for his model.

On Mike Nichols

2008-08-19T07:16:00.000-04:00

Although a 33-year gulf separates the making of Carnal Knowledge (1971) from Closer (2004), there’s really no time-lapse whatever in the currency of these two films, these masterpieces of meditation on the subject of deceit and the destruction of which deceit is capable when one is dumb-fool in love. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate are also, of course, movies about the difficulty of really knowing anyone, even the one laying next to you, down to the very base of their basest motives—but those two movies (also adapted by Mike Nichols from outside source material) never achieve anything near the searing intensity that Carnal Knowledge and Closer manage to inflict upon their viewer. It just shows that when a great director seems for years to be dead, it may be that he’s really only hibernating; you never know when he’s gonna wake up and scare us to our own death all over again.

It was for reasons of autonomy and control that he grew restless inside of his comedic partnership with Elaine May. He wanted to be able to sand and polish and refine back to a dull finish, rather than just winging it every night on stage cracking wise. He wanted to direct films, he in fact had meant to direct films all along, and that’s exactly what he did when the chance finally appeared, even though it meant dissolving one of the truly substantial comedy teams of the 1950s. When you think about it that way, it’s no wonder he’s put together perhaps the finest body of work about man’s (and woman’s) struggle to subvert relationships in the name of upper-hand leverage.

On Parliament-Funkadelic

2008-08-16T05:51:00.000-04:00

Joseph Campbell could have spent whole volumes cross-referencing the mythology that George Clinton has constructed around his two dominant bands, Parliament and Funkadelic, that began in the seventies and have continued on, in various mutations, in the years since. In addition to “The One”—a unifying philosophical principle whose name plays on both Hindu mysticism and James Brown musicology—there’s Dr. Funkenstein, the Mothership, Funkentelechy and the Placebo Syndrome, the Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, Sir Nosedevoidoffunk, Chocolate City and the fanciful radio station WEFUNK; there’s Rumpofsteelskin, the Motor-Booty Affair, and an Atlantis-like city beneath the sea.

But way before Clinton hipped us to the awesome powers of a fully operational mothership, he gave us another mythology, without even really thinking of it in quite those terms, and it’s his most fascinating mythology of all. I’m talking about the P-Funk’s origin myth. One of my cherished possessions is a CD, now regrettably rare, of Clinton’s first group, the Parliaments from out of Plainfield, New Jersey, with their conked hair and their green-and-gold suits. These beaming doo-wop singers, testifying to their own sweet devotion, are some of the core members of what would become, in just a few short years, Funkadelic. This is the bud before its incredible bloom. This is the hero at the threshold of his call to questing adventure.

It wasn’t long before they were ingesting psychedelic drugs, wearing flamboyantly garish costumes on stage (or sometimes, in the case of Clinton, wearing absolutely nothing at all), playing their guitars not only with bigger amps but with fuzz-tones and wah-wah pedals, and singing socially conscious lyrics about America’s ghettoes and the war in Vietnam. Eddie “Maggot Brain” Hazel and Billy “Bass” Nelson kept the guitar sound Sly Stone-psychedelic until Bootsy and Catfish Collins came over from Brown’s band to help out, along with trumpeters Fred Maceo and Wesley Parker, also from the JBs, and Bernie Worrell from Julliard with his Moog and the means to make it sing. By the time Clinton changed their name back to a variation of the Parliaments, to Parliament, the group bore as much resemblance to that original outfit as Sgt. Pepper’s band did to the boys who had sung about wanting to hold your hand—maybe less.

I had the chance to see them play a small club in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the spring of 2003. They didn’t bring the Mothership or any other life-size space-age paraphernalia into the place—they would have literally had to tear the roof off the sucka—but they were still holding hard to the conceit just as steadfastly as ever. Gary Shider was up on stage wearing only his over-sized baby diaper, and George Clinton’s hair slithered down out of his head like long gray snakes. They jammed the fuck out of the songs, the same songs that had started to make them famous some thirty years before. It was the most exhilarating kind of musical moment possible for a human being to experience. I don’t even have any idea how it happened; the whole thing seemed like it was occurring in a parallel galaxy twice removed.

On Sonny Rollins

2008-08-11T07:11:00.002-04:00

The Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn is where Sonny Rollins went to get his sound clean in ’57, detox by woodshed, and when he came down from the bridge to record what he’d found up there, the album he brought with him became one of those instantly totemic signifiers of virtuosity that has only become legendary in the years since. He called it The Bridge.

Never an idealist when it came to the finished product lacquered in wax, Rollins has always been a purist for the performance, a Zen believer in jazz as something that exists in the moment, from moment to moment, and then disappears, but only for another moment, unless it’s sustained.

It makes sense, then, that his second great sabbatical was to the East to study yoga and meditation. He came back from that one in ‘72, ready to play according to the new present moment in music, incorporating funk and rock sounds into his jazz, like Miles was doing, before moving on to the next great moment.

When the jazz critic Francis Davis caught up with him in ‘82 for his essay “An Improviser Prepares,” he found a Sonny who was nervous-exhausted at the age of 63, but touring still, and as of this writing, in 2008…well, you do the math.

This restless quest for the live performance as lasting art can maybe explain, almost of itself, all those bland throwaway titles Sonny has always liked to give his albums, as if some interested party had succeeded (just barely) in talking him out of assigning them catalogue numbers and moving on. There are albums that refer to his instrument of composition (Saxophone Colossus; Tenor Madness); that describe the contents within (Mambo Jazz; The Sound of Sonny); that provide the locale of their recording (A Night at the Village Vanguard; At Music Inn); and that explicitly state his intentions with their recording (Solo Album; Tour de Force). He’s always understood that these recordings are just moments, nothing more, and taken it stoically for granted that some moments are inevitably more lasting than others, but that doesn’t mean you don’t carry on to the next moment, and the moment following.

On Arnold Schwarzenegger

2008-08-08T13:15:00.000-04:00

Anyone who gets the plot of Total Recall is either too stoned or stupid to be governor of California, and we all know it’s been a long time since Arnold Schwarzenegger shot illegal drugs. Of course, steroids weren’t illegal back in the seventies, and Arnold used them as “tissue-building” rather than performance-enhancing, so roll that one in your paper and inhale it, like Arnold and that victory joint at the end of Pumping Iron.

That movie still makes for fascinating viewing all these years later—not in spite of or because, but just as a plain matter of fact. Look at the way it evokes the Southern California physical-fitness culture of the 1970s, Venice Beach-absurd, as well as one man’s (actually several men’s) pursuit of excellence for its own sweet sake, and tell me it’s not one of the seminal documents of American culture at its most profoundly strange.

It can go without saying that it’s by far the best film Schwarzenegger has ever been associated with, but it probably shouldn’t. Too many commentators have tried to take the contrarian position that Schwarzenegger is some sort of closet genius, who’s really quite smart if you’re open-minded enough to look beneath the stereotypical cliché of blockheaded bodybuilder—a view that has itself hardened into cliché, even as Schwarzenegger goes about business as usual in the Contemptuous Conservatism branch of the Republican party. At least he has the good decent and honest sense not to go after drug users and homosexuals, given the world in which he found his fame.

We know that he’s tough, but not because he’s played the predator and barbarian and terminator in so many hideously stupid movies, but because anyone who’s foolish enough to fall continuously from both motorcycle and skis and then keep getting back up is many things but he is obviously no girlie-man. It’s as if he’s allowed to get away with acting the part so terribly in movies because he embodies it so well in real life, and he gets away with it in life because he does it so terribly in movies. Meanwhile, the destruction continues and we can make the choice to be entertained by it or appalled.

On Jerry Seinfeld

2008-08-07T13:36:00.001-04:00

Shortly after Jerry Seinfeld rolled up his eponymous TV show and put it in his carpetbag so we couldn’t get tired of looking at it, we were invited to see him on the road touring as a standup, in the documentary Jerry Seinfeld: Comedian, the superstar as humble craftsman, plying his trade like any devoted professional. The filmmakers even juxtaposed Seinfeld’s own travels against those of an arrogant, petulant up-and-comer who I’m positive had a name, it’s just that I can’t remember for the life of me what it was. Seinfeld did it for love; the other guy did it for money and fame. Hence, Seinfeld was the true artist. Hence, Seinfeld was the bigger success….At least, that’s what I think the movie was saying.

Orney Adams—that was the guy’s name. While Seinfeld toured around the country working into shape a new act, even though he was already saturated in respect and riches, Orney complained about the life of an entertainer, he dissed Steven Wright, he rued that he wasn’t keeping up with many of his friends from school, who were making lots of money on Wall Street. “Wall Street?” Seinfeld said to him “Are you insane?”

It was a little disorienting to see this role being played by Seinfeld. This was a man who had built a parking garage so that he would have a place to store all his Porsches. This was a man whose lifelong comic idol was Bill fucking Cosby. This was a man who popularized a personal aesthetic based on Superman and breakfast cereal and talking to your friends about nothing. It was a little weird to see him on the side of artistic fulfillment over superficial materialism.

But that’s where he belonged, and it shouldn’t have taken the documentary to make that plain. With Larry David he conceived what was (until Arrested Development) the only sitcom on network television that was both consistently funny and entirely sui generis. Originally intended as a show about how a standup gets his material, it was Seinfeld’s great fortune to have a supporting cast of comedians who were every bit as funny as Jerry, probably more so, all in their own eccentrically zany ways. That’s how this standup, whose material has never been all that funny anyway, was able to transmute all that prosaic observation into ingenious narrative. It’s not a show about how the standup gets his material; it’s a show about how the material gets the standup, for the sweet sake of art and all the spoils that go with it.

On Aaron Sorkin

2008-08-03T06:05:00.002-04:00

It’s too bad Aaron Sorkin wasn’t given a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay in this year’s Oscar nominations; it would have perhaps provided him the opportunity to give a long-overdue high-profile thank-you to crack cocaine, which has meant so much to his career, to his development as an artist, to everything he’s ever achieved as a screenwriter. He did a terrific (and terrifically sober) job of adapting George Crile’s feat of contemporary-history reporting, Charlie Wilson’s War, about the Texas senator whose bright idea it was to help fund the Afghanis against the Soviets, long ago in a previous millennium when Reagan was still alive and coherent (somewhat) and communism was just about the most threatening word you’d ever want to hear. It’s a great adaptation, it’s splendid, but none of it would have been possible without….

Okay, let’s start with The American President, which he wrote while high off the success of A Few Good Men, as well as freebase cocaine. The script he eventually turned in was 385 pages. At a minute a page, that’s a lot of schmaltzy reverence for a commander in chief, any commander in chief, even one played by Michael Douglas. But even though the script had to be chopped down by more than half, it wasn’t a waste. The lopped-off portions of the American President script were used as the key ingredient in his recipe for The West Wing, which he finally had a chance to make after the critics’-darling success of his sitcom Sports Night. The inspiration for Sports Night had come from watching too much SportsCenter during those late nights burning the midnight rock at the Four Seasons, while batting out that amphetamine-fuelled first draft of The American President. Sorkin spent seven years cranking out scripts for The West Wing, and during that time was arrested for possession and had to catch his breath in rehab for a while before returning. Saturday Night Live made fun of him in a sketch, and when Sorkin returned, clean and sober, to the small screen, his new show was a one-hour dramedy about the inside workings of a show very similar to SNL. One of his major characters has a substance-abuse problem. This is how any good artist stays ahead, by making sure he gets his material just as soon as his material gets him.

By the time he made Charlie Wilson’s War he had come, like most of the rest of us, to the sober and sobering conclusion that a senator who once gave guns to terrorists is much closer to being a hero than the president who is now trying to fight those terrorists. Some of the old Sorkin stylistic stand-bys are there, including one of those walk-and-talks that he’s so famous for, except that this time the characters walk sloooow, through corridors more surreptitiously concealed than any in the West Wing. They are discussing matters more grave and urgent (hence the slowness), and in tones that can’t be captured by the exasperated sarcasm of Sorkin’s previous characters. What happened is our country’s history has caught up with Sorkin, just as surely as his own personal history had previously, and you’d have to be smoking crack not to appreciate the difference.

On Steely Dan

2008-08-01T03:41:00.000-04:00

Between 1972 and 1980, Steely Dan released seven studio LPs—carefully conceived, perfectly crafted, and brilliantly realized. The names of those LPs are: Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, Katy Lied, The Royal Scam, Aja, and Gaucho. The first of those albums has a song on it called “Only a Fool Would Say That,” and the song contains everything the Dan embodies. All their songs have narrators; each song features an individual voice or perspective. This one is sung by a pessimist who claims that there’s no such thing as utopia, no such thing as a perfect world: “A world become one/ Of salads and sun/ Only a fool would say that.” That ’s what he sings, but the music behind him tells a much different story; the music behind him suggests that maybe there is such a thing as a perfect world, and that it’s right here, in this very song—so much optimism pushing through the force of so much pessimism, it will break your heart every time. Maybe it will even make you cry.

Steely Dan didn’t make albums the way other bands made albums, and come to think of it, they weren’t really a band. They were two guys, two singing poets, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who were from the suburbs and exurbs of New York and had met at a college upstate called Bard, which means singing poet. These two bards who would base a sound and an identity on obfuscation and subversion and literary allusion—not only did they meet at a college called Bard, but when it was time to think up a name for what they would call themselves, they called themselves Steely Dan, which is a literary allusion. It’s a dildo in a novel by William Burroughs, and if you read the novel, Naked Lunch, you see that the Steely Dan fucks with people, and that it gives them great pleasure.

So they met at a pun and became an allusion. Do you see shapes shifting and forms forming yet? They would become known for a surreal, hallucinogenic sound, yet they found their initial inspiration in the early-‘60s jazz masters blowing the shit out of the songs, and they wanted to be like that, those cool spade cats, exactly one train ride and a world away. That old story.

So they weren’t a band; they were less than a band. And by being less than a band, they became more than a band, because they became any band they wanted to be. Here’s what happened: they hired studio musicians, Fagen and Becker did, and only the best—and not just the best, but those among the best who could also tolerate Fagen and Becker’s demanding perfectionism. And among those who were the best who could also tolerate Fagen and Becker’s demanding perfectionism, they used only those who were just right for the particular song or songs. Some of those musicians have names that should be mentioned; those names are: Larry Carlton, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Denny Dias, Jim Hodder, Jeff Porcero, Victor Feldman, Michael Omartian.

They didn’t write songs about the moon and June; they wrote songs about other things. This is a partial list of what those things are: coke dealers, Vietnam vets, Lolita, gigolos, nuclear-holocaust survivors, dirty old men, Odysseus, rich kids, crazed killers, vagabonds, junkies, whores. They wrote about other stuff, too, happy stuff, but there’s the not-so-happy stuff for you, some of it. And this is how they made the not-so-happy stuff sound: happy.

I don’t know why they did this. They probably don’t know why they did this. And if they did know why they did this, they wouldn’t give you a straight answer about it, because they are a couple of smart-ass punks. Anyway, it worked. They were, after all, an allusion that had met at a pun only to become an illusion. Fagen and Becker together wrote the lyrics—those singular, slippery, subversive lyrics—while Fagen sang the songs and Becker played bass. After that, it was all about collaborating with the producer, Gary Katz, and the musicians, communicating the vision until the musicians saw the vision for themselves. This took a lot of time and a lot of work, but eventually the vision was realized, every time, though at great cost: physically, mentally, and financially. At one point, they could claim to have made the most expensive studio album ever, in the history of studio albums. A lot of people didn’t like working with them, and said bad things about them in public.

So this sound that had found its inspiration in the great wide expanse of life—it didn’t find its ultimate realization until it went deep down into the cell of ascetic creation: they were more than just an illusion; they were a contradiction, too. And when they sang the lyrics, this is how they sounded: like felicitous phrasing, like vivid imagery, like poetic precision, with plenty of clever homage and reference and punning thrown in for good measure. When they played the song, this is how it sounded: like sublime jazz solos, like galactic guitar riffs, like perfectly timed falsetto interludes, like elaborate percussion, like funked-out sorcery supreme.

This is who would say that so much conflicting perfection could exist harmoniously in the world—the real world, as opposed to the sonic one: a fool.

On Oliver Stone

2008-07-31T00:33:00.000-04:00

If I hadn’t come into contact with the phenomenon myself once, I might think that someone just made the whole thing up—or that it was a conspiracy, if you will, for those susceptible to such thinking. I’m talking about the phenomenon of the Late Show, more particularly the romantic notion of flipping through the channels late at night and coming across a strange movie, hitherto unheard of, that makes you sit up and take notice, or even, if you’re young and impressionable enough, changes the way you think in some small way.

I can tell you that sometimes it really does happen that way, that it’s not just a fantastic conspiracy, because it happened to me when I was fifteen, living on an Army base in Frankfurt, Germany, and on the Armed Forces Network (there were actually no alternative channels to flip through) saw a preview for the movie that would be airing somewhat deeper into the night. It was for Talk Radio, and I somehow knew, just from that brief snatch of tantalizing footage, that it would be my kind of movie.

It was about Barry Champlain, an obnoxious, vituperative, foul-mouthed, insulting call-in host (based on a real-life character named Alan Berg), who presides over all kinds of scary strangeness in the muggy Dallas night, lit as always by that spiked glowing ball hovering amidst the skyline. It so perfectly captured the essence of talk radio—of a particular kind of talk radio—that I still consider it one of Oliver Stone’s finest achievements, even if a more comprehensive appreciation of the movie belongs to an essay about Eric Bogosian (who both wrote the original stage play and acted the part of Champlain).

At the time I didn’t even know who Oliver Stone was (JFK was still soon to be released, and I was only a kid), but I would soon learn that this is what Stone did, that this was his métier, his form, his calling: evoking the strange with his own strange brand of strangeness. Anyone who’s read about the life of Oliver Stone (or even just read interviews with Oliver Stone) knows that when he acts crazy, it’s not entirely an act. (Which is why it’s interesting to note, parenthetically, that what may be his most perverse film, U-Turn, is the one film of his that he didn’t have a hand in writing, while his second most perverse film, Natural Born Killers, was first spawned by someone else, Quentin Tarantino.)

He’s always been able to use the rich and absurd material of his fascinating life to create a better art, not just in the obvious example of his famous Vietnam films, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July (he was a Yale dropout who volunteered not just for the war but for infantry duty), but also in the screenplay for Midnight Express (he was once jailed in a foreign country for possession of drugs), in Wall Street (his father was a successful stockbroker), in Any Given Sunday (he’s always been obsessed with football), and in Salvador (he was there).

Then you have his two films about those young dead icons—JFK and The Doors—of the 1960s, that decade that Stone was such a passionate participant of. Stone’s rabid left-wing political agenda only renders more impressive his biopic Nixon, which I’ve come to consider his masterpiece, a conviction that grows only stronger with each repeated viewing. The portrayal is just as sympathetic as it is damning, which should surprise no one, Stone’s politics aside, since subject and author have at least a few crucial things in common: desperately grandiose ambitions, mood disorders, substance-abuse problems, a flair for the dramatic, and an uncanny knack for putting on a great show. Stone was able to capture Nixon’s dark pathos like no one has before, and thankfully, their kind will always be with us, circulating through the spaces between the brightness, just as long as there are crazy people, and a nighttime for them to be crazy in.

On the Swiss Army Knife

2008-07-30T02:58:00.001-04:00

When we were kids growing up in the mid-1980s it was the epitome of awesome; it was fucking awesome. It was bottle opener, corkscrew, nail file, tweezers, screwdriver, scissors, and saw, along with two or three kinds of knife. The really cool ones even had a magnifying glass. I don’t know why any grownup would want to carry one of these things around, and what army would ever even bother besides the Swiss. Which is who it was actually designed for, in the late-nineteenth century, before the term Swiss Army Knife became a metaphor for All-in-One, became a metaphor for how-many-useless-tools-can-you-fit-under-one-handle’s-heft? The thicker it was, the better. The kind you could squeeze in your fist like a bundle of sticks was the best of all, smooth surface and slotted edges and it fit in your pocket.

On Ludwig Wittgenstein

2008-07-28T00:35:00.001-04:00

It’s not true that no theoretical philosophy is ever created in the laboratory of physical duress. Sometimes it’s created in prisoner-of-war camps, and these hells-on-Earth have historically made more than a few humanists into mathematicians in spite of themselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s first loves were mathematics and engineering, and when he went to write his Tractatus, in an Italian POW camp during World War I, he did so under the influence of those disciplines’ smooth empiricism. But his need for lubriciously interlocking parts ensured that nothing outside his philosophy would ever seem lubricious and interlocking. That’s not intended as a double entendre, but you can certainly spin it that way, if you’re so inclined. When he emerged from the POW camp, he had under his arm the first draft of what would be the only book he ever published in his lifetime.

So here’s a syllogism: It’s impossible to imprison oneself. Therefore, prison is never a psychological construct. Therefore, whatever it is that Wittgenstein inhabited his whole life, it was not a prison.

And here’s a conundrum: If it wasn’t a prison, then what the bloody hell was it?

2008-07-27T00:21:00.002-04:00

On Peter Bogdanovich

2008-07-25T11:53:00.000-04:00

Looking at footage of a young Peter Bogdanovich being interviewed is like looking at a satiric performance of callow youth in all its obnoxious arrogance—its presumptive superiority, its stubborn benightedness, its smug self-satisfaction. It’s an ignorance too ignorant to discern its own shape, its precise textures and contours. It’s astonishing. It’s appalling. It’s kind of amusing.
After getting out of the gates very quickly at age 27 with his first film, Targets, Bogdanovich followed up with three more films of equal or greater value that made him rich and famous and successful: The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, and What’s Up, Doc? (That last one remains an under-appreciated comic masterpiece, and is, incidentally, the only screwball comedy I’ve ever really enjoyed—which means that it’s either a screwball-comedy-for-those-who-don’t-like-screwball-comedies, or that it Elevates the Genre. Take your pick.)

The funny thing is, before coming to Hollywood, he had already been a success of a particular kind: acting in the theater in New York, writing reviews and profiles for Esquire, publishing criticism and interviews in the scholarly journals. Subsequently, his sudden and total success as a filmmaker must have only confirmed what he already suspected about himself: that he was just about the greatest thing walking.

What happened next is a series of occurrences far too rich in nuance for E! True Hollywood Story, although it follows a similar template. Bogdanovich once put it this way about himself: “He broke up his marriage with a loyal wife and two kids; made a couple of flop pictures with Shepherd and ruined both their careers; she left him for a hometown man younger than she; he hadn’t had a hit movie in five years, his new one was a cheapie shot in Singapore.”

The above was written in Bogdanovich’s 1984 book The Killing of the Unicorn, and it should be noted that this particular passage does not belong to the Henry Adams/Norman Mailer school of writing about oneself in the third person. It’s a laconically brief recitation of his life-story as an adult as he imagines it told at a party to the woman who would become the true love of his life. Her name was Dorothy Stratten, the unicorn of the book’s title, and her imminent murder would resoundingly demonstrate for Bogdanovich that sometimes there are even worse things in life than shooting a cheapie in Singapore.

The Killing of the Unicorn is a strange and chilling document, a memoir Bogdanovich was compelled to write about a shy and sweet Playboy model he’d met at the nadir of his career, with whom he fell in love and was committed to marry, whom he starred in his 1979 movie They All Laughed, and who was shot dead in a grotesque homicide-suicide by her jealous husband, Paul Snider (from whom she was separated at the time). It’s a book sick with broken dreams and broken hearts, sexual jealousy and rage, physical and psychic violence, betrayal both overt and covert. It didn’t do a mean business at the box office, and it’s been out of print for a long time.
Bogdanovich had been seeing her for only nine months, but those nine months were a whirlwind, and when Bogdanovich first got the phone call (from Hugh Hefner) telling him that she’d been murdered, he dropped to the deck in despair and began clawing at the linoleum, as if trying to dig his way underground so he could hide there.

I don’t know why Bogdanovich provided this last detail to the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, but in his own memoir claims that it was the closet he was clawing at. Maybe it was both. There are several gruesome details Bogdanovich left out of his book. When Snider shot Dorothy, one of her fingers blasted off and was later found stuck to the wall. Snider raped her corpse. Snider shot himself in the temple and one of his eyes shifted to the center of his forehead. It was fucking hideous.

This wasn’t Bogdanovich’s Great Awakening, wherein our hero discovers that Fame does not, in the end, triumph over Love. That had already happened; he had “already learned by then that fame, success, money, and love were not as advertised by the established order.” This was something of a much larger magnitude altogether:

“After Dorothy’s death, I read those [Robert] Graves books [The White Godess and The Greek Myths] and several others of his, along with the many more I had been saving for a rainy day. All the days had become rainy now, and everything I had once taken for granted had to be weighed and examined. I went looking for clues anywhere and everywhere. I flew to Majorca to meet Robert Graves and his family, and discussed with them the mythological resonances in Dorothy’s story, as they were illuminated by his study of the White (and the Black) Goddess. I studied works of archeology and anthropology, of ancient calendar systems and ancient mythology, trying to find clues to the meaning of her life and of her sacrifice. I read Bacon’s essays, and Sophocles, Jung vs. Freud, G.B. Shaw and the Classical Greeks, studies of early Christianity, the Bible, and books on feminism; I read Virginia Woolf and the poetry of the Sumerian Moon-priestess Enheduanna, born circa 2300 B.C. I was searching and am still searching.”

That was in 1984. What he did from there was marry Dorothy’s younger sister, L.B. He made some pictures of varying quality and repute. He went bankrupt; then he went bankrupt again. He saw an old friend, a famous producer, at a party and said, “Remember me? I used to be Peter Bogdanovich.” In the summer of 2002 he came out with The Cat’s Meow. It’s very possibly the best picture he’s ever done, and it leaves no doubt as to who and what Peter Bogdanovich really is.

On Woody Allen

2008-07-24T10:37:00.001-04:00

If, like Isaac Davis in Manhattan, one were to cop cold comfort by reciting the few things that make life worth living, the films of Woody Allen would certainly have to go somewhere on the list. The question of which films is no kind of question at all, not for me anyway, and it would be answered in the form of Sweet and Lowdown and Match Point. The second of those two is now Allen’s own proclaimed favorite, and there are many longtime Woody watchers, until that one came out, whose hope had slipped seemingly forever.

Sweet and Lowdown has its admirers, but it’s still--like the equally underesteemed Husbands and Wives--playing backup in a band that features Match Point, Annie Hall, and Manhattan out front, along with The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Zelig.

What Lowdown and Match each mercifully refuse to give us is Nebbish Woody, or even his stand-in played by someone else, preening helpless-neurotic before the camera, claustro- and agoraphobic, and flattering his audience with jokes about Tolstoy and Freud, therapy and existentialism. He was able to take his two great artistic passions outside of film—jazz and Russian literature—and make of them a proper vehicle, instead of just picking them for parts and throwing the rest over a high cliff, as he’s always done in the past.

In Love and Death, he sent up Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and in Bullets Over Broadway, it was Chekhov who got to see himself made modern-day satire of. But in Match Point, Allen had the courage to play it straight, Russian and Italian opera playing all through the movie-long lead-up to a crime that is its own punishment. Then the Verdi shows up again to sing to us on our way out, and as the camera zooms in on Chris Wilton, the song serves also to remind us that not getting caught isn’t exactly the same thing as getting away with it. Come to brood on it, it’s not even close.

In Lowdown, the only onscreen Woody we get is the one giving soundbites in a mock interview—as literally himself—and his screen time is virtually none. The movie’s about a fictional jazz guitarist from 1920s America, named Emmet Ray and played by Sean Penn with none of Woody’s by-now-too-familiar neuroses and mannerisms (unlike Kenneth Brannagh, say, in Celebrity). I look at it as the ideal culmination, and realization, of Allen’s genius, the vague direction in which his incredible talent has been heading since he was a teenage gag writer selling jokes to the newspaper columnists. (This was back when newspaper columnists actually acknowledged and paid for the jokes they took from comedians.)

Soon Allen had graduated to writing for Sid Caesar and other Golden Agers, but it was hell for his managers to get him up on stage and comfortable delivering his own material, in his struggle to become a performer in his own right. Just because Woody’s wigged-out restlessness has always been an act, or part of the act, doesn’t mean that that’s all it ever was. He was mortified in his apprentice days as a standup, absolutely mortified, but it was all a part of the painful birth that externalizing his talent involved. The next part of that externalization, of course, was directing movies, and not just directing them, but starring in them as well. He became a triple-threat, writer-director-performer, and in that order, as if the private pursuit of creativity could somehow render inevitable the most public kind of creativity as well—as if one were a natural extension of the other, assuming the other was strong enough in its hard-won authenticity. It’s a wonderful notion, the idea that writing talent, if taken far enough, inevitably converts to performing talent, by the sheer force of its own dynamic. What an incredible indication of maturity and movement it is, then, that Allen has had the wisdom and self-discipline to reverse the process, folding back up inside himself and disappearing from the stage, in order that he might create some of his most conspicuously personal work of all.

On Roald Amundsen

2008-07-21T03:09:00.000-04:00

The explorer’s explorer, Roald Amundsen brought inexorable industry and thoroughness to every task he undertook, cool and methodical in all circumstances; the fire that burned underneath it all was just something that served to keep the engine moving, to keep his men loyal and his own soul fortified. By following the example of his hero and fellow Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, the dean of all polar explorers, Amundsen applied a perpetual and lifelong alacrity to his purpose of becoming the best pure explorer imaginable, mastering every facet of his game, taking what he could use from what others had to teach and leaving the rest behind, as scraps not worthy of the sled-dogs he would eventually have to slaughter for their beef when the going got desperate.

Amundsen died when he went off into the Arctic on a rescue mission looking for an airship crew, led by a man, Philip Nobile, whom Amundsen didn’t even really like, and at times despised. An Italian journalist who spoke with him just prior to this final and fatal mission claims that Amundsen told him the polar regions are “where I want to die. And I wish only that death will […] overtake me in the fulfillment of a high mission, quickly, without suffering.” Both the loftiness of the mission and the absence of Amundsen’s suffering are points that can be reasonably doubted, but one thing that can’t be doubted is that when Amundsen died, he died the quintessential death of the explorer; his body was never found, and they’ve now officially stopped looking.

After Nansen stopped being Amundsen’s hero, he became Amundsen’s competitor; that’s just part of the natural sequence of things. But he never really stopped being his hero for all that. What Amundsen didn’t learn from the Eskimos, about clothing and sled-dogs, he learned from Nansen, about skiing and rationing. This he combined with all the other priceless knowledge, hard-won by experience and accumulated by accretion, and put together the most incredibly dynamic assault on the South Pole that anyone had ever managed before the age of the aeroplane. As the conquering hero who had been the first to navigate the Northwest Passage, determining its suitability for trade routes, Amundsen hopped aboard Nansen’s old ship, the Fram, and made like he was going for the North Pole. Only his brother knew the truth; not even Nansen was privy to the secret plans for Antarctica. Amundsen might have told him, but he was worried that the loss of Nansen’s support would mean the ruin of all his plans, present and future. Eventually, he had to tell his crew, and ask them if they were with him, and it was at that point that the secret was out. He informed the world, just after dashing off a personal telegram to Robert Falcon Scott, of England, who was presently on his way there as well: “BEG TO INFORM YOU FRAM PROCEDING ANTARCTIC – AMUNDSEN.”

When Scott finally made it to the Pole, he found Amundsen’s flag already planted there in the ice, waving at him like a taunt. Amundsen had been the beneficiary of incredible luck and planning and determination—so much luck and planning and determination that not even a faux-pas false start from their base, Framheim, could ultimately ruin their triumph. (This false start did, however, trigger a first-class temper tantrum from Hjalmer Johansen, who had rode shotgun with Nansen across the Arctic years earlier. Amundsen responded with a fiery assault of his own, albeit more controlled and authoritative in nature, putting Johansen under the command of a subordinate, and begging to inform him that he would not be with the party that would try again for the pole.)

Nansen was nothing but gracious over Amundsen’s entrée to exploration eminence, even if he’d had to slide around to the back door to achieve it. But Amundsen wasn’t done; he had one more outsized medal to put on his chest. He flew an airplane over the North Pole. This in itself is not very impressive. It had been done before, just days earlier, by Richard Byrd. But that claim is still in dispute and we’ll probably never know whether Byrd’s record was entirely earned. Before that, only two men had ever claimed to reach the geographical North Pole at all—Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, in 1908 and 1909 respectively. Both those claims are heavily disputed as well. What this means of course is that Amundsen may be the first person to have reached the North Pole at all. Or he may be merely the first to have reached it by air. Or he may be neither. We’ll never know.

But it’s impressive that he’s even being discussed in these terms at all, since he’s the only iconic explorer from that golden age to have made his thrusts at greatness by both air and land: Byrd couldn’t travel on ice, and Cook and Peary couldn’t fly; neither could Nansen and Ernest Shackleton. The only other example of this kind of versatility, much less sterling, is Hubert Wilkins, whose achievements can’t begin to approach those of Amundsen.

That Amundsen took up mastery of this new and difficult technology midway through his career is not nearly as amazing as it is impressive, for he had already shown the extents to which he was willing to travel in order to find excellence. He spent years qualifying as a ship’s captain only so that he could be the commanding officer of his own vessel, for no reason other than that he wanted to avoid the typically divided command between an expedition leader and the ship’s skipper. This is a drastic measure that not even Nansen took. He also set aside several years to devote to learning how to ski, which he knew would be necessary if he wanted to achieve the world-class proficiency in that most supreme mode of polar travel.

And this goes back to childhood, when he spent seemingly all his spare time either engaged in the ascetic performance of calisthenics or the studying of expeditionary narratives. He knew even back then that he wanted to be an explorer, and he knew that the regions he wanted to explore were the polar regions. At night he’d lie naked on his bed with the covers off, windows thrown open wide, training himself to endure the harshest kind of cold. He would be an explorer, a multi-faceted, record-setting, thoroughly prepared, highly effective, long-enduring polar explorer, and he would do it even if it killed him.

On Brad Bird

2008-07-19T10:17:00.001-04:00

Ever since Toy Story we’ve been subjected to the same promise by insipid critics over and over: It’s not just for kids. That’s what they say about every new digital animated feature, soon to open on sixteen screens near you. Several double entendres, maybe a political ref or two, and a few parodies of other bad movies— that’s what makes a movie adult. Some of us beg to differ, and that’s where Brad Bird comes in.

After doing time with Disney, The Simpsons, and a few other common stops along the way, Brad Bird got his chance to write and direct his own feature, Iron Giant, and the best thing you can say about it (which is more than enough, in my opinion) is that it gave him the opportunity to direct and write The Incredibles. Heavy themes handled lightly, it had a retired superhero longing for the action, it had a spurned disciple, it had if-everyone’s-equal-then-what’s-the-point-of-competing?; it also had a Samuel Jackson-voiced character riffing on the dangers of “monologuing,” and it had superheroes being sued for liability in rescues that didn’t come off entirely as planned. It was fresh, funny, and exciting, and it did what movies so seldom do: it set a new kind of standard.

Ratatouille was more of the same, which is to say that it was more of the different, and it dealt with the meanings of beauty and aesthetic bliss in a way that only a work of real beauty and aesthetic bliss creditably can. It was a masterpiece in all its facets, and it’s Brad Bird’s last stop before moving on to direct a live-action feature, and see if he can’t conquer a new kind of terrain. I would say that Ratatouille is a movie for adults, but that would be giving most adults entirely too much credit.

On Jennifer Beals

2008-07-17T06:50:00.000-04:00

Whether as Bette Porter on The L Word, or Alex Owens in Flashdance some twenty years before, Jennifer Beals has managed to play with supreme verisimilitude precisely what she professes to be in real life: a severely moral person. If she doesn’t put it in those terms exactly, it might be because she’s too severely moral a person. But just look at those two characters that bookend her career to date: Alex whom no man will possess, and then Bette, who takes the severity one giant step further: Bette who will possess no man, and whom no woman will possess, either, come to think of that. Talk about severe. And she makes the whole thing perfectly believable, too. Of course, in the second season of The L Word, it’s Bette who does the betraying, and then she’s forced to suffer stoically and not so stoically as the severity comes swinging back in her direction, from would-be life partner Tina.

Zooming by car away from a meeting with Tina and her super-bitch of a lesbian-divorce attorney, Bette runs a red light and slams into another car. The guy’s already waiting for her when she gets out and yells (among much else), “You’re going to be one sorry bitch.” She grabs him by the lapels with both fists and yells back, “What makes you think I’m not already?” And then, for emphasis, the refrain, “What makes you think I’m not already?” But louder the second time.

At 20, in Flashdance, she was too baby-faced cute to be beautiful in a purely womanly way, but you can see the chiseled woman waiting to emerge from beneath the layer of pudgy-cheeked immaturity—which isn’t at all the same thing as callowness, not always. Twenty-one years later she emerged from a career wilderness as if she’d never left, looking at last, at 41, like the most mature 20-year-old you’d ever want to meet.

On Bacon

2008-07-15T03:21:00.001-04:00

What, really, can you say about a food that’s so delicious it should be illegal in every state except Nevada and California? In omelets, cheddar fries, and salads, it serves as salty seasoning, while reaching its highest calling when served alone, in hearty steak-like strips, tender and crunchy in the same bite. It’s lettuce and tomato’s perfect complement when served on bread, which is one of only two justifiable reasons I can think of at all for eating mayonnaise (the tuna melt, of course, being the other). With pineapple, meanwhile, it can turn pizza into a different food entirely, opening up whole new ranges of sweet-saltiness. The temptation at breakfast is always to eat more strips than three; they look so small and inconsequential sitting there on the plate amid heaps of eggs and potatoes. But those three strips are a meal, and they’re the most important meal of the day.