Bullfighting: new story by Roddy Doyle

There was no sign of the bull, although there was dung in the air and—Donal saw it now—blood on the street. A topic for the phone call home in the morning.

That’s from “Bullfighting” a new Roddy Doyle short story, presently featured on the New Yorker website. In the story, Donal is a middle-aged, middle-class Irishman who is happy with his life, but occasionally has a nagging sense that there ought to be something more to it. The passage above comes just after Donal and some old friends have watched a bullfight in Valencia—but in a bar, rather than in the arena. They’ve gone on vacation, just the lads, but it’s far from an adventure out of Hemingway: for the most part, they drink and talk much as they would at home, and enjoy themselves in the same comfortable, deeply contented way. The story seems to be about the value of safety, of comfort, of boredom, and the idea that the prospect of adventure holds the strongest appeal from a position of safety and security. It’s like the Talking Heads song “Heaven,” Donal observes: nothing ever happens, and though it’s kind of dull, it’s also perfect.

Like pretty much all of Doyle’s stuff, this one is funny and carefully observed, and unfolds with a conversational, natural feel. Doyle doesn’t swing for the fences with “The Bullfighters,” and consequently he doesn’t hit a home run. But the story has its small pleasures all the same—and it also has a vivid, memorable climax that I won’t ruin for you by describing it here.

Dig, Lazarus & the Bad Seeds’ inner Grinderman

In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Nick Cave said that last year’s Grinderman record hit “like a bomb going off within the Bad Seeds,” shaking the band up and freeing them to take new approaches. On 2008′s “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!,” The Bad Seeds do, indeed, seem to have been liberated by the participation of several of their number in Cave’s stripped-down garage rock venture. This time out the band plays with a loose, freewheeling swagger; they sound adventurous, and at times almost youthful.

There’s no piano on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!; instead, the arrangements are generally centered around organ riffing and acoustic guitar. On top of this base, the band toys with any number of styles and textures: “Albert West” relies on a classic combo of distorted guitars and sha-la-la backing vocals to achieve a grungy pop-rock feel; “Jesus on the Moon” is haunting, slow, tense, and tuneful, and even employs a flute solo; and “More News From Nowhere” probably could have been mistaken for a straightforward pop tune if it weren’t for the rush of half-spoken syllables Cave squeezes into every line of the verses.

As usual, Cave offers lyrics containing equal parts of poetry and bombast, and declaims them with a sneering aggressiveness, just daring you to call him out for indulging in excess like that. And most of the time I’m happy to go along for the ride; I’m a sucker for any tune that has the nerve (as “Moonland” does) to open with lines as bold and evocatively grimy as “When I came up from out of the meat locker / The city was gone.” I’m also a big fan of Cave’s unabashed intellectualism, which is perhaps most obvious here in album highlight “We Call Upon the Author,” in which Cave offers a half-ironic challenge to all the writers out there to try to justify all their scribbling, when they’ve generally failed to explain much of anything about life or the world. “Bukowski was a jerk,” Cave sings, “Berryman was best / He wrote like wet papier-mâché, went the Hemming-way / Weirdly on wings and with maximum pain / We call upon the author to explain.” Which I guess means that for Cave’s speaker, Berryman’s “best” because he didn’t claim to have any answers and then had the decency to give up and kill himself. (Incidentally, Berryman seems to be enjoying a surge of popularity among indie rockers of late: The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn wrote a sharp-edged and insightful verse about him in “Stuck Between Stations,” and Okkervil River also namechecked him in an interview.)

But there are points on Dig, Lazarus, Dig! when Cave’s sarcasm can’t save him—sometimes I find that I just get tired of his way-overblown darkly-debauched-poet schtick a few tunes in. And that’s one fault that the Grinderman record definitely doesn’t have. Grinderman gave Cave a chance to try on a persona that cuts right through his pretension, and offered him means to channel his inner sexually frustrated teenager through the voice of a sleazy middle-aged poet. The setting of the tunes harnesses the naive ugliness of the hyper-masculine adolescent sexuality of garage rock in order to deflate Cave’s own persona. Nowhere is this more effective than in “No Pussy Blues,” in which Cave’s speaker repeatedly begs a much younger woman for sex, and comes off as both creepy and hilariously foolish. It’s impossible to take what Cave’s Grinderman persona says seriously, and so the Grinderman tunes have the power to absorb all of Cave’s bombast and drama. (Of course, with Grinderman, Cave has his cake and eats it too: much of the reason why the record is so successful is that Grinderman also captures the sexual energy of garage rock, and wallows reverently in its filthiness, even as Cave’s persona is being sent up.)

Word is that there will be another Grinderman record sometime in the not-too-distant future—I’m not sure if it’s a trick Cave and company can pull off again, but I’ll be looking forward to it, in any case. And in the meantime, the Bad Seeds sound like a band half their age. Sometimes this comes off as a bit of a reach, or even sleazy (not unlike Cave’s character in “No Pussy Blues”)—but on the whole it’s thrilling to hear an able and experienced band playing with renewed vigor.

Paul Auster on protest and writing

Silliman pointed a recent NY Times column by Paul Auster, “The Accidental Rebel,” in which he reflects on his experiences as a student protester in the 1960s.

It’s a well-written piece throughout, but I think it’s interesting primarily for the conclusion he offers:

What did we accomplish? Not much of anything….We at Columbia were powerless, and our little revolution was no more than a symbolic gesture. But symbolic gestures are not empty gestures, and given the nature of those times, we did what we could.

I hesitate to draw any comparisons with the present — and therefore will not end this memory-piece with the word “Iraq.” I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever.

I’ve attended a number of anti-war protests in recent years, including some enormous ones, and (rather obviously) none of them brought about an end to the war. Nor did any of the petitions I’ve signed, or any of the letters I’ve sent to my representatives. But all the same, I do have my voice, however ineffectual it ultimately may be. And as Auster points out, the creation of art is much the same. A book isn’t likely to change the world, and the gesture of writing one is largely symbolic. Your voice probably won’t be heard at all, and even if it is, it almost certainly won’t change anything. But all the same, you must not be silent: it’s important to speak out, and to struggle to speak the truth as you understand it, because to do otherwise is to cede whatever small powers you may have.

And though Auster doesn’t discuss this, it’s probably worth noting that the student protests of the 60s did ultimately help to bring about change—they even helped hasten the end of the Vietnam War. Perhaps the siege of Columbia University accomplished little; but at the same time, it was part of a much larger movement, involving many sieges, and many protesting voices, that did, in fact, make a difference. And again, it’s much the same for the creation of art: all you have to offer is your one small voice, but many voices together make a culture, and do, indeed, shape the ways in which people act and think.

Or at least I hope so. I think the romantic and the cynic in me do battle on this kind of question—as to what real power, if any, art and political protest might have. Though I can tell you that making art and participating in protests for a just causes are both things that make me feel more alive, and more deeply connected to other people.

Last Night at the Lobster

Having grown up in a solidly middle-class American household, I was raised to believe in the value of hard work, and that hard work has its rewards. Though you might begin your working life flipping burgers, it was understood that your labor and persistence were bound to bring you personal fulfillment and prosperity in due time. From this assumption, it follows that this kind of job is only temporary—that it’s possible to endure the low pay and lack of dignity because the experience is only a character-building stepping stone on the way to a world of better and more remunerative opportunities.

Many of the stories told in fiction and movies about low-wage work operate under exactly these assumptions: that it’s temporary, because that the characters couldn’t possibly suffer under these kinds of conditions forever. Characters at fast food restaurants and similar establishments are almost invariably very young, and we enjoy seeing them goofing off and resisting the tedium and humiliation of their day-to-day work, knowing all the while that they’ll find their way to something better before the story’s done.

But the characters in Stewart O’Nan‘s novel Last Night at the Lobster don’t have the luxury of goofing off on their way to a solidly middle-class future. The book’s central character, Manny, has succeeded in making his career as a Red Lobster manager into something dignified and at least somewhat fulfilling: he’s worked hard, has climbed to the rank of manager, and now approaches his job with a dedication, thoroughness, and sincerity that has earned him some amount of satisfaction. But because of a decision made in a distant corporate office, Manny is now facing the task of guiding the restaurant from open to close for the final time—the restaurant’s being shut down for good, and on Monday he’ll report to an Olive Garden, with what amounts to a demotion to assistant manager. This change in fortune is causing Manny to take stock in his life, and to consider exactly what all his years of hard work has actually gotten him.

On this day, Manny offers the company-standard farewell (“Thanks for thinking of Red Lobster”) to some departing customers as usual, but now he wonders about the emptiness of his words. O’Nan writes:

By now he says this as a reflex, but what does it mean? Who, besides the people who actually work here, thinks about Red Lobster? And even they don’t really think about it.

Manny is haunted by the sense that he’s done everything right, everything he was supposed to do, for years, yet he hasn’t seen any trace of a real reward. And meanwhile, he’s not sure that his life outside of the Lobster has added up to much more. Though he’s about to have a child with his girlfriend, he’s far from certain about his love for her, and seems to take very little joy from their relationship. He feels much greater passion for Deena—a Red Lobster coworker with whom he recently had an affair. But now it’s over, and Manny wonders about the meaning and value of their brief love for each other:

He used to marvel at the fact that out of the millions of people in the world, they’d somehow found each other, whether it was an accident or destiny or the result of some logical, cascading chain of events. Now, looking out at the snow falling on the darkened cars, it’s an even bigger mystery, and, like the Lobster, a waste.

Though the bulk of Last Night at the Lobster concerns itself with the details of the restaurant’s operations, at its heart is Manny’s frustration, longing, and confusion over the fact that he can’t seem to find any way to get what he wants out of life. Near the end of the book, O’Nan offers a litany of pointless loss: “Everything gets tossed. The skewers, the fries, the rice–everything they stockpiled. The coleslaw goes, and the baked potatoes, all the cauliflower, tray on tray of biscuits….” It’s all a terrible waste, and for no good reason. What’s the point of working so hard for the restaurant, when nobody would remember it a few days after it closed? And what’s the point of being in love, if in the end that love will just be tossed away?

O’Nan doesn’t treat Manny’s life as a joke; he recognizes the tragedy in the frustration Manny feels as he leaves one mostly meaningless job behind, and prepares to take on another with no real hope of finding anything better. Just like the middle-class kids goofing off in the fast food kitchen, Manny can see the absurdity of the work he has to do, and longs to find something more fulfilling. But unlike those middle-class kids (or the protagonists of most fiction and movies about the frustrations of low-wage work), no one’s going to pay for Manny to get to college, or offer him any other kind of hand. There’s very little he can do except keep working hard—whether it ends up paying off or not.

Titus Andronicus, punk rocker

I’m having an absolute blast listening to The Airing of Grievances, the debut album from New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus—who were recently recently anointed by Pitchfork with an 8.5 and a booking at this year’s festival. I’d say Pitchfork hit the nail on the head this time—this record is an energetic, rough-edged, punk rock joy, and one of the best indie rock debuts I’ve heard in recent memory.

The Airing of Grievances definitely doesn’t carve out any new musical territory; nor does it rely on exceptional chops or especially strong songwriting. Instead it’s one of those records that remind you why punk rock will always sound great—that there’s always room for another sloppy, noisy, hard-rocking record that careens along largely on the tremendous force of its own energy and excitement. The recording is appropriately lo-fi—everything’s turned up to the point of distortion, and it sounds perfect. The drums pound, the guitars crunch, and the singer screams, yelps, and bleats, and all of it sounds fantastic.

The lyrics are often depressive, and contain an element of self-aware scenesterism—not particularly likely to be a turn-on for me ordinarily, but the music is so genuinely joyful that it hasn’t become a problem for me so far (during the half-dozen or so times I’ve played the record in the last 24 hours). But the humor in the lyrics goes a long way—for example, here’s the first verse of “My Time Outside the Womb”: “The first thing you see is the light / And then you focus on a man with a mask and a knife / And then he cuts you away from everything you thought you knew about life.” And then there’s the record’s true highlight, the eponymous “Titus Andronicus,” an infectious, hilarious punk stomper anchored by a memorable (end very often repeated) chorus of “Your life is over / Your life is over.” The singer also details exactly what the end of your life will mean: “No more cigarettes/ No more having sex / No more getting drunk till you fall on the floor….”

I’m not sure if this is a record for the ages, but it sure is a whole lot of fun.

The technological wild west

Some years after defeating Custer, Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill‘s famed Wild West Show, in which he acted the part of an Indian for an appreciative audience of whites. During the course of westward expansion, white people had utterly destroyed his way of life—yet they came to watch his performance out of a sense of romantic nostalgia: a belief in the natural beauty of the vanished west, and in the wild, noble freedom of its savage onetime inhabitants.

For Rebecca Solnit, this is the history of the American west in a nutshell, and also a lens through which we can understand the birth of Hollywood and the creation of our present-day culture of pervasive image and fantasy. The real west was destroyed—the land became home to cities, farms, factories, and mines; and the Native Americans were killed or confined to reservations—and meanwhile white people read dime westerns about the heroic Kit Carson (who once found a copy of a fictional account of his heroism with the body of a woman he’d failed to rescue) and tourists started to visit the first national parks to appreciate the tamed beauty of the west. As America industrialized and began to conquer time and space through inventions like the railroad and photography, reality gave way to image, and the world we all live in now came into being.

This is only part of the thesis of Solnit’s truly extraordinary 2003 book, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West—you’ll note that up until now I haven’t even mentioned the book’s central figure, a photographer who laid the groundwork for the invention of motion pictures, and meanwhile cast a very long shadow over the arts and sciences. And even that’s not the whole of Solnit’s story: she’s also very much concerned with issues of class, and the ways in which the culture of industrialization impoverished the lives of ordinary people, while meanwhile vastly enriching a fortunate and merciless few. It’s a story of great cultural and environmental change, of politics, murder, science, art, and loss. Solnit’s depth of knowledge is astonishing, but this book is in no way episodic, prone to tangents, or bogged down with unnecessary details; instead, she weaves all of this material into a seamless and powerful whole, told in beautiful, passionate prose, and bursting with rare and compelling insight.

Muybridge—an immigrant from England who would change his name or its spelling several times—first settled in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, where he for a time ran a bookstore. Eventually he became a photographer, and enjoyed great success making landscapes, often in the employ of railroads or other corporations who hoped his pictures would promote their services and the west in general. But his greatest contribution would come through his motion studies—under the patronage of railroad baron (and founder of Stanford University) Leland Stanford, Muybridge became the first person to accurately capture motion on film. His photographs of Stanford’s horses required a significant technological advance, and the end result astonished many people: since no one had ever been able to freeze motion before—to show motion as a sequence of discrete events, rather than as a continuous whole—no one had previously been able to answer questions about motion as basic as whether or not all four hooves of a galloping horse ever left the ground.

For the first time, an image became more compelling than perception: the “truth” of a horse’s gait could be more reliably described by the camera than by an unaided human eye. This, Solnit argues, is the birth of our contemporary culture: in which we live constantly awash in images, and devote much of our time and consciousness to the experience of those images, rather than to the “real,” more direct experiences of life to which people were limited until the abstract powers of the image were fully unlocked. Further, Solnit sees this culture as fundamentally shaped by the history of the American west: a place where people had the freedom to re-invent themselves, and who chose to re-shape the the places of the West with very little regard to its cultural or natural history. Media culture operates in much the same way: it’s a space of image and abstraction, where history and nature are little more than raw material for representation, for transformation into elaborate shared fantasies. We all live in the wild west now: a place where everything is mutable and free, and where people and cultures and history and the land all get swept up in the inexorable flow of the omnipresent river of images.

And still, that’s not all there is to Solnit’s book—but short of retyping it here, I think I’ve about exhausted my ability to describe it. But one more story/image from the book: after Sitting Bull’s time in the Wild West show, he returned to a reservation, where he became involved in the Ghost Dance religious movement, which promised the retreat and disappearance and death of the white man, and which gained adherents in many different Native American cultures in the last days of the Indian Wars. Solnit writes:

The reservation administrators saw the Ghost Dance as insurrection and Sitting Bull as a leader, and they wanted him arrested. On December 15, 1890, the reservation police woke up Sitting Bull to take him away. While he was getting dressed, his small house was surrounded by his supporters, and in the shootout that followed he was fatally wounded. But the white horse Buffalo Bill had given him was trained to perform at the sound of gunfire, and for a moment that fused entertainment, spirituality, and confusion, everything stopped when it seemed that the horse was doing the Ghost Dance.

Erik Friedlander & Teho Teardo: improvised/electronic collaborations

The jazz/electronic collaborations between Steve Reid and Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden have garnered a lot of attention over the past few years. Both are tremendously talented musicians—but I have to say that I was disappointed when I saw the two of them live at the Empty Bottle a couple years ago. I’d hoped to see some genuine improvisational interaction between the two, and had high expectations, given Hebden’s exceptional work for his Four Tet project. But at the live show, it seemed that Reid was mostly limited to following Hebden—that Hebden couldn’t change up his electronics with the same ease and fluidity that was second nature to Reid on the drums. Also, it probably didn’t help that Hebden & Reid were preceded on stage by Chicago’s great Fred Anderson, who played a muscular and energetic duo set with his frequent collaborator, the incomparable drummer Hamid Drake.

In any case, I do really like the idea of top-flight improvisers and electronic artists working together, and I’m always pleased discover successful collaborations in this mode. One recent example: Giorni Rubati, cellist Erik Friedlander‘s collaboration with electronic artist and film score composer Teho Teardo (available from bip-hop records; also available via eMusic and as an Amazon MP3 download).

The record, while excellent, is far from entirely improvised—more on that below. But first, check out the YouTube video below of a live performance by Friedlander and Teardo at the Knitting Factory in 2005. Notice how the two respond to each other throughout the performance. Teardo opens in reaction to Friedlander’s percussive, repetitive playing by bringing out some glitchy noise, but then soon moves his way into a much denser wash of darkly warm sound, which Friedlander in turn responds to by getting out his bow and entirely changing his approach to the improvisation.

On record, the two take a different approach— and in fact they were on different continents while recording the collaboration. Friedlander recorded responses to poems by Giorni Rubati —some of which were solo improvisations, while others were multitracked. Teardo then took Friedlander’s recordings, added his own contributions, and manipulated the recordings. The result is a shapeshifting and thoroughly engrossing record, in which Friedlander and Teardo both cover a wide range of sonic territory. Friedlander’s playing is often percussive, but he’ll sometimes also offer melancholy bowing or keen noisily. Teardo seems equally fond of glitchy electronic and much warmer and fuller sounds, and does a superb job of interacting with and responding to Friedlander’s recordings. Occasionally voices reading fragments of Rubati’s poetry in Italian or English float in. (Somewhat oddly, the album ends with a cover of the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette”—it doesn’t have much in common with the themes or moods of the rest of the record, but it’s enjoyable all the same.)

I’d also very highly recommend Friedlander’s solo cello record Block Ice and Propane, which I’ll perhaps give a blog post of its own someday, as it’s a remarkable record—both virtuosic and fun, and a real joy to listen to.

The Golden Age

Sonically and in spirit, American Music Club’s 2008 release, The Golden Age, fits right in with their best material from the early 1990s. On the new record, the band sustains a gentle, drifting, melancholy mood, melding folk strums, soft organs, and the occasional AM radio harmony with longtime guitarist Vudi‘s controlled noise and emotive atmospherics. The arrangements are classy, and rarely call attention to themselves—on first listen you might not even notice touches like the vaguely mariachi horns floating low in the mix. As always, songwriter Mark Eitzel‘s vocals take center stage. His voice is at once lush and scratchy, and always seems to sound better than it strictly ought to. Usually he’ll sing the beginning of a line in a moderately sunny or even indifferent manner, and then a few breaths later, the bitter sarcasm and miserably dark humor will surface. Most American Music Club songs seem to aspire to reach a kind of dreamy lounge-pop Americana heaven, only to fall back down to earth in feedback squalls and minor-key dirges.

If The Golden Age doesn’t have heights quite so high as what can be found in the envious mock-grandeur of Mercury‘s “Johnny Mathis’ Feet,” nor any moments as compellingly bleak as Everclear‘s “Sick of Food,” this is, all the same, a considerably-more-than-solid set of new tunes. As always, Eitzel’s perspective is relentlessly grim. In “Victory Choir,” for example, he dismisses God and expresses a complete lack of faith in humanity all in one breath: “You don’t need a beard and throne / To kill what you love,” he sings. But even the album’s darkest moments tend to go down easy, thanks to the understated arrangements and Eitzel’s propensity to express misery with humor and grace.

Eitzel is sometimes prone to cliche, or at least to the occasional unimaginative turn of phrase, but at his best, he’s capable of making startling observations. In the middle of “The Dance,” Eitzel pauses a moment in unfurling a tale of violence in order to observe of the perpetrator: “He holds his gun loose and free like it’s a toy / Like an orchestra conductor who surrenders to the joy.” Here Eitzel seems to be suggesting that what motivates violence might not be all that different than what motivates art— that if he were a slightly different person, he might have taken up a gun instead of a guitar when faced with frustration and misery.

Baby Face: from salacious pre-code Hollywood

In the years before Hollywood imposed the self-censoring Hays Code in order to avoid being subject to outside censorship, filmmakers enjoyed a fair amount of freedom in their on-screen portrayals of lust, obscenity, and vice. Some pictures from this era featured explicit violence, frank sexual content, and even nudity—which didn’t please the crusading moralizers of the day, who certainly would have pressured the government into making movie censorship the law if the studios hadn’t agreed to curtail themselves first.

Though the Hays Code was instituted in 1930, it was 1933′s Baby Face—the story of a woman who uses sex to secure herself a position of wealth and power—which forced Hollywood’s hand into establishing an administrative body with real censorship power. The film opens with a disturbing and surprisingly gritty sequence in which the beautiful young Lily (played by Barbara Stanwyck with convincing seductiveness and cunning) battles off the advances of a series of patrons at her father’s speakeasy, including a city inspector who dear old dad expects Lily to have sex with in order to prevent the place from being shut down. She confronts him angrily, and skips town on a freight train—though she can only avoid being tossed in jail for riding the rails by seducing a railyard employee. She goes to New York, and then plots her way into the bed of a playboy bank president by seducing and then destroying one man after another.

Watching the film, there’s not much doubt why it might have scandalized people: though there’s no nudity, and the camera always cuts away before Lily consummates one of her seductions, the film’s treatment of sexuality is all the same extremely frank. The movie makes it absolutely clear that Lily’s father was whoring her out for the sake of his business, and there’s no doubt about what’s happening when she leads her boss into the ladies’ restroom after work. Further, nearly all of the film’s sexual content all comes in the context of Lily humiliating and defeating men by using her sexuality to take advantage of their piggishness—my guess is this idea didn’t go down easily with people who would have preferred for all young women on screen to be portrayed as sexless virgins, or at worst, as victims of men’s aggressive, immoral lust. Lily isn’t the victim of a rake or a rapist; rather, she’s the victim of an environment that offers women very few choices in the realms of sex and power. By choosing to exploit the men who would exploit her (and would, in fact, be fully permitted, or even expected, to exploit her), Lily seizes whatever kind of power she can for herself. And—no doubt even more damning in the eyes of a moralist—she only begins to regret her course of action when she hurts someone she’s come to love. It hardly matters that she ruined several other men on the way up—none of them saw anything in her but a sexual object, and thus none of them were worthy of her love or her ethical consideration.

The film’s ending does strongly suggest that her ambition was misplaced—that her desire for wealth and position was bound to leave her feeling empty if she had to choose between her riches and love. But sitting there right under the surface is the fact that she simply didn’t have this choice until she and the bank president actually fell for each other—that the only way she’d previously been able to make herself valuable to anyone was by offering up her body. She had no reason to expect that she could earn anyone’s respect or love. The film judges Lily harshly not for her sexuality, and not even for the pain she causes, but instead for the fact that her first impulse is to reject love when she finally has a chance to seize it, and thereby experience a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

By contemporary standards, Baby Face feels very unsubtle and occasionally rather clumsy. There are some huge holes in the plot, and when it comes time for the film to offer judgments and conclusions, they’re delivered with a decidedly heavy-hand. Also, there’s an extremely awkward attempt to add an intellectual dimension to the film by means of the occasional appearance of a vaguely German fellow who gives Lily advice from the works of Nietzsche. Still, all of it is fascinating to watch—particularly with the knowledge that American filmmakers wouldn’t again have the freedom to deal with this kind of subject matter in such an open way for nearly forty years.

Chris Adrian: nervy, brainy Promise Breaker

I found this story via a link from Maud Newton several months ago—but I wasn’t blogging then, and it’s stayed on my mind ever since, so I’ll blog about it now: Chris Adrian‘s “Promise Breaker” is spectacularly good, an you can read it online for free thanks to Esquire. (You do have to suffer through the presence of a large number of gaudy, highly obtrusive ads in order to read it—but trust me, it’s worth it.)

I’m not actually going to say too much about this story, for fear of spoiling its plot and ruining some of the great effects that Adrian pulls off via surprise. The opening of the story employs various tactics intended to disorient the reader—a device that ends up serving very well here. Near the end, I had a sinking feeling that I knew exactly what was going to happen—and then when it did, I was devastated all the same, and I was astonished that Adrian had actually done what I thought he might.

It’s a story about family, grief, illness, and the strangeness and terror of being a parent. It’s a political story, too, and one of the boldest I’ve read in tackling the events and aftermath of September 11. (It’s a shame how writers & other artists seem to be only beginning to seriously approach this topic— and when Don DeLillo took it on in his terrific Falling Man, the book ended up being broadly maligned.) It’s a nervy, brainy, edgy story, and it’s highly suspenseful and utterly engrossing. I haven’t yet read anything else that Adrian has written, but if any of it’s half as good as this, I’ll definitely be a fan.

The Visitor: naturalism wins the day

In theaters now is writer/director Tom McCarthy’s very fine second feature, The Visitor. The film tells the story of Walter Vale, an aging economics professor and lonely widower who we see shuffling dully through his days, disengaged from his teaching, his research, and apparently everything else in his life. When he returns to his rarely-visited New York apartment for a conference, he finds it occupied by an illegal immigrant couple, who he decides not to turn away. After some initial awkwardness and discomfort, he befriends them both, and especially Tarek, who comes from Syria and plays the djembe. Walter begins taking djembe lessons from Tarek, and starts to re-connect with music, New York City, and his life. He even meets Tarek’s mother, Mouna, a widow herself, and takes her to a Broadway musical.

This sounds like a very naive (and perhaps even insulting) premise—old white guy gets a new lease on life through his encounters with a vibrant non-whites. The difference here is that McCarthy treats all of these characters—rather than just Walter—as living, breathing human beings. Tarek, Zainab, and Mouna don’t exist in the world of the film only to show Professor Vale how to live a better life. They all have their own lives too—before, during, and after the time they spend with him.

Even more importantly, McCarthy stages the interactions between these characters in an extremely naturalistic style. Though The Visitor is often funny, it never strains at a punchline, but instead lets the humor come entirely naturally through the characters and the actors’ fine performances. And McCarthy recognizes that there’s plenty of action and interest in his story without adding extraneous elements for effect. When Walter and Mouna find themselves thrown together for several days, McCarthy doesn’t have them instantly (and very improbably) fall in love with each other; nor does he create any kind of artificial conflict between them. Instead, we see two reserved and self-contained people slowly opening up to one other, awkwardly and imperfectly. Together they end up sharing fleeting moments of both joy and despair, and their emotions and reactions seem entirely believable because nothing we see on screen is external to their personalities or to the situations that they find themselves in.

For all its naturalism and careful attention to matters of character, The Visitor is also an overtly political film. And in McCarthy’s hands, the political message goes down just as smoothly as everything else, because he treats it with the same degree of honesty and naturalism. The movie’s politics are inherent in the structure of its story, and in the very lives of its characters, and so nothing ever comes off as didactic, forced, or preachy.

McCarthy’s first feature, The Station Agent, is also remarkable, and for somewhat similar reasons. Its premise seems even less likely to succeed: it’s the story of a reclusive dwarf who finds his peace and privacy besieged by a couple of quirky small-town characters. But again, McCarthy takes all of his characters seriously as people, and by maintaining a highly naturalistic style throughout, he resists all impulses toward cuteness or sentimentality. Despite its improbable premise, <em>The Station Agent</em> is a subtly effective and genuinely moving film, and never descends into gimmickry. There’s no need, because the writing, performances, and direction are all first-rate.

The cost of being free

Sean Penn’s Into the Wild can boast of many arrestingly gorgeous shots of animals and natural spaces, as well as a host of fine performances from a strong supporting cast. But the film’s greatest strength is in the depth of its understanding of its central figure, Chris McCandless. The surface story of Chris’s life—that of a naive young man who ventures out into the wilderness on his own in search of freedom and self-discovery, and in the end becomes a victim of nature’s merciless forces—would have provided adequate fodder for a film on its own. But Into the Wild teases out a richer story than this by casting Chris’s fate not as a matter of a man’s foolishness in trying to take on nature, but instead about the pains and rewards of human love and relationships, and the great price exacted when someone turns his back on family and civilization.

In Penn’s movie, McCandless is a smart young man who can’t contain his energy and his hunger for life. As he wanders on his own through Alaska, Arizona, and down the Rio Grande, he charms nearly everyone he meets: people fall in love with him for his intelligence and drive, and also for his wild idealism. They see parts of themselves in him—most often, the idealism, restlessness, energy and hope that have long since been beaten out of them by experience and age. They seem to draw vitality from him, and love being around him, feeding off of his boundless enthusiasm and uncontained desire for making life an adventure. Chris spends a few days or weeks with a number of these people in turn—but each time when he leaves them, he seems to have no idea that by doing so he is causing them considerable pain. Again and again, Penn gives us long shots capturing the misery and heartbreak suffered by the would-be mothers, fathers, siblings, and lovers who’ve freely and joyfully taken Chris into their lives.

When Chris dies alone in Alaska, it’s not because he failed to match up to nature; instead, it’s because he failed to find a way to connect with other human beings. The movie doesn’t offer a rosy vision of humanity or of family life—it’s easily understandable why Chris would want to flee from his bitter and hateful parents, and it’s hard not to get caught up in Chris’s desire to slip the stultifying bonds of a conventional modern life. The film is not by any means singing the praises of civilization over the wilderness. Instead, the idea here is that love is better than loneliness, especially when you have to stand up to the blows raining down on you from nature, culture, and other people. Whether you’re living in the Alaskan wilderness or a tidy suburb, you’re going to need help in order to be able to face what life will bring.

Nina Nastasia makes you perk up and listen

Some songwriters have a gift for stringing together a coherent album, a solid group of a dozen or so songs of comparable quality that work well as a whole. Other songwriters seem to concentrate their powers in just a few songs, or even moments: they’re the ones who’ll make you perk up and listen whenever that certain perfect song comes along and demands your attention.

Nina Nastasia strikes me as a songwriter in the latter mode. It’s not that her albums aren’t solid and coherent—her recent records On Leaving and You Follow Me (with Jim White) are both excellent throughout. But then then there are those songs that just soar above the rest—like “Settling Song,” with its classic-ballad melody and palpable sadness, spiked with a barely-perceptible dash of wistful sweetness; or “Late Night,” in which Nastasia’s voice soars and she plays her acoustic guitar louder and louder and tells a story of horror, pain, and bitter disappointment.

Nastasia also seems to have a gift for writing tunes that aren’t as immediately obvious in their appeal, but which sneak their way inside you all the same, and perhaps end up having even greater power because of it. One example would be “Our Day Trip,” a deceptively quiet little tune from On Leaving. The arrangement is simple: an acoustic guitar strumming the chords, restrained, shuffling drums, Nastasia’s plain (if lovely) voice, and a piano offering punctuation here and there. The song sets a melancholy and plaintive mood from the start—but this feeling comes almost entirely in the music at first, in the quiet tension of the arrangement and in Nastasia’s delivery. The song’s speaker is addressing a lover, asking him not to go to work that day, offering an easily-realizable fantasy of escaping briefly to the country: “We’ve got just enough money / Let’s see how far we can amble / One day can make all the difference.” It’s only in that last bit that the lyric hints that something might be wrong here—that the two of them might be discontent, with their lives or with each other. But the speaker continues to maintain the fantasy for a while after that: “Two souls alone out on a lake / It will be a perfect afternoon / We can lose our clothes and have a swim.” As a listener, you’ve been welcomed into the dream by this point: you can feel the speaker’s longing for an escape, and the idea of it sounds great: peaceful, relaxing, sexy. But then comes the final verse (which ends the song, without a return to the chorus melody), and it dashes all hope, and breaks your heart. “Your free hand waving from the gate,” Nastasia sings, “The metal shining at your waist / You had so much more ambition.” And now we understand why the speaker wants to escape—she’s disappointed in how her lover’s dreams seem to be growing out of reach, and how he seems to have accepted this fact, which disappoints her that much more. She longs for a day of freedom with him, a way to recapture the dreams that they no doubt once shared with each other—a momentary return, at least, to a time when they not only loved each other, but also loved to imagine the great lives they might lead together. But now it seems to be too late for this—his dreams have passed him by, and a part of her love for him is gone, too.

Nuns on drugs

Pedro Almodovar’s Entre tinieblas (English title: Dark Habits), released in 1984, is in some respects very silly. It involves a nightclub singer who takes refuge from the police in a convent run by drug-addicted nuns, who are meanwhile attempting to convince a wealthy woman to continue her late husband’s patronage. So, basically we have a mash-up of two overly familiar movie plots (fleeing the police, and fund raising on behalf of a scrappy, embattled institution)—but fortunately for us, the film is only marginally concerned with telling this story. Instead, we get lots of stuff like nuns shooting up and a tiger stalking around in the convent garden. These are shock tactics, intentionally outrageous, meant to catch our attention through the force of their absurdity, through the audacity of the ways in which they violate conventions and upend our sense of how the world is supposed to be ordered. But there’s considerable danger in using this kind of device: outrageousness for the sake of outrageousness tends to become tedious with repetition. There’s only so many times a film can throw something shocking at you before you catch on to the technique, and after that, any subsequent shocks are bound to lose their punch.

But this is Almodovar we’re talking about here. Shock and absurdity are a big part of his stock in trade—yet he’s almost always able to use those techniques not just to stage gags or to manipulate the audience, but instead to create moments of beauty and emotional power. Dark Habits lacks the lyrical loveliness and thematic sophistication of Talk to Her or Volver—but all the same, here and there you can see traces of the same sensibilities and techniques that make those more recent films so successful. One example: when the nightclub singer enters her room at the convent for the first time, and the camera lingers with a decidedly erotic energy on the objects around her, I was reminded of the playful, mysterious, dark and sexual tone that pervades Talk to Her and All About My Mother, in which straightforward shots often have evocatively seamy subtexts, hinting at all the joy, pain, sex, wildness, and revelation that’s always threatening to bubble up from just beneath the perfectly-composed warmth and calmness of the camera. I saw it too in the boredom in the expression of the nun who feeds the tiger through metal bars, and scolds him like an errant toddler when he bats his enormous paw at her and growls. One of Almodovar’s great strengths is his ability to find the normal and the mundane in the wild and the absurd—it’s a way of bringing all the drug addiction and weird sex and so on into focus and comprehensibility. Watching an Almodovar film, you come to believe that the world is far stranger and wilder than you’ve ever imagined—–but at the same time you also become convinced that all such weirdness is entirely normal.

Eugenides: “Great Experiment”

Jeffrey Eugenides has a new story in The New Yorker, and it’s presently available for free on the web. The story’s called “Great Experiment”, and it’s a good one: a simple tale of temptation on its surface, and a complex meditation on the nature of American identity just beneath. At first I felt a bit uncertain about this one, as it’s yet another story about a poet—but as it turns out, the main character doesn’t really write anymore, and the only reason Eugenides makes him a writer at all is to show him drifting from the values he once held dear, now that he has suffered under the pressures of adult life for a number of years.

I love the straightforward elegance of Eugenides’ prose: there’s no flashy artifice, just flawless sentences, rich with ideas neatly expressed. In this story, Eugenides does a great job with the setting, too—he gets all the present-day Chicago details exactly right, and in so doing captures the feel of the city very well. (I say this as someone who’s lived there for seven years—and I understand that Eugenides lives here now, too.) And Eugenides also makes a lot out of Chicago’s big-shouldered industrial history and present-day identity as a financial center, and uses this to draw the lines between the city’s corrupt past and corrupt present in order to tell a story about how American ideals can all to easily drift into greed and criminality, until those ideals are more or less entirely abandoned. More remarkably, he captures the sadness of the main character’s loss of ideals—there’s a sense that Kendall’s dreams, and the American Dream, are beautiful things, but that Kendall and most Americans can’t live out their hopes and wishes without embracing the dark means of American success. It’s a story of innocence lost—of young America growing up and looking into its own heart, and admitting that there are costs to wealth and liberty and idealism.

Class, place, environmental activism, & Elvis

The March/April 2008 issue of Orion Magazine features a piece by one of my favorite essay writers, Rebecca Solnit. Here Solnit tells the story of how she came to love country music, and uses it as a launching pad for a frank and penetrating exploration of the culture clash between liberal environmentalists and many of the residents of the rural areas they seek to protect from degradation and exploitation. Solnit writes:

I grew up surrounded by liberals and leftists who liked to play the idiot in fake southern accents, make jokes about white trash and trailer trash, and…made gagging noises whenever they heard Dolly Parton or anything like her.

This, Solnit argues, is a viewpoint that is scarcely less intolerant than the racism and deep cultural conservatism of some of those country music fans that many liberals have been raised to hold in contempt. Ever since the Civil Rights movement, many liberals have effectively thrown out the baby with the bathwater: rejecting not only the repellent racism of southern culture, but everything else associated with it, too—including country music.

Solnit goes on to point out that country music’s history is far from purely lily-white and southern: that no kind of American music can claim a single racial heritage, given the ways in which American musicians of all races have always freely mixed forms like country, blues, and folk, whatever their origins may have been. The varied cultural reception of Elvis Presley provides Solnit with a helpful example. Some people denigrate him as someone who stole from black artists and exploiting their achievements for his own gain; others are scarcely aware of the source materials he’s drawing on. But for Solnit, both arguments miss the point—”Hound Dog,” for example, is a pop song written by two Jews, first made famous by a black woman, and which subsequently became a hit for Elvis, whose performance drew not only on the blues, but also on rockabilly, country, and pop.

Solnit then moves these same ideas into the context of the environmental movement, and the great resistance it has received from people living in areas where there are many country music fans, like the south and west. She argues that a lot of the problem here comes from the great distrust that rural conservatives and urban liberals towards one another—and further, that much of that distrust comes from cultural misunderstandings like the one about country music. If environmentalists and rural residents were better able to recognize the interests and values that they share, perhaps they could work together far more effectively in order to protect the environment. But in order for that to be possible, liberals need to come to understand and respect the value and importance of rural culture, and rural residents need to better recognize that the political right, despite its opposition to liberal culture, is fundamentally pro-corporate in nature, and thus is only interested in preserving rural culture or values so long as it permits them to defeat environmentalists and thereby gain the ability to profit from the exploitation and degradation of rural lands.

Solnit’s undoubtedly right that we need to look past red state/blue state divisions in order to recognize common interests. It seems to me that what’s going on here most fundamentally is a failure of empathy, and an overeagerness to divide the world into “us” and “them.” We have to recognize that the world is more complicated than this—that music is never purely black or purely white, and that our assumptions about other people are very likely oversimplified, if not simply false, whenever we start putting people into categories. At the same time, though, it’d be a mistake to smooth over differences in culture and opinions—to ignore them or pretend they don’t exist. Conservatives and liberals are still bound to disagree with each other, and so conflict is inevitable–not every situation will have a mutually satisfying resolution. But starting from a position of distrust and contempt and mutual ignorance certainly won’t help anything.

Auden on good readings

In its current issue, Narrative Magazine has reprinted W.H. Auden’s essay “Reading”—an incisive and often very funny take on how people read literature and offer criticism, and how he feels they ought to. Here Auden argues that writing and reading negative criticism is mostly a waste of time:

If, when a reviewer whose taste I trust condemns a book, I feel a certain relief, this is only because so many books are published that it is a relief to think—“Well, here, at least, is one I do not have to bother about.” But had he kept silent, the effect would have been the same.

Why waste your time on attacks of bad books, when you could be devoting yourself to good books instead? Further, Auden points out that most literary hatchet jobs are little more than ego trips, in any case:

If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

I think this applies only to the world of public reviews and criticism—there’s much to be said in favor of showing off your wit and malice in the company of friends. And I’ve also learned a lot by privately writing down my negative reactions to books and stories—to trying to articulate precisely what it is I don’t like about a work that I think is a failure. But what’s to be gained by making this kind of thing public? Chances are at least fair that the author of the failed work has fully put his or her heart into it—that he or she believes in it deeply, and has offered it up to the world in the hope that it might find an audience that understands its value. Why insult or humiliate someone for having this kind of hope, except out of jealousy or cynicism or schadenfreude?

Making art is an act of bravery, because the world’s reaction to it will almost always amount to either hostility or absolute indifference. People are suspicious of those of us who claim to be artists—who are you to think you’re so special, that you have anything to say, that you’re good enough, that I ought to pay any attention to you? And new or amateur artists are doubly suspect, as they’re making these claims without having any record of success to back them up. The general assumption is that art will fail—and people take pleasure in exposing its failure, in revealing the artist as some kind of self-indulgent egoist or fraudulent fake, as not so special after all.

But I think even failed art—art that no one but the artist could enjoys or appreciate or empathize with learn from—remains valuable at least in the act of its creation. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing art as therapy, as self-expression, as politics, or for any other reason that many people see as invalid. And there’s nothing wrong with trying and failing, at least so long as the effort was sincere and you’ve perhaps learned something along the way.

Anyway, it seems to me (much as it did to Auden) that it’s far better to publicly and enthusiastically praise the art that does succeed—the stuff that reaches you, moves you, excites you—than to denigrate the work that doesn’t. Why tell the world about a book you don’t think anyone should read, when instead you can tell them about one that they should?