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E's New Blog

Click here.  And I return to my position as the second best blogger in the household. Third as soon as Al figures out twitter. 

Notes On Control and Ian Curtis

“I think maybe he wasn’t quite narcissistic enough to be a rock star.” That’s what E said, as we watched Control, the bio pic about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division.  The “maybe” is what makes the slowly accreting film worth watching.  Unlike a lot of the things I’ve been interested in lately–novels about the Rolling Stones, I’m Not There, Bob Dylan’s own Chronicle—Control doesn’t presume any access to the private creative process that leads to art or, in this case, the private destructive process that leads to suicide.  Maybe it’s the business of art to always make such leaps and to fail to do so is to not pick up the only gauntlet that matters.  Yet, to me, the film felt properly humble.  E’s comment was sparked by one of the possibilities the film suggests:  that Curtis was just aware enough of what an asshole he was being. Curtis's epilepsy certainly had something to do with his despair.  But the movie also allows for the possibility that forces that can’t be known at a quarter century remove–or ever filmed, under any circumstances– congealed in Curtis's death. Its humility here feels like a virtue, because that tentativeness allows for its apparent accuracy and mystery. 

Damages: The Plot Quickens

Damages–the cable series about a law suit against a CEO who bankrupted his company while enriching himself–shows just how much of a pleasure plot can be.  The action unfolds in steps that are both satisfying and surprising.

That said, the series doesn’t bear a second viewing the way Weeds or Twin Peaks does. The characters just aren’t sympathetic enough, whatever that means.  Character development is almost an afterthought.  First, Ted Danson emerges as a nuanced monster who steals every scene he’s in. Later, Glenn Close and her adversary Zeljko Ivanek take on their own complexities. The younger cast members, quite possibly remarkable actors in other productions, appear to have been cast by Pottery Barn. A part of the problem is the show’s perspective, which relies too much on these glossier characters. 

And yet “lacks character development” is one of those reviewer phrases–useful as a judgement, but not quite satisfactory as diagnosis. What really makes an engaging character? I don’t know, for sure. This is an essay, an assay, in the original sense: an attempt. But I do have two data points: Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, Nancy in Weeds. Some sense of flawed struggle and vulnerability seem to be at the core of their appeal.  Cheri Johnson once wrote on a story of mine that I had created a character she loved; now I just had to make him do something she hated—or something that put him into danger. That suggests something more essential than nuance, complexity, contradiction, blemishes.  Maybe the answer I am looking for, the thing that explains the lack I feel in Damages is this: a character is a quest.  Despite some of our best actors doing some of their best work, Damages remains a case.

Glower Power: The Darker. More Interesting Sixties

My most common thought about the Sixties is, "Oh shut up about the damn sixties." If you're my age, the decade is often a club with which one is beaten and an exercise in bullshit nostalgia. But recently there have been three attempts to get at some of the decades' real artistic accomplishments and, what's really interesting, to get at the microscopic headwaters and polluted tributaries of art: Bob Dylan's memoir Chronicles, Zachary Lazar's novel Sway, and Todd Haynes' film I'm Not There.  To treat them properly would require one of those lengthy New York Review of Books style essay-reviews.  I'll treat them improperly, with these few notes:   

All three of these attempts push their chosen form around.  Function bullies form, as is proper.

Chronicles I ignores the expected timeline and the biographical greatest hits and explores three seemingly much smaller artistic incidents. Sway fictionalizes the 1960s Rolling Stones ( as well as a Manson family member and the film maker Kenneth Anger) because the book needs the freedom of fiction.

And now I'm Not There, which we just rented last week, uses multiple actors to portray Bob Dylan and multiple modes (bio, fiction, black and white, color)  to tell its story. Scrambled and gliding, it feels like a Dylan song circa Highway 61 Revisited.

What are the elements of this version of the Sixties: the scrambling suggested by drugs; the cultural richness of traditional music; the energy of an electric, high-octane world;  the smear of war and murder.  It's art that shakes hands with evil or, at any rate, the thoughts we're less proud of.

It is flawed art: the puns and juxtapositions and musical cascades in mid-Sixties Dylan sometimes seem to hide hateful, two-dimensional songs. Like A Rolling Stone spits at a cartoon slumming rich girl; The Ballad of A Thin Man mocks a nameless philistine.  The Stones circa Beggar's Banquet are often misogynistic and sometimes just lame.

But there is something in the handful of albums Dylan and the Stones created at their peaks that I keep coming back to and which I judge all other music by.

Laugh-In With Yelling: Pardon The Interruption

As is the case with so many of  the things I like the most, I haven’t ever been able to say why I like the sports talk show Pardon The Interruption so much.

But I had an insight when I accidentally juxtaposed mentions of Laugh In and PTI last week: PTI is an opinion show that subverts opinion shows.

I can’t stand most staged pontificating, political and sports talk radio and partisan blogging.  To call this culture partisan is too timid. It is a culture that enjoys hatred; it is a culture where hatred delivers the pleasures of a sport and the comfort of a family. In the case of political opinion, it is a culture that actively stunts intellectual growth and disdains common decency, all in the name of its nasty little principles. 

And along comes PTI, where Kornheiser and Wilbon yell at each other all the time but also constantly mock, subvert, tweak, and goose their righteousness. Like Laugh In, they have running gags.

This, from the hilariously detailed wikipedia entry about the show:  “Kornheiser spent an entire week mocking the pronunciation of the planet Uranus.” 

We are flawed, grasping, goofy creatures. Sometimes, we transcend our limitations and arrive at something like truth. But it’s nice to be reminded that we’re usually just talking crap.   

Donkey Wrong

It may be impossible to parody donkey basketball because donkey basketball is one of the weirdest ideas ever implemented.

Added Thursday:  I post these things because I am somehow drawn to them and I just sorted out what I only sensed last night:  the pathos of the horse who had to be put down at the Derby flowed under this otherwise wacky segment. On the (to me) almost unmissable Pardon The Interruption on ESPN, the guys were talking about whether Congress should investigate horse racing and Tony Kornheiser who is against Congressional investigation into other sports, who enjoys horse racing, and who "is not a PETA guy," summed up the pathos in three words: horses can't speak.

2-Year-Old Donkey Called Up To Pro Donkey Basketball League

R.I.P Dick Martin

Rowan and Martin's Laugh In created unreasonably high expectations of adult parties.  The jokes were lame at the time, and age horribly, but the delivery was so much fun it didn't matter.  Dick Martin was one of those guys you just look at and start laughing. There was something giddy, and perhaps zen, about  him.  Humor surged inside him, and the jokes just surfed on top.   

Look what the A.V. Club has called it a cult classic

I was on record more than a year ago as saying that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang rocked.  Along with E's favorite, The Lion In Winter, it is a part of our very misanthropic Christmas.   (It should also be noted  that, like Chandler Bing, I do mist up over the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, which I own.)

Read the  AV club article.

Don't Trust Anyone Over 300: Rewatching "Miri" from the original Star Trek

I don’t think I’ve watched a full episode of the original Star Trek since the 1970s.  So when I downloaded some early Friday evening–E was visiting some friends–I was actually able to see them with something like fresh eyes. 

The oddest of them was “Miri.”

1.    Strange new worlds, my ass.

The crew happen upon an exact replica of earth.  Not “earth-type” planet.  Earth. As in “hey, look there’s Winona.”  Star Trek loved alternative history, the most narcissistic of fantasies. But also my favorite. The only question more interesting than “What’s next?” may be “What if?”

2. And the moral of the story.

It turns out that this version of earth was stripped of all post-pubescent life by a man-made plague, which resulted from an attempt to extend life.  Kirk is attacked by Grandma Addams. For guys in a spaceship, the Enterprise crew is strangely anti-hubris.

3. Selective linguistics.

Just as our language has evolved from Chaucer’s English so has “Grup” evolved from “Grown Up.”  All other words have remained stable for three centuries.

4    Kirk’s charms are even creepier than usual.

See absence of grown ups. The planet is inhabited by children who you would think would be even more feral than they are, given that their parents died horribly three centuries ago.  The eldest of these children is a girl named Miri. Since she is “becoming a young woman,” Kirk flirts with her to get information. Given the crisis everyone is facing, this is understandable. But then he has her clean tables and sharpen pencils.  Adding to the off-the-charts cringe factor are also some scenes with Yeoman Rand, designed by the script-writers to induce jealousy.  Yeoman Rand complains, “On the ship, I always was trying to get you to notice my legs.” Really? That was a problem?  To call the female crew members’ skirts short is to acknowledge that the top/loincloth combo was, in fact, a skirt.

5. The revenge of the set decorators.

On DVD, you can see–and confirm–some details that are positively Lynchian. At 23:38 note the window tableau:  a glazed, red-smeared harlequin bust impaled on a trombone; a strangely hoisted doll with mussed hair.

6. And yet. 

The characters are chuckle-headed but sympathetic; while the science tends to be a little elided, the plots follow an engaging pattern of problem, complication, resolution that reminded me of the Horatio Hornblower I read last year.    

Noble Savages

E pointed out that if we had watched The Savages before The Darjeeling Limited we could not have enjoyed The Darjeeling Limited. 

She’s right. Compared to the Savages, which tells the story of two adult children putting their father in a nursing home, the Darjeeling Limited feels just feckless.  People talk about a death, but no one grieves. People claim to be on a journey, but it feels like a prank.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes the Savages so good, but it’s easy to see when you compare it to other movies.

Compare the Phillip Seymour Hoffman professorial character to the Dennis Quaid professorial character in Smart People. The Quaid character, though no fault of his own, fits Pauline Kael’s definition of a caricature: a character with the responses built in.  Oh, I bet that curmudgeon isn’t such a curmudgeon by the end of the movie, dontcha know.

Watch the scene where Phillip Seymour Hoffman has his chin in a sling, And here you see what separates the Savages from a kind of adolescent, video game inspired moviemaking in which ratcheting up conflict seems to be the point.   

Watch the scene in the “nicer” nursing home parking lot where the Laura Linney character explains why she wants their father to be admitted, then Hoffman explains why she’s full of shit, and then reality chastens Hoffman.

I want to call The Savages grown up, but that’s like saying it has plenty of riboflavin.  It's better than that. It's funnier than that.

God, I hope I haven't overpraised it.   

And isn't Laura Linney the most underracted actress in America?