In one of the Bronx neighborhoods Ray Scheider drove so recklessly through in chase of some drug-dealing punks, a dysfunctional family of Italian-Americans sweated out the tough times - times that inspired Twisted Head, a hilarious and cutting memoir by its youngest progeny, the actor and writer Carl Capotorto.

You may remember Capotorto as “Little Pauli” in The Sopranos, but there was nothing of the mythical mob glamor about his childhood in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. Capotorto was the youngest child of a family dominated by a father with a violent temper, and the book’s title comes from the literal translation of Capotorto - “twisted head” - which seems so perfectly suited to the temperament of Philip Vito Capotorto.

The Bronx of Carl Capotorto’s youth was still recognizable in the Bronx of the 1980s, where I arrived as a rookie political reporter for The Riverdale Press. Congressman Mario Biaggi, the pornographic Globe Theater, the shops on Arthur Avenue, Bronx Park and even Cappi’s Pizza and Sangweech Shop under the el on White Plains Road are all familiar.

But equally familiar is the close-in third generation immigrant American experience in New York; mine was Irish and based around Yonkers, but Capotorto’s experience was the same as many of the kids I knew who grew up around Dunwoodie in the 60s and 70s. I recognize the characters from their families, and from my own - the always-simmering pot of “gravy,” the uncles and their tales of European war, the trips to Playland, the allure of “the city,” the music, the cars, the long family gatherings.

Capotorto keeps his personal memoir moving and although his father’s anger provides the dramatic core of the story, the episodes with the women in his life - his mother, his sisters, his grandmother - give Twisted Head much of its richness and humor, as does the author’s struggle with homosexuality and acceptance in adolescence. The story never tips into either self-absorbed pathos or two-dimensional ethnic and sexual cliche; Capotorto deftly balances the details of the city and the times with the story arc of his family and his life.

In the end, despite the author’s evident personal struggle, you’re not at all sorry for Carl Capotorto’s early life in the Bronx. It was, after all, a rich childhood filled with picaresque characters that gave Capotorto a rare gift: a story well worth telling.

But as good as Hamm is physically - and he does seem literally cut from the paper doll outline of Matthew Weiner’s storyboards - his character slips and slides, particularly in this second season as the rest of the Sterling Cooper ensemble cast rises so surely. At times violent, at times wistful, at other times seemingly confused, Don Draper doesn’t so much drive the action on Madison Avenue as drift along with the current; we won’t speak of the strangely-locused Ossining sub-drama, a distracting bit of melodrama (tinged with faux existentialism) unworthy of the soaps for which Sterling Cooper’s non-superstars wrote copy.

In her magazine column, The Times’ Virginia Heffernan took to worrying aloud for the Hamm character:

It’s Jon Hamm I worry about. The star of “Mad Men,” Hamm is a swoon-inducing, physically graceful actor — a through-and-through Hollywood person, without much training in New York’s Method-derived acting styles. As he remembered it in a panel discussion in January, the first scene he shot of “Mad Men,” in which he plays the evasive and cruel Don Draper, required a flurry of stage business. Cigarettes had to be lighted, rooms had to be crossed, shirts had to be changed, ties tied. Hamm says he struggled with this manual ballet, but anyone who saw the first season of “Mad Men” can testify that he made it look natural. And not only natural but also intensely expressive: Hamm in the first “Mad Men” season made midcentury pantomine both nervous and beautiful, elegant actions that sublimated Draper’s anarchic energies.

But this season, the Draper character is losing his touch, and the part doesn’t require so much dexterity. Draper loses control of his car and his reputation; he shows less Rat Pack finesse. The camera seems mad at Draper, and it gives him long, stung looks, during which he has almost nothing to do but be. Sometimes these are cutaways from when another character is dressing him down, flattering him or exposing him. Sometimes they are close-ups on moments of self-doubt. But Hamm, the actor, does not seem to like the silence, and he has a hard time staying steady as Don in the quiet interludes.

At these times, an incongruous vulnerability presents itself in the reptilian Draper. Accidentally, Hamm seems to flash on an exaggerated look of melancholy or distance — as if the actor were thinking, I don’t want to be this man. Perhaps Hamm, like many Hollywood stars, wants to be liked above all, and Draper is written as less likable in nearly every episode. If the show is to mature and last, Hamm will have to risk being hated.

The demands of what Heffernan quotes Vincent Canby as defining as the “megamovie” on television - that is to say, holding a cinematic emotional center week after week after long, long week - may not be possible for Jon Hamm in Mad Men. James Gandolfini, as Heffernan says, “was responsible for ensuring the show’s continuity and coherence even as everything perpetually changed around him: directors, writers, cast, crew.”

But I’d suggest Gandolfini had a huge assist not just from his supporting cast (most notably Edie Falco as Carmelo Soprano, who carried an emotional weight a hundred times greater than the cartoonish Betty Draper character) from one key decision made at the outset: setting The Sopranos in northern New Jersey and shooting all its exteriors there. If Matthew Weiner had taken one key aspect of The Sopranos with him to Mad Men, it should have been Chase’s move to liberate a big dramatic series from the soundstage.

Gandolfini inhabited a real landscape, from the bottom of his suburban driveway to downtown Newark to the various Turnpike exits and strip malls. They helped to make Tony Soprano real. Not only is Jon Hamm in super-stylized costume, he’s also very much on the super-stylized set. Quite a bit of the real New York on 1962 still exists, but we never see Don Draper walk its streets. Instead, we get obvious Hollywood backlot exteriors and banal gaffes like Draper parking his car right in front of Sterling Cooper on near-empty Madison Avenue, and Betty riding horses in what is obviously Southern California.

Tonight, it looks like the ever-developing cast at Sterling Cooper is evolving still; in this second season, the best moments of Mad Men have some out of the workplace. That’s beginning to seem real. I’m suspending my disbelief from 9 to 5. But not fully from 10 to 11 every Sunday night. Because they haven’t given me New York.

The new first novel by Justin Peacock, A Cure for Night, doesn’t really pack the same chilling portraiture as Donaldson’s non-fiction account of the early 90s, but it does build a cinematic and dramatic story that contains the same elements of crime and race and failure in the public housing projects of New York. At its center are two public defenders - Joel Deveraux, a former white shoe litigator whose personal drug habit destroyed a highly-paid career, and Myra Goldstein, a feisty and committed defense attorney - drawn together over a shooting in the courtyard of a Brooklyn housing project.

The story unfolds mostly in dialogue and it’s got a ripped-from-the-headlines feel that ties it closely to some of the best crime procedurals on television. Peacock’s story is undoubtedly authentic, based on his own experiences as a defense lawyer, and he reveals a healthy disrespect for a criminal defense system that seems like a revolving door of poorly-tried cases and quickie plea bargains.

The crime at the center of the novel forces a view of the racial realities of life in inner city public housing that is free of any blinders: a white college student is killed during a meeting with a black drug dealer. Naturally, the murder hits the tabloids. Peacock’s lead character is weak, only semi-skilled, and easily pushed about by the currents in his life - he’s a follower. Luckily, he’s paired with the best of the Brooklyn Public Defender’s office, a young woman driven by both her belief in the law and her own abilities.

It’s a procedural whose best moments lie not in the highest drama, but in the mundane turning of the court calendar and the droning job toward a verdict. It’s a darkly liberal book: some victims clearly have no chance in the society Peacock presents. But it’s also a tale that is frost-bitten by a cold existentialism; this is life in New York for many people and it will always be so. The title is, in a way, a kicker to a journalist’s front-page story - there really is no cure for the night.

1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes
4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Click here to see why these books were challenged. And read one of ‘em. That’ll show the bastards.

Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don’t mean that we are a better people than any other society — these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts — but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle “time out” from a frantic era of hypertrophic growth, compared to the storm we’re sailing into now.

Fortunate, indeed - and now that the entire financial system is shaking, I’d like to recommend Kunstler’s 10th novel, World Made by Hand, a sharp cinematic imagining on everyday American life after the failure of the energy grid.

I read the book between trips upstate this summer, which was perfectly appropriate, as World Made by Hand unfolds in the sleepy town of Union Grove, New York along the Hudson River north of Albany - a region down on its economic luck even before the apocalyptic events hinted at in Kunstler’s tale. But as Robert Earle, a former software engineer, attempts to balance his base own survival with more human pursuits in a town edging toward violence and anarchy, we glimpse that world through his eyes.

The New York State Thruway as a walking trail. Abandoned strip malls, gas stations, and shopping outlets. The absence of mass media, except for the occasional Bible-thumping when the power cranks the radio back on. The real meaning of horsepower. In short, it’s like a field trip to an Amish village or a 19th century agrarian recreation - but littered with carcasses of automobiles, commerce, mass production and media. The Hudson is again the super-highway it was when the French and British fought for it. All food is produced locally. Drugs are scarce to non-existent, and contagion sweeps away whole generations. Recycling isn’t a feel-good fad - it’s survival. And violence in the absence of real law threatens the last of civilization.

The people in World Made by Hand are thin; they’re hungry, sure - but there’s not too much meat to their characters, either. Women fare the worst: feminism has not survived, and they are reduced either to a means of production or sad, wandering specters. The men aren’t much better, because life has become cheapened and introspection has as much validity as 50-inch Trinitron.

The most affecting character is the cultish preacher Brother Jobe who comes to town to build a new community of believers, only to find personal tragedy. Jobe has seen trouble all over the east coast, and knows that his chances in upstate New York are his last; although things are bad, they’re not as bad as elsewhere - there are terrorist bombs and lynch mobs across the land. The failed nation is rarely addressed directly, but unfolds in conversation - like this one between Earle and his new live-in lover, a young widow of Union Grove’s increasing violence:

“The world has become such a wicked place,” she said quietly, just a statement of fact

“There’s goodness here too.”

“Where is it?”

“In all the abiding virtues. Love, bravery, patience, honesty, justice, generosity, kindness. Beauty too. Mostly love.”

“I’m afraid sometimes that we drove those things out of existence.”

“No, we carry them in our hearts. They’re always with us.”

“I don’t know what’s in my heart anymore. It’s too dark to see.”

“Light follows darkness.”

To a writer and soap-box shouter like Kunstler, World Made by Hand is not so much of a warning as a promise. Yet, you can also sense a yearning from the author - who lives, after all, in Sarasota Springs - for a return to that earlier time. Indeed, there are portions of the new life in Union Grove that are admirable; the reliance on a communitarian movement for survival is one. A closer tie to the means of food production is another. You get the feeling the author himself thinks he might do well in the reinvention years he hints at in economic/political blog posts circa 2008.

This economic spasm is a result of the credit explosion in all its variety and complexity and derivation. Kunstler’s bleak future stems from energy policy. Yet the events of these last two weeks can be tucked neatly into the back story for World Made by Hand. It’s a good read. And it sure as hell beats watching the Dow or sorting through the bailout paperwork.

Over at AMC’s Mad Men site, there’s a short interview with Morse and i think it captures some of the enthusiasm around creating the Sterling Cooper atmosphere. Live-blogging starts at 10 tonights, so in lieu of a longer post, here’s an excerpt:

Q: Do you feel like you’re stepping back in time with Mad Men?

A: Not really stepping back in time, but there are many values and things in the script that are reminiscent — secretaries and typewriters, etc. — of my days when How to Succeed [in Business Without Really Trying] was on Broadway. So it is a reminder of things past, a little Proustian. Otherwise, it’s fun wearing a goatee and a mustache and having my hair plastered down. It’s fun to look completely different than you are. They write Bert Cooper very cleverly. He’s an oddball. He walks around with no shoes, his office is completely decorated in early Japanese stuff. He has these fun, odd quirks.

Q: Is it true you visit the set, even on days when you’re not filming?

A: That’s right. Exactly. I love to go into the studio on days when I’m not even doing anything. It’s like my senior club. Some people go to senior centers, well I go to my senior center. I think I’m the oldest of the group — the only one who has lived through this period. I just love this show: I show up and hit the marks and say the lines and go home. And then show up the next day with the paper and visit with everybody and have a free lunch.

Don Draper sucks the life out of the tasty little agency storyline slowly unfolding at Sterling Cooper; in truth, the man simply doesn’t have a real job. He shows up, sucks down nicotine, beds a client, tosses back a few drinks, and turns his thumb up or down on creative ideas like some early 60s Madison Avenue caesar. He never works. Not like Darren Stevens. Not like Jim Blandings. Hell, not even like partner Roger Sterling or sales director Duck Phillips, two far more authentic characters who you can genuinely sense have an eye on the agency’s bottom line.

And not like the band of ambitious junior people: Peggy, Sal, Paul and Pete. These people have plans. They have schemes. They have principles they’re willing to compromise in order to satisfy ambition. They’re interesting.

Betty Draper is a pouty mannequin; Don a brooding extra. They’re bored with their lives, having imagined more, but nothing seems to drive any real crisis. Moreover, they’re not likable, in the way that draws an audience to follow them. Sure they’re bad people. So were Tony and Carmela Soprano. But in The Sopranos, Tony and Carm dominated the center - the vast and fascinating ensemble moved around them. Don and Betty…no. Maybe they’re too pretty. Or maybe the writing isn’t up to scratch. And nor are they the literary successors to Frank and April Wheeler of Revolutionary Road, either. Yates told a suburban horror story in the guise of everyday life - he meant to horrify, and he did. (I’ll be curious to compare Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as the Wheelers in the upcoming Sam Mendes flick to the cardboard Drapers).

So I’m watching Mad Men in the edges, and enjoying it more. Peggy’s ambition is growing and she’s willing to play by the boys’ rules to succeed. Pete’s feeling needed beyond his family’s wealth. And Duck’s dealing with the make-or-break midlife in the killing fields of midtown. These people feel real and their dialogue works; further, they wear their period outfits and settings well. Last week, Peggy’s move on the men’s club turned on her break room conversation with Joan - she got tough advice and she took it. Pete renewed his partnership with Peggy. Roger brokered a deal between the feuding Duck and Don. Paul took a chance on a big creative idea.

Take out the Drapers’ boring boredom, and you had movement - you had drama, in the collision of ambition and opportunity.

With a crowd of family in tow in a sea of bustling fine art tourism, I took in the astounding Joseph Mallord William Turner retrospective at the Met last week, jostling through the headphone-wearers to gaze at a few of the finer works at some small length. Turner was an artist of empire, a prolific careerist who grew up as the son of a barber and wigmaker in London and set his sites on becoming the acknowledged heir to Europe’s great classicists. Yet his toil over a very long career spanned the tail end of the enlightenment, ignited as war swept the western world, and lasted long after, well into the industrial spread of the 19th century. And although Turner aimed for classical landscape fame, his later worked presaged expressionism in their layering of color and homage to light.

What a talent, and what range as well. There are the great historic paintings, of course - the Trafalgar images, The Field of Waterloo, and his near-journalistic work covering the great fire that destroyed the parliamentary campus in London in 1834. There are classical landscapes in strict diagrammatic patterns, and classical scenes. But there were two groups that stood out as favorites. One comprised everyday scenes of life in Turner’s times - times that also inspired the writing of a range of my favorite writers, from Austen and Dickens to the brilliant maritime series of Patrick O’Brian. The other was the later work, painted when Turner’s eyes were failing him, works that critics of the day dismissed as “the fruits of a diseased eye and a reckless hand.”

I stood longest before Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, exhibited by Turner in 1835 and on loan from the National Gallery, where I’d seen it before. It is a media-sized oil painting of the waterfront at Newcastle, a portrait of every day toil in small boats and small ships. The sky is moonlit, almost like day, and the light and clouds form a sort of visual tunnel toward open water. The ships have that classic Turner lyric of beauty discovered in hull and sail, but it’s no longer the age of Napoleon - or the age of pure sail, either. Coal feeds steamship boilers, ships move under power, and the factories are open. There is work to be done even at midnight. Smoke sends its industrial signal into that brilliant sky, obscuring some masts.

You think: it would be the 1960s before England’s skies grew cleaner again. The coal-powered London fog of Sherlock Holmes was a wisp in Turner’s painting, but it was beginning to swirl. Jane Austen is dead, Charles Dickens had just started his journalistic career, and Wellington was his dotage. Victoria was a princess yet to ascend, Darwin was in the Galapagos, and on these shores, Texas won its independence and Mark Twain was born. I love images like this that blend a “wonderful range of mind” like Turner’s - as famously described by his rival John Constable - with a clear turn of history. Sometimes you can see so much, and come away the better for it.

Highly recommended: J.M.W. Turner, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through September 21, 2008.

But indulge me for a moment in my 1962 worship. That particular week is fertile territory that I’m sure the writers will explore. On the 14th, Jackie Kennedy gave a television tour of the White House that has become an iconic piece of black and white footage. On the 20th, John Glenn made his historic flight in orbit of the earth. The next day, the first New York Mets reported for training camp - and I reported for duty at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville. It snowed buckets, as it did that Valentine’s Day (see how obsessed Matthew Weiner really is by checking the weather on tonight’s episode). There were a bunch of ‘62 babies with names you may know: Darryl Strawberry and Jodie Foster, Roger Clemens and Axl Rose, Jim Carrey and Tom Cruise, Jon Stewart and Sheryl Crow, Ralph Fiennes and Jon Bon Jovi.

Lance Mannion suggests that Mad Men is not about the time it’s set in, that “all the attention to period detail is a trick.” But I’m afraid Weiner and his crew - portrayed as accuracy-obsessed in the Times magazine - are trying too say something about the mythical Camelot years in New York, and failing. As Lance suggests, the inclusion of all the “fads of the time are meant to place us in an alien world.” And to this New Yorker, it is alien; that is to say, outside of the costumes, Mad Men doesn’t look like the New York of the 60s. They’re trying a bit more this year: promotional pictures have Don Draper in the real Grand Central Terminal (not Station, as so many Hollywood writers mistakenly describe it - Grand Central Station is the subway stop below the grand and glorious terminal). I found myself on the Times Square shuttle this morning, and it’s all decked out in Mad Men promotional decals: ersatz 1962 Grand Central in the subway in Grand Central - makes the marketing mind spin. Robert Morse’s Bert Cooper would never have greenlighted the campaign.

Over at Basket of Kisses, the best of the obsessive Mad Men blogs, the tea leaves for Season Two have sprawled naked in the bottom of the cup for months. And the proprietors don’t like our house theory of Mad Men, either. “Deb and I are a little sick of hearing how this is a show where nothing happens,” wrote Roberta Lipp. And may be she’s right - stuff does happen. Accounts are won and lost. Affairs stir, fire, and fizzle. Health erodes. The elevators run up and down. Here’s the complete list, a real service for those who need reminding.

Still, as my Mad Men blogging partner M.A. Peel argues, “it’s still the perfect summer fare, and the sixties are the place to be.” That’s why we’re here! We may think it’s a plot-starved train wreck of a drama - but it’s a damned good-looking plot-starved train wreck of a drama, and we enjoy the critical company. “How many times can you watch the show’s star, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), furrow his brow, smoke an herbal cigarette while pretending to smoke a real one, and take a long, pensive pull on a fake alcoholic drink, and convince yourself that this is real drama as opposed to a televised version of an interior decoration magazine?” asks Brendan Bernhard in the Sun [via Jim Wolcott].

Here at newcritics, the answer is clear: all season long.

So let’s get back to February, 1962. The Beatles have signed with Brian Epstein three weeks earlier and are playing the Cavern. Bob Feller and Jackie Robinson have just been elected to the Hall of Fame. There are 500 military advisers in Vietnam. Gene Chandler’s Duke of Earl is the big single. And there’s trouble - of some sort - at Sterling Cooper.

After an attack by “malware” hackers last week, newcritics looked more like Bonnie & Clyde’s bullet-sliced sedan than the functioning cultural colossus that it is has been over the past year and half. Well, the site’s back up, folks, and it seems like most of the data is intact. Finger crossed, of course. A huge note of thanks to a (thus far) silent newcritics supporter, Wordpress expert Larry Aronson - a great man indeed who helped us with the scarred and riddled chassis, and got this thing running again (with an assist from Howard Greenstein). Let’s all thank Larry. And speaking of a hail of bullets, this thing’s running just in time for Lance’s cimematic shin-dig tomorrow night. Fingers crossed, of course.

Quite the line-up. His Mayberry theme and Dick Van Dyke work open two of the great sitcoms, instantly recognizable. But Hagen also scored Call Me Madam and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, played trombone with the big bands of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Ray Noble, and wrote Harlem Nocturne as a tribute to Duke Ellington.

So in Earl’s whistling honor, a list of sorts - please add to it. My favorite television theme songs, in no particular order:

- The Rockford Files (Mike Post)
- Sanford and Son (Quincy Jones)
- The Honeymooners (Jackie Gleason)
- The Dick Van Dyke Show (Earle Hagen)
- The Bob Newhart Show (Patrick Williams)
- The Odd Couple (Neal Hefti)
- The Andy Griffith Show (Earle Hagen)
- The Sopranos (Rob Spragg)
- The Office (Jay Ferguson)
- Underdog (Ortala le Clerc Germaine)
- Dragnet (Miklos Rozsa)
- Chico and the Man (Jose Feliciano)
- Miami Vice (Jan Hammer)
- Fat Albert (Herbie Hancock)

Classic 1974 Keith Richards interview.


Keith is busted in Toronto, knocks out some covers.

Angie, 1973.

Hand of Fate, 1974.

Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, 1975

The medical tic particularly detracts. Yes, we know all about smallpox and the gory separation of limbs from wounded bodies in naval settings - we learned at the literary knee of Stephen Maturin, after all. What made John Adams a great man, always my favorite Founding Father, wasn’t his exposure to nasty colonial doctoring. His greatness originated in the rare combination of political philosophy with political tactics, wrapped into a sturdy bulldog temperament. Giamatti’s Adams occasionally captures this quality, most memorably during the too-short portrayal of negotiations of the Second Continental Congress. But too often, this Adams looks like a second-tier player, a utility infielder among revolutionaries like Washington, Franklin, and even Jefferson.

In reality, Adams was the indispensable political engine; Washington regarded him as the Revolution’s most able political actor and for good reason. The latest episode portrays virtually his entire European diplomatic forays (there were two in the 1770s, the series conflates them) as personal failures, massive wastes of time. In fact, as David McCullough’s fine biography - upon the which the HBO series is based - conveyed, Adams provided a valuable counterbalance to Franklin’s more easy-going diplomacy. While Franklin undoubtedly knew the French, Adams pushed for the fledgling republic’s immediate needs; without Adams’ urgency, Franklin’s success was hardly guaranteed.

In any event, Franklin is an impressive presence in the series, thanks to the performance of Tom Wilkinson, who really owns the character. Laura Linney as Abigail Adams is equally strong, clearly the dominant actor in Braintree; she brings home life in 1770s Massachusetts to life, and allows the occasional flavor of early American feminism to slip through the farming and cooking and cleaning and sewing. Washington remains a ghostly enigma, even played under heavy makeup by David Morse. And I’m looking for more from Stephen Dillane’s Jefferson, particularly as a political adversary later on - and an aged correspondent and close friend still further down the revolutionary road.

Did I mention the series is gorgeous? The sets, the design of the long shots, the locations, and the the costumes - top notch, sometimes stunning. Yet, three episodes in I still prefer the John Adams of George Grizzard in the mid-70s PBS mini-series The Adams Chronicles, or the fiery (and more musical) Adams brought to life by William Daniels in the 1972 film version of the Broadway musical 1776 (”for God’s sake John, sit down!) - two more memorable portrayals.

Still, I’m along for the longer ride - next up is Adams’ appointment as the new U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James. I can’t wait to hear what he says to King George.

His death also removes another one of those classic 60s and 70s television personalities from the talk show set, a singular face and voice and style that those of us who can feel those years mourn the dearth of these days. From his half recline, one arm thrown back over a corner of the chair, a pen clutched in the other, Buckley unpacked slow-moving questions on Firing Line - big slow righty curves compared to today’s ‘roid-raged speedballers - and he inhabited a public world of curling cigarette smoke in black and white, talking world that included names like Mailer, and Vidal and Capote. Jim Wolcott captured that televised eminence perfectly:

Carrying his clipboard like a discus, Buckley slouched into the studio glare of the Jack Paar show or reposed on the set of David Susskind and uncoiled his cobra act, mesmerizing the audience and his antagonists with a battery of mannerisms, his eyes widening with a gleaming twinkle just before he went for the kill. He was a master of the tangential counterattack, to borrow a phrase from Manny Farber, not only removing the stuffing and mummy wrapping from modern conservatism but endowing it with a fizzy bonhomie that enabled him to entertain friendships with liberal foils such as John Kenneth Galbraith and others. Unlike a industrial-strength grievance collector such as Norman Podhoretz, Buckley didn’t scrounge for opportunities to cast former friends and allies as enemies and infidels in order to play the role of injured party; he believed in the social emollients of courtesy, banter, and prompt drink refills during the intermission pauses between political jousting matches. His interrogation technique on Firing Line was a marvel of making a guest feel at ease before knocking him off his pedestal, his elaborate foreplay so stylized that it became a comic staple for impersonators ranging from David Frye to SCTV’s Joe Flaherty, who didn’t miss a trick conjuring Buckley’s trademark deployment of fountain pen, flicking tongue, protruding rabbit teeth, sly grin, and reclining posture–his sitting in the interviewer’s chair at such a steep incline that he nearly dropped out of camera frame.

It is true that Buckley was a polite man (I once exchanged pleasantries about winter weather and subsidized rail travel with him while waiting out a long delay at the Stamford train station), and he must have recoiled at his so-called heirs on talk radio - the smearing, hateful Limbaughs and Hannities - and the inbred pep squad at The Corner and their giggles about smiley-faced liberal fascists. His humor, too, rose far about the Beavisonian tenor of the right’s great comics; asked what he’d do if he was actually elected after a quixotic run for New York City Mayor in 1965, he responded: “Request a recount.”

He was also, per the excellent obit by Douglas Martin in today’s Times, prolific:

The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 newspaper columns, titled “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-size books. His collected papers, which were donated to Yale, weigh seven tons.

That discussion, from the National Review to Firing Line to his many books and columns and appearance on endless talking head programs, was an open and spirited one that many of us with a little living experience miss in today’s landscape (this blog excepted, of course). Jane Hamsher has it, I think:

I hate to sound like a geezer but after having listened to a bunch of people born in the 70s and 80s lecture me about what an asshole William F. Buckley was, I want to say one thing.

There is a qualitative difference between Bill Buckley and the conservatives of today. I know he had shitty political opinions and the reason I do is because he told me so. Buckley openly embraced racist, McCarthyesque views that he not only acknowledged but defended. Which made it possible to have meaningful, substantive debate between the left and the right.

That isn’t possible with today’s conservative leading lights, the Straussians who philosophically believe it’s their obligation to determine what you should think and then tell you whatever they need to in order to get you to believe it.

So, respect on the left for the Oxford-clothed, button-downed lion on the right as he leaves the field. Well, Buckley’s view of civil liberties took an unfortunate political turn early in his career (he recanted them 30 years later), leaving a stain that will always ruin his perfect preppy suit. One conservative blogger’s paean to ole WFB elicited this pithy alternative biography from a commenter named angryclown:

Please. Buckley supported Joe McCarthy and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Privileged upper-class twit spends a lifetime promoting the interests of same, dies. Yawn.

[Cross-posted from my inner lair].

Bonus footage - 1969, Buckley vs. Noam Chomsky on Firing Line - no programming like this any more:

I love the names, and I love this community. It began very simply and a year later, it remains so.

You know, newcritics is non-influential. It is non-profitable. Indeed, by any standards of the day it is non-successful.

And yet a year on, we gather to revel (some in person, some virtually) in the minor media glory - but the sweet karmic profit - of this little blog.

Why? Because we like each other. That’s obvious in the courteous style of our site, and in the ongoing conversation each week. But we’re also genuinely interested in what each of us has to say about media - about film, television, music, theater, and books. And in our careers, our disparate lives, a place to turn for some polite middlebrow conversation over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee is a very nice thing indeed.

Newcritics began after a dinner at Algonquin roundtable in the fall of 2006. The dinner brought together some political bloggers and activists to celebrate the Congressional victories by Democrats that year, taking back the House and Senate (I don’t mean to offend any Republicans hanging about - you’re most welcome). But as we sat around that table, a funny thing happened - we didn’t talk about politics very much. We talked about TV shows. And novels. And actors. I wanted to continue that conversation, but the odds of recreating that roundtable in modern times were pretty slim - so with a little fiddling around with wordpress and a little leaning on some friends and blogging buddies, that gathering became newcritics.com about a year ago.

This is an experiment, not a business. And it’s an experiment in satisfying part of our inner lives. The external ones are packed enough, but I believe many of us don’t devote enough time to our own enjoyment of art, of beauty, of sight and sound and words. The bloggers who are newcritics have vastly different experiences in life, but we all love those things - that’s the common thread - an old movie, a new drama, a single song. And this little experiment gives us just enough breathing room to explore that inner self through discussion, through connecting with others.

Most of us are old enough to remember the days when everyone was most certainly not a critic - at least not a critic with any audience outside their own kitchen or the office watercooler. Some of us have been professional critics of a sort - Jason and I were digital media critics, for example - and I know many of our writers have work that has appeared elsewhere over the years - for actual pay. Yet, we now write for each other - 400 posts over the last year, 4,000 comments in the broad discussion, 50 bloggers sharing their voices. Newcritics is indicative of a semi-professional passion that really drives social discouse online - the real discourse of depth and respect - it is, in some ways, a real cause. In this cause, we all love art and media - movies, television, music and books - and despite our busy lives we congregate to review and discuss them, fairly seriously and with good humor at this little website I’ve clumsily constructed.

In our very small, non-influential way we’re contributing to the support of art - and the appreciation of media by a wider group of thinking people. That’s why the Paley Center is the perfect place to mark our first year – what happens there is important. On a large scale, the Paley Center leads the discussion about the cultural, creative, and social significance of television, radio, and emerging platforms for the professional community and media-interested public. Newcritics is the virtual grassroots complement to that mission, informally, from post to post, comment to comment, feed to feed.

And that’s about as serious as I can get about newcritics, which after all began as an experiment and continues as an experiment. Thank you for joining me over the past year, and let’s keep that conversation going.

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Some of the newcritics bloggers have put up anniversary posts, answering my question on one piece of media - as usual, it’s an iconoclastic show and emblematic of what newcritics is (and isn’t!) - great stuff. Here they are:

Little Steven’s Rock and Roll Radio

More Inspirations: Mike Jones, Busta Rhymes, D-Block

Pretty in P!nk

Lost Lust

Once in a Lifetime

Shrunken Heads Revisited

R.I.P. The Wall Street Journal

A Bit O’ Media…

What Is The Question?

A Reason to Go On Living: The Poor Boy’s on the Line

The Reblog Button

]]> http://newcritics.com/blog1/2008/01/31/the-yearling/feed/ http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/12/30/jet-boy-flies/ http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/12/30/jet-boy-flies/#comments Sun, 30 Dec 2007 20:12:06 +0000 Tom Watson http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/12/30/jet-boy-flies/ David Johansen swung into Babylon on Friday night at Irving Plaza, the dank old Polish Army Veterans headquarters that has stood at 15th Street and Irving Place since 1914 - or about as long, in living memory anyway, as Johansen’s grinning Our Gang mug has looked out over New York audiences with that front stoop familiarity that makes him the living dean of local front men. Johansen turns 58 next week and over the last couple of years has added yet another persona to his long career of poses - the old glam star who put the remnants of the band back together, one more time.

The band is, of course, the New York Dolls, a veteran team where the dead members outnumber the living originals by a score of 4-2 and where the term “creative hiatus” stretched to three decades. Now they’re back on the circuit - three years after their reunion concert and the almost-immediate death thereafter of bassist Arthur Kane from leukemia, and a year removed from the release of the big comeback record One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. In their hour-plus shows these days, Johansen and his lone surviving bandmate, the former taxi driver Syl Sylvain, belt out a tight and pleasant variety of old “hits” - if the Dolls can be said to have had them - and new numbers, which are far better than old fans expected them to be. The new band includes veteran session guitarist Steve Conte, bassist Sami Yaffa (formerly of Hanoi Rocks), and drummer Brian Delaney.

But in truth, it’s a David Johansen gig - and, I suspect, an attempt by an artist of some real repute and accomplishment to capture a measure of the historic role for his band and their work that he undoubtedly believes they deserve.A couple of years ago, I wrote about Johansen’s long career, and I think the overall point still holds up. Here’s some of that retrospective:

David Johansen came in from the cold, sauntered to the bar just inside the door of The Bottom Line, leaned back, and raised his dark sunglasses just enough to gauge the size of the crowd for the second set. He cast a quick, professional’s eye on the audience - about three-quarter’s full, age range 30s to 50s, with a decided paunch and an air of disposable income. Satisfied, he dropped the shades back over his eyes and glided back to the dressing room.Later, he sat with complete comfort and nonchalance in an armless bistro chair on the edge of the stage, plunking clumsy 7th chords on a smooth Martin D28, fronting perhaps the tightest band of his long, quirky, and distinguished musical career. Together with the Harry Smiths, he ran through 90 minutes or so of American blues songs, from the Delta to Chicago to Mercer Street. His hair was long, and he sported a ratty beard. The old personae were nowhere: the vamping lipstick killer New York Doll, the happy slimy loungeman Buster Poindexter, the gliding bandleader Mick Jagger wannabe of the David Johansen Band. Every few songs, he pulled out a small brown bottle and threw down a quick slug.

“Saint John’s Wort,” he croaked, with the same crooked grin and unchanging Staten Island croak that has charmed New York audiences for more than three decades. “Gotta keep my spirits up.”

That was six years ago, while the Bottom Line still breathed and Johansen was soaking up the critical success (and small sales) of the first of his two roots records with the Harry Smiths - David Johansen & The Harry Smiths. It was indeed a brilliant recording, bringing the snarl and staged boredom of Johansen’s New York roots to rural blues music. I nearly wore the thing out on CD, and even now, it’s in heavy rotation in the blues folder of my trusty iPod. From Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Katie Mae” to a new cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talking” - a quarter century after the Dolls punked it up - Johansen and his sidemen gave straight but stylized version of songs that showed complete mastery of country blues in an ode to the man who produced the landmark Anthology of American Folk Music. (A second volume, Shaker, was just as good).
But the boy always did have taste.

He screamed his way into glam rock royalty with the exuberant “aaaaaahhhh-ooo - yeah yeah yeah” overture to Personality Crisis, the rollicking lead track of New York Dolls - which might well have been named “Straight Outta Staten Island.” The Dolls mixed a healthy disregard for the excesses of rockstardom in the early 70s, with a taste for Chuck Berry, Sonny Boy Williamson, and other greats. They dressed like chicks, owned downtown, fought, did drugs, and rebuilt a dead New York City music scene almost single-handedly. Their sound was driven by Johansen’s vocal and stage presence and Johnny Thunders insane bouffant Puerto Rican Jimi Hendrix guitar persona. Together, they were the Jagger-Richards of Mercer Street. But within three years, they were gone - in quick, ugly fashion - their second and last record, the aptly titled Too Much Too Soon serving as a sloppy swan song.

As the Doll with the most saleable personality and business sense, Johansen quickly moved on, capturing ever larger audiences with the David Johansen Band. By the late 70s and early 80s, he was filling downtown caves like The Ritz, hanging off the stage like a cab-driving Stephen Tyler, howling “mah people, maaaah people,” to 1,500 Heineken-sucking bridge and tunnel kids every evening. The high point was opening the chaotic Who-Clash Shea Stadium show in 1982. But the chameleon continued to change. That same year, in the basement of the since-toppled Ferris-Booth Hall at Columbia University, he rolled out a new character - Buster Poindexter. The lounge lizard act sold well - who could forget the good times at Ceasar’s Palace and the prime time of Dick Clark’s Rockin New Year’s Eve. Yeah, it was a scam - but Johansen still explored some interesting musical territories while counting the cash. And his band for much of the era, the Banshees of Blue, featured some terrific talent - the effervescent Tony Machine, and vocalists Soozie Tyrell and Patti Scialfa, later Bruce Springsteen’s wife/bandmate. When it played out, Johansen let his hair back down, and sauntered back into the blues singer role.

And that’s where he belongs - from the start, Johansen has always plumbed the blues, whether the up-tempo rock of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley to the country blues of Furry Lewis, Charlie Patton, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, to the exhuberant hits of Wilson Pickett and the Four Tops. The man’s got an ear.

There is a strong case to be made that Johansen’s remarkable career deserves a larger audience, and more acclaim - that over more than 30 years, he has achieved “renaissance man” status among New York’s teeming mass of media and entertainment hopefuls. He’s flirted with the movies, landing character roles in other people’s star vehicles - the ghost of Christmas present in the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged, goofy cop Gunther Toody in Car 54 Where Are You, and Richard Dreyfus’ sidekick in Let It Ride. There have also been lead and supportive roles in a slew of independent movies, leveraging Johansen’s permanent stature as a downtown icon. Johansen is also a painter of some repute - “painting helped me from going nuts and drinking myself to death” - and critical winning praise for expressions that “fall between between primitivism and sophistication.”

And that pretty much nails Johansen’s musical career, the source of his true legacy. There are plenty of throwaways; post-Dolls, Johansen understandably made the big stretch for the big record sales. His biggest hit (as Poindexter) remains the ubiquitous wedding band number “Hot, Hot, Hot.” He never made the arena scene, but did score some serious Atlantic City and Las Vegas bucks. For my money, these are must-haves in the Johansen canon (in order of release):

New York Dolls - 1973 - A top 100 rock all-time rock album, the brief power of Johansen-Thunders et al is in full bloom of youth. “Vietnamese Baby” and “Jet Boy” are timeless personal favorites.Too Much Too Soon - 1974 - “Babylon,” “Human Being,” and a handful of terrific covers. Great Shadow Morton production - it swings.

David Johansen - 1978 - A brilliant entree as solo artist, some of the best songwriting of career, especially the nouveau Motown. “Cool Metro” is the standout rocker, along with classics “Funky But Chic” and “Frenchette.”

David Johansen Group Live - recorded 1978 - Captures the post-Dolls excesses of the Johansen entourage, with guest spots by Dolls Thunders and Syl Sylvain.

In Style - 1979 - A quieter follow-up, with great tunes like “Melody” and “She” - early hints of Buster.

Buster Poindexter - 1990 - The debut of the party bandleader, highlighted by the Furry Lewis standard “Good Morning Judge” and “House Of The Rising Sun” (and of, course, “Hot, Hot, Hot”).

Buster’s Spanish Rocketship - 1997 - Almost completely overlooked record, this is a wonderful record of original Latin tunes written by Johansen and Brian Koonin. Backed by the Uptown Horns, Soozie Tyrell, Tony Machine and others, the album is subtle, bright, and intoxicating - with some of the best melody writing of Johansen’s career. Faves: “Iris Chacon,” Mean Spirited Sal,” and “Let’s Take it Easy.”

David Johansen & The Harry Smiths - 2000 - Yet another persona is born, the white John Lee Hooker from Mercer Street. Just a brilliant record - gorgeous recordings of “Darling, Do You Remember Me?” and “Delia.”

Shaker - 2002 - Great follow-up, with renditions of “My Morphine” and “Kassie Jones” among other tasteful choices. The band - Brian Koonin, Larry Saltzman, Kermit Driscoll, and Keith Carlock - may be the best of Johansen’s career.

As Johansen enters his late-50s, where are the accolades? No tribute album, no David Johansen songwriters series on VH1, no all-star video concert, no Hall of Fame nomination. And while Johnny Thunders and Joey Ramone now score memorial concerts on a semi-annual basis, the very much alive Johansen continues to saunter on down the road. Summer before last, he grabbed the mic on a converted ferry out of South Street Seaport and sang the blues to Wall Street types and other youngsters on the Blues Cruise. It was a nice pick-up band - blues legend Hubert Sumlin on guitar, The Band’s Levon Helm on drums, Jimmy Vivino and Mike Merritt on guitar and bass. As we coasted under the Statue of Liberty, Johansen slipped into “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” It was the anthem of a blues sideman, who can’t do anything else.

Friday night at Irving Plaza - now renamed, strangely, Fillmore East - the new Dolls covered a bunch of the old Dolls, and Conte’s guitar licks punched home memories of Thunders better than Sylvain’s clumsy version of You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory. They slid from there into Lonely Planet Boy, an old favorite, and it almost seemed like David Johansen was asking for the kind of late-career respect that other acts with lesser achievement and and influence have attained:

Oh can’t you hear me callin
I’m a thousand miles away
And I don’t wanna stay
I’m thinkin words I gotta say

Cus I wanna be there witcha
And I know what to bring
I remember, from the days
You got over, everything

Note: the very cool picture up top came from the Flickr feed of Beth Conard. More cool pictures of the Dolls, and other stuff around New York here.

Matt Bai’s piece captures Steve Gilliard’s life beautifully, and leans on his contribution to a national discussion from his perch in East Harlem. As readers know, I was a big Gilliard fan - we were acquaintances and occasional correspondents. Steve was generosity personified, generous with links and advice; when I launched newcritics.com in January, he eagerly signed on here as an occasional contributor, planning to write about his beloved classic rock. Sadly, those few, short posts came during the early part of his final illness - but they struck me as yet another example of how it was impossible to buttonhole Gilliard. He was an angry anti-war progressive with a love for military history, a black guy who dug the Beatles and the Stones, a generous, warm-hearted misanthrope. I think Bai captured the inherent conflicts in Steve’s life that made him so interesting:

It was a life both short and loud. What began with a bad cough just after Valentine’s Day became a spiraling infection that ravaged Gilliard’s vulnerable heart and kidneys, and he spent most of his last four months hospitalized. The identities he kept separate for most of his 42 years collided in the days after he died; the few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off. They must have been confused when Gilly’s online pals, sickened by the way some right-wing bloggers were gloating over his death, advised them not to disclose where he was buried, out of fear that someone might deface the site. The grave, like Gilliard himself, is known only to a few.

Please read the whole piece. I was saddened to come upon it this morning over my second cup of coffee, but also thrilled that Steve’s prominence in our ongoing discussion was so well-recognized.

Whenever tragedies like this happen, the survivors always paint the deceased in bright colors. To be expected and not to be dismissed. But please trust me friends when I tell you that Holly was one of the sweetest, most positive individuals I’ve ever known. Holly faced some serious adversity in her life, but it never seemed to drag her down. She remained optimistic and upbeat no matter what. I don’t know how she swung that, but I’ll always be amazed and impressed that she did.

Our best wishes to Dennis and his family.

Oh, there are plenty of songs in it - originals and those recorded by a variety of artists for the inevitable soundtrack. Some interesting choices too. But the story never connects to the songs, the movie’s plot arc of Dylan’s life - told in six intertwined parables with six different actors portraying Dylan-like characters - doesn’t account for the music, for the brilliant synthesis of American music that makes Dylan the most important singer-songwriter of the last half century.

What we get, in amazing photography and some fine performances, is pretty much a glorified and well-shot episode of Behind the Music, the old hackneyed story of every star: the backstory, the self-invention, the rise, the drugs, the women, the fall, the comeback, the discovery of faith…and so on. At the end of it, we’re all wowed by the detail and the ambition of it, but we don’t know any more about Bob Dylan than we did going in - or about ourselves, for that matter.

By now you know the basic conceit. There is no “Bob Dylan” in the film, but six figures who take a part of the Dylan life story - or myth - and run with it in sequences that pay homage to the directors of the 60s and 70s that Haynes clearly admires: Richard Lester, Fellini and Bergman. Cate Blanchett plays the arrogant mid-60s pop star icon of Don’t Look Back repute, and in terms of mimicry and style, she most clearly captures the actual Dylan; it’s a fine performance, the portrayal of a brittle and mercurial star fleeing his voice-of-a-generation pedestal by attacking his own reputation.

It’s the best role in the film, along with Marcus Carl Franklin as the 13-year-old black teenager who calls himself Woody Guthrie and wanders the backroads of Americana singing roots music. The kid’s love of music and his self-invention as a 1930s Okie folkman in the late 1950s United States comes the closest of any of the Dylan characters to connecting the story with the music - it’s about telling stories, of course.

The other Dylans don’t have much to work with. The eldest, Richard Gere, wanders what seems to be the old sets of Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Dylan’s forgettable film acting debut. It’s all bizarre medicine show bread and circus with no real insight into Dylan’s connection to the past. Heath Ledger is some kind of hunky Sonny Crockett of a Dylan, cheating on his French artist wife, railing about women in general, and stumbling around the paparazzi - Mark Wahlberg covered that territory in Rock Star.

It’s all very stylish and the sheer effort shows how - even in 2007 - we owe so much of what we regard as pop culture to the 60s and 70s. In Time, Richard Schickel argues that Haynes was determined to avoid the cliches of Hollywood biopics, but:

He just dresses them in different clothes. Most basically, this is the same old-same old — visionary artist struggles successfully to realize his particular vision, gets famous, gets laid, gets in trouble with the whole celebrity thing, tries to escape the demands of his exigent fans (wow, do they hate it when he turns from the acoustic to the electric guitar at the movie’s version of the Newport Jazz Festival shocker), ends up sort of beloved, sort of intact, but sort of unfulfilled, too. And sort of distant. Partly that’s because none of the multiple identities the movie explores is given time to establish itself.

It’s true that the wild melange of styles and the quick cuts from era to era, fake Bob to fake Bob, doesn’t make for a strong narrative. But who really cares about the story of Dylan’s life? What we care about is where the music came from, what it means for us now. Indeed, I took to heart the motherly advice of a woman caring for young “Woody Guthrie” - live in in your own time.

At the Times, A.O. Scott called I’m Not There a masterwork, and he loves it for the very rambling qualities that left me interested, but generally unmoved:

I would not subtract a minute of this movie, or wish it any different. Nor do I anticipate being finished with “I’m Not There” anytime soon, since, like “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” it invites endless interpretation, criticism and elaboration. Instead of proposing a definitive account of Bob Dylan’s career, Mr. Haynes has used that career as fuel for a wide-ranging (and, if you’ll permit me, freewheeling) historical inquiry into his own life and times. In spite of its title, “I’m Not There” is a profoundly, movingly personal film, passionate in its engagement with the mysteries of the recent past.

I’d subtract about 30 minutes,and I’ve never seen the mysteries. Seems to my Dylan’s been saying for 40 years to look at his output, at his production, at his songs for any “answers” scholars and admirers may be looking for. What mysteries are left, in any case? These days, Bob Dylan is omnipresent - from Apple and Victoria’s Secret advertisements to his endless 25-year road show that keeps the artist in front of live audiences constantly. There’s the brilliant XM radio show of roots music and pop tunes, and his wonderful 2004 biograpy Chronicles (which I hope will be the first of several volumes), not to mention Scorsece’s fine No Direction Home, the other film Dylan cooperated in the creation of.
Then there’s the music - his current music. Dylan’s Modern Times, from last year, is the mature work of an active artist in touch with his own times. I don’t know of a single artist who could’ve written this complete and perfect description of our times, from Workingman’s Blues #2:

There’s an evenin’ haze settlin’ over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s gettin’ shallow and weak
The place I love best is a sweet memory
It’s a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad

Live in your own time, indeed.

Note: Jason counters with his (more positive) review here.

The Deal, written and produced by Peter Morgan, came to America via HBO (I Tivo’d it) and was directed by Stephen Frears, who brought us The Queen in all its Mirrenesque splendour (yes, I’ll spell it that way, thank you) and it stars David Morrissey as Brown and Michael Sheen once more as Blair. Indeed, I wondered momentarily if Frears and Sheen filmed it as part of The Queen set-up, the way Peter Jackson did The Lord of the Rings trilogy in one, long shoot.

In the same week, I also watched the conclusion of a bit of mildly entertaining fluff from BBC One called The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, about the unlikely rise of a middle-aged woman from supermarket manager to Number Ten on the back of a purple women’s revolution. It aired on PBS’ Masterpiece Theater, which has really stretched its modifier in recent years - this was no master work. Just a Parliament-based soap opera with a fairly dour, depressive cast. Nothing like the fabulous House of Cards, for instance, a 1990 series that chronicled the rise of a ruthless British conservative to power in a post-Thatcher Britain. The Andrew Davies script of a Michael Dobbs novel was written for Sir Ian Richardson, who inhabited the Shakespearian villain, Francis Urquhart, to a rapacious turn. They don’t do Whitehall like that any more.Mrs. Pritchard purports to have its main character’s purity as the beating heart of the series, a woman whose inherent goodness is suddenly discovered by a nation yearning for more than the usual Labour vs. Tory slugfests. But this female Obama is as clueless as they come, naively taking her key supporters and cabinet members at face value while they connive and cover up, and while her family disintegrates. Oh, it’s a sloppy affair and the viewer never suspends disbelief.

The Deal, on the other hand, feels like the real thing. The best scenes are filmed in claustrophic spaces - the tiny shared office of newly-elected MPs Brown and Blair, the stifling and smokey train coaches to Scotland, the middle class kitchens and sitting rooms of the English, and the angular pubs and wine bars of London. This isn’t soaring politics; Frear only shows that in clever video clips. This is deal-making or, more accurately, a fine portrayal of the kind of personal compromise that is a necessary ingredient to attaining political power. As Jim Wolcott said:

…for an American audience, the internal battles of the Labour Party are as obscure and muffled as the rustlings in a coat-check room. Yet my interest never flagged and I admired how Morgan and Frears communicate through informal scenes of joshing in close chambers and primping for the spotlight how policy, personality, and local/national politics subtly interweave, and how loyalty or the lack thereof are revealed by the angle of someone’s head or the height at which they hold their drink glass.

It’s a very mature view of the political process, and was particularly stirring given the debate in this country’s Democratic Party about what constitutes a real liberal or a true progressive in the run-up to the 2008 election. And it shows too the degree to which, even at the highest levels, politics is so damned personal.

A Peek into the Writers’ Room by MA Peel

Comedy in Character by Self-Styled Siren

The Comedy of The Office: Humor, Familiarity and Ambition by Tom Watson (that’s me)

Chekhov’s Cup of Coffee by Lance Mannion

It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre by Rory Mach

The Essence of Comedy: Leslie Nielsen’s Umpire Moondance by Levi Asher

Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia by Lance Mannion

The Shamus Takes ‘Manhattan’ by The Shamus (of course)

Woody Allen: Television Days by David Bushman

Wil Sylvince: New York’s Funniest Comic by Jason Chervokas

The Late, Great Mitch Hedberg by Viscount LaCarte

A Short History of British Radio Comedy by Steve Bowbrick

Funny Ha Ha? by Dan Leo

My Favorite Comedy, Explained by Jon Swift

The Best Stand-Up Comedy Albums by Jason Chervokas

The blogathon was so much fun, we’re gonna do it again after the first of the year. Music? Movies? You tell us.

Also, you may have noticed a new live event in these parts. With Mad Men in hiatus, newcritics veteran Claire Helene and newcomer Jennifer Krentz teamed up to live-blog the start of the fourth season of Project Runway, the ultimate fashion-model-designer snarkfest. I missed the event (being confined to the sickbed) but loved reading the play-by-play this morning. Look for more next week.

Just a quick update: we now have 44 bloggers on newcritics, with 365 posts and 3,329 comments, contained within 34 categories. Oh, and welcome the other new newcritics David Bushman and Kelly Hadous.

When it arrived on NBC three years ago, The Office seemed certan to be a soft and slender knock-off of its British ancestor, the riotous and brilliantly cruel Ricky Gervais combination of mockumentary and sitcom set in the non-careerist backwater of Slough, an exurb of London. The UK Office denizens sliced and diced the various British working castes, and made the social climbing and career grasping of David Brent the comic fulcrum of the series.

It was funny just on the writing and the brilliant performances; but it was deadly if you got the inherent British disapproval of social and economic ambition.

Bringing it to America presented problems with the premise. We’re supposed to adore ambition, and reward it with fame and fortune in our media channels. Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, the manager of a dismal regional sales operation for a second-rate paper company, was sketched as ambitous, hard-working, sales-oriented, and wiling to do almost anything to succeed. A hero, in the conventional wisdom of the American national character. We’re supposed to love guys like Michael Scott, whose ambition makes our economy grow.

But Michael Scott is a hilarious, pitiable character - the middle manager we ridicule with joy every week - and the conventional wisdom with regard to our societal love for ambition is wrong.

In television comedies, ambition works in one way only - as a foil for some yucks, a funny recipe for disaster. Ralph Kramden’s start-up schemes, Frank Burns’ Army ambitions, Barney Fife’s big-city law enforcement dreams, Ted Baxter’s hopes for a network gig, and Michael Scott’s careerism - they’re all of a piece: the creation of hopes to be dashed in the name of being silly.

In sitcoms, the “good” people are those who accept their surroundings, their hometown, their current jobs, and their fate. The silly people are those who try and break out, start something new, or worst of all - leave. The situation itself doesn’t accept change very well; for the ambitious people doing the writing and the acting, the characters have to stay put. It’s a practical consideration.

But it’s not the whole story, I think. So much of humor comes from pain - slapstick, fall down and get hurt pain and the pain of trying and failing, of not being good enough, poor sap pain. Failure is funny. As Dan Leo said a couple of days ago in this blogathon: “Comedy is pain and frustration and crushing embarrassment; in other words comedy is much like real life.”

Except that in real life, the penalties for a pratfall or a career blunder are far more painful. Television comedies remove that pain. Cliffy is always welcome back at Cheers, and Homer still gets his wife and house back in Springfield. On The Office, Michael Scott - the butt of so many jokes as the serial aspirant he is - always has that office to return to, that wonderful ensemble cast, that situation.

It also makes us feel better. Let’s face it, the best and longest-running sitcoms are also substitute families for their fans, a half hour at a time per week. We laugh at their lives, and it helps us to get on with our own. The familiarity opens up situations because we know what to expect from the characters and their surroundings. And so when Michael Scott has another brilliant management idea, we anticipate how Jim and Pam will conspire as a couple, how Dwight will add to craziness, and how the rest of the cast will react in their semi-predictable ways.

Last year’s entire plot arc - no, the non-romantic one - involved Michael’s corporate ambitions within Dunder Mifflin. He aspired to that big management job in New York; as did several other characters. And yet the show pulled Michael (and Jim, it turned out) back to Scranton. This was no surprise at all - a successful Michael Scott working his way up the corporate ladder has no value to an ambitious comedy writer. For the show to succeed, Michael Scott must fail, Dwight must return to Dunder Mifflin, and Jim must set his career goals a bit lower.

Then we can get on with the yucks again.

This week’s episode (before the writer’s strike) perfectly illustrated the tension between ambition and comedy. Michael determined to engage in a wilderness survival test, the perfect metaphor for the business world.

Dwight: “Do I believe that Michael possesses the skills necessary to survive in a hostile environment? Let’s put it this way. No, I do not.”

And, of course, he does not pass the test, returning to the friendly confines of the regional paper office - where Jim, the young salesman, has been changing things in his place with disastrous results. Jim’s professional ambitions have taken him nowhere in three years, despite his obvious talent. In The Office, he needs to keep his practical jokes and straight-man quips in, well, the office. And so he must suffer the counseling of his mentor, the failure Michael Scott.
Michael, in full bombastic avuncular mode: “Don’t worry, in ten years you’ll figure it out.”

Jim, surprised glance at the camera: “I don’t know if I’ll be here in ten years.”

Michael with the punchline: “That’s what I said.”

There is a moment in Alan Bennett’s wonderful novel in miniature, The Uncommon Reader, recommended here by Maud Newton, when the royal literary figure in question realizes the joy of discovering a favorite writer has been hiding in plain sight, awaiting only discovery and a hundred or so quiet evenings. A few years ago, I had that delicious immersion in the work of Richard Russo, a famous modern writer whose work I’d lazily ignored since his first novels of the 1980s.

Discovered, the Russo canon became a sprint through the lives of drifters and losers in a string of upstate New York towns, a pleasure-filled reading dash along the broken-down mainstreets of Mohawk and North Bath and Empire Falls. Russo used the economically-depressed real world of u