“That newcritics crowd,” as it was known in some corners of the cultural blogosphere, came together original over politics at the old roundtable in the back of the Algonquin Hotel, grew via Wordpress, and convened virtually around esoteric filmfests, live-blogging Mad Men, and arguing about old Stones records. What a great group, especially the core of regulars: the gracious and fab M.A. Peel, who was most nearly my partner in organizing this temporary salon, the prolific Lance Mannion and the generous and witty Blue Girl, musicologists Jason Chervokas and Dan Leo, the serenely cinematic Siren and the erudite Robert Stein, the culturally agile NYC Weboy and the peripatetic Neddie Jingo, book maven extraordinare Maud Newton and comedy guru Dennis Perrin, Kathleen and Manny Maher (the Nick and Nora of our set), and the TV fashion bloggers Claire Helene and Jennifer Krentz, rock and roll wild men Tony Alva and the Viscount, the caustic Brendan Tween and film fanatic Chuck Tryon, to name just a few of the more than 50 bloggers who posted over there (not to mention outside linking support from Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott, a fan of the cultural scrum, and a hearty group of regular commenters).

What a crowd! And it was a privilege to invite them to newcritics every week for a couple of years, and kick the cultural zeitgeist around the saloon for a while. I loved it. But the party’s moved on. To Facebook and Twitter and other venues. What we did there was for and of its time - entirely worthwhile, but always time-limited and impermanent. A long conversation, but one with an end.

When I wrote CauseWired last year, I included a brief description of newcritics.com in the book, because I’d gained valuable insight into online group dynamics, and because I saw that conversation itself as a cause worth supporting. I still think it is - but it’s also clear that it will happen elsewhere. In some ways, the glory days of personal and immediate blogging have passed newcritics by; but in another sense, it’s really just part of a continued evolution in social media. The conversations I’m having on Facebook and Twitter with some of the very same people who used to hang out at newcritics are every bit as good as the ones we had at this particular web address.

So let those conversations continue. And thanks for stopping by.

[Note: we'll keep the archives up for a bit, then my guess is the site will go the way of all flesh. Comments are still on, but require full registration, so I don't expect many. I'll see you all at the next roadhouse.]

Just to be clear, I’m not a Trekkie… more like a very interested bystander. Star Trek was a formative experience for me - both the series and the initial 5 films - largely because of my cousin, Galen. He taught me the appeal of science fiction, the worlds of imagination it opened up (Galen’s artistic impulses were opened up through drawing spaceships), and tthe way science fiction could make a better world… and us, better people. I still believe in all that. And it’s why, Trekkie or no, I think Star Trek has a lot to live up to.

Star Trek takes the familiar elements of the legend - there’s not a lot of American science fiction where “myth” and “legend” so readily apply - and shakes them up: yes, it’s got the rainbow(ish) cast, the “can’t we all get along” vibe, the tension between logic and gut instinct… but mostly, it’s got a freshness and a willingness to modernize that should be celebrated. This is how “remakes” really should be remade. And full credit, clearly, goes to director JJ Abrams.

Star Trek starts with a bang and never lets go: we begin on the Starship Kelvin, which is confronted by a monstrous, clawlike spaceship and an unfamilar black hole. In short order, the Kelvin is under attack, is captain taken hostage and killed, and the first officer made Captain must evacuate the ship… including his pregnant wife, about to give birth.

The father is George Kirk, and the son is James Tiberius; and in 10 minutes the film has shown its understanding of the lore of Trekdom, and asserted its ability to reshape it. This James Kirk, a fatherless son, is a more troubled, rebellious soul than the original, taking outrageous chances (he wrecks an Uncle’s Corvette at 12, sending it over a cliff and nearly hurtling to his doom), and less certan of his destiny.

Destiny still calls, and the new Captain Christopher Pike (that’s another call to Trek types) serves as father figure and mentor to young Kirk, getting him to Starfleet Academy, where he falls in with the familiar array - a medical expert named McCoy, a communications student named Uhura, a recently graduated Vulcan named Spock. All of them (and a couple of navigators, Sulu and Chekhov) wind up on Pike’s USS Enterprise, and are called to deal with a familiar challenge - that clawlike spaceship, which turns out to be a Romulan mining ship… from the future. (oooh…. aaah…)

By the time Leonard Nimoy(!) appears to fill in some of the blanks, the shape of things is coming clear - and while it may seem like a cheat to have “a wrinkle in time” account for manhandling of the past, it’s also a brilliant stroke.  By giving us the familiar characters, yet subtly shifting their realities, we really are starting fresh. And the fresh start feels right - this film has the energy and brashness of its youthful ensemble, yet it also conncts, respectfully and deeply, to the timeless elements that have made Trek such a cultural touchstone.

As Kirk, Chris Pine has the hardest, and biggest, shoes to fill, and given the room to make his own Kirk, he finds a new sort of bravura and brashness, while not losing sight of the character’s fundamental decency. Shatner would - and should - be proud.

But the film in many ways belongs to its Spocks - Nimoy, reprising his old role with grace and dignity… and Zach Quinto, taking up the reins with every bit of the skill and elan one would expect. As a recent convert to Heroes, I’ve known for months that if anyone could make a new Spock work, it would be Quinto, whose performance as Sylar holds that show together (and Heroes, where George Takei and Nichelle Nichols have turned up, clearly acknowledges its history, too). Quinto too, has room to reshape the role of Spock… but wisely, hews closely to the original. The payoff, when the two Spocks finally meet, is entirely earned. And worth the price of admission.

The other roles, familiar and identifiable, benefit from fresh, youthful presences - James Cho (Harold of Harold and Kumar) is one lucky bastard to get Sulu by being in the right place at the right time. He’s great… but lucky (what, was James Kyson Lee busy, for instance?). Zoe Saldana adds some sass as Uhura, and she’s stunning eye candy… but she needs more to do (much as Nichelle Nichols always did). Simon Pegg makes a great Mr. Scott, Karl Urban (so far) an okay McCoy. But it’s probably Anton Yelchin - recently moving into adult roles - who steals the show as Chekhov.

Of course, none of this would matter if the world surrounding them didn’t work as well as it does - Star Trek is more than an ensemble show, deals in larger themes, bigger issues. The best advance Abrams has made is to think, in a modern way, about how to layer new ideas - mainly about psychology and human interaction - into such familar territory; added to the familiar motifs of justice and fairness is a profound sense of loss, whether its Kirk’s for the father he (now) never knew, or Spock’s for a homeland he can never have back, one where he never entirely belonged.

To be fair, Abrams isn’t entirely perfect - his action sequences suffer from overly fast edits, and sometimes key characters and incidents get lost in the melees. The world of Starfleet he envisions is very, very white… not a good sign - Star Trek’s adaptations over the years became more integrated not less, and in some ways, what Abrams does feels, truly, like a step backwards in this way, and in others. It’s not to dismiss what he’s accomplished… but he could have tried harder, done more. That leads, naturally, to the “what now” question that hangs over these “reboots” generally, though Abrams is at once in a position to go almost anywhere, and yet clearly respectful of what got us here. I have my quibbles… but I trust him. For now.

Truly hardcore Trekkies, of course, will never be satisfied… and why should they be? It’s their story; the rest of us are interlopers, hangers-on, aliens. Few people, even the most visionary, could separate themselves from the pressure; that Abrams has managed that nifty trick - and turned back the clock - is impressive. Visionary, even… and now he can, boldly, go.

Crossposted from NYCweboy.

Sharing that quality with Watchmen, Wolverine is more frustrating because the joyous, fizzy buzz of comic book adventure is much more obvious within it. And Watchmen, at least, had the sense to make things consequential: the “save the world, but lose your soul” aspect of its moral feels more consequential than Wolverine’s sense of personal drama trumping all else. Lonely man goes off to soldier alone… surely someone in a producing role noticed that the ending is, well, kind of a downer.

In these “dark comic” days that’s surely intentional, but in Wolverine’s case, the darkness just can’t contain the film’s aspirations. Partly that’s a function of the film’s leading actor - Hugh Jackman, giving it his all, is just not that into darkness. Unlike, say Christian Bale, whose icy depths offer a “love my dark side or fuck off” kind of choice, Jackman’s showmanship is more oldschool and eager to please. That’s not a flaw - Jackman’s star quality carries Wolverine and overcomes much of the slack parts - but it’s why Wolverine will never be mistaken, say, for The Dark Knight or Batman Begins. Bale is the darkness… Jackman shines too brightly to stay there.

Much of the problem here in Wolverine is the script - too many characters, too much exposition, too many hidden double and triple twist motivations. By the last couple of “surprising” revelations, it’s too much to care about, and no actor can or should have to sell as many contradictions as a number do here.

Telling the tale of Wolverine’s origin, we learn that Logan has a brother (Liev Schreiber), and both have indestructability among their powers. Beginning in 1845, the film quickly takes the pair through every major American war up to Vietnam, then moves them into a special unit of mutants (though the script doesn’t make this entirely explicit) that eventually burns most of them out. The head of this unit - Commander Stryker - seems to have ulterior motives in his dealings with all of them, which are ultimately revealed in the big confrontation on… Three Mile Island.

Points for creativity on that last bit, but by the time we get to the Evil Lab on the Nuclear Island, we’ve been, literally, all over the place; And the buildup just doesn’t lead to a great payoff: there’s a sameness of size to the action sequences (all big, all over the top) that undercuts the sense of rising tension, and the Evil Lab is kind of a letdown - neither so scary as to seem threatening nor so brilliant as to make our mad scientist seem like genius… just your usual dumb villain’s lair (you can just see the receptionist - “Master Villain’s Warehouse of Evil, how can I direct your call?”)

It’s tempting to blame Liev Schreiber for what’s not working here, but by the end he’s really not the problem; sure, he’s chewing scenery like mad in one of his least subtle performances… but someone has to, and Schreiber, like Jackman, has the kind of acting skills to give a big character in an exercise like this just enough subtext to add interest. Together he and Jackman make much of the most preposterous elements work better than they should.

No, the more likely problem is lack of chemistry between Jackman and Lynn Collins, as his love interest Kayla. Collins is just too sweet and simpy in the role, and Jackman - without offering crass speculation - works better when his female lead is more active, agressive, tougher (like Nicole Kidman in the underrated Australia). Wolverine slackens considerably during the height of their romance, and never entirely recovers. Nor does making love for her Logan’s prime motivation really give any urgency to the unwinding of the third act.

What energy there is really comes from male bonding and man-on-man tension (draw your own conclusions; I’m not saying a word… or the word). Will.i.am doesn’t add much, but he and Jackman have an easy interplay; Ryan Reynolds has great presence in the early going, but is ultimately wasted. Better still is Taylor Kitsch - still bigger and better (and prettier) than the small roles he’s getting in these ensemble pieces - who matches Jackman’s sly underplaying (and his foxy looks) and nearly steals the proceedings. It’s in these moments that a smarter, better, more consequential film seems to exist… only to get smacked down by dumb dialogue, pointless destruction, and killing characters we care about to keep the ones we don’t.

Why Gavin Hood is directing this is a bit of a mystery - was Tsotsi really that good, or really preparation for a summer blockbuster? - and may go a long way to explaining Wolverine’s muddled intentions. The man-boys who usually direct these affairs wouldn’t try so hard to be emotionally affecting… but they might be more right not to try.

And Jackman, pumped up beyond all reason, ought to get credit for trying: his amped up presence, manly but less consciously beautiful than Australia, is a real transformation. Few actors could find, in Wolverine, a gentle, yet driven, man… and it’s a credit to Jackman’s intelligence and performance skills that he pulls this off without making the softer elements feel weak or… well, soft. Unfortunately, he can’t outsmart, or out-act, the weakly scripted events here.

What’s lost ultimately, is why an audience would want this film: wanting to know how Wolverine became such a butch badass, the film can only offer, weakly, that he came that way… but hey, he’s also saddled with tremendous emotional pain… which would be compelling if he could remember what it was. He won’t, and neither, unfortunately, will most of the audience. Or at least, I bet they’d like to forget about it… if only they could.

Crossposted from NYCweboy.

Then decide.

By the high cultural standards generally ascribed to America’s generational poet, Dylan’s unexpected new album Together Through Life is light and occasionally pleasing, an interesting fourth record in a blues-based “comeback” that begin with his Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind in 1997. To Dylanologists and obsessive critics, it’ll never make the canon.

But to anyone scuffling through the the hard rain of springtime, 2009, the new Dylan record is a low and pleasing rumble of traditional blues and front parlor numbers, latched to the back-end of a cross country semi hauling one hell of a groove across the American wasteland.

If this were the work of an unknown veteran, in other words, the critics would be patting themselves on the back for their tremendous taste and ability to spot a new talent.

About that groove: the guitar work of Heartbreaker Mike Campbell and the accordion of Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo weave a border cafe filigree of melody and rhythm, while Dylan’s touring band - bassist Tony Garnier, drummer George Recile, and Donnie Herron on banjo, steel guitar and mando - lay down a rich bed of sound that’s part vintage Chess sides and part nouveau Texas swing.

Dylan’s voice has never been scruffier, a lonely warble grooved with years aural scars. But in other ways, his singing hasn’t been this good in a decade. It’s crisply enunciated. And the singer sells the songs completely, even though most of the lines turn downward these days at the end, the antithesis of the characteristic upward snarl of “how does it feel?”

This 67-year-old Dylan knows how it feels and the songs - mostly co-written with lyricist Robert Hunter - tell small and personal stories. Dark tales with dark humor and lost dreams: Dylan knows it’s late in his game (and perhaps ours as well). “I feel a change comin’ on and the fourth part of the day’s already gone,” he sings over happy upbeat blues on the record’s best song. Then he adds: “I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver and I’m reading James Joyce/Some people they tell me I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice.”

That he does. Most critics thought Dylan had finished his late-career blue trilogy (which also included Love and Theft from 2001 and Modern Times in 2006), but as Dylan sings in Jolene on the new disk: “I keep my hands in my pocket, I’m moving along, people think they know, but they’re all wrong.”

Chico Hamilton began his career in the 1940s as sidemen to greats such as Lester Young and Billie Holiday. He became a band leader in the ‘50s (making a brief but memorable appearance in the all-time-great movie Sweet Smell of Success). He has worked with greats from Eric Dolphy to Larry Coryell, and he has never slowed down.

The very fine “Twelve Tones of Love,” on the Joyous Shout! label features Hamilton doing what he does best: assembling talent both young and old, composing songs and laying down flawless rhythm for the band. Fifteen of the 18 songs are new and written by Hamilton. Unlike many marquee-name drummers, Hamilton doesn’t put his drums out front. There are no drummer solos here; no crashing intrusions; just an intelligent, shifting tempo that both drives and complements the other players.

While a few of the songs on “Twelve Tones of Love” have an elegiac feel, more of them are playful and teasing. Hamilton loves to shift moods with rhythm changes, and somehow (years of practice, no doubt) makes it always feel just right. The players he’s assembled here take turns in the spotlight and are clearly having loads of fun. Some of the highlights on this album are “Nonchalant,” a quiet, expressive blues; “Penthouse A,” a laid-back bossa nova vamp; and “Steinway,” with a cool Afro-Cuban rhythm.

To do some research for this review, I checked out the Wikipedia entry on Chico Hamilton. Under “genre,” it lists: cool jazz, west coast jazz, progressive jazz, soul-jazz, hard-bop, post-bop, crossover jazz, jazz funk and boogaloo. That about covers it, and with the exception perhaps of boogaloo, you can hear it all on “Twelve Tones of Love.”

For one thing, I stand for the idea that all of the stars should be rescued from being overly identified with The Golden Girls; long before Dorothy Zbornak, Bea Arthur was established as a Broadway and Television legend. The Golden Girls was mostly icing after that.

It’s hard to explain, in some sense, why Arthur was iconic; in some ways she was an improbable star. In another her stardom was too obvious: she was such a physical presence, so towering, so indomitable. Neither, really, is entirely fair.

I wouldn’t make you watch Mame to prove it, but what moments there are to improve the proceedings come in large measure from Arthur’s turn reprising her role as Vera Charles, Mame’s bosom buddy. That turn on Broadway - after also launching the role of Yente in Fiddler - is what made her a star (she maintained the real name of the show was “Vera”). By the time of the film in 1974, Arthur was already making her mark in television as well: after guesting on All in the Family as Edith’s cousin, she’d moved onto her own spinoff, Maude.

It’s hard, now, to imagine how challenging Maude was: the lead wasn’t entirely likable - not something normal among leading women roles in a sitcom (even now), and Maude’s politics were always up front and direct. It was easy to assume that Arthur was as direct, confrontational and political as her character (which, in real life, was actually developed from Frances Lear, Norman Lear’s wife), but really, that’s just how strong an actress she was, and she paid for it with a unique kind of stardom: controversy borne from her work, not from who she was. She was a big gal with a deep voice and it was easy to assume… many things. But none of our assumptions kept her, basically, from doing the work she wanted to do.

In that sense, it’s not hard to see how we wound up with Dorothy and the Golden Girls: after years of being seen as outspoken and challenging, Dorothy Zbornak was largely warm and nonconfrontational, and so was the show; yet, at her age it was undeniable that Arthur, Betty White and Rue McClanahan (who’d also been on Maude), as wellas Estelle Getty, were all comic veterans with impeccable timing and skills. It goes a long way to explaining why Golden Girls is what it was: safe, non threatening, extremely funny… but often mush. Bea Arthur could still be acid-tongued and perfect with a well timed zinger… but the zings were framed by a warmth and supportiveness. If it devolved into shtick… it was still incredibly well honed, well done shtick.

In retrospect, I think Bea Arthur is someone who did it right - it’s the work we’ll remember, the roles we’ll admire. As a person and a celebrity she seemed less knowable, distant, eager to let the work speak for her. And it should; it was good work. I just hope time will be kind enough to see Arthur’s roles in their totality, that she gets the credit she deserves, still, for Maude (really… who’s doing anything like that, these days?), and Vera, and all the rest… even as we get inundated, once more, with Golden Girls reruns. I could live with that.

In John Baker’s thought-provoking, elegant new novel, “Winged With Death,” the past leads the present in an unstoppable tango.

The past is 1970s-80s Montevideo, Uruguay, where the military dictatorship is burying people alive, and a milonguero, a master of the tango, dances in cellar salons. The present is present-day York, England, where the dancer has returned to his home town and is drawn into the personal nightmare of a missing family member. “Winged With Death” is a sweeping novel and yet each step reveals a perfect pattern.

In 1972, eighteen-year-old Fredrick Boyle jumps ship in Montevideo, just as the military—with United States assistance—is capturing, torturing, and murdering people ever more ruthlessly. The people rely on a growing revolutionary group, the Tupamaros, to fight these death squads. But simultaneously, many if not most citizens struggle to deny that their friends and neighbors are disappearing all around them.

Fredrick is immediately befriended by Julio Ferrari, a skillful and well read Tupamaro, who on sight changes the Englishman’s name to Ramon Bolio, an identity he keeps. Thanks in part to Julio’s unwavering friendship, Ramon tutors the privileged children of the military. He falls in love with the tango, which in Montevideo is no ballroom dance. Rather, it “has none of the flamboyance…it is sometimes passionate and sensuous, often lyrical, even philosophical, but it is never for show alone unless it is a show of unity.”

Performed throughout the city, it is “a march for the dispossessed and exploited.” While mastering the tango, Ramon seduces the reigning milonguero’s protégée. With his beautiful, young partner, he becomes a dancer to the extent that the dance becomes his life.

“The inevitability of isolation is confined to the level of the senses. But there is a realm above that, to which we all subscribe, and there, there is the potential to move together, to be as one, to dance.”

Yet nobody is safe. When his neighbors disappear, Ramon has no way to respond. Except that like anyone, he is relieved that it isn’t him—this time.

The present era appears at first like an interruption. Ramon is back in York and his sixteen-year-old niece is missing. The parents, Ramon’s brother and his wife, are mentally slow. At first Ramon thinks the girl is taking a break from her obtuse parents and will soon return.

But time passes and Ramon finds he is again involved in a delicate, dangerous dance. “In the tango both leaders and followers lead and follow.” He bolsters and calms his devastated brother and sister-in-law. Every day he provides emotional support, expansive knowledge, and careful attention. Month after month, the teenage niece remains lost. Missing. Disappeared. “The questions are overwhelming, they hide a world that is too windy and wild to contemplate.”

Accepting the girl’s death is unbearable. Yet while mourning his niece, Ramon helps his brother and sister-in-law establish the rhythms necessary for waiting, grieving, and continuing on without their daughter.

He also finds his thoughts drawn back to Montevideo. During those years, long past, when people were faced with random, unrelenting murder and torture, survival depended upon shrouding reality and maintaining everyday denial.

Here John Baker’s tango comes full circle. “Winged With Death” resonates with time, demonstrating honestly how: “Each moment contains all that has gone before it, and each moment contains all that will follow.”

[Cross-posted here]

But its the small details that really get me. Writing of one of his brothers Terkel points to an American street tradition born in Italy and Ireland which has utterly vanished today. The street song which persisted until the 1950’s but which is now gone forever like the Studebaker. Here’s Terkel on a casual street corner opera and a local boxing match without rules:

My brother Ben was a true neighborhood boy. Schooling was not his true love; his mentors and patrons were the big guys on the corner. There was little doubt that of all the kids Ben was their runaway favorite. I can still hear their requests for his throbbing rendition of “Break the News to Mother.” They tossed nickels and dimes at him, though there was nothing patronizing about the gesture. It was as though sentimental passersby were paying tribute to a street singer. He picked up enough change in that manner to occasionally take me to a Saturday feature and a Pearl White serial. The Civil War song was to Ben what “Casey at the Bat” was to DeWolf Hopper, or “Over the Rainbow” to Judy Garland. Just break da noos to mudder Y’know how deah I love ‘er Tell her not tuh wait fer me F’r I’m not comin’ ho-o-me. Now and then, Dutch or Irish or Greek would engage Ben and Quinton, the ten-year-old wonders, to box a wild round or two. Winner take all–a dime. It would usually wind up in a draw and each warrior would be a buffalo nickel richer. Neither Ben nor Quinton knew of the Marquis of Queensberry rules nor did they much care. They aimed for each other’s groin; they rabbit punched. And even pivot punched, a maneuver that was outlawed a half-century before.

Of course this isn’t a good paragraph and yet I couldn’t care less.The man is talking aloud on audio tape and he’s remembering the vitality of provincial culture–we were a land of neighborhoods until the auto really took over and for the sake of argument I’ll say that you can’t find anyone singing on a street corner in America nowadays unless perhaps they’re selling something out of desperation like religion or spurious free merchandise. No one has permission to be moved in public anymore though fighting persists but not as sport.

IN fact what you feel reading Terkel’s Mayhew-esque reminiscences is nothing like nostalgia but more a wonder or a fear that local culture can’t be resuscitated in a time of ear buds and i-phones. Nowadays if a crowd assembles on the street they’ve been told to go there by Fox news or they’re hoping to see a celebrity but no one’s going to stand on a soapbox and talk about anthroposophism or anarchy or sing a slave song or even something by the Coasters.

But you canread Terkel’s  memoir the way I read Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” as a literary museum in which you can see how America was supposed to be.

Originally posted at Planet of the Blind.

I think as critics, we shy away from reexamining the “classics” of film, the real warhorses that are so bulletproof you can’t challenge the accepted wisdom (though it’s fair to counter that, I think, with the question of what, if anything, there’s left to say). I mentioned it a while back with that penchant we have for making movie lists, too - we’re conferring some notion of “classic” onto films that deserve more consideration, more examination, and always, more thought.

The Wizard of Oz is one of those things I’ve watched for years, but not necessarily considered deeply; like for many, it was my introduction to Judy Garland, and it took me years to see her as anything but Dorothy - gay icon, forever teenaged, pretty and perfect. And when I did broaden my appreciation of Garland, it sort of cheapened “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” - I’ve come to admire most the battle weary survivor, the gal who could still put on a show almost to the end, and the powerful singer she became. Those pretty, innocent early tunes have less call than “Hello Bluebird” or the no-stops version of “Just in Time” she did in her later years (or to bridge past with present, compare her teenage version of “You Made Me Love You” to the one from her concert years… that’s a woman who’s aching with desire, not a girl with a crush).

Watching The Wizard of Oz again while on my recent cruise - we got back yesterday - I was struck by the ending, and something I hadn’t noticed before: that what really bugs me about the film is the ending. You remember - when, Glinda tells Dorothy she had the power to go home all along, and Scarecrow asks “what have you learned?” and Dorothy says (I’m quoting roughly, because it’s not on IMDB) “I think I’ve learned that everything I need is at home. And if I think I need to go searching for something, I don’t need to go any further than my own back yard… because if it’s not there, than I probably don’t need it anyway.” And later, when she wakes up, Dorothy adds “Oh, but anyway, Toto, we’re home. Home! And this is my room, and you’re all here. And I’m not gonna leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all, and - oh, Auntie Em - there’s no place like home!” (That last line was on IMDB.)

That hokey ending, of course, is pure MGM; I spent my cruise finally reading Neal Gabler’s book on the Hollywood moguls and how they remade America through its dreams, and you can, as he writes, see the moralism of Louis Mayer in that ending. All the platitudes about home and family wrapped up in those sentiments, mouthed by Judy Garland, corseted into her role as America’s perfect child-woman sweetheart.

And of course… it’s not true; it’s not even true for the character of Dorothy and her actual experiences, considering that she’s just learned “there’s no place like home”… by not being at home. Moreover, it flies in the face of the other lesson American movies give us - that we need to go out into the world to become the self made people we are meant to be. There’s no place like home… that’s why we leave it. “I’m not going to leave it ever, ever again” is the voice of the shut-in, the paranoiac, the agoraphobe. We need to be out in the world.

Or consider Garland herself, who of course found a whole world by never wanting to go back to her own backyard. Indeed, Garland is in many ways the emblem of post-modernism as an adult: when she starts to deconstruct the pretty images created for her, to let us into the life behind the mask, the makeup and the costumes - A Star Is Born is her tour-de-force because it takes the manufactured elements of Garland’s persona and rips them apart: its a fake name, makeup, a wig… and none of it can hide - or define - who the woman actually is. Yet it does define her, lock her into certain expectations… always on, always performing…. always eager to please. You want the girl next door… go next door. The Wizard of Oz can’t be her best work because all it gives us - all she’s allowed to give us - is the picture perfect image of a total fantasy without the leavening of realizing that what we’re being sold is a lie; and many I think, supply The Wizard of Oz with more depth than it has by layering on what Garland became in real life… but of course… that’s not in the movie.

I’ve realized that what frustrates me about The Wizard of Oz is that lie it tells itself, and us - after seeing a world of such magic, such possibilities… it says we should want nothing more than to stay home, never search, never explore… never even dream. We’re given a Technicolor fantasy and then told we’re better off if we never go to it. And this, in the end, we celebrate. And call classic.

And yet… coming home from the cruise - five days at sea in a fantasy world of commerce and manufactured expectations - it’s true that coming home is, in its way, a relief. A return to the familiar, the expected, the way of life you already know… it’s comforting, safe. And less expensive. That’s the hallmark, really, of a good vacation - just enough of an escape from your everyday life to le you appreciate coming back to it. There’s no place like home. It’s good to be back. Forgive me, though, if I still believe in putting more faith in the value of escaping.

Crossposted, eventually, to NYC Weboy.

So, here are the new CDs that have been in heavy rotation in the Chervokas family Toyota Highlander Hybrid during the first quarter of 2009:

1. Morrissey - Years of Refusal
There are two kinds of rock fans–those who get Morrissey and those who don’t. Most folks who fall into the “don’t get him” camp follow The New York Timeswho, in the 1980s, characterized The Smiths as part of a new genre of  “mope rock”–naval gazing, self-absorbed whining. Of course that characterization failed to account for The Smiths’ hard rocking rhythm section and Johnny Marr’s gossamer rhythm-as-lead guitar orchestration. It also failed to account for something that has become even more apparent in Morrissey’s work as the English singer has aged–self-effacing humor.

Even with the Smiths a “mope rock” anthem, like Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now carried as much humor as maudlin self-hate (I was looking for a job and then I found a job/and heaven knows I’m miserable now). It was the ambiguous love-hate relationship Morrissey had with himself, at least in song, that in part made his lyrics fresh and interesting.  These days Morrissey can be straight-up hilarious. There are lines on Morrissey’s latest solo album that had me laughing out loud, especially the lyrics to the album’s first single All You Need Is Me.

Morrissey’s solo career has never matched his best work with the Smiths, and even at its best–this album, or 2004’s You Are the Quarry–Morrissey’s post-Smiths collaborators never deliver the musical inventiveness of Morrissey-Marr collaborations. But Years of Refusal is destined for my year-end best-of list, and it rocks. Inspirational verse of 2009: Diazepam…that’s Valium…tamazpam…lithium/ECT…HRT…How long must I stay on this stuff?

2. Ian McLagan & the Bump Band - Never Say Never
Ex-Faces keyboard player McLaganhas been living in Austin, TX for the last decade or so making strong music few people notice nationally, but this album, written and recorded after the death of McLagan’s wife in 2007 is not only profoundly moving but just plain sounds great–old school rock and soul, spacious and open, played by a band with feel to die for, given wider release last month by 00:02:59 Records. Great album. Goes down like water.

3. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit - Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit
Isbellwas always my favorite songwriter/guitarist in the Drive-By Truckers when that group had a 3-man front. Now on his second post-Truckers solo album, Isbell has built this one around the sound of a new band–one that grooves gently, mixes acoustic and electric timbres, and, frankly, at first sounded underwhelming. But after a couple of listens this country tonk collection of mostly break up songs has really grown on me, most especially the late night barroom waltz, Cigarettes and Wine. Isbell’s the real deal.

4. Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel - Willie & the Wheel
Austin mainstays Willie Nelson–one of the last living connections to first generation Western Swing–and Asleep at the Wheel–the western swing revivalists–finally make the album they’ve been threatening to make together since the early 1970s when the late great Jerry Wexler first proposed it. Willie and the Wheel is a beautiful little thing made with love that probably would have sounded radical in 1972. Now it sounds warm and comfortable like slipping on an old shoe. Fits great though.

5. Van Morrison - Astral Weeks Live
Cyrus Avenue Revisited: The Belfast Cowboy’s live revival of his polymorphously perverse Proustian jazz-folk 1968 masterpiece is a fine listen, better still were the live performances at the Paramount and Beacon Theaters in NY in February and March. The Hollywood Bowl CD was recorded with minimal rehearsal but the band has grown into the performances of these songs since as witnessed by the NYC shows, digging in to summon something transcendent and spiritual. Van’s been audio and video taping these performances, perhaps later we’ll see get to hear a best of Astral Weeks live collection.

6. Bruce Springsteen - Working On A Dream
I know I’m pretty much the only one who likes Springsteen’s latest disk. No, I’m not going to make the argument that it’s the equal of Nebraska or Darkness… or Born to Run or the Wild, the Innocent…. But I do think that like Woody Allen, Springsteen is so good at what he does that its seeming effortlessness invites us to take the skill and craft for granted.

But most of Dickens’ characters are believers.  They seem to accept without question the existence of God and even the most uneducated and uninstructed characters, like Jo the street sweeper in Bleak House and Nancy the prostitute in Oliver Twist, have heard of Christ and heard enough about his teachings to recognize their fundamental truth and to be comforted by them.  The best of his characters are Christ-like in their self-sacrifices and determination to live out the Golden Rule.

Dickens wasn’t a devout church-goer—he doesn’t seem to have liked churches very much as places; in his novels no church or chapel is ever as pleasant and as welcoming as the dimmest, dingiest tavern in the most rundown inn—but in his writing he was more than just nominally Christian as a default of time and place.  He believed in the teachings of Jesus—the two commandments, “Love one another” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and the Sermon on the Mount—as correctives.  He believed that the world could be made a better place if would all be kinder to one another and in all his finished novels this happens.

Except in Little Dorrit.

In Little Dorrit, both the novel and the BBC adaptation now showing on PBS’ Masterpiece Classic, kindness, love, decency, Christ-like self-sacrifice, have virtually no power to change anything.   Amy Dorrit’s constant devotion to her family and all her efforts to keep them fed and clothed are rewarded only with increasing selfishness on the parts of her father, brother, and sister.  Arthur Clennam’s attempts to help the Dorrits and undo the harm he believes his family has done to theirs come close to bringing about his own self-destruction.  Virtue isn’t even its own reward.  It’s practically a sickness.

At best, its a neurosis.

Both Arthur and Amy are actively kind.  They go way out of their ways to help others.  But both of them seem motivated as much by guilt as by innate decency and their efforts to help others are almost always at the expense of their own needs and egos.  Kindness is by definition an act of self-effacement.  But Arthur and Amy seem determined to efface themselves right off the pages of their novel.  Their desire to do unto others  is practically a desire to disappear.  Arthur has a habit of thinking about himself in the third person with the name of Nobody.  And while Amy, Little, Dorrit’s littleness—she is so short and slight of build that she is often mistaken for a little girl—can be read on one level as symbolic of her child-like innocence and purity of heart can also be seen as the physical expression of her life-long habit of shrinking herself so as not to be noticed by her family and call attention to herself as a person in her own right with needs and desires apart from theirs. 

In Dickens’ other novels the kind and loving hearts triumph over the selfish and malicious ones, although sometimes just be out-living them, and they manage to create some happiness for themselves and a few other characters who become their adoptive and extended families.  In Little Dorrit the selfish and malicious characters have the upper-hand from beginning to end.  There is very little chance for the kind and loving hearts, but then their main conflict is not with the selfish and malicious characters, but with themselves.  More than they have to survive the machinations of the scheming Flintwinch or the murderer Rigaud, Arthur and Amy and the other good characters have to survive their own temptation to utter self-effacement and few of them, not even Arthur, manage to resist completely.

This makes Little Dorrit something of an anomaly among Dickens’ novels in that it is the least plot-driven of all his books.  Not much actually happens, onstage at any rate.  The drama and conflict occur within the heads of Arthur and Amy.  It is Dickens’ most psychological work.  Which is a problem if you’re adapting it for television.

Another problem is that it is Dickens’ least comic work.  In fact, it is almost unrelievedly grim.  The kind of eccentricities and idiosyncracies that enliven the grotesque and comic characters and make them either lovably funny or bitingly satirical in his other books are in Little Dorrit more realistically rendered as symptoms of deep-seated neuroses.  Take Flora Finching, Arthur’s old flame, whose reappearance in his life after more than twenty years have passed since their parents broke up their romance is a shock and a disappointment to him because Flora has had the bad luck of having aged less than gracefully.  She has become fat and plain and silly.

Flora insists on behaving as if no time has passed and she is still the young coquette who captured his heart when he was a boy and she was a girl and is such a grotesque parody of her former self that she instantly wipes away all of Arthur’s pleasant memories and leaves him dumbfounded that he could have ever wanted to marry this vain, thoughtless, and ridiculous old woman.  (She, and he, are forty, but the double-standard applies without question.  Arthur is still marriageable while Flora is old enough to be a grandmother.) In another novel, a woman like Flora would be a joke (a cruel joke, since Flora was based on Dickens’ own first love, Maria Beadnell, whom he had recently re-met), but it becomes clear that Flora’s silliness is out of her control.  It’s almost like an allergic reaction, not to Arthur himself, exactly, but to her own feelings about his return.  She’s a widow now and her marriage was childless and, implicitly, loveless, and all she has to show for it is her husband’s crazy and senile aunt whom she has inherited like a family curse.  She is lonely and unhappy and has nursed her old feelings for Arthur as her only comfort.  Now that he is back in her life, she can’t help hoping that his old feelings will come back to him.  Unfortunately, she knows that time has not been kind to her and she hates herself for that as if it was her fault.  Having no idea how to attract Arthur’s interest, no hope of doing so, in fact, she reflexively reverts to the behavior that enraptured him all those years ago, knowing as she does so that what was charming in a sixteen year old girl is probably ridiculous in a middle-aged widow.  The more she tries to recapture her and Arthur’s youth, the sillier she feels, but the sillier she feels the more desperate she becomes to not be herself, to be what she once was.  She’s trapped in a loop of her own self-loathing.

Pathetic, but not funny.

(In this production, Ruth Jones captures Flora’s desperation with a wild and horrified look in her eyes even as she simpers and capers for Arthur, as if she can’t believe the inanities coming out of her own mouth and would give anything to be able to stop herself.)

The same holds true for the novel’s other supporting cast of good-hearted eccentrics, the gruff and tireless Mr Pancks, the bluff and hearty would-be philanthropist Meagles, the hot-tempered housemaid Tattycoram, and the cheerful and devoted man-of-all work Cavalletto.  They all have comic parallels in Dickens’ other novels.  But in Little Dorrit they are desperate neurotics trapped in the loops of their eccentricities.

Without much in the way of action to dramatize and no comic relief to lighten the gloom, screenwriter Andrew Davies and the series’ trio of directors have compensated by picking up the pace.  The first episode whizzed through the opening chapters of the novel, getting so far into the book that I’m wondering why it’s going to need four more episodes to tell the rest of the story.  Either things are going to have to slow down, which will mean slowing down during the dullest and gloomiest parts of the book, or we’ll have to back up and recover some ground, which might be a good thing.  The quickness of the pacing has come at the expense of developing the characters, particularly Mr Dorrit, Amy’s weak and selfish but doting father.

Mr Dorrit is played by Tom Courtenay whom I expect will be superb in the role once he’s given his due.  Mr Dorrit is, in his accidental and well-meaning way, one of the chief villains of the story, in that he is the ruin of everyone who loves him, but in Episode One he’s practically a background character, coming out of the shadows only to provide a foil to Amy’s goodness.

What this production has going for it, though, is a pair of very attractive leads in Claire Foy and Matthew Macfadyen.

Although Arthur routinely thinks of himself as “Nobody,” Macfadyen—Darcy to Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice—can’t help making Arthur a definite somebody.  Arthur’s prime instinct is to withdraw.  He can only assert himself when he’s acting on behalf of someone else.  When his own interests are at stake he ceases to matter to himself and becomes listless, ineffectual, almost unable to move.  His pervasive gloom and habit of self-recrimination make him less than pleasant company.  But Macfadyen is too big and too physically active to disappear into the background, and he gives Arthur a latent good-humor that keeps breaking out despite his general melancholy.

Foy, however, is the real star of the series.  In his portrayal of Little Dorrit, Dickens gives into his own conceit too often, forgetting that Amy is twenty-one not twelve and that her small size has a real, physical cause, not just a symbolic one.  She is small because she grew up undernourished in a prison.  But Dickens frequently writes her as if she’s child-sized because she is a child.  It’s as if he’s afraid that if he allowed her any adult thoughts or feelings we might not admire her as much as he wants us to.  The result is the same as with Dickens’ other domestic angels.  Little Dorrit is easy to admire, but hard to like.

But as Foy plays her, Amy is decidedly a grown-up.  Her adult feelings, including anger and resentment, are restrained not repressed or ignored.  She is active, strong, determined, and unhappy.  Her habits of self-effacement, self-denial, and self-sacrifice are products of strong-willed self-discipline more than expressions of neurotic insecurity.  She does what she does because she has to and wants to, not because she is compelled to.  Foy is small but the Little in Little Dorrit is a demeaning insult that she shrugs off as she walks hurriedly towards whatever job she’s assigned herself today.  Foy’s Amy is imprisoned by her own virtue but she’s not caught in a loop and she is the only character who shows any sign that she can break out of her self-imprisonment through her own effort.

Episode Two of Little Dorrit runs tonight at 9 PM EDT.  Episode One is viewable online.  Episode Two becomes available online starting Monday 

Of course. It was Friday. In Lent. And we’re both Catholics.

Not the daily Mass sort, yet the culture is so strong, so nearly biological, that it still persuades secularists to traipse at least at least an extra subway stop to avoid a meaty midday repast during the period of Lenten sacrifice that will conclude next Sunday. Palm Sunday is tomorrow, and Holy Week follows - concluding that particularly New York version of the liturgical calendar that adds the green of St. Patrick’s Day to the purple of the passion play.

On Ash Wednesday, one of my favorite bloggers, Lance Mannion, wrote about his formal break with the Catholic Church, noting that he’d been “holding onto my faith by the threads of a frayed alb anyway.” Lance’s post plumbed some of the gnawing away of formal church-based hierarchical religion in this country, but I was also struck by one of the comments: “I haven’t been to Church in years. But I’m STILL a Catholic.” And that blend of personal cultural and religious self-identification, which riles traditional (and conservative) Roman Catholics, hasn’t lost its power. Reading Lance’s Lenten post (and it was a Lenten post because Lance is still a Catholic) called to mind the lyrics of punk poet Jim Carroll’s Catholic Boy from 1980:

And they can’t touch me now

I got every sacrament behind me

I got baptism, I got penance

I got communion, I got extreme unction

Man, I’ve got confirmation

I was a Catholic boy

Redeemed through pain

And not through joy

And now I’m a Catholic man

I put my tongue to the rail whenever I can

Patti Smith, the force behind Carroll’s angry, poetic record, was a Jehovah’s Witness - at least until she hit New York, and quickly adopted Catholicism (the cultural variety) as the perfect canvas for poetry. Is there a more Catholic opening line to a song from 1970s than Smith’s iconic “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine?”

That the song was a reinvention of Van Morrison’s Gloria added to the hymnal quality - Patti clearly leaning on the in excelsis Deo side of the double meaning, fresh from posing as Mary Magdalene for Robert Mapplethorpe, himself an Irish Catholic divorced by sexuality yet entirely married in culture and personal reference. This was a common formula in 1970s New York. In 1973, Staten Island Catholic boy David Johansen asked with mock incredulity: “Then all the old ladies they are on their way to the church…yuh go ta church?” That same year, St. Rose of Lima Catholic grammar school graduate Bruce Springsteen cracked, “Nuns run bald through Vatican halls pregnant, pleadin’ immaculate conception” in Lost in the Flood.

I grew up on this stuff, in the years just after my service as an altar boy, and the incense never quite abandons the cultural DNA, even after the orthodoxy has fled; I’ve observed the same phenomenon among non-observant Jews who’ll still place the pebble on the headstone every time. You can’t shake childhood, and in middle age, it’s surprising what remains of the old relationship with the cassock and the ritual. Skinny young heretics like Bruce Springsteen harbor second thoughts in the years of thickening middles - witness his 2005 conversation on Devils & Dust:

Another of my favorite bloggers, M.A. Peel, also had an Ash Wednesday post at the beginning of this Lenten season, linking this period of contemplation for Catholics to the world’s crisis: “Avarice is a mortal sin - the wisdom of that classification is now sadly clear.” And she posted a video and lyrics to the song Hallelujah by the brilliant singer/songwriter Rufus Wainright, culturally Irish Catholic on his mother’s side and quite conscious of it:

You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

As my own children make their sacraments and some days are a struggle to reconcile their upbringing with my thin personal faith and disdain for the patriarchy of the formal religion, Wainright’s words ring like communion bells. The shadows and doubts and reason are all our own. I’m not alone, I think, in harboring an entirely personal relationship with a formal religion - or thinking the blaze of light is my own. No less of a  church-goer than John Updike riffed on that individuality of faith and identify when he accepted an award as a prominent Christian writer by a Catholic magazine in 1997:

Updike’s identity, his Christianity, was portrayed in doubt and human failing wonderment, in the brutal light of clear-eyed observation and realism (very Catholic in practice). On his deathbed, in what may be the most moving pages of verse to grace an American magazine in a century, Updike didn’t shy away for a moment from either the doubt or the faith:

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tong reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely - magnificent, that “surely” -
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the ays of my life, my life, forever.

When I was in Oxford last week, I stayed in student lodgings at Trinity College that were nicer than any hotel room I’ve ever seen in London. Trinity College was founded by Sir Thomas Pope in 1555. A devout catholic with no surviving children, Thomas Pope saw the Foundation of an Oxford college as a means of ensuring that he and his family would always be remembered in the prayers and masses of its members.

The gardens at Trinity are very beautiful, but one border of the College harbors a little secret: the gates constructed along Parks Road are purely ornamental and are never opened. Tradition holds they’re only swung open when a Jacobite monarch resumes the throne of England (and presumably ends the reign of the Church of England as the state religion). While I was there, the news was full of talk about PM Gordon Brown’s move to overturn the part of the 1701 Act of Settlement that bans Catholics from marrying into the royal family. Maybe the gates of Parks Road will be opened sooner rather than later, I thought, my Catholic upbringing going off like a ring tone set to the Angelus.

Flying home last week, I found myself 40,000 feet over the North Atlantic, wedged into what American Airlines dashingly refers to as a “seat” and holding onto sanity only by dint of the seatback video movies. The dinner cart came along. It was Friday. The choice came: “chicken or pasta?” And there, in some pain and without a conscious inkling, the DNA of the catechism kicked into autopilot:

“Pasta,” says I, only vaguely aware of my current timezone.

I see our two groups of readers as completely equal. In a long, impassioned piece in the NYTimes magazine in 1995, then NYTimes Book editor Charles McGrath declared “The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel,” years before The Sopranos and The Wire. He was reacting to the second generation of serialized prime-time dramas, like NYPD Blue and ER.

“Watching television is in many ways a private, solitary activity — almost like reading. But watching television is also what we do as a nation; millions and millions of us tune in together, at the same time, to the same shows. Television is something, maybe the only thing, that all of us have in common. . . . When I went back to work the next day I had something to talk about — how Andy was doing, whether Doc Greene and his wife would get back together — and I felt connected.”

McGrath also extols the quality and writerly beauty of dialogue on these A-list shows, and the interesting literary backgrounds of the writers and producers behind them.

And that’s why it struck me as fitting, if you will, that ER is leaving the air in the shadow of the attention to the death of John Updike and the ensuing attention to John Cheever.

The Words-on Paper-Guys
John Updike died in January. The poignant posthumous publication of his poems in the New Yorker and his review of Blake Bailey’s Cheever biography are a special coda to his body of work. The March publication of the life of Cheever, one of the concentric circles in the literary universe in which Updike was a sun, broadened and underscored the cultural attention paid to the passing of John the Younger.

They were our adept chroniclers of the postwar suburbs with enormous abilities to capture LIFE between men and women with exceptional, frightening, unblinking, honed attention. But as important as their talent, they believed—with all the import of that word—in what Cheever called the “invincibility of literature,” and they understood the role of professional men of letters. That’s part of what their fans were attracted to.

Their postwar readers saw their own drab lives in the pages of “The Enormous Radio” and Rabbit, Run transformed by the power of art into something worth knowing, worth contemplating. The Johns’ writing deeply enriched the lives of their readers, and maybe helped to dispel some of the fog we all live in. The readers in turn felt a part of a literary community, not as easily in the days before the Internet, but just as certain. The emotional connection to their work was deep and spanned generations. Who is today’s equivalent of these literary icons?

The TV Drama as Novel
The watchers of ER will be gathering on Thursday to read the last episode in a 15-year long story about doctors in an emergency room in Chicago. Few series have the power to stay for so long. The list is a familiar one: Bonanza, 14 seasons; Dallas, 13 seasons; Hawaii 5-0 and NYPD Blue, 12; Cheers and MASH, 11.

We ER readers read and embraced ER’s groundbreaking semiotics as enthusiastically as the first readers of Joyce’s Ulysses did.

Diane Werts captures the power of ER in a piece in Newsday:

“Much of what “ER” pioneered has become so commonplace, we don’t appreciate the show’s pacesetting. We take for granted walk-and-talk, intensity editing, continuous sets, widescreen framing, point-of-view shooting, time-shift storytelling with interwoven flashbacks, ambient sound and moody montage.

“But all in one place? With heart-rending characters often delivering a topical wallop?

The technical side was balanced with first-rate acting, and deeply engaging characters of Benton, and Carter, and Green.

Charles McGrath:
“A small episode in last season’s finale, involving an end-stage AIDS patient, his mother and his lover, and their letting him go, can’t have taken up more than a few minutes of air time; yet in its brevity and directness, and in the honesty of its details, it was a more affecting evocation of the AIDS crisis than Jonathan Demme’s overblown “Philadelphia,” say. Its power came from the fact that this little moment happened in the middle of a lot of other moments — almost as in life. Similarly, a brief, silent stretch at the end of the botched-delivery episode [“Love’s Labors Lost”], when Dr. Greene, exhausted, fighting tears, rides the El home in a cold winter dawn, achieved a remarkably understated eloquence. The show has a knack for dramatizing private moments — for sneaking up on them when both we and the characters are most worn down and vulnerable.

“But the real reason for E.R.’s success, I think, is that it recognizes that such private moments are so few and so hasty.”

There is nothing more inherently frightening than an emergency room. We all know fiction from reality, especially where our own life and death is concerned. But storytelling is one way that we confront our fears, and the stories of ER where often cathartic because they rang so true to life. They allowed us to look at the most frightening, painful side of the human condition from the safety of our living rooms.

I did stop watching after Mark Green died. Unlike Cheers, where I made the transfer from Diane to Rebecca, I never got into the new characters. I followed Carter and Abby for a while, and then drifted away.

But like many old readers, I’ve been following these last episodes before the series finale. Alan Sepinwall, as usual, has given the returning flock a place to connect. Reading these comments is the strongest testimonial to the power of this series.

Epilogue
ER and the works of the Johns are, by their nature, accessible to the ages. And each has a discernible and important legacy.

What’s different, what will not be repeated, is the broad cultural reach of these pieces of art, as art and entertainment continue to be more personalized, more niche.

Diane Werts again, speaking of being an ER viewer for its entire run:

“We were all in it together then. As we might be when it ends. It won’t happen again.”

Myself, I think Natasha Richardson was still finding herself as an actress - and really, when we memorialize, we’re talking, as critics, about the work - and worked under the obvious, enormous shadow of her mother. I said as much when I reviewed Evening, where Vanessa Redgrave’s startling performance blew me away; Richardson, playing her daughter, seemed overwhelmed.

(I used to say similar things about Joely… but somehow, with Nip/Tuck, she seemed to find a way to hold her own. It may be the role - Richardson’s got a great part as Christian’s wife and the writing’s superb - but playing against her mother as her mother, she never seems to wilt, there.)

There’s been a lot of talk about “acting dynasties” this week, about the “storied Redgraves”, but somehow I always saw Richardson on her own first, family second. She seemed to draw strength, as much as anything, from Liam Neeson, from the life she’d created for herself. That, I think, is what I admired most - that there wasn’t a shadow of the past, but always the keen sense of creating the future from her.

I didn’t see her as Sally Bowles; I wish I had; that production of Cabaret played across 8th Avenue from my apartment, and it appealed to me, though I’d heard reports of dicey singing, and it held me back (and I was often in full romance with the Chicago revival during the same period. Ah, we were so spoiled, without realizing it entirely, I think). And maybe she was meant for the stage, though I really don’t buy it; watching her onscreen I always, always thought that she was simply a performer waiting for the right time to seize her moment. It was all there… it just needed that last spark to set it free.

That’s the thing about sudden, unexpected passings; we wind up thinking of promise and what could have been, and probably miss what was - that she was happy as a working actress and mother, that she was doing what she loved, that she loved what she did. I think of all the shadows, the pressure to do more, be more… be what Redgrave was and is… must have been intense. How could it be otherwise? Yet she never appeared to give into it, to treat it as more than an interesting curiosity. You have expectations? This wasn’t about you. Or expectations.

And we are left with a life and career in the conditional tense. What could have been, what she was meant to be. It may never be enough to remember her as she was - the calm, lightly humorous presence she’d seemed to find for herself in movies (how charming she is in the reworked Parent Trap, one of the few to believably seem to parent Lindsay Lohan onscreen; or how she makes a one-note part in Maid in Manhattan into something reasonably sympathetic). But that’s what we have, and it’s what she was. And just for that… I’ll miss her. Never mind what she was meant to be.

Both are positive reviews but I don’t think I’ll be reading the book now.  I don’t want to spend 784 pages in the company of that man.

John Cheever could be a loathsome human being.

That there might have been reasons for his loathsomeness that invite sympathy doesn’t change the fact that he was an obnoxious drunk, an emotional bully and sadist, a sexual predator, a rotten husband and an alternately cruel and neglectful father, and it wasn’t as though, like Hemingway, he punctuated his awfulness with acts of heroism and generosity.  He didn’t counterbalance his woeful private life with a devotion to art and literature or by involving himself in public life.  When he took up teaching, he did it for the money and, apparently, the opportunity it provided him to get close to and then try to seduce his students.  Cheever had a talent for perverting, short-circuiting, and canceling out every kind and decent impulse he had.  The best thing about him seems to have been that he was aware of this tendency enough to keep himself somewhat aloof from his daughter Susan, whose memoir Home Before Dark suggests that what she loved about her father was that he didn’t go out of his way to hurt her the way he did her mother and brother.

For most of his life, Cheever was a homophobic gay man who was nonetheless narcissistically fascinated by his own sexual urges.  He hated being gay, he hated what he regarded as gayness in other men, including his own son, and he spent a lot of time and energy pretending to be the kind of straight man he believed  he ought to be, except that he had no clear idea what that kind of man was.  For a while, he tried to turn himself into what he thought was his place and time’s ideal man, the gray flannel suited suburban husband.  The problem was that he hated that ideal as much as he hated his own homosexuality.  Plus he was pretty much a failure at the part, having no office to commute to and not making nearly enough money as a writer to support the lifestyle.  Another reason for despising himself.

As I said, there are reasons to feel sympathy for him, but it really is a matter of feeling sorry for the person he might have been, and that person is almost an entirely imaginative character since Cheever rarely let that person out, if there was actually any of that person inside him.   He hid deep within himself and he then he hid what was left inside a bottle.  At times in his life he seemed to be trying to drink himself to death.  Often he managed a state of near somnambulism.   When I was at Iowa, a decade after he taught there, stories of his drunkenness were still being told with awe, although they were mostly stories of his showing up stumbling and incoherent in class or saying nasty things to students and colleagues at parties, and not even particularly witty nasty things.

At this point, when the subject stops being worth writing about as a person the biographer can usually turn to writing about him as an artist and focus on the work.  I can’t tell from Maud’s or Jim’s reviews how much of his book Bailey devotes to that, but Cheever himself made that a challenge.  Compared to Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth, or Flannery O’Connor, Cheever was not an intellectual,   There’s a reason there’s no companion volume to The Stories of John Cheever called The Essays of John Cheever.  And unlike Hemingway and Fitzgerald, he wasn’t passionately engaged with the art and literature of his time.  His Journals show him to have been a thoughtful reader but not an especially insightful critic.  And his attitude towards his own art was a lot like his attitude towards his sexuality.  Writing was a weak man’s substitute for a real job.  Plus he had to write for money and no matter how hard he tried he didn’t make enough of it and that alternately enraged him and demoralized him but always gave him grounds for self-contempt.

That leaves the work itself, and when you get down to it there turns out not to be as much as you might have thought.  Four novels, which are bad, and a dozen or so short stories that are worth keeping.  Of course, several of those are among the best in American literature.

In the grand scheme of things, I’m not sure where Cheever will finally rank.  Henry James, Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Eudora Welty, each wrote more great stories and wrote with more variety and depth.   Flannery O’Connor was the best of Cheever’s hey-day.  Of “the three Johns,” Cheever, Updike, and O’Hara, I’d say it was a toss-up between Updike and Cheever, although I actually prefer O’Hara’s stories to theirs.  They’re more inherently dramatic and character-driven and show a greater understanding of the way the world actually works, plus O’Hara’s clanging and obvious prose isn’t as much of a flaw as it is in his novels since his stories tend to be mostly dialogue and he was awfully good at capturing the way people talk to each other.  Cheever’s stories are mood pieces.  Plot and character are only the generators of a mood.   All his best stories can be summarized with the same opening “A man…”  as in “A man on his way home from work is inexplicably overcome by the urge to swim home by way of all his neighbors’ pools.”  “A man trying to re-live his glory days as a student athlete sets up chairs in his living room to hurdle.”  “A man is forced off his train at gunpoint and made to beg for his life from a woman with whom he had a fleeting affair.”

But what’s important in these stories is not the “man” himself but his feelings at the moment.  In “The Swimmer” it’s his job and marriage-induced ennui.  In “O Youth and Beaty!” it’s his self-hatred for the lesser man he’s become.   In “The Five-Forty-Eight” it’s his self-complacency and then its replacement by terror and self-disgust.

Cheever is often described, and sometimes close to dismissed, as the writer of his times, the historian by way of fiction of 1950s Suburban America and its discontents, as if what he was up to in his short stories was what Yates was doing in his novel Revolutionary Road .

But I think this is a case of mistaking the people who read Cheever’s stories in the New Yorker for the characters in his stories.  Cheever’s plots are improbable, his landscapes are surreal (Re-read the description of the storm and the crashlanding in the corn field in “The Country Husband” and you’ll see that Cheever did not paint from life.), and his characters behave in fantastical ways.  He was not writing about the real suburbs in the real 1950s.  Cheever wasn’t any more engaged with his time and place than he was with anyone or anything else.  Always hiding with himself, he wrote about what he found in there.  He wasn’t writing about a purely imaginary world, but he was writing about a world transfigured by his imagination as if in dreams, and like dreams his stories are symbolic, oblique, and not to be understood in terms of simple correspondences.  The characters and the things that happen to them are not themselves or not merely themselves.

Another way of saying this is that Cheever wrote fairy tales.  I’m not kidding.  Something close to magic happens in all of them, and if there are few actual fairies, there are plenty of imps and demons.

This is why the writer I’d compare Cheever to, and possibly pair on a syllabus, is not either of the other two Johns, but the great short story writer I deliberately left off the list above.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Hawthorne wrote fairy tales too, and I think explored the same symbolic ground to find the same things as Cheever, although Hawthorne saw them as more generally characteristic of human nature and the human predicament and Cheever felt and took them more personally—the terrible guilt and self-loathing and sense of isolation at the heart of most men and women and the fear that life here on earth is a form of damnation.

_____________________

John Updike paints a much more sympathetic portrait of Cheever in his review of Bailey’s book, the last one he wrote for the New Yorker.  It’s called Basically Decent.

Dick Cavett remembers having both writers on his show together, with video.

I’ve been meaning, for months, to work on this - muse a little about how money meets art, about the binds we face in the economic collapse… and some idea of how we can survive. This wasn’t, I think, how we expected things to shake out: outside of the folks at Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, many of us were expecting, I suspect, a bit of a renaissance in the arts, a chance to exhale after the Bush years, a chance to celebrate the creative side of “hope” and “change.”

Since the beginning of the year, about 16 Broadway shows have closed; outside of some of the current profit centers of commercially successful musicals, almost nothing survived the November crash with a cushion large enough to weather the early months of the year, always a slow period in theater, made slower by the lack of discretionary funds to spend on entertainment. Recorded music and concert sales have tanked - never mind the disaster of electronics sales that mean fewer high end sound systems and flat screen TVs. And television is reeling from enormous drops in audience share, as well as drops in future ad revenue projections. NBC’s desperation play of the Jay Leno show may still be idiotic, but the economic justifications for it have only grown as GE flails around trying to escape the collapse of its debt.

Perhaps the only bright spot is the week-to-week increase in film ticket revenue, mirroring American behavior in the Depression: apparently, we’re still lured to forget our troubles watching the flickering light in the darkened hall (making escapist crap like Paul Blart: Mall Cop, He’s Just Not That Into You, Madea Goes To Jail, and Friday the 13th into even more unexpected successes than anyone anticipated). Still, even in with increased traffic, there are problems in film exhibition: ticket prices are generally too high, and movieplexes sit in some of the most enormous commercial property boondoggles of the real estate bubble. As we relocated 20, 24 nd 30 screen megaplexes further and further out in the exurbs, we attached them to malls and housing developments that are now part of the crux of the mortgage meltdown and the home construction debacle. Audiences that want film will struggle more and more this year with economic realities that force unpleasant choices that mean foregoing a weekly trip to the movies… unless prices can be forced down (anybody else see the return of the extended bargain matinee?).

Even less discussed, lately, is the disconcerting dry-up of charitable giving and high end donors who supported the fine arts: Classical Music, Dance, Museums, Regional Theater… all are reeling as donations dry up, and state supporting funds begin to feel the heat of balancing budgets. It’s all too clear that support for the arts is seen as frivolous and unnecessary too often and by too many; we worry about a healthcare crisis and a schools crisis… but no one seems to care about a looming culture crisis, a world with much less art. And light.

One of President Obama’s budget proposals this year is to finance his healthcare proposals (still vague and unspecified) with tax increases, including reduction of the itemized deduction for charitable giving. That proposal has evoked familiar howls from both sides - some howling that it’s a swipe against religion (churches make up the bulk of giving), others shooting back that no one needs more incentive to support Harvard (educational endowments, second only to churches), others comlaining about “helping the needy”… lost in all of it is the necessity of charitable giving to the arts.

Art and money has always been an uneasy mix, always that sense of dependency on the deep pockets of the wealthy has made for discomfort (and nowhere, perhaps, is the economic crisis making fools of us all on that score than in the collapse of the art auction market). Artists don’t like to talk money, aren’t necessarily comfortable talking about the need for money… but if no one speaks up, loudly and soon, a lot will be lost. A lot already has. How can you describe the loss of pictures you won’t see, music you won’t hear, talent the likes of which you will never know?

One of the things about this financial crisis that’s struck me repeatedly is how slowly people have been coming to terms with just what is happening: the realities of an economy fueled by excessive levels of debt, the fact that the lives we led will not be the lives of our near future, the many ways that the mortgage crisis, the banking crisis, and probably the government spending crisis… all of it touches all of our lives. There are still people talking about “when things get back to normal” as if this, now, is not our new normal. We’re no longer in the money. And that’s going to mean a lot to our arts, and to our culture. And as critics, I think we’re only beginning to realize what that means.

Not for nothing… but in these hard economic times, a gift card from J Crew would work just as well.

Based on yet another “graphic novel” - or indeed, what’s being called one of the “classic” graphic novels of all
time - Watchmen arrives loaded with baggage (an enormous lawsuit between Warners and Fox over rights that nearly killed the whole project, as well as one of the book’s co-creators removing his name from the film) and expectations. The “comic book movie” has suddenly moved from being merely part of the “tentpole” story of big studio Hollywood to these days being just about the only tent in town. And Watchmen, it seems, will be the first to be held up to Dark Knight level expectations of quality and success.

Count me among those who are not entirely thrilled with the idea. Though I’ve yet to see The Dark Knight, I see what it has wrought - the need for grim, downbeat worldviews amidst crushing violence is all too apparent. I am realizing that the YouTube superhero parodies of It’sJustSomeRandomGuy aren’t just genius, they’re also prescient commentary on a world where we expect all superheroes to have dark twisted psyches… even when it just makes things absurd.

Watchmen is just that - dark and absurd. Draining pretty much any joy or kick from the grim proceedings, Watchmen lurches along, relentlessly beating the audience into submission, even as it grows further preposterous with every moment. Watchmen isn’t an indictment of film’s growing grimness; but it is an indication that you can do grim wrong… and in a way that’s utterly false.

Unlike others, I suspect it may be the twenty five year old source material - Watchmen is set in 1985, as the book was, and envisions an alternate reality in which America has “won” the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon has gone on to five terms as President. Winning Vietnam is accomplished by the participation of two “heroes”  - The Comedian, a sarcastic mercenary for hire; and Mr. Manhattan, a physicist transformed into pure electricity by a nuclear experiment gone terribly wrong.

They are just two of a number of heroes in the story, which is chock full of costumed wonders with names that are not entirely memorable. The heroes have been outlawed and run underground after a series of incidents where they became uncomfortably vigilante-ish in their actions, beating up people they were meant to save.

The film opens with The Comedian’s murder, in a violent fight in his high rise apartment that has him thrown out a plate glass window to his death. His death becomes the passion of Rorschach (a muttery, guttural Jackie Earle Hailey), a faceless inkblot (his costume is a wonder of CGI) who was also part of the Watchmen. Rorschach in turn attempts to enlist Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson, trying to shed his youthful studliness), Mr. Manhattan (a very naked Billy Crudup) and Silk Spectre II (Malin Akermann), to little avail.

There’s a lot going on here, too much really for any one summary; yet the busy-ness and sprawling approach to history (I’m not even sure how to thread in the part about the black-clad lesbian who winds up
recreating the famed photo of the sailor and the nurse kissing in Times Square after World War II) tends to mask, badly, the overall narrow, claustrophobic feel of the proceedings. Despite a lot of big, noisy set pieces and diversions into past history (Silk Spectre’s mother was part of a first generation of heroes that included The Comedian as well), there’s really less going on than meets the eye, and eventually, the film has to face that.

And therein lies the problem; by the time we’re trapped at the South Pole with our main characters, including the supersmart and strong Ozymandias (a blonde-wigged Matthew Goode), much of what propelled Watchmen along has ground to a halt, and we are left with what is supposed to be a dark, cynical view of humanity… that feels utterly manufactured and false.

Where does Watchmen go wrong? I think the mistake lies in the source material, and in Snyder’s fealty to it; it’s the premise that’s the problem, but that can be hard to see. For me it came together in a throwaway moment, when Nite Owl and Rorschach confront each other over years of bitterness and bad actions, the sweetly burnt out Nite Owl accusing Rorschach of being too violent, too intense, too much shoot first and ask questions later. And Rorschach holds out his hand in apology… with Nite Owl saying “It’s Okay, Man” in that late seventies way of finding common ground.

Well, it’s not okay, man… and I suddenly found myself massively irritated at the reminder of post-Vietnam, boomer generation self congratulation. We couldn’t “win” Vietnam, because “losing” is not what happened in Vietnam either. The fundamental problem with Watchmen is that the premise simply doesn’t work - it’s a re-imagining of history that’s not thought through or fleshed out fully enough, and the problem isn’t what’s in it… it’s what’s left out: the quirky, left field details and developments that really make individuals part of history. We have no idea who these characters are, little sense of their “real” lives (though there’s much attention to period details… they don’t add up)… and it leaves them as cold ciphers, with no real way for an audience to connect or care.

I don’t “blame” Snyder so much as I see, now, that he’s willing to utterly commit to a comic book reality - 300 worked as well as it did, and felt completely different from Watchmen because Snyder was keying off of Frank Miller, who really celebrates and thrills to the possibilities of what comics can do and be. Watchmen’s darker, cynical worldview is just as loyal to the source… it’s just that it doesn’t work. And I suspect knowing that it didn’t entirely work was what kept Watchmen in development hell for 20 years. And, apropos of the recent discussion over “conservative” films, it’s not that Watchmen isn’t “liberal”… it’s that the film’s politics are too didactic and at the same time too muddled to be effective; to really succeed with its grim worldview, Watchmen would need more light and more air - a better defined sense of the good vs. evil, even within its own characters, and more attempts to let in a wider sense of the world around those characters. As it is, we get shadows… and ink blots, signifying nothing.

Snyder’s continued visual emphasis on the male form remains disconcerting - I don’t think there’s another movie, except maybe the Ocean’s series, with such an overload of the guys who get hired for their looks. Wilson, Goode, Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Comedian… even Jackie Earle Hailey has a body of death - it’s an overload of eye candy, and Snyder works in more male frontal nudity than I thought the ratings board would ever approve… ever. And somehow, against this, the fetish-y nature of the women’s costumes - all thigh high boots and garters and corsets and bras pushing breasts skyward - seems positively chaste. Snyder also continues to work out his frustrated ambitions to work in the adult industry too obviously - the sex on display here is gratuitous, mechanical, and forced (and not least because the age difference between Patrick Wilson and Malin Akermann is so obvious, and disconcerting… oh wait, and that covers Crudup and Akermann as well).

Little is helped, either, with the scoring - heavy handed, also obvious, also forced (among the many ways I felt for AO Scott and his muddled review was his spot-on point that Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” needs to be off the movie song list). And while here’s a lot to praise visually… oh, um, that’s back to the male nudity… mostly the film is a muddy jumble of images that don’t add up. As much as the dense visuals may be true the novel’s graphics… they often lack the sweep of 300’s stark backgrounds and bold colors, and really Watchmen is only visually satisfying in starts and fits.

It’s easy to pan Watchmen as no fun… but “no fun” is only the beginning of where it goes astray. Which is a shame really - I tend to think somewhere in there is a compelling, interesting musing on the nature of heroism, the conflict inherent in “doing what is best” for others… indeed, it strikes me that “Heroes“on NBC may be partly what Watchmen intended (and, lately, gets just as muddled). Because I think that’s the real secret of the allure of comic books - that despite the knocks for being simplistic, the stories of superheroes resonate because they are so archetypal, so necessary as myths and legends. I still believe in comic books and superheroes and superhero movies… I’m not sure Watchmen does… or ever did.

The liner notes read like a warning on a pack of cigarettes: “This material was recorded on analog equipment, ignoring modern noise reduction techniques. We pay our humble respects to the mighty gods of analog tape who have shown us both their destructive power and their compassionate mercy”

In the space usually dedicated to gear endorsements by the band members this caution, “Reverb and tremolo are welcome; all other effects are strictly forbidden”. This is followed by similar accolades to nebulous ‘old strings and old guitars’. The section ends with, “Norm eats Maruchan Ramen Noodles exclusively”, no doubt offering first person testament to the fact that life as a working musician is fraught with poverty, hardship, and lots of hard work. If you stop and think about it, it’s a wonder that anybody in their right mind would even consider playing music as a career at all. I have many musician friends and included in that list are a few who have passionately chosen it as their life long profession. The word ‘sacrifice’ could surely be inserted in that previous sentence without risk of hyperbole or apology.

So it was on a rainy Friday night last week that my brother Mathdude and I set out in search of a long lost friend and a little salvation in the form of one Lonesome Jim Ransone and his band The Breeze Kings. My faded memories of Jim are of a brilliant, if not painfully quiet, young guy who balanced his time back in high school between his academics, playing music, and being dragged by my brother into many ill-fated capers and misadventures. From what Jim told us, he begrudgingly attended Georgia Tech and earned an engineering degree at his father’s insistence and once he wrapped that up, he turned to his dad and said, “Okay, can I go play music now?” Of course I’m fictionalizing a bit here, but you get the gist. Amazingly, it turns out that Jim was the founder of a smoking hot band called The Urban Shake Dancers whose music I was baptized in upon arrival to Atlanta in 1991 by my ragtag gang of music friends who had graciously welcomed me into their circle. My new friends had gone to high school with the other members of the Shake Dancers and I’m certain that Jim and I were in the same room on a couple of occasions unbeknownst to either one of us.

Oh yeah, music, sacrifice, passion… The Breeze Kings. I’m pretty certain Jim had to seek out his ‘other’ education some place other than on the campus of the MIT of the South, but judging from the performance my brother and I witnessed, and after giving The Breeze Kings two brilliant CD’s multiple spins, it would seem that Jim has been doing post doc work on the life and times of Willie Dixon, Bobby Blue Bland, and Albert Collins. Mathdude and I were treated to three of the most scorching sets of traditional Chicago blues I’d heard since seeing Mr. Collins himself perform “Too Many Dirty Dishes” at ‘The Chance’ in Poughkeepsie NY back in the late 80’s.

The Breeze Kings have all the bases covered and it always starts with a swinging drummer especially when it comes to their style of music. And that’s what Mark Yarbrough is: One swingin’ son of bitch. Coupled with Dave Roth’s masterful bass rumbling and Bill Wyman-esk demeanor, Jim was free to channel with reckless abandon the ghosts of Chess Studios through his Gibson ES 135 and tweed covered tube amp. There are many great trad blues bands out there, but for me what makes one rise up out of the fog over another is how well the singer can keep up. Authenticity is made or broken in this key role. Carlos Capote’s melodic voice and mastery of the harmonica certainly didn’t disappoint me, Mathdude, or the other hundred or so in the room. I think the only critical comment I could make about the evening (other than the pouring rain) was that while the Fern Bank Martini Night drew an enthusiastic and generous sized crowd, there are places in Atlanta I’d rather see my friend and his band throw down at ( Blind Willie’s off the top of my head). The 60ft ceilings, marble floors, T-Rex and Aptosaurus skeleton backdrop were a little distracting. It would be even more amazing if at some point I could catch them accompanied by ‘The Gimme Dolla Orchestra’ who graces the band’s “You Got to Bring Some …To Get Some” album.

We’ve since heard back from Jim and you can bet I’ll be dragging my wife and friends out to see The Breeze Kings again very soon. If you like this kind of music, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of either of their records available at their website or at Amazon.com. ‘Sorry That You Put Me Down’ is worth the price alone. You will NOT be disappointed.

I used to think the lines were merely lowbrow comic relief from a man who was universally judged to be a great teacher of writing. Pursuing the rounds of a teaching life we’ve all longed for a moment of well-timed irreverence. We love it when in the film “The Paper Chase” Professor Kingsfield (played by John Houseman) hands a student a dime and tells him to call his mother. “Tell her,” Kingsfield says, “tell her that you will never be a lawyer.”

I am a blind professor of literature and I labor steadily. Theodore Roethke was profoundly disabled—bi-polar, manic depressive—after forty years we still don’t know Roethke’s true diagnosis. Lately however I’ve begun to understand Roethke’s sharp and private marginalia as being part of a disabled teacher’s life. Certain disabilities, particularly blindness and the emotional and learning disabilities, assure that the labor of pedagogy will be intrinsically steep. One may think of Sisyphus, Camus’ version, laboring with the consciousness of his own labor—Camus’ Sisyphus climbs and knows all the weariness of the climb. The teacher with a disability does not work harder than his or her non-disabled colleagues, but the disabled teacher knows in minute ways how the acquisition of that old fashioned and bourgeois clarity “costs” the body. Teaching in pain is not heroic. Still it’s a shaman’s art: the slow acquisition of a text by a learning disabled teacher can singularly change a reading of a text. As a blind reader I am called upon to listen to cadences in every line of the text before me. We are slow and methodical and this pays off.

I begrudge lesson plans and IEPs and the gum chewing of education department types not merely because I am a poet who studied poetry writing but because I suspect that most learning comes from the discovery of the irrevocable and private passion of study. A good teacher is the one who causes a revolution in the personal argument inside a student. After reading Whitman with a person who has read Leaves of Grass over and over in Braille you may hear some engagement with Whitman’s great and passionate heart and some ironic ideas about the poet’s lousy ear. The student will hear that according to his blind professor Whitman lived and wrote as though the words might run out at any moment. Forget D.H. Lawrence’s portrayal of Whitman’s poetry as a steam engine chuffing with amorous love. The blind professor will say that Whitman was throwing those long lines out of fear. Whitman, for all his love of health and robust affection lived in expectation that ill health or madness would stop him prematurely just as it had stopped his mad brother and his fragile father. Just so, says the blind professor, these lines proceed without room for breath. Does reading Leaves of Grass in Braille make such observations more probable? Yes. You come to feel it. Just as Whitman felt it when he loaded all the lead typefaces into racks after hours in a darkened newspaper office.

Roethke was afraid that hard won clarity would leave him. He knew that poetry came from disorder and that the making of poetry was therefore essentially risky as an anodyne for depression. Forget Freud’s naïve contention that poetry is merely a variant of the talking cure. Poetry and the teaching of it both spring from the chaotic and impure regions of the cave of making. Each requires a deft arrangement of logic and imagination. Work. Evanescence. Painful encounters with the consequential difference between what we think and what we like to think. In poetry this difference requires exquisite self-awareness. In turn such self-awareness comes after taking a walk in the dark. If you wish to write poetry a lesson plan may be of almost no value. Even Milton’s Areopagitica can’t help. The Lesson Plan may in this context be a kind of permission to take shortcuts by assuming that the reading list in hand offers the proprietary secret to imaginative life. Roethke read everything he could get his hands on. He read while he was receiving hydrotherapy in the mental hospital. He read and in his mind’s eye moved the words around and found new rhythms and new locations for the syllables and consonants. This isn’t Romantic and it’s not on the syllabus. I like these lines by Ikkyu, the fifteenth century Japanese Zen master:

break through one impasse there’s another let the sweet

lychee slip over your tongue and down

Ikkyu was not disabled as far as we know. But try to eat properly and with spiritual awareness and you will find that almost everyone faces physical difficulties. This Zen fragment offers a glimpse into disability consciousness—which is inherently a poetic realization. The poem comes to mind because the way is steep.

There is no lesson plan given this minute by minute mind’s flight though the wisdom resides in knowing this at every level. One  finds the body and the poetry without a syllabus.

Originally posted at Planet of the Blind.

On an intellectual level, it was the album that revealed to me the elasticity of music– that a performer could emerge from a pop music idiom and a vernacular tradition to completely transcend them, creating something so wholly singular and so unconstrained by formal concerns as to become a work of art outside of time and tradition. At a spiritual level, the album’s gossamer, hypnotic performance and lyrical mysticism gave me a direct experience of the absolute through music that I never got from folk mass. This was heady stuff.

It was also stuff from which its then 23-year old creator seemed to recoil. Of its 8 songs only Cyprus Avenue entered the Van Morrison performing repertoire as a regular matter. And, except for 1974’s Veedon Fleece, Morrison never came close again to the style of Astral Weeks with its open-ended song forms, ethereal soundscapes, and plainly Irish locations. (The Irish locations and references no doubt has added much to the album’s exotic allure).

Morrison’s retreat is understandable I suppose. Astral Weeks ain’t a fun collection of jaunty R&B novelties like Domino or Jackie Wilson Said. It’s a dark spiritual journey through a polymorphously perverse world–a psychological landscape based in large measure on scenes and spirits from Morrison’s native Belfast performed in a devotional style with emotional exorcism as its seeming goal. Its centerpieces, Cyprus Avenue and Madame George, revolve respectively around an obsessive relationship between an older male narrator and a 14-year-old girl; as well as a drunken party scene where a younger man gives himself to, and then callously abandons, a “lovelorn drag queen,” to quote Lester Bangs. Through performances loaded with hypnotic repetition the songs strain against a claustrophobic sense of place and an obsessive sense of sexual and emotional need in a bid for release–an escape from the need, an escape from the place (at the end of Madame George our narrator gets on a train out of Belfast), a rebirth in a better place both actual and psychological (to be born again is the signature refrain of the album’s title track).

The sound of the music also seemed impossible to duplicate–a weird and often evanescent melange of folk, blues and jazz, anchored by a rhythm section of first-call jazz musicians and layered over by Larry Fallon’s period chamber-folk arrangements of strings, and in one instance, harpsichord. Songs were stretched and improvised, rhythms dissolving and cohering, a sound as much as anything a happy accident of producer Lewis Merenstein’s choice of agile musicians like bass player Richard Davis, guitarist Jay Berliner, and drummer Connie Kay, and the space afforded by Morrison’s awkward shyness in the studio. It’s true that Morrison was performing some of this material  the club scene around Cambridge MA in a trio that featured acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, and flute–but on the evidence of the few extant recordings of that group, the sound of Astral Weeks came together only for those few studio sessions, not on stage with Morrison’s jazz-folk trio.

Where the sound and characters of Astral Weeks came from has been an obsession among Morrisonologists for years. I won’t recap the details, instead I’ll refer you to Clinton Heylin’s Morrison bio Can You Feel the Silence? for some oral history, and Lester Bangs’ famous Astral Weeks essay from Stranded: Rock And Roll For A Desert Island . It’s enough to know that, as Morrison’s post Moondance FM-radio hit career grew, he distanced himself more and more from the emotional intensity of Astral Weeks, saying, among other things that the album didn’t come out the way he wanted, that it was marred by Merenstein’s direction, and, ludicrously, that Madame George had nothing to do with a drag queen.

So, Morrison’s sudden decision last year to perform and record Astral Weeks in its entirety, on the 40th anniversary of its release, in a one time set of shows, for CD and DVD release on his new Listen to the Lion imprint of EMI, seemed more commercially calculating than artistically bold. Even Morrison was standoffish (nothing unusal for the notoriously prickly and mercurial performer), lowering expectations in press interviews, saying that he wasn’t taking the Astral Weeks show on the road, just performing it for the purposes of cranking out some product. But after the November Hollywood Bowl shows Morrison was ecstatic about what he had achieved, recapturing the sound  of Astral Weeks, delivering some of his most spirited and engaged singing on record in years, and summoning the spirit among an ecstatic, rapt audience. He quickly scheduled Astral Weeks shows in NYC this week and next, and upcoming shows in the UK.

Astral Weeks fetishists have nothing to fear from Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl. The CD delivers the goods–offering the best performances from two LA shows of a resequenced version of the album’s songs. The brilliantly responsive 12-piece band doesn’t replicate the original arrangements note for note, instead pursuing the original strategy of the moment: improvising, digging deep into the songs for their meaning, and more than on the original, following the leader.

Sure, the artist, now 63, doesn’t sound obsessed, trapped, yearning, the way he did at 23 when the wounds of need were fresh. But these are fine performances in their own right of music that has ripened, and Morrison–strumming acoustic guitar and directing the band it a way he couldn’t as a 23-year old–is in fine fiddle, singing in the upper, soaring part of his register more than he has on many recent records.

Interestingly, the most exciting performances come on two of the original album’s least cataclysmic songs.  Ballerina, a song Morrison had written towards the end of his run with his Belfast R&B band Them, is given a dynamic performance by the singer who alternately coos and growls. And Slim Slow Slider–the only Astral Weeks song set in London, a lament for a lover wasting away on heroin–gets an epic performance, restoring the original instrumental section that was edited from the 1968 performance, and gaining a deeper emotional heft as Morrison pleads with himself to cease caring for the girl in a new lyrical episode, bringing some of the original sense of need and yearning for escape to Astral Weeks Live.

Morrison’s reclamation of Astral Weeks isn’t the kind of catharsis that was Brian Wilson’s 2004 reconstruction of his lost 1967 masterpiece, Smile. Astral Weeks, after all, was never lost, and its creator never fell apart in the face of that loss. But neither is it a cynical piece of product designed to appeal to nostalgic boomers. Instead its the work of a performing artist revisiting one of his greatest works late in his career but still at the top of his game. And it has me more excited than before for the Saturday night Astral Weeks show at the WaMu Theater.

Ash Wednesday

I have historically avoided doing the fund raising thing on my blog, this one, Facebook, etc… but I have just been made aware of a situation that compels me to ask anyone who will listen to consider lending a hand even in these economically trying times. A national treasure needs our help. On January 15th of this year, American singer/songwriter Peter Case was sent to the hospital for emergency open heart surgery. I’ve written and posted about how special Peter’s music is to me here and on my blog a couple times in the past (here, here, and here). The good news, according to the website, is that the prognosis is for a full recovery. Unfortunately, as is the case for many uncompromising artists of our day, Peter has no health insurance and is facing an epic personal financial crisis as the hospital bills are already beginning to pile up.

As the website states, we need Peter to “get back and focus on what he does best – writing and performing his songs” as quickly as we can. I’m hoping that at least one person will have been touched enough by his music to perhaps go out to the Hidden Love Medical Relief site and make a small donation to help Peter and his family out, or as an alternative hit Amazon, iTunes, or his website and pick up a couple of his albums. You will NOT be disappointed.

Everybody has that one special artist whose songs have guided them through the best and worst of times, whose music never fails to inspire introspection, whose storytelling sounds fresh no matter how many times you’ve spun the record. Peter Case writes this kind of music. We need Peter Case around, especially right now. Please help if you can.

Rarely does an Oscar broadcast provide such a memorable moment, but when those panels separated and then flew up, and the five former Best Actresses were standing there… it was shivery. People who say they stood for Sophis Loren… well, it wasn’t just that. You can forget that to be among these winners is to be a star, and to have star presence. And they worked it.

For once, the Oscars seemed to remember a sense of occasion. For once, they seemed to actually draw on more than 75 years of movie history, rather than be embarrassed by it. And, finally, without trying quite so hard, they managed to keep the show interesting, pretty much from beginning to end.

And I should probably be clear - I love The Oscars. I believe in them, and I have since I was a kid. All I want is a great show that reflects Hollywood, the greatness - and mass appeal - of cinema, where brillinat films and filmmakers win awards for the right reasons, and it’s all wrapped up in a stunning 3 (or 4) hours of entertainment. I used to think I wasn’t asking for much… but after you’ve lived through Rob Lowe and Snow White, Letterman, Uma and Oprah… you realize, there’s plenty of ways to mess it up. And eventually, you just hope they don’t make you cringe, or wonder why you sit for 4 hours slogging through Best Documentary Short Subject.

And sometimes, if you don’t wish too hard, and you just believe… you get… magic.

Okay, so yes, the actual awards were mostly predictable, and no, Hugh Jackman wasn’t flawless and the musical numbers were more good than great. But this one got so much right… I think I’m willing to excuse what they got wrong.

Jackman is an interesting stage presence; I realized that if you hadn’t seen The Boy From Oz, where he played Peter Allen, on Broadway - people seemed not to realize how old school musical theater he can be. And like that show, I realized that Jackman is a winning presence because he doesn’t so much dominate the proceedings, as supply an aw-shucks, gee whiz kind of awe about the whole thing. That’s why, ultimately, the opening number - which seemed to fly off the rails early on - came together so well by the end; he believed in what he was doing… and damned if he didn’t get the audience to believe as well (it would have been better, though, to avoid re-conjuring that feel of early Billy Crystal all together. Been there, done that).

Similarly, Baz Luhrmann’s mash-up of Oscar winning musical moments started in a weird place, and for a minute it seemed hit-or-miss. But Luhrmann knows his theatricality, and slapping a red chorus girl/burlesque outfit on Beyonce pretty much saved the whole affair. And yes, there was Jackman, again, putting his faith into the musical number. If you don’t believe the music, he seemed to say… believe in me.

And that was the thing; in the past, that musical number would have been a - dreaded - montage of classic moments, not a fusion of past and present (and in Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, a nod to the future as well). Here we had music, dance, film… and fifty plus years of musicals all smashed up and recut and spun out as something altogether different. Love it, hate it…at least it showed some attempt at not settling for the same old, same old.

That’s why the award presentations themselves became a thing of great theater - beyond those acting presentations (where, finally, they didn’t rush out the last three presenters and zip through major awards like Best Actor and Best Actress), there was the documentary of the five Documentary makers, and the animated tribute to all the animated films… which led to their awards. Then there was the sensible step of organizing the awards around the film-making process - creation to shooting to editing and post-production - that put the right presentations together without feeling like a slog.

Well, mostly; for every brilliant moment, like Tina Fey and Steve Martin or Zac Efron and Alicia Keys, there was leaving Will Smith out there for too long, or Ben Stiller’s distracting you-kind-of-had-to-be-there send-up of Joaquin Phoenix (even if it was slyly hilarious). The elimination of about 85% of the bad banter that’s come to mark things was so welcome it was hard to remember what it was like - until Seth Rogen, James Franco and that cinematographer reminded us.

Still, what this show gave us, most memorably, were those acting awards - a reminder that the winners are a part of something, something about the collective history of film in America. It’s nice to be nominated, and we honor all of the nominees; but I was struck - especially with the actresses - of the moment when the winner and her five presenters walked together offstage. The moment had an undeniable power, a sense that the club had accepted a new member (and aside from the fact that Sean Penn was already a member, Best Actor had that feel, too). Yes, it’s exclusive and excluding… but it’s also glamorous, and a reminder that movie stars are stars… because there are few of them, and they shine.

So, it wasn’t a great year for films… so what? There’s the part about awards, and there’s the part about the ceremony (…and there’s the part about the outfits…but that’s a separate post); and the ceremony was great. So the awards were a little tired and predictable - the sweet elation of the Slumdog Millionaire crowd was charming… but also a little much, since where the evening was headed was pretty clear early on. And one couldn’t help but look at Richard Jenkins and Melissa Leo and think… well, it’s nice to be nominated… once. I may not think much of The Reader, but Kate Winslet was bound to get one, eventually. And this was nice moment to have it happen, the way it happened.

This was a hard year for film, the nominees reflected it, and it’s hard to explain what wasn’t there - that film that’s a triumph of art and message and meaning with a shattering performance that just changes everything (and if I question Heath Ledger’s posthumous award, this is why - that shattering performance was for Brokeback… and I think we kind of all know that, too). Meryl Streep isn’t just going to win reminding us she’s Meryl Streep; Anne Hathaway can’t win simply by breaking all the rules. And so, in a lackluster year, we can give a career sum-up to Kate Winslet. And Penelope Cruz.

Unfortunately, for all the nifty tricks and breathless surprises, it’s hard to get lightning to strike twice: somewhere, there’s a hack producer ready to beat all the interesting innovations of this year’s awards into the ground next time (at the very least, I hope someone has the good sense to keep that new seating configuration… which was way more intimate). The real lesson this year was the triumph of letting creative stage people have their way and see a vision through - and when you do a forties nightclub by way of the internet hung with a crystal curtain will make glorious, perfect sense. That doesn’t mean we need a crystal curtained forties nightclub… forever. Hopefully, someone out there knows the difference. But I doubt it.

After XTC released their minor masterpiece Nonsuch in 1992, the boys from Swindon went on strike against Virgin records due to a contentious contract dispute. When Virgin finally blinked, allowing them to sign with another label, Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding had at least two albums worth of stellar material. It was a tough time for fans of the great lost pop band. In 1995 I was offered a chance to purchase bootlegged demo recordings of their unreleased songs. It was a tough call, but I decided to pass. Although I was curious and desperate to hear new XTC, I knew that waiting for the official recordings would ultimately be a more satisfying experience. Finally, on February 23, 1999, Apple Venus was released to critical acclaim. It exceeded my wildest expectations. Primarily orchestral and acoustic, Apple Venus could not properly be compared to any previous XTC album. While Skylarking and Nonsuch both hinted at some of the sounds that Apple Venus showcased, the breathtaking arrangements and stellar songwriting firmly places Apple Venus Volume One on the top ten of the best pop albums of the 1990s. Here are some blurbs from album reviews when it was released: Interview: “Astoundingly oblique and original.” Newsweek: “A bouyant, beautiful album.” Rolling Stone: “XTC sire more feisty allure than alt kids half their age.” Spin: “Triumphs with deep cleverness.” USA Today: “A sumptuous banquet of symphonic and acoustic pop.” And if those quotes don’t peak your interest, a recent issue of the British music magazine Mojo asked Harry Shearer that if push came to shove, what was his all-time favorite album: “Right now it would be Apple Venus by XTC. Every fucking song on that record is a killer, and I just think it’s Beatles-esque in the best sense of the term. We’ll never see it live, which I both treasure and bemoan.”

In my absence, I try to leave a set of predictions. I believe in waiting until the very last minute; although voting closed about a week ago, there’s still that last gasp of watching the press runs and interviews… and trying to suss out who can win. who should win… and who won’t win.

Last year, I started listing Will win” and “should win”, partly because things have gotten so predicatble of late, and partly because, the predictability is depressing. Daniel Day Lewis for There Will Be Blood… predictable, depressing, and thanks to his “kneeling” before Helen Mirren, embarrassing to boot. This year promises no better… except that no one’s likely to kneel before Daniel Day Lewis.

So, without further ado… just my best guesses in the major categories:

Best Picture - will win: Slumdog Millionaire. Should win: Milk. As I said after seeing it, Slumdog Millionaire will win because City of God didn’t, because the Academy, still in its best “liberal guilt” phase of awarding films that make us feel better about knowing there’s bad things in the world while doing nothing about them, loves the idea of a feel good story where a poor person won’t be poor anymore. Never mind that the shallow wish fulfillment of one person becoming rich does nothing for millions in poverty, or that television creates an illusion of classlessness that’s utterly in denial of the realities of a society like India’s. On the other hand, maybe the Academy’s not wrong: our most dangerous export, as an idea, is that all people can be free and succeed if given a chance. Still, I’d be happier if the Academy acknowledged the power of Milk, the brilliance of Gus Van Sant’s subtle redefinition of the standard biopic, and the kind of transgressive challenge to our society mores that Harvey Milk really represented. But then, I’m gay that way.

Best Actress - will win: Kate Winslet, The Reader. Should win (not nominated): Kristin Scott Thomas, I’ve Loved You For So Long. Should win (nominated): Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married. Yeah, yeah… Winslet’s so young, yet so old, yet so nominated… save it. Winslet doesn’t win because she’s often the best thing in a so-so film, and all accounts are that she’s about the only thing that saves The Reader from utter irrelevance. If The Academy had guts, they’d admit that Anne Hathaway is the real thing, a true star of amazing talents who takes one of the most difficult, least likable leading roles and finds the heart in it. Or, if the Academy had the good sense to see I’ve Loved You For So Long - like I did last night - they’d know that Scott Thomas was cruelly overlooked for this year’s most shattering performance.

Best Actor - will win: Sean Penn, Milk. Should win: Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon. Penn’s award will cement him as the Jack Nicholson of his generation, and… well, he’s earned that. But rewarding Langella would acknowledge him as the greatest of his generation, an actor who’s grown immeasurably from a fairly callow youth into an unforgettable presence, never mind that his Nixon sings (even in fake notes) all of the man’s contradictions, making him pathetic, moving, and fascinating all at once. Honorable mention to Mickey Rourke, still crazy after all these years… but probably unlikely to match The Wrestler any time soon.

Best Supporting Actress - will win: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Should win: Penelope Cruz. Oh, let’s just get it out of the way: Cruz deserves an Oscar after years of doing amazing work for Almadovar, for being the new Sophia Loren… all of that nonsense. Is VCB her best role, or her best film? No and no… but even in a cartoon of a part, and hardly crucial to the goings-on of a mildly amusing Woody Allen joke about Ugly Americans Abroad, she does lift the material beyond where it should get on its own. You can’t, really, say that about anyone else in this category… although Marisa Tomei probably deserves Honorable Mention for proving that My Cousin Vinny was no fluke, even in an obvious Oscar bait role like “aging stripper.”

Best Supporting Actor - will win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight. Should win: Anyone else. I could make a case for Downey’s ability to do the impossible - blackface - and make it work; or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s general excellence; or Josh Brolin’s barely hidden seething rage of a performance. I could even make a case for that guy in Revolutionary Road no one’s heard of, and I didn’t see. What I can’t justify is the creepy necrophilia of rewarding Ledger, posthumously, for the role that probably killed him. There, I said it. And don’t tell me you weren’t thinking it. I wish he were still here, and I wish we could have seen what he would have become. I wish we’d given him an Oscar for Brokeback. But really, this award is going to be just so, so wrong. So wrong.

Best Director - will win: Danny Boyle, Slumdog. Should win: Gus Van Sant, Milk. It’s Boyle’s vision and his film; he deserves it as much as anyone…. but Van Sant may never deliver as well as he’s delivered at this moment, in a conventional way, yet utterly refusing to bow to convention. Honorable mention: Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon - the class project of the season, done to the nines.

Best Animated Film - will win/should win: Wall-E. Honorable mention: Bolt, which worked insanely well, for what it was.

The rest: I expect Slumdog will beat all comers wherever possible. I suspect Benjamin Button will get nothing… or Visual Effects. I bet Waltz With Bashir wins Best Foreign Film, when it should probably have been up for both Best Animated Film and Best Picture (along with Wall-E). I’m guessing The Duchess wins Best Costumes over Australia, because Baroque beats forties almost every time. Beyond that… you’re on your own. I never win the Oscar pool. I’m too passionate for the stuff I like.

Poe’s bicentennial was observed on January 19, the day before this country’s inauguration of optimism and transformational change. Maybe this was not the best timing for Poe’s birthday bash; he was never a feel good guy, sunny with life’s possibilities. But Poe’s more gloomy impact permeates our contemporary culture as deeply as Lincoln’s legacy.

There are some nice websites devoted to Poe’s anniversary, particularly Poe Revealed, but none capture his startling relevancy. Unlike anyone before him, Poe penetrated the luminance and darkness of the mind. He developed forms of expression, which have been carried on by contemporary media, to uncover this uncharted psychological terrain. Seeking to illuminate the “fantastic terrors” in this world and beyond, Poe pioneered the detective, science fiction, and horror genres. Columbo, Star Trek, and Stephen King will forever be in debt to him.

In 1841 Poe created the archetypal detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue; this was before the term “detective” had even entered the English dictionary. His mystery solver, C. Auguste Dupin, cracked cases that Poe ripped from the grisly New York headlines. Imagine that, Dick Wolf. At the same time, he also crafted the first modern science fiction, by integrating realistic detail into his speculative stories and paving the way for Verne, Bradbury, and Battlestar Gallactica. Poe’s scientific sensibility was so finely tuned that he envisioned the Big Bang theory in his prose epic Eureka a century before cosmologists concocted the term to describe the origins of the universe.

Searching to represent the splendor and dread of the imagination, Poe crafted an artistic landscape that continues to be dazzlingly visual and musical. The earliest experiments in film, radio, and television all tried to duplicate this unique POEtry. One of the first major news works of the 21st century was Lou Reed’s deliriously heady re-imagining of the master’s life, The Raven, with two cohorts whom would surely have been drinking buddies of Edgar Allan: Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi. Poe has remained our muse when we grapple with the new.

Unlike Brian Wilson, Poe was made for these times. His life mirrored the joys and tribulations of freelancers everywhere working at the service of their art, but Poe was the prototype. He was the first to try to make a living as a writer and critic, arguing his way to the top of New York literary society only to tumble back to the bottom, becoming a mocked charity case. Even during his final penurious days at his Fordham cottage, he got tantalizingly close to his goal of presiding over his own publication, only to die very Poe-like in Baltimore, under very mysterious circumstances. But, even with his hardships, the visionary Poe recognized things would be different in the future, as stated in this quote recently posted by Andrew Sullivan:

“… authors will perceive the immense advantage of giving their own manuscripts directly to the public without the expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous intervention of the publisher. All that a man of letters need do will be to pay some attention to legibility of manuscript, arrange his pages to suit himself, and stereotype them instantaneously, as arranged…. In the new régime the humblest will speak as often and as freely as the most exalted, and will be sure of receiving just that amount of attention which the intrinsic merit of their speeches may deserve.”

I could go on and on about the Poe man, but a recent Internet posting said it best: “Dude, he invented us.” We are Poe for evermore.

Hard to say where that craze began (or, some might say, migrated over from MySpace), though the 25 Random Things brushfire certainly drove social networkers into a frenzy (my sister, feeling unloved because no one had tagged her yet basically begged her friends to tag her).

I spent part of the weekend responding to the latest Facebook listmeme, 15 Albums–a list of audio recordings that “changed your life.” It was a fun exercise for me–not only because I enjoyed the social status of being tagged and tagging, not only because the process of making the list drew me through a string of joyful memories (hearing Otis Spann and OrnetteColeman for the first time), but most of all because I loved reading the lists of my friends. Social networking invites TMI-burnout. But the artifice of these exercises brings to even a confessional medium something both voyeuristicly remote and warmly inviting.

In fact, I found myself hungry to read more lists, any lists, all lists, lists posted not only by my Facebook friends–whose conversation I lustily enjoyed but whose musical tastes were largely familiar–but also posted by strangers. I wanted to follow the chain back through every tag to the beginning.

But no can do, at least not easily. These lists are typically posted as Facebook “notes” and can only be shared among one’s friends and network members. I understand, Facebook never setout to be a content company. It’s a social network. Friending is its lingua franca. Maintaining the integrity of relationships is crucial to the semi-intimacy that makes Facebook work. Providing experiences that incentivise members to make new friends is the alchemy that makes Facebook grow.

But the 15 Albums list is a variation on a very familiar sort of traditional entertainment journalism (ie, the desert island list, etc). It’s also a Web 2.0 version of Web 1.0’s roboticly named “user-generated content.” It is interesting stuff to read. And, one suspects, it is potentially valuable to Facebook.

I’m not sure the list craze in particular was on the mind of Chris Walters this weekend when he posted to The Consumerist  an analysis of Facebook’s revised terms of service–suggesting that Facebook’snew TOS gives the company a perpetual right to use in any way, anything posted by users now and forever whether users remove the content or not. But Walter’s post set off a tempest in a teapot among some of the technorati.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded yesterday on the Facebook Blog clarifying the nature of the policy:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebooka license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox.

Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebookto work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

But if Facebook is to be a platform, as is Zuckerberg’s ambition, then the company would do well to think beyond the tight circle of friends when it comes to certain kinds of user created content. Facebook as a microblogging platform would benefit from some organic mechanism for sharing more broadly content of the 15 Albums sort, some way for content created inside Facebookto cross the public-private wall more easily, some kind of central repository or tag for such content that would allow easy access to it for Facebook users beyond one’s circle of friends.

For my part, well, here’s my 15 Albums list. If you want to join the discussion on Facebook, please do. How? I dunno. I suppose you could ping me as a friend with a note saying you’re coming from Newcritics. Post your 15 Albums tagging me in the note. And join the Newcritics group. Or just reply here. Let’s keep the conversation going.

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. They might not be what you listen to now, but these are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world.

When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you’re it!

BTW, I’m trying to do this w/o too much thought…reacting more to the question that thinking about it…the records that connect to something deeply personal for me

1) Common One - Van Morrison
First got laid to this one…a weird religious sexual thing and a fantastic experience all around.

2) The Shape of Jazz to Come- Ornette Coleman
Found a box of library discard records on the street in Greenwich Village once, including this one. Put it on the turntable and listened to the weird cross rhythm tug that leads to the mournful melody of “Lonely Woman” and I was literally transfixed…I felt like a bolt of light was shooting down from the ceiling and holding me in one spot.

3) “Burning Fire” - Otis Span
I heard this on a Vanguard blues anthology I took out of the Ossining Public Library when I was in 8th grade…my parents had been cracking the whip on my piano lessons for years, but suddenly I knew what the piano was for.

4) “Remember Me” - The Soul Stirrers
First heard this on the Tony Heilbut-produced LP anthology Fathers & Sons–it’s out of print and it’s CD successor, Kings of the Gospel Highway, doesn’t have “Remember Me.” Since I’ve collected the original 1940s Aladdin 78. RH Harris is one of my two or three favorite singers of all time…This isn’t one of his greatest leads, but record that moves me more than any other. (There’s only one CD of the Stirrer’s Aladdin sides–a mixed bag of 78 transfers on P-Vine out of Japan.) Note to whoever outlives me: make sure they play this at my funeral.

5) Fireside Chat with Lucifer - Sun Ra
A souviner of the first Sun Ra show I ever saw–an early 80s gig @ Jazzmania in NYC. So mindblowing that I, a broke college student, hid in the bathroom as they cleared the house for the second set, then sat in the back nursing a beer so I could hear more.

6) Thelonious Alone in San Francisco- Thelonious Monk
I love Monk, esp. solo Monk, and this is his most fluid and best recorded solo album. I’ve listened to it thousands of times perhaps. The version of “Ruby My Dear” is my favorite Monk performance of my favorite Monk song.

7) Kick Out the Jams - The MC5
Still my go to disk when I crave rock guitar noise.

Astral Weeks - Van Morrison
Wouldn’t have made it through my adolescence w/o this mixture of the ephemeraland the eternal, can’t wait for the AstralWeeks live shows later this month

9) The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle - Bruce Springsteen
Those romantic young boys, all the ever wanna do is fight….

10) Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan
11) The Complete Basement Tapes - Bob Dylan (bootleg)
12) Music From Big Pink - The Band
Our American gothic.

13) Stand Up Comic - Woody Allen
1970s Casablanca twofer culled from Woody’s early 1960s Colpix records. I can still recite every routine word for word. First prize went to the Berkowitz’s, a middle aged couple dressed as a moose….

14) Maggot Brain- Funkadelic

15) Stay Positive - The Hold Steady
Which rekindled a long lost love for rock and roll.

Plus all the others: Cookin’ w/ The Miles Davis Quintet , Dock Boggs Country Blues , the Monroe Brother’s RCA Victor sides, Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers , The Smiths - Hatful of Hollow , Ray Charles complete Atlantic recordings, Sly & the Family Stone’s Stand , all the Staple singer’s VeeJay sides, Sam Cooke’s Night Beat and all his recordings w/ the Soul Stirrers, TS Eliot reciting The Wasteland on the old Caedmon LP, various Hendrix, most esp. The Cry of Love but also Axis: Bold as Love , Robert Johnson King of the Delta Blues Singers , all the Sabicus records I’ve ever heard, et al….

The whole idea matters to criticism, I think, because there is the constant temptation to review a film’s politics, or other esoteric thematic concerns, rather than simply evaluate how a film tells a story. And as a critic, I hate to be locked into a narrow frame - my approach to film encompasses a lot of ideas I’ve encountered over the years: feminism, liberalism, socialism, social justice… and yes, even conservatism. But ultimately, I think, the question I bring to each film is more basic: does it work at its primary goal - to entertain an audience? Because a film that fails as a film, I think, can’t be an effective vehicle for any thematic or political message.

Whereas, I think, a film that succeeds as a film often transcends its more didactic politics. Take, for instance, the top “conservative film” on the NR list: The Lives Of Others, a recent winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. It’s true that you can see in that film a clear indictment of the repressive politics of East Germany just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall… but to narrow the film’s thematic message to just the politics misses the compelling human drama unfolding around it. The complexities of the relationships between a playwright, his actress girlfriend, the Stasi official obsessed with her, and the low level functionary sent to spy on them, reveals layers of complexity in human interaction. Is all of that “conservative”? I’d argue no… but really, it’s the argument that’s beside the point; The Lives of Others is such a transcendent piece of filmmaking, I think it defies easy categorization, and demands wide viewing.

Here are the top 10 in the National Review List:
1. The Lives of Others
2. The Incredibles
3. Metropolitan
4. Forrest Gump
5. 300
6. Groundhog Day
7. The Pursuit of Happyness
8. Juno
9. Blast From The Past
10. Ghostbusters

Of course, the first, obvious reaction to all of this is that list is basically a mess; it lacks any sort of critical or intellectual rigor, the choices are all over the place, and the idea of “conservatism” as a thread to tie this films together is tenuous at best, and underlines how poorly defined “conservatism” is in these post-Bush days.

Also, apparently, none of the top conservative movies is made before 1983.

I have a longtime bias against these exercises in list making; count me among those who thinks the “AFI Top 100″ list of the “greatest films of all time” does a disservice to all concerned. Unlike the NR list it deifies, and calcifies in amber, a sense that old matters more than new, that the old warhorses (you know Casablanca and Gone With the Wind are in there) will always matter, no matter what. The AFI list is no more useful, or more thoughtful, ultimately, than National Review’s: it makes me want to know what missed the cut, and why I should let others decide for me the films I need to see.

As a critic, of course, the dilemma of influence is key: does our opinion matter for anything, can we actually convince anyone to do anything based on our views? Lists of films sidestep that question by creating an instant sense of authority, even though the opinions are just as daft, if not more so. We can waste hours, days, years (thanks AFI!) arguing the relative merits of #17 versus #25.

At this point in my writing, I don’t need the sense of control; I write criticism because the ideas interest me, films fascinate me. What they say about us, about our cultures, the lives we lead or could lead… these things animate my critical view. And because our lives don’t fit easy “political” theories, neither do our films. Am I concerned about the feminist implications of a series of films - Bride Wars, Confessions of a Shopaholic, He’s Just Not That Into You - that suggest women are easily stereotoyped? Sure; but do I think the consumer culture and modern mores have made weddings, shopping and boyfriend acquisition part of the story of our culture? Yeah, that too.

For the record, I love Metropolitan (and Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco), 300, and The Incredibles. I love them for different reasons - and frankly my love of 300’s eye candy is one reason NR should be worried about listing it - and none of them, I think, makes me conservative, nor is a “conservative” view of the world what I take from any of them. And the reasons I dismiss the films I don’t like on the list - the maudlin, cheap melodrama that really defines Forrest Gump; the childish, offensive commercialism of Ghostbusters - have nothing to do with rejecting conservative ideas (indeed, Forrest’s role as a character of fundamental decency is the film’s only saving grace; though the fact decency is equated with being mentally simple speaks volumes about what’s being celebrated). And I think making assumptions about the politics of the makers as defining the product - and really, where are Cecil B. deMille, for instance, or Loretta Young on that list - is just as fallacious. I spoke to Whit Stillman’s mother at a Democratic fundraiser years ago; I have my reasons to suspect that his politics don’t necessarily fit the bill NR describes.

It’s frustrating that so many see arts criticism as something anyone can do; that we think a film review from the gal in the office (”The film is great! Brad Pitt is awesome!”) is similar to the work of AO Scott (personally, I blame Peter Travers). Lists of films, I think, reinforce the idea: anyone can make them (just check Amazon or Netflix), and the criteria needs only a sliver of reason to seem deep. National Review, like other political jourmals, treats its arts coverage as an afterthought; and just as poorly, as part of the current conservative movement, it suffers from a general anti-intellectual, anti-creativity approach to the arts that makes serious criticism all but impossible.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing in conservative circles about the abject liberalism of films from Hollywood. The National Review list, clearly, is meant to subvert the idea that “Hollywood liberalism” is reflexive. A more nuanced examination - which occasionally surfaces on the right - is that conservatives don’t impact the arts more because they largely don’t try hard enough: too concerned with the political message, they sacrifice the necessary elements of drama, conflict and character development that make performing art thrive. Many of us - me included - would welcome art that challenges our preconceived notions; that what art does, what its meant to do. You can’t create a notion of a “conservative cinema” by simply wholesale claiming various projects after the fact, certainly without the kind of intellectual rigor that sets a precise definition and takes more care than the casual, sloppy exercise on display in NR. I’m subversive enough of a liberal film critic to think we’d better off if someone tried to actually define a conservative cinema… but it won’t be me doing it. And so far, it won’t be National Review, either.

Cross posted to NYC Weboy

Jerry Lewis had France, and until recently Allen Spain, adoring him. But to their credit Spanish critics did not fall for the crass pandering to their own clichés and stereo-types financed by Catalan tourism budgets: this movie was unanimously panned not just in Spain but in Europe generally, with only US critics this time lining up obediently behind their guy, ostensibly for having treated him rather harshly in the past, be this for good reason.

But what a shame, besides becoming ridiculous this little man seems suddenly to be sliding down to levels of outright amateurism. I hope this is not the onset of senility, but I fear the worst. And ladies, let me tell you straight off, this is yet another Allan movie whereby a seriously slippery smartass, even ugly as sin, can manipulate several otherwise intelligent and always beautiful women into doing as he wishes, at any time. They just flop down and fold open, the sad sack but really maniacal victor having the gall of asking how he was and expecting a medal for his selfish lust. Of course we all know what that makes women, in this pathetic and insecure mind. The only thing we’re delivered of is Allen playing himself, the way he was want to, year after year, flick after self-absorbed, neurotic and tiresome flick, only occasionally truly funny.

And with Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s celebration a whole industry going to pot, enough at least for one to become very cynical about the circular, odious way crap like this gets whipped up to become some fictitious gourmet dinner: the oohs of it, the ahs of it, like infomercials, everyone scratching the other’s back, a place where certain fleas and scabs do mass. For it’s baffling to see this feature film feasted on talk shows, dubiously given awards and made the subject of laudatory reviews even cornier than this piece of laughable, not comical, cinematographic romance itself. A work ‘critically acclaimed’ while not yet released, by people with some sort of incentive to do so. A film replete with multi-millionaire pads, elegant art galleries, rich poets, sports cars, 5 star resorts, artist painters typically holding a commercial pilot’s license and owning a private aircraft, plus castles, guitars, concert pianists and everything explained, signaled ahead, spelled out for the stupid. All glossy, sentimental crap but spiked with stale ‘wit’, you see, and instantaneous Psychology 1.01 analysis. Though the audience I shared this unforgettable evening with, bless them, did constantly burst out in loud laughter for the ‘wrong’ reason and in the ‘wrong’ places, so unbelievably derisory a story, with sequences like Javier Bardém, the lead actor trying to bed our ‘serious’ heroine, Rebecca Hall, uttering the astonishingly original come on

Doo dyou like leestening to the eSpanees guitar?

(breathless) Yes, I love Spanish music!

Instantly followed by, surprise, surprise, on command, a eSpanees courtyard, and, yes, yes, a Spanish guitarist, playing Spanish music on, incredibly, a….Spanish guitar below passionate or were they gooey eyes?

As with (constant, annoying voice over) When the owner of the fruit store turned away for a second to take a telephone call, (whatever his name was) touched her hand.

This is shocking, the audacity of the mere brushing of the hand of a woman a guy already knows, in a small supermarket while the owner is momentarily turned away to take a telephone call, pre-announced, and then again all happening before our very eyes. Too much! This after having been shown her walking round town with the same dude, enjoying several lunches, naturally following intensive Catalán language and history courses together, with her reacting

What gave you the impression that you can touch my hand. Does my vulnerability show that much…I’m a married woman you know… (or whatever)…blah, blah, blah

Of course this is the stuff of intense, sudden supermarket drama, its owner momentarily distracted by taking that damned phone call. I once scratched my nose in fruit store while its owner was momentarily distracted by a phone call. It was horrible, horrible. I felt so dirty. And guilty, at the same time. Must be my vulnerability, which didn’t show, because I was alone at the time.

So does this Harlequin-cum-travelogue continue: future husband arriving from New York with empty suitcases apparently, lifted with incredible ease and in itself a joke, with more shots of balconies, theme parks, facades, constant Gàudi, Dali, Picasso, Miró and other Barcelona references, than one can shake a stick at.

But behold, besides cornball statement upon cornball take, how could we forget the hirsute Penélope Cruz and her timeless performance of an ex-wife, fellow-painter and of course classical piano genius, constantly tossing her hair mainly because it’s all she has got, while displaying the emotional depth of a flat Paella casserole. Again superbly unconvincing, miscast, and cutely showing us the almost palpable suffering of a woman who attempted suicide a day ago, was hospitalized, but quickly came along to the picnic, cracking all the carefree, shallow jokes she could think of, the way most of us do after trying to finish our life in deep, clinical despair.

And there’s no point bringing up Scarlett Johansson, poor thing having a dismissible character to play, and doing so in equally dismissible fashion.

I know, light-hearted ‘romantic’ comedies cannot be taken seriously, but why is that this one is and that there exist very, very good ones, but this unfunny one definitely not one of them? Because there are standards, aren’t there? Somewhere! Yes, we do know these too exist, but where can they be found? Not here, that’s for sure, a terrible, self-indulgent script, let me assure you!

I walked away from the show after an hour and twenty minutes, figuring that a movie that hadn’t delivered anything after 80 minutes wasn’t worth spending the last 16 minutes on. And I wasn’t the first person to leave, there were others having better things to do with their evening. So save your money, this is crisis time and you deserve entertainment and escape, not aggravation and daylight robbery during night time.

Nevertheless I’ve come to see that there’s a philosophical difference between the scientists and the writers. This takes a little time to sus out because at first there’s the wine and the brie; the mutual curiosity about ideas; the discovery that the scientists read widely in literature; the finding that writers are fascinated by science and medicine. A young genetic researcher recites a long passage from Kipling’s “Gunga Din” which is meant to be heard not read and aside from all the colonial sentiments (admittedly a big aside) one feels suddenly disposed toward Kipling who one hadn’t thought about since the third grade when the saga of Riki Tiki Tavi was on one’s mind. (Personally I wanted to become a writer because of Kipling. I decided this when I was 8 years old. Many writers will tell you similar stories while substituting Booth Tarkington or H.G. Wells.

A doctor recites the prologue from “The Canterbury Tales” and we learn that he was long ago in a life before med school actually an English major. He makes no joke about having come to his senses. He knows the supple discriminations of lingo are central to the mind’s muscularity. He knows he’s a better doc because he’s carrying old rhythms and plots under his white coat and deep in his chest.

A writer says he likes Oliver Sacks and another says he is fascinated by the history of consciousness and the work of Antonio Damasio (who used to teach at the University of Iowa) and still another writer talks with affinity about the history of mathematics.

We talk about the importance of narrative both in scientific research and in figurative language. We talk about narrative medicine and how doctors especially young ones need to hear their patients.

And like Rousseau we drink bordeaux and nibble cheese and think of the mind as a fit gift to the world. We have a log on the fire.

When an evening like this is over I think (as we all do) that we need much more cross fertilization. I won’t say “in the university” because I think that the business of bringing  parenthetically specialized people together is critically important in every social culture we can conceive of. Currently I’m just thinking of my own fireside.

In some respects I think the writers have more to learn from the scientists than they would easily imagine. While this is a generalization to be sure, I’ve seen over time that many writers (in all genres) are quietly and uncritically attracted to what I can only describe as a kind of amateur apocalyptic thinking. They imagine the world is ending. They have the evidence of course. The evidence is overwhelming. Everyone knows the evidence. A very limited undergraduate said to me once and without irony:”It’s all Al Gore’s fault.” He didn’t know what he meant any better than I do but its safe to say that he was talking about evidence. And the trouble with evidence as any reader of crime fiction well knows is that once you’ve dug it up you can’t bury it again.

The poet Wallace Stevens wrote: “The world is ugly and the people are sad.”  He was incorrect about both the people and the world even as he was undeniably certain how he (as a singular man) felt about both the people and the world. That is, he was correct about some of the people some of the time and some of the world all of the time.

Some. Feeling. One spots the provisional quality of Stevens’ apprehensions. In English departments they talk of subjectivity not just as a condition of the individual but as an inheritance from cultural influences. We are reduced, isolated, made smaller within the mind by the predilections of organized politics, religion, education, and yes, literature.

Wallace Stevens had a lousy marriage, a boring job (he was an insurance executive “by day”), and he studied French modernist poetry and philosophy. Was he sad? You bet. And why not?

Trouble is: way too many American writers and especially writers who make their livings by teaching at universities think like Wallace Stevens. While they may understand the entrapments of subjectivity they easily give in to habits of imaginative limitations.

Part of the reason for this is that contemporary literature is driven by feelings. Fiction is more often than not concerned with failings of families or of communities; poetry is about spiritual loss or the maddening and inchoate quality of language.

It is hard to care about literature that isn’t about anything beyond the artful arrangements of its ingrown despairs but this is mostly what’s going around. I won’t bother with examples. Pick up any literary magazine. Go to a writer’s conference.

Its hard to imagine scientists who believe that the words “feeling” and “some” are sufficient to their work. If you want to cure diseases you are testing every hypothesis and challenging your assumptions. If you love literary language you love it for its aesthetics and you don’t confuse aesthetics with progress.

Of course some writers would tell you that “progress”is a bourgeoise notion thereby dismissing it. Well, one of my friends is close to curing blindness. Stick that in your poetry pipe.

Originally posted at Planet of the Blind.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is a lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

I hardly knew Lowell as a poet.  I knew him much better as a playwright.  And as a character in Mailer’s Armies of the Night.  I think I was smart enough not to trust Mailer’s characterization of him.

My feelings about Stafford and Lowell were based entirely on a photograph of the two them with their friend Peter Taylor.  At the time I hadn’t read any of Taylor’s short stories either.  Amazingly, I was considered very well-read by other members of the Writers’ Workshop.  The photograph of Lowell and Stafford and Taylor reminded me of the picture of Robert Redford, Katherine Ross, and Paul Newman as Sundance, Etta, and Butch.  I don’t know what I was wishing for.  A life of robbing banks and trains and coming home at night to write for a while and then stay up late arguing about literature?   I’ve never had a romance that included either bank robbery or poetry, mine or hers.  I dated actresses and dancers and one painter, but no poets or fiction writers, and none of the girls I was serious about, including the one I married, was very bohemian.  I’m not much of a bohemian myself.

At Iowa I was Peter Taylor to Steve Kuusisto and his girlfriend’s Lowell and Stafford, or was I Butch to their Sundance and Etta.  I talked to Steve on the phone this morning about Lowell.  I forgot to ask him if he and his girl back in Iowa robbed any banks.

Steve admires Lowell no end.

Talking to him I remembered that I have a non-connection connection with Lowell.  He taught at Boston University.  Long before I got there, but he’d died only a couple of years before, so you’d think he’d have been a topic of conversation around the creative writing department.  I swear I never heard his name mentioned.  In fact, I didn’t know he’d taught there until I got to Iowa where a girl in the poetry workshop told me about it.  “Oh,” she exclaimed at a party, “You went to BU?  Did you take any courses with Robert Lowell?”  I’m pretty sure she knew Lowell was dead, but she was hazy on the dates.  I didn’t let on that what she was saying was news to me.

I told Steve that it still surprises me that Lowell was such a non-presence at BU.  He was not a forgettable guy.  I speculated that he had offended the entire faculty and two decades later they hadn’t gotten over the hurt.  Steve said he didn’t doubt it, academics are easily offended and Lowell was a difficult character.  He went on to describe Lowell in words I should have written down and that I can’t remember now because they’ve been over-written in my memory by Lowell himself.  After I spoke to Steve I read one of Lowell’s essays on his friend Randall Jarrell.

He could be very tender and gracious, but often seemed tone-deaf to the amenities and dishonesties that make human relations tolerable.  Both his likes and dislikes were a terror to everyone, that is to everyone who either saw himself as important or wished to see himself as important.  Although he was almost entirely without vices, heads of colleges and English departments found his frankness more unsettling and unpredictable than the drunken explosions of some divine enfant terrible, such as Dylan Thomas. 

Lowell’s description of Jarrell is pretty close to what I now recall Steve saying about Lowell, except for the part about being almost entirely without vices, and Lowell was known to explode drunkenly from time to time.

I imagine that Lowell inspired jealousy among his colleagues too.  He was tall and handsome and famous.  The prettiest and smartest co-eds must have flocked to his classes.  Around him the professors probably felt like fat bald squirrels in the presence of a fox.

I’m skipping around in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. It’s Spring of 1962.  Bishop’s poem First Death in Nova Scotia has just been published in the New Yorker.  Lowell’s been sick and sicker.  He’s down to a hundred and seventy three pounds.  He’s been dreaming of Philip Rahv.  He’s amazed at how many of their old Bohemian friends have become snobs and social climbers.  Lowell’s coming to Brazil, maybe.  Bishop is planning a trip to Italy, but not while Lowell’s in Brazil of course.  She’s trying to get him a cheap rate at a swanky hotel in Rio.  Lowell tells her that when he comes it will be with his family in tow and they’ll be taking along a Radcliffe girl to look after Lowell’s little daughter.  At this point, Lowell was teaching at Harvard not BU.  Based on nothing else but my own imagination, I’m thinking the Cliffy went along to look after Lowell too.  This is probably unfair of me.  Lowell often behaved badly towards the women in his life, but I don’t know if he ever behaved that badly and in that way.

Later, when I mentioned to the blonde about Lowell’s absence from my memories of BU, she was dubious.  Her professors talked about him, she said.  She can’t recall anything particular that they said, but she’s sure they were all proud of having been his colleague and, in one case, his student.  She thinks I just must not have been paying attention, which could be, since not paying attention is something I was very good at when I was an undergrad.

It’s June, 1956.  Lowell’s wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, is expecting.  It’s very hot in Boston where they live.  Bishop’s last letter reported the arrival of the Lowells’ Christmas present.  Lowell can’t believe it took so long to get to Brazil where Bishop’s living.  The present was a pitcher bought at a shop near the State House.  That shop was still there when I lived in Boston thirty years later.  I wonder if I’d gone in there and asked they would have remembered Lowell.

While I was on the phone with Steve I put on my boots and parka and went outside to wait for the mail.  Our mailbox was plowed in and has iced over and our carrier cannot get her truck close enough to reach it and deliver our mail.  I kicked at the snow piled up against the box to test if I could budge it with a shovel.  Pellets of ice sprayed away from the heel of my boot with a hiss.  Despite the cold it was a good day to be outside.  The sun was brilliant and the sky an almost summery blue.  A cardinal was singing in a bush by our fence.  Both Lowell and Bishop could have done something with that cardinal and the snow and the bright blue sky.  They were good with animals.

Lowell:

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air–
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Bishop:

Now, it’s all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
–Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man’s voice assures us
“Perfectly harmless. . . .”

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It’s awful plain.”
“Look! It’s a she!”

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

“Curious creatures,”
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r’s.
“Look at that, would you.”
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there’s a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

It’s January, 1949.  Bishop is learning how to play pool from a Polish girl and the elevator boy at her hotel.  She’s either in New York or Key West, I can’t tell which and she doesn’t say and the editors aren’t helpful.  Must be Key West because she’s thinking of going bone fishing in June.  I didn’t think there were any buildings tall enough to need elevators in Key West.  But it’s a hotel.  Who wants to climb steps in the Florida heat carrying luggage?  She has to be in Key West.  Sunday she is going to the cock fights.  She calls herself a female Hemingway.  Meanwhile, Lowell has seen Djuna Barnes kissing T.S. Eliot.  He says that Bishop and Peter Taylor have always made him feel like something of a fake and he loves them both for it.  He had to interrupt his letter at that start because he smelled something burning and had to go look to see what was on fire.  Turns out it was the pocket of his jacket.  He’d stuffed a lighted cigarette into it.  There were some matches in the same pocket.  He’s been reading Moliere and thinks he’s swell.

It’s January, 2009.  Sixty years later.  I’m not in Key West.  There are no cigarettes burning holes in any of my pockets.  I think Moliere is swell.  I don’t want to imagine T.S. Eliot kissing anyone.

Springsteen’s chart success probably has more to do with the fact that middle aged men tend to be less at ease with Limewire than do 13-year-old girls–not since the dual releases of Lucky Town and Human Touch in 1992 has Springsteen made an album more personal and less in tune with its zeitgeist. In times as dark as any since the days of Nebraska (Springsteen’ brilliant response to the recessionary despair of the early 1980s), Bruce has delivered what is mostly a contemplative album of domestic bliss.

Lucky Town and Human Touch seemed somehow lesser for their being removed from the world. They also sounded like the work of a man at war with himself–at the time Springsteen was recently divorced and remarried, had broken up his band of a dozen years, and had released simultaneous records spotlighting different styles of music. By contrast, Working on A Dream sounds like a man in an almost serene condition, embracing instead of running from the sounds and styles that inspired him, still looking outward–but in a nearer circle–finding an enviable peace in the little details of domestic life, marriage and aging: This Life/This Life and then the next/I finger the hem of your dress/My universe at rest goes one new chorus. Badlands this ain’t, but, at the risk of sounding like Yoda, beautiful, it is.

Springsteen insisted to Rolling Stone that the aging lovers in the touching Kingdom of Days weren’t autobiographical. But, it’s frankly impossible to read anything but autobiography in lines like And I count my blessing that your mine for always/We laugh beneath the covers and count the wrinkle and the grays coming from a father of three, pushing 60, almost 20 years into a second marriage. And for my part, I find it impossible not to be moved by the sentiment. This is an album devoted to the sudden moments of transcendent connection that come when you least expect them and are born out of the most mundane things like the swelling emotion of watching the joy in someones eyes when you throw them a surprise party or the lonely guy’s aching unrequited love for the check out girl. (Yeah, I know, there’s a whole meme going around that Queen of the Supermarket is the worst song Springsteen ever wrote. Anyone who tells you that is nuts and doesn’t know shit about songwriting. This is the kind of glorious pop songcraft most pros would give their right arms to achieve. Schmaltzy? Sure. But hey, this is pop music we’re talking about.)

Some folks, and rock fans in particular, eschew this kind of sentiment much as they choke on the cornpone (I was surprised by the vitriol aimed at Springsteen’s Super Bowl jokey lyric changes and hammy theatrics which I found both entertaining and wholly in keeping with Springsteen’s entire career). But unless you’re the hipper than thou type who needs your rock angst-ridden or not at all, you may find, as I do, that this is Springsteen’s most listenable album of original tunes in many years. On balance it’s better than Magic which was written contemporaneously and features many of the same sonorities. Sure, there are some slight songs here–the title track for one, the bluesy Good Eye, the tossed off Tomorrow Never Knows–but even the slightest songs feel so good they go down like a cool glass of lemonade on a muggy August day.

Musicly Working on a Dream is packed with old school pop hooks (Andy Whitman of Paste must have been listening to a different album) and is almost an encyclopedia of generational rock gestures. As Jon Pareles catalogued in his Jan. 28 Sunday NYT Arts & Leisure article there’s the Brian Wilson homage in the massed harmonies and reverb laded woodblocks that introduce This Life, the CCR chug of the title track, the psychedelic backwards guitar solo and 8 Miles High distorted 12-string of Life Itself, and, I’ll add, the spacey, Pink Floydish coda to Queen of the Supermarket. (Oddly, there’s no obvious Dylan influences in the mix, although the 8-minute spaghetti western Outlaw Pete which opens the album does have echoes of Dylan’s warped late period versions of Marty Robbins western ballads, songs like Romance in Durango or Brownsville Girl).

Although sonically the records Springsteen has done with producer Brendan O’Brien leave a lot to be desired–this one has a flat, in-your-face quality that apparently even a great mastering engineer like Bob Ludwig couldn’t fix–there’s no question that O’Brien has inspired Springsteen to expand his sound with the kind of dense orchestral overdubs which Springsteen largely turned away from 30 years ago. And there’s no doubt that the process has given new life to Springsteen as a songwriter. Still the pulsing heart of the sound of Working on A Dream comes from the live rhythm tracks laid down quickly by the E Street Band. Not since The River has the band sounded this tight and loose at the same time, falling easily into the pocket and providing the kind of living, breathing feel that gives the overdubbed flourishes an oragnic foundation upon which to rise.

It was 30 years ago–when the Boss fired his original management team and began stripping down the romantic, street opera sound of his early records– that Springsteen made the decision to shoulder the burden of working class American bard as deliberately as anyone since Walt Whitman in 1855. The sense of responsibility to give public voice to certain kinds of shared concerns gave rise to many of Springsteen’s finest works–Darkness on the Edge of Town, much of The River, Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad, the best parts of Born in the USA. These were records that worked because as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation Springsteen was always able to articulate the small, emblematic story; to find the simple dramatic narrative moment; to summon the perfect detail or concoct the exact character that allowed part to stand for the whole (the shotgun wedding of The River, the pawned engagement ring of Spare Parts, the meth lab explosion in Sinaloa Cowboys). But in recent years Springsteen’s dilberate public works haven’t come as easily. Songs like 57 Shots, Land of Hope and Dreams and even The Rising sounded like the work of a guy who was trying too hard to live up to his self-appointed responsibility. Working on a Dream isn’t a repudiation of those works or that approach, but it’s kind of like Another Side of Bruce Springsteen–a record that sounds much closer to the heart, that sounds like it was much easier to make, and that is certainly much more enjoyable to listen to.

I had never heard this anecdote before. It’s from Jonathan Gould’s luminescent book on the Beatles, Can’t Buy Me Love:

“And Your Bird Can Sing” sounds like the second act of “She Said, She Said” — another song about personal pretention, sung by John to the accompaniment of George’s crazed, cacophonous guitar. [N.B., it should be both John and George's crazed, cacophonous guitars, but perfection eludes even this splendid book.] “Tell me that you’ve got everything you want, and your bird can sing, but you don’t get me,” John taunts his anonymous adversary in the opening verse. Listeners tended to assume that the “bird” in question was British slang for “girl,” and the song works well on that assumption. But Lennon was stalking bigger game in “And Your Bird Can Sing.” The song was inspired by a profile of Frank Sinatra by Gay Talese that appeared in the April 1966 issue of Esquire. “Bird,” Talese wrote, ” is a favorite Sinatra word. He often inquires of his cronies, ‘How’s your bird?’; and when he nearly drowned in Hawaii, he later explained, ‘Just got a little water on my bird’; and under a large photograph of him holding a whiskey bottle that hangs in the home of an actor friend named Dick Bakalyan, the inscription reads, ‘Drink, Dickie! It’s good for your bird.’” What brought the article to Lennon’s attention in the first place was not its revelations about Sinatra’s private vocabulary, but rather his attitude toward an upcoming network television special with which he hoped to reassert himself as a force in contemporary pop:

Sinatra had been very excited about this show; he saw here an opportunity to appeal not only to those nostalgic, but also to communicate his talent to some rock-and-rollers — in a sense, he was battling the Beatles. The press releases being prepared by Mahoney’s office stressed this, read: “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons….”

After the crack about mops and melons, John Lennon could take some satisfaction in reading about “an inconspicuous little gray-haired lady” on Sinatra’s staff whose sole responsibility was to care for the singer’s collection of sixty “remarkably convincing” toupees. But Talese’s fawning description of Sinatra’s charisma (”the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America , the man who can have anything he wants”) and Sinatra’s wealth (”his film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five”) was more than enough to inflame John’s sense of professional jealousy. Insult had been added to injury around the time the article appeared with the announcement of the Grammy Awards for 1965. In the year of Highway 61 and Rubber Soul, the American record industry turned its back on the youthful trends in pop by honoring Sinatra in the categories of best male vocalist and best album for a world-weary collection called September of My Years. “Tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is,” crooned the world’s greatest kid singer in his enigmatic reply, “and your bird can swing. But you can’t hear me. You can’t hear me.”

So what we’ve learned here, class, is that “And Your Bird Can Sing” is about Frank Sinatra’s dick.

I’m sure your lives are greatly enriched by this knowledge.

One of the more charming tracks on the Anthology is an outtake of the Fabs trying to track the vocal on this song, and absolutely pissing themselves laughing. I’d assumed it was the effect of an herbal jazz cigarette; now I believe we have another data-point in explaining the howling laughter.

(Damned shame that books about pop music aren’t carefully footnoted; I’d love to know precisely where this information came from. Gould’s bibliography is 12 very closely set pages, and I don’t have a lifetime to devote to tracking it down.)

Slightly later update: With this information in mind, the bridge takes on whole universes of new meaning:

When your prized possessions
Start to weigh you down
Look in my direction
I’ll be round
I’ll be round

Without this knowledge, it’s an offer for help, a friendly “you’ve got a shoulder to cry on.” But with it, ooof! Burn!

Slightly later, later update: How much you wanna bet that “possessions/direction” rhyme started with “erection”? Knowing John….

Beckett’s 1958 play, Krapp’s Last Tape, was conceived for one actor, portraying a failed novelist on his sixty-ninth birthday. The character Krapp celebrates his anniversary by listening to recordings that he made on previous birthdays, particularly one created by his thirty-nine-year-old self. The distant voice on the tape speaks of youthful desires and ambition, which were never fulfilled. In fact, the reels of tape embody different possibilities of self that Krapp has grappled with and forgotten over his life. For Beckett, time is not a river, but cartons of tape that keep piling up. On those reels of tape our memories reside. Krapp’s Last Tape is at the intersection of who we are and how we electronically remember.

When Beckett conceived Krapp in the midfifties, the tape recorder was just being merchandized for personal use. Reel-to-reel tape was created in Germany in the midthirties and not developed by the Allies until after World War II. Actually when the play was first produced, it was technically impossible to have a personal audio record of your life thirty years before. Magnetic tape was a recent phenomenon; postwar production allowed for the privatization of media for middle class memory. But we don’t critique Beckett for his electronic expertise.

Beckett was prescient in how our lives are refracted and preserved by our own private media. Over the last few decades several artists, most notably Atom Egoyan, have investigated how media determines and confuses collective and personal memory. Krapp would be a touchstone for his memory meditations, and, in 2000, Egoyan adapted the play for television, with John Hurt as his wizened media Everyman. Here a Hurtful Krapp sardonically comments on his past self. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jV5I9vtouE

Actor Michael Laurence has recast Krapp for the new millennium. First presented at the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival, where it received the award for Outstanding Solo Show, and now running at the Soho Playhouse, his Krapp, 39 looks at how private media overwhelms the struggling self. Krapp is no longer an old man looking back at life, but a youthful thirty-nine-year-old, trying to make sense of his many selves preserved by phone messages, computer screens, and home video. His character, obsessed with Beckett, continually undergoes the painful self-scrutiny that the Irish playwright thought was reserved for old age. Laurence dramatically shows us that the proliferation of new media now engulfs us with all sorts of memory, which is almost paralyzing. New technology has made us all Krapp, scavenging the splinters of our media lives. Here is the Krapp that defines our digital destiny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2-zZK0qX_Y

Cross-posted at The Paley Center for Media.