Special Weekend Awesomeness Alert Update

Speaking as an old school hard-copy periodical freak, The London Review of Books has long been one of my favorite periodicals. I got my hands on my first copy when I was still in high school in the early 1980s, and at the time I just assumed that I was coming in at a late moment in its august, storied history; surely something called The London Review of Books must have been around forever, providing the occasion for dueling challenges to be meted out in Mother Swithins's Grog and Steak House while Samuel Johnson hogged the free copy and sat in a corner, chuckling at the cartoons. A very pretty thing, eh, Bozzy? Admire the fine, knobby detail on the trunk of the tree into which Milton has been to heedlessly walk face-first, ker-thunk! It wasn't until many years later, when I began picking up the paperback anthologies drawn from the LRB's back issues, that I learned that I was actually pretty close to being unfashionably early at the Review's party; it only began publication in the fall of 1979.

Now, to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, the LRB has finally made its full archives available online to subscribers, because even with the archives of The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Harper's all there online, I was still managing to spend enough time away from the computer to shower every other day. (I only subscribe to the current version of Harper's so that I can continue to dip into the crystal-clear waters of its salad years; i.e., whenever Lewis Lapham was barred from the premises.) Of course, you have to subscribe to get the full effect, and I wouldn't advise doing that until you've first punched that yellow donate button on the right side of the screen and send me some damn money!, but after that, anyone with a curious mind, an Internet connection, and a few bucks to spare really owes it to him- or herself. Because then, you will gain easy access to an alternate account of our times from the dawn of Thatcherite-Reaganism to the present day: a rich cross-section of opinions about literature, art, politics and history. Anyone who can't afford it right now can take solace in the fact that I plan to start running amok there, with my poaching sack in hand, in a constant search for opinions and turns of phrase that I'm sure I would have come up with myself if I had more time and had deep-fried fewer brain cells in my wayward youth. This place is about to get a whole lot smarter.

Slow Treen Going

The news that former Louisiana Governor Dave Treen has died at 81 won't affect a lot of people who don't have an emotional investment in, and the inevitable mixed feelings about, the political history of the Pelican State. I was born in Louisiana but haven't lived there since 2001, which scarcely matters; once you've made the mistake of getting interested in the stuff, it leaves its permanent mark on you as surely as untreated syphilis. Treen himself was enough of a Louisiana pol that he tried to keep his hand in for most of his adult life, and he spent most of his time having it either ignored or rudely swatted away. Every obituary for Treen will routinely point to him as the first Republican Governor elected in Louisiana after Reconstruction, which may cause some people to think that political ideology, and maybe the rightward shift in the country in the late seventies, had something to do with the shape of his career. But in twentieth-century Louisiana, most of the successful local politicians were registered as Democrats, and the bulk of them were at least as conservative as the politicians in the rest of the country who called themselves Republicans. In recent years, as the Republican party has, nationwide, turned wholeheartedly bugfuck, Louisiana has had to witness the sorry site of its senior U.S. Senator, Mary Landrieu, a "Democrat" who's conservative enough to give President Obama problems getting health care passed, challenged by rampaging right-wing loons like Suzanne Haik Terrell and the dead-now-thank-God Woody Jenkins. Treen wasn't cut from that line of cloth. His identity was defined in relation to his career-long rival, Edwin Edwards, and that identity wasn't "super-conservative" but "dull but honest" in contrast to Edwards's "entertaining crook."

His glory period came with his one term (1979-1983) which fell between Edwards's first two terms and his third term. The two men had run against each other back in 1972, and at the time, Louisiana law prevented Edwards from serving a third consecutive term. He had to sit out the 1979 election, but everyone knew he'd be back, and there were even rumors, which were probably true, that behind the scenes, Edwards put all his muscle to work trying to help Treen get elected, because he knew he'd be a cinch to beat when he came back. It was during the 1983 race that Edwards was inspired to deliver his best-known wisecrack, about how the only way he could lose a race against Treen would be if he were caught "in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." Treen ran a hopeless, fumbling campaign, memorable chiefly for a flood of TV commercials bragging about how few pardons he'd given to felons, compared to the number of pardons that Edwards had racked up when he was in office. This was his way of intimating, without saying it, that Edwards had been handing out pardons in exchange for bribes, but because Treen fancied himself too decent a man to actually say it, the total effect of all the commercials was to make it seem as if he were bragging about what a mean, pitiless son of a bitch he was. In some precincts, that's exactly the key to a Republican voter's heart, but in Louisiana, where the same people who pride themselves on their judgmental uptightness partake of a culture that treasures rascally behavior (and who probably have a relative or two who's no stranger to the penal system, or at least the drunk tank), a candidate aiming for a law-and-order pose has to hit his mark just right. Buddy Roemer, the completely worthless and unredeemed dipshit who kept Edwin Edwards's chair warm for him from 1988 to 1992 (when Edwards won his fourth and final ride at the Governor's desk), made a similar mistake when he tried for a comeback in the mid-90s, flooding the airwaves with a terrifying series of ads, shot as if they were from a lost reel of Cool Hand Luke, in which he promised that, if elected, he'd put your wayward uncle or prodigal son on a chain gang to die of heat stroke by the side of the road.

The tender feeling that people in Louisiana have for politicians who come on like snake oil salesman is based on memories of such legendary hustlers as Huey Long and his brother Earl, complicated, genuinely problematic figures who did a lot of good for the average citizen while honing a ruthless political cunning that sometimes bordered on (and sometimes crossed over into) dictatorial rule. Edwards represented the complete degeneration of that model; in four terms over the course of almost a quarter of a century, he never showed much interest in anything but his own financial enrichment, but voters embraced him because he was so much more fun than dullards like Treen or mealy-mouthed, sanctimonious loads like Roemer. Dave Treen wasn't loathsome, like Roemer, but he seemed clueless about why anyone wouldn't prefer him to a flashy con man like Edwards, and that cluelessness made him a turn-off, even if you shared his disgust. He may have been a nice guy who meant well, but he plainly just didn't get it, and his not getting it made him useless as a good-government conquistador. After Edwards mopped up the floor with him in 1983, Treen entered, or flirted with entering, race after race--for the U.S. House or Senate, for governor again--but he was never taken seriously and never got anywhere; he was stamped forever as Cliff Barnes to Edwin Edwards's J. R. Ewing. He spent part of his later career expressing proper public Republican horror at the brief ascendance of David Duke, and the horrible thing about his show of horror was that he seemed to not understand how Duke could possibly appeal to anybody, either--this despite Treen's own past membership in the segregationist-Dixiecrat States' Rights Party.

That may well have been an association of convenience, forged in a time when it didn't seem likely that a Southern politician would ever have to answer for having applauded speeches about white folks' and colored folks' inalienable right to their own water fountains. But it came back to bite him on the ass in 1987, when complaints about it forced President Reagan to withdraw Treen's name from nomination to fill a vacant seat on New Orleans's U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. That was pretty much the end of Treen's political career, though he kept issuing endorsements and condemnations and kept running for stuff, right up to a couple of years ago, when he announced that he'd run in a special election to fill Bobby Jindal's House seat after Jindal was elected Governor, then announced that, once again, on second thought, no he wouldn't. By then, this had happened so many times that one had visions of some little underling in a basement office of the headquarters of the Louisiana Republican Party whose only job was to watch the local news and see if Treen had stuck his head out of his gopher hole, in which case he would sigh, pick up the phone, punch the only number on his speed dial, and say, "Dave, please."

I don't know that Treen deserved a lot better; I never saw much evidence that he was a man to be hated, but I also never saw any evidence that he was any more colorless, unimaginative, or uninspiring than his colorful, imaginative, and flamboyantly destructive enemies painted him as being. He was a little like Jack Kemp, whose own death earlier this year probably marked the passing of the only Republican politician in history who preached supply-side economics because he actually believed that it would somehow help those at the bottom of the economic ladder. As George Bush, Sr.'s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Kemp became a figure of fun inside Republican circles because he actually tried, fruitlessly, to interest the President in programs aimed to making life better for the less fortunate and disenfranchised. I'm not sure that the less passionate Treen ever inspired as strong a response as ridicule in his comrades. In a political environment notable for the depths of its corruption and cynicism, he was honest, diligent, honorable, and self-effacing, and in the end, he was a menace, because he made it all too easy for the corrupt and the cynical to make their case that having integrity was inseparable from being ineffectual.

Special Weekend Awesomeness Alert

It has just come to my attention that William Ham, who I like to think of as the writer I might have been if God liked me more, has some new record reviews up. You have to scroll down for it, but this bounty includes his definitive capsule history of Jobriath. Anything Ham writes is worth your time, but finding out that he's spent a few words on Jobriath is like finding out that they just went through Sam Peckinpah's foot locker and found a pristine copy of his previously undiscovered epic film about General Custer starring Charlton Heston with Iggy Pop as Crazy Horse.

Suck It Up

If you're going to try to get television, even public television, to devote an hour to a study of an increasingly obscure and little-loved historical figure, it helps to have a new angle. The recent PBS documentary Herbert Hoover: Landslide attempted a sympathetic depiction of our 31st President, that being the only way to go so far as fresh angles on Herbert Hoover are concerned. You can't argue that the man was up to his job as President; even the batshit right-wingers who, in recent years, have tried to make a case that FDR's policies actually exacerbated the Great Depression would never dream of arguing that Hoover did any kind of job of protecting the country's economic security, finding it easier to pretend that it was he who sort of invented the New Deal, presumably by being so soft on the poor as to permit the army forces sent to disperse the World War I veterans camped out in Washington to only beat and maim them with impunity instead of machine-gunning the lot of them. One of the talking heads who appeared on the PBS film summed up the difficulty of presenting Hoover in a warm light when he was unable to think of a more touching way to describe the President's feelings towards the starving vets than to say that he "was not unsympathetic to them as human beings." For me, the most pleasing moment in the whole hour came when the assembled historians, trying to find the best way to convey the bullet-headed cluelessness of Hoover's approach, its shattering effect on those it was his supposed duty to defend and protect, and how this in turn came to affect the way he was seen by the country at large, described it as "a Katrina moment."

According to everyone who's read up on Hoover's life, a very special cross-section of the intellectual community that does not include me, the big irony of his career is that he had distinguished himself, in his pre-presidential days, as a major humanitarian, devoted to using his smarts and management skills to make life better for those who had been shattered by war and natural disaster. In other words, he was not a drinking buddy of Montgomery Burns but a decent sort who wanted the best for people but, when faced with a cataclysm that challenged his core beliefs about how the world worked, simply lacked the imagination to expand his world view and find new ways to combat it. (At this point, it is acceptable to allow one's mind to wander to the sorry spectacle of Alan Greenspan, a man whose reputation went from the pedestal to the swirling bowl in the blink of an eye, meekly bleating, in response to the direct questioning of Representative Henry Waxman, that at the age of 83 he had discovered that the Randian model of the world he had employed all his adult life was full of gas.) Hoover may have been a worthy soul, but the idea that everyone in the country would be better off if there were a point below which the least fortunate were not allowed to fall, and that the government had a responsibility to provide a social safety net designed to serve this purpose, was as alien to his way of thinking as it is offensive to people like George W. Bush.

There was a time when the kind of government initiative that Roosevelt embodied, and that Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama have tried to extend to basic medical coverage, was considered strange and new, and it was allowed to become an accepted part of the national landscape because for a couple of generations most people, including those American politicians (Ronald Reagan very much not excluded), still had vivid memories of how much worse things could be without it. George Bush, Jr.'s effort to privatize Social Security was an important moment in the contemporary American history, because it served notice that power had finally passed into the hands of a generation of thoughtless spoiled 'tards who lacked both historical memory and any feeling for anyone who couldn't have their personal assistant hire a private jet if that was what it took to get them the hell out of the way of a hurricane. It's not yet clear how much the current population will remember the crash of '08 and its own lessons; it would be sweet to think that people will take the hint and stone the next person they see preaching the importance of markets unfettered by regulation, but the last several years would have been a lot different if they'd taken that same lesson from the S & L scandals that, along with the end of the Cold War, provided an appropriate capper to the Reagan era. Instead, that turned out to be one of the most mysteriously quickly forgotten instructional lessons of our time, brushed aside in what Greenspan himself called the "irrational exuberance" of the '90s bubble economy. One hates to suggest that an even worse crash might have been healthier for the long-term sanity of the nation, but it would be interesting to know how many of the people whining about the dangers of socialism at those town hall meetings would have eagerly mailed their Social Security funds off to Bernie Madoff, if only our former MBA President had had his way.


Hoover isn't the only former President whose reputation is getting a pass through the rinse cycle. Like a lot of people, I was really excited when I heard that a new book was coming out drawn from interviews that President Clinton did with the great Civil Rights historian Taylor Branch, late-night gab sessions that the two had during Clinton's term in office, the idea being that he would use the tapes to jog his memory while writing his autobiography. Also like a lot of people, I felt my excitement cool down significantly when I found out that Clinton had held onto the tapes and that Branch's book mostly consists of his own descriptions of what Clinton had said. So the book isn't the salty candid talk-fest of a political-geek-slash-Clinton-obsessive's dreams. However, the reviews I've read have made it clear that it has has at least served one useful purpose by reminding readers of the insane, rabid vendetta that Clinton faced from day one of his term, led by the Republican opposition but with the full complicity of the media, which for some reason--I'd honestly be less coy about it if I'd ever understood it--took in the messy private life and the phenomenal political skills and the poor-white-Southern background and became convinced that he must be, to pin it at the exact level of sophistication that most anti-Clinton journalism from both the right and the left tended to achieve, a Bad Man. (The line quoted in all the reviews--and I haven't yet seen it quoted in a tone of disapproval--is Clinton's assessment of how the special prosecutor circus played itself out: "I trusted the press. I trusted Congress. I trusted the courts. I was wrong on all counts.")

George Bush, Jr., by contrast, always sold himself as a good guy--especially in 2000, when the media was desperately phonying up reasons to think of Al Gore as Clinton: A Bad Man, Part II. And by the generous, if specialized, standards accepted by the Republican Party, he is a good man, which means that he thinks the poor can go fuck themselves but that, unlike Bill Clinton, he'd never go into the Oval Office in the middle of the night to retrieve the TV Guide without first changing into a suit. Bush is on the speaking-tour circuit now, proclaiming his right to be seen as a good guy, with the implicit understanding that an incompetent and uninterested good guy is morally superior, and in some way maybe a better president, than someone who has the bad taste to know anything and give a shit, which can lead to one's putting on airs. “I am confident," he told audiences at a dinner in Canada last week, "that I made decisions based on principle, that I made calls as best I could, and I did not sell my soul." That's what the Bush personality cult that the media once embraced so fervently really boils down to: it's not a bad thing to fuck things up so long as you really mean well. Bill Clinton, by contrast, did a lot to keep the country safe and afloat, but for presumably venal motives; I guess he just wanted to make life harder for all those Sunday school teachers who had to answer the students' questions about how we could have an adulterer in the White House without flaming hailstones pelting the Blue States to show God's displeasure.



Bush's subsequent debut as a motivational speaker came through the auspices of Get Motivated Seminar, In., an organization run by Peter and Tamara Lowe; their website announces that they've been at this "for over two decades", a time frame that does not exclude their previous motivational business, which went broke. In a video clip that was deemed worthy of inclusion on The Daily Show, Tamara Lowe can be seen explaining that "success and significance in life is all about motivation. Success in life is not to the wise or the strong, the talented or intelligent." Pump up the gush factor and throw in a shot at Al Gore for being a big girl, and that could be anything Maureen Dowd wrote in 2000. On a more elevated intellectual plane, we have Charles Krauthammer's interview with Der Spiegel, in which he lambasted President Obama for merely being "average", without ever acknowledging that having an average person occupying the White House after eight years of Bush represents a significant improvement. (He also bitches that Obama is "a left-liberal, not center-right the way Bill Clinton was." I don't know when Krauthammer had this breakthrough insight into the relative acceptability of Bill Clinton's views, but when Clinton was in office, he came across as one of those guys who thought that the President only let Janet Reno send troops in to collect Elian Gonzalez because he was hoping to give Castro an excuse to call so he could confess that he thought he was dreamy.)

Towards the end of the Hoover documentary, one of the talking heads says that most people think that Depression ended the day Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House. This is exactly the sort of thing that right-wingers sometimes say when explaining why they hate Roosevelt's guts, but the speaker didn't intend it as a put-down; FDR, he explains, gave people hope, which is something the stolid potato Hoover never could do and may not have even seen as part of his job description, and giving people hope in bad times is an important part of being a leader. Krauthammer and others righties aren't blind to that; if they were, they wouldn't have always given Ronald Reagan such tremendous credit for having seemed to embody their values in a way that made a lot of people feel optimistic, or hopeful, or just better than they had when they looked at Jimmy Carter melting in the hot sun. Reagan was a lot less committed to the kind of neo-con principles that Krauthammer carries in his mechanical heart than George Bush, Jr., but Ronald Reagan was the one conservative President that righties can claim masses of people loved the way people loved FDR, and John Kennedy, and for that matter, outside the Beltway and away from the militia compounds, a hell of a lot of people by God loved even dirty old Bill Clinton. It's the same kind of love that people have for Obama--the love people feel for a leader who seems to care about what kind of country they're raising their families in, and who gives you the feeling that he wouldn't try to blame it on a faulty press office if he screwed the pooch and made things a thousand times worse. One reason the cult of personality around George Bush, Jr. was so intense was that, for a while, the people trying to erect it thought that they might have that kind of inspirational leader in him, but he turned out to be a more typical kind of Republican, the kind who can only "inspire" the country at large by scaring the hell out of everybody. If conservatives really thought that was as good or as desirable as being the kind of leader who inspires hope and love, they wouldn't use up nearly as much balloon juice insisting that Obama's ability to inspire hope and love are the mark of a lightweight, if not a menace.

Apparently, I Watched This: "Chandler"

For no reason I can articulate that would be flattering to myself as a person, I seem to get real excited whenever Turner Classic Movies finds something to show from the seventies that I've never even heard of, let alone seen before. This last happened almost six months ago with Robert Mulligan's The Pursuit of Happiness, and last night it happened again with Chandler (1971)), a rare starring vehicle for Warren Oates that is the only film directed by Paul Magwood. Magwood must have gotten along okay with his leading lady, Leslie Caron, because at some point years later, he married her. He had to wait awhile, because at the time the picture was made, she was married to its producer, Michael S. Laughlin, who broke into films as the producer of the Edith Evans film The Whisperers, who in the busy year of 1971 would produce not just Chandler but also Two-Lane Blacktop, as well as Dusty and Sweets MacGee and The Christian Licorice Shop, resurfaced in the early '80s as the director of the self-aware genre riffs Strange Behavior and Strange Invaders, and whose name was last spotted in a credits sequence as the writer of the long-delayed Warren Beatty bomb Town & Country. I'll bet he has some good stories.

Chandler is set in Los Angeles and stars Oates as a detective named Chandler, who drives one of the many vintage '40s cars on view. All this points to the likelihood that the filmmakers intended an homage to the classic Bogart/Philip Marlowe private eye movie. (More clues along this line can be found in a 1971 Time magazine article about the consternation then being caused by MGM President James Aubrey during a turbulent reign during which he personally oversaw the re-cutting of many a picture, including Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. According to Time, Laughlin and Magwood "placed a black-bordered ad in the Hollywood Reporter a few weeks ago that said: 'Regarding what was our film Chandler, let's give credit where credit is due. We sadly acknowledge that all editing, post-production as well as additional scenes were executed by James T. Aubrey Jr. We are sorry.' Laughlin and Magwood claim that Magwood was locked out of the MGM cutting room, and that Aubrey inserted several minutes of new footage to simplify the plot and replaced their nostalgic score with a trendy one. The result, says Laughlin, is 'a completely different movie' from the 1940s-type private-eye flick that he set out to produce." Time, apparently feeling the need to add insult to injury, did its part by claiming that the movie stars one "Warren Gates".

Whatever it was meant to be, Chandler has the fascination for Warren Oates cultists of being one of perhaps half a dozen movies, if that, where he landed the central starring or co-starring role. It is not his finest hour, though the opening, in which he gets scolded for looking shabby on the job as a security guard ("Chandler, where's your hat?") and walks off the lot in a fit of middle-aged disgust promises terrific things. That's as funky as Chandler gets, though there are hints that it wants to be about how time has passed the romantic private eye figure by. It's also about as coherent as it gets; Raymond Chandler used to invent plots that were so entertaining in their labyrinthine flamboyance that you didn't mind if it ever occurred to you that the pieces of the story didn't add up, but Chandler, at least in its finished version, manages to be just as confusing as The Big Sleep without ever convincing you that it has a story to tell. From what I can tell, Oates is hired as a patsy to shadow Caron, a gangster's moll who "knows too much", so that she can be whacked, with the approval of the government. Much of this is imparted to the audience in the form of exposition shoveled directly into the audience by an embarrassed-looking Charles McGraw (the star of the minor noir classic The Narrow Margin, who, like his co-star Gloria Grahame, seems to be on hand to add some genre flavor-by-association) and a sinister Chuck McCann wannabee whose overwritten dialogue sometimes has him sounding like Bela Lugosi in Glen or Glenda? ("The arrival of another catalyst--our equation changes! Zip your fly, Chuck.")

Oates himself has to say things like "You ever see a man die?" and "Emancipated women are a pain in the ass", to establish that his character is both a dinosaur and an admirable representative of the old toughness. Unlike Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, Chandler doesn't see any humor in the tough detective character being out of touch and in over his head, so the movie itself is finally more sentimental than tough-minded. It wants to use Oates for his anti-star qualities but at the same time expects both the audience and the Caron character to respond favorably to his sexy bad-boy charisma. And the fact is, bad-boy charisma isn't something that Warren Oates ever had an ungodly amount of, though when he played bad men you often couldn't take your eyes off him. When Oates had a character to build, and when he had to fight to hold onto and stand out in his little part of a movie, he could make you long to see him get the chance to carry a movie, but stars who carry movies often have to do a lot of the screenwriter's job for him, convincing you that this guy up there deserves your full attention for a couple of hours. Oates had the talent to do a lot with a little and miracles when he had a lot to work, but watching him trying to play a scene where Leslie Caron succumbs to his dirt-road-faced charms is an occasion to realize that he may not have had the confidence to be a star--that is, the confidence that he was worth watching even when he hadn't been given enough to act with that some part of him must have felt that he wasn't earning his paycheck the way he was on all those other jobs, when he must have had days when he just stared at the dumb-lug leading man and wondered why he didn't have his job. Which, in an actor, is an honorable a failing as one can imagine.

New in Nashville Scene

My review of the Coen brothers' A Serious Man

Return to Sendak

Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's book Where the Wild Things Are was at least ten years old, and an established classic, when I first made its acquaintance. In the book, young Max, who acts out while wearing a full-body wolf costume, is sent to his room without supper and imagines, or dreams, his way into a jungle landscape where the raucous monsters--the wild things--claim him as their king, until he gets homesick enough to return to his room. Everybody knows that the wild things represent Max's id, but what makes the book an instant pleasure for kids Max's age is that the book itself is pure id. It's not just that it doesn't lecture you. (Max's desire to return home comes upon him unexpectedly and instinctively, like a kid's longing to return from summer camp.) It's that, as a kid, you appreciate Sendak's eagerness to get to the good stuff. Having established, with the wolf suit and Max's habit of chasing the family dog with a fork, that our hero is a wild child, Sendak doesn't waste a lot of time on the reasons for drama in the household. There's a monster on the freaking cover of the book; he knows that his readers will pick it up with one thought first in their heads: how long until this big boy arrives? Sendak can talk a good game about the meanings behind what he does, and those meanings are key to the way that the book's tone and images take root in your head the first time you read it. But the reason his readers' brains are so receptive to that is that he wins them over as an entertainer, the way that only one of those rare adults who still remembers what it felt like to be a kid can do.

The big new Where the Wild Things Are movie, directed by Spike Jonze from a script co-credited to the director and Dave Eggers, has a perfect Max in nine-year-old Max Records (who played the young Mark Ruffalo in The Brothers Bloom; a striking collection of monsters--animatronic suits created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, with voice work by James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, Chris Cooper, Forest Whitaker, and (most imperishably) Catherine O'Hara; music by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the always interesting soundtrack composer Carter Burwell; a magical look by Jonze's usual cinematographer, Lance Acord, and the production designer, K.K. Barrett. But it takes forever to get to the good stuff, and then the good stuff turns out to be...not so good. There are clear warning signs, not just that the movie will go wrong but how it'll go wrong, in the opening, pre-wild things section, showing Max with his family. (He has a single mother, played by Catherine Keener, and a sister who's starting to get old enough to prefer the company of her friends to her little brat of a brother.) We see Max get into a snowball fight with his sister's friends, which he enjoys, until they unknowingly smash the igloo he's built and his sister, not understanding why he's suddenly upset, goes off with the friends instead of staying to comfort him. Then his mom comes home, and she comforts him, but then gets upset with him when she sees water all over the floor. These scenes have a delicate feeling for the thin line that separates happiness and disappointment, and how crushing it can feel when you're a child and that line gets crossed when you're least expecting it.

The scene that follows, with Max trying to get his mother's attention while she conducts a business phone call, caused me to flash back on an AT&T commercial from the '90s where a bunch of little girls guilt trip their mother into using her cell phone to conduct a business meeting so she can take them to the beach. But what's really off about the early scenes-- which also include a visit from mom's boyfriend, a barely glimpsed Mark Ruffalo-- is the way the moviemakers feel obligated to spell out why Max and his family don't always get along. Kids who read the book knew perfectly well that they sometimes didn't get along with their families, and they didn't want some helpful Dr. Phil to explain to them why: they just wanted to know they weren't alone, and felt an automatic closeness to the book that seemed to reflect some of their experience. Showing Max's grounds for resentment and feelings of being shunted aside by his mother and sister in favor of other, older playmates is an adult's idea of what's important, done for the sake of the adults in the audience who want proof that the little bastard doesn't just need a time out and a dose of Ritalin.

These problems are exacerbated by the arrival of the wild things themselves, who don't suggest overgrown children but underdeveloped, immature adults, who have all the neuroses of depressed grown-ups with none of the ability to cope that kids count on seeing in their parents and other authority figures. The only thing Max stands to learn from them is that, sometimes, whining can be a more effective mood altering technique than standing on the table screaming. Sendak notoriously created the wild things as caricatured versions of childhood memories of his adult, Jewish relatives, a detail that the movie understandably doesn't know how to handle. Instead, these wild things suggest whimpery coffee house denizens who have tried to build an alternative family out of their drinking buddies, none of whom have ever quite recovered from the discovery that their graduate degrees in comparative literature haven't exactly made them hot properties in this economy. And though the movie is presented as a collaboration with Joneze's name most prominent in the publicity, I have a hunch that all the wild things have re-read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius more times than they'd re-watched Being John Malkovich.

It's just a hunch, of course, but Wild Things has considerably more of Eggers's self-conscious self-awareness and dreamy melancholia than it has of Jonze's anarchic prankishness; it may have less of the Sendak Wild Things spirit than anything else Jonze has done, the music videos very much included. I don't really like to knock Dave Eggers; for one thing, it's been done --it's even been done by me--and besides, I've re-read Heartbreaking Work myself and, whatever my reservations about it and everything else the guy does, I do think that he is, overall, a force for good. But I do have this terrible suspicion that he's one of those people who thinks of himself as part of A Generation, and worse, that he may even have bouts of seeing himself as A Spokesperson for same. There may be worse and stupider things in the world than dividing people up into camps according to their birth years--give me a minute, okay, Holocaust denial, there, that's worse, right?--but it's hard to imagine how it could do anything but harm to an artist. In its term-paper quality, the movie resembles Hook, Steven Spielberg's grotesque take on the appeal of Peter Pan, but where that movie was simply clueless, an open admission from its director that seeing with the eyes of a child didn't come nearly as easy to him as it used to, Wild Things has traces of an unholy, overconfident smugness in its right to claim Sendak's timeless masterpiece as a generational touchstone, with special meaning for those who weren't yet born when it was first published but have since come of a certain creative age.

I think this has something to do with the strange emphasis, in some of the interviews given by Jonze and Eggers and Sendak, too, on how the book was attacked by some adults in its day. Of course, it was attacked, and is still being attacked, just as some people found reasons to get bent out of shape over Harry Potter and Judy Blume and Roald Dahl and The Wizard of Oz. The fact remains that it won the Caldecott Medal a year after it came out and was lauded in the press and was inspiring adapters as early as 1973, when Gene Deitch made an animated short film version. The first Sendak book I ever saw was actually In the Night Kitchen, which came out in 1970, and which features the three-year-old hero running around naked with his winky visible. This, too, inspired controversy, but such was Sendak's reputation that Miss Willis, my third-grade teacher at that hotbed of progressive education, Walthall Academy in Tylertown Mississippi, felt safe springing it on us, and I remember that when I expressed concern that the pictures of the unclad dingus might make the baby Jesus cry, I got looked at funny by Angel Corman, a sure sign back then that I was out of step with hip opinion. Which is to say that, by now, the protests Sendak's work has inspired is a relatively small sideshow to his true legacy, and that people who seem to have adapted his work partly as an excuse to disassociate themselves from those lost souls run the risk of seeming to be in the oneupsmanship business. It's especially strange that Sendak and his adapters have made a special effort to target the late Bruno Bettelheim as Wild Things' Inspector Javert, considering that the movie's approach to dramatizing Sendak shows the influence of such psychological studies of the meanings and function of children's literature as Bettelheim's own classic book The Uses of Enchantment. The movie's ideal audience may be young adults who know the book by heart and appreciate the filmmakers' efforts to help them reconnect with it on the shallowest, most solipsistic level imaginable. Its worst imaginable audience would be made up of small kids like the ones crowded around me in the theater where I saw it this morning, who from the sound of it wondered why they couldn't be somewhere more fun, like church.

Bad Boys Don't Cry

After Rush Limbaugh was dropped from a group bidding for the St. Louis Rams, the aggrieved radio star declared that "this is about the future of the United States of America and what kind of country we're going to have." Well, yeah. We're a country where saying that slavery kept the streets safe at night and that "The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips" can make even your fellow white billionaires reluctant to be seen in your company. Not that race was the only thing that could have taken Limbaugh out: it was the protests of black players that got Limbaugh's potential partners to shun him, but after he made fun of Michael J. Fox for being twitchy, does anyone think that he would have gotten as close to the deal as he did if any of the other rich white guys involved had a child with Parkinson's or cerebral palsy? (Reportedly, the comment that really came back to haunt Limbaugh in this instance was the one that, back in 2003, ended his brief fling as an ESPN commentator, when he called Donovan McNabb "overrated" and declared that McNabb was getting a free ride because "The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well—black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well." As it happens, I've never thought that was a racist comment. I don't know jack shit about football, so I can't judge if he was right about McNabb's talent level, but I know perfectly well that the media does look to identify black stars in areas where blacks are thought to be underrepresented, and that mediocre and worse talents, such as the Oscar-winning Halle Berry, sometimes get overpraised as a result. But to get too upset about Limbaugh losing his job and getting tagged as a racist over that is kind of like not understanding why the government made such a big deal over a little case of tax evasion when the defendant was Al Capone.)

Limbaugh and the other people who've spent the past year explaining that it's racist for black people to get elected president because it costs at least one white guy a job and makes some other white people wonder when the rules changed will have no trouble seeing racism in a rich white guy being held accountable for the workings of his own mouth. There's nothing new in Rush the law and order drug fiend wanting one set of rules for himself and the rest of the world, of course. And it seems unlikely that, had the deal gone through, he would have been the only guy who talks this way on the golf course who's ever had part ownership in an NFL team. But he's the one who made his fortune by making incendiary public comments. The most interesting part of the story about the racist Justice of the Peace in Hammond, Louisiana is that the guy has held the post for 34 years and his views must have been pretty widely known, but nobody thought it was worth making a stink over. I lived in Hammond in the 1980s, and it's not exactly Athens, Georgia, but it is a small college town with a fair number of enlightened citizens. I can only imagine that, over the course of the past several years, he must have encountered some people who found out what he thinks of interracial marriage and who, once they recovered from their shock, recognized that he was a dinosaur no longer fit for public life or polite society and, thinking him a nice and relatively harmless guy, chose not to make trouble for him because they felt more pity for him than anything else.

Limbaugh is too famous and leather-lunged to inspire much pity. But he's not above courting it, and any number of fans and fellow travelers are ready to testify that they feel his pain. There's no doubt that Limbaugh feels that, by being told to keep his money, he has been crucified, to a much greater degree than, say, John Kerry was when wingnuts described his Vietnam War heroism as an act of treason or the Clintons when it was suggested that they'd whacked Vincent Foster. Joan Walsh quoted one idiot who wrote: "Tonight, Rush is us. And we are him", kicking off a tear-stained diatribe that, according to Walsh, "went on and on like that and ended with the famous anti-Nazism parable attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller, 'First they came for the communists …'" Keep in mind that this had nothing to do with any attempt to muzzle Limbaugh or boycott his show or cost him a dime or a single listener, but with the decision by a small group of his peers that, because of the belligerent, obnoxious image that he has crafted and reveled in, he's not somebody who they want to be seen with in the photo decorating the annual stockholders' report. Then think about the typical right-wing blogger, to say nothing of the typical member of Limbaugh's audience, and ask yourself: how many of them do you suppose can say that their image is the main thing standing between them and someday getting to kick back in the owners' box at an NFL game?

If the most interesting thing about all this is Limbaugh's blustery, blubbery reaction to the discovery that his successful career as a right-wing takedown artist has a lead ceiling, then what it most illuminates may be the very nature of the concept of the conservative bad boy. It wasn't so long ago that this was supposed to be an emerging species of provocateur on the political and cultural scene, the idea being that right-wing bad boys had all the fun because they weren't fettered by wet-blanket concerns about fairness and political correctness. When supposed liberals like Mickey Kaus began to reserve their meanest put-downs for people on their side, it was as if they wanted to jump the fence and hang with the cool kids, the bullying jokers who liked to snicker at white trash, welfare queens, and feminazis. Meanwhile, the lockstep partisan bad boys on the right helped inspire some on the left to embrace the likes of Michael Moore and the later, shriller version of Keith Olbermann--lockstep partisan wiseguys they could claim as their own.





But the classic bad boy motormouths like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Terry Southern, and even Hunter Thompson were nonpartisan figures who were still seen as implicitly liberal because of their choice of targets. Bruce and Pryor were self-made men who came from scabby backgrounds and who had narrow, cynical views of the world that naturally made for satirical takes on How It All Works. One difference is that, being empathic and sensitive where Limbaugh is only egotistical and grandiose, they automatically went after the bearers of power, where the conservative bad boy thinks he's being a troublemaker by assaulting those who would question the status quo, assist the downtrodden, and afflict the powerful. (Another obvious, and telling, difference, is that when Bruce and Pryor got in trouble with the law, they, unlike Limbaugh, actually saw the insides of some jail cells.) Bruce and Pryor's message, which they may have only dimly been aware of themselves, was, Here's some shit that's not right--and if I can get you to laugh with me about it, I may just be able to get you to pay enough attention to to what I'm saying to get you to think about it. Limbaugh's message has always been, my talent and volume level have enabled me to lift myself up from nothing, and now, if you welcome me into your world of privilege, I can help you keep the rest of the rabble down where they belong. In the early days of his success, Limbaugh was conservative but not averse to attacking others on his team. The first President Bush co-opted him with embarrassing ease, inviting him to visit the White House and spend the night, where he reportedly spent the evening making phone calls to people bragging about where he was.

Bruce and Pryor may not have been intellectuals, but they were searchers, never able to get to a place where they felt comfortable with the world or their place in it. Bruce may have developed a Jesus complex and lost his sense of humor in response to legal persecution, but he never tried to argue that society had no business judging him; he only wanted to be judged fairly, on the basis of what he actually did on stage and not according to some vice cop reading from his notes. His ultimate pipe dream was to perform his act in front of the Supreme Court and then have him, in the words of the critic Robert Fiore, declare him to be normal. And Pryor, who by 1979 was capable of making such a leap as his renouncing the use of the word "nigger", on which he'd practically built his career, was so richly alienated that he never quite recovered his bearings after he became so widely accepted--beloved--that he was named the number one box office attraction in movies in the early '80s. Their underdog attitudes and identification with society's outcasts may not have been a matter of conscious choice for either of them, but it gave their bad boy status a purpose and even a touch of unlikely nobility. At their best, they were capable of satire. Conservative bad boys want to show that they can express their contempt for the common folk with an acidic verve that will earn them the applause and maybe the patronage of the upper-class twits, and can achieve only smugness.

But what really makes them pathetic is that they insist on the glamor that comes with being seen as a bad boy while always remaining, in spirit, safely tucked inside their limos with their security detail. People see bad boys as heroic because they take risks, even if it's just the risk of their audience's displeasure. But the faux-bad boys will have none of that; whether it's Limbaugh bitching about a business deal gone wrong or Don Imus responding to complaints about his ugly on-air remarks by reminding people of his charity work for kids with cancer or Dennis Miller whining and blinking in confusion after a Republican audience turned on him for waxing snarky about Senator Robert Byrd's youthful (and much apologized for) connection to the Ku Klux Klan, they insist upon their right to say anything while reacting with indignation, or worse, to the possibility that they should ever be penalized for it. Real bad boys expect to have to take some shit for breaking the rules and telling the ugly truth; that's not just part of the thrill, it's part of the point. Limbaugh does have the right to say whatever is on his mind about anything, and I for one wish that more people would follow his example; then we'd have a better idea of where we stood with most of them. But he and his ilk (and their fans) shouldn't kid themselves that being flacks for Big Brother is the same as being bad boys. And when people who know what they think, because they've heard them saying it loud and clear on the radio, decide that they no more want them for business partners than they want Roman Polanski driving their kids to school, they shouldn't be so gracelessly oblivious as to pretend that this is an example of The Man standing on their necks.

Sweet Jesus Christ on a Fucking Crutch

Where I went to college, ladies and gentlemen!

New in Nerve

The Fun Cooker



Ten Hollywood Sex Scandals

USA! USA!

I'll freely admit that, when I turned on the computer this morning and saw the news that President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, my first thought was that the Yes Men or some similar bunch of jokers must have hacked into the Yahoo! News page. A lot of talk has already been stirred up about how this is ridiculous because it amounts to awarding a major international humanitarian award to someone on the basis of lofty ambitions, idealistic goals, and inspiring speeches. You think? If you have to give someone an major international humanitarian award every year, then, given the state of the world, you're going to spend a lot of time making symbolic gestures. Read the list of Nobel Peace Prize laureates and the citations attached to their awards, and you will notice many variations on the phrase "for his/her/their efforts". Not successes, mind you, but efforts. Consider that Yasser Arafat got one, in tandem with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, for his "efforts to create peace in the Middle East", which some might argue is kind of like giving Susan Atkins an award as Midwife of the Year. One of the few instances when someone got it for a single concrete act came in 1973 when Henry Kissinger (and Lê Ðức Thọ, who had the grace to turn it down) won the prize for the cease-fire in the Vietnam War, and that has long been recognized as the greatest sick joke in the award's history.

The news does seem a little like a joke about the way that Obama (especially to his enemies) to seem to stride through life to the tune of Karen Carpenter singing "Close to You", just as (say) the story about Newt Gingrich having a pouty fit because he didn't get to spend a lot of snuggly alone time with President Clinton during the flight to Israeli for Rabin's funeral seemed like a joke about Gingrich's petty, megalomaniac instability (and the way that he himself derailed the budget shutdown by telling the story seemed like a joke about Clinton's ability to dance on the bodies of his own self-imploding enemies). In the end, though, who cares, really? Why, all those people who, this time last week, were practically dancing in the streets because Chicago wasn't going to get to host the Olympic games, which they saw as a slight to Obama. (Limbaugh and the dittoheads who have openly prayed for Obama to "fail" aren't kidding--they really don't want anything good to happen in this country for the next four years, lest he get some of the credit for it. This is their patriotism, the same kind of patriotism that, when George W. Bush was in office, took the form of condemning anyone who suggested that soldiers in combat zones overseas be given sufficient body armor and other protective resources, if the President and his Defense Secretary didn't want them to have it.) When the Olympic Committee is seen to be dissing Obama, wingnuts are suddenly hugely impressed by the wisdom of international deliberative bodies, but when the body in question is offering Obama a Nobel, it's probably only a matter of time before a meme is generated alleging that he only got the award after Roman Polanski put in a good word for him.




It is already being helpfully suggested that Obama should do the right thing and turn the prize down, pointing out that he is not (yet) worthy, and thus heading off "a Nobel backlash" that, writes Mickey Kaus, "seems non-farfetched." Really, you think so? You think that a man who has been routinely denounced for his steady availability (i.e., over-exposure) and bi-partisan reaching out (i.e., spinelessness, wresting defeat from the jaws of victory), and eloquence (i.e., empty fancy talk), all of which he brought to the job, like rain to the desert, after eight years of a rigid ideologue who hid behind his handlers and couldn't manage to be articulate enough to even be coherent much of the time, could somehow fall under attack for having been given an impressive-sounding prize that he hasn't earned by a bunch of foreigners? Is it really so important to these people who gets the Nobel this year that they think Obama shouldn't have it on his mantle if he has the chance to stick it up there, or is this what it feels like: battered liberals doing what they've begun to accuse the President of doing, and trying to reach out to the very people who've been using them for pinatas by agreeing, hey--our guy ain't that great! I might agree if I thought the award going to Obama was an abomination, like the Medals of Freedom that Bush pinned on all his lackeys and toadies. But at worst it's just silly, albeit silly in a nice way, and anyway, it's not as if I'm the one who's being invited to drag my ass out to Oslo in the winter.

Of course, the people who'll yel loudest about it will be those who can't see a Nobel for the President as a nice thing for the country but as a slap in the face, because they think this democratically elected president who was voted into office in a landslide and is widely liked, if not loved, is a dictator whose existence is an implicit condemnation of their values and their way of life. (The very lowest of the low will see it mainly as more evidence that well-spoken black dudes just have everything handed to them.) And you know what? They're right, kind of, at least about the part regarding what's being implicitly condemned. The Nobel does have one very real purpose, and that is that, by giving it to the right person once in a while--a Dalai Lama, a Lech Wałęsa, a Desmond Tutu, an Al Gore--you can really piss off some people who richly deserve to be pissed off. The Committee has done its best to suggest that Obama was given the award because of the things he wants to do, but I suspect that he was given the award for something he is, or rather isn't: i.e.. he isn't George W. Bush, or Bush's designated successor. Which ought to be recognized as a very low bar, but there's more to it than that.

The Bush years should be--will be--remembered as the country's moral low point since the end of slavery, a time when an inane little man with no qualifications but his family connections lost a democratic election, was appointed to the job of leader of the free world anyway, by his father's old cronies and party colleagues and with the complicity and approval of the press, and then proceeded to spend his full term ignoring the needs of the country and its people while using the time to instead order up legal rationales for an imperial presidency dedicated to the justification of torture and wars of choice, while feeding and exploiting a climate of fear that was meant to provide a reason for all of it. It was a horror show, and for those of us not of boundless faith, there were moments during it when it felt as if it would never end and that the most rotten people in America had succeeded in permanently reshaping the country and its values to make a better climate for their lizard skins. This all must have been dismaying to the many people in Europe who love what this country is supposed to stand for, who have a special place in their hearts for its history and its stated ideals and principles, and who were especially saddened, in 2004, to see a man voted back into office as recompense for having been caught wiping the Constitution and his own beloved Holy Bible with his diarrhetic ass.

You don't hear much about it now, certainly not in this country, not even from most Bush haters (who do have a lot else to focus on), but among Bush's crimes and atrocities, one of the greatest still has to be the way he took the moment after 9/11 when the whole world was offering America its condolences and tender best wishes and threw them down and danced on them with a stupid cackle, just to show his gym buddies how tough and "independent" he was. Just as Walesa, in the days when Poland was in lockdown, and Tutu, when apartheid was still the law of the land, were given the Peace Prize largely to show them the world's gratitude that there were living counter-examples to their own corrupt and degraded societies, Obama has been given the prize for letting the world breathe a sigh of relief at the news that, no, it isn't going to go on forever, that the people whose job it is to decide that wanted it to stop. (Even though, as Garry Wills recently pointed out, it hasn't yet stopped as thoroughly as it should. But that's another post.) In light of this, the award should rightly have been given, not to Obama, but to the voters of the United States, who made the real heroic choice last November. But to have done that would have come too close to admitting the real reasons for giving the prize to Obama, which would have amounted to saying aloud that America, from the moment that the Supreme Court decided that honor and intellectual decency were things that it would be happier without, to at least the 2006 midterms, seemed about as much of a lost cause as Poland under martial law and South Africa during apartheid. And you don't win a peace prize, or get chosen to distribute them, by saying things like that.

New in Nerve

15 Movies to Guanrantee You Sleep Alone



As soon as I sent this off, I immediately regretted forgetting about Birth and Auto Focus.

Apparently, I Bought This, #1: "Strange Sports Stories #2

[I am poor in funds, but I am rich in friends. But my friends are all broke too, in some cases because they made the mistake of lending me money. And by the way, something happened to my template that sank the "DONATE" button to the bottom of the screen where it is even easier to miss than it used to be, but I'm still going down there twice a day to kick it to make sure it works. But in the meantime, I am also rich in stuff. Which, come to think of it, might have something to do with my being poor in funds. As I go through my stuff to select which items I want to keep nearest at hand if I have to exit via the fire escape when the landlord shows up with a battering ram, I am sometimes struck by the choices--after giving it some thought, the adjective I have chosen to deploy here is "mysterious"--I have made over the years as to which stuff to acquire. Since I cannot put them to work in a sweatshop or send them into the fields to pick cotton, I have
decided to initiate a new feature here at the Experience so that they might yet justify their place in my life, if not their very existence.]

This anthology comic, which ran for six issues, has the distinction of being one of the rare obscure DC comics that I'll bet has never been considered for a Vertigo reboot that bears scarcely any resemblance to the original, though I'll bet they get there eventually. The second issue, which bears a November-December 1973 cover date, includes three stories, including one written by Denny O'Neil and two by Frank Robbins with art by Dick Giordano and Curt Swan, as well as Murphy Anderson, whose name is squeezed awkwardly into the same box as Swan's name, as if he were a last-minute touch-up man who was presumed to be working without a credit until he threatened to hold his breath until he turned blue unless he got one. The old school talent involved probably helps to account for why I wanted this. I do have a dim enough memory of having wanted it that I know that, when I bought it, I sort of assumed that it contained true strange sports stories of the believe-it-or-not variety. This is an assumption that I must have made without paying close attention to the cover, which clearly describes the contents in these terms: "HOW did a DINOSAUR get to run in a modern-day horse race? WHY did a KARATE match start on Earth--and shift to the MOON?" But you shouldn't think that I suffered anything like a crushing disappointment over this. I'd hate to leave anyone with a false impression that I have a passionate thirst for true stories about one-legged baseball players or blind archery champions that dwarfs my interest in the kind of strange sports stories that have dinosaurs in them.

1973 was the year of Enter the Dragon, so of course it's the karate-on-the-moon story that takes pride of place at the front of the book. It's the one written by Denny O'Neil, the man who, early in the Nixon era, teamed Green Lantern up with Green Arrow, stuffed them into a van, and sent them out to explore America and touch Indians, so it's not surprising that it uses the subject of martial arts as an excuse to teach the kind of moral lesson that made brainwashed peacenik sapheads like me so ill-equipped to deal with the world into which we grew up. It opens with a couple of guys testing each other in the local dojo, and it's clear right away which one of them has a natural understanding of the Asian philosophy at the core of his art, because the colorist has bestowed upon him a skin tone the color of fresh melon, whereas his opponent is a white boy with a sinister set to his eyes and hair that looks like a bad wig. In a conversation helpfully decorated with explanatory footnotes ("*Black-belt wearers are karate experts!--Editor."), it is made clear that our hero, Sammy Lee, understands the defensive, anti-violent nature of the sport, where the vile Davey Raines suffers from "motives [that] are different--vastly different" and means to use his skill "to bully...to brutalize!" Davey is such a toad that he even hires some thugs to "put the hurt on" Sammy, because he doesn't like "the idea of there being two black belts on this block!"

But Sammy has an ace in the hold. He has ventured into an alley to help an old man who was too weak and ill to climb into his compact rocket ship without aid. (Davey has blown off the chance to lend a hand himself because "I look out for number one--Davey--and that's it!") The old man is grateful and repays Sammy by giving him "the blessing of Kirth", explaining that "in your moment of greatest need, the blessing will save you." The moment in question comes the next day, when Sammy and Davey face off in the contest to earn their black belts. As the two tussel, they, and the teachers observing them, are suddenly transported to the face of the moon, where the lack of gravity is of immeasurable benefit to the defensive-stance fighting style favored by Sammy but plays hell with the more aggressive Davey. (You might be wondering about how they are affected by the cold or the lac of air. Sammy clears that up with a thought balloon reading, "Somehow Davey and the judges and I aren't affected by the cold...or the lack of air." After Sammy defeats his enemy soundly and wins his black belt, they are returned to the dojo, and Sammy notes that no one but himself seems aware of what happened. The sensei ("*A Japanese word meaning, roughly, TEACHER!--Editor.") have bad news for Davey, though: he gets no black belt, because, they tell him, "You have yet to learn to defend with honor!" Note the "yet". Denny O'Neil is loathe to just give up on anybody.

The dinosaur-in-a-horse-race story lacks that kind of philosophical core, I'm afraid. There's also some confusion about the time period that I found distracting: despite the reference on the cover to "a modern-day" setting, the fashions favored by the racetrack touts and the fact that a central character is named "Nosegay Nellie" give it the flavor of a 1920s Damon Runyon yarn. Nellie, who looks as if her image was committed to paper by an illustrator with one eye on a TV showing Maude, turns out to be a witch who simply turns one of the horsies into a T-Rex in mid-race, then switches it back after the critter has won "by a nose." It appears that the results of the race are declared official, which I'm sure inspired no criticism by those holding losing tickets; for my part, as a bored reader hoping for a big finish, I reserve the right to be a little disappointed that the gigantic lizard didn't clear the field by picking up the other horses and riders and tearing them apart like fresh bread before turning its attention to the spectators in the stands.

Sandwiched in between these epics is "Volley of Death", headlined on the cover thusly: "WHO had to play a tennis game with a LIVE GRENADE?" I'd think that the big question raised by this scenario would be more a matter of "WHY?" than "WHO?", but I should probably just leave such judgments to the professionals. In any case, the "WHO" has a name, "Len Ashton", but beyond that, his character boils down to "the guy who for four pages is seen whacking a grenade back and forth with a tennis racquet with a thought balloon above his head." I feel that, before calling it a day here, I can best capture the flavor of his story by quoting the thought balloon in the first panel ("[GASP] That's no tennis ball...it's a live grenade!") and those in the concluding panels ("So that was our guardians' strange challenge--to pit man against machine in a battle for survival of the fittest! And proved I was the fittest once I 'saw through' my opponent--saw that Roy was a robot--who had not been programmed to sweat or grow a beard!").

Today's Assignment

I was walking down the street just now and saw some guy who was still a good distance from me, running as he approached from the other direction. He saw me see him, and we both seemed to lean first to the left and then to the right, and then I made direct eye contact with him in a quizzical sort of way that was meant to say, "I see you running towards me. As I feint to my left to keep from colliding into you, understand what I'm doing and just go with it." He understood and kept moving in a straight line as I stepped out of his way. This is a maneuver that I did not improvise on the spot but one developed through years of practice and employed in several previous near-misses. Why is there no term for it? Send your suggestions  to the U.S. Patent Office and remember who put you on the path to success when your copyright is approved and the royalty checks start cakewalking through the door.

Person Who Died, or Rural Route Hassle

The news, from a couple of weeks ago, that Jim Carroll had died, really took me back to a weird time in my life. Like his friend Patti Smith, Carroll straddled the worlds of beat-influenced poetic writing and, after his album Catholic Boy came out, downtown New York rock music, except that as a rocker he was a one-hit wonder (the hit being the rapid-fire, incantatory "People Who Died") and I never encountered a poem of his that really stuck. He first attracted attention with The Basketball Diaries, a slim book of prose that described his life in the big city from ages twelve to sixteen, recounting his steady descent from high school sports star to a junkie hustling for his next fix. I had a Bantam paperback copy of that book when I was in high school myself, and it had a picture of Carroll on the cover. I used to dip into it sometimes, but I'm not sure that I ever finished it, and I know that I never actually sat down and read it all the way through, which given its size and journal-style presentation couldn't have taken me more than an afternoon. 

Instead, I remember spending long stretches of time stretched out on the floor or my bed, lying on my chest, staring at Carroll's picture. I wasn't especially inclined to admire a man for his physical beauty in those days, but in that picture, Carroll was beautiful in a way that I found transfixing, for what it seemed to represent. There are some writers who'd flip out at the thought of somebody caring that much about a copy of one of their books for reasons unconnected to the writing inside it, but I like to think that Carroll would have understood, and that he might have even have approved. "“When I was about 9 years old," he once said, "I realized that the real thing was not only to do what you were doing totally great, but to look totally great while you were doing it.” (A terrible movie was made of The Basketball Diaries in 1995, and Carroll tried to use its release as the occasion to stage a comeback; "spoken word poetry" was then on MTV and in TV commercials for Gap jeans, and it must have seemed that this was his real form and his moment to cash in on it. But he didn't get that much of a bump out of it, and I think that's probably because his looks had deteriorated to the point that he was no longer beautiful, but not in the kind of interesting, photogenic way that turned William S. Burroughs and Leonard Cohen into pop sages--Gandalfs with their own ISBN numbers.)

In the photo on the paperback, Carroll was standing on a street corner, his back against a wall and his face, which was gaunt but not yet cadaverous, glowered at the camera. He looked like a corrupted, possibly Satanic version of Tom Verlaine, who was my big underground hero and man-crush at the time. Verlaine had led the classic, two-albums-and-we're-outta-here downtown NYC band Television, all of which was ancient history by the time I first heard of him, early in his solo career. In terms of talent and style, Verlaine was pretty much the kind of hipster I aspired to be then, except that he was sweetly angelic and sometimes seemed to be having visions of Bernadette during his guitar solos. (I should mention, for the benefit of any youngsters in the room, that back then, "hipster" was a value-neutral term, unless it was being used by Diana Trilling. It had come up with the beats and through such cultural manifestos as Lenny Bruce monologues and Norman Mailer's "The White Negro", in a context that used it to signify a special kind of informed alienation, street aestheticism,  and special, dirty knowledge of sex and how the world works, and by the time I first heard it, it had broadened to include hicks like me who had a lot to learn about sex and how the world works and whose felt rarely hit concrete but who were doing our damndest to develop advanced tastes in the art and pop culture we liked. It was only a year or so ago that I discovered that the term is now pretty much exclusively used as a term of abuse, thrown around on the Internet to tag people whose taste in non-mainstream work differs from that of the person doing the throwing as trendy phonies. As a lover of language, this saddens me, because in its original meaning, "hipster" struck me as a pleasing word to say and write and read that served a clear and useful purpose. I think it's a loss, especially since it's not as if we were really hurting from a shortage of terms of abuse.)

Carroll's tainted kind of urban dweller beauty was very appealing to me, way out there in one of the parts of Mississippi that even other Mississippians regard as the sticks. It made me want to be a city boy, even as it led me to buy into the idea that being a city boy of the cool kind naturally entails some especially ugly kinds of self-destructive behavior. I was of an age where hustling sounded smarter than being an office temp: it probably freed up a lot more of your hours for going to the movies. And there were parts of the book that did stick with me, especially the very last lines: "I got to go in and puke. I just want to be pure." Those words summed up what, for me, was the appeal of the fantasy of having been a junkie. I actually did that, fantasize about having been a junkie. Mind you, I didn't fantasize about being a junkie. As a kid, I never got into drugs or even alcohol, and this had nothing to do with morality or common sense. I remember not ever feeling the pull. I guess a lot of kids start there to fit in, and fitting in was already a long way from being an option for me as a teenager. I also remember that I used to tell people that, when you're living in rural Mississippi and don't fit in, it's probably a good idea to always have a clear, undistorted view of what's going on around you. But I really just never felt the itch. I liked having a clear head, because there was so much in life that I wanted to take in. And, in retrospect, I think I also recognized that, based on how I responded to things that I liked--movies, music, books, smart pretty girls--I probably had an addictive personality and that if I got to liking being drunk, my time as a social drinker would be a brief way station on my way to spending enough time sprawled on the floor that it would seriously cut into my reading.

But having been a junkie was something else. Like having been in Vietnam, it conferred upon one an instant, glamorous past and a patina of--a word that I would never use unsarcastically as an adult--"authenticity." Reviewing one of William S. Burroughs's lesset novels--you who've read more than a couple of his best-known books will recognize that this is really saying something--John Updike wrote that "The net effect Burroughs achieves is to convince us that he has seen and done things sad beyond description." When you're teenaged and pretty sad already and terrified that you might also be boring, one likely response to that is going to be, "Hell, yeah!" Never mind that actually seeing Jon Voight hustling Bob Balaban in a men's room in Midnight Cowboy was enough to get me to postpone my first trip to New York indefinitely. But even as I probably qualified for the first, if not only, "straight edge" kid in the history of the Walthall County school system, I did my best to pass as a junkie. I wore a lot of black and oozed through the halls working on my heavy-lidded, reptilian stare. Looking at the pictures of myself from those days that my grandmother insisted on using to decorate [sic] her own hallway, I was struck by how hard I tried to look bored to tears in every one of them. It was especially striking considering that I doubt that I was anything like bored at the time, boredom being a feeling that has never come to me easily. (I guess that makes me the Typhoid Mary of boredom, a chief transmitter of that to which I am immune.) I doubt that any of my hated conformist classmates ever noticed my faux-junkie act, though. They were always too stoned to appreciate it.

Eventually, I left the farm, and hit what passed for the big city, where I skulked through the suburbs confusing people who mistook my well-rehearsed coolness for the effects of chronic depression with a little insomnia thrown in, and then moved on to an almost really big city, New Orleans, where I was quick to demonstrate my street smarts by feeling a little tingle of excitement the first time I guy with a thick coat on in July asked me for fifty cents while I was sitting having breakfast in a Burger King. I've made it! I thought. The thrill lasted maybe forty minutes, wearing off fast as I stood in the poetry section of the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library and turned to look through the plate glass window to my left and see an old woman pushing a shopping cart full of junk step up to within three feet of me, turn around, drop her pants, and take a dump. I later got a job working at a Baptist mission, tutoring drunks and junkies hoping to someday get their G.E.D.s, a job that entailed a certain amount of rehab counseling. I recognize now that I was probably hampered quite a bit in that job by my own indifference to getting high; if I'd understood the appeal and felt the attraction, I probably would have been much better equipped to reach people who were in its thrall. But all I really understood and had ever felt was the appeal and attraction of the style, the pose, which smart addicts know is finally only good for hustling suckers like me. But whatever gets you through the night, right? Rest in peace, Jim.

The Devil, Probably

Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which has its American premiere tonight as part of the New York Film festival, attracted a lot of negative publicity, ranging from outrage to simple ridicule, when it was shown at Cannes last spring, and when I squeezed into a New York press screening more than a month ago, it was obvious that a lot of people had come to see the train wreck. The movie, which stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for it) as a married couple identified only as "He" and "She", opens with a fancy-looking sequence showing the two leads fucking like a house on fire (including graphic penetration shots provided by the bearers of a pair of stunt genitals) while their baby, as if trying to escape the Handel aria that's ladled over the images like curdled milk, makes a break from freedom and dives out a high window. (The camera follows its descent down to the pavement, where it splatters like one of those watermelons David Letterman used to sometimes pitch off the roof.)

This prologue is followed by an hour or so of total boredom as She lies in bed grieving and He looks sheepish about wishing she'd feel better. There's a kernel of undeveloped drama: He is a psychiatrist by profession, and She suggests that he's being awfully arrogant and sure of himself (Himself?) in disregarding the obvious conflict of interest in his presuming to oversee her treatment. But there's so little sense that either of them is a real character, let alone that they're two people who are involved with one another, that this never takes root. Then, finally, He deduces that She needs to confront her greatest fears, which apparently involve nature, so they light out for an extended stay at their cabin in the woods. The crowd I saw the movie with did a lot of loud sighing during all this, but press screening audiences are by their nature well-behaved, and certainly don't generally resemble the Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang, and though a couple of people did just walk out in bored despair, tou could sort of feel that people were trying to hold it together. But as soon as the talking fox showed up, all bets were off.

For a movie that isn't worth talking about, Antichrist has inspired a lot of talk, and it's going to be talked about a lot more. It's worthless, but in a way, that's just saying that it's another Lars von Trier movie. Gainsbourg got her award not for her acting but as a reward for her fearlessness: she agreed to step in at the last minute after Eva Green dropped out (or was forbidden by her agent from doing it) and so can be seen masturbating a stunt penis to bloody climax after hitting her movie husband in the nuts with a log and performing a clitorectomy on herself with a pair of scissors. The one demonstration of talent in the movie, with the possible exception of the work of the animal wranglers, is the beautiful cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle, who previously worked with Von Trier on Dogville and its companion piece, Manderlay, as well as The Celebration, 28 Days Later, Millions, and Slumdog Millionaire. But that's sort of a negative virtue, since there isn't anything in this movie that you don't regret being able to see clearly. But no fan of Von Trier's movies should stay away from Antichriston my say so. I laid out my feelings about the director's work a long time ago, and Von Trier admirers judged them to be unconvincing. I still remember that one friend of mine reacted to that article by writing that "no one who's really looked at Von Trier's movies" could fail to recognize that he's so great an artist that he's beyond the bounds of common criticism, or at least beyond the bounds of being made fun of, and I still haven't had the guts to ask him if he was implying that I hadn't really looked at the movies I was trashing or if I had really looked at them, seen that they were masterpieces, and decided to lie about it.

So nobody who cares about Von Trier as an artist and wants to say what he has famously called “the most important film of my entire career” should even consider not seeing it because I think it's a load. But I would counsel any sensible person who goes to see it with their hopes up high to accept that it's okay to believe the evidence of their eyes and ears: it's a load, accept it. It doesn't make the movies of his that you love any worse. (You don't hear me going on about how Get to Know Your Rabbit is an unappreciated classic.) It's true that, in their attempts to reconcile the gimmicky shallowness of Von Trier's movies with their own desire to believe that something that goes straight for their gonads like that must be important, Von Trier partisans have invented their own special brand of "this piece of shit sure is a masterpiece" pull-quote, such as the ones I cited in my Dogville article (“brilliant but loathsome” — Sarah Kerr, Slate; “true to its hateful vision” — Stephen Holden, New York Times; and “insufferably pretentious” yet “a masterpiece” — J. Hoberman, Village Voice), and in his determination to find a way to embrace Antichrist, Holden has just added: "[Antichrist is wide open for ridicule. Yet it is indelible." It would be a small pity if many of the director's admirers find a way to pretend that Antichrist has some reason for being, because the one thing that's kind of interesting about this movie is the ways in which its total failure illuminate what was effective about Von Trier's earlier films.




In Stephen Holden's article, he also praises the director as "one of world cinema’s most foolhardy provocateurs", which applies to Antichrist but is otherwise completely wrong about Von Trier and his career to date. Von Trier has always been the master of the calculated risk, a "gimmick-meister" (to use another potentially insulting term that I've seen applied to him as a compliment) who's always shown great cunning in jerking audiences around in ways that they were able to feel was somehow good for them. I didn't like Breaking the Waves or The Idiots or Dancer in the Dark or Dogville, but I could see and even appreciate how they worked, in the way you could see and appreciate how a mousetrap works. What's dismaying about Antichrist is that it doesn't work. It represents a new way of working for Von Trier, and your awareness of how effective his old methods were only makes you that much more conscious of the fact that what you're seeing doesn't work at all: it starts out stone dead and then turns into a mine field of bad laughs. By now, most of the people who might want to see it have already been alerted to the nature of its "shocking" content, and that's probably a bad thing, because when the shocks aren't surprising, there's no distraction from how silly it all is, whether you're watching the genital mutilations or the symbolic woodland beasties who might be Von Trier's homage to South Park's Christmas Critters or an "ominous" dream sequence in which Dafoe, his face a mask of bewilderment--the face of an actor who trusts his director but has no idea why he wants him to do this--stares at the camera while a shower of acorns falls around him in lyrical slow motion.

In his biggest hits, Von Trier subjected actresses to slow torture and pulled stunts like the poverty-in-America montage at the end of Dogville because he knew how to get a rise out of people. In his press notes for Antichrist, he claims that he abandoned his usual methods and wrote the script by instinct, piecing it together with images taken from his dreams. God help me, I believe Mr. Shifty. (The movie has been attacked as misogynous--which, all things considered, is kind of like criticizing Charles Manson for poor grooming--because, I guess, it could be taken as seeming to imply there's some innate capacity for violence and evil in women. The one thing in the movie that feels calculated in the trademark Von Trier shit-stirring manner is that, when He and She actually talk about this, it's the woman who takes the anti-woman side of the debate.) I think that instead of diagramming this one on the blackboard to achieve maximum manipulative effect, he took a stab at plumbing his subconscious in search of fresh, vibrant images, as if he were David Lynch or somebody. But he just isn't that kind of filmmaker, and the results show no talent for that kind of thing. Even those of us who don't respect the kind of filmmaker that he is can feel the difference when he tries for something so far outside his range.

I wouldn't take that Dogville article back, but after I wrote it, I did shift my position on Von Trier a little. What did it was The Five Obstructions, the only movie with his name on it that I've actually enjoyed, and a surprisingly revealing look at Von Trier's artistic philosophy--surprising, to me at least, because it turns out that he really does have an artistic philosophy and isn't just trying to get a laugh out making the monkeys jump. In that documentary-cum-anthology film, Von Trier induced his hero, the older experimental filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to make five different variations on a short film, each time testing himself against the boundaries of a different set of guidelines imposed on him by clever Lars. The film is actually touching, because Von Trier, the last person in the world you might expect to take pleasure in another director's triumphs (or at least the last person in the world you might expect to want to be seen admitting it--his man-you-love-to-hate act can make you wonder why the people who cast the villains in James Bond movies have never gotten in touch with him), seems genuinely delighted every time Leth finds a way to turn the "obstructions" to his benefit and pull another one out of the fire. Obstructions convinced me that Von Trier really is trying to do something worth doing in his movies, and Manderlay, the follow-up to Dogville convinced me that he just doesn't understand how limiting the gimmicky constructs he imposes on himself in his own movies really are. Manderlay bombed because it was just too much like Dogville to pull anyone's chain, and Von Trier was subsequently unable to get funding for the concluding film in his projected "U.S. Trilogy".

His next film, the flagrantly dopey comedy The Boss of It All, which opened with a voice-over introduction from the director promising that what was about to follow would be completely innocuous, felt like a middle finger to the world that wouldn't let him finish his epic masterwork. By now, I was actually willing to consider the possible that the little fucker that it was because the world found Manderlay too challenging and edgy, rather than that he'd bored everyone to death by trying to seat them on the same whoopee cushion twice. Antichrist is supposed to be his way of climbing out of the depression that all these setbacks caused him to undergo, and now that he's feeling better, I hope he'll get back to what he's good at: the construction of hollow Rube Goldberg machines that make people think they're watching something perched on the far end of edgy. The movies, again, won't be any good, but it's what he knows how to do. His last few movies don't make people jump and prattle--or don't make them do it in the right way--and a Von Trier movie that doesn't feel daringly "provocative" has so little reason for existing that it's just sad to think of him having gone to the trouble.