...about the creative process:
"Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things."See also: "Whatever talent I have for writing lies in being friends with my head."-- Russell Hoban, "Afterword," "Riddley Walker: Expanded Edition" (Indiana 1998).
"It's tempting to give up on our liberal studies before even making the attempt, the better to continue on our merry way, fighting, drinking, and all the rest. At least, then we we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate."More excellent Smith here. I've been shying away from this writer for years, fearing either the Second Coming of Rushdie (Multi-Culti Magic Realism) or a new addition to the Hitchens/Amis Patronizing Smarty Pants School. But I've loved a couple of her recent essays.-- Zadie Smith, "Some Notes on Attunement," "The New Yorker," December 17, 2012, 30-35.
My other source of daily pleasure is—but I wish I had a better way of putting it—”other people’s faces.” A red-headed girl, with a marvelous large nose she probably hates, and green eyes and that sun-shy complexion composed more of freckles than skin. Or a heavyset grown man, smoking a cigarette in the rain, with a soggy mustache, above which, a surprise—the keen eyes, snub nose, and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self.As a paragraph written by a novelist this is promising. Last week I dug out the copy of "White Teeth" I've owned for something like fifteen years. Any day now...
These cool clips are being posted around to celebrate the publication of a book that looks like an HBO series waiting to happen.
Est-ce Que Tu Le Sais - Scopitone Sylvie Vartan by samandari
The author of "A Feast of Love" on the novelist who is both the literary eminence John Banville and the would-be thriller purveyor Benjamin Black, who each have new books out.
A reading of the two books, the Banville novel and the Black novel, might inspire in some readers a consideration of the way that plot on the one hand and eloquence on the other have taken their leave of each other and have set up separate realms, if that is indeed what has happened. But the real mystery at the center of these books has more to do with the question of how to freeze time so that it partakes of the eternal, which is Banville’s true subject, and with the problem of consequences of actions in the here and now, which is Black’s. Eloquence is not the point of [Black's] "Vengeance," though it contains passages of verbal legerdemain, and plot is almost irrelevant in [Banville's] "Ancient Light," although it contains a surprise ending.A larger distinction can be inferred between literary novels that seek to "freeze time so that it partakes of the eternal" and entertainments, which exploit a sense of time rushing onward to generate excitement. While there could be cases in which the merely stiff or frozen is mistaken for the timeless, the association of the temporal and the contingent is pretty well locked in; a key issue for us OG liberal artists.
UPDATE: I think the distinction between stop-time novels that seek stasis and/or the eternal and "temporal" plotty ones is too suggestive to be reduced to an art vs. entertainment squabble. Slowing time down to an extreme close-up crawl or speeding it up to gets hearts racing aren't the only alternatives. Some of our favorite books, from "War and Peace" to "A Suitable Boy," somehow manage to evoke the exact, flowing, forward pace of life, without hype in either direction.
He almost gave up [bicycle riding] after a week. But then Doc Barkhuizen gave him the "five-minute" tip. "This is what I do, Benny. If I'm not in the mood I tell myself, 'just five minutes,' and if I don't feel like going on, I'll turn around and go back home." He tried it -- and never once did he turn around. Once you were going, you went on.-- Deon Meyer, "Thirteen Hours" (Grove Press 2011)
Anthony Lane on the new film "Killing Them Softly:"
Why haven’t more movies stolen from George V. Higgins? He died in 1999, but his work remains a trove, begging to be raided for linguistic loot. If you want to grade postwar novelists on the strength of their ears alone—how fast they prick up at the crackle and blare of American speech—then Higgins and Elmore Leonard, you could argue, lead the pack, ahead of more distinguished names.Writing about the same film, around the same time, for the same magazine's online edition (cold looks when they pass in the hall?) Richard Brody proves himself to be a true hipster by asserting that "storytelling is the most overrated value and misattributed term in the world of moviemaking." Luckily, by the time he gets to his big finish, Brody is saying something a bit different, making a point that reflects a degree of cluelessness about how the process of film production actually works:
…this mode of bare-bones storytelling—in which a pared-down framework of facts is presented, tightly and narrowly, as if foregrounding the plot and locating all traces of character in the actors’ performance—is one of the dominant trends of contemporary filmmaking. It doesn’t just serve the goal of brisk entertainment: it reflects the desire to pass the fiction off as objective truth—in order to convey as all the more self-evident the filmmaker’s political point.Read more.
Catching up with this densely textured and satisfyingly Higgins-y smuggling thriller, virtues not surprising when you consider the source.
Edifyingly, the new season of "Homeland" (Channel 4) had chosen just this time to appear, as if to prove that an international action series can have a plot full of holes and still be 10 times better than "Hunted."
Saw this on the plane on the way home from China. Not half bad.
Not enough footage in this trailer of the great Kara Hui Ying-hung...
...who dances with Donnie in the film's best fight:
Chute, David. Film Comment 34. 6 (Nov/Dec 1998): 62-65.
The Japanese eco-fantasist Hayao Miyazaki is an animation magiclan, a crowd-pleasing storyteller who is also a builder of worlds. He designs meticulously engineered imaginary aircraft, sets their perfect gears spinning, and propels them over mossgreen rolling landscapes, zipping between the sprung columns of ruined castles. He uses animation in a refreshingly direct and intuitive way, reveling in its capacity to lift things off the ground.
(Olivier) Megaton’s dazzling style (at its best in "Transporter 3" and "Colombiana") goes back to D.W. Griffith’s use of cross-cutting–basic stuff but Mills’ fight with hooligans while his wife is tortured and his daughter is chased along the rooftops of Istanbul really works. His technique provides a visceral and ethical exercise. When Mills confronts his nemesis (Rade Serbedzija), the call for “Justice!” gets corrected: “You mean revenge!” This essence is like what Costa Gavras’ most complex film explored (1970’s "The Confession" about Communist show trials). Beyond the political and religious surface of seeing Americans under siege, "Taken 2" exposes the politics of vengeance, the rationalizing of immorality. This was also the good theme of Neveldine-Taylor’s brilliant "Ghost Rider 2: The Spirit of Vengeance" (also underrated).
David Mitchell writes about the movie of his novel "Cloud Atlas," about which some crabby people have had reservations:
I met the three directors in 2008, and their plan to foreground the novel’s “transmigrating souls” motif by having actors perform multiple roles (each role being a sort of way station on that soul’s karmic journey) struck me as ingenious....
Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film’s final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made. Funny thing is, not even the author is immune to this colonization by the moving image. When I try to recall how I imagined my vanity-publisher character, Timothy Cavendish, before the movie, all I see now is Jim Broadbent’s face smiling back, devilishly. Which, as it happens, is fine by me.
Dennis Lehane again teaches us the lesson:
In the Boston neighborhood where I grew up, people talked vividly. Lots of f-bombs, lots of italicizing, lots of words purposefully dropped from a sentence because they got in the way of the meaning or the punch line. To grow up around such wonderful, profane, exuberant dialogue is to have a found poem dropped in your lap every day before you've even finished the walk to school. So, when I began my apprenticeship as a writer, the only gift I brought to the table was an ear for dialogue bequeathed to me by constant exposure to Olympian-level talkers. That's given me a lifelong love of colorful gab, both as a reader and writer.Dialog trumps story -- Always thought that myself (see I. Compton-Burnett), and am glad to see Lehane admitting that the rule of simplicity is just begging to be broken....
In Richard Price's urban masterpiece, "Clockers," two New Jersey cops sit in the bowels of a housing development and tell stories to each other. The scene goes on for pages and, in truth, adds little to the overall plot. But the dialogue is so pitch-perfect an urban symphony, and so hilarious, that it effortlessly crosses the transom of the utilitarian standard and transcends any rules that would box it out of a novel. If everyone could write dialogue as gutter-gorgeous as Mr. Price, they could write a hundred pages before any reader started asking if a story was going to appear anytime soon.
(Ford) made it hard for himself by ensuring that his magnum opus would be as hard to read as possible. The Americans have always liked "Parade’s End" better than the British, but that could be because the style has the word “modern” written all over it. Tom Stoppard’s adaptation reconstitutes the passionate story that Ford almost bleached out in the light of flashbacks and flashes forward.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has very good things to say about Carl Barks and Scrooge McDuck in a review on Saturday of the latest installment in the Fantagraphics Barks set. Also, as a throwaway reference to a "midcentury student of America's vernacular arts" (whom I really should look up), the critic -- Tim Marchman -- provides a precise statement about the elements of a great deal of what we all love.....
The stories in this collection range from perfect one-page gag strips to 30-page features so packed with incident that they would have to be trimmed to be adapted as films. They're about love, greed, the settlement of the West, what happens when modern ducks meet pre-modern cultures, and more. They're also about the American way of storytelling, in which rigid discipline can make abrupt transitions seem natural and inevitable: from money hidden in¬spinach cans to Beagle Boys in robot suits to an entire society of invisible native spirits hidden along the beaches of Hawaii.John A. Kouwenhoven, the great midcentury student of America's vernacular arts, had a theory about what makes the country's native art forms unique: The key to such achievements as jazz and the skyscraper, he suggested, was a tension between order—as seen in the gridiron pattern superimposed on a continental scale from cities to farms—and a spontaneous, discontinuous rhythm felt in everything from the way Mark Twain spins a yarn to Walt Whitman's prosody. He identified comics, "which come to no end demanded by symmetry or proportion," as a special example. Carl Barks's creations show you exactly what he meant.
Good Faith (Jane Smiley)
- Highlight Loc. 3695-99 | Added on Tuesday, September 18, 2012, 03:56 PM
“It’s simple,” said Dale, “but it’s not easy. Here’s what they did. They made all these panels and moldings by hand, with hand planes. That way, if anyone made a mistake, it would only be a thirty-second of an inch mistake, and he could rub it out, no problem. This is beautiful, painstaking work. It’s always harder to make something simple look right than to make something elaborate look right.”
==========
==========
Death of a Red Heroine (Soho Crime) (Qiu Xiaolong) - Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 4177-88 | Added on Tuesday, August 28, 2012, 08:33 AM
“Across-the-bridge-noodles—I think I’ve heard of that unusual dish.” Chen showed a gourmet’s curiosity. “Or I have read about it somewhere. Very special, but I have never tasted it.”
“Well, here’s the story about it.” Yu found himself explaining. “In the Qing Dynasty, a bookish husband studied in an isolated island cottage, preparing for the civil service examination. His wife made one of his favorite dishes, chicken soup with noodles. To bring the noodles there, his wife had to cross a long wooden bridge. When she got there, the noodles were cold, and had lost their fresh, crisp taste. So the next time she carried two separate bowls, one bowl of hot soup with surface layer of oil to keep the heat in, and one bowl of rinsed noodles. She did not mix the noodles with the soup until she was in the cottage. Sure enough, it tasted wonderful, and the husband, feeling energetic after finishing the noodles, did a good job of preparation, and succeeded in the examination.”
“What a lucky husband,” Chen said.
“And Peiqin’s an even better chef,” Yu chuckled.
Yu, too, had enjoyed the noodles, the soup rippling with the memories of their days in Yunnan.
Information from our favorite source.
"Long Beach, California - Little Phnom Penh - is the world's largest Cambodian enclave outside the homeland, founded by refugees."
Dengue Fever perform's Ros Sereysothea's "A Go Go:"
C.I.: Tulkinghorn
...with which I am surprised to find I sympathize.
Despite calling "The Artist" "great," [Chris] Rock noted that the film wasn't what audiences want. "['Grown Ups' is] better than The Artist' 'cause the audience says so," he said. "No film critic's going to say it, but 'Madagascar 3' is better than 'The Artist,' and it's better because it makes people feel better. That’s ultimately what it boils down to. --Noted film critic Chris Rock.
Critics’ Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time
My new favorite critic, The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, on serial storytelling, melodrama, cliffhangers and soap opera. A nice note: The upcoming book she refers to, "Complex TV," is being published serially on its author's blog.
In her brief essay on "Lolita," in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel," Jane Smiley tweaks Vladimir Nabokov for "working as hard as James or Tolstoy to promote a theory of art and of the novel that led straight to him and his sort of greatness." But of course this is what Smiley herself is doing in "Thirteen Ways." Probably any novelist writing about novels would be so inclined. Any painter writing about painting, any critic writing about criticism. The number of professional commentators who could resist the temptation to equate excellence with their own practice could be counted (as I believe Pogo Possum once said) on the fingers of one finger.
Henry Jenkins and Dave Kehr at the Lost Cinema festival in Italy. Looking at Jenkins makes me wonder if there's a factory someplace.. (h/t Howard Rodman)
INCONTRO CON LA CRITICA AMERICANA from cineteca on Vimeo.
....
New "Spider-Man" director Marc Webb:
It's all about regeneration. "I kept on going back to the single moment where Peter Parker was left by his parents," Webb suggests. "Realistically, anybody's whose parents disappeared in a very urgent or chaotic manner when he was six or seven-years-old, that's going to have a huge emotional impact. And that moment is more definitive than even the spider bite. It defined the character and the movie in a very specific way for me."As far as the orphan story, Webb refers back to Dickens. He finds the whole notion of these kids having a generosity of spirit yet distrust for the world around them very provocative. "It brings up questions of identity and in the last part of the film I inserted a lecture that my high school teacher had given me about there being [only one story] in fiction: 'Who am I?' I find myself when I watch movies or read books thinking that it's the soul of so many stories that I really enjoy. This idea of a kid who puts on a mask and becomes somebody else and has to lose part of his identity and sacrifice other parts of his life: it's the right question to ask."
Harry Edgerton was the model for the character Frank Pembleton, played by Andre Braugher on “Homicide.” Ed Burns was David Simon’s co-creator on “The Wire.”
==========
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (David Simon)
- Highlight Loc. 1540-51 | Added on Monday, July 02, 2012, 10:33 PM
(Harry) Edgerton’s detachment from the rest of the unit was furthered by his partnership with Ed Burns, with whom he had been detailed to the Drug Enforcement Administration for an investigation that consumed two years. That probe began because Burns had learned the name of a major narcotics trafficker who had ordered the slaying of his girlfriend. Unable to prove the murder, Burns and Edgerton instead spent months on electronic and telephone surveillance, then took the dealer down for drug distribution to the tune of thirty years, no parole.
To Edgerton, a case like that was a statement of a kind, an answer to an organized drug trade that could otherwise engage in contract murder with impunity. It was a persuasive argument. Close to half of Baltimore’s murders were believed to be related to the use or sale of narcotics, though the solve rate for drug murders was consistently lower than that for nearly any other motive. Yet homicide’s methodology hadn’t changed with the trend: Detectives worked the drug-related murders independently, as they would any other homicide. Both Burns and Edgerton had argued that much of the violence was related and could only be reduced—or, better still, prevented—by attacking the city’s larger narcotics organizations.
By that argument, the repetitive violence of the city’s drug markets betrayed the weakness in the homicide unit, namely, that the investigations were individual, haphazard and reactive. Two years after that initial DEA case, Edgerton and Burns again proved the point with a year-long probe of a drug ring linked to a dozen murders and attempted murders in the Murphy Homes housing project. Every one of those shootings had remained open after detectives followed the traditional approach, yet as a result of the prolonged investigation, four murders were cleared and the key defendants received double life sentences.
It was precision law enforcement, but other detectives were quick to point out that those two probes consumed three years, leaving two of the unit’s squads short a man for much of that time. The phone still had to be answered and with Edgerton reporting to work at the DEA field office, the other members of his squad—Kincaid and Garvey, McAllister and Bowman—would each be handling more shootings, more questionable deaths, more suicides, more murders. The fallout from Edgerton’s prolonged absences had served to push him further from the other detectives.
True to form, Ed Burns is at this very moment detailed to a sprawling FBI probe of a drug organization in the Lexington Terrace projects—an investigation that will eventually consume two years. Edgerton originally went with him, but two months ago he was shipped back to the homicide unit after a nasty budget dispute between federal and local supervisors. And the fact that Harry Edgerton is now back in the standard rotation, pecking away at a 24-hour report on something as menial and undramatic as a suicide, is a source of glee to the rest of the shift.
Yale at last! An online lecture course on the postwar American novel including HG favorites Lolita, Wise Blood, Housekeeping, Blood Meridian, and Lost in The Funhouse.... Of course, it used to be that one read these extra-curriculum. We live in degenerate times.
...several times, in his piece on the Film Forum Spaghetti Western series.
The Western’s basic civilization vs. wilderness theme gets travestied by Spaghetti westerns into nihilistic prognostications about mankind‘s depravity. [Alex] Cox confesses the young person’s conventional fascination with cynicism as a rejection of sentimentality which hipsters consider weak and untrustworthy (especially in counterculture terms that dismiss established moral tenets). The cynicism of Spaghetti westerns now seems an inevitable development of the skepticism following mid-20th century American imperialism and triumphalism. It was a way for Italian Communist anxiety (a luxe privilege) to express itself within a critique of the American ideals it cannot sustain.
Alexander Payne, Filmmaker of the Year, offers five pieces of advice to students at the UCLA/TFT Film Festival "Directors Showcase" event, June 14, 2012.
1. Be prepared for it to take a while.
2. If you're writing a script that you want to direct, don't take any money for it.
3. Watch Ozu.
4. Always get your entrances and exits.
5. Quoting Italian director Nani Moretti, who in turn is quoting writer Eduardo De Filippo: "He who searches for style, finds death. He who searches for life, finds style."
(sort of)
There's a non-fannish, genre-informed rave review by Javier Martinez of his new book, "Blue Remembered Earth", on The LA Review of Books website. An interesting political perspective, by the way.... I've never paid much attention to the politics of SF, but Martinez's analysis makes sense to me.
Reynold's frame is a society which is a technological totalitarian state -- and that's OK by Reynolds, apparently. Says Martinez:
This concept half a century ago would likely have been depicted as a sinister hive-mind, a metaphor for global communism, that our protagonist would rally against and overthrow armed only with his smarts and can-do attitude. BRE moves away from this libertarian old-guard position, upheld by such pulp-era titans as John W. Campbell, Robert A. Heinlein, and Poul Anderson - not to mention their ideological heirs, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and the stable of writers at Baen Books.
The ideological shift from individualism toward techno-collectivism is, if no less problematic, evidence of a left-leaning vision in Reynolds's work. A conventional history of the genre can trace the leftist turn in SF back several decades to at least the 1950s, with the pioneering social satire featured in Galaxy magazine. But Reynolds's lineage is more complex: he clearly owes a huge debt to those authors central to the early decades of the genre (certainly the future-history detailed in his "Inhibitor" series is a nod to Heinlein's work, if not his ideology), but he melds this traditionalism with elements culled from the writers of the1960s and '70s - such as John Brunner, Barry N. Malzberg, and Barrington J. Bayley - who turned routine space adventures into more meditative excursions. At the same time, Reynolds expresses an exuberance that aligns him with the outer-space quasi-mysticism of Arthur C. Clarke and Fred Hoyle. Reynolds's romanticism, however, is not transcendental but purely material, a celebration of the endless possibilities of secular culture and the richness of experience technology promises.
Many annoying changes, but volume three gets two seasons.
Having read the second novel, I’m not surprised by the plot. But this is really a model of adaptation. The character work is even deeper in the series than it is in the books, the plot has been trimmed to its essentials, and ending the season with the supernatural creatures assault is more dramatically satisfying than the revelation of Bran’s (in the book less unambiguous) survival.The series has been quite faithful to the novels so far; it will be interesting to see if they are as willing to sacrifice characters next season as George R.R. Martin has been.
"Game of Thrones" is every bit as much about the exercise of power as Caro’s monumental LBJ biography is. Not quite on that level, of course, but deeply considered and challenging.
To introduce a summer festival of Italian westerns in New York, Alex Cox (whose love of big, incoherent, violent movies was not, in the end, good for his career) reminisces about summers spent in the second-run movie theatres of Paris:
My enthusiasm for “Django” and its contemporaries rivaled that of a young Elizabethan treated to the London theater of the Rose or the Globe. Who cared why the Dane waited so long to murder his uncle? There was mayhem! There was murder! There was madness! There was music! And a ghost! The enthusiasm for these things shown by the best Renaissance playwrights — Marlowe, Webster, Kyd, Middleton — rivaled the spaghetti western auteurs’ equal passion for arbitrary killing, crucifixions, loud music and scenes with white-clad villains abused by talking parrots.His list of favorites:
• Carlo Lizzani’s “Requiescant,” a fierce revenge tale in which the director Pier Paolo Pasolini and several of his actors appear in strange character roles.• Corbucci’s “Navajo Joe” and “Great Silence,” also pessimistic revenge tales, in this case ones that do not end happily for the hero. (“Navajo Joe” is the best of all possible Burt Reynolds vehicles; “The Great Silence” is one of the finest westerns ever).• “Quien Sabe?” (“A Bullet for the General”) and “Tepepa,” parables about third-world revolution and the Vietnam War disguised as westerns.• Giulio Questi’s “Django Kill,” which had nothing to do with “Django” but displayed a surreal aesthetic worthy of Buñuel, featuring gay outlaws, murderous townsfolk and that talking parrot.• Tonino Valerii’s “Price of Power,” which restaged the Kennedy assassination, in Dallas, circa 1880.
There is gloomy, melancholy and bleak, and then, several leagues below despondent, there is Goodis.
Pleasingly right-on "Doctor Who" write up from Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker's science fiction issue. Working hard to establish her non-fan cred, she seems not to realize that some of the sterling qualities she is ascribing to the Stephen Moffat version of the show were actually innovated by Russell Davies, whose seasons she has not seen. She ends up praising Moffat for qualities he's actually soft-peddling, in comparison with his predecessor.
Before I caught up on the last two seasons, my expectations were low. I anticipated something like the seventies-era series that I faintly remembered: a goofy, juvenile thrill ride. (I haven’t watched Davies’s version, but a fellow TV critic told me that she was so attached to his “Who” that she wasn’t watching Moffat’s.) The original “Who” dwelt on pure sci-fi obsessions, abstract questions of how society is organized and the line between humans and machines. But, as deeply as fans loved the show, its themes were rarely emotional. Instead, it jumped from Aztec civilization to Mars, as much an educational show for children as an adult narrative, with a British-colonialist view of the universe. (So many savages, so little time.) The series’ most striking feature was the Doctor himself: in contrast to “Star Trek” ’s Kirk—the Kennedyesque leader of a diverse society—the early Doctor Who was an alien iconoclast with two hearts and a universe-wide Eurail Pass. For a certain breed of viewer, this was an intoxicating ideal: the know-it-all whose streak of melancholy—or prickly rage, depending on who was Who—had to be honored, because he actually did know everything.Though that show had its charms, I was surprised, and delighted, to find that the modern “Doctor Who” has a very different emphasis: it’s a show about relationships, in an epic and mythological vein. Certainly, the show has plenty of the classic “Doctor Who” pleasures, albeit with more sophisticated effects: there are seafaring pirates; a metallic England floating on a giant “Star Whale”; and a factory full of avatar-laborers whose faces melt off like goo. The Doctor himself is a pale, puppyish genius who shares several qualities with Moffat’s modernized Sherlock Holmes, including fashion affectations (he insists that bow ties are cool, then fezzes, then cowboy hats) and a Professor-from-“Gilligan’s Island” allure. The show’s strength, however, is not its one-off stories but its longer arcs, a structural breakthrough of “The X-Files,” which modelled the notion that episodic TV could be woven together with powerful, season-long themes, inspiring the more complex breed of modern shows, both sci-fi and regular-fi.
While I was relishing the Moorcock/Dent formulae for writing pulp fiction, posted below, I was notified by Twitter of the latest "Weird Things" column by Damien Walter about "The New Pulp"... He tries to make the case that this is a golden age for pulp because the barriers for publication have become so low... Not convinced myself, but he has a couple of compelling recommendations, including one for a book called Empire State, by a guy called Adam Christopher, published by the admirable Angry Robot.
Sez Walter:
If the history of the 21st-century pulp fiction revival is ever written, Empire State might well be seen as its starting point... Empire State is a homage to all things pulp, a multi-genre mash-up of a novel that collides fictional tropes such as a literary particle accelerator, while hoping like hell the thing holds together – which on the whole it does quite admirably...
Arguably the most famous song from "Ice and Fire"is "The Rains of Castamere,"and The National has performed the Lannister ballad for the upcoming "Game of Thrones" second season soundtrack. "The Rains of Castamere" is about Tywin Lannister's overwhelming victory over House Reyne during the Reyne-Tarbeck Rebellion and is featured at several pivotal parts throughout Martin's novels. Particularly during... no spoilers. Let's just say it's an important number and the indie rock band's sombre sound, not to mention Matt Berninger's low register do it justice. It's not upbeat by any means but it's definitely worth a listen. UPDATE: If it seems familiar, it's what Tyrion has been whistling.
I have found out, during almost thirty years of writing, that the best characters are the ones who simply walk, unplanned, into a story, and take it over. I suppose the real explanation is that they represent the spontaneous creativity of the subconscious mind, which is less labored than the conscious mind ... I must be getting old. I am tired of logical explanations. ... I prefer to think that Damon exists somewhere and demanded to be written about.. -- Marion Zimmer Bradley, "Darkover Retrospective" (1980).
One reservation: a residue of elitism in the notion that a key to the fun of reading genre stories is the knowledge that we could be reading something better. Betcha some genre fiction defenders would find that patronizing.
"And part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better, something that, in the words of [Matthew] Arnold, reflects "the best that has been thought and said in this world. ... readers who seek out mystery novels are seeking to escape not from life but from literature, from the 'pluperfect tenses of the psychical novel.'"Looking at the quotes again I realize he's being sarcastic; patronizing the snobs, if anything.
The only TV show to date to be covered episode-by-episode in a New Yorker blog (by sainted Godard-worshipper Richard Brody) is now the subject of the sort of lead-review rave that the NYRB usually reserves for seasons of "Downton Abbey." I love the show, but this level of tastemaker over-reaction suggests that the fix is somehow in. Is "Girls" really that much better than everything else on the air?
Joe Morgenstern on Polisse:
...What makes this astonishing French feature a singular experience is the convergence of fine acting, moral urgency and a willingness to linger on moments of great intensity. ..... Fred embodies the movie's moral and dramatic center. A passionately dedicated public servant, though also a volatile and violent one, he's played by the French rapper Joeystarr, a burly figure whose tenderness put me in mind of Wallace Beery....... (The director and co-writer) Maïwenn—who was born Maïwenn Le Besco—plays Melissa, a photographer assigned to document the unit's activities. Like everyone else in the cast, she's an excellent actor with a great director.
The show at its best is near-perfect escapism, bending but not breaking the conventions of Old School, pre-cable primetime detective foolishness. But the increasingly strained contrivances needed to keep the leads apart were becoming irritating. Now "Castle" has a chance to become, if not "The Thin Man" at least "Hart to Hart," than which many things are worse.
John Podhoretz, whom I generally admire, has been making great fun of Richard Brody's list of the ten greatest films of all time, posted and explained here. He calls it the worst ten best list ever published and then goes further by posting Brody's picture and making fun of THAT. (To quote a line from Rocky "I don't see any crowd around you...") Adolescent hi-jinks aside -- and that 's what Twitter is for, right? -- there is a point to be made about the dangers of going too far in refining your taste for something that is, after all, a vital and popular art. Here's the list. (Turns out that I've seen all of these except "Voyage to Italy", and there are only two movies on the list -- "Playtime" and "Rules of the Game" of course -- that I seriously treasure. It is truly a strange list, I must say.)
“King Lear” (1987, Jean-Luc Godard)
“The Great Dictator” (1940, Charlie Chaplin)
“The Last Laugh” (1924, F. W. Murnau)
“Marnie” (1964, Alfred Hitchcock)
“Shoah” (1985, Claude Lanzmann)
“The Rules of the Game” (1939, Jean Renoir)
“Gertrud” (1964, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
“Playtime” (1967, Jacques Tati)
“Husbands” (1970, John Cassavetes)
“Voyage to Italy” (1953, Roberto Rossellini)
UPDATE: Fanning the flames, Podhoretz in back to back tweets today quotes both James Wood on Hilary Mantel's gift of being interesting and Salman Rushdie saying: "Art is not entertainment. At it's very best, it's a revolution." To which Podhoretz adds: "Which is why he's a bad artist."
You could write a book on turning common-or-garden variety anti-intellectualism into its own aesthetic. Lots of people have, I'll bet. I often lean that way myself, especially when confronted with the company I'd have to keep otherwise.
An interesting summary review of the six contenders for this year's Nebula by Chris Barsanti in The Millions. Nothing here really attracts me this year (except Embassytown, of course, but I'm not sure if I'm up to it), but I loved his description of "Among Others" by Jo Walton. (Especially since I just talked to an old friend who was reading a much-loved Ace Double until it fell apart in his hands.)
Walton’s real story is Morwenna’s love of science fiction. The novel is told in diary form, and nearly every entry includes some finely argued notation on the joys and merits of what she’s reading. Her list is heavy with dark transgressors like Samuel R. Delany and John Brunner, as befitting Walton’s late-1970s setting. There’s a gripping, deeply-learned love here that goes beyond mere fandom, delivering one of the most intelligently impassioned odes to science fiction, and reading in general, ever put to paper. As Morwenna says on entering her father’s study: “I actually relaxed in his presence, because if there are books perhaps it won’t be all that bad.” Anybody who has felt the glow and tug of mind-warping joy that comes with devouring a stack of broken-spined sci-fi paperbacks will know exactly what she means.
The incessant buzz around upcoming films can indeed be irritating, and to some of us more than others. But this report led me to information about a possibly great vintage (not Vintage, or at least not yet) noir novel that was completely unknown to me. And yet, no less an authority than Black Lizard founding guru Ed Gorman is willing to entertain the possibility that the "flawless" "Black Wings Has My Angel," by Elliot Chaze, is "the single best novel Gold Medal published during its heyday." Elsewhere, Bill Pronzini offers a picture of Chaze and says he wrote three other books that are almost as good. Marching orders, if I ever heard any.
Offered here as an educational service of the Hungry Ghost blog:
James Wood, recommending Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell:
This season young men carry their effects in soft pale leather bags, in imitation of the agents for the Fugger bank, who travel all over Europe and set the fashion. The bags are heart-shaped and so to him it always looks as if they are going wooing, but they swear they are not. Nephew Richard Cromwell sits down and gives the bags a sardonic glance.
From Horse Heaven:
...there was no reason for the man not to sell the horse. Herman Newman was not a horseman, and seemed uncomfortable in his new role as owner. All over the world, on the other hand, there were deserving men who had spent dozens of years and millions of dollars without ever coming to a horse like Epic Steam. Why should Herman Newman, a man who couldn't remember what a blinker was from one day to the next, run a horse like this one, when men who knew horses, who had horses in their blood, who in some cases believed that they had been horses in previous lifetimes, had no chance at him? Ah. Well. Of all the things that were unfair, ownership, the simplest of them, often seemed the unfairest of all.
From a review by David Shields of a book called "The Grey Album", by Kevin Young:
“Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain,” Young argues.
“Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously.
In fact, it sees them as synonymous.”
As explicated by Adam Gopnik in the current New Yorker, while discussing "Mad Men": "The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past." Explains why pizza parlors when I was a kid always looked like barber shop quartets lived there.....
He has this lovely thought:
And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time.
Just how many people surf porn sites?
Engineers know: they know everything these days...
At peak time, YouPorn serves 4000 pages per second, equating to burst traffic in the region of 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps.
To put that 800Gbps figure into perspective, the internet only handles around half an exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost 2% of the internet’s total traffic. There are dozens of porn sites on the scale of YouPorn, and hundreds that are the size of ExtremeTech or your favorite news site. It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.
Others here may scoff, but Sterling keeps circling around the issue really, really ,really, trying to figure out whether The New Aesthetic project is the first strike in an attempt to come to grips with the digitization of everything. Says Sterling in an essay entitled "Still Freaking Out!!!!!"
How would you know if some new aesthetic was really and truly a “new way of seeing?” How would you prove that this had happened in real life? What would be convincing evidence that such an event had taken place in our world? What proofs could one demand, or offer, that such a thing was an authentic cultural change?
So far, the best evidence that something has really changed is of this kind. Imagine you were walking around your own familiar neighborhood with some young, clever guy. Then he suddenly stops in the street, takes a picture of something you never noticed before, and starts chuckling wryly. And he does that for a year, and maybe five hundred different times.That’s the New Aesthetic Tumblr. This wunderkammer proves nothing by itself. It’s a compendium of evidence, a heap of artifacts, and that evidence matters. It’s a compilation of remarkable material by creative digital-native types who are deeply familiar with the practical effects of these tools and devices.
They’re looking for instances when this use-activity pops out of the background of some older, contrasting worldview. Without this eye-catching glitch aspect, without this sharply perceptible and thought-provoking contrast, it wouldn’t look or feel “new.”
Consider, for instance, the Indian legislators porn-surfing on iPads while their legislature is in session. These dignitaries are not performing-freaks who are there to amuse us. They are fellow human beings just trying to get through their day. Real legislators are always bored silly by legislation. That’s rather the point of grinding down the opposition in long procedural debates. But it doesn’t occur to these Indian nabobs that their brand-new Apple anti-boredom toys are big screens flashing sleazy softcore pr0n to indignant shoulder-surfers.
That’s why this interesting incident shows up on the New Aesthetic tumblr radar. The prurient Indian press thinks that this story is all about porn and the class privilege of the Indian ruling caste. The New Aesthetic crowd thinks it’s about the social impact of handheld-device deployment. They’re both right, but porn and class privilege are both eternal, while iPad deployment is a phenomenon we’re all still getting our heads around.
With a snarky aside about "24".
The Swedes and Danes make even the Americans look formula-ridden. I never miss an episode of Homeland (Channel 4) but nor am I ever able to forget that the same production outfit made 24. Sooner or later either Claire Danes or Damian Lewis will be asked to do something stupid.But at least the Americans, on occasion, know that the fizz of fine brains working on a problem can be good television. Here in Britain it is often as if the people who made the show – let’s say it’s about the political loyalties of a bunch of people who shared a house in their student days – got all the way through university without meeting even one person smarter than they were. You just don’t get the sense that television drama here is being made by the top grade of minds. In the Scandinavian countries, evolution seems to have gone further.This observation is probably too generalised to be useful and there are, of course, exceptions: if you remember State of Play, you remember something truly intricate, with Bill Nighy given ample room to groan and purr. But on the whole our television drama conveys no sense that there might be an elite within the elite: a dedicated bunch who think that television drama is the top dog among the creative media and who have the mental wherewithal to prove it. I am just one of the millions of people in my generation who have never been very confident about finding Denmark on the map, but look at the Danes now: they’ve got the whole world talking about them, and every bright young man in the English-speaking countries wants to emigrate to Denmark and marry a Danish girl on the off-chance that she might turn out to be a television producer.
When the Guardian calls, everybody answers. Today the question is about the books you read over and over again.. Philip Hensher claims to have read "Code of the Woosters" and "Rum Punch" and "Buddenbrooks" numerous times. Also "In Search of Lost Time" four times. Well. Ian Rankin loves Anthony Powell; John Banville reads The Great Gatsby because it isn't quite good enough to risk disenchantment. John Gray, who's the most gnarly of the bunch, reads Borges a lot. Makes sense to me. My hero Geoff Dyer has read "The Names" by Don DeLillo six times.....
I pick up "Lucky Jim" every three or four years because it makes me laugh and feeds my sense of social resentment at the same time. Also "Code of the Woosters". I try to read Proust often, but that's not quite the same thing.
One of the SXSW panelists was a guy confusingly named Russell Davies.... Some cool quotes from his blog follow. I love this because it is so resolutely not-Tulkinghorn. Like a vacation from my usual obsessions
I'm also depressed about the lack of future in fashion. Every hep shop seems to be full of tweeds and leather and carefully authentic bits of restrained artisinal fashion. I think most of Shoreditch would be wondering around in a leather apron if it could. With pipe and beard and rickets. Every new coffee shop and organic foodery seems to be the same. Wood, brushed metal, bits of knackered toys on shelves. And blackboards. Everywhere there's blackboards.Cafes used to be models of the future. Shiny and modern and pushy. Fashion used to be the same - space age fabrics, bizarre concoctions. Trainers used to look like they'd been transported in from another dimension, now they look like they were found in an estate sale.
......
Mr Gibson mentioned Bruce Sterling saying that maybe bohemias were the dreamtime of industrial societies and wondered what that implied for a post-industrial society (and made me wonder about whether you'd need to create new bohemias if you wanted to re-industrialise, which would seem like a good idea.)....
His explanation for why his novels have snapped to the now is that there's not enough solid present around on which to erect a plausible future. There are too many wild cards around. Writing something set in 2060 demands you address so many issues that we know about now, but can't imagine how they'll pan out, that convincing prediction becomes impossible. That made sense to me.
While the less gifted in Austin last month were looking for the new Lena Dunham or Mumford and Sons, Bruce Sterling was attending the panel on The New Asethetic, which is a British art and design movement devoted to digital technology. Kind of like the Futurists, only eighty years on, and not, you know, fascists. He's blogged about it... A good idea first to check out the related Tumblr.... and the blog of movement godfather, James Bridle. These guys all link to one another and tweet like berserkers. A good Saturday morning project, and less time consuming than watching the NCAA tournament.
What is kind of cool about this is that Sterling is not consumed with love of the results, only of the process. He's rather wistful about it all, and, unless I'm projecting, is both passing on the torch and telling these guys that "new" isn't enough. Poor Bruce, in short, sounds like somebody has just walked over his grave....
Sterling says:
This is one of those moments when the art world sidles over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical. This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. These things occur. They often take a while to blossom. Sometimes they’re as big and loud as Cubism, sometimes they perish like desert roses mostly unseen. But they always happen for good and sufficient reasons. Our own day has those good and sufficient reasons......
It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.It is generational. Most of the people in its network are too young to have been involved in postmodernity. The twentieth century’s Modernist Project is like their Greco-Roman antiquity. They want something of their own to happen, to be built, and to be seen on their networks. If that has little or nothing to do with their dusty analog heritage, so much the better for them.
So. These seem to me to be fine things. They’re not my own things, but I can see why they make good sense. They show promise. They have depth and breadth. They matter. They will have lasting consequence........
That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one. That’s the case so far, anyhow. No reason that the New Aesthetic has to stop where it stands at this moment, after such a promising start. I rather imagine it’s bound to do otherwise. Somebody somewhere will, anyhow.
That is my thesis; that’s why I think this matters. When I left the room at the SXSW “New Aesthetic” panel, this is what concerned me most. I left with the conviction that something profound had been touched. Touched, although not yet grasped.
Mary McNamara, television critic of the LA Times, is approving in her review of "Game of Thrones". They should have let her review "John Carter (of Mars)":
This season proves, once and for all, that there is nothing remotely slackerish about fantasy culture. To be a fantasy geek requires the obsessive focus of a miniaturist and the artistic intellect of a medieval scholar....
"Game of Thrones" is breathtakingly ambitious, an ever-unfurling tapestry that threatens, at times, to overwhelm its frame. That it does not is a testament to the power of piecework — art is not defined by the space it occupies but by its details, the truth it captures. Many heads bend over this adaptation, each belonging to a master of his or her craft, and what emerges is a truly new, and miraculously accurate, definition of epic television.
Long fierce piece in defense of Kael and in contempt of today's critics: all of them. Bracing stuff.
In today’s culture, journalism’s collusion with the entertainment industry has come to be expected. Post-Kael publications like Premiere Magazine, Movieline, and Entertainment Weekly have created a gushy, starstruck culture where hype and reviewing are inseparable. Today, mainstream entertainment journalism is so hand-in-glove with Hollywood in terms of what is and is not worth praise and attention—so tied up with promotional campaigns and fan-boy fervor—that journalists are bewildered and suspicious when they encounter someone who consistently deviates from that consensus. Audiences these days seem to want to be validated in their own opinions, and take personal offense to critics who do not oblige.Considering that hype, from advertising pages to review pages, is perceived as the only way to respond to popular art, perhaps Kael’s most radical maxim comes from her 1970 piece “Notes on Heart and Mind,” when she averred: “Without a few independent critics, there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.” That notion seems perverse today, when criticism occupies a different, more indulgent position in the culture.
Another sign that the US is getting more like France every day. David Goodis joins Philip K. Dick in the Library of America.
Good roundup and some cautionary words about Paul Cain in the WSJ. Also a reading list, which I can never resist.
Alternate hard R and PG cuts on the DVD?
People who hate onscreen sex can rejoice in the release of "Games of Thrones"' first season on DVD. They no longer have to endure all that nudity to learn about the Lannister family tree, the Targaryen history with dragons or why Joffrey is an illegitimate heir to the throne. Released earlier this month, it methodically explains aspects of Westeros that the show breezes through en route to its next decapitation.
"During the week, I joined my little granddaughter for one of her regular viewings of the first Toy Story movie and I was reminded all over again that some of the programmes which television people would like to think wonderful are not so wonderful compared with the movies."More here.
Wil Wheaton, judging between two novels in the first bracket of the annual on-line "Tournament of Books", on "The Sisters Brothers":
The Sisters Brothers made me feel like I was sitting in a movie house in Red Dead Redemption, watching an episode of Deadwood that was written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by the Coen Brothers.
I love this. Leonard Cohen was mentioned reverently here a while back, and this is billed as his own favorite version of one of his signature tunes. It's also everything that makes crawl the skin of people who revere restraint and elegance above all other musical (if not literary) values. Lang seems never to have met a melodramatic impulse she didn't like. (Her version of Neil Young's "Helpless" is Wagnerian.) Plus, at this stage of her life and career she clearly doesn't give a shit; comes out on stage barefoot, in a bathrobe, looking like Zatoichi. A liberating spectacle.
From the lit/sport website Grantland:
Asked to name the greatest Wire character of all time (let it never be said that Grantland does not ask the tough questions!), the Commander in Chief didn't hesitate: "It's gotta be Omar, right? I mean, that guy is unbelievable, right?"
.......
This gave us an idea. What if we actually did subject the key players of the Wire-verse to rigorous bracketological inquiry? If we played corner boys against dock workers, murder-polices against hoppers, and craven politicos against enigmatic not-actually-Greek human traffickers, in matchups as arbitrary and occasionally unjust as life and death on the mean streets of West Baltimore, would the king stay the king? This week, we're going to find out. And we're probably also going to make David Simon mad, again. Behold: Grantland's first-ever TV bracket. Thirty-two characters. Six days.
Words of wisdom from the early '90s cop show "Homicide," which I've been re-watching recently. A crucial evolutionary step from some of the guys who went on to create "The Wire."
A long, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, analysis of current trends in television narrative centering on the move away from series episodes toward installments of longer works.
This change, which has been sneaking up on us for a long time now, suddenly seems more important than anything else that's been going on in movies and television this decade. Maybe we should start being more analytical about it....
Some quotes I liked:
It’s easy to blur the line between “episode” and “installment” if you’re blowing through an entire season of Breaking Bad over a single weekend. When doing this, thinking about how a certain episode works on its own becomes less relevant. Simply getting through the virtual stack of content becomes paramount, with the next episode literally moments away from appearing on your screen. Plowing through a single season in two or three sittings may feel thrilling, but it’s also shifted the importance of a single episode in terms of the overall experience.....
A television show is a living, breathing entity that represents a synergy of creative, cultural, and social forces that simply can’t be predicted five weeks out, never mind five years out. It’s not a book that can be rewritten before anyone can read it, or a film that can be reshot/re-edited before it screens in theaters. The cat’s out of the bag, for better or worse. Laying in groundwork for a massive payoff down the line is a terrible risk, one that comes with so little control as to be almost laughable.What can be controlled is a reaffirmation of the structural and narrative importance of a single episode. You don’t even have to construct a theoretical example of how to balance the needs of an episode with the needs of a season or series. FX’s Justified offers a master class in how to achieve both. Graham Yost and his writing staff have found the sweet spot where an episode has a shape unto itself while informing the larger 13-episode season and the ever-growing series, while at the same time focusing on world-building, something television is fantastic at doing. With a theoretically unlimited amount of episodes to fill, it’s smart to look at the environments in which shows operate and look under rocks and behind corners to see what might exist. Harlan feels three-dimensional, and though it’s self-contained, it also feels limitless in terms of story potential.
Posts
All Comments
