HUNGRY GHOST BLOG

New Whit Stillman

2012-02-14T23:34:00.001-08:00

In the run-up to season two...

2012-02-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

When Game of Thrones aired on HBO this past spring, there was a lot of conversation and debate about the depiction of sex, rape, and female agency on the show and in the books. How do you feel about the way the show handled those things in comparison with what you tried to do in your novels?

My novels have quite a bit of sex in them. ... I have read some people saying that they added sex scenes, and they did. They also didn't put in some sex scenes that are in the book, so on balance, I think they're the same. A few things were handled differently. Obviously the way I wrote it in the book is the way I would have handled it.

How do you make decisions about the depictions of sexual violence that you include in your writing?

Well, I'm not writing about contemporary sex—it's medieval.

There's a more general question here that doesn't just affect sex or rape, and that's this whole issue of what is gratuitous? What should be depicted? I have gotten letters over the years from readers who don't like the sex, they say it's "gratuitous." I think that word gets thrown around and what it seems to mean is "I didn't like it." This person didn't want to read it, so it's gratuitous to that person. And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.

Spanish playback singer in a Bollywood film

2012-02-10T20:17:00.000-08:00

More Elmore

2012-02-05T12:25:00.000-08:00

Tulk has passed along an essay on Elmore Leonard from The New York Times that I like even better than the excellent Guardian overview he posted earlier. The reviewer, novelist Olen Steinhauer, admires Leonard in a way that is closer to the heart of the matter, as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps this is because I first began reading him in mass quantities during the fruitless years trying to write screenplays. They don't call him a writer's writer for nothing.

Steinhaur has been on my "ought to read" list for years. Time to bump him up to the top.

One thing you can say with confidence about Elmore Leonard...

2012-02-03T12:36:00.000-08:00

He has never used the word...

==========
A Clash of Kings: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Two (George R.R. Martin)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 73 | Added on Thursday, February 02, 2012, 07:57 AM

yestermorn

==========

Martin writes fewer sentences that are individually savorable, and so he reads faster, and therefore seems speedier, than Leonard, even though he is objectively wordier.

Always trying to help a friend.....

2012-02-03T06:19:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the invaluable Michael Lavorgna -- who now has a day job running a digital music website -- comes this recommendation. If there were a factory creating singers to David's liking, it couldn't have done a better job.

Romney and Gingrich remixed

2012-02-02T14:56:00.001-08:00

This works so many ways....

A new genre to me:

2012-02-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

Military fantasy! Tom Clancy meets Tolkein! Check out the cover....Details from Jeff VanderMeer, who interviews the author:

The idea for the Shadow Ops series came to Cole while working for the Pentagon in the late 1990s. “The Pentagon is regulation-central. Everything has a rule and a manual to look it up in…Well, add geek to that. I kept wondering ‘What if Army Materiel Command was having to requisition magic wands? What if the contractors working here were gnomes? What would the regs say then?’ Would there be a department set up to handle magic? How would the senate appropriate funds for that?” These kinds of questions drove Cole to write Control Point “as the only way to answer them.”

Spielberg under the knife

2012-01-30T12:23:00.000-08:00

A tweet from Mark Horowitz alerted me to this dissection of Steven Spielberg in Slate from a once and future admirer, named Bill Wyman (not THAT Bill Wyman, he must be tired of saying). For shorter discussion purposes, this list ranks all his movies from "The Sublime" down to "We're going to need a bigger boat. " (In the latter: "the Terminal" and "Always", which he likes less than the last Indiana Jones movie....). I liked this about Spielberg's effect on other, younger, directors:

In the last year, both Jon Favreau (Cowboys & Aliens) and J.J. Abrams (Super 8) have offered us Spielberg homages (in both cases, oddly enough, under the protective producership of Spielberg himself). Is it a coincidence that, in both cases, the directors delivered work far beneath what they are capable of? In Cowboys & Aliens, which could have taken Indiana Jones into a new world of genre mashups, a delicious premise starts out amiably enough, introducing a spectrum of characters one by one. But then the demands of showcasing the technology overwhelms the story. The characters become inconsistent and the plot becomes increasingly risible. (Wait—the aliens sent Daniel Craig back to earth with a secret weapon on his wrist that could blow up their spaceship?!)

Super 8 is even weirder; it’s a deliberate homage to the Great Master’s work, right down to the camera flares that salute E.T. It starts with group of kids making movies, just like Spielberg himself did. Abrams elicits their charms and emotions effortlessly. But the movie’s second half is a drag; forced, arbitrary, noisy, and senseless, just like much of the later work of Spielberg himself. Abrams let his sensibilities be overwhelmed, just as Spielberg did—by the stiltedness of The Color Purple, the heavy-handed sentimental manipulations of Hook, the schlockiness of War Horse, or just the sheer noisome randomness of Minority Report or War of the Worlds. It’s almost as if Abrams’s unconsciously encoded into the film the arc of Spielberg’s career. It’s the story of a filmmaker whose talent for great pop art was too thin a foundation on which to build bigger things—and it’s ultimately an arc of failed promise.

I guess it's official, now

2012-01-29T09:12:00.000-08:00

One hugely irritating thing I do is to file away David's advice and opinions (instead of acting on them) until they bubble up into the broader culture only then, it seems, noticing them. And what's worse is the pleasure I find in the process..... I've long since given up trying to explain that's it's all not true.

Anyway, I can't resist passing on this major piece from this weekend's Guardian by Philip Hensher on, of all things, Elmore Leonard. Like David, Hensher worships Leonard, has read and absorbed the lessons of Leonard, gets him, and writes beautifully about him. I love that....

His ultimate take is that Leonard is the great American humorist (and that even his vaunted "Rules" are "semi-jocular" and basically ignored by their creator), which as David points out, is what is really going on in that Raylan scene quoted below.

Too many cool quotes -- his explanation of why the first lines of the 'great' Tishomingo Blues are unfilmable, for example, or the paragraph that discusses that book, Out of Sight, Rum Punch, and Get Shorty without the obligatory mentions of the movies based on them, or his astonishing comparison of Leonard to Gladys Mitchell -- but I laughed out loud at this description of a scene from Rum Punch:

The comedy of the hopeless and of the inert reaches a sort of climax in the scene in Rum Punch when the three savage "jackboys", Zulu, Snow and Sweatman, find a rocket launcher in the back of their van to fire at the police trying to arrest them. Their superiority in firepower seems assured, but "'How to fire the motherfucker,' Zulu said." Here's the problem: none of them went to school much, and they are thrown back on their limited literacy, trying to read the instructions:
Zulu said "'Re-…' The fuck is that word there?" Snow said "'Re-…lease.' Yeah, it say to release the … something. 'Release the safe…ty.'"
It's going to end badly, as the police gather round the van.

This comparison of Leonard to Italo Calvino cracked me up, too:

Most powerful is Get Shorty, accurately described by Martin Amis as "a masterpiece" and surely one of the greatest novels of the century, the American If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.

Anyway, it's a great piece. Sorry.

Nominated

2012-01-25T13:44:00.000-08:00

William Joyce has been a Tulkinghorn favorite for decades, but this! Nominated for an Oscar and very sentimental. Ideas and emotions galore and devoted to those who love books. Worth clicking through the embed....

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

Raylan

2012-01-23T17:14:00.000-08:00

Raylan: A Novel (Elmore Leonard)

- Highlight Loc. 1360-80 | Added on Saturday, January 21, 2012, 04:03 PM

“You ever look for the Nazi lovers beat you up?”

“Two of ’em are gone, overdosed. The third guy,” (US Marshal) Nichols said, “by the time I found him was a crackhead, his tats hard to read. I stood him against a brick wall, put on leather gloves while I’m lookin him in the eye. I hit him one-two, both sides of his jaw. He went down and I stood lookin at him.”

Raylan said, “He remember you?”

“I doubt it.”

“Something you had to do before you got too old,” Raylan said. “It’s a shame he wasn’t a wanted felon.”

“So I could shoot him he resisted.”

“I meant you’d have a reason to hunt him down.”

Nichols said, “You’ve shot and killed a man?”

“Yes, I have,” Raylan said.

“An armed fugitive?”

“More than one,” Raylan said.

“It doesn’t matter how many, does it?”

“Not a bit,” Raylan said. “Once or twice I might’ve been lucky.”

“You get to where you have to pull—”

“Knowing you better shoot to kill,” Raylan said.

Nichols gave Raylan a nod.

They knew each other.

Team Nora

2012-01-19T13:13:00.000-08:00

The offspring's gregarious nature serves her well.

Click to enlarge.

The Real Thing? Pretty close...

2012-01-16T08:02:00.000-08:00

Last week, reading Jeff VanderMeer's Philip K. Dick shortlist rundown -- the PKD awards the best paperback original SF of the year -- I was led to a review from the Journal from last May:

Robert Jackson Bennett's slower, more thoughtful "The Company Man"made me realize how far sci-fi has come in my lifetime. In a way, this is a crime-noir novel, with detectives investigating strange murders in the city of Evesden on the West Coast. It's 1919, but an "alternate" 1919, in which World War I did not take place, thanks to the dominance of new American technology controlled by the McNaughton Co.

Bits of "The Company Man" read like sections of "Das Kapital," with its images of abandoned children in filthy tenements, men worked till they're worn out and then discarded, and Company goons searching out union ringleaders. One of our goons, though, can read minds—or, rather, he can empathize. Half an hour with him and he's your best friend, whoever you are: a useful quality for an interrogator. Trouble is, he's picking up messages from something that isn't human, and that explains the strange hermit's technology breakthroughs as well.

I've been reading The Company Man over the holiday weekend and what's amazing is the detail and realism of its completely manufactured setting -- Zola meets Hammett meets Mieville . (Bennett himself insists on the influence of Le Carre, as well) There are the usual tyro structural flaws and narrative awkwardnesses, since this is a second novel (and from his picture he looks to be about 15) . But, boy am I looking forward to his next novel, which is set in the world of vaudeville.

Reading the Friday reviews....

2012-01-13T06:39:00.000-08:00

Contraband: The new Mark Wahlberg vehicle gets high praise from Joe Morgenstern in the Journal this morning ("uncommonly well-crafted", 'thoroughly entertaining", etc.). More interesting perhaps is the pedigree:

"Contraband" was written by Aaron Guzikowski, Arnaldur Indridason and Óskar Jónasson. It's an English-language remake of "Reykjavik-Rotterdam," an Icelandic thriller in which the director—who was born in Iceland—played Mr. Wahlberg's role. Of the Icelandic films that Mr. Kormákur has directed, I've seen only the creepily intense and extremely accomplished "Jar City"....

Alcatraz: Here's hoping this school-of-Lost series is good enough to get really elaborate and confusing. Sez the Journal's TV critic Nancy Smith:

When the notorious federal prison in San Francisco Bay officially closed in March of 1963, its 265 prisoners and 46 guards were not, as the historical record says, transferred to mainland facilities. Actually, they disappeared without a trace and authorities still keep that a secret. Yet now some of America's most dangerous criminals—looking unchanged and unaged—are returning and committing new crimes.

Cool. Also it has fan favorite Jorge Garcia.

Teacher Nora: Stage Struck

2012-01-12T21:34:00.001-08:00

More Here

Yeah, I see your point...

2012-01-12T12:45:00.001-08:00

C.I.: Teacher Nora

Not cute, not a girl, and really really old

2012-01-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

Leonard Cohen has a new record coming out.

The Kindle Killer

2012-01-10T13:30:00.000-08:00

George

2012-01-09T21:24:00.001-08:00

Oh, please

2012-01-08T22:41:00.000-08:00

Clive nods, yawns, dozes off:

Benedict Cumberbatch is now back on screen as Sherlock (BBC One, Sunday). Due to the overload of techno talk, I found the first episode of the new season almost incomprehensible...

Tulkinghorn's Revenge

2012-01-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

In a pretentious mood this morning after a delightful birthday lunch with frequent contributor Christian Lindke and his friends, knowledgeable in cultures I've barely heard of, I'm drooling over this list from lit-blog "The Millions" of the most 'anticipated' books of the upcoming year. Call it revenge for exposing the limits of my sophistication....

Someday I'll act the cleric in your RPG and beat you guys like a drum.... In the meantime I'll curl up with William Gaddis. Cool notes:

More recently, English-language monoglots have been discovering the work of László Krasznahorkai. Susan Sontag called The Melancholy of Resistance, “inexorable, visionary”…(of course, Susan Sontag once called a Salade Nicoise “the greatest light lunch of the postwar period.”) More recently, James Wood hailed War and War and Animalinside as “extraordinary.” Satantango, Krasznahorkai’s first novel, from 1985, now reaches these shores, courtesy of the great translator George Szirtes. Concerning the dissolution of a collective farm, it was the basis for Bela Tarr’s 7-hour movie of the same name.

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer: Geoff Dyer shows no signs of slowing down after seeing two stunning books of essays published in the U.S. in 2011, Otherwise Known As the Human Condition and The Missing of the Somme. This English writer, blessed with limitless range and a ravishing ability to bend and blend genres, is coming out with a peculiar little book about a 30-year obsession. It’s a close analysis of the Russian director Andre Tarkovsky’s 1979 movie Stalker, and Dyer calls it “an account of watchings, rememberings, misrememberings and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection.” Even so, Dyer brings some sharp instruments to the job, and the result is an entertaining and enlightening joy.

When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson: The exalted author of Gilead and Home claims that the hardest work of her life has been convincing New Englanders that growing up in Idaho was not “intellectually crippling.” There, during her childhood, she read about Cromwell, Constantinople, and Carthage, and her new collection of essays celebrates the enduring value of reading, as well as the role of faith in modern life, the problem with pragmatism, and her confident, now familiar, view of human nature.

The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa: This historical novel by the Nobel Laureate “sits in the tradition of Vargas Llosa’s major novels […] in its preoccupation with political issues and its international scope,” according to Faber, who released it in Spanish this past fall. The Dream of the Celt explores the life of Irish revolutionary Sir Roger Casement, who was knighted by the British Crown in 1911, hanged five years later for treason, and disgraced as a sexual deviant during his trial. His crime: mobilizing public opinion against colonialism by exposing slavery and abuses in the Congo and Peru to the world. At a lecture, Vargas Llosa said that Casement made for a “fantastic character for a novel” — if for no other reason than the influence he had on the eponymous dark view that filled his friend Joseph Conrad’s own best-known novel.
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon: East Bay resident Michael Chabon has spent the past several years working on his novel of Berkeley and Oakland, titled Telegraph Avenue for the street that runs between the two communities. Chabon titillated readers with an essay on his adopted hometown for the Ta-Nehisi Coates blog at The Atlantic, which reveals nothing about the plotline but assures us that the new work will be, if nothing else, a carefully conceived novel of place. Chabon had previously been at work on an abortive miniseries of the same name, which was said to detail the lives of families of different races living in Oakland and Berkeley.
Ancient Light by John Banville: Having published a string of popular crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black over the last five years, John Banville returns again to serious literary fiction with Ancient Light. In the novel, the aging actor Alexander Cleave remembers his first sexual experiences as a teenager in a small Irish town in the 1950s, and tries to come to terms with the suicide of his daughter Cass ten years previously. With 2000’s Eclipse and 2002’s Shroud, Ancient Light will form the third volume in a loose trilogy featuring Alexander and Cass.

Why life among the chattering classes is so irritating

2012-01-06T17:57:00.001-08:00

The Wall Street Journal posts this quote from a New Criterion article by Charles Murray:

The members of America's new upper class tend not to watch the same movies and television shows that the rest of America watches, don't go to kinds of restaurants the rest of America frequents, tend to buy different kinds of automobiles, and have passions for being green, maintaining the proper degree of body fat, and supporting gay marriage that most Americans don't share. Their child-raising practices are distinctive, and they typically take care to enroll their children in schools dominated by the offspring of the upper middle class—or, better yet, of the new upper class. They take their vacations in different kinds of places than other Americans go and are often indifferent to the professional sports that are so popular among other Americans. Few have served in the military, and few of their children either.
Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn't have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor's monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase "all of the children are above average," but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.

Haywire Trailer

2012-01-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

Right-wing pundit, neo-con royalty, and occasional film critic John Podhoretz just tweeted his opinion that this may be the best movie trailer ever. (Linked instead of embedded for quality reasons...)

Many here will share his enthusiasm.

Happy New Year

2012-01-02T14:37:00.000-08:00

“Just do what I do: Hold on tight and pretend it's a plan.”

-- The Doctor (Matt Smith) in Doctor Who: “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe,” written by Stephen Moffat. BBC One, December 25, 2011.

Teacher Nora Christmas Album

2011-12-31T14:35:00.000-08:00

Toasting marshmallows...

...for the first s'mores in Bangmei.

More here.

Waiting for a newspaper smart enough.....

2011-12-31T09:03:00.000-08:00

Roger Ebert, in an otherwise unsurprising essay about the decline in moviegoing, says this:

Netflix alone accounts for 30% of all internet traffic in the evening. That represents millions of moviegoers. They're simply not in a theater. This could be seen as an argument about why newspapers and their readers need movie critics more than ever; the number of choices can be baffling.

How about a weekly column, with capsule reviews, on the best movies and television series (Did YOU know that "The Misfits" was available for streaming on Hulu Plus?) premiering on the streams?

The cozy elitism of the screening room is ill-suited to the modern movie-going experience.

Always last to the party...

2011-12-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

This has been the "Breaking Bad" holiday chez Tulkinghorn. Only four seasons too late. (Anna Gunn! From Deadwood to this....) Enjoying it more than Killing II, which feels like homework. I'll try the DVDs. Dropped "Homeland" after four episodes because the same thing kept happening over and over -- a virtue in comedy, not so much in a thriller. As I understand it, though, it actually developed a plot soon after I quit. Another missed boat.

In the meantime, there's the Doctor Who Christmas Special, and a new production of "Great Expectations" with Ray Winstone (!) as Magwich and Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham. (Since there's a G.E. movie coming this year as well -- Dickens bicentennial in 2012 -- we'll get to match Anderson against the rather too eccentric Helena Bonham Carter.)

It's a good life, but real work will return in a week.

Live by the buzz, die by the buzz

2011-12-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

Larsson and Herge/Spielberg/Moffatt/Jackson underwhelm at Christmas...

May be the audience's fault, of course, especially these days, but I can't help but wonder if overfamiliarity killed the desire to leave the house.

Season's Greetings From Poland, ME

2011-12-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

Click to enlarge.

Why you should never read the Guardian political stuff

2011-12-20T08:36:00.000-08:00

Amusingly unimaginable:

Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place.
Havel's anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

The Chinese word for mud...

2011-12-19T12:35:00.000-08:00

Teacher Nora has a home-visit breakthrough in Yunnan.

Annie, Molly, Jenny, Samantha and Emma with ND firstgrader.

Kim Jong Il: Ronery no more

2011-12-19T06:52:00.000-08:00

A late entry for tweet of the year, according to Glenn Reynolds, from conservative blogger and political consultant Josh Trevino:

I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third....

How to be a writer

2011-12-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

Hell... how to be a person. From one of dozens of moving reminisces of Christopher Hitchens, this one by Ian McEwan:

....this was a man in constant pain. Denied drinking or eating, he sucked on tiny ice chips. Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature. Over the three days of my final visit I took a note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian novelist; whether Dreiser in his novels about finance was a guide to the current crisis; Chesterton's Catholicism; Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, which I had brought for him on a previous visit; Mann's The Magic Mountain – he'd reread it for reflections on German imperial ambitions towards Turkey; and because we had started to talk about old times in Manhattan, he wanted to quote and celebrate James Fenton's A German Requiem: "How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times."
.......

The next morning, at Christopher's request, Alexander and I set up a desk for him under a window. We helped him and his pole with its feed-lines across the room, arranged pillows on his chair, adjusted the height of his laptop. Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker's biography of Chesterton. Whenever people talk of Christopher's journalism, I will always think of this moment.

Consider the mix. Chronic pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton's romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism, and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk. At intervals, his head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line. His long memory served him well, for he didn't have the usual books on hand for this kind of thing. When it's available, read the review.

Hitchens on Wodehouse and Wilde

2011-12-16T06:34:00.000-08:00

Since I don't think of myself as sentimental about such things, I surprise myself at how upsetting it is to read the many many remembrances of Christopher Hitchens that appeared this morning after last night's death, from Salman Rushdie's simple tweet "Goodbye, my beloved friend" to a wonderful piece on the New Yorker blog from Christopher Buckley. Those who thought that atheism must have left a gap in his spirit never understood how fiercely he loved the English language (and cigarettes, and drinking, and women, and his friends, and argument, and eating). I loved this note from Buckley:

When we made a date for a meal over the phone, he’d say, “It will be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.” I never doubted that this rococo phraseology was an original coinage, until I chanced on it, one day, in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse, the writer Christopher perhaps esteemed above all others. Wodehouse was the Master. When we met for another lunch, one that lasted only five hours, he was all a-grin with pride as he handed me a newly minted paperback reissue of Wodehouse with “Introduction by Christopher Hitchens.” “Doesn’t get much better than that,” he said, and who could not agree?

The other author that he and I seemed to spend most time discussing was Oscar Wilde. I remember Christopher’s thrill at having adduced a key connection between Wilde and Wodehouse. It struck me as a breakthrough insight; namely, that the first two lines of “The Importance of Being Earnest” contain within them the entire universe of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

Algernon plays the piano while his butler arranges flowers. Algy asks, “Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?” Lane replies, “I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.” And there you have it.

.......

During the last hour I spent with Christopher, in the Critical Care Unit at M. D. Anderson, he struggled to read a thick volume of P. G. Wodehouse letters. He scribbled some notes on a blank page in spidery handwriting. He wrote “Pelham Grenville” and asked me, in a faint, raspy voice, “Name. What was the name?” At first I didn’t quite understand, but then, recalling P.G.’s nickname, suggested “Plum?” Christopher nodded yes, and wrote it down.

The Spielberg Face

2011-12-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

Film criticism that would have been impossible fifteen years ago -- also a trip into your own movie-going past... Caution: may make you aware of manipulative sense of wonder in an unhelpful way..... (On my machine the audio is very weak. Probably just as well.

Going green 1949 style, bitch....

2011-12-09T15:04:00.001-08:00

Ice Cube talks about LA and Charles and Ray Eames. Brilliant. Love it or leave it.

Honoring Harvey Pekar

2011-12-02T13:16:00.001-08:00

Alan Moore, and others, including Pekar's widow Joyce Brabner, have just completed a Kickstarter project for a memorial statue to be placed at a Cleveland Heights public library.

The goal has been met (with almost 800 funders), but the project is still open through the weekend. There are a number of interesting goodies to be had at various levels of involvement. $99 gets you a seat at a video conference with Moore at which 'impertinent questions' may be asked. The statue is described:

A way to celebrate comics as art and literature at a Cleveland Heights public library. A literary landmark, a desk that's always filled with paper and pencils for people to sit and write or draw comics at the same place where Harvey Pekar liked to work.

Mounted on the desk, a sculpted bronze comic book “page.” Stepping out from a panel, Harvey-- using his semi celebrity to focus on the creative possibilities of the art form he opened up to so many people. On the reverse, gridded into bronze ruled "panels," a giant slate storyboard that looks very much the way Harvey always started his own scripts. (He wrote and drew stick figures, just like Paul Giamatti in that movie.) Plenty of chalk and plenty of encouragement from a library that cherishes comics. At different times each year, a librarian can unlock the middle drawer of the desk and pull out copies of books that Harvey read as a kid that inspired him to write, AMERICAN SPLENDOR scripts, memorabilia and anything else that could inspire library patrons to be creative with comics.

Things that make you go 'hmmm..'

2011-12-02T10:35:00.000-08:00

From Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal:

John Gaddis, in his biography of George Kennan, quotes him saying of himself: "I have the habit of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself."

RIP, Montserrat Figueras

2011-11-30T15:25:00.000-08:00

I've never (except obliquely) discussed my passion for the early music or authentic instrument/practices movement. Suffice it to say that there are many completely first-rate and compelling performers in the field whose fame is limited by the sometimes cultish/snobbish attitudes of both audiences and performers.

That has not been true of the Catalan violist Jordi Savall, his ensemble Hesperion XXI, and especially his wife Montserrat Figueras, who died last week at the age of 69. The attached half hour clip shows a lot of popular appeal (at least around my house). Figueras sings at about 8:30, but the whole thing is worth a listen. (I'm planning to adopt the percussionist's look someday...)

Maybe because a lot of the performers are young, or because a lot of the music is dance music, or simply because the performers usually seem to be having so much fun, early music has in a lot of ways replaced rock in my affections.

Amis explains why

2011-11-27T11:26:00.001-08:00

In a review of a book of Don DeLillo short stories, Marin Amis formulates (in self-defense, probably) the 50/50 rule:

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less......

Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are.

Jonathan Lethem's Library

2011-11-27T11:20:00.000-08:00

A snapshot from what seems to be an interesting new book, called "Unpacking My Library: Writers and their Books" of a bookshelf of the former sf (now literary) writer Jonathan Lethem. A man after my own heart...

Count Floyd and Dr. Tongue talk 3D

2011-11-24T10:44:00.000-08:00

Note the cool effects, precursors of Hugo's steady-cam 3D move through the train station.....

Anthony Lane Makes The Case

2011-11-24T10:35:00.000-08:00

From a recent New Yorker:

There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.

Appropriate Celebrity Behavior

2011-11-23T19:36:00.000-08:00

I saw John C. Reilly and his family having lunch today at Pie 'n' Burger in Pasadena. Don't think I'll see Michael Gambon or Julie Delpy there any time soon.....

Probably Unfair

2011-11-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

Richard Rushfield, unknown to me, but apparently an editor at Vanity Fair, the LA Times, and Gawker, makes concrete an often-made observation by cruelly comparing Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Lauren Bacall to their age cohorts in the above photo, which he captions "Gatsby for Kids." It does look like senior prom at Lawrenceville.....

Frank Miller makes a right turn

2011-11-16T13:15:00.001-08:00

And gets denounced by all the usual suspects. Commentary has the story, including a passing denunciation of China Mieville's pro-Palestinian politics. But Miller's rant is righteous:

Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.

Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.

And this enemy of mine — not of yours, apparently - must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh - out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.

In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas’ basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft.

Or better yet, enlist for the real thing. Maybe our military could whip some of you into shape.

So wrong. And yet.....

2011-11-15T14:01:00.000-08:00

From the wonderful BibliOdyssey

Fools

2011-11-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

The movie version of the Doctor. Yates is a talented guy, but this is really dumb:

"We're looking at writers now. We're going to spend two to three years to get it right," he said. "It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena."

More media death

2011-11-13T07:58:00.001-08:00

From frequent commenter Christian Lindke, we find an article in Crain's New York Business, from which we learn the following. ("A good thing", mutters David, who hates trade paperbacks...)

Net sales of those artfully designed, easy-to-hold, pleasant-smelling trade paperbacks slid 18%, to $773 million, in the year through August, compared with the year-earlier period, according to the Association of American Publishers.
Meanwhile, sales of e-books, the second-place format, soared 144%, to $649 million.
Just as telling are reports from inside publishing houses, where more and more often, executives are thinking twice about which hardcover books to reprint in a trade paperback edition.
....
Some recent paperback sales figures show how fast the world is changing. Jonathan Franzen's blockbuster 2010 novel Freedom, for example, sold around 1 million copies, according to publisher Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, with about a third of those in e-book and the rest in hardcover.
Since its Sept. 27 publication, the trade paperback edition has sold just 28,000 copies, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 75% of the market.

Can this really be the end?

2011-11-12T11:22:00.000-08:00

I'm really just a stegosaurus looking for food.... From this morning's WSJ:

Activision said Friday that within the first 24 hours of the new "Call of Duty" game's release, 6.5 million units were sold for $400 million in North America and the U.K.

"We believe the launch of 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3' is the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium, and we achieved this record with sales from only two territories," Chief Executive Bobby Kotick said.
.......

Late last month, Electronic Arts said five million units of "Battlefield 3" were sold in the first week the game was available.

Doing the math: That's a bit under 5% of the gross US theatrical boxoffice so far this year. One game, one day.

The Guardian has the final word

2011-11-10T11:59:00.001-08:00

The ten heaviest albums ever made, with video samples. This, at least, is short:

You see, here's what I like:

2011-11-09T10:56:00.001-08:00

I know exactly what you're going to say. Doesn't bother me at all. Sigur Ros in concert (make sure you stay past the initial feedback part):

Sigur Rós: Ný Batterí (Inni) from Sigur Rós on Vimeo.

May have posted this before...

2011-11-08T14:37:00.000-08:00

...though who'd dare complain?

UPDATE: Todd McCarthy in his "Hollywood Reporter" review: "A handsome, dark-haired hard body who wears an evening dress as easily as she does a hoodie, Carano exudes the sort of self-confidence and physical wherewithall that leaves no doubt she can prevail in any situation."

Ricky Hui - 1946-2011

2011-11-08T10:13:00.001-08:00

It's stronger than I remembered...

2011-11-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

...and therefore probably easier to dismiss, overstatement being Kael's leading vice as a writer. This is a quote from a quote, just to make sure we know what we're talking about. There's also a memorable "of course" in the final graph.

Are people becoming afraid of American movies? When acquaintances ask me what they should see and I say The Last Waltz or Convoy or Eyes of Laura Mars, I can see the recoil. It’s the same look of distrust I encountered when I suggested Carrie or The Fury or Jaws or Taxi Driver or the two Godfather pictures before that. They immediately start talking about how they “don’t like” violence. But as they talk you can see that it’s more than violence they fear. They indicate that they’ve been assaulted by too many schlocky films—some of them highly touted, like The Missouri Breaks. They’re tired of movies that reduce people to nothingness, they say—movies that are all car crashes and killings and perversity. They don’t see why they should subject themselves to experiences that will tie up their guts or give them nightmares.

And if that means that they lose out on a Taxi Driver or a Carrie, well, that’s not important to them. The solid core of young moviegoers may experience a sense of danger as part of the attraction of movies; they may hope for new sensations and want to be swept up, overpowered. But these other, “more discriminating” movie goers don’t want that sense of danger. They want to remain in control of their feelings, so they’ve been going to the movies that allow them a distance—European films such as Cat and Mouse, novelties like Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, prefab American films, such as Heaven Can Wait, or American films with an overlay of European refinement, like the hollowly objective Pretty Baby, which was made acceptable by reviewers’ assurances that the forbidden subject is handled with good taste, or the entombed Interiors.

If educated Americans are rocking on their heels—if they’re so punchy that they feel the need to protect themselves—one can’t exactly blame them for it. But one can try to scrape off the cultural patina that, with the aid of the press and TV, is forming over this timidity. Reviewers and commentators don’t have to be crooked or duplicitous to praise dull, stumpy movies and disapprove of exciting ones. What’s more natural than that they would share the fears of their readers and viewers, take it as a cultural duty to warn them off intense movies, and equate intense with dirty, cheap, adolescent? Discriminating moviegoers want the placidity of nice art—of movies tamed so that they are no more arousing than what used to be called polite theatre. So we’ve been getting a new cultural puritanism—people go to the innocuous hoping for the charming, or they settle for imported sobriety, and the press is full of snide references to Coppola’s huge film in progress, and a new film by Peckinpah is greeted with derision, as if it went without saying that Bloody Sam couldn’t do anything but blow up bodies in slow motion, and with the most squalid commercial intentions.

This is, of course, a rejection of the particular greatness of movies: their power to affect us on so many sensory levels that we become emotionally accessible, in spite of our thinking selves. Movies get around our cleverness and our wariness; that’s what used to draw us to the picture show. Movies—and they don’t even have to be first-rate, much less great—can invade our sensibilities in the way that Dickens did when we were children, and later, perhaps, George Eliot and Dostoevski, and later still, perhaps, Dickens again. They can go down even deeper—to the primitive levels on which we experience fairy tales. And if people resist this invasion by going only to movies that they’ve been assured have nothing upsetting in them, they’re not showing higher, more refined taste; they’re just acting out of fear, masked as taste. If you’re afraid of movies that excite your senses, you’re afraid of movies.

Times Book Review Gleanings

2011-11-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

These days, the Sunday Times Book Review is the only part of the paper I can stand to read.... These amused me:

Geoff Dyer's essay about the vintage-1970 covers of the Penguin Modern Classics (and why aren't there statues of Geoff Dyer in every town square?):

Since then the happiest moments in 35 years of museum-going have occurred when I’ve seen these Penguin Modern Classic paintings on a gallery wall. Especially since the cover often showed only a detail of the original. Seeing the works themselves revealed exactly what had been lost, though I invariably saw it the other way around, with the painting as an expanded version of the Penguin original.

James Wolcott, quoted in a review of his memoirs (which should be required reading for all overweight lovers of transgressive 70s grunge -- Ugly George and Vanessa Del Rio are mentioned -- the only time you'll see them and Pauline Kael in the same paragraph) on first seeing Patti Smith:

“Shortly after entering below the awning of a bar and club with an initialed name, a place I’d never been to on a street that still looked like a Robert Frank photograph of raw, spilling night, I gingerly installed myself for a bar-stool view of the stage, which was stationed left of the aisle and barely large enough for a barbershop quartet. The atmosphere was most unmagical, worthy of a cheap paperback set on skid row. It had a palpable texture, this prosy ambience, a bit of World War I trench-warfare leftover aroma of dung, urine and damp carcass, but it was the ’70s and not a time to be picky. Then I saw this visage, this vision, shark-finning the length of the bar, and I knew this had to be Her.”

And finally, a good joke from Andy Borowitz:

If ‘House of Mirth’ is Edith Wharton’s idea of ‘mirth’ let’s be grateful she never wrote ‘House of Bummers.’

VN on commonsense

2011-11-04T21:03:00.000-07:00

Essay "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," in Lectures on Literature

In the fall of 1811, Noah Webster, working steadily through the Cs, defined commonsense as “good sound ordinary sense…free from emotional bias or intellectual subtlety…horse sense.” This is rather a flattering view of the creature, for the biography of commonsense makes nasty reading. Commonsense has trampled down many a gentle genius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam of some too early truth; commonsense has back-kicked dirt at the loveliest of queer paintings because a blue tree seemed madness to its well-meaning hoof; commonsense has prompted ugly but strong nations to crush their fair but frail neighbors the moment a gap in history offered a chance that it would have been ridiculous not to exploit.

Miike 3-D

2011-11-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

The 1st annual LA EigaFest will take place from Friday November 11th to Sunday November 13th , at the Mann Chinese 6 Theatres at Hollywood and Highland in Los Angeles.

The festival will showcase the latest and greatest in Japanese shorts and feature films, opening with "Milocrorze: A Love Story" (2011) from Director Yoshimasa Ishibashi and ending with "Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai 3D" (2011), by the legendary Takashi Miike!

The Answer is Pork

2011-11-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

The point is supposed to be that it's wrong to eat pork. What I take away from this clever PETA ad is that it would be OK to eat cat in some situations. Like if you're offered some in China and don't want to hurt your host's feelings. Risking the discovery that Mittens over rice is just too darn tasty.

Fear of Music 2

2011-11-03T13:43:00.001-07:00

Perfect choice to direct "Loutallica" video

UPDATE: Vladimir, by contrast, was almost pathologically insensitive to music, which he once described as “an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.” (From a review of a new book about VN.)

She's back

2011-11-03T06:55:00.000-07:00

Europhile eurocrime fans rejoice! The second series of The Killing starts on BBC Four on the 19th.

Lund's depressed:

But at a mere 10 hour-long episodes, The Killing II runs at only half the length of the first series. That is largely to do with the story, said Gråbøl. "The plot is much more complex than the first season. The plot is the main focus … but our task for ourselves was how far into [Lund's] own darkness we could get."
The new series sees Lund, her life destroyed after the Nanna Birk Larsen case of Forbrydelsen I, working on an investigation that involves national politics, the military and Islamist terrorism.

Didn't much like it, I guess

2011-11-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

Tom McCarthy, slipstream novelist (and author of "Tintin and the Secret of Literature"), really, really, really doesn't like the new movie. The headline calls it 'great art crudely redrawn' and descends from there, more than a bit crazily. This is truly an opinion that I could never have:

In the books, money both stands for genealogical fakeness and is fake itself (a brilliant scene in The Crab with the Golden Claws shows Thompson and Thomson tricked into passing off the very counterfeit coins they've been charged with tracking down: a doubling of illegitimate faces and false "metal"); in the film it literally pours down, in one scene, from the skies, Haddock's reward for being "true to himself". Thus Hollywood's idiotic "message" is forced on an oeuvre that is great precisely because it drives in exactly the opposite direction. It's like making a biopic of Nietzsche that depicts him as a born-again Christian, or of Gandhi as a trigger-happy Rambo blasting his way through the Raj.
Perhaps this movie will be studied, in years to come, as a Žižekian example of a dominant ideology's capacity to recuperate its own negation, or something along those lines. For now, we just have to wonder how Spielberg went so wrong, or if he was in fact involved at all: so badly put together is this film that it's easier, and perhaps more comforting, to imagine a semi-simian marketing committee writing and producing it under the banner of his name. If your children love the Tintin books – or, more to the point, if they have an ounce of intelligence or imagination in their bodies – don't take them to see this truly execrable offering.

Melophobia (Fear of Music)

2011-11-02T11:43:00.000-07:00

Artists need to be willing to risk embarrassment. Unless they're impervious.

Lou Reed + Metallica + Wedekind. Just out and already judged The Worst Album of All Time by eminent authorities.

Horror is always good....

2011-11-01T14:27:00.000-07:00

.....even outside the season. James Morrison, an occasional commenter here, posted a link to this 'spooky story' roundup over at a blog, unfamiliar to me but pretty well connected, called "The Second Pass".

Lots of good stuff here (including Morrison's own suggestion of a John Wyndham novel -- and not the ones you'd expect), and I especially liked John Crowley's contribution, about "The Sign of Four", which suggests an entirely new way of reading mysteries:

When I first read it (age 10) it was terrifying in the awful sense of paranoid possibility it awoke. I didn’t understand it was a mystery that would be solved; for all I knew it would simply go on generating horrid complications forever, and I didn’t see that the ending resolved anything.

More cute Chinese kids

2011-11-01T14:08:00.000-07:00

Including the one in the foreground who's named after me.

Poulenc

2011-10-31T17:47:00.001-07:00

"Only communicates anxiety"

2011-10-31T17:07:00.000-07:00

Radio Three's Halloween concert, which you can listen to for a week on line here, supports David's assertion about the limitations of modern musical forms. Or at least some of them... It's called "Disturbia". Pretty spooky, huh? As described:

The BBC Concert Orchestra present a spine-chilling Halloween alternative. Poulenc's La Voix Humaine is a classic psychodrama based on the play of the same name by Jean Cocteau. Soprano Ilona Domnich performs the role of a fragile young woman, thrown into a nightmare as she makes an agonizing last attempt to establish contact with her ex-lover over the telephone.
Penderecki's Polymorphia for 48 string instruments is famed for its use in films 'The Exorcist' and 'The Shining' and evokes nameless terrors. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood presents a 21st-century spin on the work in the UK premiere of his 48 Responses to Polymorphia.

The edgy world of contemporary electronica comes into focus with Aphex Twin's Nannou, as orchestrated by Patrick Nunn, before the audience faces the extreme emotions of Berio's spine-tingling electro-acoustic fantasy Visage. This iconic recording features the disturbing and erotically charged vocal improvisations of Cathy Berberian and was originally banned from the airwaves in Italy.

Taking bets they won't hire Iain Glenn

2011-10-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

Their loss.

A Tulkinghorn Holloween

2011-10-31T08:54:00.000-07:00

"Strike Back" Strikes Back

2011-10-31T08:17:00.000-07:00

Re-runs already?

Weekend listening...

2011-10-30T22:08:00.000-07:00

Not the book we're waiting for...

2011-10-29T12:05:00.000-07:00

...but still.

How patterns emerge...

2011-10-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

Some authors methodically prepare for the novels they write by researching, planning, visiting locations and assembling material. Others, including me, go about it in a less rational way. The first drafts of my novels evolve rather as a plant grows. Like a gardener, I can do a certain amount to facilitate the process -- to extend the analogy I can prepare the soil, water the seedling and pray for the right sort of weather. But, also like a gardener, I have to accept that there are elements I cannot control. (The rearing of children and the writing of novels have much in common.)
--Andrew Taylor, "Writing A Stain on the Silence" (2006)

Motion Capture Tintin

2011-10-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

Of antiquarian interest perhaps, but to my eyes this seems more successful than the current offering. Certainly cheaper and less pretentious.

Grandmaster wisdom

2011-10-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

"What was the date?"

"It's in my memory book. April 14, 1945. Why does it matter?"

"Because you can't explode reality. Life hangs together in one piece. Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections."

She said with some irony: "That's your mission in life, isn't it? You're not interested in people, you're only interested in the connection between them. Like a--" she searched for an insulting word-- "a plumber."

-- Ross Macdonald. 1965. The Far Side of the Dollar.

Small World Dept.

2011-10-26T11:19:00.001-07:00

Posted to Facebook as "the best Diwali scene in Hindi film" by someone Tulk and I went to college with.

See also:

Best Chinese Meal Ever

2011-10-25T23:41:00.000-07:00

The offspring's sense of adventure pays off in food.

Tenchong speciality, guohuo, in the region itself, at the home of fellow TFC fellow Zumei. (Click to enlarge.)

Almodovar...

2011-10-25T14:11:00.001-07:00

...programs thrillers and horror films.

Politics in Perspective

2011-10-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

"According to the White House pool report, Obama first helicoptered to a landing zone in Brentwood and the motorcade made an “off-the-record” visit to Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles. The president ordered at the counter for himself (and nearby aides) the No. 9 “Country Boy” – 3 wings with choice of waffle, potato salad or French fries ($8.90). He then started chatting with diners. I say who cares if you like Obama’s politics or not: he’s got good taste when it comes to LA’s favorite eats."

"Walking Dead" 2.2

2011-10-24T14:20:00.000-07:00

Shuffling through the underbrush.

Andrew Taylor on James Sallis

2011-10-24T13:22:00.000-07:00

In The Spectator this week, an appreciation of James Sallis (who wrote the book on which "Drive" was based and who has a new novel out) by the wonderful crime writer Andrew Taylor. Makes me wonder if the relative failure of the movie was a case of pearls and swine. I thought this was interesting:

As a young man, he spent a good deal of time in England at the invitation of Michael Moorcock, who asked him to become the fiction editor of the science fiction magazine, New Worlds. During his time there, the magazine became increasingly experimental and literary, before lurching into bankruptcy.
He began writing, too — surreal, intense short stories. He became something of a linguist: he has published translations from French, Russian and Polish poetry. He is himself a poet, as well as an expert on blues and jazz who has written extensively about music.

Back from Boston

2011-10-24T13:19:00.000-07:00

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

"Strike Back" - Season Finale

2011-10-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

Good, clean writing

2011-10-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

From this week's "Castle" episode, about an art theft:

"Somebody stole 'The Fist of Capitalism'? Anyone check up the ass of Socialism?"

"Walking Dead" 2.1

2011-10-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

Good without quotation marks.

"Strike Back" Episode 9: The Penultimate Thrill

2011-10-17T06:53:00.000-07:00

Spoilers.

Birthday in China

2011-10-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

Like White on Kael

2011-10-14T12:11:00.000-07:00

Canonized:

“Perhaps more deeply than any other writer, Kael gave shape to the idea of an ‘age of movies,’” art critic Sanford Schwartz writes in the Library of America collection he edited. “Deeply” is a Kael euphemism; she actively attacked the lofty heights of intellectual pretense. Her style transformed the once staid New Yorker—and culture writing in general.

Kael significantly diverged from the haughtiness of film critic authorities Graham Greene, James Agee and Robert Warshow—men who all harbored mid-20th-century guilt that there were greater, more intellectual pursuits than movies or movie criticism. Kael, no less professional than they were, brandished guilt-free enthusiasm, not because she was illiterate or a vulgar sensationalist but because she was a literate, sensual aesthete who appreciated those qualities in the most kinetic of art forms.

More Kael comments here

The offspring blogs her students

2011-10-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

"A Bunch of Wild Monkeys."

Set Visit

2011-10-12T23:19:00.000-07:00

Pitchfork:

The headline of one of the best Hollywood gossip stories you're likely to encounter this year reads, "Shia LaBeouf and Michael Bay Got in a Really Big Fight Over Feist." To prepare for an emotional scene in Transformers 3, LaBeouf plugged his iPad into a pair of on-set speakers and was vibing to The Reminder ballad "Brandy Alexander" when Bay abruptly shut the song off. Things got heated, "spit [was] flying," and Bay stormed off set. Whatever this incident tells us about Michael Bay (like maybe he's just really impassioned in his opinion that Let It Die was a better record), it tells us even more about where we're currently at, culturally speaking, with Feist. Even among Hollywood titans, she's divisive. She has probably, over the past couple of years, helped an infinite number of jocks and action stars get in touch with their latent emotions ("It's a little feminine," LaBeouf told the Los Angeles Times of "Brandy Alexander", "but it touches me"). But most importantly, the low croon of her honeyed, creaky-door voice has become pop culture shorthand for "the diametrical opposite of what robots blowing shit up sounds like."

Celebrity Tweets (A Headline New to HG)

2011-10-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Actor Michael Gambon, known as Professor Dumbledore from “Harry Potter,” tweeted: “Dear BlackBerry, your networks appear to be going down more often than Katie Price at the moment.” Price is a British model known for a leaked sex tape.

Good actor all the same.

"Boardwalk" 2.3 - Happy Al, Glum Nucky

2011-10-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

Shortest TV re-cap ever.

This sounds like a wonderful movie

2011-10-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

Human Centipede 2 (I missed the original, but the sequel sounds better..) One of those reviews that David hates because it makes fun of the movie and its director. But still..... The premise reminds me of Don Quixote, that beginning point of all fiction, in that everybody in Human Centipede 2, just like everybody in part 2 of Don Quixote, has seen the original. Daniel Engberg writes engagingly:

Once you've made a feature film about a lunatic who kidnaps innocent people and then sews together their throats and rectums, how do you raise the stakes? I'll say this for Human Centipede 2: Tom Six has done the impossible. He's created a sequel that's several orders of magnitude more vile, more nihilistic, and more repellant than the original. And he didn't even need to change the premise.

The genius of HC2—you heard me, the genius—lies in the way in which it repurposes the original. Once again, we're following the exploits of a lunatic kidnapper with a fetish for artificially induced digestive continuity. This time, it's a simple-minded parking attendant named Martin who's obsessed with Human Centipede in a film-within-a-film kind of way. He watches it on his laptop, again and again, and takes copious notes for a re-enactment.

Real-Life Dickens

2011-10-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs on his adoption, birth parents, college education, sister.

Iain Glenn: An Axiom of Premium Cable

2011-10-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

Two observations about the aesthetics of TV drama, both prompted by the work of an excellent British actor named Iain Glenn.

The two episode storyline on "Strike Back" in which Glenn plays an international arms dealer is a perfect example of the way this psychologically astute series attempts to braid almost non-stop action adventure heroics together with drama -- though the emotionally squeamish would probably call it melodrama.

Glenn's character, an arms dealer named Crawford, has diverted his latest shipment of lethal weapons to Darfur, to meet the ransom demand of the militia leader who kidnapped his daughter, a UN aide worker whose do-gooding career was a repudiation of her father's greed and amorality -- the fruits of which may now end up saving her life. Glenn plays Crawford as a wise monster suddenly hamstrung by love, and he gets off a zinger in a conversation with one of our sinewy Section 20 heroes, the married one who is increasingly conflicted shuttling back and forth between hearth and home and various death-stinking war zones: "I know self-loathing when I see it."

On "Game of Thrones" Glenn plays Ser Jorah Mormont, a man who is almost wholly admirable, a paragon of loyalty. His section of the story, the Daenerys Targaryen/Khal Drogo subplot, is the one that works best on TV by a wide margin -- in part because here we occasionally get to see things happening, rather than listening in as characters describe them to each other. (Entire episodes of this widely praised series are devoted to expository conversations. Screenwriting students have been flunked for less.) Most often we see these things because Iain Glenn shows them to us through the eyes of Ser Jorah -- the eyes of a knight in exile, hungry for a cause, watching with dawning recognition as the young woman he was hired to protect transforms herself into a queen. It's a love story, in other words, not so much about a man smitten with a woman (thought there are hints of that) as about a knight smitten with a lord, one of the few on earth who may deserve the fealty of a person of his pride.

I think all premium cable shows from now on should be required by law to offer a role to Ser Iain Glenn. If he considered them worthy they would be better for it.

Tulkinghorn Coffee

2011-10-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

David and I went to Intelligentsia in Pasadena, and I think (even though the coffee was terrific) that he felt like the customers in this video:

Coffee Snobs from Frankie Shaw

Pun of the day

2011-10-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

John Podhoretz retweeted a tweet from New York Times reporter Peter Lattman:

The Nobel victory of Tomas Tranströmer has got to be a devastating blow to his archrival, Gerhard Göböt.

How long since you tuned in just for one of these?

2011-10-05T13:28:00.001-07:00

Free stream of four songs from album available here. Very nice. ("Understated melodrama"? Never claimed to be a music critic.)

Boardwalk Empire 2/2 - A Controversial Approach

2011-10-04T09:18:00.001-07:00

Is anyone still watching?