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Friday, November 30
UNSPEAKABLY COOL: LITTLE SAMMY SNEEZE
by
Lloydville
on Fri 30 Nov 2007 01:26 AM PST
The third of the four coolest books published in the past few years is (I am compelled to report) also from Sunday Press Books -- a collection of Winsor McCay's pre-Nemo comic strip Little Sammy Sneeze.
This book is not a gigantic volume reproducing newspaper pages in full size,
simply because Little Sammy did not command a full page on
Sundays. It is, instead, a good-sized coffee-table book -- all
that's needed to reproduce McCay's color Sammy Sneeze strips almost exactly as they were originally published.
Sunday Press's philosophy in regard to reproducing old color strips is
very sensible. They use modern digital techniques to correct the
fading of colors and the yellowing of paper, but don't try to improve
on the colors as they would actually have appeared to a reader of the
time and don't try to eliminate minor characteristic printing
errors. What one sees in their books is thus a very close
approximation of the medium the comic strip artists composed for.
In Little Sammy Sneeze, McCay
took a very small idea and made something wonderful out of it.
The strips normally employ either six or eight panels, all showing the same location
and generally from the same point of view. Activity proceeds within the space
of the location as Little Sammy works himself up to a sneeze, which
usually produces catastrophic effects within the location and causes
Sammy to be ejected from it angrily. For some reason, this
mechanical formula produces endless delight -- much the way simple
variations on a musical theme can produce endless delight.
The drawing, of course, is brilliant, as you'd expect from McCay, and
the period detail within the mostly realistic settings has only grown
more magical with time. The strips are in part about time, of
course -- small segments of time in which many things happen.
Seeing the way static pictures on a page can evoke a sense of the
passage of time is intrinsically fascinating. It's like
deconstructing the process of cinema, with the illusion laid out
anatomically before you.
In one instance, McCay deconstructs his own medium, as Sammy's sneeze fractures the frame of the comic strip panel itself:
If the gag in the strip is always the same, or more or less the same,
it is nevertheless always surprising -- or perhaps one should say
always suspenseful. There's a psychological phenomenon involved
here that's at the core of any good joke, which can make you laugh even
if
you've heard it before. In part, it's the shape of the joke that
makes it work -- a tension is created that can only be resolved with
the release of a laugh. The same phenomenon is at work in all
stories, which is why it's possible to cry every time you read A Christmas Carol -- even if you know it almost by heart.
You can obtain Sammy's sneezes here.
Thursday, November 29
UNSPEAKABLY COOL: WALT AND SKEEZIX
by
Lloydville
on Thu 29 Nov 2007 12:39 AM PST
The second of the four coolest books published in the past few years is another oversized volume from Sunday Press Book -- Sundays With Walt and Skeezix. It collects a number of Sunday pages from Frank King's brilliant long-running strip Gasoline Alley,
one of the glories of American popular art. I've written before about the
series from Drawn and Quarterly Press which is reprinting the entire
run of the daily strip in a succession of handsome volumes -- but the Sunday
pages are something else again.
In the daily strip, King created a narrative masterpiece graced with
many flights of visual invention, but in the color Sunday pages his
visual imagination grew much bolder -- lyrical, almost abstract at
times. He looked at the Sunday page sometimes as an arena for the
wildest experimentation -- to see just how far the expressive potential
of a comic strip might reach.
In the Sunday Press collection we can see these Sunday strips almost as
their
first viewers did -- in the same colors and in the same size.
It's a measure of our culture's descent into mediocrity and triviality
that no work of such ambition and grace now accompanies any daily
newspaper in the land, and certainly no cable news channel. It
used to be assumed that the visions of great popular artists ought to
be part of every American's daily dose of media. Today only cheap
digital graphics and portentous musical jingles accompany the canned "news"
doled out by the major media outlets.
Americans have never liked being spoon fed "culture" -- meaning culture
that somebody decided was good for them. That was the beauty of
the comic strip -- it was an art form so unpretentious, so vernacular
and casual, that Americans could consume it over breakfast or before
dinner without a trace of self-consciousness or social anxiety. But its
expressive range was almost limitless. We know that from the work
of artists like Frank King, who in their own quiet but audacious ways
tested its limits to the full.
You could read through these comics and weep that stuff this great used
to be thrown up on the porches of millions of Americans by
paperboys every Sunday morning -- and isn't anymore. Or you could read through them
and take heart at the fact that stuff this great could ever have been part of
American popular culture -- and so might be again. Why not?
You can buy Sundays With Walt and Skeezix here.
Wednesday, November 28
OTTO PREMINGER
by
Lloydville
on Wed 28 Nov 2007 04:14 PM PST
In 1963 Jean-Luc Godard published in Cahiers du Cinéma his list of the top ten American sound films of all time.
It featured many of the usual suspects -- Vertigo, The Searchers -- and one film you'd never expect, at least not these days . . . Angel Face (above), a classic film noir directed by Otto Preminger.
Among the French New Wave directors, Preminger was considered one of the
masters of cinema, who could be spoken of in the same breath with
Welles or Ford. Today he holds a place somewhere between Cecil B.
DeMille and Fred Zinneman -- considered a first-rate showman, as an
incarnation of the directorial persona, but otherwise a merely
competent craftsman of studio product.
I really can't explain what happened to his reputation as an
artist. Perhaps the theatricality and commercial calculation of
his directorial persona cheapened him, made him seem less than serious,
as it did for DeMille and even Hitchcock for many years. Truffaut
made Hitchcock respectable again, and DeMille seems to be undergoing
reevaluation these days. Preminger is admired, if he's thought of at all, for his early noirs, and for the noirish Laura. The major works of his later years are appreciated somewhat less enthusiastically.
These later films, like In Harm's Way,
for example, have the feel of standard studio prestige pictures of
their time -- but in truth they're far more interesting than that,
certainly on a visual, cinematic level. They are
filled with movies within movies -- elaborately choreographed scenes
that often play out in one or two shots with a highly mobile
camera. These passages are breathtaking -- they impart a sense of
being someplace rather than of watching something.
They are, as the New Wave critics might have put it, passages of pure
cinema -- examples of the discursive style largely lost to mainstream
movies since the coming of sound. Ford, also working in the
mainstream, got away with this sort of thing mostly because he worked
in genre -- in Westerns we were supposed to sit back and enjoy watching
men ride horses through spectacular spaces. But the long tracking
shot that contains almost the whole first scene of In Harm's Way,
set at a naval officers' party in Hawaii on the eve of Pearl Harbor, is
very unusual in a big-budget studio melodrama. It's exceptionally
effective -- drawing us into the time and place on a subliminal level,
making us feel vulnerable to the Japanese attack that's unleashed the
next morning.
Almost all of Preminger's films have passages like this and they linger
in the mind, even if the film as a whole is disappointing. Bonjour Tristesse
is one of the most disappointing of Preminger's films, but its mood and
sense of place were the things Godard riffed on to produce Contempt
-- which is almost a formal variation on the visual and dramatic themes of the
earlier work. (And of course it was Jean Seberg's odd but
compelling performance in Bonjour Tristesse that inspired Godard to cast her in Breathless.)
Preminger is due, overdue, for a comprehensive critical reevaluation.
Monday, November 26
A TISSOT FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 26 Nov 2007 11:22 AM PST
Tissot loved the Thames and its waterfronts -- which offered him
endless opportunities for the sort of spatial drama that he reveled
in. The example above is especially dynamic, with its small boat
moving forward into a space in front of the picture plane as the
taller ships lead our eye backward into the space of the painting, reinforcing the sense of
movement. The result is a highly cinematic image.
Sunday, November 25
JOKERMAN
by
Lloydville
on Sun 25 Nov 2007 12:28 AM PST
Well, the rifleman's stalking the sick and the lame,
Preacherman seeks the same, who'll get there first is uncertain.
-- Bob Dylan, Jokerman
To
call Bob Dylan the greatest Christian poet of the 20th Century (and the
21st Century so far) is probably to damn him with faint praise.
There just weren't that many great Christian poets in the 20th
Century. His Christian poetry, however, is more alive and vital
than the work of
other poets with greater reputations, like Auden and Eliot, who were
nominally Christian but whose poetry is less concerned with expressing
passionate faith than with charting the ennui of a faithless age.
And Dylan is not quite a poet in the modern literary sense -- his words
don't live on the page, only in conjunction with the music that is
inseparable, expressively, from those words, and mostly only in his own
voice. Very little of his poetry survives in cover versions of
his songs -- although it can.
(Hendrix knew how to sing Dylan, and Dylan's Gospel songs come
gloriously alive in the versions of them by black Gospel singers
collected on the recent CD Gotta Serve Somebody
-- most other versions fail because the artists who attempt them
don't realize how deeply Dylan's work is steeped in the blues, or have
no great feel for the blues themselves.)
Dylan wrote two types of Christian songs, one type that fits more or
less directly in the Gospel tradition, however quirky his take on that
tradition might be, and one type that follows the image-collage strategy of
another American tradition, what might be thought of as Whitman by way
of the Beats.
Jokerman is of the second
type. It's a powerful evocation of the image of Jesus, or
rather the images of Jesus, but it's hardly a catalogue of familiar
icons. It's more like a passionate torrent of Dylan's own
various imaginings of Jesus, his own various attempts to comprehend
him. The momentum of the work seems to be deeply personal -- not
an intellectual or aesthetic meditation but a desperate attempt to
record a racing stream of thought in which one image of Jesus is
instantly
rejected as insufficient, replaced with a corollary or opposing
image. The ultimate effect is a kind of lyrical portrait in the
round -- but a portrait in which the subject just won't sit still.
Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing.
Distant ships sailing into the mist,
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing.
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
The
first quatrain presents us with the image of an almost pagan figure --
a
terrible Jesus who stands in conflict with the ancient false gods,
the iron gods. Dylan, too, was born with a snake in both of his
fists and did not reject the terror of the predicament. (Just try
to imagine Auden or Eliot with their hands full of venomous reptiles --
they would certainly faint dead away, once they realized that the
snakes weren't metaphors.)
But the last couplet jolts us back to a different
kind of complexity. Jesus, the lord of nature, the destroyer of
false idols, is not free like the gods of old. His power is
useless in the absence of truth within the hearts of men. This is the difference between
Jesus and the other, older gods. His power and his
freedom count for nothing if they can't be shared, communicated,
translated into the language of simple men. This fact defines his
mission, his incarnation.
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,
Bird fly high by the light of the moon,
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman.
Why
"Jokerman"? Because the paradox of Jesus's mission is like the
paradox of a good joke -- too surreal to be taken seriously by a
slow-witted humanity. Many of the climaxes, the final unexpected
twists, of Jesus's parables are like the punchlines of jokes.
Laughter is not an inappropriate response to them.
In Dylan's recording of the song, listen to the yearning, the
hopelessness in Dylan's voice as he sings the last line of the chorus
above. He is bemoaning the limits of language and music and human
thought.
Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy,
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers.
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed,
Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features.
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space,
Half asleep 'neath the stars with a small dog licking your face.
In
the first couplet
above, the paradoxes are almost resolved. Jesus has come to
fulfill the law and the scriptures, to reconcile them with the laws of
nature. The message of Grace will find unsentimental expression
in light of a harsh view of this world and its inexorable
destructiveness. The issues, the stakes, won't be fudged.
(See the couplet at the beginning of this post.) In the next
couplet above, Jesus is exalted,
aestheticized -- worshiped as he's worshiped in art:
But Dylan
can't leave Jesus here -- a figure carved in marble.
The last couplet above startles like a bolt of lightning -- because
suddenly Dylan is back imagining Jesus as he walked the earth, sleeping
rough, on the road between two villages, as he must have done on so many
nights, getting just a little rest, and alone, probably grateful for
the affection of the little dog who undoubtedly showed up at the
disciples' campfire looking for a handout. This is a good man,
the dog senses -- he won't kick me.
All the allegories and all the art fade away. The image of Jesus
won't be fixed by any convention. It always returns to the dust
of the earth and to mystery. There are no "answers" in Jokerman --
just a question . . . who is this guy, who is this joker? It's
the question Dylan is asking himself, and it's unanswerable.
Lyrics copyright © 1983 Special Rider Music
Saturday, November 24
AFTER ACTION REPORT
by
Lloydville
on Sat 24 Nov 2007 12:42 AM PST
My
friend Jae and I supplemented our modest cooking skills with large
doses of improvisation and luck to concoct a truly splendid
Thanksgiving meal.
Jae, in an impulse of reckless ambition, decided he would make mashed
potatoes. "I'm going French with them," he said, but would not
explain what he meant by this.
In the end he made stupendously
good mashed potatoes and only after they'd been tasted would he reveal
his ingredients. Half-and-half for creaminess, a large but not
overpowering amount of finely chopped garlic, one single, large
shallot, a small amount of freshly grated Romano cheese and a pinch of
cayenne pepper. I can't say
what's French about any of this but I can say that the results were
delicious.
Jae made stuffing but added to it at my request some oysters and, on
his own initiative, as likely to complement the taste of the oysters
well, some crumbled fried bacon. Again . . . delicious.
Our large turkey for some reason did not produce much in the way of fat
drippings, so that late in the cooking of it we despaired of having
enough liquid in the pan to make gravy. On another inspired
impulse, Jae poured some pumpkin ale into the pan, which made for a
very fine gravy in the end -- an improvisation that could well become a
Thanksgiving tradition.
I confess I couldn't savor the meal as slowly and carefully as I might
have, because I started drinking too early in the day, and too many
different things. A rosé wine, then some of the pumpkin ale,
which had a cheerful, festive taste to it, then some Chimay ale and finally a
Merlot with the dinner. I was past consciousness even before I
got to the pumpkin pie, which served as a fine breakfast the next day.
Friday was a bit of a blur, sharply focused only by a turkey sandwich and by a viewing of Vertigo, which still yields up treasures after countless viewings in the past.
And so the time of leftovers begins. From the look of things this should last quite a while.
Thursday, November 22
A WILLIAM BLAKE QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 22 Nov 2007 12:50 AM PST
. . . the pang of affection & gratitude is the Gift of God for good. I am
thankful that I feel it; it draws the soul towards Eternal life &
conjunction with Spirits of just men made perfect by love &
gratitude—the two angels who stand at heaven’s gate ever open, ever
inviting guests to the marriage. O foolish Philosophy! Gratitude is
Heaven itself; there could be no heaven without Gratitude. I feel it
& I know it. I thank God & Man for it . . .
Wednesday, November 21
A JOHN HUSTON QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 21 Nov 2007 02:50 AM PST
We can make good movies or we can make bad movies. The bad movies
cost a bit more, but if they give us enough money, we can make them
just as bad as they want them to be.
Tuesday, November 20
THE SHOW
by
Lloydville
on Tue 20 Nov 2007 12:51 AM PST
Jae
and I headed back to Death Valley Junction from our dinner at the
Longstreet Casino coffee shop with plenty of time to spare before the
performance by Marta Becket (above) at her Amargosa Opera House.
We were amazed at all the people who'd showed up -- the little theater
could hold about a hundred people and it ended up nearly full.
The place is a hoot -- all its walls and ceiling painted by Marta
herself to resemble the inside of a Baroque opera house. It took
her four years to complete the job.
Today she is frail and birdlike, but still carries herself as a
dancer. She walks out onstage, sits in a chair and talks and
sings for about an hour. She has great presence, partly
diva-like, partly girlish. You come away from the show, from the
whole phenomenon of the Amargosa Opera House, with a swirl of questions.
Is it silly or sublime to be the biggest star in Death Valley, where there
are no other stars? Is it heroic or preposterous to create your
own world out in the middle of nowhere and dare the rest of the world
to ignore you?
All of the above, I guess. Marta's world is part David Lynch,
part Fellini, part senior high school play, part good old-fashioned
show-biz, utterly disciplined and professional. Once she
bought a ghost town and brought it back to life -- now she's a bit of a
ghost herself, but right at home in the spotlight.
What's profound about it all, I think, is the reminder that all theater
deals in the presentation of spirits, not quite flesh and blood, not
quite illusion. She painted an audience for herself on the walls
of her theater, and every Saturday night at 8 o'clock between November
and May she conjures a real audience out of thin air, there on the edge
of Death Valley -- she conjures us out of thin air, and we become part
of the ghostly goings-on. We lose some of our solidity in the process and feel
that we know what it's like to dance on air.
[Photos © 2007 Jae Song]
Monday, November 19
DEATH VALLEY NIGHTS
by
Lloydville
on Mon 19 Nov 2007 12:41 AM PST
On
our visit to Death Valley my friend Jae and I decided to attend a
performance at the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction, just
outside the boundaries of the national park. The opera house sits
at one end of a large u-shaped arcade built in 1923 by the Pacific
Coast Borax Company as a kind of company town. It incorporated
living quarters, offices, a hotel, a dining room and a community
center, which is what the opera house started out as.
When New York City dancer Marta Becket and her husband chanced upon the
complex in 1967 it was a deserted ruin, but Marta imagined the
community center as a theater in which she could exercise her
art. She and her husband leased it, renovated it and gradually
bought up the rest of the complex, reopening the hotel and presenting
shows in the "opera house" every year from November to May, all
starring Marta.
She's still at it, though at 84 she can no longer dance. She
gives a seated performance these days, in which she reminisces and
sings songs of her own composition.
While waiting for curtain time we drove seven miles north to the
Longstreet Casino, Hotel and RV Park. Like everything else in
these parts, it's in the middle of nowhere. As I learned from a
bartender there, the casino's fortunes rise and fall with the numbers
of RV campers who stop in on tours of Death Valley and the American
West.
There only seemed to be locals on hand when we visited. "Why do
people live out in places like this?" I asked myself. The answer
came to me after a while -- "There are no yuppies here." It
was refreshing.
Jae and I had some decent burgers at the casino's coffee shop, and I won 57 cents at a slot machine.
Then we headed back to Death Valley Junction for the show.
Sunday, November 18
A NEW LOW
by
Lloydville
on Sun 18 Nov 2007 01:57 AM PST
My friend Jae is in town, visiting from New York, and yesterday for
some reason we decided to drive to Death Valley, which is about three
hours away. It was like a journey to another country.
We headed straight for Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the Western
Hemisphere -- 282 feet below sea level. It was amazing to think
we'd sunk so low.
There was a broad pathway from the parking area whose surface was
packed salt. As you walked out into the valley on this pathway
you could see other figures walking far in the distance. It made
you feel like a pilgrim on some supernatural highway leading to the end
of the world.
The good news was that the only way we could go from Badwater Basin was up.
Saturday, November 17
AN IMAGE FROM THE WAR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 17 Nov 2007 12:33 AM PST
Ken Burns says this photograph is his favorite among all the still images used in his documentary The War.
It really is beautiful -- the composition, emphasizing the deep space,
reminds one of Victorian academic paintings. Tissot and
Alma-Tadema reveled in compositions like this:
Friday, November 16
A JULES RENARD QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 16 Nov 2007 10:58 AM PST
Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
Thursday, November 15
A ZORN FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 15 Nov 2007 12:21 PM PST
Like Renoir, Anders Zorn seemed to be intoxicated by female flesh --
the sensual surface of his canvases seems to be a sexual response to
the female nude, whose aura radiates outward to affect her
surroundings, which take on her sensual properties, as in the painting above. The whole
world seems made of flesh. Renoir said, "I paint with my penis,"
and the same can almost be said of Zorn.
Renoir's world sometimes seems about to melt in the sexual delirium but
Zorn
kept a stricter control over his draftsmanship and his sense of
modeling, of space -- he was more academic in that sense. The
tension between the sensual surface and the precise rendering of forms
makes Zorn's work more interesting to me than the late Renoir nudes,
which always seem to threaten to dissolve into goo (see above.)
They become
more and more about Renoir's mood and process, less and less about real
women.
Wednesday, November 14
WINSOR MCCAY AND THE CINEMA
by
Lloydville
on Wed 14 Nov 2007 11:05 AM PST
The
influence that went on, back and forth, between the cinema and other
visual arts has often been noticed but rarely studied in detail.
Writers on cinema have produced tome after tome about the influence of the
stage and literature on movies, but the visual side of things has
rarely been subjected to rigorous investigation.
Partly this is because the two principal visual influences on movies,
comic strips and Victorian academic painting, have had little prestige
in the scholarly culture, and partly it's because these two forms have
been hard to study themselves. First-rate reproductions of even
the most important comic strips have been difficult to come by, and
Victorian academic painting tends to languish in storage in museums, to
make room in the galleries for the junk creations of "modern art".
With respect to comic strips, things are changing. Splendid reproductions of seminal strips like Popeye, Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates
are becoming available in ongoing series, and Winsor McCay is getting
spectacular treatment in large over-sized volumes which do full justice
to his amazing visions. (See here and here.)
New revelations about the connection between comic strips and movies should
follow. Here's a brief slideshow (via Boing Boing) created by a critic at the Boston Globe
which surveys some of the most obvious ways Winsor McCay's work has
influenced the iconography of movies. It's based on observations in a new collection of McCay's strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend. More complex issues of
narrative technique and composition will surely come to the fore in the
future. [McCay created some of the earliest animated cartoons, so
his influence on film animation has long been appreciated, but his
influence on movies in general was far more comprehensive, as the
slideshow suggests.]
If you want to contemplate the connection between cinema and Victorian
academic painting you will just have to settle at present for my
passing observations in the essays collected here.
Tuesday, November 13
D-DAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 13 Nov 2007 12:23 AM PST
This
picture has an aura and authority that may become harder and harder to
appreciate. It was taken by Frank Capa, who went into Utah Beach
with the first wave on D-Day, 6 June 1944. Utah Beach was, as it turned
out, the most hellish sector of the invasion, where the most casualties
occurred. Even before that became known, Capa would certainly
have been aware that he was risking his life to record the moment on
film, that there was a good chance he'd never return from France, even
if he managed to get ashore there. But he knew how important the
invasion was -- what a visual record of it would mean to everyone
praying for its success, and to future generations.
In modern warfare, there would probably be video cameras attached to
the landing craft, capable of transmitting live images to a command
center somewhere, but in Capa's time a real live human being needed to
be there with a camera to bring back pictures of the assault. A
life had to be put on the line for it.
Capa could assume, too, that his pictures would have a built-in
authority as proof of his witness. Today, in the era of
Photoshop, when photographs can be faked almost beyond detection, the
photographic medium has lost some of this authority. We have to
think retrospectively to summon up what the image above and the one below meant to Capa
and his contemporaries.
There was a tragic but somehow fitting end to Capa's experiences at
Utah Beach. He survived but most of the photographs he took did
not. A nervous lab assistant back in England tried to dry Capa's
rolls of 35mm film too quickly -- and all but eleven of the images were
destroyed. But this just served to make those eleven images more
precious -- to remind us of all that was lost on D-Day, all the lives
of young American soldiers that ended on the invasion beaches.
The eleven images that do survive are miraculous things. It's
like having photographs of the last day at Thermopylae, of the battle
on Bunker Hill, of the furthest advance of Pickett's charge. The visual
records of future wars will be more extensive and more useful to
military planners, but they won't have quite the human dimension, the
spiritual dimension, of Capa's pictures. They may make us shudder but they won't make us cry -- as Capa's do, or should.
Monday, November 12
MA VIE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 12 Nov 2007 12:33 AM PST
Here's a poem in French by Henri Michaux, Ma Vie:
Tu t'en vas sans moi, ma vie.
Tu roules.
Et moi j'attends encore de faire un pas.
Tu portes ailleurs la bataille.
Tu me désertes ainsi.
Je ne t'ai jamais suivie.
Je ne vois pas clair dans tes offres.
Le petit peu que je veux, jamais tu ne l'apportes.
A cause de ce manque, j'aspire à tant.
A tant de choses, à presque l'infini...
A cause de ce peu qui manque, que jamais tu n'apportes.
Here's a rough translation:
You're going away without me, my life.
You're rolling on.
And I'm still waiting to make my first move.
You've taken the battle elsewhere.
You've deserted me.
I never followed you.
I've never seen anything in what you offer.
The little I want you never bring me.
Because of this I want so much --
So many things, almost everything . . .
Just because of this pittance I lack, that you never bring me.
Sunday, November 11
A NEW CREHORE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 11 Nov 2007 07:40 AM PST
This new painting, Deja Vu Waltz,
by Amy Crehore was just completed for a show at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa
Monica, California, opening on 17 November. If I were in the Los Angeles area I'd rush
right out to see it. It's awesome.
The devil would like to turn all this gossamer sensuality into
something else, but he can't -- he's under severe restraint. The
naughty dream will just go on and on.
Saturday, November 10
THE WAR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 10 Nov 2007 06:27 AM PST
Reading Hitler's War,
David Irving's massive, exhaustive study of WWII as seen from Hitler's
perspective, is riveting but spiritually exhausting. We will
never have a more sympathetic portrayal of Hitler and his motives, at
least not one consistent with the purely factual record, but what vapid
company the Führer turns out to be. Even the glamor of evil can't
redeem him and his henchmen from their utter banality, from the sheer
colossal mind-numbing stupidity of their fear of and paranoia about "world
Jewry". As they grow in power their puny souls seem smaller and
smaller -- consistent with the bunch of clever, fanatical, provincial
hacks they were. It will be to Germany's eternal shame that it
consented to be led in momentous times by such mediocre shadows of men.
A useful specific for the soul-sickness induced by Irving's book is Ken Burn's 15-hour documentary The War.
It's not without its passages of moral self-congratulation, but its
greatest value lies in its willingness to confront the darkness that
the war summoned up in the victors, especially in the young men who had
to fight it on the front lines. In the filmed interviews, the American combat
survivors -- old men looking back on the war after more than half a
century -- still tremble when they recall what they had to do, still seem
mystified that they could do it.
Like the Germans and the Japanese, the good guys in this war learned to
kill without mercy -- even to kill defenseless civilians and unarmed
prisoners. And sometimes they experienced an exhilaration in
killing. The experience shook their souls and by the evidence
they never really got over it. The fact that they won a "good
war", or a "necessary war" as one of them prefers to call it, didn't
heal the wounds within.
Hitler, and the Japanese warlords, sought to glorify the merciless
killing of war -- sought to embrace it as a given of nature. The
soldiers of the great democracies may have recognized it as a given of
nature, but their refusal to glorify it, to accept it willingly as a part of who
they were, even in a just cause, makes for a startling contrast to
the supposed "realism" of a man like Hitler. It gives the heart a
little breathing space in a heartless world.
Friday, November 9
AND RINGO
by
Lloydville
on Fri 09 Nov 2007 08:11 AM PST
Yeah.
Thursday, November 8
GEORGE
by
Lloydville
on Thu 08 Nov 2007 05:12 AM PST
Yeah . . .
Wednesday, November 7
PAUL
by
Lloydville
on Wed 07 Nov 2007 12:11 AM PST
Yeah . . .
Tuesday, November 6
JOHN
by
Lloydville
on Tue 06 Nov 2007 02:45 AM PST
Yeah . . .
Monday, November 5
GLORIA SWANSON'S SADIE THOMPSON
by
Lloydville
on Mon 05 Nov 2007 12:54 AM PST
In
1947, an old, bitter, alcoholic has-been named D. W. Griffith
complained to a journalist that movies had lost something -- "the
beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful
blowing on the blossoms in the trees" is how he summed it up. It's sort
of an odd thing to say, since movies never stopped moving, and when
there are trees on screen you can often see the wind moving their
leaves.
But of
course Griffith was talking about something more profound -- harking
back to his own heyday as a filmmaker, when those moving blossoms were
not just a grace note, an accident of location, which might possibly
affect the taking of live sound, but in some real sense what movies
were about . . . movement, the illusion of movement in space, the
transformation of that illusory space, drawing us into it
imaginatively, investing it with emotional drama.
Griffith
was bemoaning the loss of the discursive style of cinematic narrative,
in which the accumulation of passages of plastic transformation were
not simply the accouterments of style but the very method of
storytelling, of emotional communication, in film. He was bemoaning the
terrible efficiency of the studio method, in which those moving
blossoms became incidental decoration, garlands gracing the elegant,
ruthless machinery of narrative exposition.
Those
of us who love Westerns love them in part because the Western genre
alone for many years after the coming of sound preserved that
discursive style -- in which they way people and horses and things
moved and penetrated and transformed the spaces of a room or a street
or a landscape carried the burden of the drama, the narrative
exposition being pretty much formulaic and predictable.
Raoul
Walsh, a Griffith protege, became a brilliant craftsman of the studio
style in the sound era, with an eye for plastic values which lifts most
of his work above the ordinary. But not far above the ordinary. His Sadie Thompson, from 1928, is a masterpiece, however -- and a film
that in many ways defines the crossroads movies had come to in
Hollywood on the eve of sound.
Sadie
Thompson is a very slick film, of great narrative economy -- a studio
picture in that sense. But in scene after scene the narrative momentum
is suspended dreamily as we are invited to appreciate, to inhabit
intimate spaces and moments -- to linger in them languorously. Swanson
plays a hardboiled dame, but we can sense the girlishness and innocence
that has survived her smarmy past -- and Walsh takes time to let us
inside that quality of hers . . . not with a line of thought-balloon
dialogue, but in a rapturously lit scene at her window with O'Hara, in
which the way she looks at him illuminates her face from within,
absolutely breaks your heart. It's like a movie within a movie, and
when you're watching it, it seems as though this is what the whole
story is about.
Walsh
doesn't have a soundtrack to deliver the incessant noise of rain, so he
lingers on moments of transition between the wet outdoors and the dry
interiors, physical business with umbrellas and ponchos and damp
clothes. He luxuriates in exploring the fabulously atmospheric and
spatially intriguing inn set designed by William Cameron Menzies. He
rarely moves the camera, but when he does it has an emotional purpose
-- Sadie being drawn into the interior of the island after she gets off
the ship, surrounded by the marines, O'Hara trying to carry her away
from Davidson and his creepy spell.
One of
the most powerful moments is also one of the most subtle. Just before
the climax, Davidson looks down at the redeemed Sadie, slumped in a
wicker chair. She's removed her make-up and straightened out her hair,
but still looks beautiful, in a severe way. Then Walsh pans down very
slightly from a close-up of Swanson's face -- just enough to let us see
her upper chest moving as she breathes. There's no skin -- we don't
even see the curve of her breast under her dress -- but the very
subtlety of the shift of attention is wildly suggestive and erotic. We
know exactly what Davidson is thinking.
Lionel
Barrymore, as Davidson, looking gaunt and somewhat terrifying, plays an
extreme character, but his performance is beautifully nuanced,
particularly at the beginning. We feel the sensual pleasure he takes in
tormenting sinners, which prepares us for his surrender to another kind
of sensuality at the end. It's far more effective than Walter Huston's
more tasteful and buttoned-up take on the character in the 1932 sound
remake.
The simplicity and reserve of Walsh's performance as O'Hara (above) serves the role well -- he used his very inexperience as an
actor to sell O'Hara's shy, straightforward decency.
Swanson
is brilliant -- and brilliantly inconsistent. Her tough-girl swagger is
charming, and not entirely convincing, which makes her sweetness with
O'Hara, her innocent faith in his love, believable, and her sudden
breakdown in front of Davidson plausible as well . . . she was never as
hard and self-possessed as she seemed to be, and her first look into
the face of irrecoverable loss unhinges her completely. Joan Crawford's
Sadie in the 1932 remake is a one-note impersonation by comparison, and
could have been played almost as well by a man in drag, which is what
Crawford sometimes suggests.
It's a shame the last reel of the film has been lost -- though the reconstruction of it on the Kino release is well-done
and as satisfying as possible under the circumstances.
It's a wonderful movie, with a foot in two different eras of Hollywood filmmaking, but with its heart and soul in Griffith's.
Sunday, November 4
A SHAKESPEARE SONG FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 04 Nov 2007 01:50 AM PDT
- O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
- O stay and hear! your true-love's coming
- That can sing both high and low;
- Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
- Journeys end in lovers meeting--
- Every wise man's son doth know.
- What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
- Present mirth hath present laughter;
- What's to come is still unsure:
- In delay there lies no plenty,--
- Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty,
- Youth's a stuff will not endure.
It's from Twelfth Night.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journeys end in lovers meeting . . .
Are there any lovelier lines in all of English poetry?
What I like about them most is that they combine the lover's faith with the storyteller's faith.
The reference to singing both high and low is apparently mildly obscene, but I'll leave the details of it to your imagination.
The carpe diem message of the
song is not unusual, but the gossamer delicacy of the tone is
rare. As I've suggested before, A. E. Housman got it down pretty
well:
Clay lies still but blood's a rover,
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad, when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.
Saturday, November 3
HITLER'S WAR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 03 Nov 2007 03:48 AM PDT
Early
in his career the brilliant but unbalanced British historian David
Irving became convinced that most of the history of WWII as written by
the victors was suspect -- infected with a mythology of moral
superiority which wasn't always supported by the actual documentation
available. He set about to correct this.
Irving became an indefatigable researcher, particularly in the German
archives whose contents few historians had mastered. His sense of
sympathy for the Nazi regime also encouraged many German survivors of
the war, or their heirs, to make available to him private documents
which had not been available to other historians.
The result of this was, eventually, an extraordinary book, Hitler's War,
which the great military historian John Keegan has called one of the
essential works of WWII historiography. It is, Keegan says, like
the memoir Hitler never wrote.
The book takes us through the war from inside Hitler's headquarters,
and from Hitler's perspective. It doesn't minimize Hitler's
bloodthirsty ruthlessness, but it offers many instances of the
bloodthirsty ruthlessness of his enemies -- the sorts of things that
Hitler might have used to justify his actions in his own mind.
The detail in the book is mind-boggling -- it's almost a week by week
record of Hitler's habits, movements, decisions, moods. It's like
viewing all the events of The Lord Of the Rings from inside Mordor.
It can't be said that the book gets us inside Hitler himself, inside
the man. Even his closest associates would admit in later years
that they never managed to do that. He remains an enigma -- a
hollow human being. That may have been one source of his power -- he
was a vessel in which the mighty currents of history, both good and evil,
could collect. But the book does bring us into his uncanny
presence.
Irving takes care to point out that no hard documentary evidence
exists that Hitler knew of or approved the Final Solution of the
"Jewish problem" as it developed in the last years of the war. Irving uses this gap in the record to
argue that Hitler was in fact unaware of what Himmler was really doing
out in the field. Even Keegan admits that the proposition is
illogical -- but for Irving, apparently, it was an important one.
It allowed him to see Hitler as a brilliant monster, along the lines of
Napoleon, say, but not as a demon in human form.
This desire to see Hitler as less than purely evil was, as it turned out, the seed of something darker in Irving,
which has gradually marginalized him as a historian and as a man.
His sympathy for right-wing neo-Nazi movements and his personal racial
prejudice came to the fore. He eventually decided that the
Holocaust, as it's generally understood, did not exist -- that the
Final Solution was not a Nazi policy but a series of ad-hoc actions by
local commanders in the final months before Germany's defeat. (In the most recent edition of Hitler's War,
from 2002, Irving has amended the text to reflect his later views of
the Holocaust -- so it's worth tracking down an earlier edition if you
plan to read it.)
By allying himself with the lunatic fringe of Holocaust deniers and
neo-Nazis, Irving has become something of a joke, a very unpleasant
joke -- and yet . . . the core of his achievement remains. The
massive research supporting Hitler's War,
the vast accumulation of detail in it, is indispensable stuff, even
though it may be presented in the service of unacceptable attitudes and
prejudices. You simply cannot understand WWII without
reading it.
[For Irving's perspective on all this you can visit his web site here.]
Friday, November 2
JACKSON'S END
by
Lloydville
on Fri 02 Nov 2007 12:15 AM PDT
Stonewall
Jackson is buried in Lexington, Virginia, near the Virginia Military
Institute, where he taught before the Civil War. But his arm,
which he lost at Chancellorsville, where he received the wounds that
killed him, is buried near that battlefield.
When Jackson's shattered arm was cut off after the battle it was
thrown onto a pile of amputated limbs, as was customary, but his
chaplain decided to retrieve it and he took it to the nearby farm of a
relative, who buried it in the family plot. Eventually a small
stone marker was erected over its final resting place.
The grave can be visited today, but it's not easy. When I toured
the Chancellorsville battlefield two summers ago, with some relatives,
we had to park at a gate about a mile from the cemetery and walk to the
grave. My eighty year-old mom was along, and she made the trek
with the rest of us, in the hot Virginia sun.
The cemetery was beautiful -- a small fenced-in plot on a knoll
overlooking cornfields, shaded by old trees. There was no
particular emotion associated with visiting the site. An arm is a
tool. It was like visiting the grave of Stonewall Jackson's
sword. It was the walk with family that was moving -- and
surreal, like the Civil War itself. We Americans are going to
take up arms and kill each other in great numbers, they said back
then. We are going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of Stonewall
Jackson's arm, we said generations later. Somehow it all made
sense. I kept thinking of Jackson's famous last words:
Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.
There are some mysterious, unexplainable journeys that just have to be made.
Thursday, November 1
LOUP GRILLE AU FENOUIL
by
Lloydville
on Thu 01 Nov 2007 02:21 AM PDT
Loup
grillé au fenouil, translated precisely from the French, means wolf
grilled with fennel. Those familiar with Mediterranean cooking will
recognize, however, that the wolf, the loup, referred to here is loup
de mer, the wolf of the sea, or sea bass. Sea bass grilled with fennel
is one of the glories of southern French cuisine.
I
first encountered it in one of the restaurants facing onto the harbor
of Villefranche, a small town just east of Nice -- a restaurant called
Mère Germaine. There are several restaurants just like it facing the
harbor, and loup grillé au fenouil is not prepared better in Mère
Germaine than in any of the others, but Mère Germaine is where I first
had it, and so that must remain the center of my nostalgia for the
dish.
It has
certainly never tasted better anywhere else -- except perhaps on a
terrace barbecue in Seattle once. A friend living there had discovered
wild fennel growing near him in a vacant lot, and used its seeds to
season the fish, its stalks to fuel the fire beneath, resulting in a
wholly satisfying sensory experience.
Nostalgia
is a potent spur to culinary ambition. One day while peeking into
the tiny seafood selection at my local supermarket I noticed a
tempting fillet of Chilean sea bass. I bought it, along with some dried
fennel seeds from the spice racks, and decided to see how close I could
come to recapturing the taste of those long ago nights on the Côte
d'Azur.
I
coated a small pan with olive oil, salted and peppered the bottom of
the pan, then covered it with fennel seeds. I placed the fillet of sea
bass in the pan and made two slits in the fillet. I coated the top of
the fillet with olive oil, salted and peppered it, and covered it with
fennel seeds, filling up the slits with extra seeds.
I set it under the broiler in my oven until the fennel seeds
were brown and thoroughly roasted, at which point the fish was cooked through but still moist.
I ate
it with a respectable Chardonnay from the Coppola vineyards, and the
wine was fine, but a drier one would have suited the taste of the fish
better. The taste of the fish was miraculous -- light but flavorful --
and the toasted fennel seeds gave a pleasant reminder of the dish as
it's prepared on the shores of the Mediterranean.
It was not by any means loup grillé au fenouil as you'd encounter it there, cooked on a real charcoal fire, seasoned with
fresh fennel. But it was poignantly close.
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