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Tuesday, September 30
REBOUND
by
Lloydville
on Tue 30 Sep 2008 09:48 PM PDT
 The stock market rebounded a bit today. The big crash has been postponed -- Congress has a little more time to get its act together. With luck, John McCain will stay away from Washington until a rescue bill is passed. I pulled the truck around to the back of the cabin and put a tarp over it. I'm still spending a lot of time in front of the mirror, practicing my Depression game face. "Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there . . ." Monday, September 29
UPDATE: MONDAY EVENING
by
Lloydville
on Mon 29 Sep 2008 08:26 PM PDT
 When I drifted off to sleep this morning I wasn't expecting the House to vote down the credit market rescue bill, but that was the news I woke up to this afternoon. I guess John McCain wasn't expecting it either. Has anyone bothered to tell him that the deal on the bill has collapsed, or is he still out on the stump taking credit for putting it together? Good work on that one, John! This morning, I was worried that the market had fallen 300 points in half an hour. It managed to fall nearly 500 more points while I was dozing. If you think it's hit bottom, I suspect you're still asleep and dreaming.  Of course you can't blame the House Republicans for voting 2-1 against the bill -- Nancy Pelosi was mean to them in a speech before the vote, right there on the House floor, in public. It was like the most popular girl in high school (like, the homecoming queen or something) dissing them at assembly -- in front of everybody! You could hardly expect them to be thinking clearly, or considering the welfare of the country, after something like that. It's not like we're dealing with grown-ups here. My friend PZ sends a line from an old pop song -- "They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad." I fear that Tuesday will in fact be much worse. O. k., then -- bring on the big D. I got the truck running and loaded up. I hear there's opportunities in Mexico for folks who aren't afraid of a little hard work . . .
MONDAY MORNING
by
Lloydville
on Mon 29 Sep 2008 07:14 AM PDT
 I'm writing this just after seven in the morning Pacific Time. After working all night, I was getting set to go off to bed when I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach -- a sense that the bail-out bill crafted by the geniuses in Washington wasn't going to work, that the markets would feel the same way about it . . . and that the American economy was about to go under, suddenly, in one fell swoop, today. I turned on the television and saw that the Dow Jones Average had plummeted three hundred points in less than half an hour. I hope things won't continue in that vein, but I have a horrible premonition that they will. If the House Of Representatives approves the bail-out bill in the next few hours and the market continues to fall, it means that Washington has waited too long -- dithering around for a John McCain photo-op and other exercises in political posturing and giving more banks time to fail, undermining investor confidence beyond repair. As I head off to bed once again, I have a feeling that I might wake up in a world that has been utterly changed. Boy, do I hope I'm wrong. Sunday, September 28
A PATRIOT'S JOURNAL
by
Lloydville
on Sun 28 Sep 2008 06:06 PM PDT
 As you undoubtedly know, John McCain and I have been working tirelessly over the past few days to rescue America from its worsening economic crisis. John felt it necessary to suspend his campaign for the Presidency in order to spend more time on the phone asking people how things were going, while monitoring events closely on CNN. I suspended this blog, vowing to contribute only "Freedom Bulletins" until the crisis was resolved. This is Freedom Bulletin No. 2.  John also threatened to withdraw from the first Presidential debate, in order to dramatize the seriousness of the situation. Simultaneously, working in close coordination with John's staff, I threatened to leave the dishes in my sink unwashed until Congress made meaningful progress on a rescue bill. Our unprecedented actions bore fruit -- Congress did make meaningful progress towards a bill, John showed up at the debate and I am making plans to begin work on my dishes any day now. All of this has taken a terrible toll on John and myself, both physically and emotionally. Last night I decided I needed to take a break from the almost unendurable strain, so I headed off to the Paris, Las Vegas casino to play some poker.  [Image © 2006 Paul Kolnik] I played for about six hours and showed a profit at the end of the session of $31 dollars. $31 may not seem like a lot of money in real terms, but it's actually very hard to win any money at all at a Las Vegas poker table. Sure, there are a lot of tipsy tourists who are easy to best, but there are just as many local sharks who know how to strip you of your chips, your dignity and your sense of self worth.  Driving home at about 3am I heard on the radio that Hank Paulson believed a deal on the bail-out bill was done. I raced home to await his call thanking me for my efforts to get America out of this mess, but he must have been too exhausted to contact me at that hour. I understand this, and feel that no slight towards me was intended. I poured myself a beer, averting my eyes at all times from the kitchen sink, stretched out in the La-Z-Boy and smiled. I didn't feel like a hero -- I had only done my duty. I thought of the extra $31 in my wallet, the prospect of America solvent and prospering once again, and the dance Fred Astaire and Ann Miller do to Irving Berlin's "It Only Happens When I Dance With You" in Easter Parade.  I thought of one poker hand in particular from the evening now coming to a close. I was dealt AK of spades. There was a fair amount of betting before the flop -- the pot was sweet. I stayed in, of course. The flop came with the makings of a low straight, but two of the cards were spades. A guy bet 20 bucks, I called and everybody else folded. I figured he was drawing to the straight. The turn brought another card in the straight sequence. My opponent bet 15 bucks. I figured he'd made his straight and was feigning weakness, hoping for a call. I called. The river brought a jack of spades. My opponent bet $30. I raised him $30, sensing that was the most I could induce him to call. He thought about it for a long time and called. At the showdown he turned over his nut straight. I turned over the nut flush. Life was good. Saturday, September 27
FROM THE ARCHIVES: REPORT FROM THE BEACH, 17 AUGUST 1998
by
Lloydville
on Sat 27 Sep 2008 12:15 AM PDT
 [Image by W. L. Warner] Yesterday evening a deep coastal cloudbank was driving in across the whole horizon, eating up the headlands beyond the Ventura County Fairgrounds. It was the last night of the fair and the lights of the Ferris wheel glowed spookily in the mist, miles away. Wild rays of sunlight, like banners, seemed to flutter over the headlands at the edge of the cloud bank. The sun, a bright red viscous disc, appeared through the mists just before it disappeared into the ocean. These sorts of phenomena turn the blank landscapes of the sea and sky into theatrical spaces, which seem both awesome and manageable -- a place one might act in, given the appropriate role, mythological and ritualistic. Conditions also in which gods might step down into our world. ["Freedom Bulletin" No. 1 -- no more posts until Congress solves the credit crisis!]] Friday, September 26
BLOG SUSPENDED
by
Lloydville
on Fri 26 Sep 2008 12:12 AM PDT
 Inspired by John McCain's example, I have decided to put country first and suspend this blog until Congress passes legislation to solve the nation's credit crisis. I will continue posting as usual, but I will not think of my entries as "posts" -- I will think of them as "Freedom Bulletins". I encourage everyone to think of my posts as "Freedom Bulletins". If my "Freedom Bulletins" lead to a rapid solution of the deadlock in Washington, I will let the American people decide, in their own way, how to honor my sacrifice. If they wish to place a small historical marker at the site of my birth, so be it. If they wish to erect a full-scale equestrian statue on the Mall in Washington, so be it. I am not going to quibble about such things at a time when our nation is in peril. Thursday, September 25
JACOB'S LADDER
by
Lloydville
on Thu 25 Sep 2008 12:16 AM PDT
 These are hard times, likely to get much harder. But believe it or not, we are climbing Jacob's Ladder. Every rung goes just a little bit higher.  That's right -- every rung goes just a little bit higher. Don't take my word for it -- listen to the testimony of the Staple Singers, in their wonderful version of "Jacob's Ladder" on the album Freedom's Highway. Wednesday, September 24
PROMISE TO VOTE, GET COOL SONG
by
Lloydville
on Wed 24 Sep 2008 12:59 AM PDT
 The band Wilco is offering a free download of a cover they did of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" if you go to their web site and promise to vote. Remember, cute girls love guys who vote!  Tuesday, September 23
CIRCUS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 23 Sep 2008 12:37 AM PDT
 The circus was a fixture of American popular entertainment as early as the colonial era. It competed vigorously with fancier forms of theatrical entertainment in the first decades of the 19th Century and survives in several forms today. It was always evolving -- the only constant being the “circus”, the ring, which for most of circus history existed primarily for a horse or horses to race around. In the early 19th Century, if you had a clever horse and a tent, you had a circus -- all the rest was filler on the bill.  Dan Rice (above), described in the subtitle of David Carlyon’s biography as “the most famous man you’ve never heard of”, started out in the 1830s as the traveling exhibitor of a learned pig -- it could count and tell the time. Then Rice got a horse and a tent and became a circus showman, the most famous of the 19th Century. P. T. Barnum (below) lent his name to an enterprise that became the most famous circus of all time, but wasn’t himself predominantly a circus man. He wasn’t even responsible for his circus’s immortal motto, “The Greatest Show On Earth’, invented by someone else as a topper to “Dan Rice’s Great Show”.  Rice was an accomplished horse and animal trainer but earned his immense renown as a clown, of a new kind. He sang and danced and did physical comedy, sometimes in blackface, and enacted parodies of Shakespeare, but captured the fancy of the nation with his comic monologues -- often of a topical nature, ranging over the subjects of national and local politics (in whatever town his circus happened to be playing.) His specialty was audience interaction, improvisation in the moment -- quick wit on the fly. He so impressed the public that he was thought of as a great and wise man -- a bit like Will Rogers in the 20th Century -- and he was recruited to run for political office, including the Presidency, on more than one occasion.  Though he was the chief draw of his “Great Show”, it was still a circus. Its featured animal act was a horse named Exclesior, who could do astonishing tricks. Later on, when “menageries” (of exotic animals) became part of the circus, Rice enlisted an elephant who could walk a tightrope, a rhinoceros who could obey a few simple commands and a trained camel. The menagerie of exotic animals developed apart from the circus, as an adjunct to the “museums” of curiosities which flourished in the 19th Century, and in which Barnum mostly specialized. The idea was imported into the circus as a new-fangled attraction. In Rice’s day, the circus was a show for grown-ups, featuring plenty of sex, in the form of scantily-clad female performers, and sometimes crude humor. It morphed into a children’s fantasy only at the end of the 19th century -- when its cruder offerings were moved over into the adjoining midway. By the 1870s, Rice’s brand of verbal comedy had been absorbed into “variety” -- a very crude form, for male audiences only, centered in urban areas, usually associated, physically and commercially, with saloons. This was the form that got cleaned up for mixed audiences (ladies as well as gents) of middle-class patrons in the 1880s and renamed vaudeville. It still had a lot of circus in it.  Tony Pastor, the impresario who led the way in cleaning up variety and did the most to popularize the new designation “vaudeville”, had gotten his start as a knock-about clown in one of Dan Rice’s circuses -- and knock-about clowning always had a place on the vaudeville stage. So did the comic monologuist -- carrying on a tradition pioneered by Rice. Horses were gone, of course, along with the rings they raced around, but trained animal acts remained. One of the most popular and fondly remembered acts in vaudeville was “Fink’s Mules” -- sometimes called the greatest opening act of all time -- in which a blacked-up Fink engaged in a losing contest of wills with his expertly trained animals. Dan Rice also had a mule act, with two mules that only he could ride. He’d dare audience members to try their luck with the animals, who inevitably bucked them off, to the delight of the crowd.  Horses and feats of horsemanship stayed in circuses, even though the exotic animals became the real stars, but horses took center stage in Buffalo Bill’s arena shows, a kind of circus masquerading as a historical pageant. The chaotic popular entertainments of the 19th Century, always evolving, left their mark on the popular entertainments of the 20th Century -- via vaudeville, which fed the Broadway and Hollywood musical with images, acts and talent, and supplied silent film comedy with its greatest clowns . . . and the rodeo, which carried on the circus’s and Buffalo Bill’s celebration of the horse. The classic American circus survives only in the two companies of The Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey “Greatest Show On Earth”, but another kind of circus, classier and adult-oriented, thrives on the Las Vegas Strip. Now called “cirques” (as in “du Soleil”), they form the core of Sin City’s permanent live-performance attractions.  The continuum revealed in all this is not much remarked upon, a result of the 20th Century’s insistence on seeing itself as “modern”, freed from the shackles of the Victorian era, but also of the age-old tendency in show business to emphasize novelty. “A 19th-Century Attraction Reborn and Refurbished!” isn’t an ad line that’s going to pack them in on a Saturday night in the 21st Century -- though it would offer a more reliable indication of pure entertainment value than almost any other. Monday, September 22
PLUTOCRACY UPDATE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 22 Sep 2008 12:33 AM PDT
 It looks as though even the national media have decided it's o. k. to use the "p" word -- even if they have to teach the American public what it means. Perhaps this will lead to a little press questioning of the administration's new eight hundred billion dollar bail-out proposal. Who exactly is it meant to benefit? Tellingly, Treasury Secretary Paulson doesn't want to put a cap on executive compensation even for those institutions that the American tax payer is being called on to rescue. As The New York Times reported: Mr. Paulson said that he was concerned that imposing limits on the compensation of executives could discourage companies from participating in the program. “If we design it so it’s punitive and so institutions aren’t going to participate, this won’t work the way we need it to work,” Mr. Paulson said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Let’s talk about executive salaries. There have been excesses there. I agree with the American people. Pay should be for performance, not for failure.” But he quickly added: “But we need this system to work, and so we — the reforms need to come afterwards.”
In short, the executives would rather see their companies and the world economy tank than give up a dime of what they might be able to squeeze out of the crisis for themselves. It's amazing that Paulson could say such a thing with a straight face. He's essentially admitting that the CEOs of America's major financial institutions are sociopaths. But that's plutocracy for you -- personal shame and civic responsibility have no place in it. Sunday, September 21
ANOTHER WAY TO DIE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 21 Sep 2008 08:29 AM PDT
 Jack White (of The White Stripes) wrote and produced the theme song for the new James Bond film Quantum Of Solace and performs it on the soundtrack with Alicia Keys. The movie is coming out in November but you can listen to the song now here. It's awesome -- funked-up John Barry with a nod to McCartney's Bond song and a lot of White Stripes drive. Jack's work is big because he's got so many strains of music rattling around in his brain and no firewalls of convention, attitude or fashion separating them. You could say the same of Armstrong, Presley, Hendrix, Dylan. Saturday, September 20
PLUTOCRACY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Sep 2008 12:12 AM PDT
 As you watch the current Wall Street meltdown unfold you should bear in mind that the crisis doesn't represent a failure of capitalism, it represents a triumph of plutocracy -- government by, of and for the wealthy. This is the way plutocracy is supposed to work. In a plutocracy like ours, the wealthy instruct the government, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America, to construct a system, a set of rules, under which corporate America can behave like a pack of rabid hyenas in its hysterical pursuit of short-term profits. When and if the hysteria leads to a breakdown of the system -- basically because the suckers get tired of being defrauded, or run out of money to lose -- corporate America instructs the government to bail it out with tax dollars from ordinary Americans . . . that is to say, the same suckers it was trying to swindle by other means.  The wealthy never lose. Dick Fuld (above), the CEO of Lehman Brothers, got a bonus of 22 million dollars last year, as he was in the process of defrauding hundreds of thousands of people with essentially worthless financial instruments and leading his company forward into bankruptcy. The two top officers of Merrill Lynch, which had to sell itself to the Bank Of America to avoid the fate of Lehman Brothers, will split a parting gift of 47 million dollars. The financial institutions which tried to make quick bucks by selling bundles of nearly valueless mortgages are now going to sell those bundles to the American taxpayer, in what will surely be the greatest act of corporate welfare in the history of human civilization. Such moments in history are instructive. They remind us that corporate America, and conservative apologists for the "free market", have no real interest in free markets -- they are interested in free money for the wealthy. If they can get it through unregulated fraud, that's fine -- if they can get it through corporate socialism, that's fine, too . . . as long as they get it. This is the sort of racket which used to be called "the old army game". Like any sophisticated con, it's a no-lose system for the hucksters who are running it, corporate America's wealthy elite. Trust me -- Dick Fuld is not going to give back the 22 million he got for doing his part to send the world economy into a tailspin, placing the welfare of millions at risk. And he's not going to jail, either -- because he was operating within the laws that he and his fellow hyenas paid to have enacted. It's plutocracy as usual. Friday, September 19
AN IMAGE FOR TODAY: THE BROX SISTERS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 19 Sep 2008 12:12 AM PDT
 Wake up, wake up, you sleepy heads, Get up, get up, get out of bed . . . [With thanks to Vitaphone Varieties] Thursday, September 18
TENDERLOIN
by
Lloydville
on Thu 18 Sep 2008 06:18 AM PDT
 Cartoonist Winsor McCay never ceases to amaze. I love this particular image (despite the preposterous ethnic caricature) because its cityscape reminds me of my old neighborhood in Manhattan, which real estate agents called North Chelsea but was in fact the old Garment District and before that, in the days when Teddy Roosevelt was New York's Police Commissioner, the Tenderloin, a precinct largely devoted to sin. It's made up mostly of late 19th-Century and early 20th-Century commercial buildings like the ones in McCay's panels, with more than a few even older townhouses. It has become a dreamscape to me now, which McCay's image evokes precisely. [With thanks to a delightful web site devoted to McCay's work -- Meeting McCay.] Wednesday, September 17
BLACKFACE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 17 Sep 2008 10:24 AM PDT
 There had been blackface (as well as whiteface) clowns in American circuses in the 18th Century, but blackface performance didn't become a sensation until the 1830s, when T. D. Rice popularized a dance he called the "Jump Jim Crow" -- learned, he said, from an old black stable hand. In 1842, Dan Emmett, sometimes credited with being the composer of "Dixie", created a blackface revue with three other stars and minstrelsy became an established phenomenon, one that wouldn't disappear from "the show business" in America until the 1950s, with the dawn of the modern civil rights movement. T. D. Rice's dance had given its name to the late 19th-Century laws that made segregation in America official, and so it's fitting that Jim Crow stopped jumping on American stages around the same time that the Jim Crow laws started to get repealed. The minstrel show served several different functions in American culture, some of them hateful and some of them more ambiguous morally. The hateful functions are clear enough. Creating stereotypes of blacks as lazy, shiftless, ignorant and childlike served as a powerful reinforcement of the second-class status imposed on blacks, cynically or paternalistically, by the dominant white classes. It assuaged the troubled conscience of the culture, seeming to justify a patent injustice. But minstrelsy also allowed, on levels too deep and too disturbing to contemplate directly, a kind of cultural conversation between black and white America -- a coded conversation between human beings, in the transcendently human terms of music and dance. It allowed the expression, in both directions, of a kind of perverted but very real love, and a kind of ironic critique of the obscenity of America's racial system.  The complexity of it all has never been, and perhaps never can be, sorted out fully -- but one clue to the mystery can be found in an odd detail associated with T. D. Rice's appropriation of the "Jump Jim Crow" dance. After he learned the dance from the old stable hand, Rice bought the ragged clothes off the man's back, to wear in his stage performances of the number. This is very strange. Of course Rice blacked up when he performed the dance -- disguised himself as a black man. But wanting to wear the actual clothes of the man he learned the dance from takes us into a surreal realm -- suggesting a desire on Rice's part to go beyond disguise, beyond impersonation. It suggests that Rice wanted to appropriate the identity of the old black stable hand -- to be, for the time of the stage performance, an African-American.  Rice's impulse takes us forward to George Gershwin, a second-generation American Jew, born in Brooklyn, whose first big hit as a songwriter, "Swanee", a minstrel number, started the career of this quintessentially American composer, vaulting him squarely into the mainstream of American popular culture.  It takes us forward to Al Jolson, who became a different kind of performer when he blacked up, more natural, apparently more at ease in his own skin, which was actually somebody else's skin.  It takes us forward to Elvis Presley, wearing the "cat clothes" he bought at the hipster emporium in Memphis that catered primarily to blacks -- finding his truest self as an artist by appropriating the moves and the vocal style and the rhythmic sophistication of black performers. Black identity, it seems, has always been the transcendent American identity -- a kind of matrix in which the chaos of American diversity dissolves into freedom, deliverance from conflicting and confining cultural imperatives. Why? Perhaps because blacks had already done the heavy lifting in our culture -- creating a new style by fusing an "alien" African heritage with European forms . . . the process that gave us the spiritual, the blues, jazz and rock, the most American of American art forms. All of American culture proceeds from this kind of fusion, but it has always had its most dramatic and exemplary expression in African-American culture. When T. D. Rice bought the clothes of the black man whose dance so captured his imagination, he may have been expressing more than a desire to be that man, or to know what it felt like to be that man. He may have been recognizing, in some subterranean way, that as an American, creating a new culture in a new world, he already was that man.  No matter how it's analyzed, the phenomenon of white performers in blackface, literally or figuratively, remains unutterably strange -- but its flip side is even stranger. Louis Armstrong, unquestionably the greatest and most influential American popular artist of the 20th Century, adopted a stage persona from the minstrel tradition, with his wide-open, rolling eyes and ear-to-ear grin. He, too, it seems, had to "black up" in order to enter the mainstream of American culture. Tuesday, September 16
Monday, September 15
WATER
by
Lloydville
on Mon 15 Sep 2008 07:42 AM PDT
 There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" This is an excerpt from a commencement speech given a couple of years ago by the writer David Foster Wallace (above), who committed suicide this week at the age of 46. I don't know Wallace's writing, although it has quite a reputation, but I've been struck by many of the quotes from it that have appeared in various notices of his death.  The quote above is particularly resonant. It reminds me of Walter Benjamin's notion of the "phantasmagoria" associated with each age in history -- those dreams that a whole epoch dreams and can't recognize as dreams, because everyone is having them. He's referring to cultural assumptions so profound and so unexamined that they're simply experienced as part of the environment, like water, or air -- things noticed only when they're absent. (Curiously, Benjamin, pictured above, also committed suicide, in much different circumstances.) It seems to me that the principle task of any critic, of art or culture, is to discover the phantasmagoria of his or her time and disenchant people out of it -- so it can be seen. It is, as I've written before, a delicate task -- like letting a dreaming person know he's dreaming without waking him, because as soon as he awakens, his defenses, his unexamined assumptions about things, will reassert themselves.  Phantasmagorias exist in the regions of our culture unexamined or devalued by the official, that is to say, the conscious, culture. In the 20th Century, for example, the official culture dreamed that the Victorian Age had been left behind in Modernism's dust, and thus it could not see how the central art form of the age, movies, was essentially Victorian. The official culture dreamed that certain kinds of movies, like musicals, were frivolous and escapist, and thus could not see that they represented some of the century's most radical experiments in cinematic form. The official culture dreamed that Las Vegas was a vulgar cultural aberration, and thus could not see that it was the one place where the 20th Century was anticipating the future of our cities most perceptively (while also, paradoxically, keeping the Victorian tradition of the "universal exposition" alive.)  Image © Paul Kolnik These observations will seem like clichés a hundred years from now, in retrospect, when we've awakened from our current dreams. It's the job of a cultural critic to get inside our dreams while we're dreaming them. So how's the water where you are? Saturday, September 13
FILM NOIR REVISITED
by
Lloydville
on Sat 13 Sep 2008 02:53 AM PDT
 It's sometimes noted, quite correctly, that the artists who made what we now think of as the classic films noirs were entirely unfamiliar with the term, and indeed had no conception that they were working in a distinct tradition. They thought of the movies they were making as crime thrillers. This is occasionally cited in support of the idea that the term film noir is a category created by cinéastes after the fact, and therefore inauthentic, misleading. It certainly was created (or at least popularized) by cinéastes after the fact, but that doesn't mean it's inauthentic or misleading. Such a view fails to take into account how genres and traditions arise, which is a complex process -- a combination of historical and cultural trends, influence and imitation among artists, and simple commercial calculation. All these factors can combine to create distinct new forms, and in the case of film noir I think they did.  Two early films, which I would not call films noirs, nevertheless set the tone for the new form -- The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity. The Maltese Falcon was a fairly standard work of hardboiled detective fiction but it had a twist. In hardboiled detective fiction, the world might be a dark and messy place, but the detective had a code of honor which made a kind of grim moral sense amidst the darkness and the mess. Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon had such a code and he stuck by it -- but Huston allowed him more than a trace of doubt as to whether the code had any ultimate meaning, any ultimate value. This was something new in the crime thriller, in hardboiled detective fiction -- this hint of existential uncertainty. In Double Indemnity, essentially a domestic murder melodrama, Billy Wilder offered a portrait of middle-class American life that was unremitting in its bleakness, its moral vacuousness. I'm not sure that Wilder had any particular message to convey by this -- he just sensed that in the midst of the global horror of WWII audiences were looking for sterner stuff in their melodramas, a darker vision of ordinary life that would accord with the experience of civilization as a whole gone suddenly mad.  Both films were commercially successful -- proof that audiences were at the very least receptive to darker visions, to stories that raised the most disturbing (and unresolved) questions about morality and society. Both films were also well-received critically. This gave other film artists a kind of permission to experiment with similar themes -- within the confines of the crime thriller. They got very creative within those confines after WWII, when a generation of men scarred by war came home, and when the specter of nuclear annihilation became a reality for everyone. They didn't think, "We're going to create a new kind of existentially challenging crime thriller." They just inflected the crime thriller with a new mood. Audiences responded, and formulas began to solidify. Film artists imitated each other, got turned on by each other's work. Elements that worked in one film got incorporated into other films, given new twists. It was a combination of playing it safe commercially but also pushing things as far as they could go within familiar territory -- testing how much darkness the public really wanted. It turned out to be quite a lot -- so much so that that during the Fifties filmmakers began to realize that the darker themes could be incorporated into other genres besides the crime thriller, as they were, for example, in the domestic melodramas of Sirk, in the Westerns of Ford and Mann. When that happened, the classic film noir more or less played itself out. Its usefulness as a cultural escape valve had ended. Any kind of film in the Sixties could deal with existential angst, with moral bewilderment, with political or social criticism, in more direct terms. America had internalized the darkness of the film noir -- the resulting culture wars were just a matter of time. Film noir had a beginning in the global dislocations and moral derangement of WWII, and an end in the open social and political critiques of the Sixties. There had never been anything quite like film noir before WWII, and there has never been anything quite like it since the Sixties. It was, and remains, a distinct tradition. [With thanks to Tony D'Ambra at films noir for some thoughts that provoked the above meditation . . .] Friday, September 12
BIG STACK BLUES
by
Lloydville
on Fri 12 Sep 2008 12:56 AM PDT
 On the face of it, the total collapse of Barack Obama's momentum in his race for the Presidency seems puzzling -- but any poker player will find the phenomenon all too familiar. Obama doesn't know how to play a big stack in a no-limit tournament. He ran up an enormous lead in chips early on by taking chances -- positioning himself as a new kind of Democrat, one who'd risk it all to live up to his principles. Then, when he had the Democratic nomination locked up, coffers filled with contributions from millions of small-time donors energized by his boldness and courage, he changed his style of play -- cow-towed to the wicked Clintons, picked a safe running mate, started breaking his promises to his Progressive base. It happens every day at the poker table. A guy sits down, plays aggressively, builds a big stack -- then suddenly gets afraid of losing what he has and tightens up. Other players realize he's lost his nerve and begin bluffing him, stealing his blinds -- and his chips start dribbling away. When you play poker trying not to lose -- you lose.  John McCain, who's holding 7-2 off-suit, just pushed all his chips into the pot with the Sarah Palin stunt -- one of the most daring bluffs in the history of American politics. "Don't call me," McCain says, "or I'll accuse you of hating motherhood, small-town America and ordinary folks everywhere." Obama's holding a pair of Jacks. If he calls McCain, if he just states the plain truth that Sarah Palin is a religious extremist (when she's talking in church, if not on national television) and a compulsive liar, he wins. But, as I say, he's lost his nerve. He thinks that if he lays down his Jacks, he might get an even better hand on the next deal. He might, but that's not the point. You can't play poker when you've lost your nerve -- when you aren't willing to risk it all, especially against an obvious bluff. It's a lesson Democrats never seem to learn. Look for John McCain to win this particular tournament. [After writing the above I happened to read an old report in The New Yorker from the campaign trail in Mondale's race against Reagan in 1984. Polls showed that voters agreed with Mondale on the issues, when they were listed one by one, but that they liked Reagan better as a man. The Mondale camp decided that they had to just keep hammering away at the issues and not attack Reagan, for fear of offending those who liked him so much -- and because Mondale wasn't "comfortable" in the attack mode. In the election, Mondale carried his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.] Thursday, September 11
FRONTIER FEMINISM
by
Lloydville
on Thu 11 Sep 2008 04:05 AM PDT
 I've posted some harsh things here about Sarah Palin, but much as I fear -- and think everyone should fear -- what she might do if she ever got control of America's nuclear arsenal, I must confess that there's a part of me that loves her. Camille Paglia (pictured above), in the extraordinary article from Salon below, made me realize why I love her: New Blood For the Vampire You won't read anything like this article anywhere else in the national media -- it's an exhilarating exercise in free thought, a celebration of Sarah Palin by a liberal, atheist, dissident-feminist lesbian who hates John McCain, supports Barack Obama and is a passionate advocate of choice on the abortion issue. Paglia is dead wrong about many things but she's right about what Palin represents, at least in part -- America's frontier past, its real frontier past, in which women hauled their fair share of the freight, and then some.  I especially commend this article to my fellow progressives, who need to understand its profound insights if they're ever going to have a chance of electing politicians who represent their views . . . something I fear is not going to happen this time around. Sarah Palin may not be a good woman, or an honorable woman -- she may even be a very bad and a very dangerous woman . . . but she's the kind of woman who got the crops in before the hailstorm hit while her husband was passed out drunk in the barn, the kind of woman who saved America's sorry ass more times than America cares to remember. As Paglia argues, she represents a kind of frontier feminism that was getting its hands dirty with the hard work of the nation before feminism was an ideology you could subscribe to -- when it was something you had to live.  Credit where credit is due, folks. This is powerful stuff. There are, I suspect, millions of women who would be willing to endure four more years of economic catastrophe and international disgrace, indeed to sacrifice this nation's welfare for many decades to come, just to see that kind of feminism honored and respected. The impulse might be, in the larger context of things, irrational, self-destructive, borderline insane, but it's there and it's not going away. The chickens are coming home to roost. Wednesday, September 10
A CALENDAR GIRL FOR SEPTEMBER
by
Lloydville
on Wed 10 Sep 2008 12:11 AM PDT
 There's a lot more to cheerleading than sis-boom-bah . . . [Image by Al Moore for Esquire, 1950 . . .] Tuesday, September 9
HITCHCOCK AND LEWTON
by
Lloydville
on Tue 09 Sep 2008 01:42 AM PDT
 I've written before about the painting above by Arnold Böcklin, The Isle Of the Dead, which reportedly inspired some of the compositions in Hitchcock's Vertigo. It was an image that was important to Val Lewton, as well. A reproduction of it hangs on the wall of one of the interior sets in Lewton's I Walked With A Zombie, and of course Lewton made a film called Isle Of the Dead, which references the image more powerfully, in the film's setting. Lewton and Hitchcock had crossed paths before they made any of these films. Lewton was working as a story editor and assistant to David O. Selznick at the time Hitchcock made Rebecca for Selznick. I think Lewton learned a lot from Hitchcock on that film -- specifically how to create a mood of supernatural dread using only lighting and suggestion. Hitchcock learned from Lewton in return. Lewton's The 7th Victim has a very creepy scene (below) in which the heroine, home alone, is taking a shower behind a translucent curtain when suddenly the silhouette of an older woman materializes on the other side of the curtain, delivering an ominous warning.  The moment doesn't escalate into violence, as it does in Psycho, but the sense of surprise, of violation, of vulnerability is exactly the same. The similarity of the two scenes is too great to be coincidental -- and I think we can see Lewton's influence on another important Hitchcock film. The whole tone of Vertigo -- quiet, dreamlike, subtly, ambiguously ominous -- is far closer to the tone of Lewton's RKO horror films than it is to Rebecca, which is essentially a very classy and delicate rendition of the spooky atmosphere found in old-fashioned Gothic fiction. The house, with its ghost, haunts the heroine of Rebecca. In Lewton's films, and in Vertigo, the whole world is haunted, unhinged -- it has become a spooky maze with no exits. Hitchcock's innovation was to create Lewton's deranged dream world in color, in California sunshine -- which is ultimately much more unsettling. Monday, September 8
FROM THE ARCHIVES: REPORT FROM THE BEACH, 9 AUGUST 1998
by
Lloydville
on Mon 08 Sep 2008 01:30 AM PDT
I sent out irregular reports to friends about Ventura -- mostly meditations on place, a record of my exploration of the town and an attempt to create a myth about it for myself, as we always create myths about the places we live. Here's the first of those reports, from 9 August 1998: The beach at the end of my street isn't wide. At high tide the waves lap up against the embankment of rocks designed to keep them from the houses lined up like books on a shelf, facing the ocean. Sitting on one of these rocks at sunset I can look south and see the breakwater and the masts of Ventura Harbor, basically a man-made marina. North I can see the coastline for a few miles, curving inland in front of the city of Ventura then back out again to a headland of tall hills. There is often a lot of coastal mist at sunset. Sometimes the tops of the hills at the headland are covered in it. Sometimes the whole beach is shrouded and it's hard to make out a surf-fisher fifty yards away. All the permutations of the mist make for strange and shifting effects of the light when the sun goes down. The water I look out at is the Santa Barbara Channel, running between the mainland and the Channel Islands, which so far have always been hidden by the mist. The waves at the beach are not large or long but there are always surfers here. They wait out beyond the breakers, sitting still on their boards, sometimes for twenty minutes at a time, hoping for a good wave. They remind me of ducks then. Usually when a wave comes they are up and down in seconds. I think this must be an amateur or novice surfer's beach. Still, for those few seconds, riding upright on their boards, the surfers look bitchin', tuned into something awesome. The ocean. Sunday, September 7
HARD TIMES
by
Lloydville
on Sun 07 Sep 2008 03:23 AM PDT
 Alaska is a very rich state -- its coffers are overflowing . . . to the tune of a five billion-dollar surplus, mostly from oil-related revenues. It still somehow manages to get more money per capita from the federal government than any other state. (When Sarah Palin canceled the "bridge to nowhere", she didn't send the money back to Washington -- she just used it for other things in Alaska.) I doubt if Palin has ever visited the meaner streets of South Chicago, where Barack Obama did the community service she finds so laughable. It's possible that she's never met any truly, desperately poor people, unemployed, without health care, and no jobs, no hope in sight. She should take a few moments and listen to Stephen Foster's beautiful song "Hard Times", wonderfully sung by many people through the years but never better than by Bob Dylan on his album Good As I Been To You. It might touch her heart, and the hearts of all the soi-disant Christians who laughed along with her at an example of actual Christian charity. Saturday, September 6
IMAGE
by
Lloydville
on Sat 06 Sep 2008 01:37 AM PDT
 A lovely image of the lovely Dominique Sanda from The Conformist -- a film that it makes me happy just to think about. [With thanks to Moon In the Gutter . . .] Friday, September 5
ONE, TWO, THREE . . .
by
Lloydville
on Fri 05 Sep 2008 02:37 PM PDT
 The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson Honorable behavior in uniform doesn't necessarily translate into honorable (much less competent) behavior in public office. Look at Ulysses S. Grant, who presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in American history. It also doesn't translate into honorable behavior in one's personal life. Look at the way John McCain treated his first wife, the truly honorable American woman who waited for him and raised their children alone during his ordeal of captivity in North Viet Nam. If he's going to ask us to judge him on the basis of his honorable acts many decades ago, shouldn't we also take into account his dishonorable acts from the same era? Do we have any way of knowing which John McCain will show up to work at the Oval Office, especially given his record of inconsistency where political expediency is concerned? McCain opposed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy which he now supports. He opposed the off-shore drilling he now supports. He supported immigration reform which he now disowns. More importantly he once opposed the influence of the nutty wing of the religious right and now asks us to place a right-wing religious nut a heartbeat away from control of America's nuclear arsenal. Obama doesn't have a lot more political courage than McCain, and has made a disgraceful retreat from his support of the U. S. Constitution, but he also isn't selling himself as paragon of transcendent honor, and he doesn't have a running mate who sees the war in Iraq as "God's task". (End of debate for Sarah Palin, folks -- you can't argue with God.) Have you counted your spoons recently? Thursday, September 4
FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 04 Sep 2008 02:05 AM PDT
 I loved the way Sarah Palin mocked and derided Obama for his community service on the streets of Chicago, devoting himself to "the least of these" when he could have been making big money on Wall Street, or, if he wanted to be really noble, serving as the mayor of a suburb in the oil-rich state of Alaska. Palin, a self-described pit-bull with lipstick, must find Jesus's example of "community service" to the least of men downright hilarious, compared to the serious responsibility (and true charity) involved in getting streets paved for upwardly mobile Alaskans. In her speech she also said, "Hope is not a strategy." But isn't this the strategy that Jesus asked his followers explicitly to embrace? Wasn't it Saint Paul who said, ". . . for we are saved by hope"? Wasn't it Saint Peter who said, "Be prepared to give witness to the hope that is in you”? Isn't hope the very condition and ground of life for Christian believers -- not just a strategy but the strategy? It makes you wonder just what it is Sarah Palin likes about the Christianity she professes. Saint Paul also said, "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Having mocked hope and charity, what is Palin left with? Faith, I guess -- pinned like a cheap plastic crucifix to the pit-bull collar. Wednesday, September 3
SEA
by
Lloydville
on Wed 03 Sep 2008 05:05 PM PDT
 Eternal Father, strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep; Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea! Take a moment to rejoice that New Orleans has been delivered so far this year and hope for the best from storms to come . . . Tuesday, September 2
PAULINE KAEL, PROVOCATEUR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 02 Sep 2008 12:07 AM PDT
 Tom Sutpen, over at Illusion Travels By Streetcar, has recently posted a delightful recording of a talk, with a question-and-answer session, that Pauline Kael gave at UC Berkeley in 1968. Kael had just been hired as the film critic for The New Yorker and had just published her second book of collected criticism, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and she was full of beans.  The talk is a useful reminder of what good criticism is all about -- not being right, or consistent, or even terribly logical, but stimulating, challenging, and sometimes downright infuriating. Kael is remarkably honest about her ambitions as a critic. She wants to deflate pretension, shake up the common wisdom and promote the films she likes with polemical verve. She admits to withholding any negative reactions she might have to films she likes, lest this interfere with her promotion of them. She makes her critical biases perfectly clear -- she is interested in the sociology of the film audience and in the literary qualities of film content, and astonishingly unsympathetic to the visual aspect of cinema.  In the course of a thorough demolition of avant-garde and "underground" films (like Andy Warhol's Empire, above), she remarks that longer films "without synchronous sound" are basically unwatchable -- a direct contradiction of her love for many silent films. She says she has lost interest in Westerns because she's seen too many of them and their plots have become overly familiar. This is an odd sort of nonsense -- rather like an art critic saying she's lost interest in still-lifes because she's seen too many painted apples. (It must be noted, though, that in passing Kael aims a well-deserved shot at the "socially conscious" Western, which was already a tiresome cliché in 1968.) At a certain point in the talk you begin to realize that she's trying to make you angry, trying to shake you out of your complacency -- demanding that you create higher standards for movies and for your reactions to them. Even when she's talking nonsense, she gets your blood racing. Monday, September 1
THE PENALTY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 01 Sep 2008 01:19 AM PDT
 American popular literature has a long grotesque tradition, stretching back to Washington Irving, our first literary celebrity. It achieved its apotheosis, in terms of both sensationalism and art, in the work of Edgar Allen Poe -- and it migrated naturally into the exaggerated conventions of Victorian theater, and from there into movies. After WWI, and perhaps in part owing to the unprecedented horrors of that conflict, grotesque melodrama became a distinct genre in cinema, much as film noir became a distinct genre after the collective nightmare of WWII. Its power and prestige is best illustrated by the extraordinary popularity of Lon Chaney. One of the most celebrated stars of the silent era, he specialized almost exclusively in the genre of the grotesque. (He's seen above in and out of make-up for The Miracle Man.) In tracing the rise of the modern horror film from its roots in silent cinema, we can easily misconstrue the grotesque genre as it was experienced by early audiences. The Phantom Of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, proto-horror films starring Chaney, actually have more in common with a grotesque contemporary melodrama like The Penalty, also starring Chaney as a legless underworld crime boss -- and the three have more in common with each other than any of them has with Dracula, for example, with its supernatural elements, or even Frankenstein, with its elements of mad-science fiction.  The Phantom, the Hunchback, and the legless Blizzard from The Penalty are all disfigured men whose afflictions have rendered them terrifying, while not quite extinguishing the romantic souls within. It's hard not to see in this an echo of the many thousands of mutilated survivors of WWI, and a metaphor for the psyche of a world scarred by previously unimaginable battlefield carnage. The word grotesque does not quite describe the dramatic tone of The Penalty or the world it creates. Demented is closer to the mark. It does not present us with a vision of normality penetrated by grotesque elements -- it is set in a universe which has become unhinged at the core, and this nightmare universe is delineated matter-of-factly, as though its logic were the logic of the world as it is. This creates a wonderful, dreamy kind of surrealism, with great poetic force, and a delightful atmosphere of frisson -- but it is finally very disturbing. One is tempted for this very reason to dismiss it as lurid pulp, but one cannot -- mostly because of the authority of Chaney . . . the physical authority of his shockingly convincing impersonation of a legless man, and the artistic authority of his performance as the paradoxical Blizzard. We are given to drawing a distinction between silent film performers who "over-acted" and those who played in a more restrained and "modern" style. Chaney is usually considered more modern in this sense. But in truth, Chaney overacts in every frame of The Penalty, by modern standards. It's just that the broad strokes of his expressions and gestures are so grounded in psychological truth, so complex in their suggestiveness, so graceful and sublime in their execution, that we are swept beyond our modern expectations of what acting should be. We are experiencing screen performance as audiences of the time experienced it. The intimacy of the camera certainly did require a technical toning down of physical expression and gesture for actors coming from the stage -- much as a smaller theatrical venue would have for actors accustomed to playing huge auditoriums -- and there were certainly lunkheaded actors who couldn't pull this off. But most of the time, when we talk about the difference between over-acting and more naturalistic acting in silent films, we are simply noting the difference between bad acting and good acting.  One of Cocteau's great maxims was "You have to know when it's all right to go too far." Great silent film actors knew this -- and great modern actors know it, too. James Cagney and Jack Palance -- and Jack Nicholson, for that matter -- habitually overact by so-called modern standards, yet their performances still seem fresh and convincing, perfectly au courant. Daniel Day Lewis's performance in The Gangs Of New York, one of the very greatest performances ever committed to film, is as wild and over-the-top as any silent film performance ever was, and yet it is a work of complicated and compelling genius. The camera did allow a new breed of actors to step to the fore -- the minimalists, of whom Robert de Niro is probably the most astonishing. But Lon Chaney was no minimalist. He was an actor in the grand style -- and, quite simply, a supreme master of that style, consistently pitch-perfect, and consistently breathtaking. The delirious tale of The Penalty begins with a boy injured in a traffic accident, treated by an incompetent doctor who unnecessarily amputates both his legs. An older doctor covers for the younger physician's mistake, and the chastened bumbler goes on to an exemplary career in medicine. But the boy never forgets.  He grows up to be the crippled criminal mastermind Blizzard, played by Chaney, who amasses power, covets more, and plans his revenge -- on the doctor and on the world. | |||
