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May 10, 2005
TT: Entries from an unkept diary
- I was channel-surfing the other night and ran across Auto Focus, Paul Schrader's biopic about the unsolved murder of Bob Crane, the star of Hogan's Heroes. I didn't see it when it came out in 2002, so I watched the first part out of curiosity. At first I was struck by the concept--a straight-arrow radio host stumbles into sitcom stardom, learns that he can have pretty much anything he wants for the asking, and turns into a full-fledged sex addict--but within a half-hour or so I found myself growing bored. The problem, as is so often the case with fictionalized biography, is that life and art aren't the same thing. No matter how many liberties you take with the life of Bob Crane, you're still stuck in the end with a man who was either dull or ultimately unknowable, neither of which makes for an engrossing narrative.One of the best examples I know of a work of narrative art based on a real-life model is Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, a novel about a southern politician who at first glance closely resembles Huey Long. What sets All the King's Men apart from lesser works in the same genre is that Willie Stark isn't Huey Long, but a made-up character based on Huey Long. For the most part, his life, both interior and exterior, has been imagined, not adapted, which is one of the reasons why All the King's Men is a great novel, not a clever roman à clef.
So why don't more artists do the same thing? The answer, I realized as I watched Auto Focus, was put with devastating terseness in a review by Edwin Denby of Seventh Symphony, a ballet by Leonide Massine set to Beeethoven's Seventh Symphony: "Like a cigarette company, he is using famous names to advertise his wares."
I can't say it any better than that.
- As I listened to one of the bands that played at the wedding I attended last weekend, I leaned over to a friend and said, "The Eighties, woh, I missed out on all that." To which she crisply replied, "Consider yourself lucky."
I don't know about that, but I do know that I heard very little pop music between the early Eighties and the mid-Nineties, when Our Girl in Chicago took me in hand and made sure I had some knowledge of what was going on out there. Thanks to her unceasing efforts, as well as iMusic and the soundtracks of certain indie flicks and TV shows, I'm no longer completely at sea when my youngest friends make casual reference to the music they like. I was chatting the other day with a twenty-four-year-old woman who asked me out of the blue if I'd ever heard of Zero 7. "Oh, 'In the Waiting Line,' right?" I replied. She looked at me strangely, as if my gray hair had suddenly turned brown. Seized by a pang of integrity, I added, "Don't worry--I heard it on the soundtrack of Garden State. But I do like it!" We both laughed, no doubt for different reasons.
Be that as it may, I'm not at all sure that it was seemly for me to have recognized the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun" when the wedding band played it on Saturday, much less to have been aware that Erin McKeown was surely thinking of it when she wrote "Queen of Quiet," the first track on Distillation. I mean, I've already had my midlife crisis, right? Nor does it help that the only reason why I recognized it was that it plays over the credits of Grosse Pointe Blank, which just happens to be one of my favorite Nineties movies....
O.K., enough. When you're in a hole, stop digging. I am a middle-aged litterateur of taste, distinction, and elegance, and I wouldn't know Chan Marshall if I bumped into her on the street. I could definitely pick Ani DiFranco out of a lineup, though. (After all, she's a Righteous Babe!)
Posted May 10, 2005 12:03 PM
