December 2008 Archives

Have You Seen...? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films by David Thomson
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1024 pp)
For a thinker with writerly titles (Warren Beatty And Desert Eyes), this literalism goes kerplunk. And the organizing conceit (1,000 films sequenced alphabetically by title, 1200 thoughtful words per), is even more humdrum. But conceits are for shredders, and Thomson cheats with glee: he's not recommending each and every film, he's listing a body of work worth talking about even when popular taste eludes him (like The Graduate). Typically fearsome, he recommends Platoon without blinking, and rejects Planet of the Apes. He assigns choice descriptions to key writers (James Ellroy's novels are "crammed and hectic"), and notes how time works on cliched homilies (regarding It's a Wonderful Life, he says "since 1946, the United States has come to resemble Pottersville far more than Bedford Falls...") Choice daggers of invective slay the loftiest talents: Last Tango in Paris "...may be the picture where he is really being Marlon Brando, hunching up in stupid self-pity and behaving like a jerk." Each entry teems with imaginary sidebars and parentheticals leading you further astray, and scores of cinematographers, production designers, script doctors and other offstagers get contextualized. Sentences scan beautifully, each detail pressing Thomson's interpretations further. Some epigrams leap out tombstone-ready: David Lynch's Blue Velvet becomes "Beowulf at the International House of Pancakes." The botched title is mild compared to the nixed index, which for a Knopf book this handsomely produced amounts to criminal omission. Somebody put everything from this and his Biographical Dictionary online and make it all searchable. Now yer talking.

Tim DeChristopher (best header: LAST AUCTION HERO, Grist magazine) now represented by former Better Land Management lawyer Patrick Shea.

I have two new obsessions: twitter, and all its flotsam, and I forget the other one.

This NYTimes article ran WITHOUT LINKS, making it that all-too typical "norm" in newsprint "web coverage," good reporting that doesn't get you where you want to go:

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"Something very vital indeed, something revolutionary happened to American culture during the 1930s..."--Francis O'Connor

First, a comment: Does anybody really think the economy would be in this much trouble if we HADN'T been spending $10b/month in Iraq? How come nobody's asking THAT question?

ARTICLES OF THE WEEK

Ed Ward reviews Ted Gioia's Delta Blues in Truthdig

Anil Dash on music industry, Dylan

Tom Carson on Veep "Angler" Cheney

AD LINE OF THE WEEK: TIE

Colon Cleansing A Scam ? - www.ColonCleansingDiaries.com - Read this Colon Cleansing Review Before WastingYour Money. (Google email ticker ad)

WHOPPERS VIRGINS AGREE: BURGER KING WINS (Burger King TV ad)

GAG OF THE WEEK
Lessons in Subliminal Subterfuge (McSweeney's)

"In his adivce to the players Hamlet says that the purpose of playing is to hold 'the mirror up to nature' (3.2.20). But the metadrama of modernity does, in a way, the opposite. It holds nature up to a mirror, and it believes the mirror. Never more than when it juxtaposes stage death and real death on the stage--and real death wins.
--Marjorie Garber, in Shakespeare and Modern Culture, a way-too-literal title for writing this ideas-per-sentence rich.

True, the damage wrought by the Weatherpeople is trivial compared with the war itself and has arguably been more thoroughly denounced. After all, John McCain most likely killed civilians while bombing Vietnam, and he got to run for president as a war hero. Henry Kissinger is fawned upon wherever he goes. I'd be happy to forget all about the Weatherpeople, many of whom have done good things with their lives since. But if we're going to talk about them-- and Ayers can't leave it alone-- let's tell the truth. Of all the sectarian groups from that era , Weather, in all its permutations, was the least effective and the most destructive to the movement. It was all about the romance of itself. And it still is.--Katha Pollitt in the Nation

Sasha Frere-Jones
Culture Bully's Top Ten Music Vids

I. Greil Marcus returns Real Life Top Ten to The Believer, where it originated in its imaginary early issues. (Trail of broken dreams: Village Voice, artforum, Salon, City Pages.) Snake in the grass.

B. notes on The Shield finale: Chiklis as skilled actor who takes on a magnificent character and doesn't let Vic dwarf him, while dwarfing everybody else on screen. That bullet baldie look is so symbolic you forget about it while constantly questioning you own sympathies for this monster. (Two autistic kids, that's as rich as one of Woody Allen's blind priests.) But even beyond Mackey, Whitey Bulger with a badge, comes the plot, a mass of blind alleys and twisted allegiances where few respect the law less than the cops, thugs, politicians and ordinary civvies. You wanted more of Dutch's serial killer fleshed out, at least a BODY for chrissakes, but that transaction with Steve's lawyer made for heady contrast to his makeout session with Danni last season. CCH Pounder is the new Yaphet Kotto, somebody put her on the big screen next to Helen Mirren. And when Mackey reaches for his gun in the final sequence, you realize what he does: that he can simply go on as before, one deal gone south is nothing to his experience and appetite for narcissistic self-destruction. Where is the major essay on this material?

...A 1929 editorial ridiculed the fact that a statue erected in Grant Park to honor American Indians had given them horses of a sort that never roamed "over the plains that are now Illinois, or anywhere else on this continent." And throughout its run the magazine took it upon itself to defend Chicago from those who claimed it was overrun by crime, it stank, its government was corrupt, its streets were wind-beaten. So went the litany at the time. "Chicago," declared one editorial, "happens to be, by common consent of the writing gentry, the Gomorrah of the moment." The magazine thundered against such calumny, defending the city's "gusto and glamour" in issue after issue... (Matt Weiland, NYTimes)

Neil Harris author interview
Chicagoan covers gallery

from obituary for Doris Dungey: "Tanta argued that for every asset that banks unloaded on the government, the chief executives should be required to explain "why they acquired or originated this asset to begin with, what's really wrong with it in detail, what they have learned from this experience, and what steps they are taking to make sure it never happens again."