Archives for September 2, 2003

This is the week I answer my post-vacation mail–I promise. Really. Last week I had to write and write and write, but this week I only have to write and write, so be patient and watch your mailbox for further details. In the meantime, welcome back to “About Last Night,” the 24/5 arts blog. I took yesterday off and planned not to write a lot today, but as usual the bit got caught between my teeth, so here are today’s topics, from peculiar to commonplace: (1) Will the real Harvey Pekar please fess up? (2) Another round of “In the Bag,” with a tip of the hat to my fellow baggers. (3) A date which will not live in infamy. (4) The latest almanac entry.

For those of you who were gone last week (and I know some of you were, lucky stiffs), much of what appeared on “About Last Night” during your absence is still visible–just keep scrolling down. If you’ve been gone longer than that, jump over to the top of the right-hand column and click on the archives link and you can browse and sluice at your leisure.

More tomorrow, as always, but in the meantime, let’s get that site meter bouncing, O.K.? Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com, one at a time or en masse–the choice is yours.

I saw, and loved, American Splendor, not least because of Hope Davis’ pitch-perfect performance as Joyce, Harvey Pekar’s penny-plain sourpuss of a wife. (It happens that I’d also seen Davis the night before in The Secret Lives of Dentists, and seeing two of her films back to back left me more sure than ever that she is the finest actress to come out of the indie-flick world–better even than Parker Posey, though I hate to admit it.)

What makes American Splendor so good is not its postmodern switching between “Harvey Pekar” the character and Harvey Pekar the bonafide on-screen weirdo himself–that aspect of the film borders on the cutesy–but the clarity and humor with which it portrays the grubby melancholy of lower-middle-class urban life. In that respect, the films it most reminded me of were Ghost World (no big surprise there) and (here comes the curve ball) One Hour Photo, a considerably more thoughtful movie than was generally realized when it came out last year.

At the same time, I think it should be pointed out that the “Harvey Pekar” of American Splendor is a semi-fictional character, and that a movie about the real Harvey Pekar might well have been even more interesting than American Splendor, if less touching. Yes, Harvey the celebrated author of autobiographical comic books and “Harvey” the fictional author of autobiographical comic books both spent a quarter-century working at crappy jobs at the Cleveland VA hospital, survived cancer, razzed David Letterman on camera, found love, and started a family. But the real Harvey Pekar is not simply some hapless record-collecting schlub from Cleveland who decided one day to write comic books about his working-class life. He is also a full-fledged left-wing intellectual–homemade, to be sure, but the shoe still fits–who reviews books for the Village Voice and does regular commentaries on NPR. (Search his name on Google and you’ll find, among many other things, his thoughts on Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which is about as eggheady as it gets.) You’ll learn nothing of this from watching American Splendor, or even from reading Pekar’s slightly faux-naif blog.

None of which invalidates the movie–it has its own expressive validity independent of the man whose life it purports to portray. Still, it should be kept firmly in mind that in creating “Harvey Pekar,” the makers of American Splendor–not to mention Harvey Pekar himself–scissored out inconvenient biographical details whose inclusion in the film would doubtless have caused it to make a radically different impression on many people. “Harvey” is a weird but nonetheless convincingly common man whose plight really does come across as more or less universal. Harvey is…well, something else again. To put it mildly. And then some.

Bloggers all up and down the right-hand column have been playing “In the Bag” lately. Modern Art Notes seems to have been first to take up the cudgel, but after that it spread like kudzu throughout the blogosphere. Since imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, I’m flattered–so here we go again.

First, a quick review of the rules for those of you just joining us. “In the Bag” is my private variation of the old desert-island game. In this version, the emphasis is on immediate and arbitrary preference. You can stuff five works of art into your bag before departing for that good old desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering–the secret police are banging on the front door. No posturing–you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how dumb they may sound. What do you put in the bag?

As of this moment, here are my picks:

NOVEL: W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

PAINTING: John H. Twachtman, Winter Harmony

PAINTING: Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room

POP SONG: Aimee Mann, Deathly

FILM: Nicholas Ray, On Dangerous Ground

Over to you.

P.S. If you’re wondering why I put two paintings in the bag this week, by the way, the answer is, I just felt like it.

I have now gone an entire calendar year without listening to any minimalist music whatsoever.

Go thou and do likewise.

“The amateur painter is in general a cultivated man who has discovered the pleasures of painting and pursues it as recreation and sport. The approach he adopts may be a form of Impressionism, or even of Abstraction, depending on his age group and education, but it will necessarily be a thoroughly familiar one. He is interested in playing a fascinating game, not in making up new rules. He is visiting a world already explored by other painters rather than creating and imposing a world of his own. His real originality has already found its expression elsewhere. Otherwise he would long ago have quit his own profession for that of painter, as Gauguin gave up a career on the stock exchange in his pursuit of art. The price of originality is undivided love.”

Maurice Grosser, Critic’s Eye