Archives for October 5, 2005

The soil now gets a rumpling soft and damp,

And small regard to the future of any weed.

The final flat of the hoe’s approval stamp

Is reserved for the bed of a few selected seed.

Wind goes from farm to farm in wave on wave,

But carries no cry of what is hoped to be.

There may be little or much beyond the grave,

But the strong are saying nothing until they see.

Robert Frost, “The Strong Are Saying Nothing”

The soil now gets a rumpling soft and damp,

And small regard to the future of any weed.

The final flat of the hoe’s approval stamp

Is reserved for the bed of a few selected seed.

Wind goes from farm to farm in wave on wave,

But carries no cry of what is hoped to be.

There may be little or much beyond the grave,

But the strong are saying nothing until they see.

Robert Frost, “The Strong Are Saying Nothing”

Count me overjoyed, elated, and ecstatic that the early word on the Wallace and Gromit movie is positive:

“Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” has forced me to ponder the deepest mysteries of cinema. Why, for instance, do certain faces haunt and move us as they do?

I am thinking of Gromit, the mute and loyal animated dog whose selflessness and intelligence can be counted on, when things get really crazy, to save the day. Gromit has no mouth, and yet his face is one of the most expressive ever committed to the screen. In particular, his brow–a protuberance overhanging his spherical, googly eyes–is an almost unmatched register of emotion. Resignation, worry, tenderness and disgust all come alive in that plasticine nub. To keep matters within the DreamWorks menagerie, you might compare Gromit to Shrek, who has the genetic advantages of Mike Myers’s Scots burr, a bevy of celebrity-voiced sidekicks and rivals, and state-of-the-art computer-animation technology. Good for him. But Gromit, made by hand and animated by a painstaking stop-motion process, has something Shrek will never acquire in a hundred sequels: a soul.

I had a good feeling about this, and not only on the basis of “The Wrong Trousers” and the other delightful shorts. When I somewhat unaccountably went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory over the summer, the high point of the screening was, by a very wide margin, the trailer for Were-Rabbit.

Count me overjoyed, elated, and ecstatic that the early word on the Wallace and Gromit movie is positive:

“Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” has forced me to ponder the deepest mysteries of cinema. Why, for instance, do certain faces haunt and move us as they do?

I am thinking of Gromit, the mute and loyal animated dog whose selflessness and intelligence can be counted on, when things get really crazy, to save the day. Gromit has no mouth, and yet his face is one of the most expressive ever committed to the screen. In particular, his brow–a protuberance overhanging his spherical, googly eyes–is an almost unmatched register of emotion. Resignation, worry, tenderness and disgust all come alive in that plasticine nub. To keep matters within the DreamWorks menagerie, you might compare Gromit to Shrek, who has the genetic advantages of Mike Myers’s Scots burr, a bevy of celebrity-voiced sidekicks and rivals, and state-of-the-art computer-animation technology. Good for him. But Gromit, made by hand and animated by a painstaking stop-motion process, has something Shrek will never acquire in a hundred sequels: a soul.

I had a good feeling about this, and not only on the basis of “The Wrong Trousers” and the other delightful shorts. When I somewhat unaccountably went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory over the summer, the high point of the screening was, by a very wide margin, the trailer for Were-Rabbit.

“So what this writer impressed on me was the fundamental importance of time management, of routine in the life of a writer, that you had to use routine like a tool, like a fulcrum and lever for heavy lifting.”

Michael Ruhlman, House: A Memoir

“So what this writer impressed on me was the fundamental importance of time management, of routine in the life of a writer, that you had to use routine like a tool, like a fulcrum and lever for heavy lifting.”

Michael Ruhlman, House: A Memoir

A few weeks back I reviewed Caryl Phillips’s new novel, Dancing in the Dark, for the Baltimore Sun. (In print it appeared right alongside Lizzie Skurnick’s review of On Beauty. The bloggers are taking over! We are your overlords.) It didn’t appear on the website, so I can’t provide a link–but I can cut and paste! I liked the book a good deal more than Brooke Allen, who registered respectful disappointment in the NYTBR last weekend. Until near the end of the novel, I actually thought I agreed with some of Allen’s misgivings, but the denouement utterly changed my mind about the entire book.

Dancing in the Dark is a fictional account of the life of Bert Williams, a black American vaudeville performer who found theatrical fame by portraying, in blackface, a character that amounted to a racist caricature. Here’s some of what I wrote for the Sun:

One of the most famous entertainers to don blackface on the American stage was a black man. He was Bert Williams, a native West Indian who emigrated to the U.S. with his parents as a boy and became half of the vaudeville team Williams and Walker, the first black performers to make it to Broadway. In Dancing in the Dark, Caryl Phillips ventures to imagine the unknown inner life of this enigmatic historical figure. What his keen novelist’s eye discerns behind the multiple masks Williams wore is quietly harrowing.

…The existence of Phillips’s Bert Williams is a trial. We sense this even before we know of the compromises that make it so difficult. From the outset, the prose has a somber, almost funereal timbre–the antithesis of the low comedy that characterizes Bert’s “foolish blackface antics” on stage. A bracing tonal chiaroscuro results from this juxtaposition of the “clownish roughness and loud vulgarity” that he projects and the profound gravity he contains. Bert cultivates this distance between outside and inside, as though a private existence of monkish reserve could cancel out the exaggerated exuberance of his stage persona.

…The power of Dancing in the Dark builds slowly and almost imperceptibly as Bert shuffles from mirror to stage to mirror again, rubbing away a little more of himself each time he removes his makeup. Together, the book’s somberness and its intricate introspection make for a sometimes glacial pace. But the reader’s patience is ultimately rewarded. All of the tensions and contradictions engendered by Bert’s situation are released in the crises at the end of the novel, and with them comes a world of feeling that has been dammed up to bursting.

On one hand, Bert’s black audience grows increasingly disapproving of his trademark character. In expressing their unease, they merely echo the reservations that he has silently harbored from the first time the burnt cork touched his skin. But in an astonishingly moving scene, Bert, having been confronted with objections that he shares, finds himself defending the character he plays–“he shuffles a little, and he may be slow-witted, but we surely recognize this poor man. The essence of my performance is that we know and sympathize with this unfortunate creature.”

On the other hand, the white audience whose approval underwrites Bert’s livelihood will tolerate no divergence from the caricature they adore. Emboldened by the examples of the proud black professionals and activists around him in Harlem, Bert seizes an opportunity to perform on film without his makeup. The cold reception with which this is met leaves him a lost man for whom all the pathos of the ordinary has-been is multiplied by the baleful effects of racism, politics, and self-loathing.

There were times, I’ll admit again, when the novel almost lost me, it was so slow-moving and lugubrious. But it all added up, I thought, to something pretty amazing.

A few weeks back I reviewed Caryl Phillips’s new novel, Dancing in the Dark, for the Baltimore Sun. (In print it appeared right alongside Lizzie Skurnick’s review of On Beauty. The bloggers are taking over! We are your overlords.) It didn’t appear on the website, so I can’t provide a link–but I can cut and paste! I liked the book a good deal more than Brooke Allen, who registered respectful disappointment in the NYTBR last weekend. Until near the end of the novel, I actually thought I agreed with some of Allen’s misgivings, but the denouement utterly changed my mind about the entire book.

Dancing in the Dark is a fictional account of the life of Bert Williams, a black American vaudeville performer who found theatrical fame by portraying, in blackface, a character that amounted to a racist caricature. Here’s some of what I wrote for the Sun:

One of the most famous entertainers to don blackface on the American stage was a black man. He was Bert Williams, a native West Indian who emigrated to the U.S. with his parents as a boy and became half of the vaudeville team Williams and Walker, the first black performers to make it to Broadway. In Dancing in the Dark, Caryl Phillips ventures to imagine the unknown inner life of this enigmatic historical figure. What his keen novelist’s eye discerns behind the multiple masks Williams wore is quietly harrowing.

…The existence of Phillips’s Bert Williams is a trial. We sense this even before we know of the compromises that make it so difficult. From the outset, the prose has a somber, almost funereal timbre–the antithesis of the low comedy that characterizes Bert’s “foolish blackface antics” on stage. A bracing tonal chiaroscuro results from this juxtaposition of the “clownish roughness and loud vulgarity” that he projects and the profound gravity he contains. Bert cultivates this distance between outside and inside, as though a private existence of monkish reserve could cancel out the exaggerated exuberance of his stage persona.

…The power of Dancing in the Dark builds slowly and almost imperceptibly as Bert shuffles from mirror to stage to mirror again, rubbing away a little more of himself each time he removes his makeup. Together, the book’s somberness and its intricate introspection make for a sometimes glacial pace. But the reader’s patience is ultimately rewarded. All of the tensions and contradictions engendered by Bert’s situation are released in the crises at the end of the novel, and with them comes a world of feeling that has been dammed up to bursting.

On one hand, Bert’s black audience grows increasingly disapproving of his trademark character. In expressing their unease, they merely echo the reservations that he has silently harbored from the first time the burnt cork touched his skin. But in an astonishingly moving scene, Bert, having been confronted with objections that he shares, finds himself defending the character he plays–“he shuffles a little, and he may be slow-witted, but we surely recognize this poor man. The essence of my performance is that we know and sympathize with this unfortunate creature.”

On the other hand, the white audience whose approval underwrites Bert’s livelihood will tolerate no divergence from the caricature they adore. Emboldened by the examples of the proud black professionals and activists around him in Harlem, Bert seizes an opportunity to perform on film without his makeup. The cold reception with which this is met leaves him a lost man for whom all the pathos of the ordinary has-been is multiplied by the baleful effects of racism, politics, and self-loathing.

There were times, I’ll admit again, when the novel almost lost me, it was so slow-moving and lugubrious. But it all added up, I thought, to something pretty amazing.