Pages tagged “issue 39”

Another book on the meaning of Marge

Make extra room on the bookshelf for another cultural-studies analysis on the significance of The Simpsons. Tim Delaney aims to show how Springfield is relevant to contemporary culture, and with this easy target, I guess he succeeds.

But his approach reads like a cross between a middle-school sociology textbook (here’s a definition of “extreme sports”) and an encyclopedia of sober plot summaries sorted by societal characteristic (here are episodes that feature skateboarding).

For a beginning student of both the show and sociology, Delaney’s book may be an approachable starting point. For the rest of us, Simpsonology lacks the fanboy minutia and obsessive analysis to reveal the show’s larger meanings—if there really are any.

After all, The Simpsons’ biggest accomplishment is that it has kept us laughing for 19 seasons and more than 400 shows. As Homer once said, “Oh Marge, cartoons don’t have any deep meaning. They’re just stupid drawings that give you a cheap laugh.”

Hellhound on the trail

Is the Mississippi Delta really the birthplace of the blues? Forgive the heresy, but maybe not.

Marybeth Hamilton suggests that the Delta’s enshrinement as the Eden of the blues is actually a piece of mythmaking that was perpetuated by a few obsessive blues-record collectors who lived in New York City in the 1950s. These white boys comprised a Blues Mafia that feverishly championed the recordings of a few previously obscure bluesmen (notably Charley Patton and Robert Johnson) who hailed from the Delta.

Musicians in other cradles—Storyville, W.C. Handy’s parlor—failed to fire the romantic imagination like the avatar conjured by these critics, the hell-haunted, ferociously talented, unbowed, vagabond black bluesman striding alone over the wide, flat Delta. This image took root in the American mind, and then leaped the Atlantic, landing on the turntables of kids named Richards and Jagger and Clapton and Page.

Hamilton offers a book worthy of consideration and debate, a well-written and researched inspection of blues, bluesmen, and American mythmaking.

High over the earth, in style

Over the years, I’ve heard many Southern writers of my generation talk about Barry Hannah’s 1978 short-story collection Airships in terms that mirror the way it struck me—as a great upheaval of our literary expectations, a liberating force. Reading it was such sheer fun that it made you want to have a go at writing fiction yourself, especially with the boundaries suddenly expanded. For many of us, the book has long since hardwired itself into our concept of the possibilities of language.

So much of Airships’ impact is in its style. Hannah’s language is audacious, bracing and insistent, often at the ragged brink of control. Words flash in ways no one had thought of before. Not ever.

Raymond Chandler—who knew more than a little about the subject—saw style as more than gloss and show. It is, Chandler claimed, deeply related to a writer’s truest substance, “a product of the quality of his emotion and perception.” Which is exactly why the explosion of language in Airships is not just fireworks, though there is plenty of dazzle to be enjoyed. Strings of words pop and crackle as if they were an entire pack of Black Cats set alight. And sometimes sentences detonate in larger ways, like the satisfying, whomping spout of yellow flame that comes from a dangerous overloading of White Rain in your tater gun.

But underneath the flash is a deeply Southern sensibility that’s also bitterly and hilariously critical of its fundamental culture and its too-frequently deluded inhabitants. Hannah can enlighten or eviscerate in one or two little strokes of grammar. In one story, a Confederate in Pennsylvania sums up the lost feeling of many soldiers when they went from repelling an invasion to committing one: “We’re just bandits and maniacal.” In another story, a 70-year-old man falls off of a party boat into the Hudson River and swims back to the city. His reaction to survival is this: “I’m horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop?” Later in the book, a man is described as “an intellectual in real estate.” Try honing your contempt so keen and precise as those five words.

The stories are often brief outbursts only a few pages long, the characters grotesque and romantic, with all their epic and pathetic desires and prejudices on vivid display. Though the style is in-your-face aggressive, sadness and pain and comedy are the dominant moods.

What Airships did for a whole generation was slap us in the face with its compelling voices and the notion that, yes, there are ways of being a Southern writer whereby one might joyously claim the freedom to take dead mules and busted up chiffarobes a little less seriously than had been the custom.

Release Date: Feb. 29
Director/Writer: Brett Morgen
Head of Animation: Joao G. Amorim
Starring [voices]: Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo, Nick Nolte, Roy Scheider
Studio/Run Time: Roadside Attractions, 103 mins.

Rabble-rousing documentary finds lessons in 1968

Short on nuance but long on passion, Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 takes a loud, rock-laden look at the protests that shook the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and the personalities that led the revolt: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and their band of irreverent troublemakers, who came to be known as the Chicago 7. Morgen not only uses new math, but he also recreates the gradual boil-over from peaceful gathering to chaos by augmenting ample, close-range footage with the kind of sonic boom that seldom accompanies political documentaries. And where he lacks footage—namely for the circus of a trial that followed the riot—he conjures the scene with striking digital animation.

The “yippies” who gathered in Chicago objected to Lyndon Johnson’s support of the Vietnam War, and that’s as deep as Morgen goes into the politics. He’s created a portrait of action, not policy, sending a simple message to his present-day audience: if you don’t like what your government is doing, get off your ass. He’s taken Hoffman not only as a protagonist but as a model, which may explain why he counterintuitively uses so much recent music—the movie’s only blatant connection to 2008.

Watch the trailer for Chicago 10:

Life. Death. Can’t have one without the other

Did you know that the human ability to exactly duplicate foreign sounds is lost after age 12? That IQ usually peaks by the time we turn 25? That 40 percent of women grow hair on their upper lip by age 55? That we’re already dying once our life begins?

Author David Shields peppers his ninth book with tidbits such as these, but this tome is more than a rehashing of long-forgotten biology lessons: It’s a kind of love/hate letter to his 97-year-old father who refuses to go gently into that good night. (At age 86, he suffered a heart attack while playing tennis—but finished the match before going to a doctor.)

Shields meticulously weaves family anecdotes with what great thinkers (among them Schopenhauer, Voltaire) and celebrities (including Woody Allen and the Phoenix Suns’ Steve Nash) have said about aging and death. The thing about this book, happily, is that it turns out to be surprisingly more uplifting than moribund.

Lebanese director’s full-length debut sweet as its title, but not as sticky

Release Date: Feb. 1
Director: Nadine Labaki
Writers: Labaki, Jihad Hojeily, Rodney Al Haddad
Cinematographer: Yves Sehnaoui
Starring: Labaki, Yasmine Al Masri, Gisele Aouad, Joanna Moukarzel, Sihame Haddad
Studio/Run Time: Roadside Attractions, 95 mins.

Caramel focuses on five conflicted women in the emotional crucible of a Beirut beauty salon. Nisrine is engaged to a man who doesn’t know she’s not a virgin. Jamale is a struggling actress. Rima secretly likes girls; Rose has forsaken romance to care for her mentally ill sister (played with mischievous aplomb by Aziza Semaan); and Layale (writer/director Nadine Labaki) is having an affair with a feckless married man. The film is compulsively watchable, thanks to the radiantly amateur cast. Caramel is also poignant when these women’s desires founder on the crags of a youth-obsessed, patriarchal society, like when we learn that the age-obsessed Jamale is faking her menstrual cycles. But the narrative feels strangely inert. The conflicts don’t arise and resolve within the plot; they bookend it, and only Layale’s is meaningfully resolved, an incongruous structure in an otherwise resolutely traditional staging. This uneasy mixture of filmic classicism and narrative stagnancy is exacerbated by Khaled Mouzanar’s Philip Glass-lite score, which always tells us exactly how to feel, as if the characters weren’t already doing so themselves.

Watch the trailer for Caramel:

New pulp-fiction collection covers the waterfront

The story starts like this: While thumbing through some stacks of paperbacks in a Paris bookstall, Yank writer Barry Gifford came across quite a few titles by fellow American Jim Thompson—in French. Seems publisher Gallimard’s Serie Noire had been producing the pulpmaster’s books all along, while here at home his work had long since gone out of print.

Back in the States and determined to rectify the situation, Gifford got with Don Ellis, head of West Coast publisher Creative Arts, and formed an imprint called Black Lizard. The rest, as they say, is literary history.

Before its acquisition by Random House, Black Lizard would publish some 80 works of the most hard-boiled fiction ever written. The house, it could be argued, single-handedly revived interest not only in the works of Jim Thompson, but in scribes such as David Goodis and James M. Cain, two once incredibly well-known writers whose works had also, for the most part, fallen out of print.

Well, ante up crime fiction fans, and buckle down for another chapter in the story. Black Lizard’s back with a whole new twist—The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. And get this—it’s big enough to start a third resurgence in hard-boiled history. Actually, this baby might be as big as history itself. At 1,100-plus pages, it’s almost as voluminous, and just as bloody.

You know about the pulps. Named for the paper on which the tales were printed, pulps came cheap at a time when life seemed to come even cheaper, through Prohibition and The Depression. In other words, when things were tough and expected to get tougher.

The toughest imprint of them all was Black Mask. Founded in 1920 by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to bankroll their fledgling Smart Set literary magazine, Black Mask was then flipped for a handsome profit after only eight issues. But the publication really came of age in ’23, when Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” introduced us to the notion of a hard-boiled detective. A month later, Daly’s Race Williams showed it could be done in a series. That same year, by circumstance, Dashiell Hammett debuted his pulp character Continental Op, and the world’s been cracking wise ever since.

The pulpists took a lone man—and it was nearly always a man—and tossed him into what Chandler so succinctly described as “streets that [were] dark with something more than night.” So, too, were those lone protagonists dark, their troubles marrowed to a bleakness that mirrored the grinding cities where they lived: New York and Chicago with their teaming hustle of hopelessness; L.A. with its dream decidedly deferred. Even so, these wolves never succumbed either to hopelessness or deferment, of any kind. Instead they went boldly into that bad night, battling injustice with a wit and savvy most surely envied in the breadlines that snaked through the nation.

Pulp’s back-alley princes put black-and-white where all seemed before only a slate of grey. In pulp, there was good, and there was evil. If sometimes the good guy had to slither over to the side of evil, well, he did so for all the right reasons. Mostly though, he did, and—in a land where men couldn’t do much about their lot—such resolute action made him a hero.

Of all the scribblers Black Lizard initially brought back into print, the two Cains are the only names to recur in The Big Book of Pulps. There’s Paul Cain (aka Peter Ruric, née George Carrol Sims), whose “One, Two, Three” reads so much like a movie you can hear the narrator’s voice thick in your skull. And there’s the immortal James M. Cain, he of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, who here spills the tale of a man undone by both the obligatory femme fatales and then by his own smart self.

Chandler and Hammett, of course, are well represented in The Big Book, with three works from each, including a previously unpublished(!) story Dashiell called “Faith.” This one’s all about a chuckler who’s seen worse, and fully expects to see worse still—even if he’s gotta bad it out himself.

Welcome, too, is the three-piece from Cornell Woolrich, as well as the trio from Erle Stanley Gardner, perhaps pulpdom’s most prolific scribe. Gardner’s “Honest Money” features Ken Corning, precursor to the enormously successful Perry Mason (80 books, 300 million sold, a subsequent nine-year TV series that made Raymond Burr a household name).

But beyond the best-known bylines, this kickass omnibus gives us an opportunity to rediscover talents most of us never knew existed: former flatfoot Leslie T. White (“The City of Hell!”), whose novel Harness Bull became the Edward G. Robinson star vehicle Vice Squad; Brit-born Charles G. Booth (“Stag Party”), who Oscarred for the story to The House on 92nd Street; and Steve Fisher (“You’ll Always Remember Me”), who not only big-screened with his classic I Wake Up Screaming, but went on to script such TV hits as Starsky and Hutch, McMillan & Wife, and Barnaby Jones.

In fact, the pulps—and the pulpists—have left a memorable mark on pop culture. Every one of Hammett’s novels save The Thin Man was first serialized by Black Mask, and if you meet a writer of any stripe who claims not to have read—let alone seen—The Maltese Falcon, well, you’ve met yourself a liar (or worse, a truthful hack). Horace McCoy (“Frost Rides Alone”) wrote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the book that became the basis for the controversial 1970 Sydney Pollack film of that name. Leslie Charteris (“The Invisible Millionaire”), not only scripted the Sherlock Holmes radio series featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, he also just happens to be the creator of Simon Templar, better known as The Saint.

At a penny a word, what else could these writers do but branch out as widely as possible into the public pantheon? What’s most interesting, though, is, even at such a lowly scale, the pulpists never padded their work. Sure Captain Joseph T. Shaw, the main editor behind the Black Mask boys, favored ‘economy of expression’ and ‘authenticity in character and action.’ Hell, he probably provoked it. Yet why not stretch a story into at least a living wage?

Because you can’t sugarcoat a bruise, that’s why. These lean and mean and essential scribes couldn’t have lived with themselves if they had.

The Outback? Far out

It’s the social revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. Seven-year-old Che has been kidnapped by a hippie named Dial Well (if “kidnapping” is a term that can be used when a child is taken to see his radical mother).

In a series of dramatic turns, Che and Dial find themselves in a commune in sweltering Australia. Stripped from his restrictive yet cushy life with his “Upper East Side” grandmother, Che feels utterly misplaced in the Outback: “The boy had no idea where on Earth he stood. He understood the names of hardly anything, himself included.”

Carey, two-time winner of the Booker Prize, has written an addictive, intriguing, beautiful story about innocence—and what it means to be completely lost. His writing blends ingenious analogies, stunning imagery and lovely melodic flow in a fantastical story that pushes fiction to the limit. It’s a story that is sometimes crazy, but always in the best possible way.

Donkey Kong competition turns games into real-life drama

Director/Writer/Cinematographer: Seth Gordon
Starring: Steve Wiebe, Billy Mitchell
Studio/Run Time: Picturehouse, 79 mins.

In Seth Gordon’s feature directorial debut, newcomer Steve Wiebe challenges longtime world-champion Donkey Kong player Billy Mitchell for the highest score in the game’s history. After it becomes obvious that Wiebe may threaten to depose the competitive gaming world’s longtime hero, countless roadblocks are thrown in his path by both Mitchell’s fans and the gaming institution itself. As Wiebe becomes increasingly embroiled in this subculture, he ends up learning firsthand about the disturbing lengths people will go to in order to be the best at something, regardless of how silly that something may be. A humanistic comedy in the vein of early Errol Morris, the film’s contest is every bit as exciting as any sports film, while also shedding light on how obsessions can combine with corrupt power structures to drive otherwise normal people to ridiculous ends.

Watch the trailer for King of Kong:

Lighter-than-air acoustic set from SoCal singer/songwriter

The second album by this one-time competitive skateboarder from Huntington Beach was produced by No Doubt guitarist Tom Dumont and released on Jack Johnson’s label, so its surfeit of strummed-acoustic whimsy isn’t surprising. Costa’s jazz-tinged neo-folk songs are boyishly engaging for as long as they last, but they drift away without leaving a trace, as he too often settles for merely maintaining a feathery, bittersweet modality, so that the McCartney-esque tunefulness of the title track, the Mungo Jerry-like lilt of “Miss Magnolia” and the ever-so-slight edginess of “Cigarette Eyes” stand out by default. The 25-year-old artist’s limited, everyman voice convincingly projects sincerity, but it lacks the implied psychological complexity found in the similarly unvarnished deliveries of Jeff Tweedy or Ben Gibbard. Consequently, when Costa sings, in the fingerpicked “Downfall,” “If I wait long enough, the sun might come out,” the line has little more weight than the forecast of a TV weatherman.

Irish band hits stride with American debut

There’s Marissa, this week giving the lesbian lifestyle a try, blankly staring from behind fashionably lanky brown hair and deciding that maybe it is alright to have a Valentine’s Day date with punky, crack-skinny Alex. Cut to Sandy, with his black caterpillar eyebrows crawling together and apart as he faces Kirsten, who has shredded his roses in the disposal because she believes he’s cheating with his first love. Then cut to the adorkable Seth, pining for a girl again, shuffling along the Newport Beach pier and whining and sighing and whining some more about all the lucky, happy couples in the OC.

Then the waves crash, and we zoom in on Alex and Marissa, sitting close in the nighttime sand. “The tide just turned,” Alex says, nearly winking. Marissa still looks blank. They lean in and share their first kiss.

All the while, in the background, we hear the melancholy strains of Bell X1’s “Eve, the Apple of My Eye.” With its mournful falsetto, I-can-barely-get-out-of-bed piano, and lyrics like “You left, I died / I went and you cried,” the aching ballad is very much at home in the context of a teenage soap opera.

Thankfully, “Eve” is the only song on the Irish quartet’s American debut that seems so readymade for overwrought TV. The rest of Flock, originally released in Ireland in 2006, shows a depth of musicality and imagination too great to serve simply as a sonic backdrop for the tired angst of southern California rich kids.

Less could be expected of Bell X1, given the group’s history. The band started about a decade ago in North County Kildaire as Juniper, fronted by a gushy Damien Rice. But after Rice’s departure for a successful solo career (“band harmony was a scarce commodity,” according to Bell X1’s bio), drummer Paul Noonan took over at the mic, and he and his mates rushed out their first sans-Rice record.

The group’s next album, Music in Mouth, took about three years to complete, and was met with high praise, even though Rice’s influence was still apparent and much of the album had a soggy, Better Than Ezra feel. But on Flock, Noonan and his cohorts break out. Noonan’s vocals are lovely like Rice’s, but not quite so precious; they’re livelier and the lyrics are more intellectually interesting, a la Thom Yorke. And deeper listens will bring up other pleasing similarities. On “Flame,” for instance, a crowd singalong reminiscent of Modest Mouse gives way to a vocal warble that sounds like David Byrne. There’s also a welcome grit to Noonan’s lyrics, a complexity of instrumentation and a willingness to take risks, whether looping a frisky, frenetic piano riff on “My First Born For a Song,” or using the name “Bad Skin Day” for a song Noonan says is about “the general sense of inadequacy” he sometimes feels. The latter is a special, beautiful track with soaring strings and heavy cymbals as part of a drum-machine-style percussion, building to a joyful noise that then deconstructs as the song drifts to an end.

To be sure, Flock isn’t pitch-perfect throughout. Some creative choices don’t quite work, like the incongruous pre-chorus cowbell on “Bigger Than Me,” and the Violent Femmes-ish guitar on “Reacharound.”

But Bell X1 is maturing into one of Ireland’s great bands. It may never be on the scale of a U2, but it has for now surpassed former frontman Rice. Flock will prove that Bell X1 is, in its own right, an incredibly valuable export.

“It comes back to what ‘Sweding’ is: even if your resources are really limited, you don’t let your limitations limitate you,” says Michel Gondry in his endearing French-limitated English, expressing both his love of the handmade and the raison d’être for his new comedy, Be Kind Rewind.

For the 44-year-old Gondry, whose Science of Sleep (2006) was shot entirely by handheld cameras, his fourth feature rings of unlimited resources from its first shot: a massive Cinemascope pan across the Manhattan skyline, then past a rushing highway, to the underside of an overpass, where Mike (Mos Def) and Jerry (Jack Black) graffiti an ad for the titular video store.

And Sweding, of course, is what ensues when Jerry accidentally magnetizes his body and erases the shop’s stock, forcing the somewhat dim-witted pair to record its own versions atop the blank tapes. “I’m Bill Murray, you’re everybody else,” Mike tells Jerry as they start Ghostbusters. Black and Mos Def pull the plots from their memories and skill up the special effects. Very special effects. It’s an elaborate plot to get to the veteran video director’s usual worlds within worlds.

When these worlds unfold, Mike and Jerry substitute pizzas for splattered blood in Boyz N the Hood and a green garbage bag for Ghostbusters’ slimer. In a brilliant perspective trick, characters dangle from a jungle gym over a floor map of a city grid to recreate a cliff-hanger from Rush Hour 2. Elsewhere, Gondry’s style is channeled into elaborate sight gags, like an intricate Jerry-rigged camouflage designed for the junkyard where he lives. Its locale—post-industrial Passaic, N.J.—is fascinating to Gondry.

“At times, America just seems like a vast suburb,” he admits. “I don’t say that with contempt, because I come from a suburb in France. In suburbs, you really feel the economy boom and contribute to society, and it’s sometimes at the edge of decay, whereas in cities, you have lots more parts that can hold the thing together. When you go into suburbs, you see the more direct effect of society on people.”

The effect in Be Kind is either a mass affliction of the sublingual awkwardness affecting Gael García Bernal’s Stéphane Miroux in Science of Sleep or acute stupidity. Gondry doesn’t explore the former too deeply, preferring jokes about Jerry’s tin-foil helmets to exposition. “It’s a country, not a verb,” one customer says, when the word “Sweded” first emerges from Black’s mouth. It is perhaps the film’s only moment of self-awareness.

“Somebody has to be in charge or have important control from the very beginning to the very end of the film if you want to keep the current going,” says Gondry, who, for the second time in as many features, penned the script himself. One control method Gondry employs is chaos, intentionally throwing an actor’s timing by, say, misplacing a prop.

“I do that because it’s a nice way to lose any type of schtick,” he says. “They must forget the process of acting, which I find so invasive in a lot of movies I watch. Even movies which get great recognition, and the actor gets rewarded, sometimes I feel they are not in the moment, because they are in so much control. Especially in American movies, actors have so much power that sometimes it feels as if they’re controlling the camera.”

Though one might expect Gondry to Swede his own picture into headspun abstractions, Be Kind is almost entirely feel-good. “I wanted it to be a little more classical filmmaking,” Gondry explains about his use of a tripod and semi-traditional narrative, two characteristics missing from his best-known titles. For fans of those movies, the meat of the matter is not Be Kind itself, but the 20-minute Sweded productions at its heart—allegedly coming to the Web by press time.

Gondry—who sometimes seems more comfortable unfolding small ideas in ads and videos—is made for snack culture, committed to experimenting with short subjects in a way few of his peers are. Though the form was exiled from the big screen decades ago, Gondry has found a broad range of outlets. Recently, those have included a clip for long-time collaborator Björk, a YouTube miniature of the director solving a Rubik’s Cube with his feet, and an elaborate $800,000 RAZR2 ad criticized by Motorola execs for being too artsy.

Perhaps another byproduct of being un-limitated, the ad set was an intricate artbox of dream associations, powered by pulleys and sliding panels, and it was—despite being literally commercial—perhaps the purest Gondry yet: a nightclub wall collapsing into a distant grid of shimmering city lights.

“I don’t think it would fit nicely with an advertising block with a Burger King ad,” groused one exec. “It’s far more sophisticated.”

In Los Angeles, back from shooting his part of a triptych about Tokyo in which his main character turns into a chair, Michel Gondry sighs.

Me? A Luddite?

I do show a number of early warning signs. I prefer by several degrees of magnitude to talk with a live human being, whether I’m placing a restaurant reservation or booking a flight. I am annoyed—sometimes highly—by people sending BlackBerry text messages or tuning iPods while I explain how modern Atlanta might benefit from a second visit by Gen. Sherman or as I lament the dismissive critical treatment given Norman Mailer now that he’s naked and dead.

In fact, I keenly felt like a Luddite in my very first staff meet at Paste magazine. I bounded into a crowded room set to engage in Meaningful Dialogue and Sparkling Idea Generation. Instead, an entire roomful of writers and editors stared in silent blue trances at personal computer screens. Hello? Anybody home? Want to share a few thoughts on hidden themes of persecution in the works of Lynyrd Skynyrd?

Sarah Boxer’s new book offers a guy like me the possibility of redemption, a way to newly appreciate the web log, an activity that I have heretofore viewed as one of the most self-indulgent time-wasting distractions of modern times.

Blogs have, in my estimation, replaced good old-fashioned onanism as the activity most likely to eat up personal time and more meaningful human contact. We now have an estimated 77 million blogs, a great global jamboree of self-expression that might—or might not—be completely healthy.

My concerns aren’t new. We live in a world that’s as separated as connected by electronica, with too many of us starved for real human-to-human community. Technology has led to rehab camps in Korea that treat users for their 17-hour-a-day Internet addiction. The very Silicon Valley nerds who wired our world now take seriously the advice of a former kickboxer whose new best-seller, The Four-Hour Work Week, says basically: Check email just once a day.

So, I pose a Luddite’s question: Is the blog generally a valuable form of self-expression … or simply self-indulgence? Does blogging help us engage the world … or evade it?

Sarah Boxer, ex of The New York Times, culls mightily from the Amazons, Niles and Mississippis of blog flow. Her journey begins as a blog neophyte, and ends in her Top 25 blog choices. Many of the destinations are funny and fascinating, not to mention attractive in their intentions.

Boxer gives us one blog from a Nobel Prize-winning economist who talks in economic terms about social issues such as gender selection of babies in China. There’s a cartoonist who keeps us up to date on the hand-drawn adventures of rats interacting with a piece of shit. We get the critical ravings of an “Angry Black Bitch”; selections from the diary of 17th-century London chronicler Samuel Pepys; and a more contemporary, gritty diary from an Alabama Marine stationed in Fallujah in 2006.

Want to go deep into theoretical physics and get worked up over dark matter? Check out a blog called Cosmic Variance. Boxer includes still more from a political muckraker; a classical-music blog written by New Yorker critic Alex Ross; plus a sidebar from a blogger—re: the Illiad of Homer—in which lines of brand-new epic poetry are delivered from the quill of an imagined Greek soldier without a great deal of sympathy for his leaders or the Trojan War.

And there’s more—blogs that cleverly instruct on the Swedish language, on making it through miscarriages, and on being (purportedly) handsome: El Guapo in DC is a truly funny reflection by a Guatemalan-American blogger who may indeed be God’s gift to women. Or perhaps a contemporary version of Saturday Night Live’s wild-and-crazy guys.

Boxer has selected well, and, at times, I felt informed and energized by this collection.

Yet I remain unconvinced. Several pieces in Boxer’s sampler are delicious, but I still put down this book with no real compulsion to spend many hours of my life—however much of it happily remains—glued to the next postings of even these smart and creative essayists, thinkers, newsmen and cartoonists.

I’ll go for a walk instead, and out there under the new spring leaves share a few thoughts on life, speak with a friend or two: live humans who laugh when I laugh, who hug and high-five and cry, real-time.

Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World of a drug called soma that made society self-satisfied, internalized, indifferent to all cares. I think a case may be made that soma isn’t Prozac or some other mood pharmaceutical, but modern technology—TV, iPods, the web, all of it.

Could 77 million blogs be a symptom of some ailment that separates our 21st-century souls instead of connecting them?

The funny guys tour America

Release Date: Feb. 8 (limited)
Director: Ari Sandel
Starring: Vince Vaughn, Ahmed Ahmed, Bret Ernst, John Caparulo, Sebastian Maniscalco, Justin Long, Keir O’Donnell
Studio/Run Time: Picturehouse, 110 mins.

In the fall of 2005, actor/comedian Vince Vaughn decided to take four other comedians (Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, Sebastian Maniscalco) and a motley band of guests on the road for Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show, 30 nights of stand-up comedy across America. He also took a film crew to document the experience. Starting in Hollywood, the group works its way eastward, performing each night for sold-out crowds and encountering hecklers, local celebrities, screaming sorority girls, refugees from Hurricane Katrina, and its own roots.

Vaughn, the most recognizable of the bunch, doesn’t hog the screen. Instead, we see the ups and downs of the performers’ mental states as they work the crowd, rant off-stage, tell their life stories in bits and pieces, and bemoan the state of American standup comedy. The film plays more as a home video than a documentary, but injected with live performances and local flair in the heartland of America, it’s still relatively fun.

View the trailer for Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show:

Hitmen/Postmodernism collide in historical Europe

Release Date: Feb. 8 (limited)
Director/Writer: Martin McDonagh
Cinematographer: Eigil Bryld
Starring: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clémence Poésy
Studio/Run Time: Focus Features, 101 mins.

You know you’ve tripped into the ambiguous realm of Postmodernism when medieval Europe, midget jokes and ultraviolence converge into a seamless whole. Theater auteur Martin McDonagh’s debut feature, In Bruges, thrives on these stylistic clashes with its narrative of two sympathetic hitmen who seek refuge in a European wonderland full of tourists and irony. The film excels, painting its story through the extreme juxtaposition of its subjects, with each contrasting plot element not only understood but felt visually. This technique pits staccato violence against the surreal camera pans of Bruges’ fairy-tale cityscape, projecting the internal conflict of hired killers Ken and Ray against their new, pacifying environment. The film’s visual appeal complements irreverent and hilarious dialogue—timed brilliantly with the Anglo-Saxon bravado of Fiennes, Farrell and Gleeson—to produce one of this holiday season’s most pleasant dark-horse dramadies.

View the trailer for In Bruges:

Astronauts tell story of Apollo project with renewed enthusiasm

DVD Release Date: Feb. 12
Director: David Sington
Cinematographer: Clive North
Starring: Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Michael Collins, Charlie Duke, Jim Lovell
Studio/Run Time: ThinkFilm, 100 mins.

I walked across the Purdue University campus one day in 1993, headed toward some lecture or quiz or lab that in retrospect seems unimportant, because assembled at that moment on the grassy lawn outside of University Hall was a mass of students and faculty waiting in the sun to hear Neil Armstrong speak. But with two roommates majoring in aeronautical engineering, I’d had my fill of space talk—and there was that class—so I passed up the chance to see this most famous alumnus in person.

Years later, I concluded that this decision showed a remarkable lack of maturity. Test, schmest. If there’s one person who has lived in the shadow of the moon, it’s the famously reserved—if not downright reclusive—Armstrong. He makes the occasional low-key speech, but so profound is his denial of the spotlight that David Sington’s new documentary about the Apollo project—in which astronaut after elderly astronaut steps up to the camera with a twinkle in his eye to tell his amazing story—includes nary a peep from Armstrong’s contemporary voice. It seems that he’s already said everything he has to say to the world at large, and he said it on the freaking moon.

You’d think this film would underscore my regret, but instead it flipped it upside down. Melville told the story of Moby Dick not through Ahab but through Ishmael. Conan Doyle told the tales of Sherlock Holmes through Dr. Watson. And In the Shadow of the Moon reveals that the most engrossing storyteller of this ensemble of astronauts is not the first or second or even 10th man on the moon, but a man named Mike Collins, the Ishmael to so many Ahabs, the astronaut who stayed aboard the spacecraft while his more famous crewmates, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, roamed the surface of the white whale. If the whole experience has weighed heavily on Armstrong, it seems to have left Collins free to be self-deprecating and casually poetic. He’s the everyman in space, able both to express the gee-whiz wonder of humans in orbit but also cut through the New Age pixie dust with wit.

He sums up JFK’s 1961 mandate like this: “Do what? Moon! When? End of the decade!” Roger that. And he jokes about having been called the loneliest man in the universe as he sailed around the dark side of the moon by himself. “Baloney,” he says. “I had mission control yakking in my ear half the time.”

In the Shadow of the Moon functions as a more concrete companion to ethereal films like For All Mankind (1989), which conjure the unfathomable by setting NASA footage to Brian Eno music. Sington uses plenty of NASA footage himself, but this film’s notable feature is the extensive array of new interviews. This is the trip to the moon as told exclusively by the travelers themselves, now old men but with their vivid, informative and entertaining memories still intact—memories that, together, tell a story you wouldn’t think needs retelling. It’s iconic Americana, and we’ve been celebrating what may be one of Humankind’s most arbitrary accomplishments since the day it happened. But it never hurts to be reminded of our potential and our insignificance, and who better to do the reminding than clean-cut American boys who have covered up the entire world with their thumb—people like Collins, Aldrin, Alan Bean and Jim Lovell?

Not Armstrong, of course, but his absence is also a part of this story.

Stylistically, Shadow is simple and utilitarian, like something you’d see on PBS. No wonder: Sington has written, produced and directed several episodes of Nova. But like the men it’s about, this film obtains all of its sizzle from the awesomeness of the experience. Before they were shot into space, not one of these guys was destined to write a treatise on human existence, and no talking-head-driven, by-the-numbers documentary deserves to soar. And yet there, waxing eloquent, go the astronauts. And there, across the sky, arcs this plain-Jane motion picture, and together they leave a surprisingly magnificent vapor trail.

View the trailer for In the Shadow of the Moon:

Rocking in the corporate world

Dan Kennedy thought he landed his rock ’n’ roll dream job as Atlantic Records’ Director of Creative Development. However, he quickly learned that the record business was led by eccentric weirdoes with strange personal quirks. The higher one had climbed on the food chain, the more clueless he or she was about rock itself. The book’s big climactic moment occurs when the new head of the company announces that they are no longer in the music business, but in the lifestyle business. Merchandising will be the source of future profits.

The thirtysomething-white-male-suburbanite-punk-wannabe author writes humorously about directing gangsta rapper Fat Joe, putting together an ad campaign that celebrates 25 years of love songs by Phil Collins, and promoting Jewel’s anti-corporate single with a tie-in to a commercial for a woman’s razor.

Most of the musicians themselves come off as normal people surrounded by nuts. Kennedy finds personal salvation at an Iggy Pop concert and reminds readers that it’s the music that matters.

In addition to marking the midpoint of the 21st century, the year 1950 stood as the doorway to a paradigm shift in music, politics and technology that would significantly revolutionize American culture for decades to come. In Honeydripper, John Sayles’ cinematic homage to the Deep South and the birth of rock 'n' roll, the veteran director and fore-father of independent film digs deep into his birth year to subtly reveal a world on the brink of social and musical transition.

“I’m old enough to remember chain gangs, segregation, people in the cotton field, the colored restrooms, and all the stuff that existed before the civil-rights movement. But the music came from there, and there’s a personal quality to the South,” recounts the auteur behind Lone Star and Passion Fish, telling of his childhood trips below the Mason-Dixon line. “There are some great things about it, and [there were] some things that had to change.”

In the film, lounge owner and pianist Pinetop Purvis (Danny Glover) must learn to embrace this change as the new sensation of rock 'n' roll eclipses his blues band (its frontman played by legendary blues vocalist and Stax artist Dr. Mable John). Purvis puts aside his personal musical tastes to save his club after he meets Sonny Blake, a vagrant musical prodigy (Austin-based blues guitarist Gary Clark Jr.).

The plot revels in the rich history of the South, mirroring the exploits of real-life New Orleans artist Guitar Slim (real name: Eddie Jones). Slim periodically failed to show up for his anticipated gigs, often forcing venue managers to push a stand-in on stage, claiming the replacement was the absent rock guitarist. “A lot of the people who later became the great guitarists of rhythm and blues,” explains Sayles, “were just told by their club owner, ‘Well, look, learn this song, because tonight, you’re Guitar Slim.’ He didn’t show up for his gig and nobody knows what he looks like because there were no album covers or rock videos back then. So as long as [the stand-in] played it well, there wasn’t going to be any problem.”

To capture the rustic aesthetic of mid-century blues and early rock ’n’ roll, Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi cast a collection of top-notch players—including Keb’ Mo’, Henderson Huggins, Eddie Shaw and Arthur Lee Williams—for the live-music segments. After shooting, these jam sessions continued long into the night—in hotel lobbies and also in The Honeydripper All-Star Band, a touring incarnation of the movie’s house band slated to perform throughout the year at various blues festivals. “Folks who were working in the lobby were jamming and having a good time,” recounts Clark Jr. “We played one little rehearsal, and it just clicked.”

With a working live band and his film set for release, Sayles hopes to raise public awareness of how the all-but-forgotten blues grew into today’s cultural landscape. “Musicians don’t grow up with a certain music, and the minute they hear it, they take an aspect of that and make it a part of who [they are],” he explains. “Musicians are always borrowing from each other.”

Whenever abortion is a major plot point in a film, it’s natural for viewers to try to immediately suss out the perspective of the filmmaker—whose propaganda are they about to endure? But in the case of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Romanian writer/director Cristian Mungiu never seems like he’s trying to win audiences over to a particular way of thinking.

“I knew from the beginning that I wanted the film to just stay a film, and I wanted to tell a story,” he says. “I hope that the story is going to be important for some people, and [that] it’s going to, I don’t know, make them think. But I never wanted to pass any kind of judgment. I just relate what I remember to be the truth from that period, hoping that it’s universal enough for people even today to think about it and make their own conclusions.”

The film follows two roommates at a Romanian university in the late ’80s, a period when abortion was outlawed and both the underground physicians and the women they serviced faced stiff jail sentences for terminating pregnancies. It’s a story based on true events that were recounted to Mungiu 15 years ago, and one that touches him personally.

“I was born in 1968 as a result of this law that interdicted abortion in Romania, and this is something that our parents would never hide from us. So, all of a sudden, I was one of the very many children of this baby-booming Romania.”

Leading up to the illicit operation, the characters are frustrated at every turn—from trying to buy cigarettes to making a hotel reservation—with the oppressiveness of the last days of Communism growing more palpable with each moment. Still, there’s humanity even in those responsible for the worst abuses of power, reflecting Mungiu’s view of this period in Romanian history.

“I don’t like having black and white characters; positive and negative guys. I’ve never met anybody who is like a complete moron or very stupid. No, people do good things and bad things, and overall [the abortionist in the film] is not a positive character. He’s doing a lousy thing in the film, but still it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a mother and that society treats him badly. It’s very likely … he feels inclined to treat the others badly because this was a time when this is the way you were treated by everybody that had authority.”

Mungiu plans to further explore this period with both features and shorts in a series he calls Tales From the Golden Age, an ironic reference to the last 15 years of Nicolae Ceauescu’s rule—and he’ll leave the judgments to his ever-growing audience.

Graffiti has long been considered one of the four fundamental elements of hip-hop culture, along with MCing, DJing and breakdancing. To ensure that this important visual component was properly represented in Recognize!, curators commissioned D.C. graffiti artists Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, whose work has been featured in advertisements and movies, to tag four 20-foot panels lining the hallway between the exhibition galleries.

During the summer preceding the opening, Conlon and Hupp tagged the panels with the exhibition's title, their own tags (CON and AREK), two stylized self-portraits, and lots of playing cards—in particular, the king of diamonds. "You have a master level of graffiti, a king," Conlon explains. "Graffiti is essentially a competition and a game of getting your name out there."

[View the Recognize! online exhibition here.]

Hip-hop, by nature, is autobiographical. MCs tend to identify themselves strongly—even existentially—with a particular place and time, detailing their often humble beginnings and remaining the primary subjects of their own songs. In this way, hip-hop is a form of continuous self-portraiture, and as such it’s the subject of Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture, a special exhibition running from Feb. 8 through Oct. 26 at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

“We’re not trying to say that this is a comprehensive show about hip-hop and its history,” says Brandon Fortune, a curator of painting and sculpture who co-organized the show with fellow curators Frank Goodyear and Jobyl Boone. “It’s hip-hop through the lens of portraiture, which is what we do.”

Recognize! is the first large-scale hip-hop installation to hang on Smithsonian walls, but the National Portrait Gallery is not alone in its attempt to bring this living, street-based artform into the confines of a museum. In 2006, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History launched a massive campaign to collect hip-hop memorabilia, which netted Grandmaster Flash’s turntables, Fab Five Freddy’s boom box, and a mixture of cheers and jeers from editorials and blogs. Exhibitions at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Brooklyn Museum have also displayed the genre’s artifacts, raising questions about what this new relationship between hip-hop and the museum world will mean for either party.

“You don’t want to turn hip-hop into a dead thing that’s going to be put into a glass case and taken out of its context,” says Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and editor of Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. “It’s participatory, it’s interactive, it’s engaging, it’s oftentimes infuriating, but it demands a response.”

THE MANY FACES OF HIP-HOP
Instead of displaying the music’s artifacts, as most shows have done, Recognize! takes a different approach: It exhibits visual responses to hip-hop. The exhibition features seven artists depicting a range of performers through a variety of media, devoting considerable attention to Santa Fe-based photographer David Scheinbaum and New York portraitist Kehinde Wiley. In his 26 black-and-white photographs, Scheinbaum—a former professor of photography at the College of Santa Fe, and once an assistant to renowned curator and author Beaumont Newhall—documents contemporary and, in some cases, lesser-known musicians such as Jean Grae, Cut Chemist, Mos Def and The Pharcyde, capturing most of them mid-performance. Masked rapper MF Doom is a blur of motion against a dark background; soul chanteuse Erykah Badu swings her arms in wild, theatrical swoops.

Wiley’s large-scale paintings, on the other hand, include portraits of established hip-hop icons: Ice-T, LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. These works are part of a series commissioned by VH-1 for its 2005 Hip-Hop Honors show. In contrast to Scheinbaum’s smaller, seemingly spontaneous monochrome images, Wiley’s canvases are enormous, colorful and knowingly composed. Wiley—drawing from European and American historical portraits—portrays his subjects as powerful and monumental: Ice-T sits in for J.A.D. Ingres’ Napoleon, clad in robes and seated on a throne, while LL adopts the pose and poise of John Singer Sargent’s John D. Rockefeller, implying an entrepreneurial link between the performer and the tycoon.

“I really loved the idea of allowing my work to somehow lionize the type of heroism surrounding the inception of hip-hop,” Wiley says. “It became an opportunity to allow the language and the power surrounding the history of painting to intermingle with a lot of the bravado surrounding the inception of hip-hop itself.”

Recognize! also includes an ode to hip-hop penned by poet Nikki Giovanni and inscribed on the gallery walls by Brooklyn sculptor Shinique Smith as part of an original installation. The show has a strong local component, too, with video installations by D.C. artist Jefferson Pinder and four 20-foot hallway panels painted by D.C. graffiti muralists Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp (see sidebar)—all of which contain elements of self-portraiture.

MATTERS OF PERCEPTION
The National Portrait Gallery believes that Recognize! will encourage visitors to think about hip-hop in a broader cultural context. “I think the show brings to the forefront a number of important larger issues about race and class and popular culture that have of course circulated around hip-hop forever,” Goodyear says. As hip-hop enters the museum world, the effectiveness of exhibitions like Recognize! will depend heavily on whether viewers will participate in this type of critical questioning, or whether they will keep their distance, refusing to validate a subculture many believe is violent and misogynistic.

“The complexity of hip-hop is important to display,” Chang says. “The best art for me in hip-hop has been the art that’s completely challenged me and forced me to examine what I thought were pretty much sacred or fixed points of view. I would never want us to censor that or deny that particular impulse in art.”

“Hip-hop is as varied as those people who participate in the project itself,” Wiley explains. “There’s incredibly destructive hip-hop and there’s incredibly instructive hip-hop. I think the extent to which a museum is capable of depicting the whole arc of that is the extent to which the museum has a successful exhibition.”

With Recognize!, the National Portrait Gallery becomes the latest institution to argue for hip-hop’s relevance as a cultural form. According to Goodyear, “these images counter the notion that hip-hop is somehow destructive and bad. This is a beautiful, creative tradition that the youth culture of America understands, and we need to get behind that.”

“It was kind of a comment on our culture, on what’s going on.”

The Bowery Hotel wants to pamper you with its plush sofas and soft light. An echo of a New York that never was, the hotel is comfortable and solid, carefully designed to help you relax. In other words, it seems like the perfect place to listen to a Jack Johnson album—his breezy guitar and gentle lyrics a perfect match for the hotel’s warmth and comfort.

But with new album Sleep Through The Static, Johnson is not out to soothe or comfort anyone. During a recent listening session at the hotel, “All at Once,” the record’s elegiac opening track, immediately breaks the Bowery’s gentle spell: Around the sun some say it’s gonna be the new hell some say / It’s still to early to tell some say / It really ain’t no myth at all / Keep asking ourselves are we really strong enough / There’s so many things that we got too proud of. With its brooding piano and minor chords, it’s a haunting opening—the darkest point on an album that refuses to accept easy answers. Static balances its dark material with quiet, wistful love songs, and the result is ambiguous, which is exactly what Johnson wanted.

“Sometimes I ask myself, 'Would I listen to my music?' I’m not sure if i would or not, to be honest.”

As we sit in an epic ballroom with a fireplace that’s larger than your average hotel room, Johnson remains grounded. I ask him about his last album, the soundtrack to the Curious George movie, wondering whether the record (Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the Film Curious George) was a clever screw-you to critics who’ve accused him of being too soft and too safe? Well, yes, he says. “Sometimes, I like to disarm people. I can see a lot of the reasons why I might get attacked by people who like edgy music. The funny thing is I never really tried to make any claims of being like a rock band or whatever.”

Static shows that Johnson is comfortable with musical growth, but it’s definitely growth on his own terms. There are more instruments than ever before—keyboards, electric guitar, even a Moog synthesizer—and more dynamic range: Johnson and his producer, J.P. Plunier, intentionally made the loud songs louder and the soft songs softer.

Despite Johnson’s light touch, Sleep Through the Static is not an escape from heaviness. “It’s not just like, ‘Things are tough, but don’t worry—everything’s OK.' It’s, ‘Things are tough—I feel alright sometimes, but, man, it can be overwhelming.'”

“Hopefully it’ll catch on and change the industry a little bit in a small way.”

Before politics ever appeared in his music, Johnson was taking the world seriously. In the back of a Cadillac Escalade on the way to the hotel, he tells me that his record c