Dick Dodd, Lead Singer of the Standells, Dies at 68 - NYTimes.com

Dick Dodd, Lead Singer of the Standells, Dies at 68 - NY Times

Dick Dodd, lead singer for the proto-punk garage band The Standells , has passed away. Dodd had a nasal, snotty, irritating way of singing , or rather vocalizing , perfect for a band that was composed of hammering backbeats and barbed wire guitar riffs, and it was a choice component of the band's one big hit, "Dirty Water", a left-handed salute to Boston . Talking about grime and filth of the River Charles and hanging out with "lovers, muggers and thieves", the song was a telling bit of self reflection of a town that was on edge with the collective trauma set upon by The Boston Strangler. Boston at the time was not a happy town , like any number of American cities experiencing the full wrath of the 60s, and Dodd's obnoxious refrain at the chorus "I love that dirty water....ooooooh Boston YOU'RE MY HOME..." was the kind of defensive, fist in the face move a local gives to a hand wringing out of towner too busy tsk-tsking over the sad plight of a city to actually understand what was happening in Bean Town. The punk genius of the song, though, was that the Standells weren't from Boston, but from Los Angeles, inveighing on a song written by their manager. Now that's punk.

Unhinged Melody

"There Was A man of Double Deed" isn't great poetry, but it is worth remarking upon for how effectively it creates the mindset of someone for whom the world is great chain of secret connections that are mysterious, foreboding and headed, inevitably , toward a terrible end. The rhyme scheme, tick-tock, back and forth, a child's jump rope tempo, suggests a mind setting everything in sets in a convoluted task to understand a heartless exterior life through some ordering protocols, but this is in vain since the view here attempts to be global , beyond the limits of what this narrator sees and encounters daily. The banal things that get mentioned are paired with things that they have no functional relation to; seeds give way to snow banks, ships are without belts (meaning rudders, I suppose) and are likened to tailless birds who in turn fly in a roaring sky that brings a sounding lion to the narrator's front door.

There was a man of double deed,
Who sowed his garden full of seed;
When the seed began to grow,
'Twas like a garden full of snow;

Something crucial is missing in the descriptions , and the lack of a logical, connecting tissue results in violence on the imagination that might otherwise conceive a simple day as orderly and diverse in the purpose others besides oneself have in their daily routines. Save for the man of double deed (a shadowy figure we might think, a figure of divided agendas) there are no others in this poem, just he and the suffering narrator reeling as matters unfold, reeling as it all comes in, cause and effect seemingly obvious , but all without reason.

When the snow began to melt, 'Twas like a ship without a belt; When the ship began to sail, 'Twas like a bird without a tail; When the bird began to fly, 'Twas like an eagle in the sky;

It's a pile up of circumstances, and the speech is just this side of hebephrenia, the behavior and language habits of the paranoid, the schiznophrenic who lacks the psychological infrastructure to sort through incoming stimuli and create categories, context and relationship to the passage of time; everything happens simultaneously, at once, and everything that does happen does not end, but rather keeps occurring, repetitive, violent, without reason to the suffering. Items are conflated, images become strange, unfamiliar, and the mind that must deal with this chaos feels permanently tormented, put upon.

When the bird began to fly,
'Twas like an eagle in the sky;
When the sky began to roar,
'Twas like a lion at my door;
When my door began to crack,
'Twas like a stick across my back;
When my back began to smart,
'Twas like a penknife in my heart;
And when my heart began to bleed,
'Twas death, and death, and death indeed

.

The conclusion of all these connections, which the mind attempts to bring meaning to by relentless speculation as to how unlike things actually purposeful and conspiratorial relationships, is that all things , all deeds lead to death. In such a state, death is the only thing that makes sense, since even to the most marginalized of personalities death is seen as an end from which there is both no recovery and no more torment. The poem's rhyme scheme, 'though too slack and lacking muscle for my tastes, still gives you the chills for the unvarnished and clear mindset it gives you. I cannot shake the feeling of these odd enounters I've had over the years, listening to someone speak slowly, deliberately, with purpose as they told me about their poor circumstances, only to pick up the pace, quicken the rhythm as more detail came forth, until finally sentence structure had collapsed and the speaker was overwhelmed by attempting to talk about everything that came to their mind at the same time.

"The man of double deed" seems to be one who is not what he seems, someone superficially in our presence who seems friendly enough but who has an undisclosed purpose and reasoning in his dealings. Because the man is viewed suspiciously, the tint of treachery seeps into all he does. He is the proverbial tipping point from which the poisin spreads; perhaps in a perfect world each person and place and thing contribute only to greater happiness and prosperity, but there is something wrong with the world of our narrator, who describes events where activities end in some manner of demise; this is a cruel world of distraction and summary dismissal. The man of double deed, whatever name a listener might give him, appears to be doing nothing less than sowing the seeds of our destruction.

Ezra Pound the Mountebank

Onan the Librarian

Ezra Pound is a traitorous, spunk-stained groin polisher with at least two ideas that have traveled well through the decades. Otherwise, he is a ball of congealed grease, dust, and hair you pull out of your brush, an utterly unusable poet. Pound was a lousy writer besides. Reading him is like taking a bullet in the bidness. Eliot, however, was a terrific poet quite apart from his grouchy affectations of upper-class Royalism. The writing remains evocative, ironic, with a tangible melancholy and despair that makes one want to live life fuller than they had been. He might have gained much by having a hard one crease his private channel, but then we will never know; all I know is that Eliot's poems still get the heat to the meat.

One hears arguments in support of imperfect heroes that genius will carry their reputations above and over and far, far away from the corrosive and unforgivable aspects and deeds of their lives, a notion I take under advisement for this reason:  it depends on the art they create. Pound fails this simplistic criterion for reasons more subjective than they are objectively sustainable, those being that his motivation really wasn't to create things of beauty that even the boob, the numskull, and the drooling poltroon could relate to, but instead power. Bob Perelman, poet and an incredibly astute critic of modernism, pointed out the difficulty of Pound, Gertrude Stein. These writers operated under the assumption that their icon-smashing,perspective-dashing, syntax relaxing experiments were going to be the death of the old filters and provide populations with new ways of seeing. Pound, I am sure, wanted the world to see things his way, complexly, nuanced, infinitely connected to the real roiling subject of humanity, which was godless and unguided by nothing else other the critical desire to kick a homeless man in the throat, steal the pennies off a dead uncle's eyes and, most loathsome of all, desire to rule the world for reasons no more significant than what a meal at the cornet spittoon saloon will give you.

 But this was something of a bad bet--the more original his vision, the harder it was for him to make people see. So it became more about power, power embedded in a charismatic man who could transform the landscape, in the world, and the psyche through major feats of willpower. Readers, viewers, butchers, wives, teachers, witless dregs no longer had a choice to vote with their feet or let their tastes guide their selection; great historical forces were at play. Or at least Pound was running his mouth and sucking up to fascist powers on whom he sought common cause and a significant stipend. His poetry seemed odious and thick as bales of mildewed hay, bloodless examples of what his theories were elaborating on. He was a Rush Limbaugh for those intellectuals who fancied themselves better than the rest of the population, who existed solely to annoy them, slow them down.

Eliot, though, is a more slippery sort to grasp. He is the brooding,sad-sack Methuselah of the generation that lacked the patience to wait the years it usually took to be jaded, aristocratically bored, permanently and fashionably melancholic, and on the other hand, a closeted racist, homophobic, Jew-baiting ass hole.  Anti Semite he was, but he could make you feel his weariness, loneliness, and sadness that the world was ending badly, becoming a fetid stew of mediocre thinking and piecemeal achievement.  He was a great poet and a natural pill as a human being. He is someone you would compliment for the stunning brilliance of his language and then try to slam into your truck as he left work. He was a man you wanted to admire and then spit on. That is greatness.

Ridley Scott's sore spots

American Gangster promises much from the advertising, highlighting to live-wire Oscar winners in the form of Denzel Washington and Russell crow as, respectively, a powerful Harlem based crime lord and an honest cop heading a narcotics investigation that eventually brings him to trial. Directed by Ridley Scott, this should have been a sure thing, but the lesson behind items bandied as safe bet is that they go sour more often than we wish.

Scott is, at times, a brilliant stylist who can set a mood, get atmosphere and move action and drama along concurrently, as is the case in his masterworks Blade Runner, Alien, The Duelist, Gladiator . The balance between the oddly composed frame, the baroque design and the character driven plots  made for what is now a rare thing in the industry, a well made Hollywood entertainment. He's never met a skewed color scheme or illogical edit he wasn't taken with, a fact that makes more than a few of his movies as if they're in competition with brother Tony Scott. Ridley Scott often gets as agitated and formula-glutted and offers up patented bits of nonsense like the predictable (but stylistically engaging) crime story  Matchstick Men and Kingdom of Heaven, generic equivocations of style employing an excess of trendy edits ,gauche camera filters that came to nothing at all except a noisy journey to forgone plot resolutions. American Gangster is somewhere between these virtues and vices, and it is to be commended that Scott has calmed his camera hand and offered up the wonderfully grit-textured scenery of a Seventies-era New York with a minimum of gratuitous flair.

The plot, though, is something pieced together from a half dozen crime dramas one could name, the most obvious being the face to face meeting between Washington's and Russell's crook and cop characters, where opposing world views are exchanged: the nod to Pacino and DeNiro in Heat is glaring, obvious as a zit. Scott also takes his time developing the story lines of the crime boss and the cop to where they eventually meet and lock horns, in between being the standard troubled marriages, drug addictions, mob hits, all proceeding at a snail's pace. Add to this drawn out build up the fact of Denzel Washington's persistent monotone and we have a collection of tics and quirks passed off as style. Russell Crow again manages to barely hide his Australian drawl and underplays his part as the dutiful and shambling cop, more cipher than character. 

Both characters are more stereotypes for the writers to hang their refurbished clichés on. Still, this seems old, contrived, pieced together by the numbers, and the assurance that this film is based on a true story doesn't mask the feeling of having seen all this before, nor can it make for the lack of dramatic tension. It's a paycheck, not a testament. Slowness is not a sin, of course, but there is the occasional mistake by good directors and their script writers who think slack momentum equals literary acumen, something this film maker obviously coveted. 

Black Hawk Down is a bad film by a good director, Ridley Scott does his best work when there is something of compelling literary interest here, i.e., characters that are written, not merely depicted as they are in Black Hawk. The Duelist, Blade Runner, Alien, and Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, among his best work, achieve a "suspended- disbelief" credibility in as much as image comes to match idea, and directing hand seems to catch some of the musicality of conflict and buried desire that gives off a sense of some larger insanity of desire that is hidden. Black Hawk is a routine war-is-hell yawner that cannot rise above its status as movie-of-the-week fodder. Scott is a fine stylist if he has the literary substance to make his approach more than just gestures and window dressing, as it is here. 

The moral drift of this thing is disturbing, and the feeble little declaration toward the end that the Marine's motivation in a rudderless, under-determined mission is being there for the other guys, your buddies, does not raise the level. I suspect Scott would do stronger, more compelling work if he were adapting a war story that had an implicit argument within it, or at least a consistent point of view that would make the visual displays fire up more than mere weirdness. 

It's intriguing to think what he would have done with Heart of Darkness had Coppola not beat him to it. There remain Michael Herr's brilliant Dispatches, a vivid gonzo journalism read on the Viet Nam war. Viet Nam, though, is pretty much tapped out as a film subject matter. The camera lingers too often in Black Hawk Down, lapsing into slow motion while presumably native music blasts over the speakers, the lens frozen as though dumbfounded, an acid head who discovers his face in the mirror. It’s a bad film that lacks the guts of these idealized Marines convictions. Had Ridley Scott given us something that suits the military culture BHD (the film) pretends to celebrate, something even on the level of John Wayne, we'd have a film with a narrative reason to exist. Scott, though, is a director of strange moods and articulate passion, and his diffidence here is betrayed by unmotivated characterizations --stereotypes , really, card board cut outs --and his frequent lapses’ into fluttering slow motion , accompanied by booming music, with piercing vocals. He loves exotica, and sometimes it works, but not here, when a straight up comprehension of military ethos and genre expectations would have worked much better than this distracted, protracted performance. ______________________________________________

Ridley Scott never directed a film as beautiful or as provocative as film Blade Runner, his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep much has been said of the film's look, an evocation of Los Angeles in a future time, with smart and stylish renditions of classic film noir style. If nothing else, this film does make fine... See More use of the extremes of light and dark, with a muted , earth toned schema for the matters in between that suggest the competing sediments of rust, dust, soot and chemical pollution, a suitable palette for a thriller set in the future. More than the look, however, is the set of issues the movies manages to cogently engage, from the spiritual ---the rogue androids quest to meet their creator and so extend their lives--to the sociological and philosophical. Immigration, urban densification, the mashing of cultures, the unprincipled introduction of technology into the marketplace. He's directed other noteworthy films ,but none of them have the combination of ideas, tone, or visual allure that made Blade Runner a singular piece of work; the odd thing is that it is that rare instance of when an elegantly designed vehicle contains any number of ideas that are substantial enough for a half-dozen discussion groups and a surfeit of monographs.

 This follows Philip K.Dick's fascination with how populations are willing to relinquish their humanity--the kind of inventive, curious, adventurous humanity that isn't afraid of hard work, using its brain, or risking death in the cause of finding out more of the world. In his novels technology is seen as the means through which the human being becomes less human by having the burden of having to use his Free Will less and less. As the machines take on more of what was exclusively the domain of flesh and blood, the tragedy that befalls those who've chosen convenience and leisure over a grittier essence don't seem tragic at all; it is hard to empathize with the products of pure leisure that haven't a care except for the entertainment of their senses.

Norman Mailer at the Movies : The New Yorker

Norman Mailer at the Movies : The New Yorker:

 I doubt that you have known a more dedicated Mailerophile than me. Even so, with all the wit, wisdom, nuancing and artful equivocation I've done over fifty years discussing this man's body of work, I do not like his movies. This article is the sort of "smart guy" talk that avoids the usually criteria of film criticism, evaluating whether a work succeeds on whatever terms the film choose to work within, and instead chat amiably (and gutlessly) about what ideas had or might have had while making his trio of films. The author here is smart enough to tie the films--Wild 90, Beyond the Law and Maidstone--to Mailer's own essays on film-as-art, and latched onto nice spring board with which to avoid passing a summary judgement on Mailer's skills as a film director. 

The discussion then becomes metaphysical, in the stratosphere of aesthetic reasoning where theorizing about a movie's intentions is more important whether something tangible, emotional cathartic , or arguably perception-changing was transmitted to a viewer as a result of seeing one of his movies. Interesting and strong arguments can be made in defense of muddled , imperfect works--I am one of those who argue in favor of Mailer's fiction, especially his late works like Ancient Evenings, Harlot's Ghost, The Gospel According to the Son and The Castle in the Forest--but there has to be elements in the flawed work that demand attention just be virtue of being outstanding , in itself, that element that deserves inspection, interpretation, praise, and contextualization. 

Mailer's movies, though, have no splendid moments; in the case of Mailer's essays about film and writing of his own experience, what he was thinking of was more interesting , far more real genius than the films he actually realized. It does look swell, of course, to have the term "film maker" in a biographical sketch when the curious desire to know what someone did in his or her lifetime. "Norman Mailer, novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, newspaper publisher, film-director". Yes, all that sounds cool, very nice indeed. Mailer's achievements are in his writing, and it those, I think, that will continue to be argued for a few more generations to come. What he accomplished with his movies, though, is something less grand , which was to give a handful of film scholars and theory-driven academics some fresh material for their pipeline.

______________________________

I would suggest that Mailer's goal from the get-go was to be a volatile blend of genius and jerk,  as he writes in the first paragraph of his introduction to his 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself:

 .“…Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that would go so far as to think it’s my present and future work which have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years, I could be wrong , and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all   agree it would cheat this collection of its true Interest to present myself  as more modest than I am.”

 This is not to suggest that he didn't regret that some of off-strength projects, whether films, plays, poetry or screenwriting, weren't as superb or revolutionary as he desired them to be, but he certainly didn't wallow in his failures. He got up  and went back to work on his next project, toward an unknown artistic success or career destroying embarrassment. Except his career didn't end. Even stabbing his wife in a drunk, speed-chased rage couldn't stop his career. Mailer believed in dualities in human personality, and he achieved his , admirable and loathsome at once. We are lucky he elected to remain a brilliant literary figure ,where his problematic nature could be contained, rather than get himself elected to office. God help us if he got his hands on any kind of real political power.

a few seconds ago ·

Tough Guys Don't Dance

The late Norman Mailer was one of the most important American writers in the 20th century who, despite what misgivings you may have about his vanity, arrogance, and odd sense of the masculine imperative, wrote some masterpieces. His novel, “Tough Guys Don't Dance", wasn't one of his master works, but it was a first-rate entertainment, a noirish murder mystery that combined Mailer's career long themes--the nature of courage, the search for knowledge through sexual encounters and violent challenges--with a wonderfully presented atmosphere and a cast of skewed, tortured, characters.

 The tale of an alcoholic, would be writer who tries to recover from a black-out exactly how a woman's head showed up in his marijuana plant stash is an intoxicating read. A tale of improbable events and impossible characters made plausible by the poetry of Mailer's writing. As a film director, however, Mailer is quite awful, being someone with notions of how a film ought to look and how it should achieve its effects but with no idea how to get anywhere near the mark he set for himself. 

 The dialogue, acceptable in the context of the dark and brooding world of Mailer's novel, is preposterous here, revealing a tin ear for the rhythms of how people actually sound. Good actors seem stiff and embalmed, and bad actors come off as automatons. In a more forgiving light, one might say that his is an art film, an avant gard production that just happened to have some money behind it, but that would be wishful thinking. The movie is just odd and awful.

Jeff Beck : less is less

Occasional guitar genius Jeff Beck.

Jeff Beck is a tiresome guitar player whose penchant for sparse noodling sends too many listeners, seduced by legacy and legend,  into reveries about how "less is more" and the virtues of having a minimal palette of tones. Truth be told, less is merely less and a Jeff Beck performance means there will be huge, gaping spaces in an improvised section, while the guitarist waits for what seems like the random moment to lay another twist to the string. His band, particularly on the Live at Ronnie Scott's album, stays busy while the master awaits is riffing muse, laying down a carpet of funk with a fabric of high-register bass work, minimal drum work, and a variety of ethereal space chords emanating from the keyboards. John Cage had the notion that the audience need to sit in their impatient stews for some periods so they have a chance to listen to their own music (Zen/chance practices in music are more exciting theorized about than experienced firsthand) and the take away for me is that the point of going to a Jeff Beck concert is to confront his reputation and to wait for him to do something interesting. This is what the late critic Steve Esmedina called "boredom as aesthetic effect". Beck, I'm sure, intends other things, and thinks himself akin to Miles Davis, another musician who never burdened his solos with gratuitous technique. Davis, though, could build tension and, when required, fire on all cylinders and make it frantic, exciting, breathe taking. Beck does not do that. Decades go by and endless conversations refer to the genius of Beck and still, nothing happens at the address I was given. I understand that and we have, of course, is essentially subjectivities competing for dominance.

The matter isn’t whether Beck can play guitar. As a blues/rock guitarist who first came to American attention during the British invasion of the Sixties with the Yardbirds and later with his string of short-lived (but memorable) ensembles, Beck is a pioneer in matters of extending the vocabulary of an African American vernacular and incorporating elements of funk, jazz, reggae and fusion and rockabilly into his particular mix. He’s recorded quite a bit of music that still makes me turn my head and stare incredulously at the speakers; when he wasn’t being cheap with his playing and willing to lavish more in guitar bravado, his guitar work is of a whole piece.

 Not just flashy solos, which were, in fact, the least of Beck’s best art, but of control of tone color,  splendidly, tasty fills in the interstices of his band’s alternately rocking or funky fury, attacks, flurries and elongated elaborations on the tremolo bar when your attention was otherwise engaged.  What makes Jeff Beck a great guitarist (when he wants to show off) is that while his compatriots were concentrating on the number of notes they could cram into a twelve-bar or sixteen bar phrase, he did what Miles Davis did with is trumpet after he ventured from the fast, rapid, conspicuously virtuoso inclined sphere of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and instead pared back his soloing to what was essential and made musical sense. 

While others dominated their songs and performances with fusillades that eventually became a comfortable rut, Beck filled his accorded solo slots with the gift of space, fewer notes, high register bends, and unique tunings. I put forth his first two albums The Jeff Beck Group and Beckola in evidence and will skip ahead to his fusion release Wired and still later Beck’s Guitar Shop as prime examples. That sweet, discerning blend of flash, taste, discretionary speed, off-center attack and an uncanny mastery of electric guitar volume are marvels for future generations to listen to if they wonder what all fuss was about. These weren’t records by an artist still making his reputation. Presently, his reputation is made, his name now a brand, his work too frequently a stylized snore.  Again, I wish Beck would indulge the less savory side of his musical nature and burn a hole in the state no one can leap over.

That, though, is part of the fun of discussing musicians and their work. It just seemed to me that Beck has refined his style over the decades to the point that he is drastically essentialist in the tweaking of his playing; all the speedy, distorted, flashier bits are missing in large measure in the interest of a more mature purity, Artists, as they age, do that, but I think Beck's ruthless reappraisal of his chops has, for me, left much of what he's recorded sound empty. I would love to hear Beck rave it up again, to cram a lot of notes into a measure and make them stick, like he used to.

Ender does not end here

Ender's Game, a movie based on the novel by the currently controversial Orson Scott Card (who is in the soup for not knowing when put a cork in it), is a decently executed science fiction film, although I found Harrison Ford's unrelenting scowl as the head of the planet's military command to be a bit of a headache inducer. The furrows in his brow were deep enough to plant crops in. Director Gavin Hood keeps this enterprise moving along well enough, explaining its fake historical circumstances and contrived dream theory well enough , but there was really no anticipation in the story line. 

I hadn't read the novel and likely will not do so--I like my scifi on the screen where words don't matter--but I had a very good idea where this thing was going. Let me just say that with the Title and the plot's strong emphasis on battle simulations in preparation for war, the shocking twist was not a shock, twined or unwound. It is, you guessed it, a thinly  disguised critique of militarism and war mongering. It's not Noam Chomsky, but the subtext has the benefit of being easily grasped, too easily perhaps. The state of Political Commentary isn't that much smarter than the barely concealed verities in Ender's Game. The flashy  visuals, not a spoonful of sugar,make the medicine go down. 

The ending was an expected and unsatisfying set for the sequel; the dissatisfaction lies not in the fact that story was unfinished by the end of the movie, but that far too many movies you take a risk on seeing are likely not intended to be stand alone entertainments but rather the installments of studios hope will be profitable franchises. The prevailing feeling is "here we go again", as you feel part of the masses, teased by gossip, speculation and all other manner of celebrity non-news , responding in Pavlovian fashion to a vague , if  loud and flashy promise that you can relive the thrills you had over a cherished film from long, long ago. You may that particular memory from your own experience. Whatever the film, though, all of us know, in an unguarded moment of self-honesty, that those thrills are not coming back. 

PINK FLOYD'S LONG, TRUDGING MAGNIFICENCE

Rolling Stone has informed us that Pink Floyd, in order to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the release of their admittedly brilliant album "Dark Side of the Moon, has invited fans to tune to their website this Sunday, March 24, in order to stream the record, in full. I can't help but think this is less the gift to fans than the band might think, since any committed fan of Pink Floyd likely already owns the album and has been listened to it relentlessly for decades; myself, I know precisely where every pop, skip and hiss occurs on my long lost vinyl copy.  All told, this is one of those records that has been around for so long and has been played so often that I wish I could condemn it as nostalgia, but I can't. It is a brooding, moody, poetic and richly textured end-of-the the-dream concept album, a masterpiece of disillusion that rivals, I declare, T.S.Eliot and his beautifully distraught "The Wasteland".

There is in both the mesmerizing defeatism of their respective projects; the shoulder-shrugging and firm embrace of the will to live fully have never found better, more seductive expression, both poem, and album. Refreshing in the music and lyrics of Pink Floyd, as well, was a what I think is unmistakable for the working class; along among British Art Rockers, PF avoided verbal drag and double talking allusions and planted their narrations dead center in a streaming disgust with the mess men have made of the world; politicians and corporations for being such greedy, short-sighted exponents of the profit motive and the misery index, and the common people, for believing lies told them and willfully buying into a fantasy that will only kill them all, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Wish You Were Here" were two endearingly burnished sides of the same dented coin, legitimate and remarkable expressions of a lightly toxic worldview. 

Predictably, with commercial artists contractually obliged to produce new work on a corporation's schedule, they ran out of fresh things to say; later records tended to be as dreary as dour music is supposed to be. England has a tradition of hippie art-rockers going sour as they edge into their thirties; Barrett had the good sense to just break down and allow his legend to simmer on low boil for decades. It is an accomplishment that he has managed to be that footnote in the Pink Floyd saga that ABSOLUTELY NO ONE FAILS TO MENTION. I like that he his name persists on the band's name and legend with no effort on his part. His actual story is sad, though, and he would be the first example I would cite when arguing that drug taking without medical need is intellectually indefensible. Waters, though, stuck around, had his moment of glory in which truly great work was done, but he became a boring old cynic bemoaning variations of a faceless, grey, corporate England divorced from a romantically envisioned past. He reminds you of that great sex you had after a cocktail party where you fucked the fried liver out of your partner and then waking up and seeing who it was you were putting it to, or who was placing it in your personhood. Ugly recrimination followed rapidly and you wonder what was worth this current cramping of one's expressive style. Roger Waters never sang about that. Pink Floyd could have used more Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart and less Basil Bunting.

Although I am sick unto death of ever hearing this album again, "Dark Side of the Moon" is a keen and sufficiently angsty expression of a generation's loss of idealism. Their narcoleptic music and vaguely saddened ruminations, in fact, are an extended impression of a very bad drug crash, when the good vibes of acid and pot became overwhelmed by the critical burn-through of methamphetamines. The irony is that for a band that has lampooned, bemoaned and besmirched regimentation with their mirthless minimalism, their goal, with the live streaming, is to get the last three citizens of the planet who haven't purchased the disc to buy it, finally, and to become a nonconformist just as the rest of us have always been. Like-minded free thinkers.

This Space: Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach

This Space: Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach:

"The problem with Kafka's fiction is that while in general the surface presents a generic world, recognisable even to those of us living a century later, the content is not familiar; it does not counsel the reader with wise observations on the human condition or provide practical information and descriptions of places for the reader to absorb and use in their lives; there isn't even a happy ending in sight. The only resort for the reader is critical: 'What do I make of this?'."

I would venture that Kafka's fiction "--does not counsel the reader with wise observations on the human condition--"  is exactly why it remains a literary art that remains powerful and continues to resonate  nearly a century after his death. One can make a cogent case for the primary mission of literature to be one of relaying stories of how characters, heroes and heroines both, meet their challenges head on and come out the other side, changed, but wiser and more or less intact, but I fear the rhetoric he would use would be the kind of religious insistence which,however presented and finely parsed with philosophical what-ifs and teleological what-nots, maintain rather simply that fiction , fabulation of any kind, be instructive.

That would be instructive in the ways of a culturally dominant habit of pervasive rationalization that there is a purpose to the way things are, that each trial is a test of faith and character (judged against a vague, abstruse creed) and that the individual is required to keep faith and entrust their well being and souls to Church, State and Banks.

Kafka is an artist precisely he didn't have much for the finely tuned , beautifully poetic rationalizations of one might term "moral fiction"; he was rather obsessed, both as individual and as writer making an aesthetic choice, to be true to his alienated, bleak, cruel existence where attempts to cajole and seduce a person to look on the bright side of things only intensifies that nothing makes sense and that existence is cruel, amoral joke. His loyalty was to truth as he experienced it,  and his fiction, splendid eviscerations of folk tales and judgment past, makes a reader consider their feelings of similar psychic destitution  and do the work of making something , something beautiful, truthful and meaningful, where nothing existed before.

Mormons Offer Cautionary Lesson on Sunny Outlook vs. Literary Greatness - NYTimes.com

Mormons Offer Cautionary Lesson on Sunny Outlook vs. Literary Greatness - NYTimes.com:

I  have met and still know a number of superb poets and prose writers who are former Mormons. Catholicism and Protestantism are very much older than Mormonism, and one should note the massive influence Christianity had on European culture, and the longevity and resilience of its imprint. A writer or poet, whether believer or some form of alienated and rambunctious free thinker, couldn't but have their moral, philosophical and aesthetic precepts formed somehow by the daily pervasiveness of theological thinking; in any event, poets and writers and playwrights and artists of all sorts were able to find nuance, exceptions, ironies, tension within the Church's thinking.

It was generations of artists attempting to resolve the conflict between what they were socialized to accept and a suppressed desire to believe and do otherwise. One can cite their own examples here, but suffice it to say that some sought reconciliation between the desire to rebel and a need to believe in more mystical infrastructure, while others wandered off toward spiritual beliefs more accommodating of a free spirit, and still others rejected an afterlife and its laws altogether.

This conflict follows us to the New World, where it morphed into something else all together, hence another discussion. Mormonism, a young religion founded only in the 1820s, is not in an historical position to have its writers struggle with their belief system with the result being a species of arguably great art; Mormonism, in fact, seems more a parody of basic Christian catechism than anything else. 
The same may be said of Scientology, a legitimate religion, I suppose, but one whose tenets of faith seem more the subject of bad science fiction writing. Christianity, of course, was a mirroring of Greek and Roman mythology, with a vast reduction of gods and demigods, of course. I suppose it's only the natural progression of things that so much contemporary spiritual thinking seems inspired by dog eared paperbacks one finds in damp boxes on garage shelves or in bookstores where dust mites and mildew rule the roost.

Changing seats

Save your cash and skip the slow-moving, turgid, and criminally inane Thor: The Dark World. It improves over the first Thor film, but there is lethargy in all the action scenes. Nothing seems crisp or crucial in the physical battles, although there is some good CGI of London smashed to pieces by the invasion of the Dark Elves. Chris Hemsworth as Thor talks like a bad High School drama student who is trying to force his voice into a lower register--he sounds like he's trying to suppress a burp while he speaks--and there is a frown on his face throughout the film that makes him look as though someone gave him a shot of castor oil. Tom Hiddleson as Loki is inexplicable anyway you look at-- he fluctuates between glee, sorrow, and rage raggedly, scene to scene. Plus, he is incapable of not looking like Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. Anthony Hopkins as Odin is utterly disengaged from whatever is going on around him and appears rumpled and ready for a nap. At the same time, Natalie Portman, consistently the least charismatic actress I can think of, moves through this movie in a variety of self-loathing postures, as though in pain, realizing everyone she knows will see her in this expensive windup toy of a film.

 A Thor movie could be entertaining if there was the right cast, director, and script, a crew that had a feel of the source material, i.e., the Marvel comic book, not the original Norse legend. This is an efficient, professional bit of filmmaking and does provide a moment or two of entertainment. Still, the cast is so indifferent--either phoning it in or gnawing the scenery--and the plot points so diffuse, distracted, and pitifully predictable, in blockbuster terms, that what we have is an expensive, noisy apparatus utterly without charm. What's missing is the grace, energy, and, yes, essential good humor and humanity of the original Kirby/Lee comic book tales. Jack Kirby had an extraordinary visual imagination, and a capable rendering of his version of Asgard could have been simply magnificent, magical even. I think a Thor movie could be entertaining if there was the right cast, director, script, and crew that had a feel of the source material, i.e., the Marvel comic book, not the original Norse legend. This is an efficient, professional bit of filmmaking and does provide a moment or two of entertainment. Still, the cast is so indifferent--either phoning it in or gnawing the scenery--and the plot points so diffuse, distracted, and pitifully predictable, in blockbuster terms, that what we have is an expensive, noisy apparatus utterly without charm. Barry has a point that what's missing is the grace, energy, and, yes, essential good humor and humanity of the original Kirby/Lee comic book tales. Jack Kirby had an extraordinary visual imagination, and a capable rendering of his version of Asgard could have been simply magnificent, magical even.

What they settled for were computerized variations of Shangra La from Lost Horizon. Worse, the make-believe city resembled a cross between Hearst Castle and an M.C.Escher painting. That, combined with the sluggish momentum this movie is barely capable of, is quite enough to make you calculate how much you worked to make money for the ticket you bought to see something that finally made you feel like a moron for seeing. What they settled for were computerized variations of  Shangri La from Lost Horizon. Worse, the make-believe city resembled a cross between Hearst Castle and an M.C.Escher painting. That, combined with the sluggish momentum this movie is barely capable of, is quite enough to make you calculate how much you worked to make money for the ticket you bought to see something that finally made you feel like a moron for seeing. They've thrown a lot of things in the air for this juggling act, and too many things hit the stage they're playing on.

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Getting around to some old movies, courtesy of the NetFlix miracle, and I decided to catch up on a Ben Affleck/Samuel L.Jackson film from more than a few years ago, Changing Lanes.  It thought it was a decent enough Hollywood "message" film, though it had the dopiest premise imaginable. 

It's not that I object to happy endings -- in this case, each of the characters played by Sam Jackson and Ben Affleck realize the exact nature of their wrongs and wind up doing the right thing by the world and themselves: The concentration of the events into one day snaps credulity, and while you're wondering whether this is an alternative universe where there are 76 hours to a day, the film drags way too much in critical areas. Jackson and Affleck are both quite good here. Still, in the crush of the events that are eating our protagonists up, there is too much reflection, self-examination, and fortuitous circumstance for the characters to redeem themselves. The irony is fine, but Affleck's flailing do-gooding at the end is a stretch, theatrical without being dramatic.

 Like the film as a whole.  

The good and bad of Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma is a film maker who covets the genius of other film makers, so much so that he reflexively duplicates their trade mark signature gestures as his own. This does occasionally result in some exciting film work, such as the staircase scene from "Battleship Potemkin" artfully crafted into De Palma's "The Untouchables".

More often, though, the unending of one homage after another homage, tributes, plagiarisms is not unlike a three year old's version of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich; they are virtually unwatchable, dripping with references, abrupt and illogical in their construction. De Palma, in fact, seems far too often to contrive a story just to insert his neurotic virtuoso camera tricks. He desperately wants to be taken seriously, to be considered an artist .and yet the best he can do is occasionally approximate the contours of another film maker's inspiration. No can really watch "Blow Out" and not think of the two superior films that inspired it, "Blow Up" and Francis Coppola's ingenious Americanization of the film, "The Conversation"; both those film makers had an idea of what the trying to do. The Untouchables and Casualties of War do not succeed as film narratives because De Palma had good scripts he hadn't the chance to alter, "improve" on, nor had the liberty to ignore. He is a director whose body of work would be more impressive if could reign in his desire to short-cut his way to genius. De Palma seems to select what scenes he would like to plagiarize and then fashion a movie around them; that would be an interesting technique if it had better results, but it doesn't. 

Saying that De Palma's style is "post- modern pastiche” is a nice way of saying that this director hasn't an interesting idea of his own. The tradition has been, and stubbornly remains, that younger artists are influenced and inspired by older artists; the younger artists, those few who will rise as being notable on their own terms, will imitate and then mold their influences with their own experience and sensibility. It's a compelling dialectic. De Palma's work is a good example of what is fatally wrong with the post modern method: take various scenes from other film makers and then does a puppet show. 

 Carrie, Casualties of War, The Untouchables and Carlito's Way a few are indeed fine movies, but one can say that they are the least "De Palma like" in the body of work. He does good work when he sticks works in service to a good script; he had the potential of being a very good "Hollywood hack", an underappreciated designation to those directors who take assignments and produce powerful movies that resists fashion and politics. 

Perhaps he should have aspired to be Robert Aldrich rather than Alfred Hitchcock. De Palma revealed technical virtuosity, yes, but unlike those he admires, he could translate his personal quirks and issues into a compelling art. Scarface is a classic merely because it is glutted burrito of excess; true to a post modern nature, one cannot decide if it is intended as parody or critique. I doubt De Palma knew either, as the increasing extremes of debauched sex, violence and vulgarity achieves not catharsis but rather the opposite, apathy. The last few minutes, the climatic shoot out with Sonny's invitation to "say hello to his little friend", is wonderful, of course, but it is the only thing in the film worth talking about these decades later. It is simply bad movie made memorable solely because it was so expensive and garnish.

 Casualties of War is one of DePalma's best films, a straight forward and powerfully told morality tale, highlighted with notable performances from Michael J.Fox and Sean Penn. De Palma has always been a master of moving the camera in virtuoso turns (or rather, someone who has mastered the virtuoso camera turns of others, i.e. Hitchcock, Eisenstein, et al), but he is too often a lousy story teller, replacing a tricky sensationalism for plausibility. Here, he gets the combination right, a crucial issue at hand--at what point do liberators fighting for an Essential Good become worse than the evil they think they're fighting?-- the right script , the right actors, a balanced trifecta that compels the would be maestro to keep his film making in balance as well. 

 There is not a wasted scene, not a gratuitous cut or splice to hijack this movie's power. Michael J.Fox does a credible job as a soldier with religious convictions that are in conflict with his Mission, who's perimeters, he finds, are being improvised and diminished, and Sean Penn is stunning as hyper-macho team leader whose loyalty for the good of the men under his command changes from Good Soldier to Concentrated Evil; his sense of morality is shattered and ground to dust and there is a gleaming insanity just behind those radiating blue eyes. What additionally comes into an articulate focus are De Palma's views on violence towards women at the hands of warped men. Rather too often in films, women seemed little more than witless innocents or scheming, sulking whores who were engineering their violent ends due to a variety of self-scheming schemes; leeches, blood suckers, vampires, debilitating things to be poked, shot, prodded with blunt instruments, drills, knives. 

The director, a gifted technician with a conspicuous desire to sit among the greats in the Auteur Pantheon, seemed to have issues with women, issues that seemed to find only extreme resolutions. The ambivalent treatment of the misogyny made you wonder whether DePalma was an inept moralist who couldn't make his movies perform both as entertainments and moral inquiries, or if he was merely interested in the thrill of seeing women abused by disgruntled men. With Casualties of War, the focus turns the churning culture of men in war time, on a band of soldiers who recreate and embrace their loyalty only to one another in the field to the tragic exclusion of all else. DePalma lines up the scenes of escalating violence and decreasing reason, until Penn's character offers up a lone Vietnamese women for his men to rape, offered up like a cash reward for a job well done; this is more than a melodramatic turn according to a prefigured script, but an effective, disturbingly presented result of group thinking. The issues aren’t nuanced considerations of good versus evil and what appropriate and punishments should be meted out--it is a blunt, plain truth, the inflicting of pain by the powerful against the weak. This problematic director for once gets that across forcefully, artfully, unambiguously.

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 Writing at Salon.com, Louis Bayard turns in a cute piece defending that barnyard stinker Scarface, mustering up what reads like a strained enthusiasm for that movie's grinding, loud and bloody imposition on the senses. It's perfectly fine to find something interesting to talk about in films that otherwise stink on ice, such as the controlled formalism King Vidor gives to the Ayn Rand's proto-fascist film version of her novel The Fountainhead;the ridiculous politics and Vidor's visual elegance make the film watchable , not a little campy. It's a quality worth commenting on further. Bad is bad, though, and Bayard's love of the egregious Brian DePalma film cannot quite get out of the drive way. It's an old space-filling trick for a pop culture wonk to take up the case of a commonly derided example of mass-art and argue the hidden or forgotten virtues therein.

 Lester Bangs was brilliant at inverting commonplace complaints and making the case for bands that would otherwise be swept off the historical stage, and time has shown that he was right as often as not, noticeable in his early raves for Iggy and the Stooges and the MC-5. But the trick is a stock ploy now, and the reversals of fortune have become a splintered, ossified rhetoric, and this defense of Scarface doesn't carry the weight to make what has to be Brian DePalma's most elephantine, graceless, absurdly baroque film into anything resembling a watchable entertainment. Even the fabled violence and allegedly "operatic" style, over the top as they are, no longer , if they ever did, jolt, shock or make us consider the effects of mayhem on the viewer, nor does it make us contemplate the nature of violence in American culture at large. All the other virtues, as intrinsic critiques of American greed, the cult of the individual, the flesh-eating glee of unconstrained capitalism, are all there, surely, but these elements are less examinations of causes of real world ills than they are pretexts for the leaden DePalma show piece stylistics where he see the director , again, mashing together camera strategies he's lifted from directors who work with a steadier hands. 

Steady DePalma isn't, and Scarface drags and seems interminable despite its reputation for vulgarity and grizzly gun play. It just goes on and on and on still until the sheer tedious weight of the thing mashes you into the seat. One might say something of Al Pacing’s flame-throwing performance of Tony Montana, and here it is; even Oscar Winners can be wretched when left to their own devices, and Pacino without a good director or a decent script might as well be an antsy house cat clawing up the furniture.

Superman Puts the Zod On Batman

There is a bit of wondering going on about the role Kryptonite (the fictional substance that is Superman's weakness) will play in the Man of Steel sequel, tentatively titled Superman v. Batman. The thinking seems to be that the two characters will eventually duke it out, with Batman employing the special K as an equalizer in face of Superman's obvious physical advantage. I'd prefer it if the filmmakers found another angle to bring these two men together. I share the opinion that Superman defeats Batman, period, no explanations, no conditions, no excuses. 

The "Batman v Superman" name is a working title only, and there is NO NEED to have these two characters fight. We can leave the Frank Miller tale where it belongs, in DC's "Elseworlds" sagas and let these two men meet under more realistic circumstances. In any event, even with kryptonite, Superman would likely win in a heartbeat. His skill set, ie, powers, are too many and overwhelmingly superior to Batman's skills and expertise. It would just strain credulity and lessen the reinvigorated Superman brand. More interesting, intriguing and with greater plot potential and character development would be to have the two heroes circle each other with suspicion, each considering the other as an abomination and contrary to everything each of them stands for. And, as the plot's crisis mount, the two find themselves in common cause and discovers that each has abilities and skills that come in handy in the fight against evil. This way we can have Batman's using his skills in detection and strategy with more purpose, and we get to see Superman be super against a foe, we assume, who can give him a fight worthy of his strength.

On the matter of Kryptonite, let me add that that the filmmakers would be wise to just get rid of. I always resented the fact that the most powerful being in the universe could be rendered weak and eventually killed with a mere radioactive rock. It doesn't do any good to hypothesize alternative theories around this; Superman is a character who is able to withstand immeasurably destructive cosmic forces and it is irrational for a hero of such heroic resilience to quite suddenly lose his strength and commence to perish because of a rock emitting a particular kind of radiation. It has never, never been plausible, even considering how insanely implausible (albeit entertaining) his comic book world is.

Kryptonite is, and always has been, a fast exit for writers who hadn't the imagination to create better, more demanding perils for Superman to face. It had gotten to the point that seemingly every two-bit punk and shoplifter had a chunk of the green stuff in reserve in case Super tried to interfere with their acquisition of ill-gotten goodies. We have to consider as well two other inconsistencies with the fictional rock; (1). If a rock emits radiation powerful enough to weaken and eventually kill the otherwise invulnerable Man of Steel, why have humans, in most of Superman's 75 years, been able to handle the substance without harm. This was a glaring inconsistency, an issue unresolved because the writers wanted human villains, be they punks, technologized billionaires, or mega-powered bad guy, to be able to handle the material to foil Superman and then move on with their agenda. It's a cheat in the narrative art. 

By rights, humans should burst into flames and scream something horrible before there is nothing but a black scorch mark on the ground where they once stood. Kryptonite should have been killing humans all along. 

(2). Why has it seemed that every single chunk of Kryptonite landed on Earth? Over the many decades that I've read Superman, it has always seemed that the kryptonite was much, much too plentiful. Even in the comics, the universe is a very big place and it would seem only the smallest, nearly unmeasurable amount of K would crash to earth. What I am basically arguing is that Superman's only weakness should be someone with superior strength, skills, intelligence. The Kryptonite trump card has got to end. And DC should run another Dark Knight novel with an alternative ending--Batman picks a fight with Superman and Big Blue, annoyed, goes Full Zod on him. If you want some of Superman, you're gonna get some of Superman. As they say, you mess with the bull, you get the horn.

Sound, fury, cliché! Lazy pundits “double down” on “game-changing” “narratives” - Salon.com

Sound, fury, cliché! Lazy pundits “double down” on “game-changing” “narratives” - Salon.com:

'Thomas Frank, writing in Salon, does a neat job of collecting and arguing the uselessness of cliches and other forms of verbal filler when it comes to the discussion under way on cable tv's political talk shows. 

I remember a night watching the old Keith Olbermann show on MSNBC where I heard he, author Richard Wolf and Washington Post columnist Gene Washington have a wonderful time saying "double down" to one another , in rapid succession. Conversations, even ones stressed by tv segment time constraints, are based on rhythm and cogent phrasing to be understood at first listen; the relentless repetition of the odious "double down" rendered the topic of the discussion all but incoherent to my ears, not an easy thing to do since I am someone who listens to what others are saying. 

Gone was the showy outrage over whatever the latest GOP happened to be at the time; what replaced it was a verbal circle jerk that sounded like it involved the odious Kentucky Chicken offering, also named the Double Down. The sandwich was two thick,greasy chicken breasts and lots and lots and lots of cheese, bacon and assorted other bringers of cardiac complication. The panel on Olbermann's show sounded like they were slipping into a Food Coma, murmuring for more Double Downs before the Lights Went Out.