American Gangster: Epic Tedium

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 the 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 the atmosphere and move action and drama along concurrently, as is the case in his masterworks Blade Runner, The Duelist, Gladiator, and Black Hawk Down. The balance between the oddly composed frame, the baroque design and the character-driven plots ( Black Hawk Down, though, is more about combat protocol than personal demons) 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 predigested bilge such as the blandly a-historic nonsense of 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 worldviews are exchanged: the nod to Pacino and DeNiro in Heat is glaring, obvious as a zit. Scott also takes his time developing the storylines of the crime boss and the cop to where the 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 cliches on. All the same, 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 scriptwriters who think slack momentum equals literary acumen, something this filmmaker obviously coveted.

Hollywood Ending:Tom Sleigh's "A Wedding at Cana, Lebanon, 2007"

Tom Sleigh side steps the blind alley debate as to whether this poem is prose or poetry but maintaining a fast, jerking momentum; there is chaos hear, a tangible feeling of something gone horribly wrong during what was supposed to be a peaceful , happy affirm ton of being in a life that’s worth living. He comes across this and is filled with disbelief, horror, the crushing shock of what he hasn’t seen before. At it's most effective, this poem is about a fight against engulfing incomprehension.

He said, "It is terrible what happens."
And "So, Mr. Tom,
do not forget me"—an old-fashioned ring, pop tunes,
salsa! salsa! the techno-version of Beethoven's
Fifth, Fairouz singing how love has arrived,
that's what he heard after they dropped the bombs,
his ambulance crawling through smoke while cellphones
going off here here here kept ringing—
how the rubble-buried bodies' still living
relatives kept calling to see who had survived.

The narrator, whom we presume is Sleigh, describes everything he sees manically, at the dual edges of irretrievable panic and despair, creating a narrative of shattered bits and pieces with the fueled earnestness of someone swimming madly to keep their head above water. There is the pervading sense that the narrative being given, the same sort of detailing we’ve seen given by reporters in the field who’ve witnessed an attack, captured it on film, and who must now rise above their mortality and report the details to an audience, is done with the barely tangible hope that one can maintain continuity in the midst of the carnage, a sense of the world being whole in spite of the attack, a wan hope that this ruination can be repaired.

And when he dug through concrete scree scorched black
still smoking
from the explosion, squadrons of jets droning overhead,
houses blown to rebar, he saw cellphones'
display lights flashing from incoming calls and when
he flipped the covers, saw phone camera pics,
pics of kids, wives, dads, single, grouped, some wearing
silly party hats, scenes of hilarity
compacted on the screen: it was "not good"
he said, to have to take the phone out of the body
part pocket: Hello—no, no, he's here,
right here, but not—
and then he'd have to explain ... and so he stopped
answering.

The bit with the cellphones is very well played and gives Sleigh opportunity to introduce the further complication here, strong images and clues to the immensity and desirable banality of the lives of the victims, with picture of parties, party hats, people laughing, the ringing phones of callers looking for the phone owners, confused and despairing that a stranger has answered the call. A rush of words, a hard pounding stream of restless adjectives and nervously connecting commas that barely give pause before the description of the next element of the disaster, Sleigh’s condenses time, collapses it, and conveys the sensation of past, present and future happening at once; the maddened narration , the desperate piecing together of where everything was and where it had been blown away seems a grasping for a hold on sanity. This poem is filmic, in the sense that it’s jerky, forward motion and brief, flickering lapses into bits of simultaneous scenarios reminds of Black Hawk Down , Ridley Scott’s jittery, claustrophobic war film, and it is this element that spoils the work. “Hollywood Endings”, usually derided for the habit of reconciling problematic items in a film story by the end of the tale so that everyone gets the happiness they deserve, don’t necessarily have to be pleasant . For me, it’s whether the conclusions are pat , an ending, happy or sad, allowing the piece to end quickly, wrapped up in a phrase or an image that makes you believe that there is a moral to be derived.

The show over, we 

got back into our car, our tires crunching 

over rubble. As I sat there rubbernecking 

at a burned-out tank, he shrugged: "All this—how embarrassing." 

And "I hope this is the story you are after.”

Making the writer and his craft the final and the defining subject of a poem is a temptation too great for otherwise good poets to avoid, and it is in some cases a chronic condition, an urge that can’t be resisted. Sleigh gives us a downbeat Hollywood Ending,with the last shots being the camera panning over the scattered cellphones, the decimated party scene, billows of black smoke and broken glass mixed in the gravel with shredded bits of wedding lace, coming to the feet of the Westerner, gazing with Imperial Naivety over the horror, with the driver delivering the last word in the movie “"All this—how embarrassing….I hope this is the story you are after.” The narrator nods, looks at his boots, and they head back to the car and then drive off elsewhere in the city . Roll credits. Moving stuff for a motion picture, perhaps, but contrived here, a mechanical moving of the action and what strikes me as a neurotic mention that the man telling the tale is a writer. Sleigh wants to get across the creaky and cracked idea, ala VS Naipaul and Paul Theroux and Salman Rushdie, that the writer is the perennial outsider who observes, reports and deals in depth with their own inability to improve upon the miserable lives and circumstances they voluntarily bare witness to, which is fine if one intends something book length where one’s self examination doesn’t short change the people who inspire the story. The ending is jarring for me, unsatisfying, pat, seeming more the result of a writer’s conditioned reflex than the observing and rendering of an honestly ironic element that happens quite apart from his self image. Had this been in a work shop I was conducting, I would have asked him to can the conclusion he came up with and instead give the reader something as powerful and sure as what he began with. The presence and perception of the narrator and his state of mind is strongly implied and reinforcing that at the end is redundant and distracting; something more about the bit of the world that was smashed while the bigger world, the community, struggles to go about its daily life would have been stronger, more powerful, more honest.The poem is about a specific situation he was witness to, and the larger subject, how a population tries to conduct their lives as normally as possible in the midst of this violence, was being effectively presented by Sleigh until the intrusion of his occupation, a writer.The poem works as a rush of sensation and impression, and the larger issue of genocidal policy is not part of what makes this poem work or not work. The aim is doubtlessly to get readers to think critically of the situation, but discussion of that here is, honestly, useless to a discussion as to how this poem might have been more powerful as a work of literature. Politics are fine, but political poems are foremost poems, and they need to succeed as writing if they're to have impact.

Ready-mades, Aesthetic Distance, Art as Mere Fun

I had a professor once point out that something becomes art once it is framed, no matter what that object may be This Marcel Duchamp’s' idea, a classic dada gesture he offered with his ready-mades, such as urinals hoisted upon gallery walls, and snow shovels on pedestals. The point, though, was that the object became an aesthetic object, denatured, in a manner of speaking, from its natural context and forced, suddenly, to be discussed in its very "thingness". Among the dubious yet witty results of this sort of framing, this creating of distance between the banal thing and the person who might have a real need for it is that a perfectly fine urinal, or a snow shovel, or a pipe all becomes useless.

There design virtues, originally aimed at smooth functioning, are usurped and become instead aesthetic dimensions one appreciates in a vaguer language. This aligns itself with Oscar Wilde’s notion of art, in his small essay accompanying Portrait of Dorian Gray, that all art is quite useless; this reflects, perhaps, his attitude for most people, whom he undoubtedly didn’t care for as such, but found them amusing as manifestations of impulses conflicting with protests of moral standards, Great Theatre, in other words.

The object becomes art by the lexicon we wrap around it, a linguistic default. Whether the object is art as most understand art to be--the result of an inner expressive need to mold , shape and hone materials and forms into an a medium that engages a set of ideas about the world, or unearths some fleeting sense of human experience -- isn't the point here. Ironically, art, generally defined as something that is absent all utility, any definable function, is suddenly given a use that is sufficiently economic, which is to keep an art industry in motion; it is the sound of money. Duchamp, and other Dadaists who sought to undermine this idea of art and its supposed spiritual epiphanies for the privileged few, instead furnished a whole new rational for art vending.

Paul Rodgers

It’s my view, after a weekend of rummaging through old albums , that Paul Rodgers is the best singer of his generation, and is the only singer from that era who has gotten better as a vocalist .Roger Daltry and Robert Plant and a host of other blues shouters have had their voices go south, wither, get reduced to a miserable croak, but Rodgers has only gotten better--power, control, feeling, range, the whole shot. Though it's not for everyone, his Muddy Waters Blues album, a tribute to the great blues man, is a super fine blues/rock effort, with Rodgers belting, blasting and swing blues standards in ways veeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry few Brits were ever to do . The songs, classics all, are bullet proof, made for a talent like Rodger's to grace. Rodgers is a brilliant vocalist who is also one of the worst songwriters of his generation, post-Free. Bad Company were an OK band, but not geniuses in any department, and the kind of blues-bathos that Rodgers and cohorts tossed at us made the band seem like a Foghat with a good singer. They had a run, they were popular, I saw them several times, but anyone who listens to the old Free albums, especially Tons of Sobs or Heartbreaker, and not notice the depreciation in song quality, or conviction of performance really hasn't been paying attention. Rodgers sometimes sounded like he were droning into a nod, that his last held note often sounded like they were going to transform into snores, and we might have had the sound of our singer falling to the floor , napping hard. Crash!!! Bad Company's best album was Straight Shooter. After that, it was cruise control rock and roll, hard rock MOR. Nothing especially rich or interesting, basic as bread and water. The Page/Rodgers match up didn't do much for me, not completely, but I did like their version of "You've Lost That Loving Feeling". But the fact is that the Righteous Brothers version is untouchable, though others have given the songs decent readings: Bill Medley, the lead vocalist on the original version, performance that is legend. The right voice for the right song. I think Rodgers would have better luck teaming up with VanHalen, at least for one album. But only if he let Eddie write the music and David Lee Roth scribe the lyrics, provided Roth can holster his ego and content himself with being Bernie Taupin to Rodgers’ Elton John. Not likely, though, and that’s too bad.

Rita Dove's Rage Against Complacency

Context is indispensable in literary interpretation, but not every poem written requires the digging in order to grasp the larger things a poet is getting at. Rita Dove's poem "Blues in Half Tones, 3/4 Time"is a good example of this. The context is from the black experience, but she doesn't depend on every reader's knowledge of black history and it's struggle for civil rights in order for them to comprehend and respond to her more generalized theme: nay-saying and apathy are killers of the soul and ambition. Her particulars happen to be black, elements with which she creates art, but the poem is written skillfully enough for readers of different cultural origins to relate to her themes and understated assertions. Meaning, as such , is not locked up in an identity-specific criteria.

Dove sounds like she's talking about equivocation here, in the voice of someone responding to another's remarks or complaints about the wrongs that exist in life, both on the personal and global levels. The responding voice admits the unfairness of the wrongs that have been done, but offers a solution that equals the that one may as well make the best with the imperfect situation they're in.

From nothing comes nothing,
don't you know that by now?
Not a thing for you, sweet thing,
not a wing nor a prayer,
though you got half
by birthright,
itching under the skin.
Much of the troubles seem to be automatic, by the color of skin and the blood that courses through the veins; a hard fate one is born into and which one must accept as inevitable and unchangeable; only then can real decisions be made and real actions be taken to find or create some happiness.

The speaker seems a chronic, make-no-waves
placater, someone who would be considered a realist by some because of a refusal to be absorbed by the illusion and ideology of false hope (and who will not foster in others), and a defeatist by others who accepts what few comforts he or she has under the economic and political heel of a white majority. It's a voice, a constant voice in neighborly patois that encourages conformity, a studied complacency, a kind of defeatist small talk that has the unexamined sway of religious belief. There is no hope, no empowering on this earth:

I'm not for sale because I'm free.
(So they say. They say
the play's the thing, too,
but we know that don't play.)
Everyone's a ticket
or a stub, so it might as well
cost you, my dear.

It's the thinking that has it that no one gets out of this life alive, and that no one is exempt from the
dictated stations and pains of the class one is born into. There is no heaven on earth, and salvation and reward awaits in someplace other than this existence. This is the classic "slave morality" Nietzsche railed against in his tracts and rants against formalized Christianity . Dove, of course, brings this to street level, to a conversation had in market, over a backyard fence, over cigarettes and beers on the porch.It's an insidious device that keeps the powerless without means not by great machinations of determinedly evil powers (though there was and is great evil in the world)but because the victims themselves have adapted to their circumstances and made their powerlessness a virtue, a moral imperative.

Dove's poem is skillfully rendered sketch of a kind of flawed thinking that is as deep in its mal-forming tendencies as any real disease. But it's not just on the epic scale that the chatter concerns itself with. Even the smallest matters, such as finding what I take to be a wallet or purse at the end, are seen as evidence of hubris, and an invitation to the wrath of moronic, piggish gods:

But are you sure you lost it?
Did you check the back seat?
What a bitch. Gee, that sucks.
Well, you know what they say.
What's gone's gone.
No use crying.
(There's a moral somewhere.)A self-preserving relativism transformed into a laziness that is so uncommitted to chancing anything original or self assertive that the speaker cannot (or will not) even dare to attach a cliche moral to an already hackneyed reaction to another's incidental misfortune. You understand clearly why it is a young person, writer or otherwise, would want to leave the neighborhood and all it's nay-saying constraints at the earliest opportunity.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. --Norman Mailer

Rita Dove doubtlessly concurs with Mailer on this point, whatever their differences on other matters might be. A fine, delicately attack on the conformist mentality

No Sparks from Spacks for "On Desperate Days"

Barry Spack’s voice is assertive, booming, decidedly decisive in a poem
that glories in the nostalgic equivocation that takes place in his poem “On Desperate Days”. The protagonist roots around what we assume is the house he grew up in, sifting through layers of emotional sediment and inspecting collected objects that held significance for him. The nooks, the corners, the stairs seem to come at him faster than he can register his sensations and give his responses properly clinical names:

I'd putter in the attic above
neat rooms with books and beds, gleam
of cared-for sink and tub, stairway
down to the place with the lovely name,
the living room, and farther down
the dreaded basement roots of that house,
spider-thread and furnace-throb,
dust in the dingy corners, pipes,
oh desperate days returning the way
wipers sweep wild rain from a windshield
and new rain comes .

Even as the details reveal a snapshot accuracy in the way they are presented, there is a lack of praise for what has been inspected again, after years of absence; in contrast to what has become a subgenre among stay-at-home poets , whose usual contents have a narrator outlining the collision of past ideals and existence of rounded-off situations and a harder life’s experience where ideas are revealed to be flawed and coherent narrative becomes open-ended and without resolution, Spacks refuses to offer up the shrugging irony that winds up a sigh, both of regret and relief. The resignation signifying that one part of his life is done with and that one must walk slower into mature acceptance of what’s been done and what one will do with the next phase of their years, Spacks remains restless, discontented. This is a survey that hints at the choices he might have made instead; there is the strong smell of resentment where one suspects the narrator thinks he was living the wrong life, the wrong house, with the wrong family.


... days when I prayed
somehow my hungers might leach away
as I formed junk-sculptures, gluing a coil
of abandoned vacuum-cleaner hose
to a fractured mirror, married to woe
while seeds of changes ticked at my heart
original joy the next house over!

This might be a slap at Billy Collins, a fine poet who’s made a career writing about his home, his neighborhood, his passions, delivering one safely assimilated paradox, irony, and bittersweet one after the other. Good as he is, very few of Collins’ poems remain with you; few lines haunt you, nag you, come to you in those instances when your thinking needs another mind to reference. Good as he is, Collins lacks an edge, the urge to reveal human drive as something stupidly self-centered, egocentric. I find reading Collins like taking the same tour over and over again; what might delight after a while becomes a repeated punch line one has forgotten. In many ways, I think Collins does essentially the same thing that Charles Bukowski had done, which is to stake out of the territory of subject matter he knows well enough and continues to wrest surprise after surprise from the material for the audience they're writing for. The subject matter varies, but the method is the same, and it's worth noting that their audiences, by and large, are those who don't read great amounts of poetry. I would hope that those enamored of the easy epiphanies and predictable tragedies in either poet remain curious to the form and investigate other contemporary, much lesser known writersSpacks’ poem, in fact, sounds like Collins if he was woken up from a deep slumber and asked a series of inane questions; cogently linking phrases together wouldn’t be the strong point one would have at that moment. Cogency and coherence aren’t Spacks’ strengths either in this poem, with its pile-up of anonymously described home objects, the purpose of which is deferred until the ending, which contains the sudden admission that one wanted to move into the house next door and become part of whatever life it contained. Restless, irritable and discontent Spacks’condition with “On Desperate Days”, and there’s a missed opportunity to undermine a complacent genre of “McPoems”, that sort of verse that keeps its dynamic range under the boiling point. Even a usurper of the form must have a segue to have their revolution makes sense to those it was supposed to matter to.

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury is on of those writers who first earned a living writing lowly science fiction trash for the nascent paperback publishing industry in the fifties who, by dint of sheer professionalism and an unwillingness to vanish into the cellar with other pulp scribes, has achieved a middlebrow respectability. Good for him, since now there is one more teenage favorite whom I no longer have to contextualize as a being a fancy I had before I developed "taste" or 'sophistication". If your a good genre writer and you stick around long enough, you have a very good chance of having a host of recently minted book critics and biographers elevating you the higher ranks of Faulkner or Twain. It's happened a dozen or so times , particularly in the mystery/crime arena with the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Sometimes the shoe actually fits, given that Chandler and Hammett were both innovators of form who had their lyric flights and coolly compressed melodramas informed by a tangible and subtle played romanticism.

Others have been less believable, as in the case of Jim Thompson, who is genuinely creepy and entertaining, but lacks music and wit, or James Ellroy, who mistakes intensity and encroaching unreadability as requirements of writerly worth. Elmore Leonard resists the temptation to let critics and upper echelon authors seduce him with praise and a general invitation to take his work more seriously;
he is the kind of professional you most admire, someone who continues the work, writing one brilliantly middlebrow entertainment after another.
Would that a few of our "serious" authors adopted the work ethic and wasted fewer pages and less of our time with their reputations.Some writers literally beg to be taken seriously; they implore us to read their novels deeply and let the philosophical conflicts resonate long and loudly. Has there been a John Le Carre novel that hasn't been compared to the world weary speculations of Graham Green's ambivalent attaches and minor couriers wrestling with the issue of Good versus Evil under a shadow of a silent Catholic God? Has there been a discussion among fans of James Lee Burke that didn't slip into a tangent about the the American Southern tradition , with Faulkner's and Flannery O'Conner's names repeatedly dropped like greasy coins? It's not such a bad thing, though. Le Carre and Burke are fine writers and do manage to provide a complex settings where the moral battles take place in their work. Their presence in the high rankings needn't make anyone squeamish.

Stephen King, try as he might, will not remain on the top shelf no matter who places him there. He is the master of premise , one great and magnificent idea after another, but then he goes soft in the head and rushes through his novels with flights of illogic that even excusing them as part of a horror novel's delirious nature cannot excuse the slip shod execution.

Bradbury? He is very good, sometimes even brilliant in all his amazing convolutions, and I think it would do everyone a great favor to not burden him with the weight of "literary importance". There are issues and morals and philosophies galore slithering through the paragraphs of his stories and novels, but Bradbury above all else is fun to read. I think it's enough that he be admired as craftsman with a slight touch of the poet. Bradbury , however sage we might wish him to be, never shed the basic rule of all professional writers go by; you need to be read by an audience that wants to be entertained.