Nothing in the store was over five dollars

Nothing in the store was over five dollars , so Brake thought nothing of it to get a bag of cell phone cases for a sweet deal of a buck and a quarter. He gave the cashier a five, pocketed his change as he released a satisfied snort , and walked out of the store.

Then he remembered he was still in Clairemont, at an intersection that had chain coffee shop, an adult continuation school and Church full of garble tongued snake handlers on the other three corners. Just beyond a grove of dead crab apple trees he could see the High School Science building roof, a bleak and dreary twp story slab of flyweight construction from which the American flag was seen caught tangled in the chain and pullies of the flag pole.

The flag wrapped around the pole as the wind made sharp corner of the item flap listlessly like an animal caught in a trap who's reflexes spasmodically twitched and pulled against the inescapable of the steel tooth device. Brake thought of Thanksgiving dinner and dropped his bag of cell phone cases, remembering he had no cell phone and no phone number either.

Killing Them Softy: great crime drama

The conventional wisdom regarding Brad Pitt's new film, Killing them Softly, is that it is an abomination because it had a pathetic box office yield in its first weekend . Such are the fortunes, I guess, when how little a film makes over rides the critical concern of how good a film is. Killing is my favorite film of the year , adding more evidence to the notion that Brad Pitt has handily transcended the curse of being a Ken doll to being a versatile film actor; his portrayal here of Jackie Cogan, a cynical, methodical hit man who is called in by Mob higher ups to investigate a robbery of a Mob protected card game and then extinguish the lives of those responsible as a means of warning other street punks from attempting the same gambit, is subtly detailed and nicely mannered depiction of a character who has a grasp of what he is , a contract killer, and the world he lives in, an America where everything is a brutal business transaction. 

Cogan, a lean presence, is the only one in the Game, this particular crime environment, who hasn't addled his senses with drugs, booze or the destructive reaches of delusional rationalization. In a dark,rainy, cold, urban terrain l of decrepit side streets, ratty warehouse districts and freeway overpasses , we witness a noose composed of criminal short sightedness slowly tightening around the necks of petty hooligans and thugs as their sloppy , double-crossing plans to a quick and easy provide the means of their eventual , violent deaths. "Killing them Softly" has the inevitability of a great Tragedy--American crime fiction at it's best , in the guise of Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson , James Ellroy and Cornell Woolrich, delivers the same bleakly poetic warnings against untoward Pride as does Euripides, Shakespeare or O'Nell-- and Cogan is the only one who understands the situation and certainly the single personality with the focus and method to do what needs to be accomplished. Indeed, this merciless, pragmatic hit man is the only one who understands the terms of this convoluted gaggle of greed and stupidity. Cogan dispatches the elements that have disturbed the city's criminal equilibrium with a perfected mechanical precision. Erratic  punks  creating more ruckus than  riches are not long for this crime world where mob bosses, like any succesful level of management, prefers profit tGo see this film.o employee quirks. Dead problematic thugs cease to be a problem.

 Beyond the oddly  alluring industrial grit of the  crime story itself--a revealing series of conversations where the quirky fuck ups reveal the poetic and vulgar limits of their world view--there are intriguing backdrops that offer themselves up as a critique of the culture at large, particularly the 2008 Obama/McCain race for President where we see, on newscasts observed on televisions in various rat hole brass, the political parties making promises to help the working man while we watch working men, cheap, minor gangsters, struggle , hustle and screw each other for whatever advantage they can get. All this said, Andrew Dimkins, writer and director, has done a superb job with this film, in the overlapping of the three principle story lines that merge at a credible expedient pace, and with the photography, which fashions a dark, noirish feeling in the perennially raining darkness of this film. Superb performances as well by James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins and Ray Liotta as well. 

Say what you see

The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation. In fact, it is nothing but the representation itself conceived as stripped of irrelevant clothing. But this clothing can never be completely stripped off; it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an infinite regression here. --Umberto Eco, The Limites of Interpretation

Umberto Eco some essays, and a book on the matter of over-interpretation, that argue, crudely paraphrased, that observers who've divorced themselves from a need to act upon their judgments on things and events have no recourse but to keep discoursing, interpreting, giving things and events even newer, subtler descriptions until the chatter isn't about what ought to be done in order to effect the way we live but rather about how can we continue to contrive more speech for its own sake.

There was an idea, formerly, that critical theory would describe and diagnose a particular set of problems, and then would prescribe a slate of actions that ought to be done to rid the world of the defined problems: there was a tacit agreement to stop theorizing and to start implementing the radical remedies. Revolutions do not happen by those who hover over the water cooler or  yell at their unblinking tv sets.

Praxis, theory into practice, from Gramsci. Praxis, though, is something the left has forgotten about, gun shy perhaps with advancing any set of ideas that might somehow be construed by the politically sensitive as racist, ageist, sexist, and so on. The ability to name the world in front of us contained the possibility to rename it as well, and then change it. Our theoretical left has taken refuge in poetry and novels and refuses even to discuss what their objects are talking about in the author's terms, exhibiting a convenient nihilism.  

The right isn't afraid to name, nor to advance their cause. There is a living embodiment of political will behind their description of the current situation, and it would be Post Modern Tragedy that we've theorized ourselves into submission.

Sons of the Pioneers

Another in the long series of abbreviated versions of Dylan songs that each contained the by-then formula Byrds/Sonny and Cher arrangement of jingle jangly guitars, over-stated drumming and , just for kicks, a chorus coooing an off key "ahhhhhhhh" in the background. Harrison's talk-singing is impeccably British, charming as a generic trait of Carnaby era artifact, but toothless as an interpreter of one of Dylan's finest, most acidic song-poems. Whatever his technical limits as a singer, Dylan 's nasalisms conveyed attitude, unwavering its combination of exhasustion and disgust. The small talk between Harrison, son of acting stalwart Rex, and  Gary Lewis, son of spastic comedy icon Jerry, is typically lame reparte. It's lameness is the funniest thing about it.

Met a Dude

Met a dude on the Boardwalk in 1973. He had long hair and wore jeans, as did I.

I leaned against the sea wall and played few gasping notes on a harmonica I pulled from my back pocket. It had candy wrappers and clods of hair crammed all through the reeds, and the metal cover plates were crushed. It sounded like a robot death rattle.

"Bad shit, bro" said this dude, "I mean, Paul Fucking Butterfie

ld gonna shit his pants when you step up."

"Thanks" I said, "smoke a joint?"

"Fuckin A right on with your shit".

Without a word we ducked into an alley and fired up a doobie. It was a rainy day, the sky was grey and two story apartment houses in Mission Beach seemed to sag like wet bags of French bread left on a back porch in the dampest days of April.

We never saw each other again. I never thought it worth mentioning.

Philip Roth calls it a day

1. I developed a bad habit of announcing that Philip Roth was not my favorite novelist before offering a considered opinion on particulars of his that I had just read, opinions, oddly enough, that were generally favorable to the work. Despite my protests , there were times I argued that what Roth was doing as a novelist was singularly brilliant, obsessed and varied; Roth might have had just a few themes and, but unlike a good many serious writers his age, he continued to find new ways of invading old ideas. Above all else, he favored story over fashioning a glittering prose style to reinforce old prejudices. Roth is not my favorite writer, as his prose style isn't as graceful or elegant as others of his generation--not Cheever, not Mailer, not Updike, not Didion, not DeLillo.

   
   

    As stylists, writers of breathtaking prose, they are Roth's superior, but there is in each of them a theory of the novel that they are bringing forth in their respective bodies of work. Although I have gotten more  sportsman like thrills from  Mailer and had my heart torn   out  by the ongoing heartbreak of Cheever's tales of sad, alcoholic men, it was Philip Roth, who superior novelist in many respects .

   
   

    The particular theoretical prejudice about what the novel needs to be, the obligation to make a story perform in a manner that is determined by intellectual conceit even without the author's awareness, is all but missing in Roth's prickly collection of novels. Anger, lust, rage, hatred, jealousy, self loathing and grotesque self-infatuation are the hot button emotions in his acidic comedies and tightly coiled melodramas. Roth is a combination of craftsman, inventor and moral interrogator, showing a series of characters in bad situations who are forced to make decisions that result only in more misery an recrimination, un-buffered by the convenient cushion of irony. 

   
   

   There are no neutral corners in Roth's fiction, even to the extent that the author, who has a readable if decidedly poetic method of getting his thorny characaters and terrains into the world, of not offering the reader the distancing , ease giving relief of a simile burdened style. His punchlines and catharses have the effect of body blows.   I realize that I have read about ten of his books over the years, a goody amount I thin, and I realize belatedly that I been reading books by an American  Master. Regardless of ethnicity  or creed, Roth is the master  showing his following how human beings create their own customized versions of Hell by doing nothing more than following their bliss.

Elvis : Poet/Destroyer

It's been argued by rock and roll philosophers for some time that Elvis Presley was everything truly rock and roll are supposed to be, a cross-pollination of gross historical contradictions that meet, fuse and give rise to an expressive result that is fundamentally insane. In this instance, it is the mythological fusing of what is said to be the innate sexuality and vitality in African American blues and the slave culture that created it, and the inbred, Christian determinism that filters through the racist and goony backwaters of the American south, a strand vaguely disguised by the soft soaping pathos and lilt of Country Music. Elvis wrote this poem, a klutzy bit of doggerel, and gives us a clear example when these combating buts of cultural DNA find a place in the same utterance:

ODE TO A ROBIN

"As I awoke one morning 

when all sweet things are born, 

a Robin perched upon my sill 

to hail the coming dawn. 

It was fragile, young and gay 

and sweetly did it sing,  

and thoughts of happiness and joy 

into my head did bring. 

I listened softly to his song 

and paused beside my bed, 

then gently closed the window 

and crushed it's  fucking  head."

A recording of Elvis reading the poem to some friends can be heard here. 

 The result is a volatile example of pure ID, an insatiable appetite, a force so uncontainable that when left alone without the pieties of Church hymns and the sleepwalking good manners evinced in most public moments, the urge is to destroy the world, kill what is delicate, turn what is held as beautiful and permanent into a smashed, crushed, trashed path of rubble and bloody guts. Elvis is said to be the Ur Punk, a barely contained insanity that will inevitably find freedom and its full expression in demolishing the house of excuses we pass off as firmly planted foundation of moral certitude. ““The pure products of America / go crazy," wrote William Carlos Williams. Elvis, among others, fulfills the prophecy.