Elvis Costello's deluge

Here's hoping that Costello doesn't publish a book of poems, since his more elaborate work of the last ten years, save the punchy and rocking' When I Was Cruel, suffer a kind of Aesthetic Bloat. He wants to be taken seriously, and has weakened what used to be a strong cache of talent by too many half-considered

at complexity, diversity, and sheer musical muscle. Contributing to the diluting of the songwriter's work is his odd multi-label record deal with Polygram Records, with whom Costello seeks to release an album on each of that company's many imprints as if they might suit particular projects. What's informative, at least, is that there's a limit to what used to seem like Costello's unlimited capability; it's a symptom shared by novelist Joyce Carole Oates or poet John Ashbery, where quantity indeed diminishes quality. The voice becomes so ubiquitous and inevitably repetitious that you're left with nothing to look forward to. Sorry to say, that one grows tired of the signature styles with unceasing stream of releases and experiments. You become thirsty for other waters.

Costello's genius lies in square in the pop music tradition, where his fanciful notions of theme and eclecticism were reined in by a sense that a song had to work on many levels and still justify itself as something essentially pop-ish, of interest to listeners. This is a lesson he could take from the Beatles, who remained tuneful and catchy, for the most part, during their great period of experimentation and lyric irony. So much of Costello's music lately has been reminded me of nothing so much as the sound of a man in the corner, on a cot, moaning and crying over a sadness he can't express. Costello used to be able to get the words and music to match the heartache and anger; this is not the case any longer.

One can go on about the preening seriousness of Costello's quest to wear a bigger

beret; Painted From Memory, his collaboration with Burt Bacharach, works only half as well as it should, since nearly song is a medium tempo torch song where heartbreak after heartbreak is detailed to such brutal detail that one stops caring and wishes that Costello and Bacharach provided some slick, horn accented pop music that was Burt's other strong suit during his strongest period, back in the day. North, truth be told, was so marginal that one had to wondered what brings a man as gifted as Costello to release a disc of leftovers, half thoughts, modest inventions.

I had the faint hope that Elvis Costello's most recent CD, "The Delivery Man”, would be a solid and tuneful set of punchy rock and roll and sharply writ lyrics as was Costello's previous "When I Was Cruel" from four years ago, but such is hardly the case. Well, no, that understates the disappointment, which was something akin to questioning my tastes when I was in college and feeling compelled, fleetingly so, to apologize for all the positive reviews I'd given his albums in the Seventies and early eighties when I felt I still had some purchase on informing the culture and the people in it about the best work the best of us were doing. Fortunately, I stopped drinking some years ago and avoided anything so rash; I went to sleep, and the worst despair was gone, but I was still irked, cheesed off, madder than a wet hen. Elvis Costello has been sucking for years now, and I was tired of waiting for one of those "return to forms" one anticipates aging rockers to do, hoping they live long enough to make one more disc that has half the kick such musicians might have had back in the day, or the night, or just back when they cared. One way or the other, it amounts to waiting for someone to die, yourself or the artist in question. It's a very slow game of chicken.

The songs are wandering bits of amorphous mood setting, vaguely sad, melancholic, and inward drawn. The worst of "Painted from Memory", is irresolutely medium tempo collection of Muzaked dirges with Burt Bacharach (both of whom apparently forgetting that Bacharach’s work is marked as much by quirky, up-tempo tunes) meets the pulse less shoe-gazing sniffling of "North”. Costello has been trying to show everyone how much he's matured and grown as an artist and writer, but unlike someone like Paul Simon, who improved dramatically in his solo work after he finally bid adieu to the collegiate poesy of Simon and Garfunkel's too-precious word mongering, Costello tries to get it all in, to say it all in one song, and then again in the song after that. His songs tear at the seams, and there is not the overflow of talent you'd like, but rather an uncontainable spillage. Simon, through "Rhymin' Simon" and onward, knows the meaning of restraint, containment, care in image and metaphor. He remains a songwriter with an especially strong sense of pop structure, a matter that forces him to make each song the best he can do at the moment. Costello is, occasionally, a better melodist than Simon and a more interesting, verbally dexterous lyricist, but it is his lack of care that sinks him here and throughout most of his output in the 90s. Tom Waits, his closet in terms of sheer talent, does the sloppy and the unrestrained with the kind of genius we reserve for Miles Davis and Picasso. Costello is shy of genius, is a brilliant craftsman when he applies the technique, and reapplying himself is accurately what is called for. The songs on the new one are unfocused and drift in structure--Costello seems to be trying to convince that playing being indecisive about how he wants a melody to unfold, or what mood and psychology he wants to get across is enough to evoke Hamlet like assumptions of deep thought and artful equivocation on key narrative points. He sounds as if he's trying to be artfully oblique, but what Costello forgets is that his greatest talent was his ability to absorb the styles of fifty or so years of rock, pop, and rhythm and blues styles and then compose a fantastically buoyant music that was at once subtly argued in the lyrics and intensely rocking with the music. Costello must not like to dance anymore, and has entered middle age with some overblown assumptions that he needs to be artier, moodier, more depressed, more diffuse, and more obtuse than he was when he was a young punk trying to make a buck off his bad attitude.

There are those die hard fans who would counter that Costello's lyrics are the subtlest and most literary of his career, something I would argue against, but all the same this is a weak defense of the general torpor that saturates "The Delivery Man". Even if it were so, albums that are more interesting to read than to listen to are fit, theoretically, to be used for target practice at the next skeet shoot.Elvis Costello is a boomer himself. He was born in 1954, I was born in 1952. The issue isn't his taste in music-- I've been a fan and supporter of Costello since he first appeared in the States in 1977, precisely because it seemed he and I shared much of the same attitude about the world and that we drew from the same musical and literary influences. The issue is the lack of consistent quality in too much of his later work. He's written a good number of good songs scattered throughout the uneven and unfocused discs he's released, but it's disconcerting to buy albums on the fading hope that I might be lucky enough to get two or three good tunes out of the average seventy minutes running time per CD.

I bought the record all by myself, listened to it alone, listened to it again alone, generally listened to it for a week by myself, more or less, and found that I liked it better than any record he'd been out in several years. I wrote my review on a now defunct music site I had without the benefit of reading anyone else's reviews; what I found when I did read the notices in The Village Voice and Rolling Stone was that the reviewers thought as I did, that EC was working at full boil once again. Not surprisingly (to me) most Costello fans I talked to about Cruel liked it quite a bit; some even thought it was his best album ever. Anyway, the point is that it's more likely that our man actually put out a great album rather than a manifestation of group think. Cruel, actually, bucked the trend, since most of his later work was getting mixed reviews at best. The herd mentality, if there was one regarding EC, was to give him less than unqualified raves. As for the song lyrics, you already named two of them, both "Episode of Blonds" and "45" are punchy, clipped, caustic and wonderfully layered in their nuance, puns and insinuations, and I wish he could write this well more often these days. I would add another favorite, "Spooky Girlfriend".

Waits has a shtick, sure, but everyone does. Packaging and image is a large part of getting the music out there. Finally, though, there is the music

that stands to be judged, and Waits sublime fusing of alien styles --hard bop, delta blues, Brecht-Weil, Beat prosody, and any number of influences one might toss at him--is unique and grandly textured. It is artful, as opposed to arty, and it is unique, and contrary to the notion that he makes the same album over and over again, it's more accurate to assert that he has a style, a set of aesthetic principles he brings into play and expands or contracts as his instinct dictates. The music he's making in the late nineties isn't the same as the relatively modest efforts from the Seventies. He's grown, he's gotten wiser, and he’s become more interesting to listen to. And he's the best "poetic" lyricist currently in the game.

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IN PRAISE OF PATTI SMITH THE ROCKER

I've seen Patti Smith twice in the Seventies, once at a student-run music club called the Back Door at San Diego University, and then about two years later at the Civic Theatre in the Downtown. A shock was what it was, like sex for the first time, scraping guitar, rudimentary drums, one-note bass lines, and Smith's incantations, yowlings, caterwauling, and proclamations, channeling Jim Morrison and Blake. It was static, feedback and backbeat fused with Smith's flailing rag doll dancing and howling, hardly refined but sublime. I told my date in the middle of the Civic Theatre concert that I wanted to climb on stage and fuck Smith. My date, a demure young woman had a look in her eye and whispered in my ear "So do I..."Patti Smith may be many things, but she is not a phony, and neither was Allan Ginsberg. Full of themselves, perhaps, and a shade pretentious but this is what it takes to an artist in America. Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Kate Braverman, Ann Waldman, Truman Capote, and John Irving are no less fixed in their public identities and self-images of being people with words that cannot be denieddenied. 

Writing is not for modest people; but none of us have to live with these folks, just read their books and find what value there is to be had. Real emotion, insight, poetry, things that resonate with you despite the writer's quarrelsome personality. That's why you read them. Patti Smith I think is a fair- to- mediocre poet, but she was an excellent rock-and-roll artist; I have a firm rock-and-roll aesthetic and consider her best work to be on record and on the stage, in front of a band, and it is here where I think she taps into something larger than herself. But again, whatever she is, she's not a phony, whether you like her. I like some of what she has done and I admire her gutsiness to invade a male bastion and make rock-and-roll something women can find a primary place in. For Ginsberg, I would say he stopped writing good poems thirty-five years ago, abandoning his Blakean visions for a Buddhist practice of a direct transcription of his thought processes--no editing, "first thought, best thought". The result has been an awful lot of wasted paper. Still, when all is said about by professors, acolytes, and sycophants, there remain the great poems he wrote back in the day, mainly because "Howl", a certifiable masterpiece. 

There are several other Ginsberg poems and volumes that likewise ascend to the sublime, and when it all is said that there is to say about him, the writing that is actually good is what I return to, again and again. I worked a poetry reading he gave eleven years ago, and he was a crab, but he was also a man in a hurry; he knew he was dying and was dead about nine months later. So I will forgive his affectations and will be grateful that he lived long enough to write a handful of the best poems written by a post-war American writer.I wouldn't say that Ginsberg is a great poet, only that he has written some great poems. A great poet remains great over a longer stretch of their career than AG did; he ceased being a poet and became instead a celebrity. 

His great work, though, remains great, and that, for me, mitigates somewhat the ensuring mediocrity and cult of personality he cultivated. I would say Smith's arrogance is precisely what her rock-and-roll performance style require, and I found it exciting when I've seen her in full throttle. Personally, I don't mind arrogance in an artist if there's something there to back it up. I admire writers Norman Mailer and Camille Paglia, two strong personalities who back up their bluster with strong and eloquent word-smith-ing. The distinction between the gifted egotist and the blustering pretender would be that the gifted egotist's personality receded after a while and a reader confronts their assertions at face value.

 The pretender's disguise merely dissolves like spun sugar against a wet tongue. Smith, in a more limited sense, is akin to the aforementioned two; she is not a writer, really, but a performer tapping into energies made real by her immodest assertions. In a rock-and-roll context, I think it's riveting, and there is a strong DIY appeal here. She's marshaled her limit assets as a singer and musician, and even as a poet and transformed everything into a perfect rock-and-roll concept, where rough-hewed elements and qualities of the self-taught are deathless assets. If arrogance and extreme self-confidence are, of themselves, qualities one objects to regardless of the work produced, there's nothing I can say to change your mind.

Mark Conway's "Tarot Card of the Dreaming Man Face Down"

The tragedy of someone's death isn't that someone is no longer with us and that it's a sad and unjust matter of the universe that such a rich
life force is now extinguished.

No, it's not that, no matter our intense desires to fetishize the dead with praise of genius, great qualities and fantastic deeds. Those who have died are merely dead, after all, they've ceased feeling pain and mental anguish, they've gone beyond the nagging anxieties that makes Life a blood pressure reading we must keep our eye on. For all the hosannas and energized grief, for all the post-mortem reviews that might catch God's passing ear and perhaps persuade Him to allow the spirit through the improbably crafted gates, we are , in effect, frantically flattering ourselves for having had the acquaintance, claiming acquisitions of knowledge, wisdom, beneficial examples with each chat and shared drink; it's subterfuge, after all, and we pad the walls of our psyche against the irrational, powerful, consuming waves of rage and grief.

It is the living who are in pain, in various stages of mortal panic, it is the living who have to yet again close another house in their neighborhoods of the familiar and realize again, and again that those who are leaving this terrain are dying not through accidents or natural disasters, nor from age much in advance of their own, but from a mortality that wears a face much like their own. There is no longer distance in the deaths of those one knows, it is no longer a distant reference abstracted through complicated strings of association and family ties. Each passing leaves a tangible space next to you; you feel something gone, a wind blowing through an old house. We attend memorials, we go to services, we bring flowers to the grave site, we cushion ourselves in ritual acts and pro forma talk regarding death and dying, and yet still there is panic, anger, roiling, seething grief, a rage that remains. Mark Conway's poem Tarot Card of the Dreaming Man, Face Down gets to that tertiary layer in the geology of the soul and, I believe, gets it right when his narrator begins to admit that the rituals are not enough to handle a close death; he bites his lip and allows the thoughts to form, hard, bitter language, caught half way between poetic expression and stammering rant.


Then it was gone, the beatitude
of your body,
specifically there,
black, black, blue, heavy
as a dead dog, the back
of your legs
looking plastic, looking extra, trailing
behind the rest of you
like a mooch, like a goddamn moron and you
barely there,
already caravaggioing your way
through the light
and dark, mouthing the prime numbers
of eternity .

The memory of someone's entire lifetime is reduced to ritual and ornate templates of otherworldly inevitability, and this something that suddenly seems cheap and besides the point. Conway's narrator speaks for anyone who has the conflict during memorial services of thinking that the extended and costly protocols of death and burial being false and morally repugnant and yet sitting through it all, choking on combinations of tears and sorrow. One wants to be like Lear and tear off their clothes in the rain while excoriating themselves for their purchase of such now-conspicuously shabby delusions of order and purpose, yet one keeps their seat, ultimately uncertain of what lies beyond the last breath one takes and the last beat a failing heart manages. There is only the chance to live in that uncertainty, leave the ritual be, and acknowledge anger and selfish rage in the deeper recesses of the soul where true feelings reside in unthinkable cohabitation.

Where you are, slipping
through the monstrous
inner membrane of the world,
you see how it works.
I, like a mooch, like a goddamn moron, live.

We waited for you. Two or three days.
Then an old man came and prayed

Searching for words, Conway's narrator attempts the elegant and the poetic to make his ambivalence ironic, to create another kind of distance between his emotions and his constructed equilibrium, but what comes forth is only confusion. Conway's poem works for me because it is not dense with literary or to the cultural references, although the piece cites them. Conway goes past the dictionary contextualization, or the gnomic referencing;he does not pull an Ezra here and drop obscured names and terms into a verse without pause to make them emotionally relevant. Our narrator seems tongue tied, between a cultivated voice that makes easy resizing of responsive emotions, the other wholly inarticulate. What happens are high cultured points stripped of their critical trappings with their naked appeal to emotion bared yet again. Something tangible in Caravaggio's dark paintings is revealed when his name is here used as an adjective. The poem is a elliptical account of the inner struggle to regain composure and the overwhelming desire to collapse under grief's smashing weight.

The inexpressible cannot be written or spoken into being; the truth that does arise is the insoluble fact that goes on, life is for the living , that goodbyes must stop and one's shoulder must return to the wheel one is obliged to push through obligations. One needs to stop dreaming of a visit from an gone soul and learn to live in the spaces formerly occupied by another.

Mailer's Masterful THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST

The Castle in the Forest
by Norman Mailer (Random House)

Norman Mailer’s new novel, The Castle in the Forest, to be released on his 84th birthday on January 23rd, is an eccentric imagining about the young Adolph Hitler, narrated by a top lieutenant of The Devil. Mailer's novel is study in three generations of dysfunction, with the young Adolph being the cold sociopathic fulfillment of Hitler Family Values. In incident after incident, ranging from his father Alois's incestuous infidelities to the youth's rapt fascination in a village blacksmith's theories on how a "Will of Iron" is galvanized only through relentlessly consuming fire, Mailer's use of the narrating demon is, in fact, a inquest into why and when the worm had turned.

It's an audaciously seductive saga exhibiting Mailer's verve in full force. Among Mailer's lifelong themes have been examinations of power as well as the consequences, political and spiritual, of how power is used. This theme, Mailer’s central obsession in his fifty years of authoring books, is obvious in such varied novels as An American Dream, the punch-drunk fiction that has an alcoholic writer and television personality murdering his estranged wife from intuited instructions from the moon; or in Ancient Evenings, where reincarnation and sexual domination are the means to control and manage one’s journey through history. The first person memoir of Jesus Christ in The Gospel According to the Son, where we witness the bizarre difficulty of being half man and half divine in the exercise of godly powers with a very mortal sense of weariness and exhaustion, while within the generational CIA novel Harlot’s Ghost Cold War intelligence gathering becomes akin to religious practice and operatives must ironically acquire the capacity for amoral application of trade craft to preserve the rumored good of their cause. We have in this brilliant and contentious series of novels characters who give themselves over to impulse, obsession and a sense of greater powers instructing them to follow vaporously suggested agendas. These are acts of faith without promise or proof that the demonstrations will come of any conventionally desired good.

Diverse though the settings and eras are, Mailer’s fiction all have a similar existential notion, whether his protagonists take responsibility for the actions given them by respective flights of intuition, voices from ashen moonscapes, or the whispers of ghosts and spirits. Mailer has defined his idea of existentialism as the practice of taking risks and accepting challenges without regard to trying to control the results. It is only in the pure state of happenstance that real and authentic choices are made, with the manipulation or denial of the requisites ending badly, in disease, disaster, war, lost hope. The Castle in the Forest’s imagined portrait of a world scourge emerging from a festering mess will give one something to ponder, perhaps in a pause of action when one is deciding whether to be a bastard by exacting a revenge for a slight, real or imagined, or mature enough to let the irritation fade and thus not make the world a more sour place. The beating of butterfly wings indeed; our good works, enacted in good faith, has an effect on how history turns out, but the sad fact is that our worst deeds seem to swell faster and sweep aside all good intentions in their tsunami like rush.

Our narrator, a lieutenant of Satan going by the name DT, or Dieter, here tells his tale in elaborate detail, extended digressions, and anecdotes about what it’s like to work for such a horrific employer, and characterizations of the small nuances of the war between heaven and hell. Young Hitler is nudged, whispered to, exposed to various stimulations, excitements and harsh experiences, made to witness great spectacles and various forms of cruelty and abuse.

Worse, perhaps, DT gives the young Adolph’s ears the speeches of vain and minor men and women speaking volumes about their best intentions, only to have their asides and instructions and philosophical squibs given the lie by crudity and violence. The petty vanities of Hitler’s parents—a preening brute of a father, a doting and emotionally confused mother—and their sustained failures to be ballast for their children gives us a portrait worthy of Faulkner of a family held together on delusional applications of bad faith. Adolph is lied to, pampered, ignored, humiliated, praised and damned; we are given DT’s chronicle of how he had subtly, quietly created the conditions under which the youth who would personify unrelieved grief. This is far less the creation of a merely immoral person, but rather the formation of a collective world view; young Adolph's experience in a world where every adult action is justified by transparent prevarication forces him to organize manipulative techniques that will in turn help tap into a country and culture's bounty of stored frustration and rage.

Adolph fantasies of himself as master of the world who will forge it to perfection, or destroy it in the attempt, and the delusion becomes an ideology, a cause, a death wish that engulfs the world. Mailer’s writing is sure and vivid, showing again his ability to assume voices quite unlike what we'd consider his elegant, wild and rolling style.

Insinuating his ideas in the idealized cadences of Marilyn Monroe , an ancient Egyptian King and Jesus , Mailer's bold empathy with of their respective struggles helps him in find a mortal ,human center, divided between polarities of the All Good and All Evil. The human soul has equal capacity toward the saintly and the unspeakable, and it is the center the pragmatic mind assumes. Both tendencies are balanced for the individual to live creatively through a life of unexpected results, but it is DT's assignment from Satan(whom he refers to as "The Maestro") is to usurp, subvert and stunt charitable inclination and curtail the capacity for more nuanced world view. The aim isn't pragmatism, which allows a man or woman the capacity to make decisions and take action without a guarantee about the results. DT's interventions make the young man's mind a reactionary, solipsistic mess. What would have been a better nature in less obstructed circumstances become a roiling mass of impulsively destructive delusion.

The goal isn't the greater good, but the greater chaos, and the reason, offered by DT with barely concealed glee, is petty and judgmental, to embarrass the Lord God for all His pomp and humorless instructions to humility and selfless works. DT is a demon who loves his work, but work it is no matter how he relishes the resulting chaos, and for all the information about the conduct of the war between Heaven and Hell, the social strata of rank within The Maestro's army, and the alluring description of tricks of the Devil's persuading trade have Wildean jadedness, a sharply articulated sense of professionalism that has become mere expertise. DT, albeit untrustworthy, is bored and frustrated with his Master's assignments. Something is not revealed here, and DT's evocations of how young Hitler's psyche was polluted by engineered bad luck and circumstance are told with just a hint of sympathy for the boy's eventual fate as destroyer.

The scenario echoes old Flip Wilson jokes about a felon explaining in his crimes with "the Devil made me do it", but the dashed expectations, engineered disillusioning , and endless witnessing of adult duplicities wedge the youth into a sphere where moral choice is impossible; simply, there are no genuine virtues to learn, no moral behavior attending all professing and philosophizing. DT's ministrations to his client aid him in achieving true pathology. The world and its people is something either to endure or to master with the mightiest force imagination and will is able to muster. Unreflective, unmoved by incident, we experience a malevolence slowly layered and nuanced with conflicting impulses and desires, warring instincts one resolves by unleashing violence onto the world.

You detect a sigh of Hell-born despair between the demon's measured words. He is at once sympathetic, vain, a wit and a confessor, is ambiguous and seductive, no a being to be trusted no matter the smooth surface of his speech. You read and you empathize with DT's workload as he details the limits of his abilities and lays out his frustration and then remember the roiling rage and devastation that are his stock and trade. Civilized, intelligent, sophisticated beyond imagination, this is merely a sleek glossing over a face that can only corrupt and undermine all forms of good will. Confusion, chaos and the spread of falsehood are the end-all qualities this curious entity exists to perpetuate.The peculiar mix of historical detail and shrewdly outlined characters gives the readers something that is better than formal history or History; it is Hitler as felt presence, a monster raised from circumstances not much different from our own. Mailer’s Hitler is a palpable presence, fully and masterfully realized, and the demon’s nonchalant, jaded recollection makes this book a chilling exploration into the imagined limits of historical record.

NEW WEB ADDRESS!!!

Regular readers doubtlessly have had the old baddance.blogspot.com URL link to some old pages of this blog and wonder where the recent stuff has gone to. If you've found this page, please note that the new address is ted-burke.blogspot.com, and this
is the result of an experiment with the New Blogger formatting; needless to say, I couldn't change back to the old address, and now feel like I'm on cold Arctic island.

A rant, and then a true story

Plagiarism seems a sociopathic activity, like other forms of theft, petty and grand. The thief, due to whatever contorted world view, finely ratcheted system of rationalization and a dependable lack of conscious that they're doing any something wrong, will merely take someone else's writing and assign their name to it, no problem.

The only labor involved was the discovery of the writing that's about to be absconded , and whatever effort it took to cut and paste the material. What is especially aggravating isn't the big names that have been caught pilfering from other authors--Goodwin, Ambrose and Haley can at least fall back on laying the blame on harried research staffs--but rather the thievery of the truly mediocre scribe who continually gets caught using other people's writing as his or her own, and yet continues to claim authorship for the work of others.

I ran a poetry series for years in the seventies and eighties, where open readings were featured, and among the other poets, good, bad but definitely original in their work, where three regulars who read Dickens, Blake, Eliot, Marvel and Johnson , each of them claiming to have written the poems they just voiced. Others in attendance at these readings couldn't believe what they were witnessing, but no one said anything, fearing a fight or some such thing, until finally I cornered one guy, a forty year old, at the end of the last open reading I would MC. He'd just read a thick, awkward Canto by Pound, and I could see a dog eared copy of Ezra's poems crammed in his backpack. He taken the time to type out what he was appropriating , and introduced the poem as "the hardest thing I've ever composed..." I told him he has to stop taken credit for poems someone else composed. Not blinking, he stared at he, zipping his backpack shut, obscuring the Pound volume I conspicuously made note of. "Fuck, you man," he said,"language is free and genius isn't understood
in it's lifetime."

"Ezra Pound is dead for decades" I said,"and I still don't like him. But you gotta stop saying his stuff is yours."

He walked out, the cafe owner turned out the lights,
and I stopped hosting poetry series that night onward, and that is precisely the reason I'm still able to write and read poetry without losing a lung in coughing disgust.

Children of Men

Children of Men has been ruthlessly compared to Ridley Scott’s moody tone poem Blade Runner,a disservice to both films. The comparison is thus: both are most likely (to my mind)the best movie evocations of a dystopic future, and it is there that discussion should stop. What works particularly well in Children of Men is the rapid pace, aided by Cuaron’s decision not to belabor the audience with an excess of expository explanation. It accelerates briskly, convincingly, from the disruption of Theo’s getting his coffee, to the bomb explosion occurring when he’s about to spike it.

The viewer catches on to details rapidly enough, a little here, a bit there, something like catching passing comments or pieces of conversation when one is in a hurry. This film is an odd blend of action/adventure and parable-like think piece; it’s film making at precisely the right pitch. There’s a manic urgency here that stays just this side of panic, abetted by Cuaron’s amazing controlled fluidity of his camera angles and editing–there are tracking shots here that are uncommonly subtle and integrated into the movie’s framework, not mere DiPalmesque show pieces–and Clive Owen’s quizzical performance as Theo.

He’s in something of a daze, a once committed activist gone made mainstream, cynical and alcoholic, slowly drawn back into the action by a variety of circumstances, off on a series of extraordinary labors where he discovers the foul agendas of rebel forces and discovers within himself a core value that leads him to do an unselfish thing. It’s a marvel to behold in a film studded with razor sharp performances.

White Knuckle Sobriety is Good For You

The last book to help me in a profound way was Alcoholics Anonymous, also known in AA as "The Big Book". Other books preaching pop psych and spiritual cures , ale Peck, Chopra and Dyer depend on the authors convincing their audience that there's something amazingly and incredibly wrong with them and that their respective series of books are the ways to rid oneself of the troubling psychic clutter and then engage the world clearly and fully.

The success of these cures isn't easy, however, ala Peck, Chopra , Dyer and their smooth-talking ilk always have yet another book for you too read, some essential follow up on the preparatory text you've just read, all of which is followed by yet increasing numbers of follow ups, work books, versions for teenagers, young moms, desperate dads, grand parents, gays, business men, and so forth.

Curiously, all these treatments are geared toward people who have nothing physically wrong with them, and who have been convinced by these glorified motivational hucksters that there is something dreadfully askew in their life, something dysfunctional in the soul that must be attended to by constant confession and self-examination. This is the curse of having too high an income, too limited a library, and too much spare time; being merely bored with life isn't good enough but now has to be dignified by being called a disease. It's a rather bizarre way to get feel better in your own skin, and an expensive one too.

I'm a bookseller in my secret life, and I've been selling these self help tomes to an endless stream of Pilate-addicted cellphone moms and dim wit weight lifters who want to ponder something spiritual that contains no greater message other than it's okay to wallow in self-regard and pointless material accumulation. There is a mania behind many of their eyes, always wide with incomprehension, that suggest that every circuit in their brain is overloaded and we'll soon have a cortical short out. Ouch.

The benefit of being an alcoholic, if there is one, is that you pretty much know precisely what your problem is; once you figure that out and stopped blaming your consumption of mass amounts of Vodka and whiskey on parents, the government, aliens, or the bus driver who looked at you funny, you had a very good chance of beating the odds. Alcoholics Anonymous, put briefly, gave me a way of doing things , and doing them consistently well, that kept me distracted , let us say,from taking that first drink and helped me climb from the wreckage of my all-thumbs approach to life so that I could have a life that was worth sticking around for.

Yes, yes, I know, it's written in dated variety of English prose that sounds quaint, and there is an insistence in the book that one must come to terms with a Higher Power (or "God") in order to stay sober, but these are things of small concern, "small beer", as it were. I wasn't depressed, in a bad mood,suffering extreme forms of ennui and other mutations of existential misery. I couldn't stop drinking of my own power, and AA and its Big Book offered me a way out. I gave it a half-hearted try, and eighteen years of continuous sobriety later, it's a very pleasing state of so far, so good.

Eric Paul Shaffer v. Rod McKuen

Eric Paul Shaffer's "Sitting in the Last Sunset, Listening to Guests Within" is exactly the kind of poem I continually tried to write when I was fifteen and sixteen, when I had a teen obsession with the free form kitch of Rod McKuen and his carefully cultivated image of being A Man Alone.

I loved it all, it made me want to have "poetic experiences", it made me want to catch it all in words as McKuen had done; foghorns, waterfronts, grey mist on dark downtown streets, some nameless other in the shadows catching my eye, she gives me a wink, a tilt of the head, and with little transitional problems, me, the hero, walking alone again down dark and empty downtown streets, nursing a apt melancholy, thinking thoughts of supreme heaviosity. Lucky for me that I
discovered the Beats and Eliot and Wallace Stevens and WC Williams among others whose works disabused from trying to compete with schlockmeister McKuen on his own turf. Poor Eric Paul Shaffer--can we ever trust a poet with three names (William Carlos Williams excepted)?-- gets in the ring for at least this poem, and leaves the arena seeming less a writer firm in what he knows and more like bad actor auditioning for every role beyond his grasp.

Eric Paul Shaffer, off by himself, having a reflective moment as the sunsets, too busy mentally redecorating the world around him with limp literary language to have actually seen anything at all. If this poem weren't so earnest and non-ironic in its detailing of a sensitive soul parsing his surroundings and friends it would be a snapshot perfect caricature of a young writer attempting to convince himself that he has a vaster experience than he actually has. The writing is very writerly, cast in the hopes of coming up with fine language:

" The stars are far, the moon far from full, yet even alone
under these old stars, I'm not alone".Self consciousness plagues this verse like an obvious head cold; it sounds stuffy, congested, it makes the voice sound callow as it makes a claim for a small truth that lies submerged in this fussy diorama.

All my friends are in the kitchen now. Dinner is done, the sun set,
and after our muted admiration from the yard, by ones and twos,
they rose beneath a sky gone dull and turned to the house for wine

or coffee and pie. Plates clatter, and cabinets bang, and the spigot
gurgles in the sink. I'm alone on the last step, watching universal
blue darken the mountains and the sea.
This is a lot of writing to set a mood with, with the sole purpose of introducing the narrator as someone apart from the collective; we are meant to glean some less than graceful suggestions of melancholy, of psychic isolation, and for all the descriptions of the constructed world of dinners and washing plates and the natural world of stars and tides, the situation is unnatural, contrived.

How utterly film-like and subtly dramatic, the hero, the one with the soul of a poet, easing off to dwell on deep words in a world that remains silent to his yearning. How completely superficial, fake as Nigerian money orders. All that remained was for a young woman, slim, red haired and holding a long stemmed wine glass, to come up behind him while he mused and offered a penny for his thoughts. Cliches are fine for poets to play with, but the point, I'd think, is to subvert them and make the language do other things, catch the reader by surprise. Not, as Shaffer does here, offer them as fresh, original.

I am not a philosopher, nor do I play one on TV

I am not a philosopher, nor do I play one on TV, but I have a couple of degrees in literature, I read alot, and I have a blog, meaning, of course, that I get to ramble, rant, wax and whine as long as this peculiar technology holds up. Or until I get bored, die mid-sentence, or secure a real hobby. Or date more often, God knows.
Anyway, these are some random notes on isolated matters gleaned from some conversations. The serious reader will note, no doubt, some spurious assumptions as to what I think the forthcoming names are talking; again, I am amateur, the worst sort of hobbyist at this game, but I don't think the paragraphs are bereft of worth. Ideas for essays I'll never get to writing, perhaps. Sigh...
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Nietzsche Apollonian drive is a desire to find order in a confused, chaotic, and cruel world. It is the mother of all control issues, an insanity of over organization that compels the spirit to quell the spontaneous spirit and instead attempt to keep everything in its assigned place.
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Half the work is creating categories and new places for the finite groupings of worthy things and excluding newer, suspect ideas, ideas and tendencies unproven and likely to be fraught with danger. Risks not worth taking with what works are avoided, efforts to expand beyond the granted wisdom is suppressed. It's a conservative notion that argues that civilizations are built upon the foundation of unchanging truths about the nature of man, and that the culture that's been created is an accurate representation of everything that is best in our nature. It denies change, and it is an institutional inclination that seeks hegemony in every aspect of life. Order must be maintained regardless of everything. Nietzsche found that life and faith in this state of affairs was the worst sort of slavery.
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The Dionysian drive, desires to break down that artificial order. Nietzsche had great fondness for those institutions that reinforced what he felt was the codified falseness of culture, but he was inclined by instinct to favor the Dionysian impulse to make the old order a smoldering ash heap, at least metaphorically speaking. The Dionysian drive was an attempt to describe what instinct must be present for a human being to free themselves of lies, babble, cant and religious and political crudity and position themselves to witness truth, and create meaning relevant to their existence. It is
an impulse to take something very orderly and beauty in all it’s unmarred elegance and
then destroy it, smash it, make it as unappealing as aesthetic object as it was in its formalized existence.

Herbert Marcuse was a Hegelian who had an idea of the movement of history toward some great purpose that was only being gradually revealed to us. Not exactly the Dionysian sort, which is a spontaneous effect occurring among individuals. Nietzsche had little patience for the fate of masses of people, or to restoring them certain rights and qualities liberal philosophy argues are universal; these are sham arguments, he argues, and focuses instead on the sensual experience of the individual, unbound by convention, living beyond the narrow view of existence and possibilities in it. Nietzsche's is a precursor to much contemporary existentialist thought, and his cranky and provocative views makes him a hero of libertarians, who habitually regard themselves enlightened beyond the comprehension of society. Stalin was not a Dionysian; neither was Hitler. They were monsters.
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Does Marxism and Communism, with their materialism and anti-intellectualism arguably "Dionysian", or at least anti-Apollonian, the same thing? No. What Marx has in common with Nietzsche is a dominating idea that the way things are in the world are false and oppressive, and that there needs to be a radical change of venue in order to attain a natural state of being through which individuals can fashion themselves , unencumbered by creaking hegemonies. Beyond that, similarities fade. Marx did foresee a withering away of the State, it was only through a long period of presumably enforced reorientation through the dictatorship of the proletariat; in any event, this meant consolidation of power, economic strength, and coercion of all kinds.
Marxism as theorized is rich in insight, and offers a cool sociological analysis to material relations better than breathless Idealist philosophies, but as an applied political method, it became a cumbersome, slow moving contrivance that could not accommodate social experimentation or diversity. Free market systems , I think, are closer to being Dionysian in nature. Ruled by an instinct for profit, it is about as anti-intellectual force that you might mention, and in fact seems to thrive on creating chaos, and like creating order from the mess that it cannot help from making. Nietzsche , Classicist he is, insisted that a balance between The Dionysian and the Apollonian was what should be achieved and maintained, a conservative, disciplined instinct blended with an spirit of adventure, innovation, self-definition. The superstructure of one makes the experimentation of the other possible, workable.