Spielberg

It is interesting to consider which of Steven Spielberg's are his be movies art, but the irony is that the director is really little else than jittery hack without a real idea, emotion or camera move in his style who just happens to have a brilliant technical command of film making techniques. There's no doubt that he has a deep and abiding love for movies and for movie making: there are movies he's made that rise above his typical habit to pander and tell the story without a misstep. Those would be Munich, a film  on the serious side of narration that is emotionally tense and taut in the telling; it reminds you how brilliant this director can be when it comes to crating tension. I would add as well his adaptation of  Phillip K. Dick's dystopian short story Minority Report. In spite of the expected creation of a future world that looks as though Steve Jobs would have designed it, sleek, efficient and without a soul, Spielberg creates and sustains the paranoia that makes Dick's tales the amazingly knotted thrillers they are.  but he is basically a technocrat who cannot help but make you feel that he's more interested in the how of things of things instead of the how. He is, to say the least, not hesitant to use every gun in his arsenal in much of the time in order get through his plot points and the emotional resonance they are meant to convey. Resonate they do, from Close Encounters, ET and through his two new films, War Horse and Tintin,  it's a unpleasant feeling that you've been had, worked over, played for all you were worth. Emotional displacement is not one of his results.  What makes his conspicuous button  palatable, watchable is the brutal efficiency of the spectacle he provides. Fantastic and overstuffed many of his films seem to be, they are brisk and they don't waste your time; there is a calculus Spielberg has devised that makes even the most absurd of his films from being entirely a waste of time.He is, I think, a button-pushing cynic who approaches movie with the same level of sincerity the producers of "reality" television shows do. HIs seems , film by film, to care less about the artfulness of the story--subtlety,irony, character complexity--than he is in eliciting a response. On the score, his work is the most mediocre of directors currently in Hollywood. He is less honest than Michael Bay, he is less likable than Edward Wood.

Defending John Updike

Writer Katie Roiphe does a wonderful job defending the late novelist John Updike against the onslaught of posthumous naysaying regarding his reputation in her current piece in Slate. Cheap shots, she essentially declares, quoting the more notable snipers like  David Foster Wallace and James Wood. The biggest complaint isn’t that Updike wrote badly; in fact, he is pilloried for writing too well, too often. Roiphe puts the lie to the accusations.  Another charge is that the departed novelist wrote the same novel over and over, for decades, decorating rich promiscuity of his language; the sheer perfume around the prose was meant to distract us from the paucity of ideas, the lack of variety. One wonders how much Updike these critics have read. There are advantages to reading deeply and slowly.

 Updike has written novels that resemble one another in many respects over the years, but this not issuing the same novel "over and over." I would say that he is thematically less repetitive than Philip Roth, who is often cited as The American writer is most likely to be our next Nobel Laureate in literature. Updike has themes and ideas that he works on in his many novels and short story collections, but there are usually new variations, nuance, new ironies to experience. Most good novelists you can name do this. Updike, though, was especially keen at setting his ideas--spiritual aridity, infidelity, the denial of death through manic activity and material acquisition, the eventual irony as Life trudges forward unmindful of character pride or expectations--in settings one would associate with him.

The astonishing thing about Updike is how much and how often he experimented with form and subject, purposefully and with success straying from the nice little container his critics try to place him in. We can also have "Gertrude and Claudius," his lively prequel to "Hamlet," "Terrorist," an especially intense character study of an American-born jingoistic, and "Brazil," a favorite of mine, an inspired turn at Magic Realism. These novels, as well the novels “The Coup,” “Witches of Eastwick,” and “Seek My Face”, demonstrate an impressive range for any novelists, regardless of how high their current literary stock might happen to be.  An especially irksome, which is to say knee-jerk charge leveled against the novelist is that he is an egotist and an unreconstructed narcissist, someone who fashioned a high literary style to glide through a narrow range of matters that reflects a self-absorption bordering on a psychological defect. That charge essentially consists that Updike failed at a supposed grand responsibility to connect with a community of readers who expect the characters to be sufficiently sympathetic who retain the possibility for redemption. 

 This is patent nonsense since the principal duty of the novelist, the poet, the artist isn't to second guess their talent and attempt a version of accomplishment and truth find as someone else might imagine it, but to explore their own perceptions in some detail against and within a variety of different situations and to see precisely where their ideas, concepts, fears take them. Calling this narcissism is a convenient way of avoiding the task of understanding Updike's fictional world. I would also substitute the word egotism with confidence--the artist worth paying attention to is the one who commits themselves fully to a style that allows them to attempt many different things to the fullest degree; to the degree that Updike wrote a considerable number of novels that are not your typical mainstream inventions--he dared to experiment with his famous style--and in doing kept his persistent themes viable and capable of yielding more nuances to his tales of the frailty of the human will, he is a master. No less than Henry James, no less than Faulkner, no less than Nabokov.   Updike's stock should be much, much higher then it is, and Roiphe's article makes a persuasive argument in Updike's defense. UpdikeHHe was the best American novelist while he lived, I think, and it sticks in the craw of his detractors that there are not others who demonstrated such a brilliant consistency over many decades of writing.

2 poems by Charles Harper Webb

 I suspect we all know something about  trying to convince someone we'd just harmed that not your aggression but rather their erring behavior that brought on your abuse. As it goes in this culture and through the great tales told in the best surviving literature and histories, humanity has developed many an artful ways of allowing the powerful and the belligerent various rationalizations, elegant and crude, to absolve them from blame. It's tantamount to making the person you just gave a black eye to apologize to you because his face got in the way of your fist. Charles  Harper Webb's poem "Weapon Salve" is an alluring and yet insidious investigation to how this form of mind-fucking works.

I am inclined to think that the poem plays on the theme of blaming the victim for the injury they sustained and giving pity to the one who inflicted the harm by way of extending the over used trope that medieval medicine was , in our modern view, arcane, insane and deadly to the patient. As in the notion that various ailments, diseases, fevers and other varieties of cootie problematics could be relieved or cured outright by the application of blood sucking leeches to the patients' body in an effort to balance out the "humours" that it was thought to flow and swirl through an individual's body at the time. 

The over riding theme I read is that a firm application of a cosmology wherein conditions, causes and relationships between all things, human and otherwise, are firmly in place, intractable and factual is liable to warp our perspective and approach the unexpected, the unplanned for , the catastrophic with precisely the wrong sort of action needed. We treat the victim as if they had been asking for the punishment they had received and give our salve and our sentiment to the weapon and the person who wielded it; what was the trauma that forced the attacker to resort to such harsh resort, what blunt force did the sword suffer as it was deployed, issuing the unspeakable? 

What I find implied is that the victim blames them self as well, wondering what they had done to merit the punishment. This is a land Foucault wrote about with such clarity vigor, that punishment isn't just written on the body, it is inscribed; it becomes part of our genetic material as populations, sensing no right to grace, feel ashamed and expect punishment as a something designed by divine agencies. The weapon that God had given masters the genius to harm has been damaged during the infliction of punishment ; the damage to the sword must itself be avenged.

Web does an interesting thing at the end, after taking us through a tour of a world where weapons and the wounds they create exist, past the ritual healing and hobbling in the crippled aftermath, by extending the metaphor to language itself; every criticism and insult and carping complaint at your expense was uttered for your own good; one anticipates the lash and dreams of God in heaven and his endless bounty, one looses a limb and thinks they are reclaiming their soul, one minds themselves abused in horrible, humiliating and convinces themselves that they are ascending toward a superior state of being rather than being degraded. Pain is treated with more pain, the technology is repaired and burnished, the victim is killed by the cure. Charles Harper Webb's poems is a grisly, if elegant tour of seduction and submission. Potent poem.

_________________

There was a suggestion by one of the posters responding to the poem "Mummies to Burn"that poet Charles Harper Webb seemed to be on a creaky anti-West riff, using the anecdote
as reason enough to rehash a favorite harangue. There was a further suggestion that since the poem is a critique of Western technology strip-mining a culture for the sake of economic expansion, Webb wouldn't be inclined to criticize Egyptian history. Their record, it was asserted, wasn't Edenic and absent of cruel events. Had I came across the sentence that he had, I too would have been struck, surely, but the irony of the fact--white people converting human corpses into fossil fuel--and would have been motivated to write my own mediation on the severely negative side of Imperialism. His concern wasn't whether Egyptian history was noble or ignoble, but that European exploration into the area was intended not to learn but to discover exploitable resources.

What he gets at, his intent and success, I think,is that the mentality is a pervasive attitude in the invading culture, and that the psychology extends to a narrowly set pragmatism; short of coal and timber, need to save money. Blimey, burn these bandaged cadavers, there not doing any good just laying around as they are. The fault with Cameron's visually magnificent Avatar , is that it relies on tropes that are too obvious, especially on the Pocahontas / John Smith tale. Webb, on the other hand, is riffing on an historical fact, and provides a provocative argument that it's not an isolated instance. I don't think he's anymore anti-West than , say, Jonathan Swift or , say, H.L.Mencken, two writers we praise for their critical eye and caustic wit, as well as their willingness to speak an unruly version of Truth to whatever gathered assemblage of thugs happen, at the moment, to constitute Power.

You could say that Webb is a satirist in someway, a wiseacre, but whatever he is in spirit, he still notices how things that are said clash with things that are done, and that, like George Carlin, he has a willingness to push codified interpretations to the point where they become absurd. He is a poet, I think, who is keen on exposing contradictions and revealing the lies and embedded evasions we use to ease ourselves through the daily dose of cognitive dissonance.

Chet Baker and Archie Shepp

This track is attractive because the famously relaxed trumpeter Chet Baker is performing with Archie Shepp, who is an outstanding example of the experimental improvisation termed “free jazz”. We have here a fascinating and exciting jam highlighting a brilliant practitioner of a what we'd call a mellow, melodic style with an Avant Gard genius of the period. Shepp, of course, is fiery and unpredictable with what his solos will contain even in a context this comparatively conservative; I find it amazing to hear him in a chart-driven, swinging context and realizing he can be more than cut the mustard. He brings his own thing to it, his solos are his alone. Baker, to be sure, appears energized by Shepp's presence. His phrasing remains hushed and frayed around the edges--there are few perfectly round notes in Baker's playing--but it is something else again when he double and triple times his riffs against the rhythm section. Baker's playing gets an unfair rap, I think. At his best he could do much more than many give him credit for and, when alert and prepared, was in perfect control of all his gifts.

Tree of Life with Shallow Roots

There's much one can say about a movie's beautiful , lush photography when it works with a structure--a good script, a graspable plot and ideas an audience can take interest in, credible, complex characters--but pretty pictures by themselves cannot save a film like Terrence Mallick's "Tree of Life" from coming across as a bloated, pretentious attempt to evoke a sense of human existence and beyond what the director seemingly considers the petty concerns of individual characters.

It is a mess, with a whispering, hushed narration that cannot seem to rise above a mumbling buzz, and sequencing of story lines between a family tragedy set in a 1950's American suburb, the pensive rumination of a soul sick business man in current day Dallas, and images of dinosaurs hunkering, squirming, swimming, wandering through their various versions of flora and fauna in search of food and , we could assume, significance beyond their appetites and survival instincts.

This would all be interesting in the right proportions, but this film is not the tone poem Mallick wanted it to be; it is is not mesmerizing, poetic or suggestive of the sort of secret-of-life conceit the film hints at. What is infuriating , beyond the rhythm-less, shambling length of the film ( two hours and 44 minutes) is that for all the wonderful images Mallick and his crew manage to bring us, very little of it is effectively mounted or framed; we are not allowed to become engaged with any seen nor permitted any sense of continuity . It seems to have been edited with a lawn mower on a foggy day.he constant riff of showing us various trees, in various stages, topographically believable for conceptually baffling, with light coming through the branches was irritating, as was the constant visual cues of running water from rivers, lakes, streams and shorelines. These are meant to function as a leitmotif, no doubt, but repetition does not equal effective emphasis. This results in symbolism without an actual "thing", an idea, under the metaphorical disguise. It does seduce into thinking about one thing only to discover that something else was being arrived at just under our perceptual radar.

There is, I'm sure, a metaphysical aspect that I've missed through this ,but closer to the truth, I think, is that I merely noticed what's missing from the film. I don't know quite what those elements were as to what was intended, but it seems clear enough that no one thought to bring them to this project.

a fine poem by Joshua Rivkin

More than a few of us, I wager, have sat with friends in cafes and bistros stealing occasional glances at the people seated at the table just across the room and wondered what it was like to be them, to be with them, to live in their skins, in their world. Sudden bouts of sagging self esteem are not unfamiliar nor uncommon among a good many of us, who we are and what we have done with our lives suddenly seem so trivial and irrelevant in the presence of someone we think is the cooler variety of human. There is no logical, sensible reason for this to take place among normal, successful people who have interesting lives and accomplishments; the downward spiral of degenerating self regard hits us all in a culture that treats even personality as a material asset to be built upon, used as barter, currency, the cause for bragging. What wouldn't we give, what wouldn't we trade for just a small slice of that karma those we momentarily see as obscenely blessed have far too much of. Poet Joshua Rivkin considers this in his poem, "New Economy", a savvy and sleek lyric, expressed in self contained sections, that present a variety of situations where seekers are beseeching the people , places and things they covet with a variety of propositions that attempt to coax a bit of better luck from the flesh or the mortar of a superior Other:

NEW ECONOMY / Joshua Rivkin

A man offers to trade his guitar for a city bus. 
My pick for your passengers. Six strings for sixteen wheels. 

A bride on her wedding day exchanges her love
for bright weather, a groom exchanges his hands for hers. 

A father offers to trade his family for a hotel’s worth of sleep. 
A sailor offers the Pacific for a hotel’s worth of sex.

Tonight, the shirt from my back, my singing mouth,

my endless praise, for your skin or company.

I’ll give you my stethoscope for a red barn: a doctor. 
I’ll give you my right arm for your left: his patient. 

It’s the inequality of pain a sleepless woman wants
to give away. Here, take mine, she offers to freight trains

whistling their replies through Houston’s poorest wards:
Jealousy gets you jealousy. Rage gets you rage.

"What wouldn’t you offer?" a man asks the pawn shop window.
"What wouldn’t you take?" replies the glass. 

There is a nicely surreal tone through this poem, a series of odd remarks and offers that end up in unexpected resolutions. A man is willing to surrender his gift of music in exchange for a city bus with it's human cargo and considerable tonnage, a bride prefers a sunny day to a wedding night, doctor and patient negotiate for things they cannot have in exchange for the things they do not want to do; Rivkin's transitions, his eventualities are not jarring but make sense in a manner suggestive of how dreams work against expectation and interrupt a narrative line regarding the pursuit of lust, escape or pleasure with a complication of some sort, an element a dreamer has perhaps forgotten about but which reappears as an issue that needs to be resolved before any fanciful living can be had.

This does, indeed, sound not a little like dime store Freud, but Rivkin isn't here to analyze or instruct or even critique; the task of the poem is to put the reader in the center of all the mood, with their bittersweet undertone of regret. Interestingly enough each section reads like it were the start of a short story or a joke, something lightly suggestive of the way Rod Serling introduced his episodes of his old "Twilight Zone" television series--this prevents the poem from becoming ponderous, from succumbing to the temptation to describe poetry's limitations on describing emotional states that are fleeting and otherwise described in terse cliches or psychiatric jargon. Rivkin defies this and displays a superb craft, a sense of balance between the proposals he highlights here; this is the state of mind where some of us find ourselves so critically bored with the people, places and things of our daily existence that cause  absurd and  dangerous change appear briefly desireable . This is an evocation of a delusional on the most dream like and banal level, the bored sigh or the frustrated "oh hum" translated in an exhilarating rush of chaotic abandonment, not even concerned with trading up for a better kind of life but instead obsessed on an instinctual level only with escape from what tethers toward a future containing either possibility or oblivion.

JOHNNY OTIS

Band leader, songwriter, singer and producer Johnny Otis  has passed away. was an American Master, a truly great man who helped bring a fantastic number of brilliant rhythm and blues artists to greater fame and acclaim. I had the pleasure to meet and interview him back in the Seventies, when he had just become a minister and opened up his home in Los Angeles as his church. He was gracious, sane, civilized, believing that the spirit of God blesses all of us and our best talents; he though it was his calling to help his fellow humans become their better selves.

 The service that my associate Barry Alfonso and I attended in his South Los Angeles home back in the Seventies was a long one, with a choir of splendidly tuned vocalists revving up the already considerable spiritual energy in the room while Reverend Otis, citing Gospel, citing the Jesus of his understanding, gently but firmly exhorted his congregation to be more Christ like, that is, to be kind, helpful, loving of others. In attendance was famed jazz organist Jimmy Smith and singer/actress Della Reese, both of whom performed musical numbers at the Reverend's request. Later in the service, Otis asked us to turn to the person on our left and the person on our right and say "God loves you and I love you to."  On my right was Barry, whose hand I shook. We exchanged nods, trying, I suppose, to sustain a veneer of journalistic cool, but on my left was Miss Reese, who took my hand and said with a wide smile that God loved me and that she loved me to. On instinct I return the greeting, feeling that I had just shaken hands with someone who was genuinely connected to the message of love that Otis carried and preached. In some circles, in certain cliques, in specific venues, this view of God and his purpose for us on this planet seems naive, but it occurred to me decades later that Johnny Otis had tapped into a theological proposition more profound than one would at first think. 

It was so subtle that the majority of the religious celebrities miss it, that life on earth matters a great deal most of all; we are not here merely to perform perfunctory good deeds as if  existence were merely a test to get  into a celestial graduate school. Rather, we were here to love , nurture and help one another, to create joy and happiness through creative acts and the practice of a kind of selflessness that brings us a new freedom. During our talk with Johnny Otis in his office before the service, the musician spoke at length about the gift of music and the connection it gives him to the lives of others. about how he could feel the real pain, joy and struggles in the voice of Esther Phillips, the searing saxophone of Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. It was art as a spiritual calling, a manifest destiny to  let people know that a surrender to the God and Jesus that Johnny Otis and his brethren spoke of could not only make life on in this existence bearable, but better, tangible better. That is the power of love Johnny Otis spoke of and that is the glory of the music Johnny Otis made.