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"Room 24 will give up its dead, and the dead will be forgiven."

2010-11-14T14:59:00.000-08:00

I've moved my blog operation over to samwiebe.blogspot.com . Tumblr isn't really working for me, and I felt like a new start. Check it out.

The above quote is from John From Cincinnati, FYI.

Movie Reviews 1

2010-09-25T15:44:00.000-07:00

James Ellroy predicted no more of his books will be adapted into movies in his lifetime. Although his books spawned one great film (L.A. Confidential), one awful film (the Black Dahlia), and one pretty good film (the underseen Cop, with James Woods), a lot of Ellroy adaptations have fallen by the wayside, most notably the adaptation of My Dark Places that was to star David Duchovny, and his novel White Jazz, which Ellroy himself adapted for Nick Nolte, and when that fell apart, George Clooney and John Cusack were attached.

Yet Ellroy's cynical yet moral take on crime and obsession pervades a few movies not directly associated with him. I watched two this week, Zodiac and Hollywoodland.

I can't believe I hadn't seen Zodiac before yesterday. It came out in 2006, the year that left critics divided between the There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men camps. But Zodiac is in that league. I've never seen such a brilliant, slow-moving crime film, so detailed but so compulsively watchable. Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards (I know he was on ER for forever, but he's still Goose) are brilliant, and Jake Gyllenhall does an admirable job. James Ellroy shows up on the commentary, though he had nothing to do with the film. But it feels like his work, and I wish Fincher had been the one to tackle the Black Dahlia. Zodiac has the same feeling of obsession that Ellroy's best work does. I'm not a David Fincher acolyte, but this film staggered me.

Another Ellroy-inspired film, Hollywoodland, doesn't work as well, but is still very good. Adrien Brody plays a private eye on the make (so painfully Ellroy derivative) who's scamming George Reeves's mother into questioning whether her son committed suicide as the cops contend, or whether he was murdered. Like Zodiac, it's open-ended, and it features some brilliant acting, especially in the flashbacks which feature Ben Affleck as Superman star Reeves. Brody's not haggard enough to pull off the part, but he does a fine job, as does Diane Lane and uber-gangster Bob Hoskins.

Boardwalk Empire/The Town

2010-09-19T21:23:00.001-07:00

No spoilers here, just some pretty general comments.

Boardwalk Empire - Like Treme, it brings together a dream team of filmmakers, yet is less than the sum of its parts. Buscemi is great, the writing is taut, and it looks as beautiful as any movie, let alone any TV show. The characters aren't all that defined, and the lead actor is weak. Worth watching, but it's not all that engaging. But then, Omar was only onscreen for about ten seconds.

The Town - Understand something: Heat is the best heist film ever made. So when a filmmaker pays tribute to Michael Mann, as Christopher Nolan did with The Dark Knight, I'm on board. Affleck heads another all-star cast, and the result is a very good, well-pitched movie. If I sound a bit low-key in my praise, it's not because the movie isn't amazing, only that the book, by Chuck Hogan, was better. Normally when you hear that phrase "the book was better" you have to take it with a grain of salt, because they are two very different mediums, and what people expect from book adaptations borders on the impossible. What's weird about The Town is that it's less Heat-like than the novel. Hogan's book has an almost perfect pace to it with regards to the actual heists. You get a feeling for why McRay (the Affleck character) is such a great thief; his patience and diligence shines, just the way Neil McCauley's does in Heat. In the movie, everything happens so much quicker, and the robberies (which are certainly not lacking intensity and ingenuity) seem more the result of brute force rather than planning and efficiency.

I blame the editing. Movies today just seem to need an extra ten or fifteen minutes to establish a more leisurely feel before ramping up the emotional levels. In the book there is a bit of downtime between robberies, which establishes the characters and their relationships. In the movie everything happens at a rapid pace, which, again, does not make the film less watchable, but denies the viewer the chance to connect with the characters in a more mundane situation.

The book also had one setpiece that I really missed. In the book, the second robbery is of a movie theatre. McRay cases the theatre looking for a big opening weekend, sees the audience reaction to the flying cow trailer for Twister (the book is set in '96) and makes his decision. During the actual robbery, Jem (the Jeremy Renner character) has a shootout with the cardboard cutouts in the theatre lobby, petrifying their hostages by yelling out the catchphrases of movie stars while demolishing cutouts from their awful '96 movies. Meaning, Jem yells "Yippie Kai-yay Motherfucker" and shoots down a Bruce Willis cutout from Last Man Standing, and "Ain't Gonna Be No Rematch" while shooting up Stallone from Daylight. It was funny and edgy and would have played well on film. But the movie is set in present day, so they just knock over an armored car. Not that there's anything wrong with knocking over an armored car. It's a great scene and leads to a great chase.

Anyway, it's still my pick for best movie of the year. Affleck was terrific, Renner was even more terrific, Rebecca Hall was amazing and vulnerable and sexy, and there were spooky cameos from Chris Cooper and Pete Postelwaite.

And it has Mad Man.

The Town, revisited

2010-09-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves has been out for years. Prince of Thieves has been re-leased in a tie-in to the film, so the book is now called The Town. Trust me to only get around to it when Ben Affleck's head has been pasted on the cover.

I was enjoying it when I posted last time. I just finished the book, after doing nothing much else but reading for the last day or so. It's an engrossing, astonishing, compelling, incredible read. The last book I read that made me feel like that--jealous because the writing is so note-perfect, the story is so taut, the characters so alive, and their movements and reactions so true, was Mystic River. And Hogan's novel has a better ending than Mystic River.

Like I said last time, if the film is half as good an adaptation as Gone Baby Gone, The Town will be the best movie of the year.

You may say I'm building this up a bit too much, but consider two things: as mentioned in previous posts, the kind of films I like don't come out all that often anymore. And I haven't been waylaid--ambushed--by a novel this good in a long time. I hope the movie does it justice.

The Town

2010-09-14T23:08:00.000-07:00

It's conceivable that the best movie of the year could be directed by Ben Affleck. That's not preposterous, given his debut with Gone Baby Gone. His next film, The Town, boasts an impressive cast (including Rebecca Hall, Titus Welliver, the Hurt Locker Guy and the Mad Men guy).

I started Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves, the source for The Town. It's a terrific read. It's so good it makes me jealous, he writes exactly the kind of book I'd like to. My only complaint is the abundance of crappy music references. The book is set in 96, so you'd think there'd be something else on the jukeboxes besides U2. But other than that, it's a flawless thriller. If Affleck does half the job with it that he did with Gone Baby Gone, my predictions will hold out, and The Town will be the film of the year.

2010-09-13T21:23:00.000-07:00

A handful of James Ellroy quotes from his AV Club interview.

[on his new memoir, The Hilliker Curse]

...no one wants to read a candy-assed narrative discursive parenthetical-filled memoir indigenous to one human being. Memoirs must explicate larger spiritual and social issues.

[on why he dates women who don't agree with his politics]

I'm not looking for ease in relationships with women; I always cringe when a male friend of mine, who's very fixated on women, puts "compatibility" at the top of his list of attributes that he would be looking for in a woman. I would replace compatibility with dialectic...But I'm way past the idea of using ideology or political view as a gauge of human character. I simply don't believe it.

[on being a conservative]

There are people, cultural critics, who see no distinction between being a conservative, and going out and murdering civil-rights leaders and liberal politicians. And that's their faulty dilemma that they will have to deal with.

[just a great curmudgeonly rant]

I'm older; I have a great love of the English parlance. I can't stand dipshit, tattooed, laquered, varnished, depilatoried younger people talking their stupid shit, stage-sighing, saying "It's like, I'm like, whatever," and talking in horrible cliches, rolling their eyes when they disapprove of something. I saw that the culture was pandering more and more to this kid demographic. And in the course of driving from here to there, I began to see more and more billboards for vile misogynistic horror films, white-trash reality-TV shows, neck-biting fucked-up vampire flicks, and stoned-out teenage-boy pratfall comedies. Bad drama, bad comedy, that portrayed life preposterously, frivolously, and ironically, and that got to me. So I would drive here, there, and elsewhere through residential neighbourhoods in order to avoid billboards.

[his take on the recession]

I trust my morality in the narrow path I trek through the world as I work. I've been very much enjoying the financial flatline--and divorce, frankly, and alimony--because I dig struggle. I love to fight. And I've enjoyed the financial necessity of going out and finding work in what is to many a dwindling marketplace, but to me seems to be an ever-expanding marketplace.

Random, not especially deep thoughts.

2010-09-09T22:32:00.000-07:00

+ I'm reading a collection of Dostoevsky's short fiction (I just heard the sound of a thousand web browsers closing; hold on a second, I'm not saying it to flash my literary bona fides, I do have a point with this). Between "The Double" and "Notes From the Underground" there is a huge change in style, which is apparent even in translation. He got better with age, and that's comforting. We make so much of creative people who emerge fully-formed, especially when they're photogenic. Orson Welles is the best example, but even Tarantino and Kevin Smith, who--and this is far from a criticism, because I'm a fan of both of them--were as good at the start of their careers as they ever will be. I'd add Michael Chabon to the list, though that's debatable; his first two books are the ones that resonate for me, though I like them all. Hemingway, same thing: appreciate and admire the later works, but LOVE the early stuff. Shakespeare got better as he went along. I'm not that big a fan of early George Carlin, but I'm a HUGE fan of "You Are All Diseased"-era Carlin. It's nice to be reminded that your thirties and forties and fifties and onward don't have to involve a rapid plummet in ability or popularity, that you can improve and actually break through even if your first effort wasn't stellar.

+ Crime films are my favourite genre, and I realized today that they're the only genre that deals with economics. Every other genre, the characters just seem to have these amazing New York apartments and weeks and weeks off, and no financial burdens whatsoever. In a crime film, you always know A) how people make their money and B) how they feel about it.

Couple of film recommendations:

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead has an amazing cast, a great script from Kelly Masterson, solid direction by Sidney Lumet...and no one saw it. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke and Marisa Tomei...my brother's man-crush Michael Shannon even shows up. I was knocked out, not just with the tightness of the crime aspect, but the family dynamic is pitch-perfect.

I wrote about Mesrine: Killer Instinct before, but I just want to clarify: there are foreign films that bore the shit out of people (the kind VIFF likes, cheap shot, I know) and there are foreign films that manage to both ape Hollywood fare and put their own distinctive stink on things. Vincent Cassell is terrific as the title character, who at one point breaks out of a Maximum-Security prison in Quebec by enlisting the help of other inmates, in return promising to come back and bust them out. Mesrine has the kind of forceful personality that would convince someone he would keep that bargain...whether he does, well, check out the film. The second part comes out soon, hopefully.

Speaking of Kevin Smith, I haven't seen the last four films he's done, though I dug his "Evening With" series. I did recently see Clerks II, and donkey-fucking aside, I liked it, the ending especially.

Nothing But Trouble might...might...be the worst film I've ever seen. Well, no, but it would be in the running. I think Last Days would be number one, followed by A Perfect World, Postman, and Chicago (which won an Oscar, showing how far from the pulse of the mainstream I am). I also saw another horrendous Eastwood movie recently, Tightrope. Awful, really awful. Most of these are old movies, and there's a reason you never heard of them.

2010-09-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

For me, the most damaging Oscar upset, the one that made me realize the award has zero credibility, was TItanic's win over L.A. Confidential in 1997. I still can't get through Titanic, with its dated CGI and awful Celine Dion soundtrack. While L.A. Confidential has a few lines of clunky dialogue--"You me and Patchett, we're a team"--it's still a great and compelling film.

I remember in '98 the upset when Shakespeare in Love won Best Film. There were three kinds of voices in that argument: old people and women, who were happy, young guys who were pissed Private Ryan didn't win, and cineastes who thought the Thin Red Line should've taken it.

I never liked Private Ryan. It's one of the most manipulative and phony films, even for Hollywood. I'll admit the opening forty minutes of butchery are terrific to watch, and Hanks and Sizemore were good, but the awful framing device, the cameos, the horrendous acting by some of the bit players, and the disingenuousness of Spielberg's directing--his desperate wrenching of emotions from the viewer, while it sometimes effective, has the subtlety and lasting charm of watching a puppy being tortured. Think of all the letters being written to the dead soldiers, the old guy asking his wife if he lived a good life, etc. William Goldman has a terrific article on the film in his essay collection Who Killed Hollywood? where he dismantles the awful screenplay by Robert Rodat, which includes a man flashing back to events he didn't witness.

So almost by default, the movie I wanted to win was Terence Malick's Thin Red Line. It has more cameos but they fell less intrusive, the acting is a bit more solid, and John Cusack's charge up the hill was more exhilarating, I felt, than the famous opening to Private Ryan.

It was playing last night at the Vancity, and after revisiting it, I've decided that in this case the Oscars got it right. Shakespeare in Love is a much better film than either Private Ryan or Thin Red Line. The acting is better, the emotions it hits are more complex, and it's much less pompous. It wasn't trying to be an Important Film That Says Something Timeless About War. It was a comedy and a love story that didn't rely on cliche, and to pull that off is a feat that neither Spielberg not Malick could match.

But that's not the reason I'd give the statue to Shakespeare in Love. It's the only one of the three that bothered to tell a decent story. Joesph Fiennes's isn't the most nuanced portrayal of Shakespeare, but he comes off as fully realized in a way not one person in either Big War film did.

Look, I'm not an expert on Film. I just know Story, and for me, neither Malick nor Spielberg bothered telling one. Strip away the amazing cinematography and the harrowing visual effects and you have two very empty movies.

I'm trying to think what else was nominated that year. Life is Beautiful, which looked just as emotionally exploitative as Ryan's Privates, and Elizabeth, which nobody saw. Affliction and American History X, Out of Sight, Pleasantville, Gods and Monsters, A Civil Action, A Simple Plan, Primary Colors and The Truman Show all didn't get nominated--not that they should've, but they all told interesting stories, and some of them have held up pretty well.

Dark times, Harry, for crime films.

2010-09-02T22:41:00.001-07:00

What's that? Ray Winstone and Martin Scorsese are working together? Reuniting Winstone with Sexy Beast's Ben Kingsley? With Christopher Lee and Jude Law? Wow, that has the making of a terrific gangster film!

I wonder what IMDB says about the plot...

"The Invention of Hugo Cabret" concerns a 12-year-old orphan who lives in the walls of a Paris train station in 1930 and a mystery involving the boy, his late father and a robot.

Uh...huh.

I don't like the sound of that at all. I hate children, I hate Paris, and while I'm partial to train stations and the 1930s, I don't feel like they belong together. Especially not with robots.

Why can't people just make what they're good at? Ray Winstone is an amazing actor, but no one wants to see him in a musical where he plays Julius Caesar. Just beat up some people, will you?

Thing is, there's an AWESOME looking Winstone film coming out sometime soon called London Boulevard. It's got a good cast and it's directed by WIlliam Monahan, the screenwriter for the Departed. The book was by Irish crime writer Ken Bruen, and while it's not a brilliant book, it's a terrific homage to Sunset Boulevard while also being a first-class crime story.

And you can't find an opening date for it, because I guess it's not popular enough.

I am so sick of movies I want to see not getting theatrical releases. And the weird thing is, a lot of stuff that I'd never expect to get a release actually does. The original Swedish "Girl Who..." movies have come to cinemas, and last week I caught the first of the two French-language Mesrine films starring Vincent Cassell. Excellent movies. But where are their English-language equivalents?

I mean, why did My Son My Son What Have Ye Done never get a theatrical release? It's got Michael Shannon, a terrific underrated actor who will be in Terence Winter's HBO series Boardwalk Empire. It's got Willem Defoe, great in anything. And it's directed by Werner Herzog, the most original filmmaker out there. Plus, Herzog's last film, Bad Lieutenant (an EXCELLENT film), got a wide release. Couldn't My Son open in a couple of theatres?

The first part of the Red Riding trilogy, a British series based on James Ellroy knockoff David Peace's series, got a theatrical release for about six minutes. I wanted to see it, really I did, but when only one theatre plays a film like that, it's tough to make arrangements. Like Sean Bean (who's in the film, along with Rebecca Hall), it's never around long long enough.

The one I have the most hope for is The Town, Ben Affleck's (the director, not the actor) follow-up to the amazing Gone Baby Gone. Good cast, what looks like a good story.

But I put it to you, cinema owners, that the Greater Vancouver Regional District has enough aficionados of crime films to fill a theatre for a week's run. So bring these movies out. Give us something besides Matthew McConaughey and fucking vampires.

2010-09-01T12:06:00.001-07:00

Raymond Carver said that revision was the best part of writing. I wouldn't go that far, but it's actually a lot of fun. I understand why people suggest waiting a few months before diving into revisions. You approach it cold-blooded, as if it's a piece of writing by someone else. Then you just change it as you read it.

I started with a manuscript of almost 90,000 words. I'm halfway through a comprehensive line edit and it's down to 77,000. And everything I've taken out has made it better. I've dropped two bad characters, streamlined a bad plot development, and made the dialogue a lot less grating. Plus, with all that baggage gone, it moves a bit faster, which is always good in a commercial piece.

I don't know what the future of the book is, but I'm stoked to have something I'm proud enough of to want to make better. Revision is hard work, but it's like sanding a wood sculpture in that you see the shape of the thing emerge.

Kerouac was a fool.

Big Papa

2010-08-30T13:16:00.000-07:00

The man who identifies himself as Cohn in The Sun Also Rises once said to me, "But why did you make me cry all the time?"

I said, "Listen, if that is you than the narrator must be me. Do you think that I had my prick shot off...? And I'll tell you a secret: you do cry an awful lot for a man."

I will admit that F. Scott Fitzgerald might be a better stylist than Ernest Hemingway. It's hard to imagine Hemingway writing something as beautiful as "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

But Fitzgerald's books are about the rich and famous. His heroes are people like Monro Starr, the Irving Thalberg standin in The Last Tycoon, or Gatsby, the nouveau-riche bootlegger. Interesting, sure, but not people you can look up to.

Hemingway's heroes are people who are good at what they do. Yes, he has issues with women, and yes, he has issues with men. But his characters do what they say and act in accordance with their principals. They don't bitch and whine or fall apart. They don't shuck their workload. They are, like Fitzgerald's characters, exaggerations, but the qualities Hemingway exaggerated are more valuable and more rare than those Fitzgerald focused on.

In the last few weeks I've been dealing with a couple of family emergencies, one involving a piece of real estate rented out by my uncle (unbeknownst to him or us) to a grow-op. The other involves a family member's illness. I'm a lot more torn up about the latter than the former, but I've been operating on the same principle for both: make yourself useful. My mother is like that. She just gets down to what has to be done and does it. My dad too.

I've noticed that most of the people associated with those two emergencies have no interest in being of use. The situation exists for them to register their emotions. or to to rekindle family grudges with fresh ammunition, or to sit around talking bullshit.

The quality I hate most in people is their insistence on making any situation about them, no matter how peripheral they may be to the central issue. I have an aunt like that and I can't stand her. Emergencies reveal interesting things about people.

Sure, we all have a natural solipsism that casts us as the heroes of whatever events occur in our lives. Like the bit player in A Streetcar Named Desire who played the part of the orderly who carts Blanche away at the end. When asked what the play was about, he said, "It's about a guy who carts a woman to the crazy house."

Maybe that's natural. But there are people where, when the dictates of the situation clash with their fantasies, refuse to adapt so much as a cunthair. Feelings of uselessness and futility can be expressed in anger, boastfulness, scorn, or some such dramatic outburst. But you can take those feelings and rerout them to the benefit of everybody. That's one of the heartwarming lessons of David Milch's shows: not everyone is going to shoot down the road agent, but you can still play an important role by cooking, standing guard, even just offering to take over a few menial chores from someone else.

That would never occur to the kind of person I'm talking about.

And I think what really shaped Hemingway's outlook was knowing there were only a few people he could rely on. You look at some people and you just know they can't be counted on, which means you're looking at them as an added burden. Your choice is either to distance yourself from them or kick their ass and try to make them of use. It's hard not to be contemptuous of someone when you know they can't be counted on.

I mean, the amount of work, the casuistry people will go to to evade responsibility! Whenever I hear someone trash Hemingway's writing, I imagine that they're one of those people, utterly useless in a crisis.

Green Hills of Africa has a character, a native, who Hemigway names Garrick. The real Garrick was one of the most esteemed Shakespearean actors of his day, and Hemingway pokes fun at this tribesman's need to orate and embellish the events of the hunts (with himself, of course, taking a prominent role). Garrick the tribesman is utterly useless in the field, but he's the first one to start bragging.

It's not a matter or being nice or being good. As Mister French says in the Departed, "Nowadays who's reliable?"

The prodigal says, as he hangs his head...

2010-08-30T11:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, I slagged off blogspot in favour of Tumblr, and I gave it an honest shot. There are some things I do prefer tumblr for, and I'm'a keep that blog around for posting quotes, etc. But mostly I'm going to post here. Why? Because blogspot is less gimmicky. When I started on tumblr years ago it was a great site for posting all kinds of things. Now, if it's not a photo or some other easily-digestible tidbit, it gets ignored.

So I come back, to find that all my posts are loaded with spam comments. Like Odysseus and Telemachus clearing out Penelope's suitors, I've got my work cut out for me. But I'm back.

2010-05-28T22:15:00.000-07:00

I'm posting over at gutbucket.tumblr.com . I seem to write better posts in the tumblr forum, and get more exposure, and have a better time interacting, and piss more people off. There's something about blogspot which grates on my nerves. I don't really want to deal with comments, but I also think it's dishonest to arbitrate them. Tumblr's system of reblogging and asking questions just works for me.

I'm also probably going to leave Facebook soon. Security concerns, but also the inanity of the comments. I don't care that you made tea, or that your niece ate a grape. And if social networking is the future of marketing, I'm happy to forego that revenue. And the fucking games, man. "Dean has requested your help slaying orcs in the forest of Nebularr." "Suzie would like you to till her farm." Really?

The Hero's Journey: Not to be confused with Screenwriting By Numbers

2010-05-15T13:11:00.001-07:00

I owe my old writing prof Ross Laird something of an apology.

One of Ross's key idea was the importance of myth to contemporary writing. We spent a lot of time on the Hero's Journey, and he mentioned Joseph Campbell a number of times. Campbell is the author of Hero With a Thousand Faces, a book which argues that the similarities between myth, legend, fairy tale and religious parable point to a "monomyth." In other words, all stories tell the same basic, universal story. It's an idea which influenced George Lucas and the Matrix guys, and many many others, especially in Hollywood.

Most people (writers anyway) come to the Hero's Journey not from Campbell's book, but from a book called The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler. Vogler takes Campbell's work and forms it into an outline that all screenplays (he suggests) follow. You're probably familiar with the various steps and archetypes: Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Meeting with the Mentor, Battle with the Threshold Guardian, etc.

Now, my pitiful attempts at screenwriting did or didn't fall into that pattern, but I never found it useful in writing. It's like the saying "Every story has a beginning, middle and end." It sounds profound, is undoubtedly true, but gives you no help in creating a story, any more than saying "A Frankenstein has a head, a trunk and feet.*" It's sententious horse pockey.

I've found that going back to the original book is always invaluable, and is the only way to scoop any original insight. So I read Hero With a Thousand Faces, and now I understand the value of the monomyth, and exactly where Vogler goes wrong.

What Campbell describes isn't structure but purpose. The Journey is about the many ways that these aspects of the myth promote or hide their adherence to the monomyth. For instance, the Refusal of the Call in Vogler is a time early on when the hero tries to turn away from the quest but can't. In Campbell, the Refusal might be a myth unto itself, as in the myth of King Minos. Minos refuses to relinquish his throne, denying the gods their sacrifice. Thus he becomes a tyrant, and his wife gives birth to a Minotaur. That myth is almost entirely Refusal; Vogler turns it into a stepping stone.

Here's Campbell:

(borrowed from www.apocprod.com/Pages/ Hero/Take_the_Hero%27s... with thanks)

And here's Vogler:

(borrowed from wondering-mind.blogspot.com )

It's not a matter of "My story has to have these steps," but instead, "Chances are my story will emphasize some or most (or one) of these steps."

See the difference? See where everyone goes wrong? The same watering-down happens to any major thinker's work, from Freud to Jesus. Doubtless it will happen to mine.

As I started by saying, I owe Ross Laird an apology. I rejected outright what Vogler had to say, but should have given Campbell a chance a bit sooner.

The value of Campbell is not in an outline, but in the insight that the story a writer is trying to tell has been told before—and needs to be told again. To some people that insight could be worthless, another half-baked idea to rail against as you write a story with "no places, no spaces, no races" and try to be "experimental" (read: deliberately boring, but couched in enough Lacanian jargon that anyone who calls you on your shit "just doesn't understand" or is too "bourgeois". Die in a fire, buddy.).

One valuable thing from Vogler, which David Mamet also repeats, is the similarity between the journey of the hero/protagonist and that of the writer. I find this especially comforting, knowing that the doubts and indecisions one encounters as a writer mimic those faced by one's characters.

It would be interesting and useful, I think, to apply Campbell's journey to ALL one's characters, and note how each emphasizes different aspects of the journey. To me that's a much more interesting use than as an outline. I'm not anti-outline, I just believe they should be generated by the material, not grafted on externally. Writing is not stencilling, there's no set template, and it wouldn't be worth doing if there was.

Campbell's work has a spiritual overtone that pure academics won't be comfortable with, but it should be read and returned to. Vogler's book should prove an interesting appendix, NOT a popular summary. Campbell's book offers an understanding of the comparative skeletons of cultural fictions. Vogler's book offers the chance to earn Matrix money. That's valuable too, but it's meant to appeal to a different demographic, one eager for a formula. There ain't no formula.

* And before some asshole points out that the monster isn't called Frankenstein, the Doctor is: the whole story is about parenthood, about a man who creates life. Mary Shelley suffered a miscarriage shortly before writing it. What better name for the creation than its father's? If anything, "The Monster" is the truly misleading moniker, because it downplays the putative humanity of the creation, which is the center of the book's philosophy.

2010-05-13T10:44:00.001-07:00

Another odd fish I learnt about is the northern cavefish. It's totally blind due to the fact that it lives in dark caves and has no use for its eyes, so nature just decided to make it blind. I felt like I didn't need my eyes on my holiday to Lanzarote. Every trip I went on involved looking into volcanoes, which were that dark that you couldn't see anything, so what's the point. There is a famous quote that goes, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." If there were a kingdom of the blind, Lanzarote is where they should live. They'd be missing nothing.

It's an odd saying, though. If I lived in the kingdom of the blind, I'd just tell them I was the one with the working eye. Be hard to be proved wrong. If they didn't fall for that, I'd suggest that a blind man should be king as he'll have our interests at heart, whereas the fella with an eye wouldn't. If I didn't get the king's job I'd be the kingdom's window cleaner. Money for nothing.

Karl Pilkington. I can't wait until he's old and famous enough to start getting honorary doctorates.

Swintec, the official typewriter of the US Federal Penal System

2010-05-09T22:57:00.000-07:00

From the Swintec website:

"With its Crystal clear cabinet and its 128,000 character storage memory, the 2416DM 128K CC is specifically designed for use by inmates incarcerated in correctional facilities."

The website reminds buyers specify the right memory size, to make sure it won't be "rejected at the facility property room." How fucking cool is a typewriter built to be used in jail? And it's see-through!

Alphasmart ain't got shit on Swintec.

Grear Writing VI: All the King's Men

2010-05-04T15:42:00.001-07:00

So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

It was just where I went.

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men.

As much as I bitch about grad school--and I bitch constantly--I still very much want to teach literature. I think there's value in reading great writing and discussing great writing and delving into difficult books. Literature won't save your soul or make you a better person, but it can preserve and stoke the part of your brain that says, "There's more to it than this. There are things I still need to understand and contemplate."

Anyway, that's why I bother.

Robert Penn Warren is associated with Cleanth Brooks, the head of the New Criticism movement. New Criticism is out of favour now, which means that Warren, a three-time Pulitzer winner and Poet Laureate, isn't read much. It's a shame, because his poetry is brilliant, and I'm enjoying his fiction even more.

I'm two-thirds through All the King's Men. After a slow start it takes off. It was written within a year of Citizen Kane, and it has the same king of back-and-forth structure, which makes me wonder if Warren and Orson Welles were aware of each other.

Warren became a mentor to David Milch, and there's definitely an influence apparent, especially in how Warren works metaphysical and philosophical discussions into the thoughts and words of flesh-and-blood characters.

The first film adaptation of All the King's Men was with Broderick Crawford in 1949. It was remade a few years ago--because Hollywood ran out of original thoughts, and seems in danger of running out of secondhand ones--with Sean Penn in the lead. It can be hard to imagine a character as he or she is described once that book has been turned into a film. I can't think of Tom Joad without seeing Henry Fonda in my mind's eye. But even though I started with Penn in mind, Willie Stark really came into his own once I hit page fifty. Not that the description is excessive or even prevalent in the book, but Stark and Burden and the other characters seem fully-formed. They have a psychological integrity that makes them themselves, in the way Lear is only himself, or Victor Frankenstein, or even Hannibal Lector. There are certain depths that movies and tv cannot penetrate, depths that belong only to fiction. And isn't that fucking swell for those of us still marginally literate?

2010-04-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

CWC, the unhanged Arthur, and a Chinese guy with a Civil War Beard.

2010-04-28T00:19:00.001-07:00

So I went to the Crime Writers of Canada panel discussion last week, basically for the same reason Tommy Johnson went down to the crossroads--fame and fortune, or at least acquaintance and subsistence.

I don't hang out with a lot of writers, nor do I go to poetry slams and the like. Nothing against them, just not useful to me. But now that I have a manuscript, I'm curious as to what to do with it, and I thought some of the discussion might be relevant.

The panel was four geriatric women and a retired dentist from White Rock who answered basic questions on technique and process. I learned a couple of valuable things, though a lot of them were from people in the crowd-- I eavesdrop like a ma-fucker.

1. It takes till the third book to turn a profit.

2. Series books are desired by publishers, children's series especially.

3. Don't set a mystery in Canada if you want to sell it in the States.

4. The CWC has an unpublished-first-novel award, the "Unhanged Arthur," named after Canada's last hangman.

Which means my next project will be a trilogy of children's mysteries set in Anytown, USA.

During the Q&A, an elderly Chinese man with a Ulysses S. Grant goatee took the floor and launched into an incoherent tale of woe, that was either about a perceived racial grievance or a problem with the transmission on a Buick 49. He refused to sit down, expecting this panel of "Crime Writers" to aid him in some way. The panel, the moderator and the crowd got really, really uncomfortable. Actually, uncomfortable isn't the word. They were uncomfortable when the CWC banner fell off the front of the table. When he stood up their reactions varied from a rolling of eyes to ignoring him and hoping he would go away.

I fucking loved that guy. In my opinion, he stole the show.

No one was interested in him. How can you call yourself a writer and not be curious about people, not be willing to embrace a bit of chaos in the hope you get to hear something new? A new specimen of whackjob is more interesting than a doddering old lady explaining how she came to write "The Curious Case of the Potted Prunes" or "Murder by Begonia."

It amazes me that under the heading of "Crime Writer," you have the sweet elderly schoolmarms who like exotic locales, elaborate clue schemes that need an abbacus to work out, and a guaranteed happy ending. You also have people interested in society and justice, in writing as an art form, in aberrant behaviour and psychology, and in morality under pressure. Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler don't seem to belong on the same planet, do they?

Which I guess is a longwinded way of saying it takes all sorts.

Eighties Bond Themes

2010-04-13T13:45:00.001-07:00

Aren't they great? After about 1985 the Bond theme legacy went into a horrible spin and never recovered. I mean, once you let Duran Duran and Madonna in, you've pretty much consigned yourself to rubbish. But if the sixties were the golden age--Nancy Sinatra, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey--the early eighties had their moments too.

My two favourites: Sheena Easton's For Your Eyes Only and Lani Hall's Never Say Never Again.

The newer themes all stunk, though Chris Cornell's song for Casino Royale isn't bad.

Logic Takes its Final Bow

2010-03-28T10:20:00.000-07:00

Paul Valery wrote, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." The same holds true for books, I think, and most other art as well. You either spend your life tinkering with it, or you say, "I know this is not perfect. I know a better mind than mine could solve its problems. But it's as good as I can make it, and to do any more would be counter-productive."

Alternatively, you could take your manuscript, burn it, and commit its ashes to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, much like John Goodman and Jeff Bridges do for Steve Buscemi.

I spent last evening and early this morning trying to perfect the conclusion. I'm now on my fifth or sixth draft, I've done massive rewrites, and I'm proud as hell of it. Yet there is a lingering feeling of, "I have to make more of this. This has to be better."

As long as I felt I had the capability to make it better, I kept at it. Now I've hit the point where, whatever the book's failings are, they escape me. To do more would be to change for change's sake, which is a sign I've grown bored. I'd rather stop now.

This is new territory for me. Like most people, I'm much more comfortable talking shit about other people, or deluding myself I'm going to finish something, or immersing myself in the trappings of being a writer (I almost wrote "writerly behaviour" Ugggh).

My situation, I think, is analogous to a scene in Deadwood (you knew Milch would come up sooner or later, didn't you?). After Hearst's goon throws down a challenge, Swearengen spends a day trying to figure what exactly Hearst stands to gain by having his man fight Swearengen's. The answer is unknowable, and Al finally decides, "It's past me. I cannot figure the fuckin' angle. Go ahead and fuckin' fight him."

Or as David Mamet says, "After the play's opened you gotta say, I might've known better then, or I might know better now, but that play is done."

I don't know what comes next, aside from the next one. Self-promotion? Fuck me.

And now, to cheer myself up on this dreary afternoon, and to complete the fucking one-eighty my train of thought just pulled, here's that beating scene from Deadwood. It never gets old.

What is Our Generation's Great Movie? Or, Ghostbusters and the Death of Work.

2010-03-19T21:50:00.000-07:00

The Boomers have Easy Rider and Woodstock.

The Gen-Xers have the Breakfast Club and the rest of that repugnant John Hughes shit.

Us?

Ghostbusters.

Think I'm kidding?

Easy Rider and Breakfast Club tap into the Great Important Issues of their respective birth eras. For the Boomers, it's freedom. For the X-ers, it's making their parents wrong. What is our issue, our fantasy?

Well, what is Ghostbusters about?

Four entrepreneurs who have important jobs and do them well.

That's our fantasy. In a country with no jobs, where risk is frowned upon and hierarchy rigidly enforced, our fantasy is about economic freedom and earned celebrity.

Many if not most people our age still live with an incredible amount of parental support. This is not by choice, as with the Slackers: it's because the jobs aren't there and, to be fair, the standard of living we aspire to is very high. We all want that middle-class bohemian lifestyle; none of us can afford it. This will be the first generation since the Dust Bowl era to perform worse economically than their parents.

Ghostbusters is about people who invent a new job sector and conquer it. It's about people who do their jobs better than anyone else and get to set the rules. Who's the bad guy? Walter Peck, the government agent, who wants to regulate the fun out of this newly-created vocation. He's Standards and Practices, Clear Channel and the IRS rolled into one. Gozer is a pest compared to him.

The film is about a return to the idea of Meaningful Work, that fantasy we Millenials indulge in which says, 'Back in the day, our grandparents made things of great importance. Their jobs mattered. We are robbed of that, and are hence a lost generation.'

The truth, of course, is that none of us want to work in a steel foundry or a lumber mill. We just want jobs with the salary and security those post-War occupations had. Every generation looks wistfully back, usually for the wrong reasons.

Un petite digression.

Our world is one of regulation, safety standards, political correctness, corporate abrogation of responsibility, lowest-common-denominator programming, and credentialism. And the solutions we are offered lead to an increase in the same. As if the government will work to regulate itself. As if an extra seven years of school will make you more valuable. Like putting fire out with kerosene.

We don't go to school to learn a trade, we go to school to get accredited and to learn how to pander. You need a PhD to teach at the college level now. Ten years ago that was not the case. Have things gotten so complicated in the last decade that a teacher needs an extra seven years of school to teach Fitzgerald and Mary Shelley? Fuck no. School has become self-perpetuating, now that there's a buck to be made. We call sleazy schools degree mills, but really, are UBC and SFU any different?

The Ghostbusters embody the DIY spirit, without the shitty music and social justice. They come up with the technology, they exploit it without exploiting a work force, and they take no shit from their clients, who need them far more than the Ghostbusters need them.

Spurned by academia and fucked over by the government, the Ghostbusters have their revenge. Laissez-faire, baby.

Insincere Endorsement

2010-03-12T19:19:00.000-08:00

I guess for this to make sense you need to know that

A) Mass Effect is a sci-fi video game;

B) In the Mass Effect universe, one of the non-important races are called Elcor;

C) The Elcor are distinguished by a complete lack of emotion. They're big Snuffleuphagus-looking things that speak in an Eeyore monotone and always preface their boring remarks with a stated intention of emotion, as in, "Eager Politeness: Welcome customer" or "Resigned desolation: she thinks I'm a monster."

D) One of the running jokes in the first Mass Effect was an advertisement for "Francis Kint's award-winning fourteen-hour production of Hamlet with an all-Elcor cast."

E) In Mass Effect 2, one of the advertisements you pass plays clips from Elcor Hamlet.

F) If you get all that, the clip below is hilarious. "Morose rumination: to be or not to be"

2010-03-09T23:49:00.000-08:00

David Mamet on directing, writing, etc.

Totally Worth the Dollar

2010-03-07T22:30:00.001-08:00

Great Writing V: Bony Old Ghost of a Whore

2010-03-02T16:42:00.000-08:00

Fanny came in a couple of times. Bony old ghost of a whore. Couldn't do much, but I suppose better than a kick in the crutch. The last time wasn't so bad. How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.

Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape.

The more Beckett you read, the better he gets. What a staggering sense of humour.

John Hurt performing as Krapp:

2010-02-24T22:39:00.000-08:00

Let me put something to you.

We all take it as a given that, in order to excel at a certain art, you have to enjoy consuming that art. If you're a writer, you have to enjoy reading, and if you want to make films, you have to watch a ton of them.

But is there a limit to that?

To put it another way--could there be a point where watching too many films, reading too many books, or what have you, hinders development as an artist?

I wouldn't give up reading for anything. But I could see a time where I wasn't reading as much. In fact, I kind of look forward to that time.

Is there something to be said for immersion? Of course. But couldn't there also be benefits to deprivation?

At a certain point, does it really matter what other people have done?

I know a few writers, James Ellroy and Kurt Vonnegut among them, who make a point of refraining from engaging with other writers. That comes up a lot in interviews: older musicians don't listen to a lot of new music, and older filmmakers tend to be ignorant of up-and-comers.

That may be weariness, or it may be part of maintaining a unique voice. If you know what everyone else is doing, it constrains you, because you're either agreeing with it or disagreeing with it. Either way it shapes you.

I don't have an answer, but it's interesting to consider. The internet tends towards information overload. Maybe the best thing to do is to shut the world out. At least for a while.

"It is doubtful anyone with an internet connection at his workspace is writing good fiction": Top Ten Pieces of Advice

2010-02-20T10:14:00.000-08:00

Entire list here.

So it goes.*

2010-02-18T02:26:00.000-08:00

According to Kierkegaard, despair is the sickness unto death. Despair is also the writer's sickness, what Michael Chabon calls the Midnight Disease. It's an enterprise funded on confidence, that saps said confidence when you do it poorly. And when you do it right, more often than not nobody gives a shit.

I finished the second draft on Monday. It came in at 89,000 words and change, which is perfectly satisfactory (meaning I don't have to monkey with it). I've spent the last year on this, forsaking an awful lot of video games. The minute after I finished I was struck with two thoughts that absolutely leveled me for a day: the first chapter is shit and I don't know how to fix the first chapter and make it less shitty. That stumped me for a whole day.

It doesn't help that I've been reading Ian Rankin and Lawrence Block, masters of the kind of book I want to write, or that I've been watching the original British version of Edge of Darkness** and introducing my family to The Wire. In all cases that's crime drama taken to its summit. Anything less than brilliant looks rotten by comparison.

Anyway, I'm into draft three, and hoping to have it readable by the end of the Olympic boondoggle. The new beginning is sitting really well with me, and I know the areas it's deficient in (setting, which always fucks me up because I hate lengthy description) and problems (police procedure, which, surprise surprise, is actually pretty boring).

To get back to Kierkegaard (the second most famous melancholy Dane), the antidote for despair is to rest transparently, which is an indicatio of faith. Faith in what I haven't figured out, but half of writing--no, more like ninety percent--is a fucking slog. But it's worth it, even if it limits my Mass Effect playing time. You gotta do something worthwhile with the time you're given.

* It's a refrain from Vonnegut, who doesn't factor at all into this post. I just like the saying. It's better than those creepy Hunter Thompson acolytes who end forum posts with "Mahalo," isn't it? Or people who quote blocks of Bill Hicks comedy routines and pass them off as their own thoughts. I mean, by all means, steal from the masters, but don't, y'know, rape them.

**The British Edge of Darkness is in many ways superior to the film, though it lacks Ray Winstone and includes an uber-creepy scene where Craven finds his daughter's vibrator and gives it a sniff. Yes, you read that, and you can't unread it.

The Saddest thing you will read today

2010-02-16T12:47:00.001-08:00

After Roeper announced his departure from At the Movies in 2008 — Disney wanted to revamp the show in a way that Roeper felt would damage it — Ebert disassociated himself from it, too, and he took his trademarked thumbs with him. The end was not pretty, and the break was not clean. But because Disney was going to change the original balcony set as part of its makeover, it was agreed, Ebert thought, that the upholstered chairs and rails and undersized screen would be given to the Smithsonian and put on display. Ebert was excited by the idea. Then he went up to visit the old set one last time and found it broken up and stacked in a dumpster in an alley.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/roger-ebert-0310-5#ixzz0fjaGjgov

Reading list for the Olympic Break

2010-02-14T20:14:00.001-08:00

I was going to read something Mammoth over the break, either War and Peace or Don Quixote, but I'm bloody fagged out, guv, and the list has split into crime thrillers and short masterworks.

The Short Works of Genius list looks like this:

Flannery O'Conner - A Good Man is Hard to Find

Cormac McCarthy - Outer Dark

Nathanael West - Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts

Nick Cave - And the Ass Saw the Angel

Henry James - The Spoils of Poynton

Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome

Samuel Beckett - Malone Dies and The Unnameable

Aside from the top three I probably won't glance at them until the end of the semester.

My crime thriller list looks like this:

Stieg Larsson - Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Will Beale - L.A. Rex

Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

James Crumley - The Last Good Kiss

Lawrence Block - Eight Million Ways to Die

John McFetridge - Everyone Knows this is Nowhere

Ian Rankin - Resurrection Men

Michael Connelly - The Narrows

2010-02-01T20:38:00.001-08:00

I love writing the way Winston Zeddemore loves this town.

Insufficient Knowledge

2010-01-22T21:50:00.000-08:00

The biggest difference between college and university English cohorts is the lack of writers in the latter group. Sure, there's a ton of poets, but none of them seem all that into what they do. For most of them writing is a pastime, a low priority. I don't know if they're any good.

I do know that, as my hero David Milch says, "Anything you think about writing when you're not writing is bullshit." Every grad-school poet has an elaborate system of aesthetics, or a tradition they're trying to contribute to, or some explanation for their work. They have the answers because they've read Foucault, or Benjamin, or Butler or Zizek or whoever. The actual writing is almost an afterthought.

Writing the kind of novels that I want to write takes faith. There's a great story about James Ellroy, who started writing in his early thirties after getting sober (fucked-up Ellroy stories abound). He's never written anything of substance, and before he takes up his pencil, he prays. The first thing he writes is the first paragraph of his first novel, Brown's Requium:

Business was good. It was the same thing every summer. The smog and heat rolled in, blanketing the basin; people succumbed to torpor and malaise; old resolves died; old commitments went unheeded. And so on.

Kierkegaard thought of faith as a union of ethics and aesthetics. William James saw it as a psychological necessity. What pertains to writers, I think, is the idea that You don't fucking know and you don't have to. It's not about you. It's about the work.

The best quote on writing is from Robert Frost: "You have to start on insufficient knowledge. And you have to have that kind of courage." I transcribed that years ago, typed it out on an index card with my Selectric, posted it on my wall.

There are a million things I could do besides write, and I could think up a million reasons why they are valid and necessary predicates to writing. But writing comes first.

I'm not advocating monastic solitude and monomania. Everyone has other commitments, mine being school and work and friends. But you need discipline and focus to reserve time for writing, so you don't get bogged down in other things and forget to get the work done.

One of the reasons I gave up music was that, in the space of a year, I cut drum tracks for three albums. One guitarist/producer got bogged down in drugs and the unfairness of the world and never finished. Another decided he needed better equipment and rerecorded everything as he bought more shit. A third just sits in his house practicing, day in day out, waiting for the phone to ring.

To me, that's like the pastor in Surrey this week who blamed the recent catastrophe in Haiti on voodoo and paganism. It's also the reason why more and more people become atheists. There is nothing more disgusting than watching someone dress up in the articles of faith and espouse fear. It's nauseating.

The great thing about writing is, once you convince yourself you need to commit, you don't have to convince anyone else until the actual writing is over. That's very liberating. There's no committee to hassle you about grammar, or cuss words, or sex, or anyhing else. The onus is on you to create the standards and then live by them.

The lure of being an artist is great, and we all want to differentiate ourselves, be seen as original, creative, inspired, special. The trick is realizing you're not, and that the work is what matters. The work, not the bullshit associated with it. That takes what Harlan Ellison calls "foot-pounds of energy." And it takes faith.

2010-01-19T11:19:00.000-08:00

Fascinating article on the replacement of progressive or conservative intellectuals with "Democratist" and "Republicanist" party consultants whose only loyalty lies with the party. You watch Donna Brazille and the rest on CNN and you think, "They can't agree with everything Obama (or Limbaugh or whoever) says." But of course, they're paid to espouse a consistent viewpoint.

2010-01-17T07:58:00.000-08:00

Marry, and you will regret it; do not mary, and you will also regret it...whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way...trust a girl and you will regret it; do not trust her and you will also regret it...hang yourself or do not hang yourself and you will regret it either way.

Kierkegaard, preface to Either/Or, which ends with "Read them or do not read them, you will regret it either way."

2010-01-15T15:49:00.000-08:00

Grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

2010-01-08T16:41:00.001-08:00

Now this is a rumour, but apparently, Michael Mann will be directing the pilot for David Milch's new show 'Luck.'

Bad--ass.

Yes, I wrote this on Tonya Harding's website.

2009-12-30T19:50:00.001-08:00

Her website is fucking creepy.

2009-12-28T15:48:00.001-08:00

Some really cool acting from Leo, Kate and Michael Shannon.

What I've Read, What I've Known, Turn the Pages Turn to Stone, etc...

2009-12-23T17:44:00.000-08:00

This is what I read this year. Some of this was for school, some pleasure...but you probably couldn't guess which was which (hint: crime thrillers and graphic novels tend not to be included on college syllabi, but then neither does classic literature)

FICTION

Samuel Beckett - Molloy (a hundred pages that felt like a thousand, but brilliant)

Aphra Behn - Oroonoko (at least it was short)

Michael Chabon - The Final Solution (awesome)

Henry Chang - Chinatown Beat (big disappointment)

Michael Connelly - The Black Echo (kind of a letdown)

Don DeLillo - Libra (Interesting, but not as fun as White Noise)

Charles Dickens - Christmas Carol (An emotional rapist, though halfway through you'll start to like it, like the rape scene in Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter)

Roddy Doyle - The Commitments - I dug it.

James Ellroy - Blood's a Rover (best book of the year hands down)

William Faulkner - Sound and the Fury (he's most poetic when he's most misogynistic and racist, which is kind of disturbing)

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Ethan Brand" (An amazing story about a man searching for the unpardonable sin)

Nick Hornby - High Fidelity (helped me understand my brother)

Henry James - Turn of the Screw (William writes better, but a cool ghost story nonetheless)

James Joyce - Ulysses (1000 pages that reads like 5000; brilliant gibberish)

Ibi Kaslik - Angel Riots (Awful and Canadian--coincidence?)

Dennis Lehane - Mystic River, A Drink Before the War, Darkness Take My Hand, Shutter Island (Probably the master of the crime story at millenium's end. Ellroy is more literary and more disturbed, but Lehane is more controlled, and his stories move. An amazing writer.)

Henning Mankell - The Dogs of Riga, The Man Who Smiled (Ingmar Bergman's son-in-law who writes socially conscious detective stories. Great, but kind of depressing.)

Herman Melville - Moby Dick; Or, the Whale (A classic that's actually kind of fun to read)

Grant Morrison - Batman Arkham Asylum, Batman and Son (Well-painted and interesting)

Robert B Parker - Back Story (A good page-turner if a bit cheezy)

George Pelecanos - Soul Circus (Supposed to be better than Lehane; a big disappointment; warm-over Elmore Leonard)

Neil Pollack - Never Mind the Pollacks (worth the read, Josh!)

Ian Rankin - The Complaints, Knots and Crosses (more of a traditional mystery writer than Lehane, but his equal in character and plotting. and the television Rebus episodes are so fucking good).

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Wrapped up the series nicely; fun)

Richard Stark - The Hunter (Badass caper novel)

Robert Louis Stevenson--Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (terrific and short)

Josephine Tey - Daughter of Time (A crime novel that uncovered the historical truth about Richard III)

Michael Turner - Hard Core Logo (snorrrrrrrrrrre)

Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, A Man Without a Country, Slaughter-House Five, Like Shaking Hands With God (Breakfast was amazing; the rest were fun to read, and occaionally brilliant, but diminishing returns)

Joseph Wambaugh - The Choir Boys (Police procedurals by a real cop. A cop who can fucking write).

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road - (Astonishingly Brilliantly Funnily Poignantly Amazing)

NONFICTION

Pat Capponi - Bound by Duty (A former nuthouse patient critiques the police)

Stanley Cavell - The Senses of Walden (A cool philosophical examination of Thoreau)

Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life... (Best slave narrative I'd read...out of two)

Sigmund Freud - Overview of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Wolfman (His case studies are the best thing he wrote; beware of Lacan)

Margaret Fuller - Woman in the 19th Century (really spoke to me)

Werner Herzog - Herzog on Herzog, Walking on Ice (the greatest filmmaker is a decent but not brilliant writer)

William James - Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism (Game-changers both)

Soren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death (Impenetrable but worth the attempt)

Jon Krakauer - Into the Wild (Pretty cool)

Roy Porter - Disease Medicine and Society in England 1550-1800 (yes I read every goddamn page of this. Seriously.)

Henry Thoreau - Walden and Civil Disobedience (Terrific inspiration)

Nick Tosches - Hellfire (Great biography of Jerry Lee Lewis)

Joseph Wambaugh - The Onion Field (The best Wambaugh, and the movie's good too)

Slavoj Zizek - Understanding Lacan (I don't, so it couldn't've been that good a book, could it?)

DRAMA

Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone - (Entertaining, though I doubt they'll stand the test of time--wakka wakka, they're old, get it?)

Johann Goethe - Faust Part One and Two (The German Shakespeare's no Shakespeare, but not bad)

Shakespeare - Merry Wives of Windsor, Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Coriolanus - (It's fucking Shakespeare, okay? Everything he put a pen to is worth reading)

Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (More Beckett than Shakespeare)

2009-12-19T13:44:00.000-08:00

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned economic freedom. Does the writer need it?

FAULKNER

No. The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I’ve never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He’s too busy writing something. If he isn’t ﬁrst rate he fools himself by saying he hasn’t got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to ﬁnd out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to ﬁnd out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling.

Interview with William Faulkner, Paris Review.

2009-12-12T22:55:00.001-08:00

I haven't found a really funny site in a while, but funnyexamanswers.com did it.

Shutter Island...!

2009-12-08T23:59:00.000-08:00

Other than Sherlock Holmes, Shutter Island is the next big film I'm looking forward to. Scorsese directing an adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel, with DiCaprio, Von Sydow and Kingsley starring? Hell yes.

I started reading the book yesterday and already I'm 200 pages through, which is great considering how little time I have. Lehane is such a gifted writer, one who effortlessly combines evocative writing, interesting characters and deep moral dilemmas. See Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone for evidence of this.

Just the way he puts sentences together is arresting:

When they'd cleared the trees, they reached a paved road that crossed their path like a grin, and Teddy could see a house off to both his right and his left. The one to the left was the simpler of the two, a maroon mansarded Victorian with black trim, small windows that gave the appearance of sentinels. The one to the right was a Tudor that commanded its small rise like a castle.

That's a guy who cares about writing for its own sake, not just in furthering the plot. Michael Chabon is my favourite writer's writer for descriptions and evocative turns of phrase, but Lehane would make the short list.

You can get a copy of Shutter Island for four bucks at Black Bond. I suggest you do so.

Sinatra exacts revenge on punk for Sid Vicious's "My Way"

2009-12-06T22:04:00.000-08:00

I've listened to this now more times than I've ever listened to the Clash.

Let's rehash the war one more time

2009-12-05T01:11:00.000-08:00

I'm not saying I always agree with the guy, but Christopher Hitchens is the only person on the pro-war side of things who makes a lick of sense. If you can't acknowledge the positive aspects of those you disagree with, then you are a poop. I think John Stuart Mill said that.

2009-12-04T19:45:00.000-08:00

I'd done a gig recently, and I was complaining about a bruised rib or some other kind of injury that one incurs on stage. And Henry says, "Yeah, I've got quite a few aches and pains, too." He rolls up his trousers and his legs are covered in cigarette burns where people have been stubbing their cigarettes out on his shins. I thought: Fair enough, you win this time. But I'll be back.

Nick Cave on how he met Henry Rollins.

Top Film Performances of the 00s.

2009-11-30T23:17:00.000-08:00

The Av Club posted their list, and aside from Daniel Day-Lewis, there wasn't a performance on there that I would rank as really deserving. Not that I have anything against Mickey Rourke in the Wrestler, Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive or even Denzel Washington in Training Day, although that's a severely overrated movie. They just wouldn't make my list. Please note that this isn't scientific or even well thought-out, as I'm sure I missed a few. It's just what I liked from the last ten years.

1. Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Gangs of New York, Ballad of Jack and Rose and The Boxer. He totally deserved his Oscar for TWBB, but Day-Lewis has been doing great work forever. His other over-the-top role of the decade, Bill The Butcher in Gangs of New York, was equally incendiary, and watching him flay the Irish for three hours was a guilty treat. But his performance in The Boxer was deft and nuanced in ways that the other two weren't, despite bringing the same level of physicality. Also, Ballad of Jack and Rose saw a different side of him, playing a washed-up hippy and overbearing father.

2. Guy Pearce in Memento. Okay, it's a gimmicky movie, but Pearce has proved himself over the last decade since breaking out with L.A. Confidential. He's an actor who can do anything, but seems most comfortable in indie films, surrounded by talented misfits. I don't think there's another actor who could have pulled off the short-term-memory-loss thing as well as he did.

3. Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises. I hated History of Violence (except for Maria Bello in the cheerleader outfit). It was overwrought, full of hammy dialogue and the kind of shitty bright-red-paint splatter effects that kept me away from David Cronenberg's work for years. But with Eastern Promises, it felt like Cronenberg reigned himself in and allowed his actors and his script to live up to their potential. Viggo plays a Russian mobster with a steely calculation that recalls Michael Corleone, if Michael had to do his own dirty work. It's amazing feat that, when the twist comes, even though it's heavily telegraphed, it catches you off-guard.

4. Ray Winstone in The Proposition. There are a lot of great performances in this film, including the above-stated Guy Pearce, John Hurt, Danny Huston and Emily Watson (also amazing in The Boxer...this is fast becoming an incestuous list). Winstone looks like a cockney thug, and yet he has a tremendous sadness and vulnerability, best displayed before this in Sexy Beast. The film, scripted by Nick Cave, is dark, and threatens to go off the edge at every turn. Because he's such an absolute badass (he was an amateur boxer), Winstone plays vulnerable better than anyone.

5. Hillary Swank in Million Dollar Baby. Sure, it's a guaranteed-Oscar kind of role--basically a female Rocky with more heartbreak and less stupidity--and Swank is backed up by two of the best actors out there, Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. But Eastwood is the kind of director who lets his films stand on the power of their script and actors, and the movie rises or falls with her performance. I think it rises.

6. Kurt Russell in Dark Blue. Kurt Russell plays the American Blowhard better than anyone, managing to imbue him with vulnerability and flair. James Ellroy apparently wrote the original script, Plague Season, with Russell in mind. It's not a great film, but it's a great performance.

7. Leonardo Dicaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Vera Farmiga, Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone in The Departed. The secret to the Departed is that it's an ensemble film, a real feat considering most of the major actors don't share any screen time together. There isn't a bad performance in the film, though Mark Walhberg, never a favourite of mine, steals most of his scenes. Brilliantly scripted, capably directed, The Departed is worth a second, third or twenty-sixth look.

8. Tom Cruise in Collateral. Tom Cruise? Yes, I put him on my list. Michael Mann has a knack for bringing stellar performances out of stellar actors (Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert DeNiro), and competent performances out of frequently-incompetent actors (Colin Farell for one). Cruise falls somewhere in the middle, a great action star (whose Mission Impossible II and Minority Report are two of the better explosiony films to come out in this decade) who can be a great actor when he feels like it. He brings it all to the role of Vincent, a hit man hired to kill a slew of people in one Los Angeles night. Pretty much all of this could also be said for Will Smith in Mann's Ali.

9. Michael Shannon in Shotgun Stories. Josh turned me on to this one, about the death of a father who sired six sons, abandoned them to a hateful woman, reformed and found Jesus, and sired another three sons. The six kids meet at the father's funeral. Shannon plays Son, the oldest of the first three kids (along with Kid and Boy--now that's a guy who cared about his kids' names). His lethargic drawl fits his slightly damaged character perfectly.

10. There's lot more I could ramble on about, but Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises, Liev Schrieber in Hamlet 2000, Gene Hackman in Heist, Phillip Seymour-Hoffman in Almost Famous, Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, etc etc.

But think about this. If you take the best performances from television over the decade--Ian MacShane, Michael K Williams, Edie Falco and James Gandolfini, Glenn Close and Michael Chiklis, Idris Elba and everyone else on The Wire, the ensemble from Arrested Development--you'd have to give it to television, I think. Maybe there's no one tv actor as radiant as Daniel Day-Lewis, but it's not all that far from him to Ian MacShane, is it?

2009-11-29T12:35:00.000-08:00

Ah yes...the book.

2009-11-13T22:29:00.000-08:00

January of this year I wrote an outline for a novel. In February I started writing. By the time school rolled around in June, I had a rough draft. I put the draft aside for a couple of months and began rewriting in August. My goal is to have the second draft done by the time the Christmas break ends, January 4th.

What's it about? Vaulting ambition, police brutality, unrequited love, biker gangs, systemic unfairness, drug culture, crime in the city, masculinity in the 21st century, political indifference to a rotting social structure, and cinematic Shakespeare adaptions. But mostly it's about cops.

In 2008 I wrote the first and second drafts of a novel which wasn't very good. It was undisciplined. I was feeling my way. This time I started with a clear idea of what I wanted to do. It has taken me longer than I'd anticipated, but I'm on track, and I'm pleased with the results.

I know very clearly what I want to write--character-driven crime stories that are realistic and speak to larger issues. I'm not interested in post-modernism, structuralism, or didactic political tracts. Once I realized that, things got a whole lot easier.

Every spare moment is spent writing. I've given up the drums, I've given up video games, and I've given up a lot of reading time, in order to better serve this. Now that I'm near the end of the semester, I have to spend more time on my school research papers, and my PhD apps. But the book is foremost in my mind, and I'm beginning to outline the next one.

I'm not trumpeting myself as a success, but for years I was bogged down in the academic hoopla surrounding writing. I believed outlines made you stiff, that writing before you're thirty-five meant your work would be jejeune and fatuous, that alcohol is necessary, that you had to start in short stories and work up to a novel, etc. Those are all fear-based ideas. The truth is deceptively simple: you find what you like to read and write that as well as you can.

It cost me a year of writing to learn that--the novel I aborted in 2008 was self-conscious, trying to impress, embarrassed about what it truly was--a crime story. Fear kills creativity. Being a shy person, whose bombastic assholishness only comes out from behind the safety of the computer, I let fear convince me of some pretty monstrous untruths.

I once watched an interview of Robert Frost, who said the most profound thing about writing: "You have to start on insufficient knowledge. And you have to have that kind of courage." I hope you see why that's so momentous.

The first draft of this book needed a serious overhaul. There was a flashback structure which I've removed, paring it down to one longer flashback a la the cave scene in Frankenstein. I had to clear up some character motivations, rid myself of a few coincidences, and fix a general lack of description and over-reliance on dialogue. These are real problems, but they're surmountable because I know what needs to be done to fix them. I even have a few things I want to fix for the third draft.

I write this because, if you've asked me about writing lately, I probably haven't given a very detailed account of my progress. I can't guarantee that I'll make my January 4th deadline, but I have faith.

This is another monster post with very little humour in it, and rather than come up with some bullshit comedic twist, I'll just apologize for that now, and end with a few of the books which helped me out.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield--I heard about this book from a graphic novel called The Nightly News. It addresses creative slumps, and how to change your approach to art to get the most out of it.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway--A perennial favourite because he shares some gossip about other famous people he knew, but he also describes being in your twenties, broke, and writing stories, and how he worked through his depressions by starting with a simple declarative sentence.

Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman--A personable screenwriter and novelist's take on the movie business, screenwriting, and writing in general.

On Writing by Stephen King--Probably the best book on its subject.

On Writing by George Higgins--Another classic, unlike any writing book ever written.

The Paris Review Interviews series, for obvious reasons.

Three Uses of the Knife by David Mamet--Brilliant breakdown of drama from a master.

Story by Robert McKee--A very in-depth scriptwriting book.

Poetics by Aristotle--Still relevant a few thousand years on.

How Fiction Works by James Wood--Slightly academic but well-written and insightful.

but more than any of these, what I come back to again and again are the works by David Milch:

The Idea of the Writer website, True Blue and Deadwood: Stories From the Black Hills. It sounds strange to reference a tv writer, but Milch was a Yale professor before tv, and he's incredibly insightful about the writing process, character development, and storytelling structure. His lectures ramble, but that's part of the fun--seeing how he connects Coleridge to Beckett to his hatred of Law and Order to a poem by Robert Penn Warren to Conrad's Nostromo. Inspirational, far-reaching, yet practical.

2009-11-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

William James, The Moral Equivalent of War (read online).

James is attacking the idea that war makes men out of boys. He doesn't dispute the fact that war instills discipline, bravery, honour, a sense of duty and purpose. What he disputes is that war is the BEST way to do this. The cost is simply too high, he states, when all you have to do to get the same improvements of the self is to cultivate a love of nature and take a few hiking trips.

It's amazing to think that in a nuclear society, we're still fighting war pretty much the way we did at the turn of the nineteenth century. All our much-vaunted technology hasn't changed the fact that the war machine is piloted by human beings. Success is still measured by ours/their casualty comparisons.

Terrorism and Islamo-fascism are indisputable threats to western society, and any conscientious person should oppose them. But I reject the notion that we can fix those problems through war. It hasn't worked so far. Toppling Saddam hasn't made the world safer, neither has the war of attrition we're waging with the Taliban in Afghanistan. It's not working and it won't work, and no amount of jingoism or righteous country music will change that.

What would probably work is ending our dependence on the products of Islamic nations, especially the Middle East. Understand, I'm not touting the far-left idea that 9/11 was fair retribution for American greed, and Americans are responsible for all the ills of the world. I think the US has done a hell of a lot of good. And I'm also not a green fanatic. But the way to attenuate hostilities, and the terrorism that spawns from them, is to develop affordable transportation that does not depend on oil exported from any Arabic country.

If America sunk its dollars into coming up with a solar-powered car, and SHARED that technology with everyone instead of forming a cabal to exploit consumers, then there'd be no reason for us to be in the Middle East, other than to guarantee Israeli sovereignty. And with all the troops we pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we could intervene more effectively in Israel, and keep them from doing some stupid provocative expansion into Palestinian territory.

Even if that didn't work, it couldn't not work as expensively as the war is not working. We could try economic sanctions, buy political power and install right-thinking rulers, fund a bloodless coup--in short, do any of a half-dozen morally questionable interventions that, as loathsome as they may be to our delicate fucking sensibilities, don't end with large numbers of Canadian and American soldiers coming home in body bags.

James states:

"I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them. I see no reason why all this should not apply to yellow as well as to white countries, and I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples."

That was written before World War One.

Remembrance Day should be a day to remember the follies of the past, not a current event. We shouldn't be adding new people to the roster. You look around at Canada, and we still have a monarch--a monarch in the twenty-first century--and we still have soldiers fighting a war hand to hand. Get fucking current.

I guess what I'm trying to say is:

War--

Huh--

Good God y'all--

What is it good for--

Absolutely nothin'--

Listen to me--

I should also post a link to a story by Harry Tournemille called "The Sky is Falling." Not to brag, but I knew the author before he became the legendary eco-warrior who writes for Energy Boom. Now he doesn't return my calls.

The Beck Conundrum

2009-11-04T22:03:00.000-08:00

What a great Ludlumesque title, uh?

Sarah Weiman on Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind wrote about the "Glenn Beck effect." Beck, the most noxious talk show host on air (slightly edging out Keith Olbermann) promotes thriller writers on his show. Not great thriller writers, but mid-level guys, David Baldacci (Absolute Power) and the like.

Now, a lot of people bitch about Oprah's Book Club, but you can all go to hell, because if she called I would trample fifty SFU Poets to get on her show and hawk my book. And to show you I'm not a hard-hearted guy, and it's not all dollars and cents, I'll add that Oprah picks (generally) good books (McCarthy, Faulkner, Tolstoy) and promotes intelligent literacy.

But Glenn Beck?

I don't hate right-wing pundits in principle. I actually really like Bill O'Reilly, who has some intelligent points, especially on renouncing capital punishment. I don't agree with the guy, but like Bill Maher, I find him occasionally interesting to watch.

But Glenn Beck?

When I think of words that bring to mind Glenn Beck, oleaginous comes to mind. He's William Sanderson in a slightly better suit. He's the talk show equivalent of Rob Schneider.

All joking aside, the guy is fucking stupid. He's helped pervert the small-government ethos which guys like Thoreau pioneered, giving up zero control but abrogating responsibility for all social programs. He thinks "freedom" means "free trade and a standing army." He stands against things that only a moron would be hung up on in 2009 America, like gay rights. And he's dead set against health care reform, working to kill Obama's public option, which benefits all the rubes who watch him.

Unlike O'Reilly, who, unless it's a tax question, is capable of making the best possible argument for the opposing side, Beck goes the route of cheap shots, fear-mongering, common-man-horeshit, unquestioning patriotism that would make Springsteen uncomfortable, and the kind of jokes that even Hee-Haw wouldn't air.

So even though I don't want my artistic career to be overtly politicized, and would hate to lose a conservative audience, I can't get behind Glenn Beck. That's where I draw the line.

2009-11-03T23:30:00.001-08:00

Does every US schoolgirl have to be a bloodthirsty vampire? Can't some of them be good, old-fashioned, home-grown sluts? Gosh, where's Christina Ricci when you really need her?

Joe Queenan, "Why Does Hollywood Keep Making the Same Films?"

Update: Actually, this is the best part of the article:

"The first time Michael Moore made a movie denouncing the economic system that would make him rich, it seemed amusing and powerful. Now that he has once again stood in front of the soulless fat cats' HQ with a bullhorn in hand demanding to see somebody really important, knowing full well no one is going to come out, the whole shtick has taken on the aroma of the graveyard. Nobody outside of Hollywood seriously believes that Moore likes or cares about working-class people, and, for their part, working-class people are either oblivious to his existence or despise him. Nor is anybody fooled by the faux prole headgear any more: a young man in a red baseball cap is an imp; a middle-aged man in a baseball cap is a buffoon."

How Bad Do You Want It?

2009-10-25T21:39:00.000-07:00

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1408996393?bctid=44289025001

This is an unbelievably beautiful and straightforward clip of James Ellroy talking about the realities of the book industry. It's in some dinky movie player format, unfortunately, but follow the link. It's brilliant, trust me.

2009-10-22T10:05:00.001-07:00

Horrifying but enlightening photos from the war on drugs at The Big Picture.

2009-10-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve yet to find a way to explain what I’ve written in a short amount of time and make it sound cool. Every time I try it just sounds like I'm explaining the rules of Dungeons and Dragons to the hottest girl in school.

Mike Knowles, "Hey, I Hear You Wrote a Book"

Sam Reviews the Fall Lineup, None of Which He's Seen

2009-10-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

Mad Men - I know it's supposed to be fucking brilliant, but...an ad agency? In the sixties? I'll take a pass.

Dexter - OK, this sounds like something up my alley, but the guy who plays Dexter looks too pretty to live. The morality of the show seems really false, a la American Psycho. Glorification of serial killers masquerading as indictment of same. Pass.

Southland - Again, up my alley. Again, pretty-boy lead actor who looks unfit for the role he's playing. But good supporting cast.

Sons of Anarchy - Glorification of bikers. From the pilot, which Josh made me sit through, it seems like they misapprehend the fundamental nature of biker gangs. Pass, but bonus points for Ron Perleman.

Breaking Bad - Glorification of cancer-laden meth-dealing high school teachers. Basically this show is Weeds not played for laughs. Pass minus one for constant fucking advertisements.

Cougar Town - Really?

Hung - Really?

No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Come on. Her name is Precious? Laaaaaame.

Gossip Girl - Show about snotty cunts in high school, marketed to people who weren't popular enough to be snotty cunts in high school.

CSI - They replaced Grissom with MORPHEUS...and no one could tell the difference.

The Hills - Makes WWE look like Masterpiece Theatre.

How I Met Your Mother - Really, Doogie, who gives a shit? I always confuse this show with the John Ritter one where he died and they kept going, in "tribute" (wink wink) to his enduring legacy.

That One With Glenn Close and Ted Danson Where They're Lawyers Or Something, Might Be Off the Air Now, I'm Not Sure, But She Sure Was Good On the Shield - I heard it was well-written, but not from anyone I'd trust.

This Post - Basically setting all my hopes on A) Treme, David Simon's N'Awlins show, and B) the hope that HBO will air Last of the Ninth, David Milch's cop show pilot with Ray Winstone. otherwise, I'm remaining blissfully ignorant. Screw you guys, I'm going home.

A Gun That Shoots Around Corners--No Shit

2009-10-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

Badass Trailer # 2

2009-10-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

Don't you wish they still made movies like they did in 1987?

2009-10-13T08:40:00.000-07:00

I am SOOOO there.

Stop me if you heard this one: Michael Moore and Roman Polanski walk into a bar full of underage kids...

2009-10-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

In Michael Moore's latest film, he admits to being a practicing Catholic, and interviews several Catholic priests, who all say that capitalism is un-Christian.

Maybe. You know what else is un-Christian? Protecting kiddie-rapers by shuffling priests around to different parishes and hindering their detection and prosecution. Just sayin'.

On a similar note, as much as I love Chinatown and MacBeth and The Ninth Gate, I'm glad Roman Polanski is going to jail. The celebrity outpouring of sympathy for him makes me nauseous. I don't care if he made restitution to the girl, I don't care if she forgave him, you don't drug and fuck underages kids.

One of the greatest, funniest encounters is in Martin Amis's book Visiting Mrs Nabokov, where Amis interviews Polanski. Polanski tells him, "Look, I want to fuck young girls, you want to fuck young girls, everybody wants to fuck young girls."

And Amis responds with, "No, everyone doesn't want to fuck young girls." Classic.

If you're at all on the fence on the issue, just read the transcript of Samantha Geimer's testimony. Graphic shit.

2009-10-09T10:58:00.001-07:00

Let me give one more example of how the movie uses observation instead of wheezy cliches. When Q, the writer, is giving his speech, he pontificates about ``piloting the boat of inspiration to the shore of achievement.'' James utters a loud, high-pitched giggle.

In a lesser movie, James would have continued, making some kind of angry and rebellious statement. Not in ``Wonder Boys,'' where James thinks Q is ludicrous, laughs rudely once and then shuts up.

Roger Ebert's highly favourable review of Wonder Boys

2009-10-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

You don't know why, but you've always felt something missing from your life. You've never been quite able to pinpoint it, though. A certain connexion between pop music and classic literature, something ephemeral, hinted at, but always receding from the forefront of your conscience. Until today.

Here is Jerry Lee Lewis playing Iago in a version of Othello. Don't ask how, don't ask why, just listen and love.

Sam's Unhappy Experiences with Minor Celebrities

2009-10-01T21:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I poked my head into the wrong office in the SFU English department and found myself face to face with Michael Turner, author of Hard Core Logo. He's the artist-in-residence at SFU this term, and his book is on the syllabus for the course I'm TAing. I won't say that it was a brilliant book, but it was enjoyable, original, well-written and represented Vancouver in a way that I recognized, even though a lot of the clubs he brings up, the Smiling Buddha for instance, were gone long before I had a chance to haunt them.

So what did I say to him? "Dude, I read your book. It was awesome!"

I couldn't've embarrassed us both more if I'd bear-hugged him and paid a confused Asian photographer to snap a shot of his head wedged under my arm.

Why was this so bad? 1. Turner's published more than one book, and to just assume that his career ended with HCL is really insulting; 2. He was trying to get his office set up and didn't in any way invite the intrusion; 3. He's a tiny guy with clammy hands who wears Tartan jackets, an ex-punk rocker, not the kind of person who enjoys being cornered by fat guys in black trenchcoats.

And to be honest, his book wasn't awesome. Hard Core Logo was clever and well-executed but I found it easy enough to put down to read James Ellroy's Blood's a Rover, which is authentically awesome, a masterpiece in fact. So not only was I uncouth, I was insincere, and ex-punk rockers only thrive on one of those adjectives (though let's face it, punk itself is based on both those).

As strange an encounter as that was, it wasn't even in the top five strange encounters with minor celebrities--and that's as much of a segue as I'm writing. Here they are.

5. DANNY CAREY, TOOL. I met him at a music convention in Anaheim, at the height of my Tool fan-dom. He wasn't doing a booth signing, but he was nicely making an exception for a young child. When the kid left, I pushed my way up to him with another drumhead (not even his brand), thrust it into his hand and said, "I listen to Lateralus every day." Yeah, that's what a guy going incognito at a convention wants to here. He scowled at me, but I got the autograph.

4. JIMMY CHAMBERLIN, Smashing Pumpkins. Some people love that band. The only song of theirs I really dig is "The Beginning Is the End is the Beginning," which Jimmy Chamberlin doesn't play drums on. This was at the same convention where I met Danny Carey, and Chamberlin was signing autographs in a booth. Some young kids approached him, and he signed their stuff, but he had a real attitude about it. I just observed them, and this shouldn't be taken as a sweeping indictment of him, but he seemed like a choad. I mean, people like autographs, and that's part of your job, and alt-rock angst is no excuse for treating little kids badly. Danny Carey had a reason to brush me off--I was aggressive and he wasn't selling anything. But if you're sitting in a booth, though, at least make the effort.

3. RAY BROWN, famous jazz bassist (oxymoron?) who played with Frank Sinatra, was married to Ella Fitzgerald, and played on albums from Oscar Peterson to the Brothers Johnson. I saw a clinic he gave, and he was really cool. But aggressive ol' me approached him after the clinic, snagged an autograph, and told him, "It's an honour, sir." Boy, he looked disgusted with me. But you know what? It was an honour. He played with Bird.

2. DALE CROVER from the Melvins. Everyone knows that the Melvins were Kurt Cobain's favourite band. No one knows what they sound like. I got his autograph anyway, and told him I'd seen him do a show in Seattle (not mentioning that that show had been on TV). His response: "Yeah, you know, I don't live there anymore." Nice guy but strange.

1. The lead singer from EVERCLEAR. What a DOUCHE that guy was. His music is unlistenable, and he was fucking rude, too. He was sitting in the back eat of a Hummer smoking a stogey ata stop light in Surrey. My brother and I saw him, nodded at him, and with great disdain he looked us over and scowled. This wasn't 1996 when he was riding high, this was 2003-and-struggling-to-get-that-sixteenth-minute. Uggh. He looked really bad, too, like Fred Durst with a soul patch and hair plugs. It's one thing when the drummer from Tool gives you the high hat, but Everclear? My great regret is that I didn't lob the Slurpee I was drinking into his car.

Runner-Up: MIKE MANGINI and HORACIO 'EL NEGRO' HERNANDEZ (yes 'El Negro' is his nickname), legendary drummers (oxymoron?). Andrew and I saw a clinic they put on at the Central City Brew Pub. A drum clinic--at a pub, yes. Let's just say that by the end of the night, all four of us were drunk, and El Negro was writing random gibberish for autographs. That guy can not hold his liquor. The note he wrote for me was, "TO SAM. DRUMS = MONEY! NEGRO." I shit you not.

People who were really cool to me: Diana Krall (who called me "sensitive,"), Elvin Jones from John Coltrane's band, Josh Freese from A Perfect Circle and Devo, Kerry King and the other guys from Slayer, Joey and Corey from Slipknot, Dave Weckl from Madonna's band, Michael Bland from Prince, Steve Gadd who played with Paul Simon, Gene Hoglan from Strapping Young Lad, almost everyone from the Vancouver jazz and metal scenes, and the late lamented Dimebag Darrell and his brother Vinnie Paul from Pantera and Damageplan. Mensches all.

2009-09-29T16:01:00.001-07:00

I was living in New York briefly last year, and I gave a talk at Columbia. I thought they were the biggest bunch of dumbshit kids, they were all 26, 27 year olds. It was all about the identity of being a writer…. [I wanted to tell them] Learn the rudiments of storytelling, sir. Become less interested in the issue of identity, and talking about writing with other people, and get to the point of publishing a book.

And don't go for this shit about learning on short stories.

James Ellroy, Barnes and Noble Interview

PLAGUE SEASON

2009-09-24T15:31:00.001-07:00

Q: What is the greatest website ever built?

A: www.footinmouthandheadupass.blogspot.com

Q: Really?

A: Abso-fucking-lutely.

Q: What will be the greatest website ever built in the days to come?

A: plagueseason.blogspot.com

Q: Why?

A: Because it encompasses the brilliance, irreverence, puerile humour, entertainment value and philosophical wisdom found at www.footinmouthandheadupass.blogspot.com , yet outdoes it by honing its focus to a lazer-like precision. Plague Season will deal only with crime fiction, crime television, crime film, film noir, and true crime.

Q: Wow, that sounds amazing. Is the site up now?

A: Yes, with TWO all-new, all-spectacular posts.

Q: What about this site? Will it fall into disrepair?

A: Nah, I'd take it down before I'd let it fall into disrepair. But for now it stays up, preserving its function as a catch-all for everything non-crime-related. It will be a better site without my James Ellroy and David Simon obsessions weighing it down from its primary purpose, expression my hatred and frustration at school.

Q: What's that website again?

A: plagueseason.blogspot.com

Q: Awesome. I'm on my way there now!

A: What's the rush?

Q: Sorry?

A: It's the best website ever, but what's the rush? Let's stay and hang out. It's so rare we get a chance to dialog anymore.

Q: Uh, yeah...so...hows the wife and kids.

A: You don't sound like you're too enthusiastic about asking that question.

Q: Sorry. Uh, HEY, How's the wife and kids?

A: That's better. They're at plagueseason.blogspot.com , paying tribute to the genius of that site. As well they should.

Q: It's that good, huh?

A: Brother, it's un-be-fucking-lieveable.

Reveille

2009-09-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

by A.E. Housman

Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.

Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws the sky-pavilioned land.

Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying:
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
'Who'll beyond the hills away?'

Towns and countries woo together,
Forelands beacon, belfries call;
Never lad that trod on leather
Lived to feast his heart with all.

Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.

Don Crutchfield

2009-09-21T19:19:00.001-07:00

Yeeeeaaars ago I read a book called Confessions of a Hollywood P.I. . The book was a sleazy expose of the celebrity clients the private eye worked for, including Michael Jackson, O.J., and others. It was a fun read, but the author's name didn't stick with me.

Now, on the eve of the publication of James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover, I made the connexion. I knew Don Crutchfield was a character in the book, but until I visited his website I didn't realize that Crutchfield had written Confessions of a Hollywood P.I. Ellroy had gotten Crutchfield's permission to turn him into a character in his book.

In other words, the private dick who spent years investigating Eddie Murphy's transsexual hooker fetish, and Elvis's possible reincarnation as a thirteen year old boy, has been transformed into a character in the Underworld: U.S.A. trilogy. How badass is that?

Check out Crutchfield's zany website: www.pi4stars.com . The scenarios for the "Crutch Tv Series" are the best.

His clients included Marlan Brando, The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Charles Bronson (not that he would need it). Subjects of investigation include Michael Jackson, Lisa Marie Presley, Tim Allen, Donald Trump, Roseanne, and O.J. Simpson.

The dude IS a James Ellroy novel.

The Most Putrescent Dialog ever Committed to Celluloid - Part One

2009-09-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

Joey: [Discussing at Meg's on the tornadoes they have seen so far] No, that was a good size twister. What was it, an F3?
Bill: Solid F2.
Melissa: See, now you have lost me again.
Bill: It's the Fujita scale. It measures a tornado's intensity by how much it eats.
Melissa: Eats?
Bill: Destroys.
Laurence: That one we encountered back there was a strong F2, possibly an F3.
Beltzer: Maybe we'll see some 4's.
Haynes: That would be sweet!
Bill: 4 is good. 4 will relocate your house very efficently.
Melissa: Is there an F5?
[Everyone goes dead silent]
Melissa: What would that be like?
Jason 'Preacher' Rowe: The Finger of God.
Melissa: None of you has ever seen an F5?
Bill: ...Just one of us.
[Looks upstairs, indicating Jo]

2009-09-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

DEAR KWENTIN I HAVE IDEA FOR MOVIE WILL BLOW URR MIND!!! ITS CALLED (WAIT FOR IT...) "UNSCROOPULOUS SCALLIWAGZ"

IT HAVE SAMUEL L JACKSON DELIVER POP CULTURE MONO-LOG AND LONG SPEECH BY CHRISTOPHER WALKIN' ABOUT HOW HE IS THE BADDEST AND TOTALLY NOT PART BLACK. PAM GREER PLAYS LARGE PART TOO. DOESN'T THIS SOUND AWESOME?

AT THE END BRUCE WILLIS RIDES AN EXPLODES-SION INTO A NAZY BUNKER AND BLOW UP THE NAZZYS WITH MICHAEL BAY STYLE ASS-WHOMPIN'

ALSO A SCENE WHERE EVERYBODY POINTS THERE GUNS AT EVERYBODY ELSE!!! OMG RIGHT?

KWENTIN U ARE MY FAVRITE DIREKTOR NEXT TO THE BOONDOCK SAINTS GUY (U AND HE SHOULD TODALLY COLLABOR-ART) YOUR MOVIES ARE SO AWESOME BECAUSE DUDE I SLIKE TALKING HOW WE REAL PEOPLE TALK AND THEN BLLLLLLLOOOOOMM UMA THEREMIN FIGHTS LIKE SIXTY NINJAS.

UNSCROOPULOUS SCALLIWAGS WILL BE EXACTLY LIKE YOUR MOVIES ONLY LIKE AN HOMAGE LIKE YOU DO HOMAGES TO LIKE SERGIO LIONY AND THE FRENCH NEW WAVE DUDES. ONLY IT'LL BE TO YOU!!!

IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE ME, IN THE BACKGROUND OF THIS SCENE I WROTE WHERE MICHAEL MADSEN HACKS A GUY'S EAR OFF (SUBTLE HOMAGE TO RESERVOIR DAWGS HOMEZ!!! ...EXCEPT INSTEAD OF A COP MY GUY'S CUTTING THE EAR OFF A NAZZY BEFORE HE SCALPS HIM) THERE'LL BE A TV PLAYING PULP FICTION! THAT'S THE BEST TRIBUTE AND YOU DESERVE IT.

YOUR AFFEKTIONITE NUMBER ONE FAN AND COMPADRE,

SAM

BY THE WAY, I FORGIVE YOU FOR FOUR ROOMS.

You Gotta Read This

2009-09-14T23:19:00.000-07:00

From Slate: Ron Rosenbaum on Genius

And an amazing blog post on How 'Auteurs' fuck up cinema.

The Roseunbaum piece examines what it means to be a genius in these inglourious times, using Richard Linklater's new Orson Welles film as a jumping-off point. He argues that genius is pretty much dead, which I wouldn't necessarily agree with--though the more people who approach things from the same position, the fewer geniuses we'll have.

The blog post sort of works the same side of the street from a different angle--a screenwriter talks about the frustration of having egotistical producers and directors mangle scripts out of insecurity. He details how, once the idea of cinema as a collaborative art is thrown out the window, you're at the mercy of the stupid and venal, who will not only rape your script but put the blame on you.

That will be all.

Harlan Ellison on God and Writing

2009-09-14T00:15:00.000-07:00

2009-09-13T16:03:00.000-07:00

"Classical music brings back the awe of life to me and the essence of drama, and I grew up digging big, thunderous, important (music). And wanting to create it in my own way. Which could only be the word."

--James Ellroy.

Coming Out the Other Side

2009-09-10T15:52:00.000-07:00

Funny how things go. When you're in the midst of a phase, it doesn't seem like a phase. I think everyone goes through a phase where they think Quentin Tarantino is a genius. And then comes the reaction phase, where you start seeing the films he's cribbed from, and you realize that almost nothing in his films originates with him. One five minute chunk of Pulp Fiction (the ass-rape scene) references Deliverance, Blue Velvet, The Set-Up, Kurosawa, Rio Bravo and the French Nouvelle Vague*.

And yet that Tarantino-hatred is also a phase, brought on more by the slavish Tarantino imitations foisted on us by Tarantino manques (Two Days in the Valley, Anyone?). When you get over the fact that Tarantino regularly pulls off Lufthansa-esque capers of other peoples' films--and it's a hard fact to get over--you realize that he's still a pretty damn great director.

I watched Reservoir Dogs the other day with my brothers. It's been six years or so, and it holds up really well. Ditto Pulp Fiction, though seeing Bruce Willis's boxer slash up a rapist with Toshiro Mifune-like precision and then taunt his partner with John Wayne's famous "You want that gun pick it up...I wish you would" brings on knee-jerk deja vu. But they're undeniably great films, which collectively imagine the personal lives of the criminal underworld (predeating The Sopranos in that regard).

Josh and I saw Inglourious Basterds (I hope I spelled that wrong), which was damn good. Like Tarantino's last film Death Proof, though, the villain runs away with it, to the point where I was uncomfortably rooting for the Nazi. Aside from charasmatic fascists, it also features another plus in my book, the Impromptu Ieadbutt. Though it doesn't unseat the reigning Impromptu Headbutt champion, Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa, it puts some impressive numbers on the board.

The only films of QT's I'm really not sold on are the Kill Bill movies, which to be honest kind of killed off my Tarantino-rediscovery binge. But I'm determined to get through Jackie Brown, which for a time was my favourite of his films. I still think Samuel L. Jackson got shafted for that--he deserved an Oscar, though he also deserved one for Pulp Fiction.

So that covers that.

* Speaking of phases, writers go through phases where they insist on leaving French words untranslated. It's pretentious, yes, but it also makes you feel smart, so much smarter than if you just wrote "New Wave."

Great Writing 4

2009-09-07T01:47:00.000-07:00

Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro comes out September 8. There's a chapter from the audio book, read by Cave himself, available on the Onion website.

Nick Cave, in addition to being a totally badass songwriter, wrote the screenplay for The Proposition, a Cormac McCarthy-esque filmic rampage through Australia in the 1800s. His first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published by Henry Rollins. It's on my will-read-one-day list.

His writing is evocative--full of mantles of freckles, cloying voices, and humans compared to lampreys. The way he reads it is amazing, too. I just wish the goddamn cover wasn't so hideous--Donnie Darko without the Darko.

I propose a moratorium on rabbits as ironic cover art. We get it, you're dark but don't want to fall into the aesthetic cliches used by metal bands. How about a lizard? They're under-represented.

And here's Nick Cave doing "The Mercy Seat" and "Tupelo" live just because IT'S FUCKING NICK CAVE

Book Trailers

2009-09-05T15:26:00.000-07:00

I think I'm gonna watch this every day until September 22nd.

Harvey Keitel in a commercial for...?

2009-09-04T10:41:00.001-07:00

It says it's a commercial for Johnnie Walker, but it seems more like a Tool video with monologue.

Great Writing 3

2009-09-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

Soren Kierkegaard, Journals

Born to Kill: L'Homme Fatale*

2009-09-01T11:06:00.000-07:00

It's the hoariest cliche in film noir-dom, the femme fatale. At her best, she blends murder and seduction, corrupting the hero and throwing his neatly-ordered moral world askew. At worst, she's the cackling crone who always manages to produce a revolver when the hero's back is turned, usually from the folds of her shoulder-padded night gown.

It's a sexist construction, sure. Women are far less likely to commit murder...except in postwar Hollywood.

The femme fatale usually doesn't reveal herself as such until later in the film. At first she's just a beautiful woman, usually married, yet sexually available. She appears to be in need, and turns to our hero for help. Deliver this package for me. Keep my name out of the police investigation. Accomplishing this implicates the hero, and soon he's trod down that slippery slope to the point where she's in his arms, trading sex for murder.

Hammett, Chandler and Cain are responsible for the femme fatale**. Hammett wrote the best example, Chandler the worst*** , and Cain the most human. The resulting films--The Maltese Falcon, Murder My Sweet, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice--are brilliant, but taken as a unity, tell us one thing. Woman, especially sexually active women, are fucking evil harpies who will betray you given half a chance.

What's interesting about Born to Kill is that it reverses the femme fatale cliche, in three ways. First, the sexual predator is male. Laurence Tierney seduces a pair of San Francisco socialites, one for money, the other seemingly for love. He exudes the same sexual magnetism as the femme fatale, pulling the women into his web of corruption, turning them against each other. While the bond between him and the Elisha Cook Jr character is never specified as more than friendship, Cook is willing to murder an old woman on Tierney's behalf, which speaks perhaps to an attraction, if only one way. The sex object of the film is undoubtedly Tierney.

Second, unlike the classic femme fatale, Tierney's evil is revealed early in the film, when he beats to death the boyfriend of an old flame. This sets the viewer against him from the get-go (okay, not for Josh and me, but for the theoretical viewer, who likely isn't enamored with a guy landing Tyson-esque uppercuts on someone half his size).

What we're seeing in Born to Kill is a femme fatale's-eye-view of the world, where the goal is seduction, acquisition of power, and murder. Not unlike Richard III, we're put in the corner of the bad guy; the entertainment comes from how far his depravity is allowed to go before he gets his inevitable comeuppance.

Third, the detective in most femme fatale stories is usually the sexual normative. By that I mean, an attractive man who is in control of his sex drives. For instance, in The Maltese Falcon, we have the sexual normative Sam Spade at the centre, with the fat (Sidney Greenstreet's Gutman), the gay (Peter Lorre's Cairo), the weak (Elish Cook Jr--who else?) and the woman (Bridgid O'Shaughnessy) arrayed around him. He is the hero partly because his sexual desires are in check and he knows his role. This holds for most films noirs--the detective is "a good man in a bad world," as Chandler said.

In Born to Kill, the detective is a fat bastard, willing to sell out his client for a better deal. He ends up turning Tierney and company in not from any attack of scruples, but because they won't pony up the dough he needs. Walter Slezak presents no sexual normative whatsoever--most people in the film can barely stand his company. Worse, he's willing to pose as a menial dishwasher to glean information on Tierney and Claire Trevor. Can you imagine Bogey doing that? Slezak has a social fluidity and a moral cloudiness that puts him at odds with `the Marlowes and Spades and Keyses.

Born to Kill inverts and subverts the tropes of the film noir genre, showing a sexually irresistable man leading an unsuspecting woman to damnation. Claire Trevor, bouncy in Stagecoach, attractive enough in Murder My Sweet, and not quite the broken down lush she would play a year later in Key Largo, plays the Fred MacMurray part perfectly. Tierney is menacing and magnetic. And Elisha Cook Jr does what he does best--ruin everything through weakness and incompetence. Worth a gander.

*Note that Robert Wise's name didn't come up once in this post.

** What of Lady MacBeth, you ask? (No one ever asks.) I wouldn't characterize her as a femme fatale, because while she does advocate murder, she does it for the hero's benefit, and feels bad about it later. The classic femme fatales are out for themselves and feel nothing.

***Chandler's FFs are also the most prevalent--try and find a Chandler novel where it ISN'T the woman in the end, I double dog dare you. Chandler was married to a woman much older than him, and might have resented it, just a teensy bit.

2009-08-31T12:54:00.001-07:00

"This premise that The Wire wasn't real because it didn't show people having good outcomes in west Baltimore ... I don't know what to tell him. We didn't spend a series in a cul-de-sac with people barbecuing; it was the story of what's happening at the bottom rungs of an economy where capitalism has been allowed free rein. And if he's telling me it's not happening, I want to take his fucking entitled ass and drive him to west Baltimore and shove him out of the car, at Monroe and Fayette, and say, find your way back, fucker, because you've got your head up your ass at the Atlantic."

--David Simon on an article in the Atlantic Monthly that claimed The Wire was too pessimistic.

Don't you wish your colleagues would describe you as "a perpetual picker of fights?"

Hard Boiled Film Noir Titles

2009-08-30T19:27:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to come up with the greatest title for a 1940s-50s film noir. Put your suggestions in the comments section, and try to beat these gems, which are just off the top of my head (more to be added):

"Too Many Targets...Not Enough Bullets!"

"It's Murder, Baby!"

"Occupation: Hangman!"

"The Killing's Just Begun"

"The Betrayal"

"The Dame With Machine Gun Eyes"

"A Bullet For Your Coffin"

"Machine Gun Maelstrom"

"Son of a Gun Runner"

"Laughing On the Way to the Gallows"

"Bourbon for the Hangman"

"Electric Chair Blues"

"Happily Ever After...With a Bullet!"

OMG: JE on TCM!

2009-08-30T14:20:00.000-07:00

Last November, James Ellroy co-hosted a Turner Classic Movies marathon. Being an L.A. crime writer with a murdered mother, who better? Ellroy's picks: Armored Car Heist with Charles McGraw, The Lineup with Eli Wallach (Directed by Dirty Harry realisateur Don Siegel), Murder by Contract starring Vince Edwards, and Stakeout on Dope Street.

Videos of Ellroy's intros and interviews with Robert Osborne can be found here.

The Lineup

Armored Car Robbery

Murder by Contract

Stakeout on Dope Street

I obsess on a handful of writers: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Hammett, Chandler, Chabon, Melville, the James family and Mary Shelley among others. Ellroy is one of them. No one has taken crime fiction and expanded it to the American Enterprise, both indicting and reconciling himself with the fascistic and repressive elements of society. Mark my words, in twenty years Vikram Seth and Zadie Smith and Chuck Pahniuk will all have faded from view, and Ellroy will be the guy who explained ourselves to ourselves the best. And Ellroy's ex-wife's uncle-by-marriage was Eli Wallach: how cool is that?

2009-08-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

INTERVIEWERWhat was the first book you read in English?

MURAKAMIThe Name Is Archer, by Ross MacDonald. I learned a lot of things from those books. Once I started, I couldn't stop. At the same time I also loved to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Those books are also page-turners; they're very long, but I couldn't stop reading. So for me it's the same thing, Dostoyevsky and Raymond Chandler. Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoyevsky and Chandler together in one book. That's my goal.

...mine too, although Murakami's probably closer to it.

2009-08-26T23:43:00.000-07:00

What’s really odd now—trust me, I love doing movies, but right now, television is the way Hollywood was in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The dream era I would have loved to have been part of in Hollywood then is happening right now, but it’s happening on television, with these big complicated story arcs and real character-driven shows and sheer ambiguity left and right.

Patton Oswalt in an Onion interview, tellin' it like it is.

The Evil That Men Do

2009-08-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

Buried amidst all the Ted Kennedy hoopla over at the Guardian, there's an article called Misogyny, Up Close and Personal. It's an interesting read, as is the comments-section, which is four hundred comments denouncing the author, Melissa McEwan, as a hyper-sensitive nincompoop oozing misandry out of every pore.

Before I disagree with a bunch of men, I want to state that it's not because I'm more broad-minded--if I was would I have just used such an awful pun? No, it's that I think they misread the article--it's not about how evil men are, it's about the hurt that men inflict on women they presume to care about. It's about the insistence on jokes/gender-biased language knowing that it hurts them.

For someone who likes ribald humour, and likes to employ the argot of mysogyny, racism, and religious invective for amusement, McEwan's argument is worth examining, even if I'm not sold on it. Especially if I'm not sold on it. Humour is a good strategy for getting through this veil of tears without losing one's sanity. Something is most funny when it's least appropriate. At the same time, though, a lot of that is presupposed on a distance from the days of overt mysogyny which really doesn't exist. Good to keep in mind.

UPDATE: to show you exactly what a fucking hypocritical failure I am, I tried so hard NOT to include this at the bottom of my post, but ultimately couldn't help myself, pretty much proving everything McEwan says in her article is true:

"Ms McEwan, although I do not agree with what you say, I will defend to the death your right to get in the kitchen and make me eggs."

Hang your head in shame, Sam, you bring nothing constructive to the table.

Daniel Lanois and the Tea Party

2009-08-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

The Tea Party and Daniel Lanois go together like a hug and a squeeze.

Although I can't stand U2, I've always been a fan of Daniel Lanois' ethereal production, especially on Robbie Robertson's and Bob Dylan's albums. His soundtracks, especially Sling Blade, are amazing, too. But his songwriting takes it to the next level, especially "The Maker" and "The Messenger."

His songs are SO great that I think their slick production sometimes takes away from the amazing melodies and lyrics Lanois has created. Lanois's "The Maker" is an amazing tune with a great arrangement, but the song really cries out for the unplugged treatment.

Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson covered "The Maker," as did the Dave Matthews Band.

"The Messenger" was covered pretty successfully by The Tea Party on their Typtych album. I'd heard that TTP also covered "The Maker," but could never find a copy...until now.

I, uh, found it among a bunch of rare Tea Party performances (which unfortunately didn't have their cover of "I'm Afraid of Americans" with Edwin from I Mother Earth, which, sad to say, has become my white whale). Their version of "The Maker" is from a rare unplugged radio show, but the sound quality is terrific, and it brings new dimensions out of the song. I'm streaming it off my VOX blog now.

Included below is "The Messenger," live on Canadian TV.

And if anyone finds that David Bowie cover...

Getcher Veil Papers In, Folks!

2009-08-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

York University Now Accepting Submissions For a Veil-O-Thon. Yes, that's right, if you or anyone you know has a good paper on radical interpretations of veils, let York University know. God, I hate fucking academia--try reading this without slamming your fist through a mirror. Why can't people write without needlessly complicating things--are they that scared that people will realize they're full of shit? Yes, they are. I dare you to get through a paragraph of this horse pocky:

Call For Papers
This conference offers a forum to problematize the prevailing discourses
surrounding the veil while exploring the veil’s subversive potential. The
extent to which the veil can erode, or even invert power and oppression is,
with the exception of various Islam-inspired positions, an overlooked and
under-explored area of academic theorizing. We ask what new insights may be
unearthed in moving beyond the impetus to repudiate, fear, or adore the veil.
This conference is a unique opportunity to discuss those contested voices
situated within the interstices of the liberal, conservative and Islamic
constellations, and, in the process, to re-evaluate the veil in an entirely new
light by intersecting multiple disciplinary perspectives. Perhaps as
importantly, we see the appraisal of critical theory in moving theory beyond
the mainstream discursive impasse as central to epistemological responsibility
and accountability. This event will highlight highly innovative and
thought-provoking approaches to not only the Islamic veil, but the veil as
such. We envision the rich insights of critical inquiry as an under-utilized
terrain that may help unpack the current intellectual discourse on the veil.
Essentially, we seek a different kind of conversation and a different set of
lexical and philosophical devices to navigate the many paradoxes that the veil
represents.

From our perspective, part of this conversation should address the relationship
between theory and policy as it pertains to the veil and Muslims in
contemporary society. We imagine that some innovation in addressing the real
and perceived contradictions of the veil could meaningfully contribute to
policy discussions. Specifically, we would like to consider the effects of
re-interpretations of the veil on the personal, social, and political life of
veiled people. The act of pursuing novel political spaces (re-conceptualizing
the veil and advancing new forms of understanding) may have the concomitant
effect of advertently or inadvertently bridging disparate communities, and
potentially easing domestic policy efforts to control, contain, and assimilate
veiled people. Such theorizing may encourage the re-examination of foreign
policy approaches towards Muslim societies by providing the necessary
intellectual atmosphere to transcend fear and enter constructive dialogue.
Participants of this conference will therefore be encouraged to relate radical
reinterpretations of the veil to the religion of Islam, and the relationship(s)
between Muslims and contemporary society.

Elaboration
Although there is a rich supply of documentation and research on the veil, the
qualitative nature of the veil is under-theorized. The entrenched debate among
competing mainstream understandings of the veil, the increasing politicization
of the veil, made most prominent by conservative and radical secular movements
within the EU and by a growing literature that paints the veil as a threat to
human rights and/or security, have had an immeasurable effect on inter-cultural
exchanges, especially in metropolitan centers. These secular forms of
theorizing and debating have been countered by a concurrent movement,
spearheaded by Islamic-minded thinkers: the shrouding of the female form as a
variation of patriarchal resistance. Given the amplified visibility of the veil
and the growing desire of people to veil and unveil, what kinds of research
options can move us beyond this analytical impasse? Have the responses to the
liberal, conservative, and Islamic positions on the veil been cogent? What
theoretical questions have not yet been asked? What impact has this hitherto
insoluble debate had on those who choose everyday to wear the veil? These
questions are tremendously relevant, possibly overdue, in large part because of
the increasing salience and persuasiveness of the contested perspectives on the
veil. Such views are reinforced by the uncertainties of a post 9/11 world,
including the prevailing social and political mistrust of multifarious actors.
The protracted debate in Canada and abroad, to the exclusion and possible
silencing of all other views, leads invariably to the stultification of thought
and action. This conference seeks then, in the face of these trends, to bring
previously unheard views on the veil to the fore.

Within Canadian society, the relationship between those who veil and the veil
itself is complex. People navigate any number of positions in this regard. At
times, we discover those who "deify" the textile, exhibiting forms of extreme
attachment to it. With others, a relative indifference towards the injunction
to veil is evident, which sometimes turns into an unrelenting evasion of the
veil's obligatory weight. The veil could be viewed as fabric, symbol, symptom,
means, ends, expression, submission, a reclaiming, empowerment, a voiding
process, protection, separation, sacrifice, or facilitating a sigh of relief.
Has the mainstream debate adequately addressed these and other understandings
of the veil? What new questions can be asked? For example, can one "deify" the
veil and yet continuously evade it? Can people engage in indifference towards
the veil as a form of evasion? In what ways is orthodox observance of the veil
a subversive and revolutionary act? How powerful is the veil in undermining
the forces of assimilation in Canada? How do people who veil navigate the
difficulty of the veil as protection and separation? How well do veiled people
understand themselves? These, and other counter-intuitive—sometimes
paradoxical—questions need to be confronted and assessed.

A central purpose of this event is to engage these questions in new ways in
order to render more flexible, more porous—possibly to completely undo—the
boundaries that seek to encapsulate, control, and own the veil. Not only will
the prevailing discourses be interrogated and problematized, the very spaces
opened up by this event will likewise undergo the same rigorous investigation.

We welcome submissions of all sorts that deal with the issue, including those
that take cross-cultural, historical, and/or comparative approaches. Submission
formats may include academic papers from any relevant discipline and/or creative
submissions such as poetry, video performances, storytelling, visual arts and
other alternative formats. We promote traditional modes of presentation such as
panels and roundtables, but are also open to other interesting and innovative
approaches.

We encourage submissions from all disciplines that push the boundaries of
creativity and intellectual discussion, and that take a critical and previously
unexplored position on the veil. For example, we are very interested in
exploring the interpretative possibilities that arise from psychoanalytic
approaches to the veil (especially that of Lacanian theory). This being said,
the veil can be investigated in relation to a whole assortment of topics, which
we welcome and encourage. We will privilege those submissions that raise the
level of debate to new heights of originality.

Suggested Themes:
The veil can be related to: militarism, revolution, warrior/guerrilla movements,
the postcolonial experience, un-doing borders, citizenship, nationalism, the
commodity form, the market, labor, jouissance, feminine sexuation, patriarchy,
matriarchy, empowerment, identity, the beautiful, the sublime, beingness,
popular culture, prisons, enclosures, concealing males, epistemology,
philosophy, art, calligraphy, history, poverty, civil disobedience, political
participation, social justice, motherhood, anarchism, geography, urban
environment, and literature.

If you got this far, salud. How can people throw words around like that without being ashamed of themselves? "Problematize," "Subversion" and "Discourse" all need to disappear from the language ASAP. You know what else? I guarantee that every white woman at this conference will wear a veil, to show their social consciousness. For the record, I think any white woman who tries to harness the subversive power of the veil should be treated as if they were in a traditional Muslim country--beaten with a stick in the middle of the street.

2009-08-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

The Shakespeare Game on (Jess's Flickr Set). Now available: the Two Noble Kinsman Expansion set, which increases your mana pool while offering new creatures for battle like the Tom O' Bedlam, 2/3 with banding and trampling (For someone who played Magic: The Gathering for all of a month in the mid-90s, the lingo sure has stuck with me).

Trannies

2009-08-18T20:54:00.001-07:00

It's embarassing to me that I can't read any language other than English, which I read exceedingly poorly. Today I finished Goethe's Faust. While Walter Kaufmann's translation was superb (as far as being readable document), Goethe obviously loses a lot of his power in translation.

I love world literature, and I depend on good translations. I mean, think about this: Constance Garnett translated Tolstoy AND Dostoevsky AND Chekhov, in many cases for the first time. How much of what we think is Tostoy's or Dostoevsky's style belongs to her?

Anyway, if I want a shot at a PhD I better learn another language. I'd love to do Latin and Russian, though neither is particularly practical. But neither is French, which is the only one I have instruction in. The Chinese languages are supposed to be the hardest to learn due to their ginormous vocabulary ( seven hundred thousand words, all one syllable, rimshot).

I started on Beckett's surprisingly readable Three Novels (surprising because Beckett evidently didn't believe in paragraphing). An Irish Protestant, he wrote in French and translated back into English. Weird. He also fucked Joyce's schizophrenic daughter.

If the title was misleading, let me say this about transexuals: I'm for them. The doctors make the vagina out of ballbag, from what I've seen on the internet. I don't know if I'd want my ballbag slapping against another ballbag, that's kind of like when you played Ninja Turtles and everyone's parents bought them Leonardo, so instead of the four Turtles you had four of the same Turtle. But politically, I'm in favour of transsexuals. Glad you asked.

Your friend Crabtree is just into collecting weird tricks or something.

2009-08-17T19:24:00.000-07:00

Jytte Klausen's The Cartoons that Shook The World, published by Yale University, will be published without the Danish cartoons that started said controversy, though originally they were to be included. Yale has bowed to presure from...who? Themselves, it seems, as they feared the book would "instigate" further attacks by Islamo-fascists.

Christopher Hitchens has a good colum n at Slate, about the implications for freedom of speech that Yale's decision has. His column is called "Yale Surrenders," and it's worth reading even if you don't care. Especially interesting is the additional subtraction from the book, a depiction by Dore of Muhammed burning in hell, one of the illustrations from Dante's Inferno. Hitchens notes:

These same Dantean stanzas have also been depicted by William Blake, Sandro Botticelli, Salvador Dalí, and Auguste Rodin, so there's a lot of artistic censorship in our future if this sort of thing is allowed to set a precedent.

You know, I was looking around the bookstore the other day and I saw a new children's book which told fairy tales from the point of view of the villains. So it's "Billy Goats Gruff" from the viewpoint of the Troll, "Hansel & Gretel" as seen by the witch, et cetera. While that's a brilliant idea, and the implications for tolerance and open-mindedness are really stunning, there's a point where grey dissolves into right and wrong, and compromise displays weakness rather than strength.

Slavoj Zizek had a great point in looking at the absurdity of the statement "An enemy is just a person whose story you haven't heard." Does that apply to Hitler? Was he misunderstood? Should a compromise be reached? When it comes to jihadists, doesn't the same apply--is there really a middle ground for anyone interested in freedom?

Islamic jihadists are not "misunderstood." They're fucking evil. Conveying information, in this case by documenting the cartoons which lie at the heart of the case, should not be an area that Yale University feels is negotiable.

If academia doesn't at least stand up for the freedom of speech...what the hell good is it?

Great Writing 2

2009-08-15T13:23:00.000-07:00

Drifts of soundless summer rain were graying the trees in Merrion Square. Quirke hurried along, keeping close to the railings as if they might shelter him, the lapels of his jacket clutched tight to his throat. It was too early yet for the office workers, and the broad street was deserted, with not a car in sight, and if not for the rain he would have been able to see unhindered all the way to the Peppercanister Church, which always looked to him, viewed from a distance like this down the broad, shabby sweep of Upper Mount Street, to be set at a slightly skewed angle. Among the clustered chimneys a few were dribbling smoke; the summer was almost over, a new chill was in the air. But who had lit those fires, so early? Could there still be scullery maids to haul the coal bucket up from the basement before first light? He eyed the tall windows, thinking of all those shadowed rooms with people in them, waking, yawning, getting up to make their breakfasts, or turning over to enjoy another half hour in the damp, warm stew of their beds. Once, on another summer dawn, going along here like this, he had heard faintly from one of those windows a woman's cries of ecstasy fluttering down into the street. What a piercing stab of pity he had felt for himself then, walking all alone here, before everyone else's day had begun; piercing, and pained, but pleasurable, too, for in secret Quirke prized his loneliness as a mark of some distinction.

John Banville writing as Benjamin Black, Christine Falls.

Banville won the Man Booker for his novel The Sea, and now alternates serious literature with period mysteries penned pseudonymously as Benjamin Black. His main character is a pathologist in Dublin in the 1950s, and while the mystery was pretty obvious from about a third of the way in, the writing itself was spectacular.

Trivia: Daniel Day Lewis's father, Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, also wrote mysteries as Nicholas Blake.

2009-08-13T23:29:00.000-07:00

You know how men seek authenticity through the most specious and vile male human beings? Thinking artists like Charles Bukowski and Hunter S Thompson are authentic. Au contraire. It's puerile. Real guys love God, Beethoven and women.

James Ellroy

Something dangerous here

2009-08-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

I miss the comraderie of Kwantlen. In the two years I was there I made friends and had some terrific discussions. SFU is a better school in many ways, but the cliques of students are more political and less engaged with their subjects. It's easy to find a Marxist club to join, and pretty hard to find people to discuss Cormac McCarthy or Mary Shelley. And of course, they think of Kwantlen students as provincials and rubes and drug-addicted welfare mothers...they are perceptive.

I feel enriched as a person by my Kwantlen experience. Even though I didn't really dig the writing program, I met Harry and Jess, Katie, Sophie, Peter, Nelia, Adam, Ashley, Stephanie, interesting people with original takes on art, people worth getting to know. I've only met two or three people like that at SFU, and I've been there almost half as long.

The amazing thing is how little I've kept in touch with people. I don't hang out at all. Despite being poor and having lots of free time, I do nothing. I stare at screens.

I don't want to be a competitive academic, I want to teach at a place like Kwantlen, a place built on connexion with students. I'll get my PhD, but everything I do to get it will be a calculated, phony, soulless exercise. It's easier that way, since academia doesn't foster original thinking.

No one wants to discuss literature in terms of aesthetics, of wisdom, of poetic language or dare I say it, genius. They look at lit from the historical context, from the author's position on gender/sexuality/ethnicity, and from the author's political standpoint. And when you do that, you fucking kill what's great about literature. If you're not STUNNED when you read MacBeth, even if it's for the fortieth time--don't teach it. If Melville and Dickinson and Whitman don't have any power for you, if Hemingway's just a bloviating he-man and Fitzgerald's a pussy-whipped lush, if the thought of reading all of the Canterbury Tales or Paradise Lost or the novels of Willa Cather bores you--get out now. Go teach political studies or women's studies. Please. If we can't start with a fundamental love for what we do, what's the point?

There's an article by Camille Paglia where she talks of how lucky she was to have Harold Bloom as her grad thesis supervisor at Yale. He believed in her when no one else did, defended her, offered inspiration and valued her insights. I don't think I'll ever find that at university. I'm not as smart as Paglia, but smart enough to know that literature is too valuable to be reduced to 'Gee, Melville might be gay' or 'Dickens isn't a true socialist because his perspective is that of the rich looking down on the poor.' Who gives a shit! Spend some time with Ahab and Scrooge, and if you get nothing but a fleeting enjoyment from them, you've still got more than any New Historicist does.

2009-08-11T23:44:00.000-07:00

Check out James Ellroy on the Late Show hawking L.A. Confidential and My Dark Placs. This is the greatest television interview ever, and it involves a writer. Conan looks so uncomfortable...and yet he had him on again. How many authors would ask Dave Chapelle to be the Grand Dragon of the first equal-opportunity Ku Klux Klan?

2009-08-10T21:52:00.001-07:00

So after all my horeshit about reading Beckett and Mankell, the first thing I read this summer? Fucking Harry Potter Seven. And you know what? I don't regret it. I was up till three wondering if he'd find the Deathly Stinkin' Hallows. JK Rowling deserves every penny she got, for fashioning a kid's story that's equal to The Hobbit or The Narnia books, as far as being readable by adults. She wrapped the series up pretty succinctly, although the Ron-Hermione connexion really seemed more of a movie thing than part of the books.

Here's a poem in honour of my favourite wizarding character. My poetry is as astounding as my drawing ability, and while I really should be charging people for reading this, I figure giving away a free sample of my abilities won't hurt. Sometimes you just have to share:

ODE TO H.G.

O I'd love to tap the heiney

Of the girl they call Hermione

With my wand I'll give a push

Put some Hogwarts on your tush

Gone through three boxes of Kleenex

You were so hot in Order of the Phoenix

Take off your robe but leave your pants on

Or you'll get me in trouble with Chris Hanson

I really am a poetaster

But at least I know it...bastard!

Look for my thirty-dollar hand-printed chapbook on the market wherever dreck is sold, with that little "Canada Council of the Arts" stamp on the inside cover that makes your tax-payin' stomach churn. Seriously, no more money for poetry until we can make a Canadian film whose target demographic isn't narcoleptics.

2009-08-09T02:09:00.000-07:00

Why not just write "looking for old bag to rub genitals of Asian businessmen and disreputable politicians?" How much maturity and experience does it take to give someone a happy ending on a folding table?

2009-08-07T23:40:00.000-07:00

Shakespearean secularists should manifest their Bardolatry by celebrating the Resurrection of Sir John Falstaff. It should be made, unofficially but pervasively, an international holiday, a Carnival of wit, with multiple performances of Henry IV Part One. Let it be a day for loathing political ambition, religious hypocrisy, and false friendship, and let it be marked by wearing bottles of sack (wine) in our holsters.

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

2009-08-07T22:57:00.000-07:00

For my 200th post, something really controversial:

Not many people are going to agree with this, but I feel it has to be said--

John Hughes was a shit filmmaker.

Yeah, I went there.

I don't care where you were when you saw The Breakfast Club, and if you tear up when "Don't You Forget About Me" comes on the radio, please throw yourself down a well. . As Jay says, "All those stupid kids actually show up to detention?" I can give you a pass on Sixteen Candles, as long as you're a thirty year-old woman, but really, if his movies speak to you, you're not the kind of person who should be spoken to. I've seen better directing from a traffic flagger.

RIP Budd Schulberg

2009-08-06T12:34:00.001-07:00

The screenwriter of On the Waterfront died today. Schulberg willingly testified during the HUAC McCarthy hearings, which put him on the outs with most of Hollywood. Waterfront, about a broken-down prizefighter-turned-dockworker who testifies against a crooked mob boss, was Schulberg's (and director and fellow testifier Elia Kazan's) justification of his decision.

Reading his obituary in the Guardian, two things struck me: first, Schulberg did everything and knew everybody--he collaborated with F. Scott Fitzgerald (who borrowed some of Schulberg's material for Last Tycoon), Bobby Kennedy asked him to adapt RFK's anti-union book for the screen, Schulberg wrote a book on Muhammad Ali and edited Sports Illustrated, he grew up on the studio lots with Selznick and the other moguls, etc etc.

The second thing is that, from Schulberg's point of view, he was justified in testifying at HUAC. If you've read Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, you know that HUAC and McCarthy were evil motherfuckers who ruined countless careers and sped one of the great novelists, Dashiell Hammett, into the grave (those pieces of shit put an old tubercular war veteran--of both world wars no less--in a damp cell where he caught pneumonia, killing the author of The Maltese Falcon).

Schulberg wasn't right-leaning, he was a former member of the Communist Party who broke with them when they demanded he rewrite his novel What Makes Sammy Run to depict a Hollywood strike in a better light. he told them to go fuck themselves and published it as written.

Maybe his testimony was payback, or maybe he felt that the party was a vile entity. But reading his obituary made me realize that it goes deeper than the good commies fighting the bad government. On the Waterfront justified ratting out one's friends, but it's nowhere near as fantastical (and as fucking boring) as the Hollywood response, High Noon, one of the most boring and patently stupid films I've ever seen. (It doesn't help that the sluggardly Gary Cooper makes Gregory Peck look like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet).

The number of great writers who've become disaffected with communism--Orwell and Koestler to name two--is impressive. When you're young you see the system as being corrupt and full of hypocrites and lackeys--and it is. But there is no alternative. We tend to see the Other as either preternaturally evil or sublimely good, and it is neither. There is no Other. Human corruption, avarice, wickedness, is not kept in by boundaries of class or race or country or religion. The only true benefit we have in the West is that our corruption is more discussed, more out in the open, than in some of the more repressive religious and communist countries. Of course, that doesn't make us right. It means that one man following his conscience can't be judged a traitor to a cause he doesn't subscribe to. Budd Schulberg shared goals with the communist party but broke with their methods. His decision to testify is troubling, and maybe unjustifiable, but perhaps it is understandable.

On Aug 16th, Squeaky Frome gets paroled.

2009-08-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

About time! Personally, I think she was framed. If not, well, 35 murders and an assassination attempt is kind of bad, don't get me wrong, but let's let bygones be bygones. I'm sure she's repentant. Parole is only for model prisoners--it's not like they'd let her out if she broke out of prison and tried to get in touch with her boss--oh wait...

Do you think she and Karla Homolka will have a lot to talk about? Swap recipes and the like?

I wonder if she has a LoveLines.

Film Noir Overload

2009-08-03T22:08:00.000-07:00

The gangster film is a sentimental look at the world of crime. There are, we are told, good bad criminals; there is a code of honor; there is either justice or accountability. This is a film as written by a criminal, which is to say, a sentimental, self-servicing, pleasant lie. The film noir, on the other hand, depicts a cold Darwinian zero-sum world, a world without rules and without judgment. A film, if you will, written by a cop.

I got to make a heist film with Gene Hackman...he is an actual tough guy. (Lee Marvin was a marine commando in the Pacific, [Sterling] Hayden in the Adriatic, et cetera.) Hackman was a China marine, race-car driver, stunt pilot, deep-sea diver.

These men, and their performances, are characterized by the absence of the desire to please. On screen, they don't have anything to prove, and so we are extraordinarily drawn to them.

They are not "sensitive"; they are not antiheroes; they are, to use a historic term, "he-men." How refreshing.

David Mamet, Bambi vs Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business. The Hackman film he's referencing is Heist with Delroy Lindo and Sam Rockwell. Highly recommended.

All films are crime films. Well, maybe not The Cutting Edge, but all the films I like are crime films. Over the last couple weeks I've seen a slew of good crime films, some of them films noirs. A week or so ago I rented In Bruges, which is sort of like Sexy Beast if it was written by Beckett. Brendan Gleeson was terrific and Ralph Fiennes was as belligerent as he is as Voldemort. Colin Farrell is quite good as well.

Today I sat through a triple bill of classic films noirs. First was Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum as a private eye who falls for a runaway dame who's tied to his client, crime boss Kirk Douglas. Douglas was terrific as the on-the-surface-I'm-genial-but--first-chance-I-get-I'm-planning-on-disemboweling-you gangster, as was Mitchum.

Next was Dark Passage, a Bogart-Bacall flick notable for the extended first-person camera angles--Bogart plays an unjustly-framed spouse murderer who undergoes plastic surgery, so we don't see his face for the first half hour, and for the second he's in bandages.

The last film was The Racket, with an incorruptible Robert Mitchum chasing after Robert Ryan, an underappreciated actor who added depth and poignancy to The Wild Bunch and The Dirty Dozen, among other classic "he-men" films.

Bogart, Mitchum, Douglas, Ryan, Hackman, Gleeson--there is a pattern here. Tough guys who don't give a shit, more often than not ending up facedown in the gutter.

Prediction: I think the next great film noir will come from Billy Bob Thornton. If you've seen Sling Blade, you know he has that nihilistic streak to his writing, infused with the Southern Gothic style of Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. His film with the Coens, The Man Who Wasn't There, was a disappointment, but I think he's due for a resurgence.

Mid-August the Pacific Cinemateque is running their "Film Noir Festival," which includes most of the classics, including both Touch of Evil and Lady From Shanghai, two of the better Orson Welles films.

A few of my favourite films noirs, in no particular order (unlike Josh, for me film noir refers to a type of film, not an era.)

Mona Lisa - Bob Hoskins, Michael Caine

Sexy Beast - Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian Macshane

The Outfit - Robert Duvall

Point Blank - Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson

The Killers - Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes

Payback: Straight Up Director's Edition - Mel Gibson

Mystic River - Clint Eastwood (D), Sean Penn

The Conversation - Gene Hackman

The Departed - Leonardo DiCaprio

Get Carter - Michael Caine

Shoot the Piano Player - Marcel Dalio

The Long Good Friday - Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren

State of Grace - Sean Penn, Ed Harris

Twilight - Paul Newman, Gene Hackman

Harper - Paul Newman

Charley Varrick - Walter Matthau

The Killing - Stanley Kubrick(D)

The Asphalt Jungle - Marilyn Monroe

Night of the Hunter - Robert Mitchum

Cape Fear (both the original with Mitchum and the remake with DeNiro)

Bad Lieutenant - Harvey Keitel

Reservoir Dogs - Michael Madsen

Memento - Guy Pierce

L.A. Confidential - Russel Crowe

Insomnia - Al Pacino

Heat - Robert DeNiro

Sea of Love - Al Pacino

Collateral - Tom Cruise

Silence of the Lambs - Jodie Foster

Manhunter - William Peterson

To Live and Die in L.A. - Willem Dafoe

Dark Blue - Kurt Russell

Cop -James Woods

The Professional - Gary Oldman