Freitag, Februar 20, 2009

Greene, mean and obscene

I finally got a good start on Graham Greene's "Comedians," after several false starts, and promptly finished it. It's a pretty good novel about a couple of dubious ex-patriot Englishmen getting by and getting ahead, at least for a while, in Papa Doc Duvalier's Haiti. The horror of the Tonton Macoute, Papa Doc's enforcer army, is mostly off-stage, which I appreciate - I never care for gore - but Greene manages to capture the menace of a gangster state pretty convincingly.



The central character is not as interesting as many other Greene leading men, and in some ways is Greene's all-too-standard hero - a jealous lover with a dubious background, and above all an uncomfortably lapsed Catholic. The hero - the most made-up part of the book - seems mainly an excuse to bring on the secondary characters and the setting, all drawn from Greene's real-life experience of Haiti. These are almost all captivating, from the at-once admirable and ridiculous idealists, the Smiths, who hope to set up a vegetarian center in Port-au-Prince, to the quiet man-of-all-work Joseph, who is transformed at a voodoo ritual into the embodiment of the warrior spirit and gives his life in the rebel cause.

I then took a left turn and immediately read Greene's "Travels with my Aunt," a slightly ribald comedy (the "obscene" in my post title was just an easy rhyme). It does not have the yawning central gap of "The Comedians," but it never quite fulfills the promise of turning Dudley Do-Right into his lecherous, drinking and drugging alter ego. Nevertheless, it is good fun and I found it to be a page-turner - Aunt Augusta's fabulous tales are carried off with great timing and gusto.

"Travels" is also notable for its non-censorious, often celebratory attitude towards various no-nos of its era and our own, from alcohol and drugs to adultery, prostitution and Don Juan-style misogyny in general. It makes a concerted argument against the safe, traditionally ethical life, and carries it off with the simple trick of never having Aunt Augusta pay for any of it - she's never caught, never sent to jail, never beat up or raped, never knocked up (well, almost never - that's the excuse for the book, and at any rate she seems content to have had her sister raise the child), and never, above all, put off or hurt when men sleep around on her and treat her terribly. She likes it. A truth, certainly, for some women, but not the universal and righteous truth much of the counterculture advertised it to be in the late 60s/early 70s, when this book came out (1969).

That aspect of the book hasn't aged well, but the "enlightened" view of criminality it espouses I think still has much currency, and rings quite true for me. I was just talking with my wife, a law student, about a related observation: I don't doubt that many if not most breaches of the law are bad acts, but I don't regard breaking the law as a bad act in-and-of-itself. Victimless crimes, therefore, are no crimes to me.

Mittwoch, Februar 11, 2009

Madness

Just finished watching Werner Herzog's Woyzeck for the first time in maybe a decade, and the second time ever. A great, great film, much better than I was able to appreciate the first time.

It's impossible to get a good hold on the movie, because of the wildness of the play it largely follows. Woyzeck's madness is tantalizing because it seems to involve some sort of specific vision the audience is never quite able to grasp. But that vision seems to have some sort of terrible beauty.

I am one of those who is absolutely head-over-heels rapt by Klaus Kinski in the Herzog movies. I know a lot of his effectiveness is a result of self-conscious effects, but I go with him anyway. You just never see his combination of commitment and imagination, and he is gifted with a uniquely expressive, charismatic face. As Herzog says, Brando and the like are just little kiddies compared to Kinski when it comes to method-like acting.

Ewa Mattes is also wonderful in the movie, complicated, strong yet damaged, a perfect foil to Kinski. Her earthy beauty is thoroughly believable, though it can summon the slightly distracting question of what Woyzeck was like when they got together in the first place. Did she love him, or just use him? That we are moved to ponder these questions in such an expressionistic, almost surreal drama is a testament to the acting abilities of Kinski and Mattes.

I hesitate to attach the following clip, as it is the climax of the film and should be reached gradually. I also don't want people to think I get off on watching women get stabbed. But if you've never seen a Herzog/Kinski film before, the first minute or two of this clip should convince you to have a look.

Just before this clip starts, Woyzeck has walked Marie down to the still pond at the geographical center of the film. She sees he is very out of sorts, he talks some mild crazy talk, she asks, "What is it?", and we suddenly go into slo-mo and the grinding, keening sounds of a period, country string quartet.

Dienstag, Februar 10, 2009

Faking it

Gawker had a terrific post today about the gobbledygook a branding agency put together to sell Pepsi on what looks like a slight tweaking of the Pepsi logo. I have been, in my day, a leading practitioner of bullshit, and I must say I admire this work.



This is really just the tip of the iceberg, viz:



And my personal favorite, as it both honors and mocks the taste for popular distortions of relativity and quantum mechanics:



There's much, much more of this. It's really a masterwork of the genre, and I think every over-bright, under-ambitious college student should have a look before they get too full of themselves for getting away with shit.

The beauty part is that this ultimately wasn't about the branding company justifying themselves, so much as the dopes at Pepsi who paid for the logo and will pay, apparently, hundreds of millions of dollars to substitute it for the old one, also paying for the justification, which takes them off the hook. It's a perfect example of a situation in which no one will call bullshit because it's in everyone's mutual interest to go on pretending this isn't absurd.

If only the branders had fun doing this, and thought they were pulling a fast one. Sadly, I'm sure they were dead serious.

Montag, Februar 09, 2009

Happy Ending

Woodlanders, it turns out, shares one of the most remarkable qualities of nearly all the other Hardy novels I've read - a great ending. Not a Hollywood happy ending, of course, but a dramatic, powerful one. And not a stupid surprise ending, which should lose its appeal after middle school, or a remarkable-coincidence ending, of which I never saw the appeal. Between the stars below are spoilers.

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The ending of Woodlanders is not just a "return to normalcy," as the jacket copy would have it, but a terribly piquant restatement of the book - Marty South, who has hung about the fringes of the book, emerges unexpectedly as the heart of the thing, making us think twice about all the thoughts of love and fidelity we have just finished reading. She seems a moral hero, but also a dupe, whose high-flown notion of love is as useless as it is harmonious with our higher yearnings.

The Shakespearian calamity that properly ends Return of the Native is a completely different sort of wonderful ending, dark and operatic, yet touched with realism. The extended denouement is slightly tedious, but in retrospect it provides a rather welcome catharsis after the high pitch of excitement reached at the climax.

The end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles is so quiet and just, and it is sadly delightful how Hardy gives the lovers a last little period of lovely happiness before she gives herself up. Again, totally different, totally effective.

Jude the Obscure's miserable, fitting ending, yet another completely different approach.

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How mature is this great variety and power! Many put Hardy in some rather confining boxes, but as this survey of his endings illustrates, he really did a lot of different things very well. I left off Far from the Madding Crowd, which has the worst ending of the great Hardy novels, but it was the first of the bunch, and if, as I argue, ending a novel is one of the hardest parts of writing it, one can excuse him for taking a book or two to get up to speed.

Hardy could well be labelled a moralizer, but at least his ethics were consistently in the right place, and what's more, he meant it and stuck to it. That's perhaps the most important thing about these "happy endings": they justify the novels as ethical statements. They are the final, necessary imprimatur of their high moral seriousness.

Perhaps we have outlived the era of moral seriousness in novel writing - perhaps if the debates touched on in Hardy's novels were still living I would be put off rather than moved by them. But it's certainly worth asking what the alternatives might be - humor, flippancy, snark, nihilism, amorality. Good so far as they go, but perhaps, finally, lacking in intensity and maturity if we are trying to create great art. There's a discussion to be had about the difference between a morally serious novel and a didactic or political novel, but I'll leave it for another time.

Just one more note: it occurs to me that it might be moral seriousness as much as anything else that lifts the two or three great Woody Allen movies above the rest of American cinema. For all Allen's cynicism, he allows a character in the final scene of Manhattan to remind us that we all still have the existential power of choice, which is not just an uplifting idea, or perhaps not uplifting at all, but a dare - a dare to be good and to do good.

Sonntag, Februar 01, 2009

Sporty McSport's Sports Roundup

Fucking great Super Bowl. My favorite moment: a combo. (1) James Harrison, defenseman of the year, running to the edge of his Apollonian physical abilities to score a 100-yard touchdown. (2) James Harrison, possible asshole or nutcase, 20 minutes later, mercilessly pounding on a kneeling Cardinal with closed fist and shoves. This is such a blood sport. I lurve it.

I wish they had told me ahead of time that Jennifer Hudson was lipsynching. I was so nervous for her it marred my appreciation of one of the two best National Anthems I've ever heard (Whitney Houston's was also great, and so full of joy).





Faith Hill was predictably awful, and it's kind of shocking to hear that hers was also pre-recorded. It's one thing to breathe between every single word when you're under stress, but I guess that's her idea of musicianship. Lifeless, awful.

Still don't get Bruce Springsteen. He seemed really corny and reminded me a lot of Huey Lewis. Is Huey Lewis a Bruce Springsteen ripoff? The News and The E-Street Band seem to have similar compositions.


Please note matching guys in berets, matching guys with beards, and matching one black guy.