When I hear Joe Lieberman talking these days it doesn't sound like human speech. It sounds like a series of soft farts.
Author Archives: Lloydville
DAYS OF PIZZA, AND WINE
Jack Kerouac’s favorite meal — at least back in the early Fifties, when he could rarely afford anything fancier — was pizza, salad and red wine.
Carolyn Cassady, Neal’s wife, seduced Jack for the first time by serving him this meal on a night when Neal was away. Below, Carolyn with Jack and one of her children:
Eating an artist’s favorite food is a way of making contact with them across the barriers of time — a slice of banana cream pie, in the case of Elvis, for example, or some cervelas remoulade with a big glass of beer, in the case of Papa, who ate this meal at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris after cashing the check for the first story he sold to an American magazine.
I have been reading Kerouac and thinking about him a lot recently, prompted by the enthusiasm of my friend Paul Zahl (The Zahl File). So last night, I ate his favorite meal, and communed with Jack’s restless spirit.
[Photo by Allen Ginsberg]
The meal remained a touchstone for Kerouac as well. When Neal Cassady (above with Timothy Leary on Ken Kesey’s bus) died, towards the end of Jack’s brief life, Jack called Carolyn to reminisce about the old days — “of serious work, railroad, bubble baths, pizza, and wine.”
CARLA AND RAY
Carla Laemmle recently celebrated her 100th birthday. She was the
niece of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, and she had a
modest career as an actress and dancer in Hollywood. She appeared
uncredited as a ballet chorine in the silent version of The Phantom Of the Opera and had a
bit part in Dracula, speaking the first words in that film as a
passenger in the coach taking Renfield to his fateful rendezvous at the
Borgo Pass. (That's her on the left above, wearing glasses.)
She is now the last surviving cast member from those two iconic horror
films, and thus an icon in her own right for horror movie fans.
She interests me for other reasons, because of her life after the
movies. She became the lifetime companion of Ray Cannon, another
Hollywood professional — actor, writer, director — who left the
business to pursue other ventures.
Cannon became a sports fisherman, supporting himself mainly through
writing about the subject. He was among the first to explore the
fishing possibilities of Baja California, helping to popularize the
peninsula as a fisherman's paradise and a potential tourist Mecca. He
fell in love with it in the late 1940s, before the crowds came, spending
much of each year
there on various fishing expeditions, and eventually wrote the text for
a best-selling picture book about the area, The Sea Of Cortez.
A wonderfully-illustrated collection of his other writings about Baja
California, The Unforgettable Sea Of Cortez, was published recently and
it's a fine evocation of the
peninsula in the days before the tourist boom. Outside the precincts
of Ensenada at the top of it and and Cabo San Lucas at the bottom of
it, Baja California hasn't changed all that much since the time Cannon
discovered it. Over-fishing by commercial interests has depleted the
Mar de Cortes to an alarming degree, but it's still one of the richest
sports fishing spots on earth, and the gracious old city of La Paz has
yet to be despoiled by the California duppies.
The landscapes and seascapes that Ray and Carla loved are still there
— severe and beautiful and brimming with opportunities for adventure.
A JOHN STUART MILL QUOTE FOR TODAY
He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that.
JESUS AS CAESAR
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.
— Matthew 22:21
Somebody didn't get the message!
You have to wonder if anybody on the extreme Christian right ever actually reads the Gospels. I personally suspect that many of them just get briefings with all the out-of-context quotes that seem to support the social and political goals they've already embraced and would embrace even if Jesus had never set foot on the earth.
Jon McNaughton, the guy who painted the image above (and whose narrative ambition I sort of admire), has depicted Jesus as a kind of President of Presidents, the über- generalissimo of the American state. This Jesus is presenting the republic with a copy of the Constitution, instead of a copy of the Sermon On the Mount, as though he's the actual author, or Holy Ghostwriter, of the document.
There's no doubt that the Constitution owes a lot to the Christian tradition, with its radical respect for the worth of each individual before God, but really — if Jesus wrote the Constitution, or even Ghostwrote it, do you think he would have left in the original clauses allowing slavery, which evaluated the worth of a slave at three-fifths the worth of a white person? A perusal of the actual Gospels would suggest otherwise, which may be one reason the extremists can't afford to peruse the actual Gospels.
We may be grateful for the Christian influence on the Constitution, but while we're at it, how about a little gratitude for the Masonic influence? Many of the Founding Fathers were Masons, and the Masonic tradition has always incorporated a radical respect for all religions. As President, George Washington, a Master Mason, the highest rank in the Fraternity of Freemasonry, met with Jewish leaders and told them that Jews would not just be tolerated in the new republic but welcomed as full citizens of it. That attitude, which is one reason America has, to an almost unprecedented degree among nations, risen above violent religious strife between its peoples, is not one which has normally characterized the Christian tradition, with its long history of virulent anti-Semitism. It is quintessentially Masonic, though, and also, one might add, most perfectly in tune with . . . the actual teachings of Jesus.
It might be good to start thinking of the Gospels as “the lost books of the Bible”, and to deal with the irony of this, since the world would probably be a better place all around if they were the only books of the Bible.
LA BELLE, LA PERFECTLY SWELL NOISEUSE — 2
Part Two — The Case For the Defense
As I wrote in the first part of this look at Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, the film can be appreciated on one level as sheer melodrama. The tensions of the story are so well established and developed that one's attention is riveted on their inherent suspense throughout the whole four-hour length of the film. The acting, especially by Michel Piccoli and Emanuelle Béart, is very fine — nuanced but intense and alive.
The characters' understanding of what is happening to them may be facile, and it may seem to mirror the filmmakers' understanding of what is happening to them, but the dramatic dynamics of the story are sound and believable and well-observed.
But the level on which the film truly excites is the documentary. A great deal of La Belle Noiseuse simply records the process of an artist working with a nude model. Piccoli, as I say, is convincing as the artist, but much of his work is shown in close up, with the hands of a real artist creating works on paper and canvas before our eyes. All of the film's intellectual claptrap about what art is dissolves in the miracle of art coming into being in real time while we watch.
In all of these passages, Béart is naked before us, too. There is so much nudity that we cannot read any of the passages as a “nude scene” — as that conventional and usually contemptible device which presents the exposed female body as a sop to the male gaze, a titillation, a visceral punchline. We see the whole woman here, as the artist is trying to see her, not in bits and pieces, not as tits and ass, but as “the nude” — a glorification of the female form, and the female essence.
The sight transcends the erotic and becomes powerful in another way — as a symbol of the male's eternal struggle for existential gravity, part of which has always involved paying homage to, celebrating, female power.
Nudity in modern films is almost always obscene. The idea that it can sometimes be done with “body doubles”, flashing a little tit here, a little ass there, is beyond obscene — it is depraved. It doesn't just commodify women, it exposes the full cowardice of the collapsed male psyche.
If La Belle Noiseuse did nothing more than strike a blow against this depravity, take a small step towards the redemption of the female nude in art and culture, it would be an important film.
DAY OF THE DEAD: ALL SOULS DAY
Welcome to the day of restless souls . . .
The poster above comes from the ever-astonishing Golden Age Comic Book Stories site. I don't know how he does it, but the proprietor of that site puts up, almost every day, high-res scans of amazing works of popular art, by no means limited to comic book art. There's also a generous abundance of classic book and magazine illustration and promotional art for movies.
Check it out — it's one of the Internet's most consistently rewarding treasure troves.
PSYCHOPATHY
Psychopathy, the mental illness that produces serial and mass killers,
like Ted Bundy (above) and Eric Harris (of Columbine, below), is really
bizarre. It's
imperfectly understood but what is known about it is terrifying.
Psychopaths have no capacity — whatsoever — for empathy. It's not a
psychological defect or moral failing but seems to involve the
configuration of the brain. The results of brain scans of psychopaths
undergoing tests for empathy are utterly anomalous — many animals have
more capacity for empathy than human psychopaths.
The condition seems to be congenital, though there is some evidence
that early childhood development can affect whether or not a psychopath
becomes violent. Only a small percentage of psychopaths do become
violent. The rest usually become hustlers or con-men of one sort or
another. Psychopaths are almost always well-integrated socially,
preternaturally adept at learning and mimicking the behaviors
associated with empathy and other normal human emotions.
There is no cure for psychopathy, and it requires highly specialized
tests to identify it. The illness actually grows worse with
psychiatric therapy, unless the therapist has diagnosed it in
advance. In all other cases the psychopath uses the therapy as an
advanced course in determining what behavior the therapist is seeking
to encourage and leaning to feign it. Eric Harris was undergoing
court-ordered therapy — the result of being arrested for a petty crime
— shortly before he committed the massacre at Columbine (seen in
progress below) and his
therapist thought he was making extraordinary progress. He didn't have
a clue, not even the hint of a clue, as to Harris's actual mental state.
Harris's
condition was diagnosed only after the fact through the extensive
diaries he kept, which manifested all the recognized symptoms of
psychopathy — including his delight at fooling his therapist. (Dylan Klebold, Harris's partner in the Columbine killings, was a suicidal depressive — a different kettle of fish entirely.)
Modern corporations, when they reach a certain size, also display the
recognized symptoms of psychopathy. They operate on the principle of
pure self-interest. Like psychopaths, they construct elaborate
rationales for selfishness. They take as a given, for example, that
any free market activity is morally justified, as leading to the
greatest good for the greatest number. It follows from this that any
action which benefits the shareholders, and by extension the executives
and employees of the corporation, is morally sound. It is assumed
that any “bad” actions in a market will be corrected by the market,
which means that all “uncorrected” (i. e. profitable) actions are good
by definition.
When Brooksley Born (above), the chairperson of a small regulatory
commission
in the
Clinton administration, tried to warn Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan about
the dangers of the unregulated market for over-the-counter derivatives
— the financial instruments which almost brought down the world
economy last
year — he didn't want to hear about it. He was opposed even to
regulations against outright fraud in this market, believing that the
market itself would regulate fraud more efficiently than government
ever could.
Greenspan and the Wall Street executives who think like him are not
psychopaths, but they are intellectually invested in a theory of
business and human behavior which has created a psychopathic system —
a system which sees selfishness as invariably productive and right and
which simply denies any evidence to the contrary, as clinical
psychopaths do. It is a form of magical thinking.
The proof that Greenspan is not a psychopath can be found in his
admission this year that he was wrong in his assumptions about the
behavior of markets and human beings acting through markets. A true
psychopath is incapable of seeing any other point of view but his own
and incapable of taking any responsibility at all for his actions.
But that's the problem with modern corporations of a certain size — no
individual is ultimately responsible for its actions. This is why
non-psychopaths can commit psychopathic acts as agents of a corporation
and feel no need to take responsibility for them. This is why the very
executives who nearly brought the world to the brink of economic
collapse still believe they are entitled to large compensation
packages. They did nothing wrong — it was the system which did it,
and it's not their fault that the system is psychopathic.
In a way they have a point. Psychopaths are born psychopaths and can't
be cured, just as large corporations are by nature psychopathic and
can't be changed. This is not an argument, however, for letting
psychopaths do anything they want to do, or for letting corporations do
anything they want to do. Society is obliged to protect itself from
psychopathic behavior in whatever form it takes — even if those who
engage in it aren't “guilty” or “responsible” in the usual senses of
those words.
When Alan Greenspan told Brooksley Born that he didn't believe in
regulating the markets for fraud, she should have felt empowered to
make a citizen's arrest on the spot. It would have saved us all a
lot of misery.
[I am indebted to Dave Cullen's extraordinary book Columbine for its fascinating summary of the current state of knowledge about psychopathy.]
DAY OF THE DEAD: ALL SAINTS DAY
Halloween is over. The kids have gotten their candy and gone home. Now . . . the real days of the dead begin. Not so much fun, not so nice — no more masks, not even the masks of flesh. Laurie Lipton knows who's coming to call now . . .
A BOB DYLAN CHRISTMAS
A few more thoughts on Bob Dylan’s Christmas album . . .
Bob Dylan hasn’t referenced Christmas very often in his own songs, and the most notable references have been either wistful or rueful. There were, for example, the tatty, neglected Christmas decorations in “Three Angels”, looking down on the foibles of a heedless world . . . and these lovely, melancholy lines from “Floater”:
My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don’t know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had ’em once though, I suppose, to go along
With all the ring dancin’ Christmas carols on all of them Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves
This always reminds me of some other wistful lines about Christmas, in one of Robert Johnson’s songs:
If today was Christmas Eve
And tomorrow was Christmas Day
If today was Christmas Eve
And tomorrow was Christmas Day
Oh, babe, wouldn’t we have a time?
The idea in Johnson’s song is that it’s not Christmas Eve, and good times are not just around the corner — may never be again.
It’s a little surprising, then, to find Dylan in such a merry mood on his new Christmas album Christmas In the Heart. He really sounds as though he’s having fun on all the upbeat numbers — like a kid given the run of a toy store. On “Christmas Island” he seems to be contemplating a holiday in the tropics with unmitigated glee, and on “Must Be Santa”, you get a feeling he may have been dancing while he was putting down the vocal. His slightly curdled egg nog of a voice is laced with a jigger or two of intoxicating cheer.
On the more spiritual numbers, he conveys a different kind of joy — almost triumphal. He sings the first verse of “Adeste Fidelis” in Latin, punching out the words like a preacher on fire with the unimpeachable authority of the good news he’s delivering. (Now that Pavarotti has moved on, is there anybody left but Bob who can sing Latin like he means it?) When Bob sings, “Hark, the hee-rald angels sing!” you get a feeling he has them in view, or is perhaps himself a member emeritus of their band.
Christmas songs are encrusted with so many memories that singers rarely feel they have to do more than get them down, offer a respectful rendition. That’s why it’s such a shock to hear Dylan performing them, interpreting them, as though we might have forgotten what they mean, what their words are all about — not Christmas Eves past, lost times and unreachable dreams, but Christmas Mornings to come, peace on earth, goodwill to men.
My friend Harvey Bojarsky had an interesting insight into the conceptual aspect of the album, comparing its strategy of musical collage — with echoes of American Christmas music of every kind popping up in unexpected combinations — to what Charles Ives (above) was doing in his Holiday Symphony. In that work, as Wikipedia notes, Ives wanted to write each movement as if it were based on a grown man’s memory of his childhood holidays. Ives said, “Here are melodies like icons, resonating with memory and history, with war, childhood, community, and nation.”
So it is with Christmas In the Heart. You’ve heard everything on it before, though now all the elements are mixed up together, out of sequence, out of context, the way they get mixed up in memory, and this allows you hear them anew, and see the connections between them — the secret, perhaps unconscious connections between them you’ve already made in your heart.
[Go here for some more thoughts on Christmas In the Heart.]
LA BELLE, LA PERFECTLY SWELL NOISEUSE — 1
Part One — The Case For the Prosecution
Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse is a fascinating film and, if you'll pardon the chauvinism, very French.
The psychological insights it serves up are almost unbelievably trite, which makes the grave and serious tone in which they are delivered almost laughable. But not quite. It is the préparation of the dish and the présentation which redeem it. It is a form of alchemy which one often encounters in the simplest French restaurants, where a salade frisée aux lardons will sometimes be put together as though the fate of civilization depends on its approach to perfection.
So in La Belle Noiseuse one appreciates the care and refinement of Rivette's filmmaking, the precision and elegance of the dialogue, even when the ingredients Rivette is working with are simple to the point of simple-mindedness.
One has to be on guard when an artist takes on the subject of how hard it is for a woman to live with an artist. Self-importance, self-regard and self-pity are almost always hidden among the twists and turns of such works, imperfectly masked by a self-laceration masquerading as humility but in fact presented as a higher form of the artist's noble commitment to honesty, which can apparently justify any human failing.
I don't think I'm misrepresenting Rivette's sensibility here. He's a guy who once ascribed the success of James Cameron's Titanic to the fact that Kate Winslett was fat, which allowed fat teenage girls to identify with her character. That same peevish misogyny, that same inability to penetrate the female psyche, are on full display in La Belle Noiseuse.
In La Belle Noiseuse an older artist whose creative springs have run dry is restored to his vocation by a younger woman, for whom he will be tempted to betray his long-suffering wife and partner, even as the younger woman is tempted to betray her love and partnership with an aspiring artist for whom the older man is a mentor and inspiration. (I should add that the betrayals involved here are not necessarily sexual in the usual sense of that word.)
I am prepared to believe that an older artist can be recalled to productivity by nubile flesh, and that there are women who find the role of muse intoxicating and irresistible at whatever cost it comes. The phenomenon doesn't tell us much about art, however. It probably plays itself out in every profession, and there are likely more artists inspired by a faithful lifetime companion than ones revivified by fresh meat.
Such a view, however, has no place in La Belle Noiseuse, where betrayal of a loved one for art must be seen as a tragic, bittersweet necessity — somehow intertwined with the truth of art itself. The twist at the end of the film's story, while humane on one level, only reinforces this mythology.
La Belle Noiseuse is, to put it very bluntly, nonsense, on a philosophical and psychological level, but it is a measure of the intricate delicacy of Rivette's treatment of this nonsense that one can still enjoy the film as a well-observed melodrama, unfolding with excruciating deliberation, and as an incisive portrait of people in the grip of delusions which the filmmaker himself gives every evidence of sharing.
In Part Two of this piece, I present The Case For the Defense, outlining the film's many miraculous pleasures.
FRIEDMAN AND LEWIS
The incomparable Drew Friedman salutes the incomparable Jerry Lewis and gives nine reasons why Lewis should get a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Hear, hear!
The drawing is probably reproduced at too small a size to read all the captions, but the images are fun all the same.
CHRISTMAS IN THE HEART
I believe it's a sin to play Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving and that people who violate this rule will be going to Hell — a stiff price to pay for a couple more spins of “The Little Drummer Boy”.
I took a chance on Eternal Damnation, however, in order to listen to Bob Dylan's new Christmas album Christmas In the Heart, because I wanted to review it. I figured that if it was any good, folks might want to have a copy in hand when the Christmas Season begins. In short, I risked the fires of Hell so you wouldn't have to.
It was a wise move, as it turns out, because some of the mainstream media reviews of it have been, well . . . “insane” might be the nicest way to put it. A couple of dimwits who review rock music for NPR compared it, in its unmitigated awfulness, to William Shatner's dramatic readings of rock lyrics, which have become camp classics. There's nothing camp about Dylan's Christmas record, and nothing awful about it, either — it is, in fact, one of the great documents of American music.
Dylan was always a strange old man, even when he was in his twenties. Over the years he's gotten stranger and older. He's far more radical now, though, than he was as a kid and he's grasped the essential truth of radicalism in our time — it means going back to the old stuff that got us to where we were before we lost our way in the God-awful catastrophe that was the 20th century.
Dylan's Christmas album has a 19th-Century Currier & Ives type image on the cover. Many of the songs on the album were done in the past by Bing Crosby, whom Dylan admires greatly. Dylan sings the songs straight in bright, slightly cornball arrangements, often with an accompanying mixed-voice choir behind him. Don't be fooled, though — there is no irony whatsoever in his approach.
What Dylan is doing is taking us on a tour of American popular Christmas music — the stuff we grew up with, the stuff our parents grew up with, country Christmas songs and big-band Christmas songs and 50s-era lounge-music Christmas songs and ersatz Hawaiian Christmas songs, carols sung on street corners and hymns sung in churches. There's even a German Christmas polka, to which David Hidalgo adds some Tejano accordian — which of course derives from polka music played in German communities in south Texas which Mexican-American musicians picked up on and made their own.
The journey is phantasmagorical, like one of the journeys Scrooge is taken on during his night of ghostly visitations.
The result is a Christmas album like no other. Dylan's gnarled late-career voice has a built-in poignancy as he tries to sing these sweet songs sweetly, making them seem like crude homemade gifts brought to the stable in Bethlehem by a child or a troubled old man . . . just the sort of gifts that would mean the most to a guy like Jesus.
The true miracle of Dylan's versions of these songs is that he sings the words as though he believes them — believes in the good news that will bring joy to the world, peace on earth. For all the nostalgic references in the arrangements, Dylan makes the songs seem brand new — revivified by faith and commitment and hope.
Before I heard this record I would have said that the best Christmas album of all time was Luciano Pavarotti's O Holy Night, in which the great tenor sings with the same faith and commitment and hope. Dylan's funkier work can stand beside it, though — in part because of Dylan's technical limitations as a singer. Pavarotti sings like an angel, supremely confident in the truth of miracles. Dylan sings like an old drunk at a midnight Christmas Eve service desperately hoping for a miracle he has no choice but to believe in, all other options having been exhausted. Both sing from the heart, but it just may be that the old man with the broken voice is somewhat closer to the spirit of the first Christmas, when there was no room at the inn, and a young woman had to give birth to the hope of the world in a stable.
In these times, when the ancient holiday has been commercialized into a neurotic nightmare of shopping and guilt, the only place you can find a meaningful sort of Christmas is in the heart. That's where Dylan went looking for it, and that's where he found it, still in reasonably good shape, mirabile dictu.
Get your copy of Christmas In the Heart now and prepare to play it often — but please, in the name of all that's holy, after Thanksgiving.
[Go here for some more thoughts on Christmas In the Heart.]
AVE ATQUE VALE
It's always sad when an old pair of underpants wears out. Underpants are the most intimate of companions — they stick with us (and sometimes to us) through thick and thin. They can serve as pajamas, lounge-wear and as a form of sexual display capable of driving women wild. The brightly-colored cocktail glasses on the defunct underpants above, for example, send a clear message — “I'm fun . . . but sophisticated!”
I bought those underpants about seven years ago at the Old Navy store on 34th Street in Manhattan. They were very cheap. They had a good run and served me well in good times and in bad.
They will be missed.
KISS ME, STUPID
Not long ago I posted a teaser for a preview of an essay by Tom Sutpen about Kiss Me, Stupid which Tom posted on his blog Illusion Travels By Streetcar. Tom has now posted the full essay — well, not the full essay, but the parts of it he felt were worth reading in their present state.
It's fascinating stuff, and made me bump Kiss Me, Stupid up to the top of my Netflix queue. What Tom wrote set my mind racing, and tempted me to respond — which is precisely what good criticism is meant to do — but I'm going to wait until I've seen the film to get into it.
To read Tom's post, click me, stupid.