These are hard times, likely to get much harder. But believe it or not, we are climbing Jacob's Ladder. Every rung goes just a little bit higher.
That's right — every rung goes just a little bit higher. Don't take my word for it — listen to the testimony of the Staple Singers, in their wonderful version of “Jacob's Ladder” on the album Freedom's Highway.
The band Wilco is offering a free download of a cover they did of Bob Dylan's “I Shall Be Released” if you go to their web site and promise to vote.
Remember, cute girls love guys who vote!
The circus was a fixture of American popular entertainment as early as the colonial era. It competed vigorously with fancier forms of theatrical entertainment in the first decades of the 19th Century and survives in several forms today. It was always evolving — the only constant being the “circus”, the ring, which for most of circus history existed primarily for a horse or horses to race around.
In the early 19th Century, if you had a clever horse and a tent, you had a circus — all the rest was filler on the bill.
Dan Rice (above), described in the subtitle of David Carlyon’s biography as “the most famous man you’ve never heard of”, started out in the 1830s as the traveling exhibitor of a learned pig — it could count and tell the time. Then Rice got a horse and a tent and became a circus showman, the most famous of the 19th Century. P. T. Barnum (below) lent his name to an enterprise that became the most famous circus of all time, but wasn’t himself predominantly a circus man. He wasn’t even responsible for his circus’s immortal motto, “The Greatest Show On Earth’, invented by someone else as a topper to “Dan Rice’s Great Show”.
Rice was an accomplished horse and animal trainer but earned his immense renown as a clown, of a new kind. He sang and danced and did physical comedy, sometimes in blackface, and enacted parodies of Shakespeare, but captured the fancy of the nation with his comic monologues — often of a topical nature, ranging over the subjects of national and local politics (in whatever town his circus happened to be playing.) His specialty was audience interaction, improvisation in the moment — quick wit on the fly.
He so impressed the public that he was thought of as a great and wise man — a bit like Will Rogers in the 20th Century — and he was recruited to run for political office, including the Presidency, on more than one occasion.
Though he was the chief draw of his “Great Show”, it was still a circus. Its featured animal act was a horse named Exclesior, who could do astonishing tricks. Later on, when “menageries” (of exotic animals) became part of the circus, Rice enlisted an elephant who could walk a tightrope, a rhinoceros who could obey a few simple commands and a trained camel.
The menagerie of exotic animals developed apart from the circus, as an adjunct to the “museums” of curiosities which flourished in the 19th Century, and in which Barnum mostly specialized. The idea was imported into the circus as a new-fangled attraction.
In Rice’s day, the circus was a show for grown-ups, featuring plenty of sex, in the form of scantily-clad female performers, and sometimes crude humor. It morphed into a children’s fantasy only at the end of the 19th century — when its cruder offerings were moved over into the adjoining midway.
By the 1870s, Rice’s brand of verbal comedy had been absorbed into “variety” — a very crude form, for male audiences only, centered in urban areas, usually associated, physically and commercially, with saloons. This was the form that got cleaned up for mixed audiences (ladies as well as gents) of middle-class patrons in the 1880s and renamed vaudeville. It still had a lot of circus in it.
Tony Pastor, the impresario who led the way in cleaning up variety and did the most to popularize the new designation “vaudeville”, had gotten his start as a knock-about clown in one of Dan Rice’s circuses — and knock-about clowning always had a place on the vaudeville stage. So did the comic monologuist — carrying on a tradition pioneered by Rice.
Horses were gone, of course, along with the rings they raced around, but trained animal acts remained. One of the most popular and fondly remembered acts in vaudeville was “Fink’s Mules” — sometimes called the greatest opening act of all time — in which a blacked-up Fink engaged in a losing contest of wills with his expertly trained animals.
Dan Rice also had a mule act, with two mules that only he could ride. He’d dare audience members to try their luck with the animals, who inevitably bucked them off, to the delight of the crowd.
Horses and feats of horsemanship stayed in circuses, even though the exotic animals became the real stars, but horses took center stage in Buffalo Bill’s arena shows, a kind of circus masquerading as a historical pageant.
The chaotic popular entertainments of the 19th Century, always evolving, left their mark on the popular entertainments of the 20th Century — via vaudeville, which fed the Broadway and Hollywood musical with images, acts and talent, and supplied silent film comedy with its greatest clowns . . . and the rodeo, which carried on the circus’s and Buffalo Bill’s celebration of the horse. The classic American circus survives only in the two companies of The Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey “Greatest Show On Earth”, but another kind of circus, classier and adult-oriented, thrives on the Las Vegas Strip. Now called “cirques” (as in “du Soleil”), they form the core of Sin City’s permanent live-performance attractions.
The continuum revealed in all this is not much remarked upon, a result of the 20th Century’s insistence on seeing itself as “modern”, freed from the shackles of the Victorian era, but also of the age-old tendency in show business to emphasize novelty. “A 19th-Century Attraction Reborn and Refurbished!” isn’t an ad line that’s going to pack them in on a Saturday night in the 21st Century — though it would offer a more reliable indication of pure entertainment value than almost any other.
It looks as though even the national media have decided it's o. k. to use the “p” word — even if they have to teach the American public what it means.
Perhaps this will lead to a little press questioning of the administration's new eight hundred billion dollar bail-out proposal. Who exactly is it meant to benefit? Tellingly, Treasury Secretary Paulson
doesn't want to put a cap on executive compensation even for those
institutions that the American tax payer is being called on to rescue. As The New York Times reported:
Mr. Paulson said that he was concerned that imposing limits on the
compensation of executives could discourage companies from
participating in the program.
“If we design it so it’s punitive
and so institutions aren’t going to participate, this won’t work the
way we need it to work,” Mr. Paulson said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Let’s
talk about executive salaries. There have been excesses there. I agree
with the American people. Pay should be for performance, not for
failure.”
But he quickly added: “But we need this system to work, and so we — the reforms need to come afterwards.”
Think about what he's saying. The major financial institutions are in such dire straights that unless tax payers assume their bad debts, they will likely collapse, taking the whole world economy down with them. But they might opt out of the bail-out if their top executives have limits set on their compensation.
In short, the executives would rather see their companies and the world economy tank than give up a dime of what they might be able to squeeze out of the crisis for themselves.
It's amazing that Paulson could say such a thing with a straight face. He's essentially admitting that the CEOs of America's major financial institutions are sociopaths. But that's plutocracy for you — personal shame and civic responsibility have no place in it.
Jack White (of The White Stripes) wrote and produced the theme song for the new James Bond film Quantum Of Solace and performs it on the soundtrack with Alicia Keys. The movie is coming out in November but you can listen to the song now here.
It's awesome — funked-up John Barry with a nod to McCartney's Bond song and a lot of White Stripes drive. Jack's work is big because he's got so many strains of music rattling around in his brain and no firewalls of convention, attitude or fashion separating them. You could say the same of Armstrong, Presley, Hendrix, Dylan.
As you watch the current Wall Street meltdown unfold you should bear in mind that the crisis doesn't represent a failure of capitalism, it represents a triumph of plutocracy — government by, of and for the wealthy. This is the way plutocracy is supposed to work.
In a plutocracy like ours, the wealthy instruct the government, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America, to construct a system, a set of rules, under which corporate America can behave like a pack of rabid hyenas in its hysterical pursuit of short-term profits. When and if the hysteria leads to a breakdown of the system — basically because the suckers get tired of being defrauded, or run out of money to lose — corporate America instructs the government to bail it out with tax dollars from ordinary Americans . . . that is to say, the same suckers it was trying to swindle by other means.
The wealthy never lose. Dick Fuld (above), the CEO of Lehman Brothers, got a bonus of 22 million dollars last year, as he was in the process of defrauding hundreds of thousands of people with essentially worthless financial instruments and leading his company forward into bankruptcy. The two top officers of Merrill Lynch, which had to sell itself to the Bank Of America to avoid the fate of Lehman Brothers, will split a parting gift of 47 million dollars. The financial institutions which tried to make quick bucks by selling bundles of nearly valueless mortgages are now going to sell those bundles to the American taxpayer, in what will surely be the greatest act of corporate welfare in the history of human civilization.
Such moments in history are instructive. They remind us that corporate America, and conservative apologists for the “free market”, have no real interest in free markets — they are interested in free money for the wealthy. If they can get it through unregulated fraud, that's fine — if they can get it through corporate socialism, that's fine, too . . . as long as they get it.
This is the sort of racket which used to be called “the old army game”. Like any sophisticated con, it's a no-lose system for the hucksters who are running it, corporate America's wealthy elite. Trust me — Dick Fuld is not going to give back the 22 million he got for doing his part to send the world economy into a tailspin, placing the welfare of millions at risk. And he's not going to jail, either — because he was operating within the laws that he and his fellow hyenas paid to have enacted.
It's plutocracy as usual.
Wake up, wake up, you sleepy heads,
Get up, get up, get out of bed . . .
[With thanks to Vitaphone Varieties]
Cartoonist Winsor McCay never ceases to amaze. I love this particular image (despite the preposterous ethnic caricature) because its cityscape reminds me of my old neighborhood in Manhattan, which real estate agents called North Chelsea but was in fact the old Garment District and before that, in the days when Teddy Roosevelt was New York's Police Commissioner, the Tenderloin, a precinct largely devoted to sin. It's made up mostly of late 19th-Century and early 20th-Century commercial buildings like the ones in McCay's panels, with more than a few even older townhouses. It has become a dreamscape to me now, which McCay's image evokes precisely.
[With thanks to a delightful web site devoted to McCay's work — Meeting McCay.]
Take that, Weasel Man!
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet
an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
“Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
This is an excerpt from a commencement speech given a couple of years ago by the writer David Foster Wallace (above), who committed suicide this week at the age of 46. I don't know Wallace's writing, although it has quite a reputation, but I've been struck by many of the quotes from it that have appeared in various notices of his death.
The quote above is particularly resonant. It reminds me of Walter Benjamin's notion of the “phantasmagoria” associated with each age in history — those dreams that a whole epoch dreams and can't recognize as dreams, because everyone is having them. He's referring to cultural assumptions so profound and so unexamined that they're simply experienced as part of the environment, like water, or air — things noticed only when they're absent. (Curiously, Benjamin, pictured above, also committed suicide, in much different circumstances.)
It seems to me that the principle task of any critic, of art or culture, is to discover the phantasmagoria of his or her time and disenchant people out of it — so it can be seen. It is, as I've written before, a delicate task — like letting a dreaming person know he's dreaming without waking him, because as soon as he awakens, his defenses, his unexamined assumptions about things, will reassert themselves.
Phantasmagorias exist in the regions of our culture unexamined or devalued by the official, that is to say, the conscious, culture. In the 20th Century, for example, the official culture dreamed that the Victorian Age had been left behind in Modernism's dust, and thus it could not see how the central art form of the age, movies, was essentially Victorian. The official culture dreamed that certain kinds of movies, like musicals, were frivolous and escapist, and thus could not see that they represented some of the century's most radical experiments in cinematic form. The official culture dreamed that Las Vegas was a vulgar cultural aberration, and thus could not see that it was the one place where the 20th Century was anticipating the future of our cities most perceptively (while also, paradoxically, keeping the Victorian tradition of the “universal exposition” alive.)
Image © Paul Kolnik
These observations will seem like clichés a hundred years from now, in retrospect, when we've awakened from our current dreams. It's the job of a cultural critic to get inside our dreams while we're dreaming them.
So how's the water where you are?
It's sometimes noted, quite correctly, that the artists who made what we now think of as the classic films noirs were entirely unfamiliar with the term, and indeed had no conception that they were working in a distinct tradition. They thought of the movies they were making as crime thrillers.
This is occasionally cited in support of the idea that the term film noir is a category created by cinéastes after the fact, and therefore inauthentic, misleading. It certainly was created (or at least popularized) by cinéastes after the fact, but that doesn't mean it's inauthentic or misleading. Such a view fails to take into account how genres and traditions arise, which is a complex process — a combination of historical and cultural trends, influence and imitation among artists, and simple commercial calculation. All these factors can combine to create distinct new forms, and in the case of film noir I think they did.
Two early films, which I would not call films noirs, nevertheless set the tone for the new form — The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity. The Maltese Falcon was a fairly standard work of hardboiled detective fiction but it had a twist. In hardboiled detective fiction, the world might be a dark and messy place, but the detective had a code of honor which made a kind of grim moral sense amidst the darkness and the mess.
Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon had such a code and he stuck by it — but Huston allowed him more than a trace of doubt as to whether the code had any ultimate meaning, any ultimate value. This was something new in the crime thriller, in hardboiled detective fiction — this hint of existential uncertainty.
In Double Indemnity, essentially a domestic murder melodrama, Billy Wilder offered a portrait of middle-class American life that was unremitting in its bleakness, its moral vacuousness. I'm not sure that Wilder had any particular message to convey by this — he just sensed that in the midst of the global horror of WWII audiences were looking for sterner stuff in their melodramas, a darker vision of ordinary life that would accord with the experience of civilization as a whole gone suddenly mad.
Both films were commercially successful — proof that audiences were at the very least receptive to darker visions, to stories that raised the most disturbing (and unresolved) questions about morality and society. Both films were also well-received critically. This gave other film artists a kind of permission to experiment with similar themes — within the confines of the crime thriller. They got very creative within those confines after WWII, when a generation of men scarred by war came home, and when the specter of nuclear annihilation became a reality for everyone.
They didn't think, “We're going to create a new kind of existentially challenging crime thriller.” They just inflected the crime thriller with a new mood. Audiences responded, and formulas began to solidify. Film artists imitated each other, got turned on by each other's work. Elements that worked in one film got incorporated into other films, given new twists. It was a combination of playing it safe commercially but also pushing things as far as they could go within familiar territory — testing how much darkness the public really wanted.
It turned out to be quite a lot — so much so that that during the Fifties filmmakers began to realize that the darker themes could be incorporated into other genres besides the crime thriller, as they were, for example, in the domestic melodramas of Sirk, in the Westerns of Ford and Mann. When that happened, the classic film noir more or less played itself out. Its usefulness as a cultural escape valve had ended. Any kind of film in the Sixties could deal with existential angst, with moral bewilderment, with political or social criticism, in more direct terms. America had internalized the darkness of the film noir — the resulting culture wars were just a matter of time.
Film noir had a beginning in the global dislocations and moral derangement of WWII, and an end in the open social and political critiques of the Sixties. There had never been anything quite like film noir before WWII, and there has never been anything quite like it since the Sixties. It was, and remains, a distinct tradition.
[With thanks to Tony D'Ambra at films noir for some thoughts that provoked the above meditation . . .]
On the face of it, the total collapse of Barack Obama's momentum in his race for the Presidency seems puzzling — but any poker player will find the phenomenon all too familiar.
Obama doesn't know how to play a big stack in a no-limit tournament. He ran up an enormous lead in chips early on by taking chances — positioning himself as a new kind of Democrat, one who'd risk it all to live up to his principles. Then, when he had the Democratic nomination locked up, coffers filled with contributions from millions of small-time donors energized by his boldness and courage, he changed his style of play — cow-towed to the wicked Clintons, picked a safe running mate, started breaking his promises to his Progressive base.
It happens every day at the poker table. A guy sits down, plays aggressively, builds a big stack — then suddenly gets afraid of losing what he has and tightens up. Other players realize he's lost his nerve and begin bluffing him, stealing his blinds — and his chips start dribbling away. When you play poker trying not to lose — you lose.
John McCain, who's holding 7-2 off-suit, just pushed all his chips into the pot with the Sarah Palin stunt — one of the most daring bluffs in the history of American politics. “Don't call me,” McCain says, “or I'll accuse you of hating motherhood, small-town America and ordinary folks everywhere.” Obama's holding a pair of Jacks. If he calls McCain, if he just states the plain truth that Sarah Palin is a religious extremist (when she's talking in church, if not on national television) and a compulsive liar, he wins. But, as I say, he's lost his nerve. He thinks that if he lays down his Jacks, he might get an even better hand on the next deal.
He might, but that's not the point. You can't play poker when you've lost your nerve — when you aren't willing to risk it all, especially against an obvious bluff. It's a lesson Democrats never seem to learn.
Look for John McCain to win this particular tournament.
[After writing the above I happened to read an old report in The New Yorker from the campaign trail in Mondale's race against Reagan in 1984. Polls showed that voters agreed with Mondale on the issues, when they were listed one by one, but that they liked Reagan better as a man. The Mondale camp decided that they had to just keep hammering away at the issues and not attack Reagan, for fear of offending those who liked him so much — and because Mondale wasn't “comfortable” in the attack mode. In the election, Mondale carried his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.]
I've posted some harsh things here about Sarah Palin, but much as I fear — and think everyone should fear — what she might do if she ever got control of America's nuclear arsenal, I must confess that there's a part of me that loves her. Camille Paglia (pictured above), in the extraordinary article from Salon below, made me realize why I love her:
You won't read anything like this article anywhere else in the national media — it's an exhilarating exercise in free thought, a celebration of Sarah Palin by a liberal, atheist, dissident-feminist lesbian who hates John McCain, supports Barack Obama and is a passionate advocate of choice on the abortion issue.
Paglia is dead wrong about many things but she's right about what Palin represents, at least in part — America's frontier past, its real frontier past, in which women hauled their fair share of the freight, and then some.
I especially commend this article to my fellow progressives, who need to understand its profound insights if they're ever going to have a chance of electing politicians who represent their views . . . something I fear is not going to happen this time around.
Sarah Palin may not be a good woman, or an honorable woman — she may even be a very bad and a very dangerous woman . . . but she's the kind of woman who got the crops in before the hailstorm hit while her husband was passed out drunk in the barn, the kind of woman who saved America's sorry ass more times than America cares to remember. As Paglia argues, she represents a kind of frontier feminism that was getting its hands dirty with the hard work of the nation before feminism was an ideology you could subscribe to — when it was something you had to live.
Credit where credit is due, folks. This is powerful stuff. There are, I suspect, millions of women who would be willing to endure four more years of economic catastrophe and international disgrace, indeed to sacrifice this nation's welfare for many decades to come, just to see that kind of feminism honored and respected. The impulse might be, in the larger context of things, irrational, self-destructive, borderline insane, but it's there and it's not going away. The chickens are coming home to roost.
There's a lot more to cheerleading than sis-boom-bah . . .
[Image by Al Moore for Esquire, 1950 . . .]
I've written before about the painting above by Arnold Böcklin, The Isle Of the Dead, which reportedly inspired some of the compositions in Hitchcock's Vertigo. It was an image that was important to Val Lewton, as well. A reproduction of it hangs on the wall of one of the interior sets in Lewton's I Walked With A Zombie, and of course Lewton made a film called Isle Of the Dead, which references the image more powerfully, in the film's setting.
Lewton and Hitchcock had crossed paths before they made any of these films. Lewton was working as a story editor and assistant to David O. Selznick at the time Hitchcock made Rebecca for Selznick. I think Lewton learned a lot from Hitchcock on that film — specifically how to create a mood of supernatural dread using only lighting and suggestion.
Hitchcock learned from Lewton in return. Lewton's The 7th Victim has a very creepy scene (below) in which the heroine, home alone, is taking a shower behind a translucent curtain when suddenly the silhouette of an older woman materializes on the other side of the curtain, delivering an ominous warning.
The moment doesn't escalate into violence, as it does in Psycho, but the sense of surprise, of violation, of vulnerability is exactly the same. The similarity of the two scenes is too great to be coincidental — and I think we can see Lewton's influence on another important Hitchcock film. The whole tone of Vertigo — quiet, dreamlike, subtly, ambiguously ominous — is far closer to the tone of Lewton's RKO horror films than it is to Rebecca, which is essentially a very classy and delicate rendition of the spooky atmosphere found in old-fashioned Gothic fiction.
The house, with its ghost, haunts the heroine of Rebecca. In Lewton's films, and in Vertigo, the whole world is haunted, unhinged — it has become a spooky maze with no exits. Hitchcock's innovation was to create Lewton's deranged dream world in color, in California sunshine — which is ultimately much more unsettling.