Category Archives: Books

TERRY AND THE PIRATES

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As
I've written before, these are great times for fans of vintage comic
strips.  Publishers are bringing back into print many classics of
the genre — among them Popeye, Dick Tracy and Gasoline Alley — in handsome multi-volume editions that will eventually make available complete runs of the strips.

Not least welcome in this avalanche of treasures is the first volume in a series published by IDC that will cover all of Milt Caniff's wonderful Terry and the Pirates adventure
strip.  It's a big, well-printed volume with the daily strips in
black-and-white and the Sunday strips in full color.  This first
installment covers 1934 to 1936.

Caniff's is known as the “Rembrandt of the comic strip” for his
exquisite draftsmanship, but he has also been studied by filmmakers for
the dynamic cinematic compositions of his panels, the economy and punch
of his visual narrative style.

It's impossible to convey just how much fun Terry and the Pirates
is — a series of rattling good yarns set in the Far East that move
fast and are full of surprises, drawn with wit and elegance and bold
graphic invention.

Caniff didn't come up with idea for Terry and the Pirates and he didn't own it — so he eventually moved on to an original series called Steve Canyon, which is even more ambitious visually but, to my mind, a bit stodgier in terms of story and character.  The Canyon
strips have been available in a series which prints the panels so small
that it's hard to read the text sometimes without a magnifying glass
and almost impossible to appreciate the graphic work.  It's not worth owning.

The IDC edition of Terry and the Pirates, though, does full justice to Caniff's art.  I think it's one of the most important publishing events of 2007.

SIMONE WEIL ON BRUTALITY

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Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less
inhuman than our opponents we will carry the day.  Brutality,
violence, and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide
from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows
before.  For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they
must be actively and constantly put into practice.  Anyone who is
merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent, and as inhuman as
someone else, but who does not practice the opposite virtues, is
inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige, and he
will not hold out in   . . . a confrontation.

                                                         — Simone Weil

A SONNET FOR TODAY

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On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats:



Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific–and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.



Chapman’s Homer seems a bit stodgy today but compared to previous
translations in English it had power and punch — and was much closer
to the supple, hard-hitting Greek of Homer.  You have to read
Stanley Lombardo’s bold new translations of Homer to get a sense of how
Chapman’s version must have sounded to Keats’ generation.


The last four lines of this sonnet are what make it memorable, even
though we may know that it was Balboa, above, who first sighted the Pacific
from the vantage point of the New World (in Panama) — not “stout
Cortez”, below.


Hernán Cortés did reach the Pacific coast of Mexico sometime
later, or rather he reached the coast of a sea that communicates with
the Pacific, now called the Gulf Of California or the Sea of Cortez or,
of
course, the Mar de Cortés.  This is the great body of water that
lies between the west coast of mainland Mexico and the Baja California
peninsula.

WITNESS

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[Photo © 2007 Paul Kolnik]

In his great book The Labyrinth Of Solitude,
Ocatvio Paz remarks that “architecture is a society's unbribable
witness.”  If you want to know the truth about any society, look
at what it builds.

So what is the witness of Las Vegas, the most popular tourist
destination in America?  As you sit on the terrace of a French
bistro, attached to a replica of Paris, and look across the street at an
evocation of an Italian lake, or down the street at a replica of New York,
or up the street at an evocation of ancient Rome, the message is clear —
“We don't know where we are.”

Everyone in America feels this, along the strip developments and in the
malls that all look the same, whether they're in Georgia or California
— even though they might not feel it on a conscious level, or admit it to themselves.

That's why they come to Las Vegas in such great numbers, and why they
love it.  Las Vegas tells us the truth, let's us admit the truth
— we don't know where we are — and the truth is always
exhilarating.  It makes you want to party.

[A note to readers: I apologize
for the site's being out of commission for a while — it exceeded its
bandwidth once again, even though my hosting service allowed me double
the usage I was paying for.  They finally decided that I needed to
pay them more money — that now done, the site should be functional for the
foreseeable future.  Thanks for the interest!]

OFF THE ROAD

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This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road
and the book is getting a lot of attention.  (That's Kerouac's
design for the book's cover above.)  It was certainly an important
book — crystalizing the odd malaise that gripped America after WWII
and presenting an image of the way American youth would react to it, in
increasing numbers, by cutting loose from everything, drifting into a
world of sensuality and drugs, hitting the road in search of . . .
something.  The book's freewheeling, lyrical prose was brilliant
enough to allow one to take it seriously as a work of art, to place it
in the picaresque tradition of Huckleberry Finn.

The moral and spiritual emptiness of On the Road's
protagonists was part of the
book's truth, of course, but that truth, to me, was a thin one, without
any deep humane dimensions — and this is nowhere better revealed than
in
the book's depiction of women.  It's not just that Kerouac's
protagonist's treat them badly, or indifferently, but that they don't
seem to see them as human beings — and, more importantly, that the
author himself doesn't seem to see them as human beings.  This is
quite a different thing from writing women characters badly,
unconvincingly — quite a different thing from ignoring women or even
raging against them for their otherness, as Henry Miller sometimes
did. 
Kerouac simply seems to see women as an existential nullity.

Some women say this doesn't bother them — that the freedom
and exhilaration of the book's spirit is an inspiration to them as
women, however the women in the book are drawn.  I can appreciate
the sense of that — but it doesn't lessen my revulsion at the way the
women in the book are drawn.  It strikes me as revealing a basic
truth about almost all beat fiction and poetry — that once you get
past the attitude, the style, there's very little underneath it, and
what there is underneath it is often repellent.

William Burrough's magical, fractured prose, best appreciated in his
recorded readings of it, is invigorating and exciting — but a little
of it goes a long way.  It's like a jazz improvisation on a melody
that the musician has forgotten, or never knew in the first
place.  It's a gesture, an exercise, not an artistic creation.

Bob Dylan was the great inheritor of the beat tradition, but he
grounded his improvisations firmly in the blues and folk traditions —
he was engaged, with a great deal of humility, in a conversation with something beyond himself. 
His early work is marred by some of the same misogyny one finds in the
beats, by images of women that alternate between goddess and destroyer,
with no convincing human presence in either.

But Dylan, unlike the beats, grew as an artist.  He listened to
the culture around him, its roots and moods, and talked back to
it.  His work wasn't just an interior howl, a negation — he was a
rolling stone who could step outside of himself and watch himself roll.

When Kerouac tried that he was appalled by what he saw — or didn't
see.  He ended his life drunk, stoned, in a state of utter decay and
despair.  We can see the roots of that in On the Road.  Kierkegaard said that the precise quality of despair is that it is unaware of itself.  On the Road
is a harrowing portrait of a despair that is unaware of itself — one
its author shared, unawares, with the book's protagonists.

Kerouac's defenders say that only the work matters — not the
life.  But I say that with Kerouac the life is in the work — is
not
transcended in the work.  Which is not to say that the book isn't an
extraordinary thing, with passages of true greatness, depictions of
places and moods that are indelible, an authentic and often moving
voice with it's its own kind of feckless grandeur.  It's just to say that there's something missing from it —
some element of heart and soul and sympathy that is crucial to any great work of art.

ALWAYS CHRISTMAS

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In his fascinating novel Little, Big, John Crowley proposes the idea that time does not actually elapse between
Christmases — that at Christmas we simply flip into another time frame
in which it is always Christmas and always will be.  Then we flip
out of it again.







This is certainly how Christmas feels, and it ties in with some ideas Octavio Paz proposes in The Labyrinth Of Solitude, his great meditation on Mexican history and the Mexican character.



In the book, Paz discusses the importance of the fiesta
in Mexican life, as a time when Mexicans cast off their masks, the
barriers they erect against any penetration of their characteristic
solitude, and feel free to commune with others, sometimes socially,
sometimes erotically, sometimes violently.




Paz suggests that fiestas, and
all ritual celebrations, don't commemorate an event but recreate it —
recreate a transcendent moment when time is dissolved and masks are
discarded.  This of course ties in with the theological
proposition that Jesus is actually present in the wine and the host at
Christian communion services — and more broadly with Kierkegaard's notion that
Christian believers are literally contemporaries of Christ.




And of course it explains why time does not pass between Christmases.

RICHARD ELLMAN ON OSCAR WILDE

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While the ultimate virtue in Wilde’s essays is in make-believe, the
denouement of his dramas and narratives is that masks have to go. 
We must acknowledge what we are.  Wilde at least was keen to do
so.  Though he offered himself as the apostle of pleasure, his
created world contains much pain.  In the smashup of his fortunes
rather than in their apogee his cast of mind fully appeared . . .

     Essentially Wilde was conducting, in the most
civilized way, an anatomy of his society, and a radical reconsideration
of its ethics.  He knew all the secrets and could expose all the
pretense.  Along with Blake and Nietzsche he was proposing that
good and evil are not what they seem, that moral tabs cannot cope with
the complexity of behavior.  His greatness as a writer is partly
the result of the enlargement of sympathy which he demanded for
society’s victims . . .

    
As for his wit, its balance was more hazardously maintained than is
realized.  Although it lays claim to arrogance, it seeks to please
us.  Of all writers, Wilde was perhaps the best company. 
Always endangered, he laughs at his plight, and on his way to the loss
of everything he jollies society for being so much harsher than he is,
so much less graceful, so much less attractive.  And once we
recognize that his charm is threatened, its eye on the door left open
for the witless law, it becomes even more beguiling . . .

    
He occupied, as he insisted, a “symbolical relation” to his time. 
He ranged over the visible and invisible worlds, and dominated them by
his unusual views.  He is not one of those writers who as the
centuries change lose their relevance.  Wilde is one of us. 
His wit is an agent of renewal, as pertinent now as a hundred years
ago.  The questions posed by both his art and his life lend his
art a quality of earnestness, an earnestness which he always disavowed.



   
           
           
           
           
           
           
           
            — Richard
Ellman

   
              
           
           
           
           
           
           
            from his
biography Oscar Wilde



THE LOOK OF NOIR

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It’s a commonplace of writing about film noir to see its dark, moody lighting as derived more or less directly from the German expressionist cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, best
exemplified in work done at the UFA studio in Berlin.  The proposition is logical enough — the “UFA style” had become a kind of shorthand in Hollywood for highly exaggerated, expressionistic lighting, and many of the cinematographers and directors associated
with film noir had European backgrounds, with experience working at UFA itself or in traditions influenced by it.

The proposition gets a little shaky, however, when you examine the visual style of film noir
with a careful attention to detail.  Its resemblance to the look of UFA-style expressionism is mostly superficial.  The UFA style had a Romantic quality, evoking candlelight and gaslight rather more than popping flashbulbs, stabbing headlights and glaring neon — which characterized the noir style.  The UFA influence is very clear in the Hollywood horror film cycle of the 30s, with its atmospheric, Gothic sets and lighting — but it’s less clear in the jagged edges of light, the jarring collisions of black and white in film noir.

As I’ve written elsewhere: “Lotte Eisner sees Murnau’s visual strategy [in Faust] as one which opposes darkness against light, but this is not quite right, for Faust is not a film of stark contrasts, but of chiaroscuro, of subtle gradations and complications. Light itself is in some ways the protagonist of the film, its mysterious workings and shadings offering a mystical perspective, making the characters and settings emblematic but also providing consolation and inspiration — the sense of a world animated by Spirit.”  This was true of many films in the German expressionist tradition — and was decidedly not the visual strategy of film noir.



There’s another, home-grown visual tradition that I think had a much clearer influence on the look of noir — the American tabloid crime photography of the 1930s and 1940s.  A book called New York Noir makes a very convincing case for this influence.  It collects images from the pages of the New York Daily News and most of these images echo the look of film noir far more closely than the great films made at UFA.

The visual style in question begins with the adoption of the Speed Graphic camera by the Daily News photographers in the 30s.  Its faster film stocks, along with developments in synchronized flash technology, allowed these photographers to penetrate the night for the first time.  The flash itself created bold contrasts of light and dark and helped construct the public image of the night-time city, especially its seamy underside — an image that is faithfully explored in classic films noirs.

Weegee was the most famous of the Daily News photographers — his book Naked City brought the public a conscious awareness of the tabloid style as a distinct phenomenon,
recognized directly by filmmakers Hellinger and Dassin when they bought the book’s title
for their New York police procedural movie of the same name.  But Weegee was just one of many great tabloid photographers who pioneered this style, who lodged it in the public imagination.

The great filmmakers who worked at UFA before WWII, including many who
eventually made their way to Hollywood, certainly developed and codified expressionistic lighting in movies — but I think the many, mostly anonymous photographers who snapped pictures of crime scenes for the American tabloids had a much greater and more direct influence of the look of the film noir.

The frame below, from Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, seems to be trying to invoke precisely the look of a tabloid crime scene photograph:

BAD BLONDE

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In the annals of Hollywood degradation, no tale is more sordid than that
of Barbara Payton.  In her earliest days in the film business she
starred in pictures opposite James Cagney and Gregory Peck — then hit
the skids and ended up in her 30s hooking on the Sunset Strip, addled
by drugs and alcohol, bloated and with a few of her front teeth
missing.  She was dead at 39.

Her spiral to the bottom seems to have started with her disastrous alliance with B-movie star Tom Neal (above), who achieved immortality as the lead in the classic film noir Detour but whose arrogance and violent temper kept him perpetually on the
fringes of the movie business.  Payton tried to leave him and
became engaged to classy but alcoholic star Franchot Tone (below).  Neal
confronted Tone one night at Payton’s home and beat him within an inch
of his life, creating one of the biggest tabloid scandals of the
50s.  Tone recovered, barely, married Payton and divorced her a
few months later — apparently because she was cheating on him with
Neal.

Payton’s career never quite recovered, mainly because she couldn’t slow
down.  A sex addict and an increasingly dysfunctional alcoholic,
she went from one bad relationship to another, and by the time she
realized that her reputation had ruined her career it was too late to
rescue it.  She proceeded down her road to oblivion with almost
manic determination, eventually selling blow-jobs on the Strip for $5 a
pop, with several arrests for prostitution and theft along the way.

John O’Dowd has written a detailed and sympathetic biography of the doomed
starlet, plausibly suggesting that some sort of childhood sexual abuse
resulted in an overwhelming self-loathing in Payton — that on some
level she willed her own destruction.  Her story can take its
place with the one Robert Guralnick tells in his magnificent two-volume biography of
Elvis Presley as an object lesson in the way American celebrity can
destroy the fragile psyches of damaged innocents.

It’s all totally heartbreaking.  You might pick up this book
looking to relish the sheer sordidness of Payton’s story — and there’s
never been a more grueling (or more responsibly researched) examination of Hollywood sordidness — but you’ll
end up touched by its portrait of an oddly appealing lost soul.

O’Dowd has a web site devoted to Payton here.

CRIME PHOTOGRAPHY

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This fascinating book, Scene Of the Crime, features a collection of crime-scene photos from the files of the LAPD, from the 1920s through the early 1970s but concentrating on the 1940s and 50s.  The photographs are both disturbing, sometimes very disturbing, and beautiful.  No longer timely as records of current events, they have become instead extraordinary glimpses into vanished worlds.  They document mostly ordinary places made extraordinary by death or violent accidents.  They echo the process by which these deaths and these accidents act as a kind of camera shutter, focusing our attention on a precise moment in time, a precise locale.


Made for purely practical, forensic purposes, documenting scenes of great dramatic interest, they have no need to be dramatic themselves.  Even when they depict empty rooms, from which a murder victim has been removed, their intention to record as much of the room as possible, exactly as it is, lends them a spooky kind of power.  One is bound to ask, “Why am I being asked to look at this — what secrets lie hidden here?”

These are exactly the questions one asks when looking at the great photographs of Atget and Evans and Eggleston, which all have a forensic quality — they don’t interpret, they don’t intervene between the mystery of visual fact and the awe of the spectator.  They offer evidence, out of which we must build our own theory of the case in question.

                                                                                              © William Eggleston

There may be irony in these great reckonings in small rooms, but the police photographer and the greatest art photographers don’t need to point it out to us.  Any such attitude, such interpretation, might prejudice our eye, dull our investigative senses.

Much as I love the whimsical ironies of Winogrand, the dark ironies of Arbus, it is the forensic integrity, the humility in the presence of mystery I sense in Atget, Evans and Eggleston that I think makes them the greater artists.  There are images in Scene Of the Crime that could pass for images by Evans and by Eggleston (though perhaps not, for mostly technical reasons, by Atget.)

One comes to realize, paging through this book, that the presence of a corpse doesn’t make an ordinary place, an ordinary moment in time, extraordinary — it reveals them as extraordinary, by making us concentrate on them seriously and hard.  And this is exactly what the greatest art photographers do as well.  The fact that they can do it without the aid of a crime narrative is what makes them artists.  Take away the corpse from the image below, or imagine the figure as a drunk passed out on the floor, and you will find yourself squarely in Eggleston territory.

To see more images from the LAPD photo archives, go here.

CAMILLE PAGLIA ON ALFRED HITCHCOCK

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“Space is like an opaque medium that Hitchcock knows how to carve, trim and slice as if it were a side of beef.”



This is from Paglia's book-length essay on The Birds
— and what she says of Hitchcock is true of all the great directors,
who carve up and reshape space before our eyes, drawing us ever deeper into the
spatial illusion of the cinematic image, the core of its sensual appeal and the
primary medium of its emotional expressiveness.  This malleability
of space, its ability to be carved and reshaped in cinema, is what places cinema squarely among the plastic arts.

It's a hard concept to grasp, which is why film is traditionally
analyzed in terminology derived from the visual arts, like painting, or
the literary arts, like theater and the novel, even though its most
powerful effects more closely resemble those of sculpture, architecture
and dance.  Albert Einstein said, “Space is not merely a
background for events, but possesses an autonomous structure.” 
Film does not simply create occasions for visual or literary events — it investigates the structure
of space, associates the structure of space with the structure of
dreams. Orson Welles said that on some level every great film is a chase — which is
just another way of saying that on some level every great film is about space.


[Paglia's short book on The Birds,
published as part of the BFI Film Classics series, doesn't, to me, get
at the heart of the film's themes, but it's an exhilarating
intellectual tour de force
with a dazzling range of allusions to other works of art and to the
cultural matrix from which the film emerged.  It's an
indispensable text.]

POPEYE

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One day in 1929 a peripheral character popped up in a panel of E. C. Segar’s newspaper comic strip Thimble Theater  and proceeded to take it over.  His name was Popeye.  Below — his first appearance:

Thimble Theater started out as a parody of popular melodrama, but neither parody nor melodrama could contain the anarchic imagination of Segar.  His world was invaded
by supernatural elements, did not conceive of drawing clear distinctions between good and evil, and relished too plainly the energy of rambunctious physical violence.  It was rather closer in spirit to The Iliad than to The Perils Of Pauline.

Popeye at once seemed to offer a kind of sea anchor to Segar’s roiling, restless
sensibility.  Popeye was ever ready to dispense violence, in his
practical, unemotional way — as just another job, like hauling
anchor.  He’d obviously been around the world a few times —
nothing surprised him, or at least not for long.  He was never
heroic but always useful (a far cry from the righteous protagonist he later
became in the Fleischer animated cartoons.)

Seen through Popeye’s eyes, Segar’s world made sense — or rather its lack of sense didn’t seem too disturbing.  With Popeye at the helm, Thimble Theater sailed
on its eccentric way until Segar’s death in 1938, becoming one of the great, dark comic
works of American culture.  Popeye was eventually toned down and conventionalized as his adventures became addressed more and more to kids, but the real character is now available once again in a series of reprints of the original comic strip being issued by Fantagraphic books.

In well-printed, oversized volumes, the first of which is now out, we
can encounter him as he was — part Odysseus, part Achilles . . . the
eye of a perfect existential storm.

A DIRECTOR'S LIFE

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Alfred Hitchcock: A Life In Darkness and Light
may be the best biography of a film director ever written.  Long
and detailed, filled with fascinating information about all aspects of
Hitchcock's life and films, it's also a great read, almost as
entertaining as a Hitchcock film.




There have been two previous full-scale biographies of the director.  Hitch,
by John Russell Taylor, was published in Hitchcock's lifetime and with
his cooperation — it sets forth the basic facts without delving too
deeply into problematic areas.  Donald Spoto's well-known The Dark Side Of Genius,
published a couple of years after the director's death, was more
detailed and uninhibited but, as its title suggests, had a somewhat
slanted point of view.  It marshaled evidence and highlighted it
in such a way as to expose primarily the neurotic and malicious side of
the man.




Patrick McGilligan, as his title suggests, tries for a more balanced
view, and specifically challenges many of Spoto's interpretations of
events and sources, while treading fearlessly into territory that
Taylor avoided.




None of the books solves the mystery of Hitchcock's genius and art,
because genius and art are mysteries without solutions, but in
McGilligan one finds a plausible Hitchcock, one that contains all the
complexity and contradiction of the films themselves, the darkness and
the light.




It's a terrific achievement.


[Apologies for the web log's disappearance for a couple of days — it
exceeded its allotted bandwidth     . . . too many visitors!  I think
the problem has been solved, and thanks for the interest!]