Don't call it a comeback

This interview with the great Angela Lansbury (about her first Broadway turn in more than 20 years) doesn't go far enough; it's like the reporter didn't want to know how The Picture of Dorian Gray's Sibyl Vane and The Manchurian Candidate's Commie Mommy folded into sleuth Jessica Fletcher, Cabot Cove's most famous mystery writer, whose sinister bubbliness always put on notice the second and third-rate actors populating "Murder, She Wrote." This old essay in The Stranger comes closest. Ms. Lansbury apparently recorded an exercise video in the eighties called, naturally, Positive Moves: A Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being at Any Age. Stacey Levine says it's "a staggering document--a nutty, busy 50 minutes of health advice, family anecdotes, muscle stretches, and thoughts on womanhood, as the cameras point continuously toward Angie."

Soggy

Hitchens has the last word on the pundit class, professoriat, and media's disgusting performances after the Virginia Tech shootings last week. To wit, Rev. Susan Verblugge:

Ms. Verbrugge recounted breaking through the previous week's numbness as she stopped on a morning walk and found herself yelling at the mountains and at God. Though her shouts were initially met with silence, she said, she soon was reassured by the simplest of things, the chirping of birds.
"God was doing something about the world," she said. "Starting with my own heart, I could see good."

Yes, it's always about you, isn't it? (By the way, I'd watch that habit of yelling at mountains and God in the greater Blacksburg area if I were you. Some idiot might take it for a "warning sign.") When piffle like this gets respectful treatment from the media, we can guess that it's not because of the profundity of the emotion but rather because of its extreme shallowness. Those birds were singing just as loudly and just as sweetly when the bullets were finding their targets.

Presumably Hitch wasn't asked to participate in a "circle of remembrance," as some Student Affairs did last week, while one delighted mourner banged a pot 32 times in remembrance of the victims.

David Halberstam -- R.I.P.

Glen Greenwald reminds us why Halberstam won't be remembered by those in power, or by their court jesters, the Washington press corps. To my good friend Alan, a fine reporter: if you're reading this, know that Tim Russert is a chump,

"She seemed to know more of the world than anyone around her"

(Returned from a trip to Seattle. Excuse the light blogging.)

I've been in love with Barbara Stanwyck since Preston Sturges' camera lingered over her spirited, persistent tousling of Henry Fonda's hair in The Lady Eve. Before the days of DVD I spent years trawling through video stores looking for Night Nurse, The Miracle Women, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and other Stanwyck obscurities (most, thankfully, widely available now) as fervently as I would for Jean Renoir films. The deftness with which her voice alternated between scorn and warmth, her immodesty (had lifelong friend Joan Crawford played Stella Dallas -- as she sort of did in Mildred Pierce -- we would have begged her daughter to shoot her instead of feeling repulsed and moved), the willingness to look ugly, to project misanthropy -- these qualities made her at home in the modern world, my world. Only Angelica Huston has come close.

Anthony Lane is right, though: she's an unknown to the general public:

To addicts of old Hollywood, as to pining critics, no actress delivered a more accomplished body of work; to the general public, however, her name is fading into the past.

Over Christmas, discussing movies with my mom and grandmother, the former wondered about actresses "of the past" whose work could favorably compare with "the actresses of today." Katherine Hepburn, duh. Bette Davis, no doubt (Abuela helpfully suggested Gene Tierney). When I mentioned Stanwyck, they both said "Ahh! Of course..." Excited they weren't (had they been given more time, they would have suggested Jeanne Crain). Maybe it was her anti-starpower, the quickness with which she dismissed pretension; she reminded them of too many other women they know, thus was of no interest to them. (Lane again: "By the time she arrived in movies, she seemed to know more of the world than anyone around her, enough to make audiences take her on trust.").

Stop Prejudice

(Overheard at the Supermarket:
"Wait, he was SOUTH Korean? I thought the North Koreans were the bad ones?")



Prejudice must not follow on the wake of the V.A. Tech massacre. It is ugly to cast upon an entire group a suspicious glare, but it's hapenned once and again: Salem Witches, Muslims, and Catholic priests know what I'm talking about, The V.A. tech murderer is NOT representative of a group, and before there are ugly waves of retribution upon the innocent, let me say this:

The average English major is a mostly harmless creature. You may see us brooding and reading "Catcher in the Rye" or "Confederacy of Dunces" and instantly hold on tight to your purse, but let me assure you, our downcast depressive ways seldom result in outright violence. Sure, there is something inherently anti-social in the way we persist on reading Beat poetry, and no one but a schizophrenic pervert would willingly subject themselves to exploring James Joyce or, God forbid, Ezra Pound, but our congenital alcoholism and drug use prevents most of us from engaging in high energy activities like shooting down a campus. An English major may PLAN a massacre, the same way he may PLAN a ten-volume epic depicting the rise and fall of a Kentuckian family, but they will abandon both projects as soon as an "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" marathon goes on the air. Should we go really off the deep end, we mostly end up in the gas oven or shooting ourselves (and only ourselves), after writing a goodbye poem comparing our lives to a sea-gull caught in a heavenly net of clouds, or some such bullshit.

I hope this provides reassurance.

The newest inductee to Stylus' Hall of Fame. Marcello Carlin's luminescent essay leads the charge. I re-evaluate the spotty The Red Shoes.

At Idolator Matos runs through the four worst Billboard Top Ten Singles charts of the Seventies. I regret that I can't remember which of the four finalists I voted for; maybe it was November 18, 1978, which happens to be the date on which I turned four. Yes, Rob Sheffield is quite correct to support "Hot Child In the City"; and I heard Exile's "Kiss You All Over" on the bus last week, the aural equivalent of having a bearded guy blow in your ear (I do remember stumping for "Listen To What The Man Said").

Here's the worst: December 15, 1979. :

1. Styx, "Babe" (A&M)
2. Commodores, "Still" (Motown)
3. K.C. & the Sunshine Band, "Please Don't Go" (T.K.)
4. Rupert Holmes, "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" (MCA)
5. Stevie Wonder, "Send One Your Love" (Motown)
6. Barbra Streisand & Donna Summer, "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)" (Columbia/Casablanca)
7. J.D. Souther, "You're Only Lonely" (Columbia)
8. The Captain & Tennille, "Do That to Me One More Time" (Casablanca)
9. Eagles, "Heartache Tonight" (Asylum)
10. Supertramp, "Take the Long Way Home" (A&M)

I DO like "Please Don't Go" and "Send One Your Love" more than the other voters, especially the sincerity-that-passeth-understanding with which Wayne Casey wrings sentiment from doggerel.

Vonnegut: irreverence vs irony

Vonnegut died last week. He meant nothing to me -- I'd always dismissed him as one read by people who don't read often and well (like those guys who revere The Doors and Kerouac, not necessarily together or in that order). To be fair, I bought Slaughterhouse-Five this weekend. Well -- what a disappointment. Sophomoric, scattered, morbid in the most obvious manner (no wonder it's often assigned in high school lit classes). Every time Billy Pilgrim punctuates a description of a gruesome death with "So it goes" it's like the honking of a car in heavy traffic. The dust jacket blurbs adduce Orwell, Koestler, Celine, when he's lucky to match Golding. Then there's a really good friend, whose literary judgment I trust, who praised Vonnegut as "the greatest satirist since Twain -- no, he's better than Twain." To be mean, I leafed through the death's-head musings collected in Man Without a Country, then read the chapter in Twain's Europe and Elsewhere called "To the Person Sitting in Darkness"; a more scorching indictment of Bush-era guile and hypocrisy has never been penned, until I remind myself that it was about McKinley and the Spanish-American War.

Before bed last night I read Anthony Hecht's "Persistences." His resplendent brittle surfaces seemed more commensurate with World War II-era eyewitness horrors than Vonnegut's, especially that poem's abrupt, shattering concluding stanzas:

Who comes here seeking justice,
Or in its high despite,
Bent on some hopeless interview
On wrongs nothing can right?

These things disdain to answer,
Though numberless as flakes;
Mine is the task to find out words
For their memorial sakes

Who press in dense approaches,
Blue numerical tattoos,
Writ crosswise on their arteries,
The burning, voiceless Jews.

This is not to suggest that aliens and time travel aren't appropriate media through which to assimilate an experience that refuses to disappear despite psychotherapy and marriage; but there's nothing in Slaughterhouse-Five as jolting as the transition in Hecht's poem, no more ambivalent response to the comfort of aesthetic distance. Plainly Vonnegut assumed that, in a climate in which Portnoy's Complaint and Myra Breckinridge were best-sellers, irreverence proved its own reward. Is it enough? Doubtless I have to read more Vonnegut.

Bright Eyes: me like!

This summarizes my feelings about Bright Eyes' Cassadaga (believe me, kids, for me this is progress). I'll go farther: the last time I heard so many lyrical howlers trapped in a song as fucking great as "Classic Cars" was New Order's "Everyone Everywhere"in 1993.

No such thing as "others" in East Germany

The last person with whom I'd agree on a film review is a regular reader of The Corner (well, I'm one, but I don't send Jonah Goldberg and K-Lo Lopez sunny letters); but this letter from a person less than impressed with The Lives of Others summarizes my reservations about that overpraised film:

1. The fundamental element of the plot, the Stasi officer Wiesler helping Dreymann, is such utter nonsense that it ruins the whole movie. It would never happen that some one with over 20 years of continuous indoctrination by the Stasi would help a mortal enemy of the State (and by Stasi definition, that's what Dreymann was). Even if Wiesler could have somehow come to see Dreymann as something other than an enemy, he still would have done what the Stasi expected, because he (Wiesler) would always have been watched and his work constantly checked.

2. That Dreymann could think he was not being observed and bugged is also utter nonsense. This guy was a top playwright who associated with the highest cultural officials and he thought he was not of interest to the State !?!? My wife was continuously watched and bugged simply because she had foreign diplomats as patients. Being watched and bugged was something every East German assumed was part of their life.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: diffidence short-circuits empathy

Meghan O'Rourke deconstructs the unusual talents of actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In three key performances the former child actor (remember him from "Third Rock From The Sun") has demonstrated a resistance to sentimentality that has thus far not hardened into sullenness. O'Rourke: "His characters are too intelligent, too merciless in their own self-evaluation, too implicated in their own destinies, to be patronized." If you haven't seen Mysterious Skin or the uneven-but-destined-for-cult-status Brick, do so.

Sad

That guy who was on "Back to School" died
Perhaps worthy of a longer obit by someone else?

Hertzberg: 'Bush II is just a twerp'

New Yorker "Talk of the Town" writer Henrik Hertzberg discusses, among other things, the efficacy of the National Popular Vote movement, which calls for a reform of the electoral process:

It would consist of a series of bills passed in the state legislatures, identical bills, that would each say our state will cast our vote for the winner of the national popular vote. And it will do this when and only when enough states will do the same to constitute a majority of the electoral vote. You wouldn’t have to abolish the electoral vote. It would be a constitutional change without changing the constitution -- a change in the British sense....The Electoral College would meet and vote and there would be a popular vote. You see how the mechanism works. The only thing that matters is who gets the most votes. It would be a huge change. It wouldn’t only mean that we would never have another 2000. That hardly ever happens. It would change the way things happen right away, the way presidents run for president. It means political organizing and activism would be worthwhile from coast to coast.

Of course, this renders the Electoral College redundant while preserving its essentials. More democratic than what we've got now. A refreshing point: we agree that the aura around the Founding Fathers is beginning to seem like plastic wrap around the head of a sleeping man.

"Silence, portent, and stillness..."

Simultaneously too attenuated and too condensed, The Good Shepherd is an anomaly, alright. Robert De Niro's take on the life of career CIA agent Edward White is so lacking in the animated sleaze we expect from spy thrillers that its lugubriousness becomes to seem a virtue in itself. No wonder it flopped. As his scripts for The Insider and Munich proved, Eric Roth's talent for pungent homilies serves him well, especially when one of the grim-visaged actors in De Niro's exemplary cast gets a chance to bare his teeth ("A senator once asked me why we never say 'the' CIA. I said, `Do you ever say `The God'?"). Otherwise the film's determination to present a tabula rasa of a man (this is not a man hollowed by the system so much as the story of a hollow man) without presenting the necessary dramatic foils grows tiresome, even though it's far from dull (this film's problems mirror my reservations with The Lives of Others). And De Niro's perversity here is truly delicious -- why else cast Angelina Jolie as the film's requisite Long-Suffering Wife? Lips never more bulbous and sensually depleted, this is Jolie's most physical performance, and, oddly, one of her best (it occurred to me: I haven't seen her on film since the misbegotten Girl, Interrupted); her brief appearances dovetail with The Good Shepherd's closeted asceticism.

As for Damon, I couldn't shake the impression that he was miscast; whatever Armond White thinks, Damon's mournful Matthew Bourne (the assonance is not unintentional) radiates more brains, more hurt. Is Damon a good actor? Like any handsome lad of Irish descent he fights a futile battle against doughiness: Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg in The Departed represent the two poles of Irish aging. In other words, his metier is to subvert his all-American shallowness (the attempts lead critics to mistake him for a "risk-taker" and, yes, a good actor). If I admire more than like him, blame the state of American films, which provide few opportunities for actors with his smarts to flaunt their wickedness (this partly explains why The Departed connected with audiences, and why its actors looked buoyed by the material). Still, the last 25 minutes of The Good Shepherd are almost...Bressonian in their use of silence, portent, and stillness. That Damon projects the qualities that De Niro and Roth enshrine is a testament to a determination Edward White himself might admire.

One step up, two steps back

A priest in a Catholic church in Wyoming withholds Communion from an out lesbian couple. Meanwhile, the Walt Disney Company extends its fairy tale wedding nonsense to gay couples.

The Hills Are Sort of Dead

Jane Smiley's "13 Ways to Read a Novel" ladled me up when I was drowning in my own literary soup of uncertainty, (to borrow one of her metaphors), so I looked forward to her latest with eager gratitude. Alas, "Ten Days On The Hills," as the poet once said, sucketh.

It's a good pitch: A motley crew gathers in the Hollywood hills to trade stories and fluids for ten days; the Iraq war looms outside; things will change. Unfortunately, the things that will change are likely to be of interest to no one but the participants, who are non-intriguing Hollywood types. Smiley's movie-obsessed characters are not exactly card-board cut-outs: they're more like the real enough people that stand next to the cardboard cut-outs and make the card-board cut-outs seem splashy and attractive.

That's a problem, because you're meant to spend ten days with them, and Gosh you will feel the time as they talk about things that are ocassionally interesting but just as often dull. The book really is like a Bunuelian cocktail party host that refuses to let you go, but doesn't really give you actual cocktails to stay for.

And then there's the sex, a lot of it, but it's not hot Hollywood sex. It's old people sex, and when it comes to the nitty gritty Smiley uses the descriptive lens of a woman in her late fifties that's gleefully surprised at the persistence of her libido. I say it's wonderful and empowering, it's nice to know to know that grandma is still going, but I don't need to have the sagging veins in grandpa's worn down, impotent you-know-what lovingly described. It's mean to be naughty, but it comes across as a turn-off.

AGI went without an April Fool's Joke. Tsk tsk

I actually can't tell if this is funny; the original song was already aware of its own excruciating idiocy, wasn't it?

Keith Richards: 'I snorted my father'

Yep.

Surely the best essay on the spooky genius of Bryan Ferry's These Foolish Things ("It imagines worlds inside these songs, worlds far removed in some cases from what the song's creators were even aware of"). I've never been able to listen to Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" without imagining campy background vocals and stentorian huffing from the artiste.

I hope Scott gets to The Bride Stripped Bare (Ferry's most satisfying, frustrating solo record) and Taxi (the nakedness of his cover of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" and the shivery ghoulishness of "All Tomorrow's Parties" are two of his best-ever performances).

David Lynch: on brush clearing, Reagan, angry dogs

A great interview with the director, published on the day I learned that Twin Peaks: Season Two will finally be available on DVD. My favorite bit:

You were a defender of Ronald Reagan in the '80s —

No, no, no. You know, we live in a time where everything that anyone has ever said, or that someone else has said that they said, goes on some site. It's kind of cool in some ways, but then you need to explain certain things.

Well, let's get this one correct for all time.

Reagan cleared brush. That's what I liked about him. My father grew up on a ranch in Montana, and I grew up in Western American thinking, sort of like cowboys in the past on my father's side. So I liked him for that, and I liked this one speech he read early on, at some convention. But at that time, I thought of myself as a libertarian. I believed in next to zero government. And I still would lean toward no government and not so many rules, except for traffic lights and things like this. I really believe in traffic regulations [pause]. Some stop signs are really absurd. Like at night, at two a.m., I come to a stop sign, obviously, no cars are coming. And when I stop at that stop sign, I feel like a fool. It's so ridiculous. And other times, when it's heavy traffic, and the light turns yellow, I really have a strong desire to stop, and to keep the car stopped until the light turns, and then to look both ways before going forward. A lot of situations are a matter of life and death. So I believe in traffic rules.

Gators win it

Again.

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