Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996)

Bottle Rocket, in retrospect, feels like almost a parody of a Tarantino film.  Or if not a Tarantino film, then one of the plethora of Tarantinoesque films that popped up in the mid-'90s in his wake.  There's no way for anybody who wasn't there to imagine how many films about gabby hitmen and quirky small-time crooks came out in the '90s. 

Had it been written fresh in '95 or '96, I'd conclude that's what Bottle Rocket was (among other things).  Check the poster - that's how it was marketed.  But the small-time crook kernel of the film can be found, intact, in the 1992 short that the feature grew out of, and I think '92 was a little early for a Tarantino parody.  Which means that there really must have been something in the water in the early '90s.  Why the sudden renaissance in the heist flick, however loosely defined?  Was it a grunge thing?  A post-Cold War thing?  I was there - Anderson's my age - but I confess I never understood it.

Yes, I missed this at the time, too.  I saw it now in an effort to catch up on the Wes Anderson I missed - I came in at Royal Tenenbaums.  This one, maybe you had to be there for.  The acting is fine, the writing fine, the characters reasonably subtle and pleasantly offbeat, but the small-time crooks motif feels so dated now that I found it off-putting.  I definitely think Anderson only came into his own when he surrendered to his inner Salinger and started making every film a secret adaptation of part of the Glass family saga. 

The best parts of this, after all, are Anthony's very Holden Caulfield-like scene with his little sister Grace and his early scenes with Ines:  like Seymour in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," with the water, the innocent girls, and the shell-shocked young man.

Stephen King: The Dead Zone (1979)

This, too, is less horror novel than meditation on questions of character, it turns out.  Not that it doesn't have its creepy moments - the evocation of a seedy county-fair midway at closing time is, well, just like I remember it from childhood. 

But really what this book is, is a fictional working-out of every high-school kid's favorite alternate-universe scenario or ethical poser:  if you could go back in time to one of Hitler's rallies, knowing what you know now, would you or could you kill him? 

Okay, okay, just because you had heated debates about this over the cafeteria tables at lunch time in 9th grade with the kid in the Iron Maiden t-shirt doesn't mean it's not a serious question, right?  And I think part of King's value is how he, at least in the few things I've read, manages to engage serious questions that every ninth-grader can relate to.  Like, lots of people write good genre fiction that appeals to the masses.  Some people write good genre fiction that appeals to the masses, that also has some kind of hidden intellectual thing going on to appeal to eggheads.  How many people write good genre fiction that appeals to the masses, that also has some kind of hidden intellectual thing going on that also appeals to the masses?  King doesn't (at least in the few things I've read) talk down to his mass readership:  he talks up to them.  He assumes that they, like eggheads, can and will respond to a well-told story that also makes ya think.

And feel.  Because, yeah, the real horror in this, if there's horror, is not in the things Johnny sees, but in the responsibilities they give him.  It's a story in which we're asked, essentially, to root for and to pity a political assassin.  A guy who knows what history is going to say about him, and who cares a lot about that, but who feels like he has to do it anyway.  What's key is how King tips the scales in Johnny's favor (if that's the word).  King could have kept it ambiguous - a lot of writers would have challenged us to trust Johnny's word, to decide for ourselves whether or not he's right.  But we know the objective truth about the things Johnny knows subjectively, and we know he's right.  In other words, King is choosing to locate the suspense, and thus the horror, not in the question of whether or not Johnny's visions are real, but in what he's going to do about them.  The moral question. 

Skeery.

Tim Burton's Frankenweenie (2012)

I suspect the proper thing to do would be to hate this big-budget, middle-aged, full-length remake of a once-so-underground-it-was-almost-punk short.  But hating it wouldn't be fun.  So we love it.

Plus, it's stop-motion, and Tim Burton is the redeeming genius of stop-motion animation.  And this, complete with tres meta stopmotion-within-a-stopmotion (not to mention live-action within the stopmotion), is a work of genius.  And he had the balls to make it black and white, and make the mouse go along with it.

This is good Tim Burton:  the Tim Burton that, unlike the one that made Alice and Planet of the Apes, follows through on the true moral anarchy of his vision.  I was wondering, as it drew to an end, if he would relent this time and decide that young Victor needed to learn a Life Lesson about accepting death - but no way.  Frankenweenie is all about saying that Shelley (whether as Gamera or not) had it wrong.  When humans learn how to bring back the dead, we will, and we'll find we're pretty damn happy about it after all.  And maybe it won't be wrong.  ...Maybe.  I mean, I don't deny the moral power of Shelley's book.  I just like the way this film pokes it in the eye, too.

About that Gamera - you'll know what I mean when you see it, and I don't want to spoil it.  Let me just say it was one of my favorite things about this movie.  Burton set the joke up a good hour ahead of time, and in a fairly tasteless way - but when he springs it, all is forgiven.  (And there's something pretty emblematic of Burton's method in how he turns Mary W. into that.)

And the Sea Monkeys.  I'm old enough to remember ads for them in the back of comics. 

And Goodbye Kitty.

Stephen King: The Shining (1977)

Here's a post I never thought I'd write.  Stephen King ain't half bad, and The Shining ought to be part of the Canon. 

Me and Stephen King go way back.  When I was in high school in the '80s he was all the shit - he was what most of my friends who read books read, when they weren't reading Tolkien.  He was also the one popular writer that educators - like my senior year AP English teacher (the same one who gave me a reader's guide to Ulysses as a graduation present) - would recommend to kids to get them "hooked on reading."  The thinking seemed to be that he was a good enough storyteller to entice even the most illiterate teen through the arduous task of turning pages and sounding out words, but that he was also - somehow, someway - "literary" enough that teachers didn't feel like they were utterly turning their backs on the Grand Tradition of Western Humanism by recommending him.

I never read him at all until this last spring.  Two reasons, I guess.  One is that Stephen King at the time always struck me as the literary equivalent of, I dunno, Foreigner?  Kiss?  Bon Jovi?  I mean, name a big dumb hard rock band of the '80s.  But the second and real reason, which I would in fact admit to if pressed, was that horror as a genre scared the shit out of me.  I once made the mistake of watching a Freddy Krueger movie and had to leave the theater;  even a few years after high school when I saw Silence of the Lambs, I had nightmares for months.  So, Stephen King?  No thanks.

My horror aversion kind of slipped away as I grew older and more phlegmatic.  After 30, anyway, I no longer got spooked by stuff like that.  But still, I never got around to reading King until this past spring, when I was teaching Yoshimoto Banana's Amrita.  I kept reading that King was one of her favorite authors, and it bothered me that I'd never read him.  I picked up this and a couple of others, and wow:  not bad.

I knew, by this time, the Kubrick film, but (like, my sense is, most Kubrick fans) I expected this to be a case of a nontranscendent genre novel getting turned into Something More.  But in fact the book is already Something More.  The horror is there - the genre requirements get satisfied, and then some - but it's also a surprisingly detailed and sensitive character sketch.  You get to know Jack and his problems well enough to understand quite easily why the Overlook Hotel found him a good target.  Which is to say, you come to believe Jack capable of great cruelty and violence without any help from supernatural forces.  And (what helps make it satisfying for those who read for depth rather than just thrills) you also come to pity him - to understand him well enough to feel sorrow as well as horror at his character.

What's more, ever since reading it I'm seeing Shining references in the most surprising places.  The one that really got me was when I realized that the last part of Murakami Haruki's Wild Sheep Chase is an obvious gloss on the ending of The Shining.  (The book version, not the film.)

Part of the value of a canon for me - why despite having come of age during the Canon Wars and despite devoting my career to the study of books that would never have been admitted to the Canon in the West when it was at its strongest - is its utility.  I like being able to get the joke.  I like being able to know what Murakami's doing when he blows up that house at the end of the book.  I like what he's doing:  I like how he's using his work as a commentary on King's, and King's work as a commentary on his own, and I like the mental exercise of comparing the two, and the aesthetic payoff that comes with appreciating the two in juxtaposition.  A canon gives writers and readers the tools to do this.  Of course writers will always make references, and will and should never be limited in those references to a predetermined set of works - that's not what I'm saying at all - and I would never advocate for a canon as a thing written in stone reflecting some sort of eternal principles.  I'm just saying that if a citizen, in the process of becoming educated, is exposed to some kind of body of works that have helped shape the culture around her, then she's that much more equipped to understand that culture - where it's coming from, what it's actually trying to say (and do) to her.  ...In the end, of course, what I'm talking about is social cohesion, right?  I believe there ought to be a way for us to learn how to talk to one another, get at least some of each other's jokes, without it necessarily meaning that we're all homogenized.

On the other hand, I still haven't read Ulysses.

Stan Getz: "Dynasty" (1971)

Some rather late Stan Getz, and a very late release for Verve - they'd be absorbed into the Polygram conglomerate the following year.  Not quite the end of the line for Getz;  he'd continue recording pretty much up to his death in 1991. 

The tune is "Dynasty," and it's part of a double-elpee recorded at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London in March 1971 and released as Dynasty the same year.  The backing musicians are all Europeans, and they're pretty good - Eddie Louiss on the organ is the one to pay attention to.  Unfortunately the recording isn't the best, and his quieter moments get kinda lost in the ether.  But he's a monster on this track (the only one I've heard from the album, actually - I have it on a Getz comp), one minute vamping like a seedier Booker T, the next sounding like Keith Emerson in a poker game against Gregg Allman.  A whole different bag than Getz's labelmate Jimmy Smith.

And Getz himself - well, if you still think of him as Mr. Bossa Nova and little else, then you really owe it to yourself to listen to this track.  He's clearly been listening to Coltrane, and brings both the soulful-wailing and polymathematical-abstraction aspects of Saint John into his soloing here, but he does it without losing the essential personability, the accessible emotion, the heartbreaking gentility of tone, that always marked Stan's own playing. 

In other words, this is a cool nine minutes.

Lady, Be Good! (Shedd Institute)

Only once in a blue moon do Mrs. Sgt. T and I go out for live entertainment.  Almost never.  This is one of the reasons it didn't bother us to move from a metro area of a millionish to one a tenth that size:  even with world-class music and theater venues all around us we hardly ever went out. 

But last night we did.  Saw a poster in a coffee shop and needed a night out and so we found ourselves at the Shedd Institute in downtown Eugene seeing a performance of Lady, Be Good.

Lady, Be Good!  It came at a good time.  In the last year, unbeknownst to my blogging self, I've been gradually (okay, maybe a little half-heartedly) exploring the Great American Songbook via jazz interpretations of it (there's a great series of Verve discs...).  And it got me intrigued by things I never would have approached willingly a couple of years ago - musicals, namely, and especially of the archaic Broadway variety.  I found myself excited about the prospect of hearing some of these songs (I only knew "Fascinating Rhythm" and "Oh, Lady Be Good") in their original context, sung straight.

I wasn't disappointed.  It's local theater, okay, so it wasn't perfect.  The orchestra took a while to get warmed up - they played the overture and everything, which was nice (it quotes from "Rhapsody In Blue," which had premiered not long before this shows did in 1924), but they didn't really hit their groove musically until near the end of the first act.  Same went for the actor/singer/dancers.  Their comic timing didn't really click until the second act.  It was a half-staged production - full costumes, minimal props, singing and dancing at the front of the stage, but dialogue delivered in read-through fashion with a narrator.  It might have been better if they'd gone ahead and acted the thing;  it might have helped with their timing.

But at its worst it was still entertaining.  And for most of the second half they managed to bring the farce alive, so that you could see how it was supposed to work.  They even pulled off the Charleston number in quite nifty fashion - nobody can match Fred and Adele, especially the Fred and Adele in my imagination, but these dancers at least made me feel like I could imagine Fred and Adele. 

Yeah.  So now I've seen a Gershwin musical, I've floated on the gentle swing of "Lady, Be Good" and "So Am I," I've had "Fascinating Rhythm" stuck in my head for twenty-four hours, I've, you know, figured out why all that fringe is there on flapper dresses.  And for the hundredth time, in the hundredth different way, I'm thinking what a surprisingly cool town the Euge is.  Only a hundred thousand people, in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, and yet I can go downtown and see a revival of a 1924 Gershwin musical.  And it's pretty okay.

That's all.

John Le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl (1983)

Obligatory first reaction, which I'm probably undercutting more than I mean to with this self-ironizing remark:  this book could have been written today, almost thirty years later, and not many of the details would need changing, and that's a disgrace.  Well, all of the details would need changing:  but not the overall arc.  And since Le Carré's genius is in the details, I guess it's better to retract that first claim entirely.  This book is not just about the heartbreaking intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It's about the details of where that conflict stood in the early '80s, and how it was thought about by certain Western Europeans.  And for that, when you read it today, it's an education.

But like everything else I've read by Le Carré so far, this so far transcends the political and historical specifics of its subject matter as to make me all but forget that, oh yes, it's also about a young woman who gets caught up in the post-Munich '72 cycle of attacks and reprisals.  Because what resonates most about it is its portrait of a young woman who is so disenchanted with her home country, so disillusioned about her own background, so sick of her self, that she's all too eager to allow herself to be enchanted, illusioned, and healed by the Other.  Whatever Other presents itself, apparently.

In that, this book struck me almost as a modern retelling of Waverley - one of my favorite books, although I seem to have never blogged it yet.  That, too, is about innocent idealism and those who would take advantage of it;  but if anything, Le Carré is more evenhanded than Scott.  He doesn't have Scott's conservative faith that it would be an unqualified good for the girl to grow up and out of it.  Indeed, this book rivals Darkness at Noon in the rigor with which it makes us see the logic of both sides' positions.

The spymaster - or rather, one of them, the one known alternately as Becker and Joseph - also turns out to be a fascinating psychological study.  In Smiley we got a portrait of the spymaster as inertial force, somebody who, in the end, is struggling because he's always struggled, and because he's being struggled against, but whose ideological foundation has long since crumbled away;  in Joseph we get spymaster as psychologist.  Not as analyst, but as someone whose job it is to help the patient into and through transference - to be for the patient (the agent) whatever the patient (the agent) needs him to be, in order to create the patient as true agent.  To get Charlie to do what he needs her to do, Joseph has to let her fall in love with him.  In the hands of a lesser spy novelist this would be James Bond territory - sleep with a woman and she'll do whatever you tell her - but here we get glimpses of just how much it's taking out of Joseph to treat another human being like this.