Alan Moore and David Lloyd: V for Vendetta

Picked this up at Powell's, figuring it was time I started giving myself more than a nodding acquaintance with some of the English language graphic novel landmarks.  I expected great things from this.

And I have to say, I was a bit disappointed.

Art:  I like the mostly outline-less heavy black art.  It has something of a German expressionist woodcut feel to it.  I hate the pastel colorings, though.  It's an interesting idea, but has nothing at all to add to this particular story.  (I know that it was originally published in b&w and it was the American reprint that added the colors, but it was Lloyd himself who did them:  I don't blame Vertigo.)

Story:  A classic, to be sure, with that familiar literate pithy excoriating Moore writing.  But to be honest, as a script it got a little talky in the last third, not to mention preachy.  The ideas were pretty clear already, and V eventually goes from being a charismatic enigma to an annoying blowhard.  (I grant that part of this may be Moore's intention.  But I doubt all of it is.)

Overall:  This suffers from a known issue with ambitious graphic novels where the script and art are by different parties:  both are trying to raise the stakes independently, and they do that by each honing their individual craft, and in the process destroying a lot of the comics-ness of the thing.  (I think McCloud talks about this, although not w/r/t this title.)  That is, Moore's writing is brilliant but way too much for the medium - too many words, too much literary posturing.  I have fewer issues with Lloyd's art (color aside), but I feel like he's trying to cram so many panels into each page to keep up with Moore's monologues that the stories can't really get going in a comics way.  Thus, script and art are independently quite fine, but for me at least don't really fuse together in the way that the best comics do.

But then again I'm probably spoiled by manga.  I mean, I guess I was expecting this to be, according to the hype, one of the most sophisticated, complex, and adult comics of all time.  But there are a half-dozen things running in Morning alone right now that beat it on those counts.

Nishimura Kenta: Kueki ressha (2010)

Nishimura Kenta 西村賢太 shared the 144th Akutagawa Prize (for the 2nd half of 2010), with his Kueki ressha 苦役列車 (Train of hard labor). 

It serves me right.

All along in my reviews of these things I've been throwing around the term "I-novel" loosely, far too loosely for my own good.  What I was trying to say with it was that A-Prize novels tend to fall into a first-person, confessional mode that is one of the hallowed literary conventions of modern Japan.  This mode is sometimes associated with something called the "I-novel" or shishōsetsu 私小説 (or watakushishōsetsu).  But, strictly speaking, the shishōsetsu was a much more limited and strictly definable phenomenon of the naturalists of the early 20th century - and the odd thing is that many of them didn't write in the first person.  They went through the pretense of putting their navel-gazing in the third person, leaving it to the readers (and the journalists) to piece together the I-ness of the thing through matching thinly-disguised details in the text with the documented life of the author.  I mean, they weren't fooling anybody, but this is what they did, and it shouldn't be conflated with the larger phenomenon of first-person confessional slice-of-life novels in modern J-lit, which owes a lot to but isn't completely identical with the shishōsetsu properly speaking.  I conflated it.  My bad.

This kind of clarification (okay, confession) becomes necessary at this point because Nishimura Kenta is self-consciously trying to bring the shishōsetsu idiom, narrowly defined, into the 21st century.  In fact he's so open about his devotion to this idiom that he was instrumental in getting one of its more obscure practitioners, Fujisawa Seizō 藤沢清造, back into print. 

His story is confessional - oh boy is it confessional - but it's written in the third person.  More than that it's written in a prose style that's instantly recognizable as belonging to the naturalists of the early 20th century. 

The story is about a teenager named Kanta (not Kenta) in the mid-1980s who has dropped out of school after junior high to live hand-to-mouth as a day laborer.  He's estranged from his mother, and his father is in prison for sex crimes.  Becoming known as the family of a rapist ruined Kanta and his mother, and is largely responsible for Kanta's miserable existence, or at least that's how Kanta sees it.

If you know anything about the tradition that this story is an homage to, you'll expect the story to detail a miserable personality and its obsessions with sex, violence, and unreasonable grudges that doom the protagonist to failing at life, and that by rubbing the reader's face in the sheer squalidness of life the writer is hoping to arrive at some sort of ultimate truth, if only by forcing us to confront certain existential tragedies.

That's exactly what Nishimura does here.  Over a hundred and forty pages we follow, in minute detail, Kanta's days working as a seafood unpacker, missing his rent, sleeping with prostitutes whenever he gets enough cash, skipping work whenever he gets enough money to eat for two days in a row, seemingly never showering, and creeping out more normal people who try to befriend him.  And he can't figure out why he's all alone.  Must be his father's fault...  (Needless to say, the details of Kanta's life match up quite well with Kenta's.  Notoriously, in his post-A-Prize interview, when asked what he was doing when he got the call saying he'd won, he said, "I was just about to hit a sex club."  Coming from Murakami Ryū this might have been edgy or cute, but Nishimura made it sound just kind of matter-of-fact, like the old sexual harasser in the office who can't figure out why pubes on a Coke can don't make the ladies swoon...)

At first I thought this was going to be a parody.  His emulation of the old prose style is pitch-perfect, and there is a mildly interesting disconnect in reading it applied to '80s things - imagine Sōseki describing vending machines and you'll get an inkling.  But by the end it was clear that Nishimura wasn't up to anything new at all.  In short, he's just trying to bum you out, just like his idols. 

The o-make story here, Ochiburete sode ni namida no furikakaru 落ちぶれて袖に涙ふりかかる (Broken down, with tears falling on his sleeve), is if anything even more unpleasant.  It joins Kanta two decades later, in something close to the present day, when he's scraping by as a writer of shishōsetsu.  We spend the first half of the story getting detailed, vivid, and yet somehow dull descriptions of how he has to piss into a plastic oolong-tea bottle because he's thrown his back out and can't get out of bed.  Halfway through we realize he's waiting for the announcement of a literary prize that he's up for.  We then get a prodigious outpouring of bile on how he knows that it's unbecoming of him to want the prize so desperately, but he wants it anyway.  (Okay, so that's kind of interesting to someone who's interested in the idea of literary prizes.)

So, obviously I didn't enjoy these stories.  So what?  I'm not sure so what.  I don't have to enjoy them to see literary value in them.  So do I?  See literary value in them?  Usually I'm game for that question, but I feel like to try to answer it with regard to Nishimura would just send me off into the night looking for an oolong-tea bottle to piss in and muttering about the impossibility of defining literary value.  If you're really, really in need of having your face rubbed in the misery of existence, then Nishimura's probably doing something valuable.  But otherwise this book is a just a wallow in a particularly grotesque kind of self-pity, unrelieved by any humor, couched in a prose that's trying really really hard to be as ugly as it is.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Flappers and Philosophers (1920)

The best thing about Fitzgerald's first short-story collection is its title.  Seeing it, and knowing of Fitzgerald's reputation as poet laureate of the Jazz Age, and maybe being familiar with his later knowing, sympathetic portraits of wild women and enchanted men, you're probably going to expect a completely unbridled, unsobered-up collection of hot jazz fantasias.  Specifically the title seems to suggest that the collection will present a contrast between the body-centered concrete liberation represented the flapper and the mind-bound abstract repression represented by the philosopher, and that this contrast will redound (scandalously) to the Flapper's benefit by suggesting that she is the true Philosopher (in the sense of having the most persuasive access to Truth and Understanding).  The title does all this (for me, anyway), and what's even more exciting is that it does it all with such perfect music in the language - the three words of the title.  I mean, think of the orthography and how it relates to the sounds.  In the word "flapper" an "f" sound like an "f" and a "p" sounds like a "p":  straightforward, honest, no nonsense, intuitive.  In "philosopher" a "p" is denatured, abstracted by an "h" until it stands in for a displaced "f":  letters are one or two steps removed from their reflexive, direct sounds.  They're processed through the brain, rather than proceeding naturally from the lips.  The words work, in this instance, like the readings they're meant to evoke.  "Philosopher" is fake nonsense:  "flapper" is real.

I wanted to read that book.  Unfortunately, Fitzgerald's book only has a couple of stories worthy of that title.  "The Offshore Pirate" and "Head and Shoulders."  The latter really does translate the ancient mind/body split into contemporary (Jazz Age) terms, with its pairing of a Broadway ingenue and a Yale prodigy who in the end switch places.  The former presents a really indelible sketch of a flapper, Ardita, "slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity," who is seduced by, or maybe seduces, a modern-day pirate.  Despite the condescending O. Henry twists at the end, these stories display the kind of louche brassiness that one might expect from the title of the book.

But the rest of the stories are not that.  At their best they're deft character studies (like "The Ice Palace" or "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"), and at their worst they're alarmingly conventional ("Benediction," "The Cut-Glass Bowl").  Either way, they're much more mundane than I've come to expect from Fitzgerald.  Middle-brow magazine fodder, which is I guess what they were.

David Fincher's The Social Network (2010)

Just got around to seeing this, right on time.  Don't have much to say except that, despite all the acclaim it got, I guess I was still doubtful that much could be made of the story, and that I was wrong.  It's a serious movie - if only because it lays bare, in an artful way, the obvious metaphors inherent in the whole thing.  I mean, what we all realized, in that three or four year period in which we all joined Facebook, was that the site was not at all redefining the way we interacted, but rather was codifying and making explicit what was already happening in our lives.  The movie brings that out nicely.

It reminded me of one of my college roommates, a history major who used to tutor freshmen.  I'd lie on my bed half-reading and half-listening to him, and one day he told a freshman, what you have to realize is, everybody who ever lived is basically driven by a desire to get laid, and that includes famous historical figures.  It all comes down to sex, and sometimes food.  Later I realized it was hardly an original argument, but it was the first time I'd heard it, and it made a big impact on me.  This movie gets that.

My other reaction to the film was one of total wonder.  I was at Harvard during the years when this all happened, but I was totally oblivious to it.  I was a grad student, and at least in my department that seems to have meant being almost totally estranged from the undergraduates.  I'd teach them, but I never really understood their world.  I have no idea, therefore, if this movie gets that right.  Hell, I didn't even join Facebook until it was opened to everyone, and then only because I heard about it from family members, not fellow Harwardians.

Wong Kar-wai's 2046 (2004)

This is the first Wong Kar-wai joint I've been disappointed by.  Knowing that this was a loose sequel to In The Mood For Love, which I loved, I was expecting great things.  And there are some great things here, but the whole thing isn't a great thing.

Visually it's impeccable - but that kind of goes without saying for Wong and Doyle by now, doesn't it?  They're expanding on their '60s-style-and-texture fetishes of the previous film (there's a shot with a green-tinged Faye Wong in the foreground and a green naugahyde chair in the background shadows that just knocked me out), and adding to them a deliriously mod futurism.  The sci-fi elements in this film, while a disaster for the story, allow them to cut loose with some near-Barbarella level visual play.  Someday I'd like to see them cut loose with a full-on sci-fi flick - I'd expect something along the lines of Fifth Element, style style style.

Unfortunately, the gynoid and Train to the Future bits strike me as silly in unintended ways - Kimura Takuya looks particularly lost in these scenes, and at one point Faye Wong actually starts moving in stop-motion, like every ten-year-old does when imitating a robot...

As for the rest of the film, well, it just didn't do it for me.  Maybe it was unfair to compare it to In The Mood For Love, because in comparison to the clear emotional through-line in that film, in this one the emotional arcs seemed muddled to me.  Maybe it's because Tony Leung's character's motivation was left unclear right up until the end.  As Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki summed it up, it's a movie about a guy who can't get over a past love - but we don't learn that he even had a past love until ten minutes before the movie ends.  Of course if we believe that this is really a continuation of In The Mood, then we already know that - but there are enough shifts to leave us in doubt about that at first, I think.

Maybe I'm just getting impatient with the director's prioritizing of visuals and mood over story;  I know that's his bag, and I expect it.  But in what I consider his best films, the intimations of story that do sneak in support the visuals, and the whole thing comes together.  Not so here.

Groovy Talkin' Verve (or, Talkin' Verve: Groovy!) (1998)

This set tries to answer a serious question in a fundamentally unserious way.  At the same time, only different:  it documents some artists trying to answer a serious question in ways that range from serious to un-.  Viz.

The rise of rock over the course of the '60s seemed to threaten to, and in fact by the end of the decade did, displace the mainstream of American pop.  From the '20s through the '50s, if I have this right, that mainstream had been a course defined, broadly, by jazz.  Pop singers like Sinatra had roots in jazz, and sang in a style that drew its rhythmic pulse and melodic impulse from jazz.  Popular music in America in this period swung, to a greater or lesser degree.  Jazz therefore had a natural "in" with pop, because it shared this basis in swing;  jazz was therefore able to enrich its repertoire with pop music, because the pop music of the period was so influenced by jazz.  The mutually-reinforcing cult of the "standard," right?  Pop music lent legitimacy by its adoption into the jazz world, which also legitimized jazz by situating it in close proximity to "standard" pop songcraft.  Tin Pan Alley and 52nd Street shake hands and both agree that each other was the shiznit. 

In the '60s (started in the '50s, but didn't hit until later), mainstream pop stopped swinging and started rocking.  We're not just talking the British Invasion, either:  Motown's beat wasn't a jazz beat.  Stax's beat wasn't a jazz beat.  And jazz suddenly found itself in danger of becoming superannuated.  Its standards were sounding old-fashioned.

There were lots of ways of phrasing the questions raised by this.  Could jazz appropriate contemporary pop songs like it had "standards"?  Could Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards tunes, or Holland/Dozier/Holland or Hayes/Porter songs, be jazzed up the way Rodgers/Hart or Cole Porter songs could? Could attempts at doing that result in serious music, or only kitsch?  Was jazz as a musical idea separable from the swing beat?  Could jazz continue to evolve?  Was rock intrinsically nothing but greasy kid stuff played by "non-playing motherfuckers" (in Miles Davis's inimitable characterization), or was there something there?

Verve, as we've seen, was already all about what the Village Voice would later (probably more retrospectively than it knew) call "pazz & jop".  So it was natural that the label would at least be willing to experiment with the New Rock, at jazzifying it, or at rockifying jazz - natural that the label would be in the forefront of that effort, which would have been perceived as an imperative by artists for every label.  So the question this set should be asking is, how did Verve do it?  And how well did Verve do it?

The problem is, I don't think the compilers were interested in answering any of those questions seriously, or in examining how the artists they're dealing with tried to answer them.  Because most of what's here is just here for a laugh, and the things that actually work, musically, that inspire grooving rather than goofing, work in ways that go unexplained by this compilation.

The compilation draws from a surprisingly small number of records released between 1965 and 1971 on the Verve, Mercury, MGM, and MPS labels.  Over a third of it is made of Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery selections, which makes sense, given how close those gentlemen stayed to pop in their Verve years, but these selections don't provide any revelations (except possibly for pointing out how bad a singer Smith was - he vocalizes on "Dock Of The Bay," and you wish he hadn't).  Add in a trio of Quincy Jones numbers and a pair of Willie Bobos, and over half of this disc is both literally and conceptually redundant with other items in this series.  Okay, fair enough, they probably didn't expect anybody to be so dumb as to get all the volumes...but some of the other cuts on here are good enough to make you wish the compilers had looked a little harder, thought a little bit more seriously about what they were doing.

The most ear-opening numbers are three tracks from the atrociously-titled Blood, Chet And Tears, a 1970 record that was Chet Baker's only outing for Verve.  We get "Vehicle," "Evil Ways," and "Spinning Wheel."  These work for much the same reason that Astrud Gilberto's take on Chicago's "Beginnings" works:  they draw from the most jazziest strain of contemporary rock, and they take it seriously.  Chet's playing well, the arrangements are forceful (very close to the originals, though), and you don't get the feeling that anybody involved is looking down their nose at the songs.

Which they wouldn't have necessarily had to do...  I'm no expert on any of this stuff, and I haven't yet started to seriously explore fusion (the elephant in this particular room), but it seems to me that a lot of the problem with the way jazz artists dealt with the rock threat stemmed from a general unwillingness.  Like, there were enough kids in rock bands in 1970 who listened to jazz, and who really wanted to expand their own music, that you could have imagined a serious rapprochement.  But instead most artists and producers seem to have taken an attitude of, "Shit, do we have to play this rock shit?  Okay, let's get it over with.  What're the kids listening to?  Beatles?  Rolling Stones?  'Tequila'?"  And then they just dash off whatever Stones title is selling best at that particular moment.  Instead of taking the time to realize that artists like Santana, Chicago, the Allman Brothers, King Crimson, and yes the Grateful Dead were thinking seriously about how to bring elements of a jazz sensibility into a rock context, and meeting them halfway.  (To this day, Santana's early '70s records get treated as "rock," and not jazz.  Why is that?)

Then again, sometimes the least serious intentions can still result in great music.  Oscar Peterson, in a quartet also featuring Ray Brown and Milt Jackson, provides a rendition of the Stones' "Satisfaction" that clearly doesn't take the tune at all seriously, but it's a complete gas.  Everybody solos at breakneck speed and within about thirty seconds you forget what tune you're listening to and just dig the improv.  Which is what tended to happen to standards anyway.  So.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night (1934)

Where do you go after Gatsby?  I went where Fitzgerald went, and frankly part of me wishes I hadn't;  Tender is the Night is such a different book, so much sadder.  More than anything it made me want to rush back and read his earlier, lighter things.  Flappers and Philosophers is next.

Other than that, I can't figure out how I feel about it.  Conventionally, probably.  I mean, I expect most everybody feels that the opening chapters, when we see the Gausse's crowd through Rosemary's eyes, gradually leading up to her/our encounters with Dick and Nicole Diver, are the most memorable. And it's no coincidence that those are the most Gatsby-like chapters, full of rich and beautiful people doing things that only rich and beautiful people can.

Once we start to see life from Dick and Nicole's perspective, they lose a lot of their appeal.  Which is, of course, part of Fitzgerald's brilliance in this book:  he's destroying their glamor for us, by showing us the insecurities and instabilities that lie behind it.

But that's not quite right, because if he had effectively destroyed their glamor for me, wouldn't I remember the opening scenes a little less fondly?  And yet a passage like this one floors me still (p. 21 of the Scribner paperback):

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, supper-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.  The Divers' day was spaced like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value...

I mean, no matter how much skepticism Fitzgerald turns toward this kind of luxurious living, it's still what he's best at describing.  Maybe he's good at it because he's skeptical of it, but as Greil Marcus once wrote about somebody else in a different context, I think Fitzgerald's attitude toward it is a loud yes and a quiet no, rather than the other way around...

In that passage I love, by the way, how he translates all of the Divers' pleasure-taking into foodie terms.  They consume their days with the discernment and deliberation of a gourmet.

There's another metaphor he uses for it, at least twice, that of curating.  On p. 258, describing the Divers moving back to the Riviera and the obscene number of possessions they take with them, he notes that "Nicole was capable of being curator of it all."  And then he proceeds to list them all.

You see this term popping up these days, too.  I don't know if Fitzgerald invented this usage, but it's a brilliant one in his book, because it perfectly captures the self-absorption of the hedonist who in his/her mind gives his/her material indulgences the dignity of scholarly or aesthetic pursuits.  That is, there are certain objects, and certain collections of objects, and certain settings for those collections, that require and deserve the kind of discernment and care that justify the term "curator" - but your luggage ain't it.  Your iTunes playlist ain't it.  Your spice rack ain't it. 

My blog ain't it.