Salvation Songs, part 6: Loser.

(They aren’t always good songs. Sometimes they’re terrible. But they’re the right songs. Ordained by God, and transmitted through an invisible stream of auditorial alchemy. Salvation songs. Read parts 1 and 2.)

1.

I knew Beck’s “Loser” was special the first time I heard it. The guitar is so distinct and pure, the drum machine and loops and the superb, mystifying lyrics. Despite the numerous records and the shifting, mercurial sound, Beck wouldn’t make a song as perfect again. Sometimes you get it right the first time. It came out in 1993. I was 16 years old. It was one of the first Buzzclips, back when MTV still had musical cache and when the label alternative meant something. Although I was characterized by punk and power pop, some of these early alternative bands made the cut. Beck was one. Tool, strangely, was another.

My sophomore year of high school, I started hanging out with a handful of juniors: Chad B., Tim H., and Matt W. They introduced me to a lot of things. Tim lived in a little side room off his parents’ house, and we spent a lot of time in there. He was an artist and a poet, he listened to Pink Floyd.

I knew Matt from soccer. He was hilarious, caustic and disparaging, an old kvetch in a young man’s body.

Chad was honest, sincere, yet mysterious. He lived nearby[1]. He had a mystical slant to his thoughts.

I don’t know why, but they liked me and included me in their group. They brought introspection, poetry, oddball literature and drug music into my life. We spent our time driving around town or hanging out at Tim’s. Wild man Robert (I’ve mentioned him before) often came along. (Jeff and Chris had their first girlfriends.)

One night Chad and I drove an hour out towards Alabama to go to a party at Braden Rogers’s house. Braden’s name means nothing to most people reading this, and I didn’t and don’t know him well. But I feel an enormous debt of gratitude towards him. When I was fourteen, just a fifteen months earlier, he saved my life.

2.

Like all high schools, Pensacola Catholic had some bullies, those ’roided up, prematurely muscled assholes who stalk the hallways looking for hair to pull and faces to smash. Some bullies drape their immense self-loathing with mean-spirited, always close to violence joking (a dude named Clayton operated in this mold, sort of like the joker, laughing maniacally while inflicting pain); some bullies are simply transferring their unhappiness from their homes; and some are just vicious and violent and mean. Chance W. was this third kind of bully. He had huge pectoral muscles when he was in tenth grade. He had three o’clock shadow at 15. He was rich and strong and rotten to the core, an unfeeling, nasty shell of a person. Most people from those years at Catholic have some story of a Chance encounter. This is mine.

One day Chance and two other sophomores named Neil and Tony came up to me in the lunchroom. “That’s him,” Tony said.

“I hear you been talking about my mama,” Chance said.

I looked around. I was over six feet tall and I weighed under 150 pounds. I was a walking skeleton, scrawny and under-muscled and absolutely not a fighter at all. I minded my own business. I kept to my friends. I had no clue what was going on.

“That wasn’t me,” I said. I tried to walk back to my table.

“No, I heard you were talking about my mama,” Chance said. Neil and Tony smiled and nodded their heads.

“I swear I didn’t.”

After lunch I went outside to wait for the bell with a kid named Cody. Chance and the others followed me. Where the teachers were I had no idea. Chance continued with his bullshit. The day was warm but not hot, and the interior quad was small. A little group formed. I continued with my protestations of innocence, but I was feeling exposed and threatened.

Then Chance shoved me and, remembering all the idiotic anti-bullying literature and after-school specials, I shoved him back. Cody took a deep breath and took a few steps back. He was terrified of blowback.

Chance swelled up right in front of me like some cartoon villain. He puffed up to swing. Time stopped. I had no skills to fall back on. I had my bony hands in fists and thought, Well, here comes your first thrashing. I was afraid, but there was a tinny little internal voice saying, How bad can a beating be?

Then Braden appeared.

“Nah, man, leave him alone. He’s cool.”

He pulled Chance aside and cooled him down. I waited. The bell rang. I didn’t move. Chance came back over. “So you weren’t talking about my mama?” he said.

“No, man, no,” I said.

He let me go.

I had known Braden from middle school. But we hadn’t been friends, and I hadn’t spoken to him in years. I didn’t really speak to him after that, either. But I felt and feel an immense debt of gratitude to him. I wasn’t cool. I had nothing to offer him. He protected me because it was the right thing to do. And, well, I’ve always loved him for it.

(As for Chance, he would later infamously kick Devin Kennedy in the face! after Devin and Peyton fought in front of half the school, and Peyton had knocked Devin down. Chance had nothing to do with the fight and didn’t know either of them very well. He told me later in a rare moment of candor, and I’m not making this up, that he was pissed because “they both fought like pussies.” We were at a basketball game, the only two upper grades students in attendance, and I was wise enough to sort of nod my head, a very minor betrayal of my values, and in retrospect, totally worth it. Chance didn’t mention our little dust-up and I was happy to let bygones be. Later that year he slapped me in the back of the head at a party. Chad ushered me out before I did anything stupid.)

3.

Back to Chad in his little white Honda and our late night trek to Braden’s house party.

We got there late, close to ten, and stayed under two hours. It wasn’t our kind of people. There was a bonfire and the others were mostly hunters and fishers and outdoorsy types, Alabama folk, good country people. The antithesis of Chad and me, basically.  Braden was there in full country regalia, camouflage and a hunting cap, the kind of vibe I would have mocked on another person, but suited him just fine. I didn’t speak to him, not really, but I wanted to hug him and say thanks. I never did.

Chad drank too much and I had to drive us home. I drove cautiously, just at the speed limit. We ambled along some forgotten highway in the country, surrounded by immense black trees and the gray night, the kind of evening that feels like it could go on forever and ever.

The whole car ride we listened to “Loser” over and over, some twenty times. We both sang along.

---

[1] I still know him.

I finally review The Master. (And yes, I know at this point, why bother?)

(I’m really, really late to the game on this one, but I’ve been digesting this movie for months, and waited to watch it a second time before writing. And then waited some more. And some more. So here are my thoughts, way too late for anyone to care.)

1.

The Master is fascinating, unnerving, beguiling and unforgettable. It’s also distressing, irritating, oblique and strange. It’s one of the best films of last year, and yet in the final tally haunted by its own failings. There’s an enigma at the film’s center, and, I suspect, two crucial scenes edited out of the final cut[1].

The movie follows an outcast ex-sailor, Freddy Quell, haunting the early post-war years in 1950s America. His peregrinations carry him from department store photographer to day-laboring farmer. He eventually falls under the sway of an emerging cult leader, Lancaster Dodd. The bulk of the film follows Quell and Dodd as they collide, attract and repel each other. Quell becomes a test case for Dodd, and the efficacy of his methods. Dodd puts Quell through the sometimes silly, sometimes grueling “processing,” of his cult, while expanding his organization against social and legal resistance.

There’s a Freudian subtext permeating the movie, an undercurrent of sexual repulsion and attraction. Throughout Quell holds a kind of animal attraction to the other characters. He’s visually represented by the re-occurring shots of the sea (just as Daniel Plainview’s inner rot in There Will Be Blood is mirrored by the scorched earth and the black tar; Barry Egan’s odd, cosmic innocence in Punch Drunk Love is reflected by prisms of beautiful light, his whimsy by the child’s harpsichord; and the de-personalized sex of the 1970s porn industry in Boogie Nights is grounded in the gears of the moving cameras.) But the image of the sea poses one of the first problems of the picture. What does it say about Quell? Is it his unpredictability, or his immense sexual energy, or the fact that he isn’t a fixed thing, that he has no center? Is he a force of nature or a formless mass? This question is never quite answered—he sort of vacillates between the two—and the film suffers for it.

Quell at work on his infernal homemade liquor.

The film might operate as an existential parable, but Quell is too disturbed to be a stand-in for everyman. His condition is so singular that the movie doesn’t operate with archetypes, not really. So the missing scene—the thing that haunts the movie, as far as I’m concerned, gives it much of its power but also interferes with our understanding of it—gets more and more conspicuous in its absence. It’s gnawing at me. I keep replaying the movie in my mind, looking for clues. (This kind of thing can pay immense dividends; Robert Altman’s Nashville has a major puzzle to it, but there’s an answer if you watch it enough times. Ditto for Mulholland Drive, Taxi Driver, Vertigo, and half a dozen other films.) But The Master resists such interrogation.

The easy read of the movie is to set up Quell as a foil for, and reflection of, Dodd, the charismatic cult leader who controls the people around him but is shackled by his own wild and fabulist claims. Dodd believes in his powers but knows, at least as Hoffman plays him, that the cosmology he’s inventing cannot be true. Yet he must believe it to keep his followers in line. So he’s a prisoner of his own inventions, like some fiction writer kidnapped by his own creations. Just as Quell is a prisoner of his own animalistic urges. With this interpretation, Dodd understands his plight but can do nothing to alter it, while Quell controls nothing in his life, including his own emotions.

Okay, fine, but too tidy and neat; this doppelganger approach can only go so far. For it is how Dodd and Quell are different that makes the movie interesting. Dodd keeps his dark thoughts hidden; Quell overflows with animus and vitriol and shame. They aren’t flipsides of the same coin either. Quell is a sex-obsessed thief, a drunken soldier, a tormented alcoholic with a tiny inner life. His thoughts are his actions, and what he keeps inside seems to be only pain. Dodd is a fabulist, a liar who sees the needs of others and tries to bend their needs to his own purposes. Dodd doesn’t want to be the miserable Quell. Who would? And Quell doesn’t want to be Dodd, hemmed in by the beliefs of his followers.

2.

The closest film to The Master I can think of, and this will strike some as strange, is Lawrence of Arabia. Both are long, careful character studies of deranged minds. Lawrence is sexually confused, violent, sadistic and sociopathic; if you watch the film carefully, you’ll see that most of his emotions are mimicry. He attempts to display the emotions that the other characters are expecting. Lawrence doesn’t understand himself, nor does he fully understand the world. He wishes to be an Arab, but he can’t help but be British. He’s at conflict with himself, and he can’t sublimate his schizoid tendencies.

Freddy Quell is a similar character, only more unhinged (through the constant imbibing of toxic, homemade liquor). He’s incapable of keeping a regular job. Like Lawrence, he’s physically weak, yet somehow strong. He’s motivated by some deep-rooted self-destructive urge. He doesn’t understand himself or the world, floating through post-war society like a child drifting on a not so gentle tide. Like Lawrence, Quell uses violence as a way to communicate, and understand, his own desires.

Hell, Phoenix even kind of looks like O’Toole’s Lawrence, angular, distorted, face in a grimace.

O’Toole as a murderous, half-crazy freak, remembered as a war hero.

 

Phoenix looking haunted, haggard, and sort of like O’Toole, right?

Both films are gorgeous. Both films are crowded at the edges with plot that seems important, but isn’t fully fleshed out. (In Lawrence, the plot is the historical forces at work in Palestine. Here it’s the formation and extension of Scientology. In both the plot is a backdrop to warp, extend, and disturb the main character. The plot acts on and against both characters, as opposed to the other way around.) Arabia obsesses over the punishing beauty of the desert. Master returns over and over to the foamy, sexually charged imagery of the ocean[2]. Both are slow, plodding, meticulous and challenging. Both slow down the viewing sensations, while maintaining inner tension within the characters that translates into discomfort for the audience.

And both films are, in essence, about repressed homosexuality. If you’ve only seen some of Lawrence of Arabia, or if you’ve only read about it, you won’t know what I’m speaking of, but there’s a scene near the end where Lawrence is captured. He’s stripped. His captors mock his pale skin and then pierce his nipples with stabbing knives. (It’s supremely disturbing.) Off-screen, the movie implies he’s raped, subjected to sexual humiliation, tortured in unspeakable ways. The movie also implies that he might enjoy being punished. He never recovers.

The Master has its hidden scenes, too. The first shot of the movie is Quell’s half-concealed face, on what appears to be a few minutes before one of the major Pacific Theatre battles. We never see the battle, or the horrors Quell witnesses.

The two movies draw from the exact same thematic well: sex, war, nature. Masochism, sadism, control. Lawrence ends with T.E. Lawrence’s face hidden in shadow. Master begins with Quell’s helmeted face hunkered down in a ship. Both films appear to scrutinize and observe, but elide as much as they reveal. Both films are about men of war trying to find peace.

The infuriating thing about the professional criticism The Master is that so many learned reviewers missed the central issue in the movie. Critics who see father-son relations are missing the subtext. They watched a different movie.

And the missing scene—if I’m right—is a love scene between Dodd and Quell[3].

3.

Anderson is superb screenwriter. He collaborates with his actors, but doesn’t to my knowledge collaborate with other writers. So his movies often feel in dialogue with each other—he’s built a body of work, like a novelist or composer. The most obvious example of this ongoing dialogue between his films is Magnolia’s operatic largeness in contrast to the compact, short, internalized Punch Drunk Love. The Master feels like an extension of Blood, but it really isn’t. Dodd isn’t Plainview, and neither is Quell. Plainview is bitter, driven, obsessed with money, a man with no past only future, asexual and bitterly aware of his own terrifying flaws. He’s a misanthrope and a monster, obsessed with family but unwilling to risk the emotional pain families inevitably cause. Plainview is ruined by his profession, hollowed out like some dug out old oil well. In another world, perhaps, he might have ended up differently. He chooses his fate, embraces his hatred, and ends up a despicable, hollowed out man.

The story goes that Anderson cobbled together this script from a number of sources, including discarded scenes from There Will Be Blood and anecdotes Jason Robards told him on the set of Magnolia. Anderson then added stories from the early days of Scientology and placed the whole thing in the 1950s post-war milieu. The movie doesn’t feel fractured so much as stitched together. The most powerful scenes, of Quell undergoing grueling psychological programming at the hands of Dodd, don’t fit with the most beautiful shots of Quell as a sailor at the end of the war. And this might be the most beautiful shot in all of cinema[4].

My vote for the most beautiful shot of the year.

The result is a film that feels meticulous yet sloppy. The costumes, the music, and the interiors all feel just right. The scenes are mesmerizing. The acting is superb.

And yet. We’re back to those missing scenes, that hole at the heart of the film. Like Lawrence coming out of the desert, a shimmering figure that somehow loses substance as he comes into view. What draws these two characters together? And what forces them apart? The movie’s answer, given in a flim flam speech at the end, is silly, a bizarre fill-in for the ambiguity both men feel about their mutual attraction.

Like many of his peers (Wes Anderson, Tarantino, Araki) Anderson’s been steeped in the language of film for so long he sometimes feels overly concerned with cinema, and not concerned enough with his storytelling.

Nowhere is this so evident than near the end of The Master when Quell falls asleep in a movie theater. He begins to dream, and in his dream receives a phone call from Dodd. It’s the one scene in the movie that simply does not work. It feels contrived (after the phone call Quell travels to England to have a final confrontation with Dodd), too self-serving and tidy (the epiphany comes in a movie theater!), and beneath the complexity of the rest of the film.

Throughout Anderson flouts many of the golden rules of screenwriting: there’s no real structure; the characters don’t seem to change; the issues aren’t numerated; the point of the whole thing is left up to the viewer. Anderson said in a recent interview, regarding the movie: “The characters don’t figure it out. They start the same and they end the same.” For all his virtuosic skill—and this is the thing that rubs some people the wrong way—Anderson no longer craves the audience’s approval. He’s been freed. But this freedom carries gravitas, and can weigh an artist down. Audience expectations keep a movie structured.

Anderson is undeniably talented with the camera. And he often fixes narrative issues with his visual brio. He’s the best parts of Robert Altman, Elia Kazan, George Stevens, Robert Bresson, Francis Coppola, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. He’s rigorous, challenging, entertaining, haunting and revelatory. He’s a synthesis of old and new Hollywood. I love him for this, and you should love him, too.

4.

For all its flaws, the movie is a masterpiece of acting, some of the best performances I’ve seen. Amy Adams is excellent. She plays Dodd’s wife, mousy on the outside but steely, driven, controlling. Hoffman is superb, balancing his character’s self-conscious lying with his self-delusion. But Phoenix delivers a performance that is unhinged, feral, outrageous. He plays the role like some black-hearted animal. He channels Brando (from Last Tango) and Jack Nicholson (from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and half a dozen others, but with a dash of untamed wildness that is mostly new. He’s ferocious, demonic, yet deeply wounded. The story from the set is that he kept destroying things during the filming, and director Anderson just kept the camera rolling.

Adams is superb, stealing every scene in the movie.

Phoenix didn’t win the best actor award. His performance was too unruly, too disturbed, too personal. There’s only a whiff of mainstream assimilation for his character, and this right at the end of the film.

Hoffman didn’t win either, which was nuts[5]. He’s incredible, both arrogant and also vulnerable, an improvement on Andy Griffith’s very fine performance as a manipulative huckster in Face in the Crowd. He’s cruel one minute, kind the next.

So the best acting of the year was passed over.

5.

The fact that The Master has struggled to find an audience, and Lawrence of Arabia was a success, speaks oodles about moviegoers. Lawrence utilizes a more formal visual language, a longer running time, and is less satisfying as a film.

Still, Lawrence of Arabia is important. There Will Be Blood is important. The Master, somehow, is not.

So is The Master the best movie of this past year? No[6], but Vertigo shouldn’t be considered the best movie of the 20^th century, either. They’re too odd, overflowing with too much hinted-at perversity, too concerned with the internal territory novels handle so well. Both auger in despair and hopelessness, detailing shattered lives. But is The Master the most interesting movie I’ve seen this year? Undoubtedly.

---

[1] Or more likely intentionally left out of the filming process.

[2] Although there’s a great desert scene, too.

[3] A second missing scene, or series of scenes, must involve Quell’s actions in the war. He’s murdered and killed, he’s seen horrible things, and these too inform his madness.

[4] Or perhaps it’s Nicole Kidman’s derriere at the beginning of Eyes Wide Shut.

[5] Although this was the strongest best supporting actor competition in my lifetime.

[6] But it’s oodles better than Argo.

Simone and Pearl and the Power Cosmic! part 7: Simone loves butt jokes.

(Except for the Chicago Public School strike diary, I’ve avoided writing about topical things. This week is no exception, but like everyone else I’ve been riveted by the Boston tragedy, disturbed by the explosion in Texas, and bamboozled by the speed of the conspiracy dudes to somehow turn both into a government cover-up.)

1.

Simone loves butt jokes. I blame Beth. One of Simone’s favorites: “Say hello . . . to my butt,” and then she turns around. Sometimes she lifts up her dress, shakes her derriere around, giggling. I can never stifle my laughter. Yesterday morning she said to me, “Daddy, I shouldn’t show my butt to my friends. It’s impolite.” Pause. “Only to mommy and daddy.” Big smile.

She’s a mischievous imp.

Last Christmas, at my parents’ dinner table, she started singing “Deck the Halls.” The family stopped talking and everyone looked at her to listen. “Deck the halls with bells of holly, fa la la la, la la la la.” She paused for a second, looked at me with a devilish grin, and started singing again. “Deck the halls with lots of butts,” and then an enormous grin. Thankfully my mom didn’t hear the last word.

She has a new favorite movie, Peter Pan; Simone is in love. Pan has taken possessions of our household. She talks about the characters like they are her friends. She tucks Michael in at bedtime, talks about him incessantly. She drives him to school. She dislikes Wendy.

Simone: “I like Captain Hook, too, daddy!”

Peter Pan has dated well. It contains a deep magic. The source material is strong. The songs are catchy, the pacing is punchy and the Schmee/Hook jokes are still funny.

But.

It also has an achingly uncomfortable portrayal of American Indians. It isn’t all negative—they aren’t the bad guys, or anything like that—just insensitive and stereotypical. Simone picked up the undercurrent right away. “The Indians are bad guys,” she said. Not sure how to handle this one.

The movie is also scary. Simone now has nightmares. But she’s clever. We can’t tell when she’s actually scared, and when she’s pretending to be scared so she can stay up later. Last night she said, “I had a nightmare. There’s a scary mean dragon. I think I need to sleep in mommy and daddy’s bed.” This last little bit is delivered with the barest hint of a smile.

2.

Pearl walks now, and like an angry gorilla. She has her arms above her head, her hands in the air, often a crazed smile on her lips. Her favorite books are Hop on Pop, which she just loves, Where is Baby’s Belly Button? and Where Is My House? When we try to read her a book she doesn’t like, she shuts the pages and begins slapping the back of the book. It’s hysterical.

She and Simone often play together now, and when they are both happy and smiling and engaged—it’s a wonderful sight. Simone still slings Pearl around, knocks her over, snatches toys out of her hands, but they seem to be getting along quite well.

Pearl likes to put Simone’s clothes on her head and wander around. She seems to understand us when we speak, more than other children, and I don’t know what to make of it. This morning I asked her what she was doing and she looked at me and said, “What?” Can’t tell if she meant it. Her eyes remain . . . discerning, for lack of a better world.

3.

“Literature isn’t innocent.” Roberto Bolano wrote that (and it’s true). I continue to re-read Bolano, after reading his entire oeuvre over the last few years: By Night in Chile then Nazi Literature in the Americas then Distant Star then all the best of his short stories. I just finished The Savage Detectives[1]. On a second read, it’s a major novel, byzantine and sexy, dense, challenging and contradictory, fun. What he’s done is infuse youth culture and poetry with madness and death. The book disturbs. It unnerves. It jangles in my thoughts.

Detectives follows teenage poets scrounging their way through an impoverished existence in 1970s Mexico. The first section is a diary of a seventeen year old poet. He has sex. He drinks too much. He writes poems. He reads. He pursues Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (Bolano’s fictional alter-ego), two renegade poets who have formed a poetry group called the Visceral Realists. Dark thoughts begin to appear, premonitions of catastrophe, portents of doom. The poets are living on borrowed time, they just don’t realize it yet.

One of the great novels, sexy, scary, weird, riveting, artful and complex. But fun to read.

The second section follows two dozen or so monologues of various characters across the globe, and their experiences with Lima and Belano. This section begins in the 1970s and ends in the 1990s, with characters interviewed in three different decades.

The third section returns to the diary and back to Mexico, and the whole jagged story—why Lima and Belano are floating through life like ghostly vagabonds—is explained.

A specter of death hangs over Bolano’s entire body of work, and Detectives is no exception. Detectives is about ghosts, exiles, voices from the dead, failure, leftwing politics, the power of the Spanish language and an obsessive disassociation with reality. It’s a furious read, at times alienating, saturated with sickness, despair, horror—plus plenty of humor and brilliant writing.

Bolano is a polarizing figure. Plenty of readers find him bizarre, hard to follow. The big problem for some readers is his tone and high/low approach. He’s obsessed with poetry, Literature, but he writes like some perverse, polyphone mash up of James Ellroy, George Bataille, and John Cheever as well as a synthesis of the entire Latin American literary canon. He’s a pulpy, violent, artful, beautiful soul.

He’s also a great reading companion. His novels are filled with recommendations, summaries of novels, lists of great poets, dismissals of overrated artists.

He was dying of cancer for his entire novel-writing career, and the sickness in his cells imbues his work with an obsessive, driven, often horrifying pulse. Much of his work is unclassifiable. Some of it is terrible. But the bulk of it remains the great literary treasure trove that was published in my lifetime thus far. I plan to re-read 2666 next.

4.

Me. Just not in the mood.

I’ve been working on a new manuscript. The blog has moved to a once-a-week post. (I have lots of mostly finished entries.) When I write essays and blog posts fiction recedes. When I work on fiction, the blog seems flimsy and a sham.

My latest manuscript is, at least right now, going to consist of three novellas. I have a draft finished of the first; I’ve mostly written the second, although I haven’t typed it up yet; and the third I haven’t even begun.

I’m feeling a bit . . . deflated tonight, so I’m going to move on.

5.

I saw Wake in Fright, the fantastic (mostly) forgotten Australian film about desolation, despair, weird sex, kangaroo hunting and binge drinking in the Aussie outback. It follows a bitter schoolteacher named Grant on his way to vacation in Sydney. En route, he stops in at Bundanyabba, a little city in the middle of nowhere, for an overnight rest. The denizens of the Yabba are excessive drinkers, gamblers, hunters and fighters. They appear friendly, but are easily offended and insist that Grant partake in their bad food, warm beer, and repugnant social life. One day turns into two and Grant, hungover and broke, wakes up in the apartment of a drunken scoundrel doctor named Tydon, played by Donald Pleasance.

Pleasance gives an outstanding performance, wild and wooly, vile and vicious, yet somehow decent and kind, too. It’s better than his Biblical madman in Will Penny (also a great performance in a great movie), and it reshapes my thinking on Pleasance. I always saw him as a buffoon, really, miscast in The Great Escape and pretty terrible in Prince of Darkness[2] the first two Halloween movies. But now, I’m not sure. He’s so fucking alive in Fright, so present in each frame, channeling his intellectual reprobate with clarity and force. Maybe he was a genius all along, just misused.

An amazing, deeply disturbing performance in a fantastic, horrifying film.

Grant’s plunge into dissolution and despair, his urge to prove himself amongst the smiling thugs and snarling bastards, is scary, heart-breaking and even a little funny, too. He doesn’t understand these people, and he doesn’t understand his own desire to earn their respect. His learning and intellect are slowly peeled away as he descends into a lurid mania. Days pass. And all the while there’s Tydon, pushing Grant into more and more extreme situations. The penultimate scene involves a surreal night hunt of kangaroo, and it has to be seen to be believed. It will turn your stomach.

The movie has been described as an Australian Deliverance, but that’s not quite right. There are similarities—both films are stunningly beautiful and horrifying at the same time—but Wake in Fright has a moral outrage over the collective madness of this rural town. These two movies, along with Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Two-Lane Blacktop (all four of them were released in 1971, what a year for movies!), and a handful of others, manage to combine high art with grindhouse savagery. Wake in Fright is probably the best of the bunch, and that is high praise indeed.

---

[1] The first time I read it in a blaze; he ferociously entered my life. This second time I cherished the book, took my time, lived with it for a while.

[2] An underrated, and incredibly strange, film.

Simone and Pearl and the Power Cosmic!, part 6: Changelings.

1.

Someone has kidnapped my children and replaced them with simulacra. Or little look-a-like elves.

Pearl is one. My sweet, even-tempered, calm little munchkin is gone. The new Pearl is a beast. She bounces up and down, she tries to rip the doll clothes to pieces, she slaps faces and even bit Simone right on the face. In anger. She giggles when we tell her no; she implacably attempts to get into the cleaning supplies; and she breaks as many objects as she can. She eats like some little mini pony and leaves destruction in her wake. If she doesn’t want the food she throws it on the floor.

Her favorite game to play with me is to stand by my back and hit it with both hands. I pretend to go into convulsions, which she just loves.

She loves to fiddle with the stereo. We now have two amateur djs turning the thing off and on, switching from phono to cd, and making the listening of music in our house a trying ordeal. Pearl has no discernable taste in music at this point. She likes to clap, do a little jig.

Her first word, as far as we can tell, is “No.” She draws it out in a long, sonorous bellow. “No-o-o-o-o-o.”

2.

Simone has been replaced, too. My spitfire ninja, my quicksilver mad-hatter has morphed into a fussy, fashion-conscious prima dona. She spends ten minutes a day trying on different outfits. She cries out when her socks aren’t facing the right direction. She said to Beth the other day, “I can’t handle these purple pants!” and then she changed.

She’s three and a half.

The princess phase continues. Amplified by just a touch of diva.

She’s become dramatic. Every day she says something like, “I’m having trouble breathing out,” (she wasn’t); or “I can’t clean up anymore, I’m so tired!” (after three minutes of standing around); or the now almost-daily, “I’m sick, daddy,” and after she gets what she asked for, “but I’m feeling better.” I can’t adequately convey the histrionic nature of her outbursts. Months ago she got angry and yelled, “I don’t get nothing. No cake and no whipped cream! Nothing!”

She’s a regular Tallulah Bankhead.

Her favorite movies are A Dolphin’s Tale and Cinderella. The first is a well-made, simple, old-fashioned tear-jerker about a lonely young boy who helps save a dolphin. Based on a true story, of course, and these animal young child friendship movies are a major weakness for me in the tears department. Simone handles it all with a big smile. She only asks me to fast-forward the scene where “the mommy gets angry,” which I dutifully do.

Cinderella is another matter. Simone loves this movie, and it’s easy to see why. The film is carefully balanced between the classic fairy tale and a Tom and Jerry cartoon. The malevolence in the movie is palatable to a child. It has none of the madness of Snow White, or the scary picaresque of Pinocchio. Plus it has lots of dresses, her favorite topic of conversation. The big issue with the movie is that Cinderella’s longsuffering seems to serve no purpose. She’s kind to animals, but she takes terrible abuse from her step-sisters. Worse, she appears to be waiting around for a rich husband to appear. (And he does!) It’s a far cry from the values we want to instill. But she loves it so much. Beth suggested we “lose” it, or say it got damaged, and that they don’t make it anymore. Ah, the casual cruelty, larceny and lies of the attentive parent. We’ll see.

Simone spends a lot of time in the neighborhood coffee shop, The Grind. A few weeks ago she turned to a dude at a neighboring table. “So, tell me,” she asked, “who are your favorite princesses?”

3.

Beth and I have changed, too; we’ve been in a media blackout. I’ve spent the last week without reading, listening to the radio, watching any movies. So no NPR, or any of the podcasts I listen to (Mike and Tom Eat Snacks; The Conspiracy Show; How Did This Get Made?; Sound Opinions and This American Life). No comic books or graphic novels. No novels, short stories or poetry. No New Yorker, New York Times, The Reader or The Onion. And no Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, or HBOgo. No internet, besides work-related email and a one check a day on gmail. So no Facebook, no Google searches, none of the websites or blogs I check on a weekly basis. Finally, I’m only listening to orchestral music. No Spotify, Youtube, Pandora, or any of my cds or records that has words. Today I listened to Carl Stamitz. Yesterday Mozart and Bach. Tomorrow, Schubert?

Even listing the above—which is a regular week for me—makes me anxious. This is the longest I’ve gone without reading since I was seven. (I binged on comic books at an early age.) The idea was to carve out some space to write. So far it’s succeeded, but in strange ways. I feel calmer. I’m spending more time with Simone and Pearl. I’m less frustrated. My dreams have returned to the vivid horror shows of my youth. And I feel more clear-headed, more lucid about my own writing. I’m working on a novella, only longhand, blue pen on white lined paper, and I’ve almost completed a draft. I’m still submitting things, and the pain of rejection really is easing.

I’ve written some thoughts on the experience, and will post them when the whole thing is over. But the experiment has shown me that I’ve been overstimulated for a long, long time.

Finally, Beth and I got some type of stomach flu again. She recovered faster than I did. My diet for almost seven days has consisted of rice, toast, potatoes, Jello and Gatorade. When I deviated from this, I was punished. With my unkempt beard, I have returned to my half-starved Danish peasant phase, where I look like some abandoned, busted out berserk eking out a living on tubers and spiders beneath a pitiless Scandinavian sun. I only need a tattered cloak and a blunt axe to complete the picture.

I’ve gone six days without coffee and feel calm and at peace. My legs don’t bounce. My kidneys don’t ache. My vision doesn’t telescope onto odd details. It’s been nice. I plan to get back to the dark bean as quickly as possible.

More to come dear friends and neighbors, fellow citizens of the world.

Donald Ray Pollock and the hard knock school.

Mid-March, and it’s snowing outside.

I’ve been in a re-reading mood. First The Sandman; then two by Bolano: By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature in the Americas; then Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. I also found some time for new stuff, including Manchette’s Fatale and Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff.

A collection of linked stories set in the tiny town of Pollock’s youth, Knockemstiff is strong stuff indeed. Pollock’s a powerful writer, masculine, blunt and spare. He’s also unsubtle, vicious, and overpowering. Think Winesberg, Ohio, only marinated with rape, drug abuse, misery, and mental dilapidation matched only by the physical squalor.

Pollock is part of a newish wave of authors who toiled in working class jobs before entering MFA programs in middle age. (He worked in a paper mill for thirty-two years.) Frank Bill, Daniel Woodrell, and F.X. Toole—who published his first short story collection when he was in his seventies—belong to this crop of tough dudes. They have, as a group, eschewed the small, ponderous short fiction that has dominated American literature for the last fifty years. Instead they write gritty, cornpone noir, stories of excess, soaked in spit and blood. There’s no room for redemption, heroics, integrity. The characters are too busy getting drunk, intimidating their families, ruining their lives.

Pollock is the strongest, but he’s strong like a pint of rotgut whiskey. Reading him burns. He causes harm. You know you’ve read something in Knockemstiff—it really is a visceral experience—but it feels like being slapped in the face, kicked in the shins, beaten up and humiliated. Like swimming in bilge water. Or getting doused with plastic jugs of white vinegar. I felt hungover through half the stories.

Stories linked by desperation and squalor.

Bitter, cruel, dilapidated, unbearably trashy, the town of Knockemstiff emerges as a squalid hamlet abandoned by God and possessed by the devil. Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson and Jim Thompson duke it out in these stories. Reading them is to be immersed in a bleak, violent place, all the more unsettling because of its banality. Repugnant, dank, rotting interiors matched only by the decaying bodies of its characters.

The strongest stories are “Schott’s Bridge” and “Bactine,” although all the stories in the collection are of a quality. He can flat-out write:

“We broke in through the bathroom window. Pressed into the gray scum of the tub, our boot prints looked like fossil feet frozen in rocks that my crazy cousins said the Devil had planted all over the world to trick people into believing we came from frog shit and monkeys.” And later,

“The pills were wrapped in a sheet of bloody butcher’s paper that had Chuckie’s Hog Brains writ on it with a blue crayon. Somebody had already eaten the brains.”

But there’s the form—descriptive and evocative and sparse—and then there’s the goddamned content, slimy and icky and nasty. Still, definitely worth checking out.

In Memoriam: James Barfoot, the holy poet.

1.

Jim Barfoot was a philosophy professor at AUM, my alma mater. He was popular, known as a witty, funny, irascible teacher who trafficked in conundrums. He was also a poet, and it’s as a poet that I knew him. He died a few weeks ago, and although I haven’t spoken with him in over a decade, I miss him terribly. The world feels lessened by his absence.

My first job was as an editorial assistant at Black Belt Press. My boss (and later co-author and friend) Randall Williams and Suzanne La Rosa had a poetry manuscript there titled The Nudes of God. Black Belt always had forty or fifty projects going at once, a fabulous juggling act that was dizzying, exciting, overwhelming. But Nudes stood out. Three hundred or so poems and, as Randall said to me the first day I looked at it, “There are poems in there that will knock you flat on your ass.”

Six months into my first year, investors illegally fired them both, I quit, and a few months later Randall and Suzanne hired me on at NewSouth Books. New offices, new energy, new job title. Many of Black Belt’s manuscripts followed us to NewSouth, including Nudes; it became one of our first books.

I met Barfoot around this time. He was short, compact, with a devilish smile and delicate, sensual hands. There was a touch of the Buddha about him. He walked slowly but with a dancer’s syncopation and balance. His voice was melodic. His eyes were large and bright. I knew of him from school. His wit, charm and implacable agnosticism. (This last turned out to be a constructed teacher persona.)

He had whittled his manuscript down, and it was time to get into the nuts and bolts of it. As the number two editor (of two), I was assigned the job.

He had a peculiar editing style. He would sit by my side. We would read the poems aloud, one page at a time. He would make subtle changes, interspersed with jokes, anecdotes, questions, puns, explanations. He was profoundly well read, in philosophy, ancient literature, poetry and mythology. (At this point, I still basically only read novels and civil rights histories.) He loved movies, too, and leant me videocassettes of the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials. He was big-hearted, silly, indelibly southern, yet sophisticated and clever and erudite. The South has loads of these oddballs, accomplished intellectuals who sound like extras from Hee-Haw.

I played a supremely minor role; I added exactly two parenthesis and one paragraph break. Yet working with him remains one of the great creative exchanges of my life.

2.

I met him at an odd time. I had a foot in two worlds. I was shaking off the last remnants of childhood, and trying to figure out the adult thing. I had finished my first two novels, and they were terrible. I was tasting failure of the adult kind. The rumblings of later loss, the fragmenting of my community, an invasion of bitter existentialism. Separate from the binding routines of soccer and school, I felt adrift. I was a bundle of confusion. I didn’t want to live in Montgomery but didn’t know much of anything else. I felt the pull of big cities, even though they scared me. I wanted to travel to Europe, but didn’t have any money. I was stasis, I just didn’t realize it at the time.

I was paralyzed in my philosophical life, too. I was quickly shedding my Christianity, but was uncomfortable in the spikes of unbelief. Blame literature and history, if you’re inclined. I went to church sometimes but felt alienated from the whole belief system, profoundly uncomfortable. I felt doomed, abandoned. Ingmar Bergman became my favorite filmmaker. Everything seemed to resonate with God’s silence. He was gone from my life, I was grasping at sand, and yet I couldn’t figure out how to live without Him.

Enter Barfoot and his book.

Barfoot loved the cover. “The book is her face,” he said.

Barfoot’s poems—sexy, erotic, spare, lusty, irreverent, yet saturated with an abiding love and understanding for humanity and a deep-rooted belief in mysteries of the cosmos—re-animated my spiritual self. Reading these poems and hearing his own thoughts on them re-awakened the spiritual being in me that so often atrophies in our 21^st Century life.

Working on the book reinvigorated my sense of self, my engagement with the world. His poems were the first of a series of realizations that physical pleasures  are not only not evil, but part and parcel of living a good life. That desire can be good. That carnal things don’t have to destroy us. And that the quest doesn’t end.

And I don’t even like poetry that much.

It’s an odd thing to say, but I fell in love with him for those few weeks we worked together. He stole away with my fragile heart. And returned it whole, intact, glowing with the contact.

3.

In another dimension, Barfoot would be an important figure in the world of poetry. His death would have been noted in various magazines and journals, perhaps written up in the New York Times. His one book is incredible, a piercing, funny, insightful, devastating, sexy as fuck volume that can be read like a novel or an autobiography. Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m given to enthusiasm and superlatives. But this is the real thing.

Nudes is a wicked volume of religious poetry as written by Pan, inspired by Apollo, translated by St. Augustine. It echoes Rumi, Ovid, Dickenson, Whitman, Berryman, Updike and Parker. The big thematic influence is probably John Donne. It’s an earthy, holy, ribald little book, lucid and spare and devastating and hysterically funny. One of the poems is titled, “How to Pick and Prepare, Present and Enjoy, the Cometwat that you’d Slap Your Grandma For.”

He clearly loved women, saw in their historical plight some deep, primal truth. The book is threaded with overlapping images, reoccurring themes. Loamy earth, stalks of sugar cane, bedroom antics and first-person confessionals. Lust, love and lust again. The afterglow of sex as a stand-in for holy epiphany. The bedroom as a holy place. Dew, manicured lawns, women suffering through the exquisite pain of walking through the garden of earthly delights.

Nudes is a desert island book for me, the only poetry book I would take. (I don’t count The Iliad or The Epic of Gilgamesh as poems.)

The book would have sold like hotcakes. Barfoot was a great reader of his own stuff and NewSouth had planned a strong book tour. But at the eleventh hour, he retreated to the ivory tower; he returned to teaching philosophy. Why, I’ll never know. Perhaps he was more like Emily Dickenson, despite appearing to be like Walt Whitman. He was sensitive and vulnerable; perhaps he feltthe book tour would be a disheartening ordeal.

For my little memoriam—a very strange thing to put on the blog, I know—I picked out fifteen or so poems, but whittled it down to these two.

Here’s a sample from “When Jesus Dined Alone in Galilee”:

The single bare crepe myrtle tree

Stands cold

Beyond the window pane.

I see it all.

The rough thin bark.

The branches

Short and thin.

Here at this table I will settle things.

The tree will be my public notary.

And, here, in “Teleology”:

A sweet noetic nude sits in my lap

Allowing me to freely trace her waist

And then

Below her waist

Her hips and thighs

The middle place

Where I will gently lace along its line

The end of my left thumb above the nail

As if her flesh

And lip

And rosebud tip

Were drawn in clay by my soft steadiness.

And often there my left thumb gives me ease

And pleases me when I feel she is pleased

And gives me pause to wonder whether she,

In bringing her warm middle place to me,

Allows me an occasion for my thumb

To do what God intended thumbs to do.

4.

We talked, near the end of our few weeks together, about the future. I asked him, what’s next? Why not a novel? (In those days I was always trying to get people to write novels.)

“I’ll write another volume for Nudes,” he said, smiling and content. “And then maybe one more. Just one large, multi-faceted, multi-part book. My life’s work. And that will be it.”

As far as I know, many of those poems have already been written, but they won’t be published. The world’s loss. But Barfoot wouldn’t mind. Like most poets he knew his work, and everything really, was transitory and impermanent. “The ground beneath the girl will open up,” he writes, “And everything but she will disappear.”

My two cents on the Oscars. And my wife gets in three zingers.

1.

Panning the Academy Awards has become old hat. The show has felt anachronistic for thirty years. But the show this year was even by the meager standards of past Oscars a big disappointment. The proceedings were creaky, ill-conceived and strange.

The Academy Awards is an industry awards show, like an insurance retreat or a real estate brunch. A teachers’ luncheon, only for the rich and pampered. Yet we watch. Movies still matter, and the awards feel like a stand-in for our values and tastes. But they aren’t. It’s a business paying homage to itself. And yet we gaze, transfixed.

Normally Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Jack Black, Ben Stiller or someone else will provide something memorable amidst the endless drag[1]. But this year it was the Seth McFarland show, he of The Family Guy. And the result was . . . demeaning to watch. I felt lessened by it.

McFarland tried to balance his act between the vaudeville of Billy Crystal with the stand-up of Ricky Gervais. So he sang and danced and mocked and smirked. But the songs were weak, and the jokes were bad.

McFarland represents much of what’s wrong with the show, as well as with aspects of Hollywood. He’s offensively self-congratulatory, cloying, smarmy and smug, with an overemphasis on style. He’s youthful but not young, talented but not sophisticated. He’s immature, snide, and seemingly unaware of the rest of the world. He’s sinned but he’s not interesting enough to be the sinner.

“No, no, Seth, baby, Seth. Seth. Seth. Seth. Seth. Just stop. You suck.”

Like the perfect post-modern host, he hid behind irony, calling attention to his jokes and the machinery behind them. He said sexist things, but cloaked them in a lazy wink. I’m not really sexist, am I? He praised bad films for making money (The Avengers, for instance) and made safe jokes that appeared to be edgy (such as poking fun at Rihanna and Chris Brown). He even made a joke about John Wilkes Booth, acting snotty when people didn’t guffaw[2].

The show conquers most talented people, as the demands of making it relevant, and yet retaining the cheesy traditions, are often at cross-purposes. But McFarland didn’t just do a poor job; he had to comment on the poor job he was doing. He was too uncomfortable in his own skin, too self-aware. He kept cutting into the laughs of the jokes that worked and dismissing as stupid the ones that didn’t. “That joke, really?” he would say to the teleprompter over and over, as if the jokes were being written by unknown slobs toiling away in some unfunny comedians’ rubber room, as he was reading them. He practiced the show for weeks. They wrote those, “That joke, really?” lines into the show. They started the whole thing with a skit about William Shatner from the future coming to stop him from being the worst host ever. Were they being ironic then? Did they realize that the audience would subliminally believe that Shatner had failed?

What McFarland lacked—what Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg and all the other lame Oscar hosts have had—is integrity. There was no integrity to his performance. For all his braggadocio and over-exposure, McFarland’s a rich, handsome, witty coward.

’Tis a pity, for 2012 was a very strong year for American films. Rampart, Coriolanus, Friends with Kids, Moonrise Kingdom, Prometheus, To Rome With Love, Lawless, Arbitrage, Cabin in the Woods, Looper, Cloud Atlas, and The Master, to name a few, not mentioning the very strong nine best picture nominees or the other nominated movies. And the performances this year were top notch. We’re in a golden age of acting. What other year would have Richard Gere in Arbitrage not nominated for anything?

2.

My wife had a running commentary on McFarland. I’ll share just a few gems here.

She said, “McFarland is making the audience feel like chumps for watching. He’s supposed to deflate the self-importance of the show with the audience, not deflate the audience itself!”

And, “Shame on your, Seth McFarland. You can’t be funnier than Daniel Day-Lewis?”

And, finally, “I hate that guy’s face. I want to kick him.”

---

[1] Credit where credit’s due: Catherine Zeta-Jones was amazing with All That Jazz.

[2] He should have retooled the joke, focusing on Booth as a mediocre actor. Now that would have been funny.