Music 2020

 

2020 Music

And might as well do a best music list as well. Again, only things heard the first time this year (to the best of my memory). Though I mainly listened to WREK and for some reason a lot of electric Miles.

Acid Mothers Temple - Magical Power From Mars

Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Black Midi - Schlagenheim

Brotzmann | Mengelberg | Bennink - 3 Points and a Mountain​.​.​.​Plus

Miley Cyrus – various covers released as videos this year

Deer Tick – Divine Providence

Bob Dylan - Rough And Rowdy Ways

Etoile de Dakar - Once Upon a Time in Senegal: The Birth of Mbalax 1979-1981

The Ex - 27 Passports

Globe Unity Orchestra & Guests - Baden-Baden '75

Half Japanese – Invincible

Mahotella Queens - Izibani Zomgqashiyo

Boban Markovic - Golden Horns: Best of Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar

The Mountain Goats - Transcendental Youth

The Mountain Goats - Goths (Deluxe Version)

Newen Afrobeat - Newen Plays Fela

Nublu Orchestra - Live at Jazz Festival Saalfelden

Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 3

Jo Stafford - Swingin' Down Broadway

Peter Stampfel And The Bottle Caps - Demo '84

Taylor Swift - Folklore

VA - Agrim Agadez

VA - Egypt Noir: Nubian Soul Treasures

VA - Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World's Music

VA - The Ecstasy Of Gold - 23 Killer Bullets From the Spaghetti West - Vol. 1

VA - Live from Festival au Desert, Timbuktu

VA - Love is a One-Way Traffic: Groovy East Asian Chicks 1960s-70s

VA - Protobilly: The Minstrel & Tin Pan Alley DNA of Country Music 1892-2017

VA - Spiritual Jazz

VA - Strain Crack & Break: Music From The Nurse With Wound List V1

VA - The Strange Sounds of the Bloodstained Films

Books 2020

 Books 2020

I’ve done a movies list for the longest time but just realized that oddly I’ve never done one for books. Same rule – read for the first time January 1 to December 31. This year I read about half the usual amount and much of that leaning towards a lighter side. But here are the top picks for best alphabetically.

And if I had to choose just a handful it would be Aickman, Elkin, Hurston, Jackson, Krasznahorkai and Shane.

Robert Aickman - Cold Hand in Mine (1975)

Martin Amis - The Information (1995)

Mike Carey et al - Lucifer, Books Three & Four (2005)

Leonora Carrington - The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (2017)

TJ Clark - The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers(1984)

Julian Cope - Krautrocksampler: One Head's Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik - 1968 Onwards (1995)

James S.A. Corey - Persepolis Rising (2017)

Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson - Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites (2010) & Volume 2: Neighborhood Watch (2019)

Lauren Elkin - Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (2016)

Al Ewing & Joe Bennett - Immortal Hulk, Vols 1 to 6 (2018/19)

Michel Fiffe - COPRA Round One (2013)

Penelope Fitzgerald - The Bookshop (1978)

Jonathan Fitzgibbons - Cromwell's Head (2008)

Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Jerome K. Jerome - Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889)

László Krasznahorkai - Satantango (1985)

Donna Leon - Quietly in Their Sleep (1997)

Kevin M. Levin - Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (2019)

Sara Levine - Treasure Island!!! (2011)

Adrienne Mayor - Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (2018)

Randall Munroe - How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems(2019)

Megan Kate Nelson - The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (2020)

Angela Saini - Superior: The Return of Race Science (2019)

Robert Scholes & Robert Kellogg - The Nature of Narrative (1966)

David Seabrook - All the Devils Are Here (2002)

Janelle Shane - You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place (2019)

William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (1848)

Ivy Noelle Weir & Steenz - Archival Quality (2018)

Martha Wells - Network Effect (2020)

G. Willow Wilson - The Butterfly Mosque: A Young Woman's Journey to Love and Islam(2010)

John Woolf - The Wonders: The Extraordinary Performers Who Transformed the Victorian Age (2019)

Movies 2020

 

Movies 2020

As I’ve done for years (decades?) with anything seen for the first time from January 1 to December 31 eligible. First batch “best” - second “honorable”.

As far as I’m concerned La Flor is the peak. It’s the only film I’ve seen in years that as soon as it finished I wanted to watch it again. (No Bluray scheduled but it’s currently streaming on Criterion Channel.)

La Flor (Mariano Llinás 2018)

The Terrorizers (Edward Yang 1986)

The Balloon (Yuzo Kawashima 1956)

Our Daily Bread (Mani Kaul 1970)

Cock and Bull (Cao Baoping 2016)

Guilty Bystander (Joseph Lerner 1950)

Venom and Eternity (Isidore Isou 1951)

One Cut of the Dead (Shinichiro Ueda 2017)

Blood on the Moon (Robert Wise 1948)

Don't Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci 1972)

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Matt Cimber 1976)

Woman Chasing the Butterfly of Death (Kim Ki-Young 1978)

#QuarantineMob Rocknmob “In The End - Linkin Park” (Petr Sterlikov 2020)

Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth 1959)

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made (David Amito & Michael Laicini 2018)

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento 1970)

Blonde Crazy (Roy Del Ruth 1931)

Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler 2015)

Django (Sergio Corbucci 1966)

A Fool (Chen Jianbin 2014)

The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (Luciano Ercoli 1970)

Gilda (Charles Vidor 1946)

The Hellbenders (Sergio Corbucci 1967)

Holy Motors (Leos Carax 2012)

India Song (Marguerite Duras 1975)

Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi 2019)

The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea (Syllas Tzoumerkas 2019)

Mission: Impossible: Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie 2018)

The Nude Vampire (Jean Rollin 1970)

Our Town (Yuzo Kawashima 1956)

Pirotecnia / Mute Fire (Federico Atehortúa Arteaga 2019)

Rocknmob Moscow “I Was Made For Lovin' You – KISS” (Eugene Zhamoydik 2019)

Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (Yuzo Kawashima 1957)

Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District (Yuzo Kawashima 1956)

Union Depot (Alfred E. Green 1932)

Wind (Marcell Iványi 1996)

EVE Online

Somebody at work calls EVE Online "that mining game."  She also says that if I ever start playing they'll never see me again  That neatly sums up the prevailing opinion - it's incredibly tedious, it's incredibly addictive.

So I've given it a week now and have yet to find the addictive part.  It has the steepest learning curve of any game I've ever encountered and the most annoying thing is that this is deliberate.  One of the tutorials usually can't be completed at night because other players have destroyed the needed material during the day but there's no indication of that.  For a tutorial!  I learned from a website comment discovered when trying to find out what I was doing wrong (nothing as it turned out).

Other tutorials are even worse.  For example, the one that's supposed to teach you how to do a mission basically just says do a mission.  There's nothing helpful about how to acquire one (which is not at all obvious) or how to get where you need to go (also not obvious).  And one I tried was listed as beginner but some Internet posts later informed me it's basically impossible for beginners.  Two of the "easy" ones I never could figure out which can't be good in general since I'm a very experienced gamer (going back literally to Pong).  If I have trouble what about curious people who might just want to give this a try?

None of that opacity is unusual for EVE but what I've played doesn't even seem appealing enough to try to push through.  Everything happens in space and all space looks pretty much the same (I'm sure later other sectors look different but they can't be that different - imagine if WoW had been played entirely in The Barrens, which some pre-Cataclysm Horde will tell you it felt like).  Combat is even more mere button pushing than any other game and I usually play ranged dps so I generally love some button pushing.  But there are limits.

And mining, oh goodness the mining.  You know grinding in other MMOs?  Well imagine grinding that is both automated and has to be stopped frequently to deposit material.  It's the worst of all possible worlds. And for rewards that honestly don't seem much like rewards - it's not like you're getting glowing ships with gryphons painted on the sides, or cute little space pets, or flaming blasters.

This article claims that the real attraction is groups and interacting with other players so maybe that's my problem.  I'm mostly a solo player even when I'm in a decent guild and consider LFG and LFR queues a blessing from the Turing Machine heavens.  A game that pretty much has no point if you're not constantly in groups isn't really for me, particularly if it's just making for more efficient mining.  I have two free months of this thing and may give it another go or two but it will likely be uninstalled before the month's out.

Why I'm Changing from Song of Ice and Fire to Game of Thrones (Probably)

My answer when anybody asks if I watch Game of Thrones has been the full-blown snobbish one – I'm literate, why would I watch the show? But it's not wrong. I read A Game of Thrones years ago, back when there was no talk of a TV show, when a TV show would have seemed like a silly joke. But I'd read George R.R. Martin off and on since I was a teenager, mainly the short stories and early novels (Fevre Dream isn't just the best vampire book I've ever read, it's just one of the best period). Maybe I shouldn't have been entirely surprised at A Game of Thrones but it had the epic sweep of high fantasy (though notably was possibly magic-free despite much character talk) combined with the complexity of medieval/Renaissance politics and a pretty grim but fairly believable view of human character.  And it was dense with description, incident, people. A TV show could be worthwhile in its own right but would invariably be a reduction.

So at some point I started The Clash of Kings, got a few chapters in, then misplaced the book. I never felt like buying another copy but when I found it again recently the time seemed right to continue the series. And whatever I saw in the first book now felt diluted in a flood of material in the second. There's so much background – kings and village histories and myths and why castles were built and ravens and what's being eaten at every single meal and on and on. And so many characters doing so many things for so many reasons, many apparently irrelevant. At some point even the actual stories became confused and exactly who was fighting who seemed unclear. Sure I could go back (or more plausibly online) and figure this out but signposting is the novelist's job. To make it worse even big fans of the books say the fourth and fifth wander quite a bit. Clearly like so many other SFF writers Martin was too enamored of his created world to control appropriately what he was doing This isn't even getting to the very real possibility that Martin won't live to finish the series – at the moment despite rumors of next year there's no publication date for the next book, not to mention talk that it may go even to an eighth book.

So this started to seem not worth the trouble. If I'm putting this much into such complicated stories clearly it's much better for them to be about the Habsburgs or Caesars or Stuarts, something that matters beyond the particular book they're in. Dan Jones' book on the Plantagenets has four pages of genealogical tables, a fifth of what's in The Clash of Kings (though Jones does have many more maps). It's not that the history is “real” so much as what's in the novel starts to feel like Martin is just dumping notes and drafts into the work. I think one of the great losses in modern literary fiction is how much description has been stripped from it, part of a general shift towards plainness and simplicity that worked for Chekhov and Joyce but not many others. But The Clash of Kings goes too far in the other direction – Martin has a remarkable control over his prose, everything else not so much.  The actual Wars of the Roses were confusing but a series of novels shouldn't be.

Which is why I started thinking differently about the TV show. Much of the excess would have to be removed (gone I hope at least some of the many rapes that occur so frequently they seem less an indication of the setting's brutality and more like something pathological in the author) and with any luck the show wouldn't have gone too far towards the just-the-story approach taught by modern screenwriting manuals. (Robert McKee should never be read though though he's really just a symptom of how money people make decisions – teaching to the test so to speak.)  In short, for this case the story is interesting enough that I want to continue but I don't see enough value in the vast mass of material in the novels to go that route.  This starts to get into the question of why read or watch at all but that's for another time.

So why the “probably” about changing? It's because I haven't seen any of Game of Thrones yet and my experience with so many highly praised recent shows is that they're really not that good, somewhat entertaining at best. I wouldn't be surprised, and even half-expect, to get a few episodes into Game of Thrones and discover that it's somewhat leaden with Hollywood-screenwriter characterization and perfunctory dialogue, all jerked around by arbitrary story needs. The problem with nearly every American TV show is the amount of padding needed to fit the production schedule but with Game of Thrones I hope that isn't an issue due to the compression of the novels. But who knows?  Maybe I'll end up discovering the show is tedious, the books increasingly unreadable and I'm left reading Wikipedia synopses like a caveman.

Marvel vs DC?

A friend who has no interest in comics recently asked if I'm a Marvel or a DC person.  It's a simple answer with a more complex background - I'm a DC boy but now read almost only Marvel.  (At least as far as mainstream, ie superhero, comics.)

Dave Barry somewhere talks about how sports fans imprint on a specific team when they're young and stay fans for life.  Possibly something similar happens for comics fans.  As a kid I read DC and that was pretty much it.  Oh I did Marvel from time to time - often enough that I knew the main characters without all the history - and as a constantly restless reader I dipped into Charlton, Dell, Archie and others that showed on spinner racks at that time, including Warren books years before I really should have tackled them.

Why DC?  I can't say.  Maybe it was goofier, maybe more optimistic, maybe more to my taste, or most likely it was just the first I read.  The brother of a friend liked DC better because the stories were usually finished in a single issue, unlike Marvel which had stories that stretched through issues and issues.  Today of course they're practically the same in this respect.  In retrospect it didn't hurt that DC had a history going back to the 30s which it often reprinted while Marvel seemed to be in an eternal now.  Even now I'm surprised at how much older material turned up in DC during the 70s.

2004's JLA/Avengers could have been just another enormous crossover to excite the fans - in many ways that's really all it is.  But somewhere along the line writer Kurt Busiek decided it could also be an exploration of the ideology of the two companies.  Nothing particularly heavy - this isn't Althusser or Gramsci.  The Flash is the first through the separation of the two universes (its own historical reference) and his reports are what DC characters think of the Marvel universe.  Different people (mutants) not just persecuted but physically abused.  The world smaller and darker.  Murderous psychopaths considered heroes (The Punisher).  Supervillains running entire countries.  The Marvel characters see something different in the DC world.  It's shiny and bright.  There are museums devoted to dead heroes.  Ordinary people ask for autographs.  It's Captain America of course who gets to utter the f-word - they're fascists.

Does this explain any of my interests?  Not really but it offers hints.  Marvel has always been considered more realistic than DC despite that being a pretty subtle distinction for superhero comics.  After all Marvel had Dr Doom shooting the entire Baxter Building into space, a Spider-Buggy (seriously, look it up) and Skrulls turned into cows (that hilariously was decades later referenced as one motivation for the Secret Invasion).  By the 70s DC was printing Batman stories as psychologically insightful as Simenon and the still-controversial O'Neill/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories that are about the only time superhero comics successfully grappled with real-world problems.

So why today do I read almost no DC but large chunks of Marvel?  Basically it's the New 52 which should have opened the creative floodgates but instead shut them tighter (you can read some of my reactions from when it launched) while Marvel has experimented and put more faith in creators.  Before the New 52 DC was publishing more than just superheroes with a Western title, fantasy, crime, SF and some unique ones.  Now that's all gone.  Today it's Marvel putting out titles featuring a Muslim superhero or a black/Hispanic one, who's taking chances on unusual ideas like Hawkeye, Superior Foes of Spider-Man and The Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl, who have more women characters in more prominent roles, who are simply producing better stories.

Looking back it's pretty clear that the New 52 was driven more by marketing than creative concerns, one reason several artists and writers have gone on record about the difficulty getting work done.  For me the titles mostly became too dull and too much the same.  Even the war and Western books were turned into superhero titles and Vertigo was partially dismantled around this time.  I don't care much about continuity but DC titles got to the point where it became an issue.

But nothing in a product-hungry field like comics lasts - there always has to be something new and as I'm writing this both companies are on the verge of big changes.  DC is backing away from some of the New 52 changes and promising more creator-driven titles but we'll see.  Marvel is folding its regular and Ultimate lines together and been tight-lipped about the result but right now have a more reliable track record.

Cool Stuff at My Other Blog

My other blog Discoveries & Oddities from the Digital Library collects unusual books from around the Internet - all public domain that can be downloaded for free and legally.  Not quite something for everyone but lots of things for many people, particularly if you have slightly off-center interests.

Recent entries include:

Fightin' monks
Missing heirs to the French throne
Victorians looking at dinosaur fossils
Poetry parodies with kittens
Accounts of the Great Chicago Fire
18th century guide to getting rid of vermin
Wild illustrations of purported demons & magical beings
How to build shacks and shelters
The first book in English about Zen
Trick photography
Outdated slang
Anti-censorship satire

and so much more......

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon 2015)

Seems like every review opens with "I enjoyed it but...." and who am I to toss aside a week-old tradition?  Because Age of Ultron is entertaining in a loud-fast summer blockbuster way but lacks much of Whedon - where's the first film's humor and sense of real conflict?  Where's the feel of character and that smart dialogue?  I also find it odd to complain that it's too much like the comics but really that's more an issue of book elements that work there but weren't translated properly to film.  Seriously, levitating an entire (if small) city works on paper but seems a bit silly here.

When we left the Avengers at the end of the first film they had separated and Fury stated they would be back when we needed them.  That sense of desperation (and religious overtone) is absent - the new film opens with them having been together for a while though it's unclear why exactly.  Yes, Hydra clean-up duty but is that all?  By the end, we're shown a way for the franchise to move forward even if the current actors leave.  Comics readers are familiar with frequent line-up changes (or for that matter multiple concurrent Avengers teams) but it's not certain if movie audiences will be as open-minded.

Ultron appeared to be a good choice for an opponent - smart, tricky and almost impossible to defeat.  On film though he becomes more a generic villain.  Why does he do bad things?  Well because he's the bad guy of course.  There is reasoning - he's programmed to defend the planet and thinks the best way to do that is to eliminate people - but it's tossed in.  Consider how much more effective it would have been to have a scene where the newly created Ultron fights alongside the Avengers and we see him reasoning along that path.  Instead it's just a given and unconvincing, perhaps one reason he embarks on such a bizarre mad-scientist scheme.  (Not to mention that Ultron's plan is remarkably inefficient and would take thousands of years to kill humans but at least it's visual.)

Ultron also becomes something of a faceless entity and the struggle against him is either technobabble or smashing robots.  Think of the first film where numerous people argue with Loki, try to reason with him, bring him to a different view, trick him.  The closest this film comes is the Avengers trying to guess what Ultron is doing - hardly the same and resolutely undramatic.  (Just as the sudden appearance of a helicarrier at a needed moment is sloppy writing.)

The film also barely exploits Ultron's biggest strength in the books - that he's an AI and since independent of a physical host nearly impossible to eradicate.  The film briefly has a bit where Ultron jumps bodies but otherwise he's in the same one throughout.  It's easy to see why - because fully using his AI state not only would turn the film into a computer hacking story where most of the Avengers have nothing to do (even if set in a Tron-like visualization of cyberspace) but that would make a sense of closure at the film's end hard to achieve.  As it stands the ending is still a bit ambiguous and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Ultron is brought back to help fight Thanos in the Infinity War.

Age of Ultron is almost overstuffed with characters.  This isn't much of a problem in the books since comics writers have decades of experience dealing with large numbers, in fact that might be a unique writing experience since maybe only soap operas even approach the same situation.  Some of the techniques used are rotating characters, breaking them off into smaller teams, focusing stories on subgroups within the larger one, etc.  But a movie is locked into a cast of actors and expectations from the previous film.  All have to get a certain amount of screen time and things to do but then again this works against showing a larger picture - this same story in comics could easily show dozens of other characters fighting Ultron across the globe in just a few panels.

Which brings us to the Hulk problem.  Why is he here?  Clearly it's because he was in the first film but in story terms there's no purpose.  In the first film Fury manipulated him just as Fury manipulated all of the Avengers and in the end the Hulk provided something of a wild card status and needed combat heft.  In the first sequence of Age of Ultron he's out of place in what's basically a military operation.  (And speaking of that it's clear why the others kept their costumes but Hawkeye and the Widow really should have been wearing white camo.)  The Hulk's next appearance shows how much of a liability he is - more importantly the Avengers are aware of that and prepared Hulkbuster armor (called Veronica in the film for an oblique reason - Banner dated a Betty and in the Archieverse Betty's nemesis is often.....)

Another comic book element that's a bit grating in the film is all the tosses to upcoming movies, at least four (Black Panther, Captain America: Civil War, Thor 3 and the Infinity War).  Comics are often narratively porous, referencing not just a current storyline but referring to numerous other series, older events, classic images and even elements from other companies.  (Just think of the government hit team based on the Avengers who appear in The Authority.)  This web of references don't work as well on film and here only the Black Panther bits seem workable because most viewers won't realize that's what they are.  But Thor heading off for a mystical bath that's conveniently driving distance from a college?

The Scarlet Witch's powers are still about as vague as in the books but she comes across fairly effectively (and even has a "look" towards the Vision).  Dream sequences and mental visualizations such as showing a character's fears are not only cheap writing tricks but rarely even a minimally effective one.  Here it seems less than useless.  So Stark is afraid of his friends dying and having survivor's guilt?  We need a fear trip to reveal that?  Thor is apparently afraid of parties and Captain America of swing music.  I think we're supposed to read this as something Thor deals with in his next film but it really just seems a reason to give him screen time.  And apparently Steve misses Agent Carter though again we already knew that.  Natasha on the other hand seems to have memories more than fears though this isn't made particularly clear and none of it shows how brutal her training was like the talk she has with Banner.

Why even bother killing Quicksilver?  He has the fewest lines and least personality of all the main characters so I doubt many people cared.  Which clearly is also a reason - the film shows the fight as having consequences but not that bad.  (Unlike the Daredevil show which had a genuinely unexpected death.)  If Whedon really wanted to make an impact it should have been Hawkeye but that gets to the point above that many creative decisions in a film like this are made for contractual and business reasons.  (Though on the other hand comics at times kill off characters willy nilly confident that they can be brought back when needed - we can guess the movie Civil War won't end with Captain America dying because we know he's in the next Avengers films.)

And by the way, Captain America's little speech about innocent people dying every time - every time - somebody tries to stop a war before it starts is quite rousing.  But stop a minute.  Cap is telling us to never try to prevent wars.  That's a little harsh and short-sighted even for a professional soldier.

Library sale

Today's haul from the library sale:

Rube Goldberg vs the Machine Age
Koch - The Rise of Modern Warfare
Solomon - Existentialism
Warren - All the King's Men
Oates - The Stoic & Epicurean Philosophers (Modern Library)
Edel - Henry James: A Life
Williams - Henry VIII and His Court
Meyers - Great Martial Arts Movies (revised edition)
Perelman - Swiss Family Perelman
Perelman - Westward Ha!

There was also a copy of Seven Storey Mountain that I almost picked up just because today was Merton's centennial but it was fairly beat up and the layout seemed more cramped than the current edition.  I'm unlikely to ever read it anyway so there's that.  Last time there were volumes two to four of Anthony Powell which I skipped but this time there was volume one with the others gone.

Somebody had donated a fair number of oversized military history books but they didn't seem to be that substantial.  I got the Koch because it's about 16th and 17th century warfare which is under-represented.  I don't think the Perelmans are firsts but they're certainly fairly close and even though these are his most common books the illustrations are nice.  I don't particularly want to read anything else about Henry VIII right now but the Williams book is more about the people, objects and locations around him.  I have the first edition of Meyers martial arts book somewhere but the revised is good to see.  I'm not sure I'll get through all of The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers but had been considering re-reading Lucretius before I read The Swerve and anyway I have a weakness for these Modern Library editions.  All the King's Men is something else I've been wanting to read - this is just a nice condition paperback.

Some documentaries

Sight & Sound released a poll of the all-time best documentaries this summer so I decide to fill in some of the gaps.  (The poll is here but a warning that the website for this is poorly designed.)

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker 1982) - I first saw this about 20-25 years ago and didn't think much of it so I watched the Criterion DVD earlier this year.  If anything it's less impressive.  The biggest surprise over time is that I now see that this is mondo film - I don't mean similar to one I mean it's exactly a mondo film.  There's the same disconnected flow of scenes, the focus on oddities and strange behavior from outside the filmmaker's culture, the faux philosophical narration to tie that together.  The only difference is that Sans Soleil is lower on the sex and violence than most mondo films.  But even if that's mistaken Sans Soleil remains a tedious film and the annoying thing is that it's the type of film that I should love.  There is sometimes an interesting play between narration and image but for the most part it's far too slight and generally almost laughable.

D'est (Chantal Akerman 1993) - This film is a series of extended takes by roadways or public spaces alternated with occasional portraiture shots mostly of women inside apartments, all done in what appears to be Russia.  (There is no identifying text or voiceover and I deliberately didn't research the film.)  In other words basically a structuralist film and if it's labelled as documentary that's probably more for marketing reasons.  Maybe it's an attempt to document daily life but apart from a few shots of field work and cooking there's almost nothing of that.  If anything the film documents the connections between daily life - driving, waiting for a bus, walking, sitting.  I don't know how much this could be considered a comment on the state of Russia (didn't research but I did see the Netflix comments) because basically the same film could have been made in Detroit.  Though this sounds a bit negative I do think this is a strong film despite being wayward and somewhat unfocused.  Overall it reminds me of James Benning's 1982 Him and Me complete with an unedited musical performance towards the end (though I consider the Benning film a much stronger one).

Primary (Robert Drew 1960) - A landmark in the development of verite this still frequently maintains interest as a kind of road movie long after the politics have gone.  (Though perhaps not too much - the farmer's issues briefly mentioned are still far from settled.)  The two surprises are that it's not what I would consider pure verite since there's some narration and a few instances of blatant use of non-diegetic music as commentary.  The other is that Humphrey comes off more personable than Kennedy which I'm not sure was the intention.  That the film often has dull spots is more that we're half a century down the line but nevertheless dull spots they remain.

Man on Wire (James Marsh 2008) - This is also only partly a documentary and not in a productive sense (as say with Close-Up).  Much of the film is recreations of a wirewalker's successful attempt to cross between the WTC towers but unlike with a TV doc about, say, Bunker Hill where the recreations are obvious the attempt here was to duplicate that era.  So even where there are some genuine photos from the actual event they're merged with the fiction.  And this story is clearly fictionalized since the filmmakers rely far too much on the wirewalker's animated and polished account.  For instance he claims when he was 17 he visited the dentist and saw plans for the yet-to-be-constructed WTC in a magazine which he then ripped out and left the office.  We're treated to scenes of that event both in the office and riding his bike afterwards.  Did this happen?  Seems quite unlikely since the wirewalker is clearly not a reliable source and here he's telling a well-worn story that's a bit too dubious.  Even apart from that fiction-issue the bigger problem is that the bulk of the film concerns the mechanics of the stunt presented in much incredibly boring detail.  It's also odd to me when some of the talking heads refer to wirewalking as beautiful.  I'm willing to grant that there are plenty of things I don't quite get but probably do have value (baseball let's say) and maybe this is just another.  But really it seems like a category error of some kind, like saying pouring water into a glass is beautiful.  It's not whether that action is or is not beautiful, it's that the concept of beauty simply can not apply to it.

Book sale

I've missed the AAUW book sale the past three or four years but made it this time.  The haul was

Malcom Cowley - After the Genteel Tradition

Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

Brooks - The Flowering of New England

Oates - The Whirlwind of War

The Best of Sholom Aleichem

Brecht - Seven Plays

Donald Harington - Let Us Build a City

Flannery O'Connor - The Habit of Being

Rose Macaulay - Pleasure of Ruins

Chubb - Dante and His World

There was an interesting book about the Pre-Raphelites but it was a QPB edition so I passed.  Also a collection of French wartime writings and another about 19c realists but I realized even for $1 I'd never read those.  There was a Modern Library edition of Life of Johnson but I didn't need another and couldn't think of anybody else who would want it.

My new blog Discoveries & Oddities from the Digital Library

http://discoveriesandoddities.blogspot.com/


Coming soon

pirate stories
a month of Halloween
lurid 18th century chapbooks
a fantastic illustrated 1840s guide to Asian entomology
1920s guide to US for Jewish immigrants
French revolutionary satire
early design books
imagist poets
more kook literature

Russell x2

Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell 2012) – Mystifying why this is so well-regarded since it’s a routine romantic comedy, not roughly but exactly.  Not a revisionist romantic comedy or one that infuses the genre with new emotion or whatever critical blurbspeak you might prefer but one that’s absolutely by the rules and absolutely with nothing to say.  Even a film like 27 Dresses shows more imagination and life but that’s not even a particularly good film.  I checked out the first couple of pages of the novel and that has a wry, self-aware tone that’s completely missing from the film (or at least the novel appears that way from only a couple of pages – for all I know it’s even more bland).  Bradley Cooper’s talents run towards farce so he can acquit himself passably in the Hangover films but here seems like he’s just starting to struggle in the deeper end.  Jennifer Lawrence is today’s Kim Novak but has yet to encounter a Hitchcock who knows how to make her essential hollowness the focus of a film. I guess if you're a De Niro completeist this might be worth checking off that box.

American Hustle (David O. Russell 2013) – A watered down Mamet tale of con artists and their schemes undone by a script that veers from blunt drama to an overly pat crowdpleasing ending.  The entire first 30 minutes or so are pointless prologue – as a character study there’s no real character and as part of the story it’s literally useless.  Trim all that out and it would make no difference to the film. Russell again proves to be no director of actors.  Amy Adams seems to understand the Mamet angle and uses that direct, uninflected tone he prefers.  (Since her character isn’t based on a historical person then her costume is more the result of a male director but when the camera starts moving to follow her backside the whole thing becomes creepy.)  Bradley Cooper seems lost and Jennifer Lawrence apparently thought she was in a Saturday Night Live skit.  The horribly miscast Christian Bale does manage to make some impression as do some of the supporting cast like Jeremy Renner.  De Niro appears in a bit of stunt casting that just underlines how little substance there is to the film but by that point it's clear that we won't be getting anything better so might as well toss in any half-baked idea that pops up.

Food books x2

David Sax - The Tastemakers: Why We're Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue (2014)

This is a journalist’s book, mainly a slapped-together collection of articles related in some way to food trends.  Sax did the research, interviews and pulled that together into stories but there’s nothing to synthesize them and barely even a connection among them.  For instance he opens with a chapter about the cupcake trend, locating the start at a bakery in New York that accidentally became a hotspot then the NYC-based media picked up the story, fed each other’s interest and that spilled out to the rest of the country.  It’s a familiar story and seems likely to be true but that familiarity and nothing new means that the story feels a tad dubious. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that this started in LA or Minneapolis but NYC gets the credit because that’s where the journalists are.  More importantly the chapter doesn’t get into why this became a trend – after all not everything pushed by NYC media hits the rest of the country.  Sax does offer the idea that cupcakes appeal to people because it reminds them of childhood, something that makes sense, is easy to believe and is obviously wrong.  That he doesn’t see how his stories are just more gloss means the book becomes mainly one to be mined for stray bits of info and background.  I didn’t realize for instance that one reason bacon started appearing on fast food menus is because they began to overcook them from fear of lawsuits and consequently needed a flavor boost.  The book has bits like this but tends to lose sight of its purpose.  When he gets to food trucks for example Sax spends most of the chapter on their legal battles which is interesting (well ok it’s not at all interesting but let’s just say it is) without getting to the point of why something that can offer only convenience and the probability of inferior food became trendy.  The Tastemakers is a book that touches on various trends offering little of substance about them.

Michael Pollan - Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013)

Pollan had the idea to explore what he considers the four approaches to food preparation – heat, liquid, baking and fermentation.  Like the Sax book he’s done the research and in this case even gone out to do this first-hand.  And like the Sax book he doesn’t really bother to pull together the material.  Though it feels like a stronger editor could have helped, for all I know the book was even more a mess and the editor did make it somewhat readable.  Let’s just give Pollan his basic idea however unlikely or even silly it might be.  (Tying these approaches to the classic four elements?  Really?  You know that’s a European thing that won’t explain other cultures right?)  The bigger problem is that going hands-on meant he only uses historical information in scattered bits though he certainly gets more substantive material than Sax apparently even thought to do.  With this ready then he gives us a lopsided book that jumps from watered down academics to overly detailed descriptions of baking.  When talking about barbeque he even spends pages on the biography of one cook for no real point.  That’s what an editor or Pollan himself should have done – cut the book by about half.  Trimmed and focused this might have been something worth reading.  

Library visit

Over a month since last post which is not unusual so a catch-up.  One of the perks of my job is access to a top-notch academic library - sometimes I almost think that's more important than the paycheck.  (Almost.)  I always have a bunch of stuff on my list but generally go until my bag is full which meant I never got to the numerous Shakespeare books I'd hoped to read before the birthday events last month.

Tonight's haul:

The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire
Somoza - The Athenian Murders
Bevington - Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages
Boethius - Consolation of Philosophy (Norton Critical Edition)
Sherwood Anderson - Complete Stories
Crispin - The Moving Toyshop
Woolf - Collected Essays Volume One (the 60s edition that's arranged thematically which is what I'm interested in - not the 80s also-four-volume edition that's chronological which seems like a snooze)
Baudelaire - The Painter of Modern Life (original edition that you can actually read - the current Phaidon is on such cheap and thin paper that it's a blur)
Calasso - La Folie Baudelaire
O'Grady - And Man Created God
Gravett - Comics Art

Viewing

Class Relations (Jean-Marie Straub & Danielle Huillet 1984) - Critics seem distracted by that title and make claims for the film's politics that just can't be supported by watching it.  The depth of Straub/Huillet's thinking is that bosses can be mean and though that sounds like I'm joking it really is almost an exact description of the force and resonance of their analysis.  Well maybe that's overstating it since there is no analysis and actually very little that could be considered political.  I'd guess they were aiming for a Brechtian approach by having actors recite dialogue with little inflection or facial reaction, with off-center framing and with leisurely if not downright eccentric pacing.  At times this might be mildly interesting - many shots of a speaking actor are done in profile but occasionally the camera is positioned just a tad back so that a sliver more of their face isn't visible.  The overall effect isn't to generate thought (or appreciation of the images which they probably consider irrelevant though the cinematography is top-notch) but instead to make the viewer wonder how they were able to finance such a ridiculous film.

Thor: The Dark World (Alan Taylor 2013) - The first film was slight but somewhat amusing - Ebert correctly pegged it as a kids movie.  This is just a misfire with a somewhat unclear plot laden with Star Wars-derived effects, some decades after that would have been a good idea.  The flying battle shots and particularly the blaster sound effects almost could have been lifted from the Lucas film.  The biggest problem though is that the lead roles were given to two impossibly leaden actors.  Hemsworth has always been a kind of modern Victor Mature though in The Avengers Whedon at least knew how to use that to underline the character's not-of-this-world origins (and if nothing else that film didn't need more big personalities in it).  But Portman?  I thought she just might be having a bad patch but then realized I've never seen her do a good job in anything.  A quick check of her filmography confirmed it - no matter what her reputation she's wooden and ineffective.  In this film the leads' inabilities are thrown into relief when they're set aside Tom Hiddleston, Kat Dennings and even Chris O'Dowd.  Christopher Eccleston is unfortunately buried under a mask but imagine what he could have done.  With any luck this will either be the last Thor film or they'll turn to the Simonson stories for the next one.

Monsters University (Dan Scanlon 2013) - Has it really been a dozen years since the original?  This turns out to be an unnecessary follow-up in every way.  There wasn't anything left from the first film that needed resolving and University seriously could have used a story editor.  The set-up just flops around from event to event, mainly feeling designed to impart life lessons on courage, friendship and sticking up for yourself.  (And I suppose to emphasize being clever though that really can't be taught.)  As these animated kids films go it's at least watchable but Pixar's glory days now seem behind it.  And what is their problem with women?  This time there are two token women teams and a headmistress (why not call her the president like real universities do?) but it just points out how much a boys club Pixar has always been, at least on screen.

Uranium Boom (William Castle 1956) - A surprisingly effective b-movie about a couple of guys fighting over mining and a woman - the story is fairly complex for a 67-minute running time.  In an odd way a kind of critique on greed in the vein of Citizen Kane (Castle had worked on The Lady from Shanghai) or more closely Ulmer's Ruthless.  Castle shows efficient story-telling skills and if not much else then that's at least enough - this is a glimpse just before he discovered gimmick marketing and made his real name.

Library sale

Originally scheduled for February but the snow storm pushed it back.  Pickings were slim this time - there were a few other interesting things but in poor condition.

I found:

The Best of Dryden (1933 edition that includes none of his drama)
Gibbons - The Poet's Work
Smith - Virgin Land
Smith & Parks - The Great Critics
Bianculli - Dangerously Funny (about the Smother Brothers show)

Two "100 Book" lists

In 1898 a scholar and sometime editor named Clement K. Shorter came up with his list of the 100 best novels.  I find these type of things, no matter how canon-defining they're attempting to be, fascinating.  Partly because they track shifts in taste and partly because they can show how limited our own might be.  Many older lists include Walter Scott, a choice for canonical author that's baffling today when he's considered more of an entertainer and only barely read at that.  Lists might also be more inclusive and not like so many today mainly focused on novels, drama and lyric poetry.

Shorter's list feels a bit eccentric even by what I know (or think I know) of tastes from that period.  Bunyan's The Holy War instead of Pilgrim's Progress?  Gil Blais?  Clara Reeve?  And starting with #18 (Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl) are a few books that I've never even heard of.  Who was Jane Porter?  G.P.R. James?  Theodore Hook?  James Grant?  Certainly some of those are works that feel into scholarly interest but at the time were more current.  At the time Shorter was writing they were about as far into his past as the 1950s and 1960s are to us - in other words pretty modern.  Interestingly there are a larger number of women than I think most of us would have expected - 32 unless my count is off.  The list also seems to lean a bit toward adventure in a broader sense.  I've seen Marryat praised for his style but he's generally considered (rightly or wrongly I don't never having read the book) a precursor to sea stories like Hornblower.  It's also heavily British with a few French, American, German and Italian writers.  And then the choices.  Not just the Bunyan but Salammbo for Flaubert?  Bracebridge Hall for Irving?  The Last of the Barons for Bulwer Lytton?  Or maybe just "Bulwer Lytton?!?"

Still I'd like to check out a few of these obscurities, not because they may be lost classics but because they might just be overlooked but worth reading.  Open Library has some that I checked.  The book about Richelieu by James ("doyen of historical novelists") sounded promising but flipping through looks a bit drier than I'd like.  Or maybe it finally is time to read Marryat.

The other list has appeared in many news reports this week - Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.  (No, I didn't forget the link - if you want this one you'll have to look it up.)  The purpose is unclear.  The banner says "to create a well-read life" but it misses so many of the truly important books that apparently they're assuming you've already read those.  The inclusion of kids books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Where the Wild Things Are goes against "well-read".  No matter how charming or developmentally important children's books are, they are also by definition of no real artistic value.  The non-fiction titles are almost random (Unbroken? Born to Run? Daring Greatly) and there are far too many recent books that simply can't be evaluated yet.

The real purpose of the list is clearly those news reports - it's just more marketing.  The list is carefully chosen so that most readers will find a decent number that they already know and more that they know about.  Nothing too off-putting or obscure or difficult. There are some books that I think are irrelevant or even bad on it but for the most part people could do worse and that is more or less the point.  It's not a serious list in any respect but one like, say, the Oscars or Grammys to make readers feel comfortable rather than acknowledge genuine accomplishment.  

Notes on Re-reading The Turn of the Screw

The Norton Critical Edition which reprints the New York Edition text and includes background material, contemporary reviews and selected criticism.

It’s odd to discover Turn was initially serialized in 12 installments – the Norton marks the end of each.  So much of the effect depends on a unity of purpose which must have been lost in such a presentation, or if readers even remembered the story.  If the journal was a weekly that’s three months for what now most of us read in one sitting.  If twice-weekly that’s still a month and a half and even if it came out every week day that’s over two weeks.

I’d never noticed before that the governess is not named.

Are Quint and Miss Jessel evil?  That’s clearly how the apparitions are given though even being presented through the governess’ account they don’t do much.  In the backstory all they seem to have done is engage in a romantic liaison – outside good taste perhaps but even in 1898 hardly evil.  (Though the story is set decades earlier it still feels much of the time of its composition.)

Surely somebody has written a story about Flora after the events of Turn.

What’s the purpose of the frame story?  To some degree this is a convention but I suppose partly it serves as evidence that the governess is in fact not insane, to account for some readings of the actual text by earlier representing these in the frame’s characters, and possibly to make the story more “final” by presenting it as a fixed text two removes in time (many years from when it was actually written by the governess who was then recounting events many years in her past).

This second edition of the Norton Critical came out in 1999 and most of its sampling of recent criticism is already useless.  Remember when academics valued the ability to write well?

The impression I get from the supplemental material is that it didn't occur to readers for years that the governess might be imagining the spirits.  Not sure I quite believe that.  If that’s true though the interesting point is how ingrained a way of interpretation is that it’s hard to imagine another way.

If I’m reading the Blackmur piece correctly he’s suggesting that both the ghosts are real and also that the governess is imagining – basically that the ghosts are mostly blank and she’s projecting the evil onto them.

Interesting that James called Turn a “potboiler” several times and dismisses it for not being as attentive to reality as his other work.  I’m hardly a pro-realism guy but admittedly do see some of his point. 

Also can’t help but wonder how conscious James was of class differences.  He was certainly aware of it but I suspect in a way that would be offensive today.  Some of the servants are listed in Turn but barely figure in the story though you have to wonder why not considering the events that may or may not be happening would have involved them as well.  In A Portrait of a Lady servants sometime flick by almost like, well, ghosts with just a passing mention during scenes where until then I didn't suspect they were even present.

Since the Quint and Jessel relation is never clearly defined it’s hard not to think that the most offensive transgression was their difference in class.

Is Mrs. Grose’s illiteracy an indication of her inability to interpret the events? Of course if the governess is imagining then she’s not missing the ghosts, she’s missing the threat of the governess.

There are many more film versions than I realized.  This would appear to be a book very unsuited to film but must be tempting to filmmakers.

Some recent reading

John Man - Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior (2013)

An odd book.  The purpose is worthy – to write an accurate history of ninja without the vast amount of myth and exaggeration built up around them.  But Man quickly runs into the problem where he has few sources of uncertain reliability.  He solves this as many other authors in a similar situation have by writing about the period, using short profiles of people, adding stray facts and interesting stories, tracing some of the remnants of the activity.  The result, though, is a clunky grabbag of material.  He focuses mainly on 16th century wars that certainly involved the ninja even if the historical record isn’t always clear about their activities or capacity.  This account gets a bit confusing which might well be my ignorance of the period but then again I’m exactly the type of person he should be write towards so if I’m lost then that can’t be entirely me.  At times he has interviews of modern historians, collectors and buffs though it apparently never occurred to him to write a combination history/travelogue much as Tony Horwitz does.  If that doesn’t work then how about tracing the development of the ninja myth?  Again there’s a brief bit about how this happened in Japan but much more about how James Bond started ninjamania in the West.  He doesn’t follow too much past that.  Towards the end of the book he’s really stretching for material.  There’s a chapter on the Nakano spy school that’s interesting and has a conceptual similarity to real-life ninja activities though there doesn’t appear to be any actual connection.  The final chapter relates the story of a Japanese soldier who didn’t believe the war was over and lived for decades hidden in the jungles on a populated island.  Man claims to see the spirit of ninja here but this is such a weak link that it’s laughable.  In one odd part so utterly unrelated to ninja history that you feel the author is trying to pad out the book he includes a bulleted list of survival characteristics including the claim that people with stable childhoods are better survivors because they don’t expect the crisis to last.  You could just as easily make the opposite claim – that people with unsettled childhoods have more experience (and might just as well know this won’t last).  It’s unlikely that either is true and there’s no source for the statements anyway.  This sort of thing makes me wonder how reliable the rest of the book is.

Jeffrey J. Kripal - Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (2011)

Kripal wanted to trace the development of comics in relation to contemporary trends in science fiction and pop culture ideas of paranormal activity.  There’s a lot of potential there but this isn’t that book.  He quite early lets us know of his genuine paranormal encounter (though what he describes is a well-known psychological effect) and his seemingly proud believe in something both so trivial and so ludicrous casts the rest of the book into question.  It’s sort of like starting a book on 20th century Italian history where the author proclaims his admiration for Mussolini – it doesn’t negate the accuracy of the history but does make a reader dubious about it.  Kripal at several points claims that the truth or not of the various paranormal events (he includes one from Doug Moench that is so clearly a mistaken memory that it’s hard to imagine anybody taking it seriously if in fact I wasn’t reading somebody taking it seriously), anyway that their truth or not isn’t important.  Fair enough.  The catch is that Kripal is using this more as a smokescreen and as the book goes on it’s more and more obvious that whether or not he personally believes this (though he’s told us that he does even if with a wink and nudge) that he’s presenting it as fact.  The bigger problem is that despite all this the book doesn’t do justice to the connections that it’s supposedly intended to explore.  Superhero comics roots in Victorian adventure and 20th century pulp fiction are well-documented (though more wouldn’t hurt) but its ties to the parallel development of modern SF is more scanty and to paranormal and alternative religious beliefs almost nonexistant (other than UFO and related which aren’t typically considered paranormal but in all respects actually are). 

David Sedaris - When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)

People have always told me Sedaris is a writer I’d love so a few years ago I tried to read something but didn’t get far.  Lately my boss went on several long spiels about Sedaris and her descriptions were funny so off to the library where I picked this as the most likely choice.  Then I read it.  It is, to borrow a better writer’s phrase, a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.  The first surprise is that despite his reputation Sedaris really isn’t a humorist.  I don’t mean that I didn’t find him funny (he has moments) but for the most part that’s not what he’s trying to achieve.  Mainly he writes memoirist essays, which I realize is a clunky phrase but best describes these little bits of his life stuck into this form.  I have no idea how much of this is true but that really doesn’t matter.  When Sedaris goes off in one of the longer, more unpleasant essays about a bad airline trip it’s clear that this is just the literary equivalent of a talk radio caller.  He’s merely venting with no reason that we should care.  Some of his character profiles offer more substance but again without much to recommend them.  In fact after finishing the book I admit to being completely mystified why anybody would think this was worth reading at all.