Links

the history of the history of ideas

Tony Isabella's 100 things he likes about comics

Simpsons & math

European mystery writers

economics of movie advertising

Christgau on Billie Holiday and the grain of the voice

High Tension

Hey, I get to play cutting-edge cognoscenti and sniff that I saw the original untrimmed, undubbed version of this a year ago. Then again this film is completely worthless so maybe I should have just kept that to myself. Nearly all of it is a mindlessly routine, by-the-books slasher film with zero tension high or otherwise which is bad enough. But then it ends with such an unbelievably ridiculous twist ending that it shows nothing but contempt for the viewer. The problem isn't just how much a cheat the ending is but that sections of the film can't be made to fit it. Still, lots of horror film fans like it for reasons that I can't fathom, despite having read numerous postings trying to explain why.

piece on practice of criticism

http://www.swans.com/library/art11/cmarow13.html

Baadasssss! (Mario Van Peebles 2004)

Melvin Van Peebles was a genuine artist struggling to make a tough, uncompromised film. Mario is an actor who can raise funding. And that’s the difference. It’s no accident that Mario seems more interested in Sweet Sweetback’s original grosses because otherwise he doesn’t seem to understand what his father accomplished. Baadasssss! is pure Hollywood, following the familiar story about a troubled artist fighting a corrupt system to make a “revolutionary” work. Even though most of the events appear to have actually happened the key is the presentation, the details. Movie-Melvin writes the entire film in a montage sequence and except for a short bit with a crew member later this is pretty much all of the creation shown. Movie-Melvin mentions that Sweetback only has six spoken lines but when did he decide that? And why? Was this really something planned before he knew he’d be playing the part himself? There’s a lot of talk about community which is something you can definitely see in Sweet Sweetback’s but not Baadasssss! where--except for a nice through-the-mirror imaginary sequence--you get easily characterized figures in front of a hazy background. Where did the original’s visual style come from? It’s an odd mix of Bruce Baillie-esque cityscapes, B-movie bluntness, documentary grime and even a near-hallucinatory desert sequence. That wasn’t all due to start-stop filming and using short end film stock. Baadasssss! of course is slick and professional to the point of being practically a betrayal of its inspiration. Baadasssss! includes some short interviews with the film characters that made me wonder why Mario didn’t go the Reds route and include the actual people. Then they turn up doing exactly that at the end but mostly saying positive, cheerleading statements. Which leads me to believe that either the interviews were so bland that the Reds technique wasn’t a fruitful option or much more likely Mario didn’t want to push far enough for any real complexity. After all, Movie-Melvin comes across as much nicer than the real Melvin does in interviews, though to be fair the ones I’ve seen are about three decades after Sweet Sweetback’s. It’s hard not to wonder what Mario actually thinks about having been put into a sex scene when he was thirteen by his dad. Perhaps some psychodrama would have enlivened Baadassss! but it’s worth noting that Mario cut the film so that Movie-Mario isn’t shown remotely near that scene (talk about a structuring absence). By the time the film winds down to a ridiculous scene about the Detroit premiere, I was wondering whether the whole story should be redone but this time complete with documentary interviews, animation, Gilliam-inspired surrealism, conflicting voice-overs, slow-motion, readings from related paperwork, etc. Just go crazy because Mario's timid recreation is hardly even a footnote to the original. The DVD includes a promotional piece about the “Birth of Black Cinema” that completely ignores Oscar Micheaux and any black actor or filmmaker earlier than Poitier. In it Mario and others also make the claim that Sweet Sweetback’s inspired Shaft and other blaxploitation films but considering that Shaft was released only about four or five months after Sweet Sweetback’s it couldn’t have been directly inspired by the Van Peebles film.

Wars Americans Know Nothing About

The Austro-Prussian

The Franco-Prussian

The Swedish-Polish

The Second Afghan

The Second Mithridatic War

The First, Second and Third Samnite

The War of the Triple Alliance

The War of the Quadruple Alliance

The Greco-Turkish

The Sino-Japanese

Henry Fletcher

I first ran across a story by artist/writer Henry Fletcher a couple of years ago in one of AC's reprint series. It featured a peculiarly effeminate "super wizard" named Stardust in the type of adventure that you expect an eight-year-old to have created. Fletcher's art had misproportioned figures and an oblivious lack of perspective that also seemed quite child-like. The whole story seemed like outsider comics, especially when I couldn't find any other information about him except that he also used the name Fletcher Hanks.

Now I found there's a webpage at http://www.lambiek.net/fletcher_henry.htm with very brief info (apparently Hanks was his real name) and better yet reproductions of three entire stories. According to Scott Saavedra there's a book about Fletcher in the works at Fantagraphics which would be an essential purchase.

recent reading

Don’t know where this fits into my standing on the 50 Book Challenge but surely I’m way behind. There’s a lot of stuff not covered in the blog that I may or may not get to eventually (including the several books I just read about the Iraq War that should be covered together).

Ben Macintyre The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (2004) - I love this kind of book where a half or mostly forgotten bit of cultural history is brought back up. In this case, of the early 19th century Pennsylvania Quaker Josiah Harlan who left the U.S. and served as a doctor with the British army despite having no medical training. He eventually ended up in Afghanistan during the Great Game, became an actual provincial ruler, an in-name-only “king” (very briefly), made arduous explorations and dabbled in Afghan political intrigues. Oh, and towards the end of his life he became a misplaced commander in the American Civil War and proposed that camels be used in the Southwest (thereby eventually giving the world Hawmps, which impressed me at age 14 but I’m probably skipping the recently released DVD). It would be hard to mess up this story and Macintyre doesn’t. Even if chunks of the book are more or less rewrites of Harlan’s own journals, well judging from the actual extracts that’s not such a bad thing and where anyway would I find the published journals? My library has extensive and thorough history holdings but nothing by him, not even on microfilm. Maybe that shouldn’t be such a surprise since checking a few books I have on Afghanistan and the Great Game, Harlan isn’t mentioned (or at least not indexed). Macintyre doesn’t make any claims that Harlan was an unacknowledged key figure but shows where Harlan was sometimes an active player and more often somewhat self-deluded. In any case, a highly recommended book.

Chuck Whitlock Scam School (1997) - But then there’s this. The title may actually be Chuck Whitlock’s Scam School which would be appropriate since this is mostly about Whitlock. From start to finish, it’s “look at me me me” as Whitlock talks about all he’s done, his TV appearances, his stings, his “research”, the tremendous response that apparently greets his every single broadcast, etc. I picked the book up because as a manager at a bookstore cons and scams are a constant, though tiny, threat and because after seeing House of Games recently I got interested in old-school cons. (I have no idea why it’s even in my library which as a serious, well-funded academic library really doesn’t even dabble in this sort of trade market trash.) Not that I learned much about anything from Scam School (though one of the cons mentioned does appear in House of Games). Whitlock’s fictionalizing of stories shows that he brings little seriousness to his constantly trumpted title of “investigative journalist” and it’s just creepy that he’s proud of hobnobbing with reprehensible people like Maury Povich and Geraldo Rivera who profit from human suffering. Sure he admits that he changed some names and dressed up the stories but it’s clear that large parts are completely invented to make it more “readable.” Whitlock’s frequent accounts of his undercover antics (never turned over to an associate) are intended to show how scams work but it’s blatantly clear that he loves the scams and showing how superior he is to everyday people. This just leaves a bad taste and makes Whitlock appear to be just like the other scammers, except he’s only keeping money from selling this con of a book and not from his televised victims.

A. J. Liebling The Telephone Booth Indian (1942) - This is the first Liebling book I’ve read even though he’s one of those people whose name floated around for years as somebody I might like. This title was chosen again because of the con man aspect. It was reprinted last summer as part of Broadway Books’ Library of Larceny series though there’s not much in the way of actual cons or even larceny here. (I read the North Point edition with a Roy Blount introduction but will probably stand in some store and read the new Luc Sante introduction just because I like his work. Or maybe just wait for the entire series’ eventual appearance as remainders.) Instead, the book creates an almost-dreamworld of what 30s NYC was or should have been like, with its small-time hustlers, boxers, entrepreneurs, bookies, hat-check girls, theatrical impressarios and so forth, kind of real-life Runyon. Apparently this isn’t Liebling at his most Liebling-like which may be why this is more top-notch reportage rather than the sparkling memoirs I’d expected. Still, the material about boxing and horseracing is interesting enough to somebody like me who otherwise wouldn’t find the subjects interesting enough while bits like the short history of hatchecking are dispatches from a vanished world. (Reading the piece about the Shubert’s theatres I was struck by the mention of Shubert Alley and couldn’t remember why that seems familiar since I know practically nothing about NYC theatrical history; eventually I placed it as the Mel Torme album.) Really the only serious flaw is the piece about Roy Howard of Scripps-Howard newspapers which repeats chunks of material and eventually bogs down in recounting editorial shifts at various newspapers, which probably fascinated a journalist like Liebling and possibly even his contemporary readers but today is like trying to keep straight the opaque succession of Italian Renaissance rulers.