The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Film

  • The Bellboy and Usher

    What is the logic of a hotel, its language, the action? In the 1960 black and white film The Bellboy, the hotel functions as a circus, its logic dreamlike, its language a dialect derived from silent films, its action as surreal as Fellini’s later 8½ (1963). Silent cinema can feel surreal as the action suggests sound which somehow fails. Stanley, Jerry’s bellboy, says not a word during the film, not until the very end, when he’s asked why he never speaks. Circus scenes shift from one ring to another without obvious transitional phrasing that might link to form some sort of logic. The spotlight moves around the hotel setting, the rest of the world remaining in darkness until awoken for its local act. The language is impressionistic, like the scene where Stanley conducts the empty orchestra on stage in front of an empty audience. Here we can see him speaking, even read his lips, but can’t hear his words, while the band plays on, with percussive emphasis. The film makes no attempt to describe some inner truth. The Bellboy scenes focus on perception as reality. The plot is stream of consciousness, the scenes like dream fragments.

    And the two dimensional black and white aspect of the film functions like a cartoon, just as a hotel is a cartoon for its two dimensional lifestyle – it’s not a real home. In the orchestra scene, Stanley stands on the stage, his back to the empty hall, conducting with a baton and music stand. He’s a bit severe, kicks out the drummer, whose rhythms we’ve been enjoying, but who then comes back, as if on cues. And that’s the cartoon – cues, commands, gestures. How is a hotel constructed? Corridors, an infinite number of doors and windows, elevator boxes like cartoon panels read up and down, and the lobby, with its front desk and bellboy stand, the artificial intelligence of the entire enterprise, a system of cues and responses.

    The Bellboy is like a drawn cartoon, geometric, architectural – straight lines and right angles, like Jerry’s body. Watching it the other night on the Criterion Channel, I was reminded of the night I stood in the lobby of a now defunct mid-century modern designed movie theater in Los Angeles, in usher uniform with flashlight, about ten feet from Jerry Lewis, who had left his seat in the last row on the center right aisle, from which he was controlling the sound volume, at an opening night, red carpet special, of his less successful film, Which Way to the Front, ten years after The Bellboy. Jerry wore glossy black tuxedo pants with even glossier stripes down the long straight pants legs, a starched white shirt, no tie, and a cardinal red cardigan sweater, and shiny reflective black patent leather shoes, his short black hair equally glossy and waxed matching above. He looked so natural in that mid-century lobby setting, inside, interior, not a word or nod to me, though he must have recognized me, boy in bellboy like uniform, both of us in cartoon like panels, his legs like stilts, while I felt stilted in a different way, wanting out, while Jerry wanted in.

    “Why are you always yelling?”
    “Why are you always asking so many questions!”

  • Scraping By

    One summer, I worked for one of my Dad’s friends in the body and fender shop at a Ford dealership in Culver City. He entertained the idea of getting a race car and I would be his driver. He foreshadowed the advent of the short surfboard. “Why are the boards so big?” he asked. “You could ride a two-by-four if you could get up the momentum.” Another summer my Confirmation sponsor hired me to work as a lab assistant at UCLA, where he was working on a graduate degree, the chalkboards in the lab covered with formulas and equations that looked like hieroglyphs left by sanderlings bicycling around the wavelets at El Porto.

    The first thing my Dad taught me about plumbing was to name the tools, so I could hand them to him when needed. And I learned to dig a trench with the correct slope, for “shit falls downhill.” I worked odd plumbing jobs with him and knew enough of plumbing to know a plumber by trade was not what I wanted to be. Today, though, I feel some affinity for the plumber’s craft, even if my Dad would not now recognize it as the same trade, the new plastic pipe, the special tools, the glues that have replaced the lead and oakum joint jobs. Boiling the molten pig of lead in a lead pot then working the cooling lead sealing the oakum with a cold chisel around the lip of the cast-iron pipe. Yarned and roped, poured and caulked.

    One day, my Dad, a plumber by trade, he would say if asked, asked me what I wanted to do, to be: a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber. I wanted to surf, which he knew, his garage a surfboard shop, but while I was a good surfer, I wasn’t an excellent swimmer, like my two best friends who were county lifeguards, but we all knew we weren’t going to surf our lives away. And I played guitar, but as an ambition as aimless as walking on a surfboard, for while I was a good guitarist, I wasn’t an exceptional musician, and had no taste for the business. And cars, beginning with the 1956 Chevy I bought for $75 from Gary, who was headed for Vietnam. I became a wheeled and track vehicle mechanic, MOS 63BC20, which helped see me through school, that talk with my Dad over and out.

    What’s all this got to do with Benjamin Wood and his novel “Seascraper,” recently longlisted for the 2025 Book Prize?

    “The horse needs feeding up and harnessing. He gets into his boots on the back doorstep, rolls a ciggie underneath the rusty canopy his grandpa built from corrugated iron – it’s hanging by loose screws, and one more heavy rain could bring it down. He’s not repaired it yet, as mending stuff like that requires an aptitude he doesn’t have. His talent is for something else – his grandpa would decry it as a waste of time if he were still alive to hear him sing a tune, and if his ma knew anything about the pocket watch he gave to Harry Wyeth in trade for his guitar, then she would make a bonfire of it in their own backyard” (5).1

    That talk with my Dad I replay like old vinyl, now full of scratches of course. I might pick an electrician to be, and maybe I’d specialize in electrical musical instruments. Or I might have moved from carpentry to lutherie. Those are indoor jobs. Do you want to work indoors or out was not a key question for a kid growing up in Southern California, where the weather was taken for granted. There were a dozen guys I knew having conversations with their Dads similar to the one I described above. Families just scraping by, recovering from one war and beginning another, and then another, or couples with a cache of war bonds that would see their two kids through USC or Stanford.

    “It never used to foul his mood this much, the cold, the loneliness, the graft, but that was long before he harboured any aspirations for himself besides what he was raised to want. He used to think it was enough to fill the whiskers up with shrimp each morning and accept the cash for them by afternoon. Providing is surviving – that’s what Pop would tell him, and what else should any man desire? Perhaps a wife, if he could find one that’d have him” (12).

    He has more than a job, an occupation, he’s a seascraper by trade. He both loves and hates it. For love, the culture and tradition, the brawn and brack, the freedom. For hate, the cold and wet and muddiness, the poverty, and not enough time to devote to his true calling:

    “He was thirteen when he first went out to sea with Pop and, in those days, few adaptations to the old equipment had been made – the cart still had two wagon wheels with metal rims, and he felt queasy after half an hour of riding in the seat with him. It was supposed to be a weekend job, that’s all, and it was something he would beg his ma to let him do, believing it to be a rite of passage. Every other Flett had been a shrimper, going back to his great-grandpa who had putted barefoot on the beach alone with just a push-net and a basket on his back” (34).

    Scraping for money, too. There’s the rub. And he learns and loves to read, fatal flaw. And comes under the spell, though he’s naturally wary, of an outsider who sees just some kind of romance in the beach and sea and fishing for a living, and who wants to make some kind of movie about it, with him the star, and the promise of some big bucks. He’s not sure.

    “The folk club at the Fisher’s Rest begins at eight, and if he wants to play tonight he’s got to put his name down on the list by quarter to. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to wait a week, rehearse his songs a few more times before subjecting people’s ears to them. He’s not in a position to refuse that kind of money. ‘I dunno,’ he says” (32).

    What’s the catch? The empty promise of a false calling. And who is calling? You’ll meet all kinds of charlatans wanting to hear your story and help you to tell it. How could you tell? He’ll make a tourist scene of your livelihood. Tom Flett is the only seascraper around who still works with a horse and wagon. The others use motorized carts. He’s like a plumber who might still be using lead and oakum. Idealized and sentimental. The tourist view doesn’t see behind the facade. There’s no money in the songs. There’s no money in the seascraping. What’s he waiting for? To know his song well before he starts singing?2 What’s he going to sing about? Seascraping. Dangerous work, and just scraping by.

    “He’s committed now and has to see it through. ‘Bear with me, then. I’ve got to work the nerve up.’ The guitar of Harry’s is much bigger at the body than he’s used to and its neck seems thicker when he takes hold of it. At least it’s strung the right way up. The frets are old and blackened, but it sounds in tune. ‘I need to warn you, I’ve not sung this more than twice from start to finish. It’ll come out ragged, but you’ll get the gist’” (161).

    Mariposa Surfboards
    1. “Seascraper,” Benjamin Wood, recently longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. Penguin Random House UK. ↩︎
    2. “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” released in 1963 on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. ↩︎

  • Graham Cracker

    Graham Greene’s “Orient Express” (1932) is a mean-spirited book about human experience and condition, closer to Theodore Dreiser than to Evelyn Waugh, and not to be confused with Agatha Christie’s trip on the same train a couple of years later. In Greene’s book, the murders take place off the train. The writing technique shows the early influence of the cinema. A New York Times contemporary review from 1932 explains:

    “Something of motion picture technique is used, with brief glimpses of the actions and thoughts now of one character, now of another, interspersed with the longer stretches of narrative.”

    NYT, March 12, 1933

    The characters are drawn from stock and the plot from Naturalism. Film endings coming as they do only an hour or two into the story, are unexpected and stir the emotions of the audience. Yet the threads are there from the beginning, and the wall could have fallen only one way as brick by brick is pulled out.

    I read the “Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition” (2004), with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens (“Hitch” to his friends), which I would not read because I don’t like reading introductions, at least not until I’ve finished the book, because, like movie trailers, they give too much away, and because I never cared much for Hitch. I almost did not buy the book when I saw that Hitch did the intro, but I did, rationalizing I didn’t need to read the intro. But I did, buy the book and read the intro – after finishing the book. All of which is nonsense, of course. And browsing through the reader reviews on Amazon, before deciding to click “buy now,” I found a curious and funny one from a guy who didn’t like the book’s physical format – the uncut pages and the folded end flaps of the cover – folded flaps that are like the book covers used on hardbacks. But I like these features, and the book has a nice heft and feel to its pages, which feel and look printed instead of photographed.

    Hitch spends most of his intro worrying about Greene’s use of stereotypes and trying to arrive at some sort of apologia for Green’s alleged anti-semitism. But Greene was probably following his bent. “Orient Express” is really about Greene’s own human predicament: his place and fit in time and class and mood. The narrator is also on the train, trying to avoid its preordained lineal descent or ascent. Like Hitchcock’s brief appearance at the beginning of his films, Greene is the purser in his first paragraph:

    “The purser took the last landing-card in his hand and watched the passengers cross the grey wet quay, over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks.”

    3.

    It’s a cracker of a book, crisp and salty, melts in your mouth, and leaves you wanting something with a bit of sugar in it.

  • It Takes a Little Getting Used To

    I’ve been reading the new Mel Brooks book, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (Ballantine Books, 2021), aloud evenings for family entertainment. It takes a little getting used to, but it beats Jeopardy, which I’ve given up along with ice cream as a near nightly habit moving into the new year. I got the Mel Brooks book for Susan as a Christmas gift. She likes Mel Brooks. She’s very knowledgeable about films and actors and singers and such. Remembers lyrics of far away songs and where she was and how old she was when she saw a movie and who she saw it with. Her grandfather on her mother’s side was in the film industry in Hollywood, a career scene painter, back in the days when movies were made mostly on backlots and required giant backdrops of scenery painted, so the action filmed in the foreground would look like it was done on location. His specialty was clouds, skies, oceans, also buildings and street scenes, fronts, false facades, and interior walls and columns and windows. One year, they flew him to Italy to paint some backdrops for Ben Hur. He worked for the studios. He was an artist, a painter, in the union. He used bristle brush and airbrush. I probably wouldn’t get in line to watch Ben Hur now, but it was a very successful and influential film. I don’t know if Susan’s grandfather ever met Mel Brooks, but Mel might have been influenced by the Ben Hur film when making his History of the World films. Anyway, Mel uses the phrase “It took a little getting used to” frequently in All About Me! For example, when he first eats the Army chow called “shit on a shingle” he says, “it took a little getting used to.”

    We’re in Chapter Three, titled World War II, and 18 year old Mel’s just finished a 1945 seasick crossing of the North Atlantic in February and is now in the French countryside of Normandy training to join an Engineer Battalion. In an aside, a flash-forward, he returns to the French farm while in Europe during the filming of The Elephant Man (1980), which was produced by Brooksfilms. And when Mel gets to the farm, he’s greeted by the little French farm kid he befriended with candy in 1945, the kid now the size of a bear. “Mon Dieu! Mel?” the now grown kid says, recognizing the now middle aged ex-soldier.

    It takes a little getting used to, but I enjoy reading aloud, even if Susan is the only person in the audience. A book like All About Me! lends itself to an oral reading, straight ahead first person narrative memoir with plenty of room for interruption to discuss what’s going on, complete with jokes and laughs and dialog, anecdote and history, and old photos to share with the audience.

    Yeah, it takes a little getting used to, oral reading for entertainment, for the reader and listener, but it’s fun and engaging and certainly beats bad television, but probably not the football championships. Add another lockdown activity to the list of things to do during the Great Covid Scare.

  • Motti, Lazzaro, and Django

    Motti, Lazzaro, and Django

    The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch (Swiss, 2018) is a coming of age story, Motti’s single marital status of existential concern to his mother, who tries to set him up with any number of, for Motti, unsuitable but available girls whose mothers are equally concerned about the marriage status of their daughters. But Motti has his own ideas about attractions and family values, even as his young and tender heart is yanked from his body by the carefree girl he falls off a cliff for, and a parental sponsored trip to Israel banking on his finding a girl the family can approve of only makes matters worse. Expect much laughter, and crying, out loud, with actors speaking German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch is about the surprise of life.

    Happy as Lazzaro (Italian, 2018) is another coming of age story. Lazzaro does, literally, fall off a cliff, but not for love, and his heart remains surreally whole, inviolate, even as his body is bruised and abused. He’s a static character, the same at the end as at the beginning, even as life around him changes dramatically. The dwelling settings, country and city, are brutal but beautiful. The lives of the sharecroppers, under imprisonment and later emancipated but just as poor, still captives of poverty, illustrate that poverty is protean, affecting both the poor and the wealthy.

    Django (French, 2017). A dramatization of the life of the guitarist Django Reinhardt and his family during World War II. The Nazis persecuted the Gypsies, many of whom tried to flee to relatively safe zones, joined the resistance, or were caught, killed on the spot, or transported via train to the Nazi concentration camps. The film focuses on Django’s one attempt to escape France, and while he did try to escape to Switzerland, according to the book Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend (2004, Michael Dregni, Oxford University Press), Django spent most of the war in Paris, where he was allowed to continue playing his music because by then he and his music had become so popular. But he had to play for the occupiers as well as for the locals, his safe treatment thus coming at the cost of a kind of debt bondage. From the book:

    “Hitler bore a deep hatred for Gypsies…From 1933, German Gypsies were doomed. The Nazis barred Romanies from cities, shuttling them into settlement camps. Nazi doctors began sterilizing Romanies as early as 1933. And German Gypsies were required to wear a brown triangle sewn on their chest marked with the letter “Z” for zigemer, German for “Gypsy” – a precursor of the yellow Stars of David pinned to Jews (168)….Yet in Paris, Django was flourishing. Never did he have so much work or live in such sumptuous surroundings. Just as the Germans permitted jazz in Paris, they allowed Romany musicians to continue to play – and paid to come hear them every night” (169).

    Still, Django worried for his family and for his own life, and if some considered him a hero, others thought of him as a conspirator: “Being in the spotlight saved him from the fate awaiting other Gypsies, but Django began to sweat under the glare” (182). Django takes off with his pregnant wife and his mother. They get caught and are imprisoned, but then, in the absurd way these things seem to happen, Dregni says, “A miracle arrived in the unlikely form of the German kommandant. He was a jazz fan, and when he came to question his new prisoner, he was astonished. ‘My good Reinhardt,’ he said, ‘whatever are you doing in this fix?’ Django promised not to try to escape again, and was freed” (184).

    Django the film is must see for anyone interested in Gypsy jazz. But it’s also just a classic film – the acting, the setting, the timing, the war, the family and country drama and suspense. It features much magnificent music, including the organ “Mass” piece Django created. Django the book by Dregni should also be read. Django never learned to read or write, save at a most rudimentary level, and that late in his life (he died age 43). The book reveals a deep history of jazz music in Europe, particularly Paris, including stories of the many Black American musicians who traveled through Europe, most stopping in Paris, many playing with Django, following both World Wars. It covers the business of music and recording and performance management, popular success and failure, the changing style of jazz as musicians work to assimilate new music experienced from new exposures.

  • Dinner Walk & Theatre

    The Willamette River flows north through the Valley roughly parallel I-5, and after making the turns near the Falls at Oregon City, moves through Portland before joining the Columbia on its way to the Pacific Ocean, but no worries, this isn’t going to be a geography lesson.

    IMG_20160320_172506
    Ross Island, from the west bank of the Willamette River, south of Portland (Mar 2016)

    After passing under the Sellwood Bridges (there are two currently, the old one and the new one, side by side), the river wraps around Ross Island, across from the Old Spaghetti Factory’s rococo restaurant – where we met friends last night for dinner before heading up river to the Headlee Mainstage of the Lakewood Center for the Arts, tickets waiting at the Will-call window, to see Spencer Conway play Hugh in a live production of BULLSHOT CRUMMOND: THE EVIL EYE of JABAR and THE INVISIBLE BRIDE of DEATH.IMG_20160320_172520

    The four of us shared a carafe of house Chianti and ate lasagna, pasta with clam and tomato sauces, fresh oven hot bread, salads and minestrone soup. We sat upstairs, at a booth in the bar area, paying scant attention to the river slooming below about sixty feet to the east. After dinner, we took a short, giddy walk along the river and paused for a few silly, group selfies with the island in the background.

    After the short, after dinner walk, we hopped into one car and drove upriver to the theatre and picked up the tickets with still time to lengthen our river walk down to the local historical park to check out the 19th Century iron smelter.

    We had seen Spencer Conway a couple of years ago in NOISES OFF at Portland’s downtown Newmark Theatre. All acting is, in a sense, a physical activity, and Spencer excels at employing his entire body in his work. When, for example, as Hugh ‘Bullshot’ Crummond, Spencer is hexed by a magnetic trance and becomes a human magnet, or slips into a parachute prop of sand, or rides the magic carpet, and more, he’s as good at physical acting antics as the great Jerry Lewis.IMG_20160321_093427I had not heard of Bullshot before last night. The form is satire, not quite farce, since there are targets – a causal argument of British colonialism reduced to buffoonery via the vehicle of a B movie on stage. Using inventive props in what seemed a record number of scene changes, the cast and production hands succeeded in creating the stage magic that allows the audience to suspend for a couple of hours and float effortlessly down the drama river. Rick Warren was perfectly cast as the evil Otto Von Bruno. Stephanie Heuston and Kelley Stewart each created original replays of B film vixen and heroine. Andrew Harris and Burl Ross filled out the cast, each frequently quick changing costumes to play multiple characters throughout the laugh-out-loud play.

    IMG_20160320_180306
    All the world is a smelter.

  • A New Denouement Comes to The Eidolon

    A moon rose pure placebo the day
    the dismantlers came to The Eidolon.
    A puppeteer hidden in a hard hat
    worked sticks and wires from a crane,
    his rude yellow wrecking ball
    a scraping bald knuckle
    -hyphenating-
    the yore tony a la mode pink marquee:

    –

    I

    D

    –

    –

    O

    N

    They hadn’t seen a movie there in years.
    Instinct drove to the location
    now hairy with graffiti and wounded windows
    boarded up. “Turn left there,” she pointed ahead,
    and here in the V of what used to be
    a local lemony clichéd Hollywood and Vine
    hung the vertical sign of rainbow chasing lights
    popped and glum, now a moon at noon.

    -OW -LAY-N-

    The wrecking crew worked amid yarns,
    a thrilling tale of piracy, or chivalric ennui,
    beach tar and feathers and a damsel tied to a rail.
    Though no one was actually tied down,
    back in the days of pretend, when make-believe
    waved sun and sea of the bottle bags of beggary,
    and kids danced to the possibilities of being free.

    SW-P -EE-

    They drove across town to watch the razing
    crew with crowbars and heavy metal
    tear down the slumping palatial playhouse,
    where teens once held hands,
    listening to rock and roll bands,
    and before them, kids spent summers in buttery
    fingered and fizzy toothed afternoons
    matinee rapt in spinning film,
    a veteran vaudeville player changing reels.

    -HIS SAT-R–Y

    Nothing could save now the last-gasp plight
    of this episodic imperilment, and the moon fell.
    The two cold cats sat on the bus stop bench
    across the street from the deconstruction,
    a couple of stoned Cupids deprived of sleep,
    sagely reminding one another to be brave
    and behave, lest they be kicked out again
    like the day they adlibbed Beatles
    and lit bee dough up in the loge.

  • Breaking Bad in Stromboli

    Breaking Bad in StromboliI walked down to meet Susan on Hawthorne late afternoon but arrived early and when I passed Nick’s and noticed baseball on the screen I ducked in to wait at the bar for a text asking my whereabouts. I ordered a glass of milk and a coffee chaser and the bartender asked me if this was my first visit to Nick’s. The game was in the 8th inning, a 3 to 3 tie, the Dodgers against the Cubs out spring training in sunny Arizona. A group of young folk occupied the north end of the bar, but I alone watched the game. The tables were all empty. The balls were breaking late, bad, away. The Cubs scored in the bottom of the 8th on a sacrifice fly to take the lead 4 to 3, and the Dodgers in the top of the 9th could not break away. My first taste this year of spring training TV was bad for a Dodger fan. I like the Cubs, too, and hope they do better than last year’s cellar close. Edging the Dodgers 4 to 3 yesterday marked the Cubs first win in seven games this spring training season. It’s still early, but the Cubs are off to a bad start. Cub fans are a forgiving bunch. Dodger fans live in baseball paradise at Elysian Park. But baseball and paradise broke bad some time ago, came the summers of our discontent, baseball breaking away.

    One of modern baseball’s design problems, as McLuhan explained, is that it’s a poor fit for television. Baseball is not pixel friendly. McLuhan saw how vaudeville moved to radio and radio to television, where there will never be enough channels, the need for distraction being what it is, even though all channels do the same thing and distract in the same way. But he did not foresee vaudeville being rekindled by Lady Gaga and Madonna in the Super Bowl arena where the camera is now a drone following the collective unconscious eye of the audience. Meantime, the living room remains the electronic middle class mosh pit. The form of television is its art; the channel hardly matters.

    Yet some said that “Breaking Bad” was television finally or finely elevated to art. The art of the installment, the fix, waiting for the next episode, the episodic adventure induced by Walter who like Fagin in Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” lives and thrives in a world of children. Is breaking bad an occupational hazard of teaching resulting from classroom isolation from the real world? Or “Breaking Bad” might have been titled “Death of a Teacher,” Walter White the Willy Loman who lives on TV fantasy to avoid the existential question imposed by being crushed beneath the wheels of contemporary financial, job, metaphysical, and medical malaise. We interrupt this post to bring you a full disclosure: I never saw a single “Breaking Bad” episode when the series was running. I did read a few reviews. I recently watched the first three episodes, borrowed from the library. I was thinking I might try to see the whole thing through, to its conclusion, and angle a post off it. But I don’t want to watch any more “Breaking Bad” episodes. Predicament may harden the romantic heart in all of us.

    For one thing, the premise of “Breaking Bad” seems algorithmic. A high school Chemistry teacher with experience and talent gets an existential kick in the butt when he discovers he has terminal cancer. He sees an opportunity in the two years he has left to make some quick money as a meth chef and improbably takes to a life of violent drug associated street crime. Various critical reviews suggest something philosophical going on. His street name is Heisenberg, and it’s probably true that nowhere in contemporary life are things more uncertain than out on the street, certainly not in the living room, watching television. So the existential predicament is the close proximity to death, not to be confused with the close proximity of television. But everyone dies and knows they will; why wait any time at all to break bad and kill the TV? Most people break indifferent. No life is longer than the one spent in moiling drudgery.

    Then I watched Roberto Rossellini’s “Stromboli” (1950). Essentially, Ingrid Bergman’s Karin’s existential predicament is similar to Walter White’s, though even more absurd, because she’s saved but ironically condemned to live in a place and with a man she believes she’s entirely unsuited for, which comes with the surprise of the epiphany. The island of Stromboli is a Mediterranean volcano. Life is harsh. Karin was expecting something a bit more pleasant, romantic, colorful. Life on Stromboli is inescapable sun or impervious shadow. The people on Stromboli live under the constant threat of volcanic eruption. Their values are kept immutable by the impossibility of change. Unlike the Mario by the end of “Il Postino,” Karin can’t see any beauty on her island or in the fishing life. It doesn’t take her long to realize she must break bad. But Karin breaks bad differently from Walter. She frantically climbs the volcano that Walter pedantically runs from.

    Note: No commas were mistreated in the writing of this post.

  • Satisfactus: “Charlie is My Darling”

    Charlie Is My Darling at The HollywoodThe new, old Rolling Stones film, “Charlie Is My Darling,” played at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre this past weekend, and we joined a mellow crowd of folks carrying beers and popcorn into the main auditorium, most of us probably able to claim that we had been raised on the Stones.

    The Rolling Stones of 1965 were born before the outcome of World War II was certain. Mick was born the week of Operation Gomorra, the Allied bombing of Hamburg, Germany, the firestorm that literally sucked all the oxygen from the air, killing 40,000, injuring another 40,000. Keith was born that December, the week Eisenhower was named the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

    Time was on their side, and ours too, as we settled into the revamped seats to view the revamped film. But time for what? One thing that seems to have died in the war was the notion of patrimony, if only temporarily and sporadically, that one might be born with guarantees, warranties. In its place would come a new wave of egalitarianism. It bartered with time, but still, what to do with it? Over in France, the question was considered existential, but for the Stones of “Charlie Is My Darling,” touring Ireland in September of 1965, the question hardly seems to have created a crisis.

    “I am not a musician,” Charlie Watts, the drummer, and Bill Wyman, the bassist, both insist. But that’s a simple argument of definition, for what is a musician? They certainly were not musicians in the sense of the classical pieces tied to their seats in a symphony orchestra. But “I just play music” is the rejoinder of the actor, the musician who takes the stage in front of an audience wanting to feel real time, feel alive and in motion. Thus Mick says he’s acting. Music becomes an act, and part of the act is the audience. There’s a scene in the film when a small crowd takes the stage, and an Irish boy grabs Mick’s microphone stand and takes the helm. But he’s not acting, or is he? It’s today a funny scene, full of dramatic irony, for we know what they don’t. It seems almost staged, improvised, but expected, at the same time. What does the audience want, the Stones are asked. To get close, to touch, to be part of the moment. To be in time with the band.

    Time is tight, sometimes, but as time goes by, we don’t always feel so constricted, but nor do we feel time “creeping in [its] petty pace,” taking its leisurely time, but still we feel we’ve time “to wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?,” and time to wonder if blogging isn’t such a waste of time, but time can be impatient with us, or we with time, like the bartender in Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” who simply wants to go home, and calls out repeatedly: “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.”

    The HollywoodTime is real. What to do? Rock around the clock.

    The film release comes in time for the Stones 50th anniversary year. It would be fine if their 50th anniversary tour gigs were as simple as the ones in “Charlie Is My Darling,” the stages low and thin, the instruments and amplification unhyped, the audience small and close, the band members close to one another, no catwalk for Mick’s jagged moves, playing venues like The Hollywood Theatre.

    Alas, too much time has passed, and with it, too much innocence.

    In the film, though 1965 does not seem like some ancient time, one is startled to see how young the Stones look and how old things seem. They travel by train, and the camera captures some splendid Irish countryside. When they do fly, it’s in a prop plane. The audiences are young, of course, but casual and quick interviews with bystanders show they were well-known, if not popular with everyone. There’s a fun and impressive scene where sequestered in a small hotel room with a piano Mick and Keith imitate Elvis and Fats Domino. Charlie pounds a bit on the piano, too. They had all gone to school on this stuff. And there’s another instructive scene where Mick and Keith are shown making up a song, the others following the process, getting it as they go – yeah, not musicians, though; they just make up songs. Mick downplays the lyrics and intellectualizing any of it. Maybe, but this too is all part of the act. What is their audience not satisfied with, Mick’s asked. Being controlled by the older generation, he says. And why do they feel that way? Because they’re dissatisfied with it.

    CharlieThe thin stages, the notable riffs, Mick’s antic catlike, moody body language, the minimal amplification and Charlie’s simple drum kit, were all easily enough to activate and satisfy the audience’s rock and roll impulse, both in the film and in the Hollywood Theatre. This could be the last time. Every time, any time.

    What to do, and why not a few songs, an hour upon the stage, or in front of the stage, or, years gone by, in an old movie theatre? Susan sat next to me, I could hear her softly singing, and I could feel her chair rocking.

  • Don DeLillo’s “Point Omega”: alt novel

    "Point Omega"Don DeLillo’s “Point Omega” is an alternative novel. At 117 pages, it’s the idea of a novel. We are not in Dickensland. The book’s structure, or frame, is divided into a story of four chapters, with a kind of foreword that tells a different story not completed until the afterword – so six parts. We are told it’s summer falling in 2006, on a separate title page, as if a sub-title – thanks for the clue. Then comes the foreword. That’s my term, to be clear. The text titles this section “Anonymity,” with a date, as if it’s a letter, “September 3.” The afterword is titled “Anonymity 2,” and is dated “September 4.”

    The Anonymity sections are written in the third person, and describe a person watching an art museum exhibit that is a modified movie from the film canon (no spoiling here). One of the themes of the book is watching, watching and waiting. The narrator of “Anonymity” describes those watching, but says the watcher is unwatched, but this is not true. The narrator is watching the watcher, and the reader is watching the narrator. And, if the reader happens to be reading “Point Omega” on the bus, in the library, at a coffee shop, yet another character might presumably be watching the reader. In any case, this idea, or theme, of one watching another is part of the idea of the novel, if not the novel. Another theme is film. We are told, still in “Anonymity,” that “film…is solitary” (9). But this is not true, either. Film is audience. Books are solitary (the Internet is audience without seats, no fixed position, the screen everywhere, no front or rear of the theatre, no theatre).

    The next sections of “Point Omega,” beginning on page 17, are numbered 1 though 4. These sections are told in the first person, and take place in the desert, inland from San Diego, where the narrator has travelled to visit an older man with Iraq War planning and consulting experience. The narrator wants to film the expert talking about his thoughts on the war. One of the themes of DeLillo’s book is how to tell a story, an idea that might begin with Poe, but once a story is told, it is subject to retelling. One version of retelling is the elongated film that is the exhibit in the “Anonymity” sections. The middle four sections take place over a month, so the connection in time to the two days of the “Anonymity” sections is ambiguous. How long a story should be is another theme of “Point Omega,” and when I got to the fly scene in the desert toward the end of the fourth section, I felt a tinge of relief that I had not long to go. Yet the fly in the desert appears to have been a foil detail.

    There is a counter view built-in that appears in “Anonymity 2.” Maybe the tale is not a detective story in the Poe tradition but a comedy, a comedy in the way that “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” can’t be taken seriously, yet some sublimation is surely going on in its audience. In any case, there is a bit of comic relief toward the end of “Point Omega,” in the dialog, but it’s soon dismissed.

    The writing in “Point Omega” creates a Poe-like atmosphere, particularly in the desert scenes, that is portentous. What might prevent the portentousness from becoming pretentious is the dejection of the characters, a dying man unable to reconcile his complicity in an irresolute war, a frustrated want-to-be film director, a type, and a possibly demented character about whom we know almost nothing. There are three men and three women who appear with significant speaking roles. The themes include appearance and disappearance, as in film, and one of the disappearances is into film, into character, and the uneasy experience of things slowing to a crawl, a distortion of real time that is not quite the call for suspension of belief or judgment we are asked for in the traditional novel. “Point Omega” might also be likened to a kind of film script, the novel ready-made to be made into a film, stripped of its thick traditions and conventions, ready for the camera. One can see it as a Hitchcockian exercise, reading as loss, as lost time, as we try to lose ourselves in the story of another.

  • Now Playing at Plato’s Cave: “The Reel World”

    Plato opened the first movie theatre, the audience chained to seats, unable to see the projectionist, and there were no refreshments or intermissions. You really had to be a movie buff to enjoy a film at Plato’s Cave.

    McLuhan (Understanding Media, 1964) explained that we must be trained to see movies, for “movies assume a high level of literacy in their users and prove baffling to the nonliterate [the unlit].” If a man disappears from the screen, the nonliterate wants to know where he went. “But the film audience, like the book reader, accepts mere sequence as rational.” And perspective is gravity, gravitas. The nonliterate will not sit still and be quiet in a movie theatre. They lack the requisite cultural-etiquette training, which requires the natural, balanced sensorium (the five senses tuned so that no one sense dominates another) to be dominated by the sense of sight. “For those who thus fix their eyes,” McLuhan explains, “perspective results.” This is why hot buttered popcorn is so popular in movie theatres – the nose is hard-pressed to go two hours with nothing to smell. The movie theatre is the new voting booth, where we learn both what we’re missing and what we want. “What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators…That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster ad for consumer goods,” McLuhan said.

    There are things we don’t want to see, movies we’ve no interest in, TV shows we channel surf away from, books we self-remainder to the rummage sale. We avoid certain conversations, too, closing our ears now to the sacred, now to the profane; there are things we don’t want to hear. Yet touch is the most involving of the senses, and the sense of smell is stronger than the sense of sight, and is tied to taste. Thus we say of a bad movie that it stinks. We instinctually avert our eyes from the ghastly, but when we want to see what we don’t want to look at, we go to the movies. “It is a spectacle,” Wallace Stevens said (“Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion,” 1945), “Scene 10 becomes 11 / In Series X, Act IV, et cetera. / People fall out of windows, trees tumble down, / Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old, / The air is full of children, statues, roofs / And snow. The theatre is spinning round,….”

    “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John: 20-29). Blessed today might be those who have seen and yet still believe. Yet “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” Blake said in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (and which the neuroscientists are busy trying to explain). What should we see; what should we read? What are our choices? “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else,” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing” (Silence, 1973). Just so, Cage gives us 4’33” of silence, but not silence, for we hear what we hear, note what we note, for we have eyes to see, ears to hear. McLuhan predicted YouTube: “Soon everyone will be able to have a small, inexpensive film projector that plays an 8-mm sound cartridge as if on a TV screen. This type of development is part of our present technological implosion.”

    The blogger gets McLuhan’s argument: “The typewriter…has caused an integration of functions and the creation of much private independence. G. K. Chesterton demurred about this new independence as a delusion, remarking that ‘women refused to be dictated to and went out and became stenographers.’” Just so, academics are beginning to refuse the traditional forms of sanctioned publishing, for the potential to blog brings about, as McLuhan said of the typewriter, “an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word.” Back inside Plato’s Cave and McLuhan’s (via Joyce) “reel world,” some critic tries to discern what we’re actually seeing and hearing, as if we don’t have eyes to see, ears to hear. Well, yes, but we can’t see the real thing. Behold, human beings living in an underground cave, blogging. This is a world of appearances, through a glass, lightly shuttering.