Archives for December 2003

Ed Page at Danger Blog! has excavated an old New Yorker piece in which James Thurber imagines how Hemingway would rewrite a Chirstmas classic. Here’s a small taste:

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

“Father,” the children said.

There was no answer. He’s there, all right, they thought.

“Father,” they said, and banged on their beds.

(Via Maud.)

The Wall Street Journal‘s column 4 has a terrific story today about Brooklyn’s last remaining seltzer truck. You know the mantra: no link, but this piece alone is well worth the buck for the paper:

Spritzed by Flatbush Avenue traffic on a wet morning, the last known seltzer truck in New York City was a double-parked apparition, its tiers of lopsided racks holding a cock-eyed pile of siphon bottles in cracked, wooden crates.

Arnold Brenner, a psychoanalyst walking to work, spotted the truck just as Ronny Beberman, the seltzerman, was wheeling a delivery toward an apartment-house door. Dr. Brenner yelled, “How much is a….” But Mr. Beberman was already inside.

Dr. Brenner stood unactualized on the sidewalk. “I was thinking I could get a case,” he said. “It’s the spritz that does it–that fizz–so soothing, so strong. Reminiscent of something, something romantic.”

Ronny Beberman has his own analysis of the spritz mystique: Because nobody wants it anymore, seltzer has become desirable.

“People, they don’t know what seltzer is,” he says. “They moved from Iowa. They ask me, ‘What’s in those bottles?’ I have people, they chase me in their cars. They’re disenchanted. They’re drinking out of plastic.”

Mr. Beberman emerges from this wonderful piece a genuinely romantic figure, the unbowed last relic of a business you’ll be amazed (and grateful) to find has not quite died out yet. Buy the paper, read the whole piece. You’ll get a Count Basie review and a profile of a fashion photographer into the bargain.

October 1938: Orson Welles strikes fear in the hearts of radio listeners everywhere with his fiendishly lifelike report of highly improbable events.

December 2003: Maud Newton strikes fear in the hearts of blog readers everywhere with her fiendishly lifelike report of highly improbable events.

Dear Terry,

You and I both are under the gun this week. I just finished writing a review of Doris Lessing’s The Grandmothers, due out in January, and it was a book that almost finished me. Going into the assignment, I didn’t have anything against Lessing particularly. I duly read The Golden Notebook as a college senior, and if my memories of it are now vague, my fat little Bantam edition bears the cracked spine and dog-ears that are reliable marks of absorption. But this new book was a tremendous slog. Several times I thought I was within an hour or two of finishing it, but an hour to two later found myself maybe 20 pages along.

I found Lessing’s writing here very mannered and schematic, and I find myself wondering about her reputation. I can’t think of any of my contemporaries who count themselves as her fans, and I know a few who don’t like her at all. Talking to the well-read, discriminating OFOB (Our Friend on the Block, from whom we’ll be hearing more in the nearish future) about the book earlier today, I said “she’s like spinach.” OFOB protested: “But I like spinach!” Is Lessing one of those writers who speaks strongly to their own generation but then does a slow fade into obscurity?

In the course of writing the review, I consulted a few references to help me get a fuller sense of Lessing’s reception. I looked at my dog-eared old Golden Notebook, the Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors, and a fun, bossy, out-of-print reference book I picked up some years ago used, Martin Seymour-Smith’s Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century Literature. The Seymour-Smith is very like your and my perennial favorite, David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, in approach, if not execution: it’s fiercely opinionated, seldom wavers, and is bracingly unapologetic about its judgments. It’s fun to disagree with.

None of these sources (of course not the paperback cover) betrays any discontentment with or doubt about Lessing at all. Seymour-Smith and the Salon reviewer, Laura Morgan Green, treat her with a rather grave and unwavering respect. But both they and folks like Irving Howe who give blurbs on the paperback tend to describe the value of her work in terms of truth-telling. Very little is said about how she tells the truth in her fiction: about, say, her style or voice. What matters, according to these accounts, is simply that she is truthful. The conspicuous silence on aesthetic questions makes me a bit suspicious of all this praise, and it definitely resonates with my experience of The Grandmothers, in which the writing was very unbeautiful (I tripped over one sentence that turned out to have eleven commas) and pleasure seemed not only out of the question, but beside the point. If important truths were told in the book, I’m afraid I was too distracted by aesthetic undernourishment to catch them.

Who knows, maybe there are some fervent Lessing fans out there who will rush to her defense, but at the moment I’m having a hard time imagining it. Even the advocates I’ve cited sound more dutiful than passionate.

Looking ahead, I have two more days in Chicago before heading off to Detroit, from which fair city (don’t believe me? see Out of Sight!) blogging will continue. It’s the meantime I’m a little worried about, since I really am going to have to move heaven and earth to get everything done that needs doing at my day job. But I’ll try to poke my head in now and again, and hope to see yours too.

I stayed up all night writing a piece (to be exact, I went to bed at 5:30 this morning), and I have to go to a play tonight, so you probably won’t hear further from me today.

I think OGIC has posting plans. Otherwise, read what’s there, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Has there ever been a better-cast Hollywood movie than Twilight,
Robert Benton’s 1998 neo-noir thriller? I’d never even heard of it until OGIC drew it to my attention, but now it’s a special favorite that I screen at least once a year, as I did last night. From the top down, here’s the star billing: Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, Reese Witherspoon, Stockard Channing, James Garner, Liev Schreiber, Margo Martindale (she’s currently doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway), and M. Emmet Walsh, and every one of them is memorably good, especially Garner and Channing. Yet Twilight wasn’t a hit and isn’t all that well remembered, presumably because its real subject matter is advancing age, a topic that doesn’t make for hits. Likewise Dick Richards’ 1975 film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, in which the nonpareil Robert Mitchum plays Philip Marlowe as much older than did Humphrey Bogart or Dick Powell–and makes you buy it.

Maybe it’s just my gray hairs talking, but I think noir and middle age go together like gin and vermouth. Disillusion, diminishing horizons, a shattered sense of the possible: that’s noir in a nutshell. Kinda goes well with the holidays, don’t you think?

This is a big writing week for me: I have to finish four pieces (and two letters of reference) before I hit the road next Monday. I promise to keep blogging all the while, aided and abetted by OGIC and our wonderful correspondents (see below for yet another case in point), but don’t be surprised if the flow of soul around here isn’t quite as profuse as usual, O.K.? It’s merely a temporary pre-holiday aberration.

Incidentally, there’s a chance that Our Girl and I will both be blogging from Chicago for a few days early in January. Should that happen, we’ll go out of our way to cook up some exotic stunts for your amusement!

“The way to get the best out of instruction is to put oneself entirely in the hands of one’s instructor, and try to find out all about his method regardless of one’s own personality, keeping of course a secret ‘eppur si muove’ up one’s sleeve. Young students are much too obsessed with the idea of expressing their personalities. In the merest harmony exercises they insist on keeping all their clumsy progressions because that is what they ‘felt,’ forgetting that the art cannot mature unless the craft matures alongside with it.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography”

A reader writes:

I’ve been mulling over your extensive posts about the cinematic experience. Two things struck me in recent days: your post of someone’s memories of the spectacle of live musical performance, and the post of someone’s complaints about how Hollywood success is measured, in which he/she comments that “movies are not communal experience.”

I’ve been a bit distressed about your opinions, not because I think you are wrong, but because I think you’re forgetting something. Yes, it is wasted energy crying about the shifts in technology and the marketplace. Yes, we should get over our nostalgia. Yes, it is possible to have great home
experiences of films.

But #1, the nature of films is changing as they are made for the home market—and this includes the blockbusters. Without captive audiences in a darkened theater, they are paced differently. Without giant screens, overly-filtered light begins to pass for cinematography, subtle camerawork and editing become less apparent and thus less likely to occur. Acting evolves in different directions to take account of the more intimate relationship between screen and audience. The advent of improved video (DVD for the moment) means that increasingly films are preserved digitally for the marketplace, not on film (more expensive). In other words, the character of the films themselves is different on television sets than they are in theaters, and this changes the very nature of how they are produced—which is one reason why you don’t remember a lot of tv movies as classics.

#2, going to cinema IS a communal experience. I don’t know what is wrong with your other correspondent, but if he/she missed all the people sitting around the theater, I’d assume blindness is the problem. Films made for the movie theater are made for collective audiences. They are screen tested with full audiences to understand how they will be received. Comedies in particular, but tear-jerkers too, have depended for their evolution not just on mass taste, but the presence of multiple tastes during viewing. Watching movies on tv is very different, and the venue absolutely affects the character of the productions, particularly over time. While many more people may watch, there is no sense to the maker of the film that he is creating an overwhelming experience for a discrete group of people.

#3, old movies on tv are reproductions. They were shot on film, not video or digital, and the translation is most often inadequate and always simply different. No flicker, no reflection of pure light into the retina, but an entirely different form of visual experience with completely different physiological and psychological implications. As Norma Desmond said, the pictures ARE getting smaller. Recordings are not the same as live performance in music, and video copies are not the same thing as original three-strip Technicolor. Period. It does make a difference, or you wouldn’t go to museums to see the posters in the shop. The reason why your correspondent who remembered his 3rd-tier orchestra in Belarus had such an extraordinary experience was because it was possible. He was listening to an original.

To sum up, movies are different on tv. Not worse, necessarily, but different. And something is absolutely lost in the transition, and to pretend otherwise is a crime against culture as surely as being a Luddite is. There is something tragic about the slow decline of an extraordinary cultural experience, cinema-going, which resulted (at its best) in art from the dross of commercialism. Would IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and CASABLANCA and CITIZEN KANE be what they are without the filmmakers’ sense of the shared aspirations and values of their collective audience? Would Hitchcock’s films be as frightening as they are without his careful consideration of how he could drive people crazy with tension in a crowded room, without his certainty that multiple shrieks would amplify fear? For god’s sake, what about the feeling you get when an entire room full of people laughs with you at a joke that one and all get?

Cinema is our great accidental art form. It is both private and collective, both interior and public, and yet its contexts have always been driven by the marketplace, wherever we live. We will all have to get used to the changes, yes. But I can’t accept that all disappearing sensations, particularly those that come from art, should simply be let go with a brisk wave and tip of the hat.

I don’t disagree with a word of this letter–which, perhaps not surprisingly, came from a museum curator. And I’m especially struck by the beauty of the last paragraph, which is very much the sort of thing that would occur to a museum curator. I will miss all those things. I don’t want them to go away. I want to be able to see the great movies of the past in theaters, surrounded by enthralled audiences…and I expect the day is coming when I’ll have to go to museums to do that. In which case we should all be grateful to museums for preserving the “disappearing sensation” of watching movies in the dark, surrounded by a roomful of people who came to partake of that miraculous communal experience.

What I also appreciate about this letter is that it completely disentangles my expectations from my desires. One of the things I try to do on this blog is predict some of the ways in which art will be affected by technological changes–but those predictions aren’t necessarily endorsements. They are attempts at understanding.

I’ve quoted it before, but I want to mention again a remark made by Marshall McLuhan in 1966: “I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening, because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.” I’m not quite that much of a neophobe, but I think I know how McLuhan felt, and what he meant. Much of the time, I wish the world could be exactly the way it was when I was young. Alas, it can’t even be the way it was this morning. I suppose the day will come when I decide to give up on the present and live in the past. Until then, I, too, am determined to understand what’s happening–and maybe even try to help shape it.