Archives for June 24, 2008

Can it have been 15 years since Exile in Guyville came out? Yes, it can. The album is being re-released today, and in honor of the occasion I thought I’d share Phair’s setlist from one of her very first shows, when she appeared as part of a showcase put on by Matador Records at Irving Plaza on July 23, 1993.
I was living in Massachusetts then, working at the Golden Nozzle Carwash post-graduation, and drove into New York with some friends for the show. According to this New York Times review of the concert, Pavement, Moonshake and members of the Silver Jews also played, which I have absolutely no memory of. Alex Ross wrote the Times review, and he describes Phair as “a distinctive singer and songwriter disadvantaged by an overloud backing band.” As I remember she was also out of tune and visibly ill at ease on the stage, standing stiffly front and center for most of her set.
My friend Shana, who doesn’t remember Moonshake and Pavement playing either (where were we?), tore Phair’s setlist from the stage after she performed and was good enough to send along a photograph of it. We have a no-swearing policy here at “About Last Night,” which I try to honor when I don’t forget, and one of Liz’s song titles breaks it, so the photo appears after the jump.

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I feel rather sorry for this guy, unable to derive a shred of pleasure from A Dance to the Music of Time and its minute observations from within of the English upper classes, even after shedding his Marxist convictions. I don’t imagine he’d care much for my current book A Legacy either: Sybille Bedford grew up and lived among the European aristocracy and cast a similarly cultivated eye on their wayss. Again he’d be missing the boat.
Powell and Bedford both look on their privileged bees and hives from a clear insider’s perspective, with all the understanding that implies and some of the sympathy. But they both also have plenty of ironic distance on these scenes and their absurdities. And they wouldn’t be successful satirists of the social scene if they didn’t also take seriously, and observe perceptively, the moral and emotional lives playing out within the teeming hive.
Bedford, a twentieth-century writer attending to a nineteenth-century scene, employs more ironic distance. She sends up her characters’ milieu and all their attendant mannerisms deliciously. One character is a bachelor living on the French Riviera who keeps pet monkeys that everyone speaks of as though they were badly behaved children, making the term “monkey” for a few pages ambiguous. His engagement to a young woman and visit to her starchy family in Berlin brings about the following passage that made me, a painfully self-conscious type, laugh out loud on the train to work yesterday about five separate times and again on the way out of the terminal.

Grandmama Merz eventually put two and two together.
“Is Melanie going to live in a house with monkeys?”
Fraulein von Tschernin, who had had a glimpse also of Julius, confirmed that this was part of her daughter’s radiant prospects.
“We’re not going to allow it,” said Grandmama.
“Herr Gehaimrat is fond of them too.”
“Monkeys are all right for bachelors,” said Grandpapa.
“I asked him whether he was going to have those brutes around for the rest of his life,” said Markwald; “and you know what he told me? Alas, very likely not, although they did live longer than dogs.”
“Dogs too?” said Grandmama.
“Flora’s Max brought one,” said Friedrich.
“Not in the house,” said Grandmama. “Flora told me.”
“What does one do with unwanted monkeys?” said Emil.
Grandmama pondered this. “He must give them away,” she said. “Hasn’t he any poor relations?”

An arrangement is eventually made with “a new kind of cageless zoo,” though Julius is “only just prevented from accepting the return present of a seal.”
The comedy is high when her view is long, but Bedford is just as canny when she gets up close to individual emotional life. The social, political, and historical forces that shape such life don’t care a fig for their victims–the novelist most adeptly makes this clear. But she cares herself.
The character we get closest to through the first three parts is Sarah, sister-in-law of the affianced Melanie, displacer of the monkeys. The following, roughly in regard to Sarah, is the sobering (or just numbing) perspective of having seen too much go by.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… Life, in the neat sad dry little French phrase that bundles it all into its place, Life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks. La vie, voyez-vous, ca n’est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu’on croit. Never as bad, never as good… When? At the instant of calamity, at the edge of fear? when the bad news is brought, and the trap felt sprung, or the loss strikes home? At low ebb, in tedium, in accidie? In the moments of renewal? the transfiguration of love, the flush of work, the grace of a new vision, the long-held now? Or later, when the doors shut, one after another, and regret moves in the heart like a steel coil? Never as good, never as bad, but a drab, bearable, half-sleep banked by a little store of this and that, subsiding after visitations and alarms, a drowsing, often not uneasy, down the years, an even-paced irreversible passage–life, the run of lives, the sum of life? Is it consoling? Is it the whole truth? Is it inevitable?

A few pages later, this character is in love.

Mrs. T and I took a few hard-earned days off and went to Blueberry Pointe on the Lake, one of our two favorite retreats. (This is the other one.) We sat on the spacious deck of our tranquil lakeside cottage, cooked hot dogs on the grill, listened to the birds singing, smelled the balmy air, and unwound as far as it’s humanly possible to unwind. I don’t know when I’ve had a more restful vacation. Bless you, Megan McArdle, for insisting that I fly the coop for a whole week!
Instead of going to plays, we spent our evenings looking at sunsets, then going inside and watching old movies, among them Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me and John Sayles’ Sunshine State, both of which have held up fabulously well since I wrote about them early in the decade:

A couple of years ago, I wrote about The Dreamlife of Angels, a haunting French film about two down-and-out young women that got glowing reviews and made no impression whatsoever on American moviegoers (it received not a single Oscar nomination). Kenneth Lonergan’s masterly You Can Count on Me resembles that miraculous film in its straightforwardness and lack of pretence, though it also reminded me of Tender Mercies, another rare example of an American movie that accurately conveys the look and feel of small-town life. Every foot of You Can Count on Me is real.
Lonergan’s directorial debut also has in common with The Dreamlife of Angels and Tender Mercies a novelistic richness that defies the simplifying art of the pitchman. To say that it is about Terry, an immature drifter (Mark Ruffalo), and Sammy, his stay-at-home older sister (Laura Linney), orphaned in childhood and desperately lonely as young adults, is to convey nothing of the moral complexity of Lonergan’s script, which pays the viewer the compliment of not making his mind up for him. Terry is never romanticized and Sammy is never treated with condescension: they are both treated as human beings, deeply flawed but not without virtue, seeking to make their way in a postmodern world that no longer has much to offer in the way of certainty….
John Sayles’ method can be seen at its purest in Sunshine State, the unabashedly rambling story of what happens when a group of unscrupulous real-estate developers tries to take over Delrona Beach, a shabby Florida town famous for nothing, and bulldoze it into a gorgeously landscaped beachfront community full of rich golfers. (Among the bad guys is Alan King, a superannuated stand-up comedian whom old age has miraculously transformed into one of the craftiest character actors around.) While their shady machinations are central to the complicated plot, Sunshine State is not a Chinatown-like study of moral corruption, and it doesn’t even matter all that much that the bad guys lose–sort of–in the end. Sayles’ real interest is in the citizens, past and present, of Delrona Beach, in particular Marly Temple (Edie Falco), a sun-dried motel manager who hates her unadventurous life but lacks the nerve to change it, and Desirée Stokes (Angela Bassett), who left town at fifteen, black, pregnant and unmarried, and has now come back home as an adult to try to make peace with her genteel, censorious mother (Mary Alice).
If you’re thinking that all this sounds like a cross between a soap opera and an eat-your-spinach editorial in Mother Jones, I can see why. Many of Sayles’ films sound painfully stilted–on paper. It’s only when you see them, or hear him talk about them, that you realize how essentially unideological he is. This has nothing to do with politics, at least as that term used to be construed. I’m sure he’s never voted for a Republican in his life, but as a filmmaker, he doesn’t go in for political caricature, or any other kind of caricature. (Significantly, he is one of the very few filmmakers whose black characters invariably act like real people, not secular saints.)

On Friday we drove into Providence to pay a visit to the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, whose small but uncommonly choice permanent collection contains first-class paintings by Manet, Cézanne, Winslow Homer, George Bellows, Lyonel Feininger, and Jackson Pollock, none of which I can show you, alas, because the museum is foolishly cautious about making images available on line. Afterward we ate pizza and pasta in the garden of Al Forno, our favorite restaurant in New England.
Today we’re headed back to Connecticut, but only just long enough to change clothes. Work awaits, and our next stop is Garrison, New York, where we’ll be visiting the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival and the Storm King Art Center, located across the Hudson River in Mountainville.
More as it happens….

“For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?”
Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere