Anyone who's spent any amount of time talking to me will tell you that I'm a guy who takes religion pretty seriously. It's a Catholic thing. Sure, I'm lapsed these days, but if you're brought up in a faith as crazy as Catholicism, it's something you have to grapple with for the rest of your life, for purposes of psychic self-defence as much as anything else. I mean, I practised ritual cannibalism for years and thought that was a good thing. That kind of thing takes working out.
Now, I could have gone down the dogmatic atheist route, like Richard Dawkins , but, well, to me it seems as crazy to believe there is definitely, provably, no God whatsoever as to say that there is definitely, provably, only one God and that, coincidentally, that God agrees with you on everything, and especially on what should be done with the women. Well, okay, the latter view is actually crazier.
Personally, my thinking on religion is that it's impossible for one religion to know everything. Muslims say allahu akhbar - 'God is big' - but very few people of any religious persuasion actually bother to consider how big God has to be, if God does indeed exist.
Think about this: if there really is one God, then that God has to encompass and go beyond the knowledge and experience of not just every human being on this planet, but every animal, every plant, every microscopic organism, every living thing on this world and any other world which supports life. That's what omniscience means. If God is all-knowing, God knows at all times what it's like to be you, me, Hamid Karzai, Lindsay Lohan, the brothers Hitchens, the cat sitting on my garden wall right this minute, Tim Berners-Lee, a lion killing a gazelle, the gazelle being killed by the lion, the vultures watching the kill and waiting their turn at the flesh, the grasses and trees growing all around them, and the bacteria that will multiply in the rotting flesh of the gazelle when even the vultures want no more of it.
It is highly unlikely that so sophisticated and all-knowing a being gives a rat's arse where you put your winkie. Or whether you eat meat on Fridays. Or, indeed, whether you have faith in it or not.
This is why I've never really went along with religions of the book. Sure, there are a lot of things I do read religiously, but the Bible isn't one of them. It comes back to the point I made above: whenever some self-appointed prophet starts telling you what God really, definitely wants, it always seems to coincide exactly with what he wants. The technical term for this is 'revelation of convenience,' and it's this above all that led me to question my own faith and, indeed, those of others. I mean, if the Pope was infallible all along, why did the church only discover this in the 19th century - faced with a variety of challenges to its traditional authority? Hmmmmm.
No, for my money, the religions that get it right are what I would loosely term gnostic religions, faiths that stress not dogma but direct engagement with and knowledge of the divine. Sufism , for example, or some forms of the syncretic vodoun-derived religions. In such traditions, subscribing to a bunch of moral dogma isn't the key, what matters is that you follow a set of practices which lead one to an experience of the divine - a 'knowing' if you will.
Ideas of religion and 'knowing' have been on my mind since, last night, I watched the film Knowing , which I expected to be a pretty dull Nic Cage vehicle and which turned out, in fact, to be an actively dislikable piece of religious propaganda.
For those fortunate enough not to have seen it yet, 'Knowing' stars Nic Cage as, essentially, a godless scientist who has became estranged from his extremely godly family following the death of his wife. After discovering a series of odd numbers in a time capsule unearthed at his son's school, the godless scientist (who's called Koestler, in a move which the film's writers doubtless think is clever but, crucially, actually isn't) discovers that said numbers predict every major disaster to befall the world since 1959, up to and including a fiery apocalypse caused by a major solar flare (which, apparently, goes unnoticed by any of the many other godless scientists Koestler knows for much of the movie - seriously, nobody notices the big-ass solar flare until Koestler informs them of his divine revelation). Meanwhile, Koestler's deaf-but-apparently-not-actually-deaf son has started seeing visions of mysterious figures who tell him he must choose to 'come with them' to escape the world-annihilating conflagration to come. Koestler witnesses a plane crash, then a subway crash, in the process hooking up with the daughter and granddaughter of the writer of the mysterious numbers, then tries fruitlessly to escape the imminent armageddon. By the film's end, Koestler has renounced his godless science and returned to the bosom of his family to await the end, while his son and the number-writer's granddaughter have been rescued by the mystery men who, it turns out, are actually angels, you see, or possibly, er, aliens, and been deposited - along with many of the other pure young children who are, in a very real way, aren't they, hmmmm, our future, - on a new world which looks, oddly enough, a lot like the biblical Garden of Eden.
Yes - 'Knowing' isn't a sci-fi film at all, it's a christian allegory. Only not a gentle, C of E, CS Lewis style Aslan-is-actually-a-bit-like-Jesus-isn't-he allegory, oh no. 'Knowing' is a godawful hybrid of the ideas of Erich von Daniken and the Left Behind novels, and is the kind of christian allegory whose authors seem intent on beating you repeatedly about the head with the sheer bloody allegorical christianity of it all. And that christianity, allegorical or not, is actually pretty nasty.
The angel/aliens, for a start, obviously have powers vastly beyond our own world's godless science - yet rather than, say, stopping the solar flare, or saving everybody on the planet, they save only the pure (and, of course, caucasian) children. Because only the children are pure. The adults are all foul, dirty sinners, corrupted by godless science and probably secular humanism to boot. But the children, ah, yes, the children, they're lovely and pure and innocent and they get to frolic in the meadow while God watches - seriously, am I the only person who finds that a bit, er, how to put this, paedo-riffic?
Scary, alien, quasi-religious child-catchers aside, another disturbing aspect of this film's smug dispensationalism is what happens to the female lead, the daughter of the woman who originally wrote down the numbers. At a crucial point in the plot, she is without faith in the numbers, and refuses to follow the will of the faithful male. As a result, of course, she is punished, in a car accident which comes completely out of nowhere. I mean, seriously, why not just go the whole hog and turn her into a pillar of salt, why don't you?
Of course, we're not supposed to be questioning. We're supposed to have faith. We're supposed to cry sentimental tears when Nic Cage says goodbye to his deaf-only-not-actually-deaf son, when the pure and innocent ickle children frolic about in the new Eden, watched over by benevolent intelligent designers who, honestly, really, aren't necessarily anything like God, and when the godless scientist returns and is reconciled, prodigal son-style, with his godly kin, in a rousing scene of family values. I know, I know. It takes a heart of stone not to vomit.
My wife actually came up with a much better ending for this film when we were driving home. Basically: don't have the world end. Have everything turn out to have been a set-up, a way of fooling humanity into parting with their children. The day after the end of the world, Nic Cage wakes up, and stumbles through a world in which new broadcasts aren't filled with talk of solar flare apocalypse, but of strange ships seen in the sky, and reports of missing children from around the globe. In the final scene, Cage opens the door of his family home. His sister looks at him and asks him where his son is. We close on Cage's shocked, stunned, silent facial expression, and then a brief shot of the armada of alien/angel ships, headed to...wherever. They've done this before (it's in the bible, people!) They come, they create panic, they harvest the children...and there's nothing we can do. A disturbing, Lovecraftian ending which might actually give the film an emotional impact beyond weird Christian/new age space brother types.
Of course, the writers would never have gone with that idea, because, really, isn't that kind of saying that God is a bit of a bastard? To which one can only reply: in your version, God kills almost everyone on Earth, except a few kids, and he isn't meant to be a bastard?
Myself, if there is a God, I prefer to credit said deity as being a tad more enlightened than that. Shame his followers can't show him the same generosity. Even more of a shame that they feel the need to show us how little they really think of their idol by making shit films about it.
Last I saw, you could pick up a copy of Dogma on DVD and get change of a fiver. It'll cost you at least three times that to go and see 'Knowing.' My suggestion: buy Dogma and spend the rest of the money on booze. Because altered states of consciousness are a path to the divine, and because Dogma is a more intelligent filmic examination of religion than 'Knowing.' And Dogma has a monster made of shit in it.
Saturday, 4 April 2009
Sunday, 15 February 2009
Triumph of the Force: Star Wars and Fascism
Thanks to Jonah Goldberg's laughable Liberal Fascism , I've been reading a lot of definitions of fascism lately, both on the interwebs and in the popular prints. What I wasn't expecting was to find similar discussions in a review of '300' which I came across after Wikipedia made that rather cheesy pecs-and-persians flick one of their featured articles. Or for them to involve Star Wars.
Like a lot of people, Star Wars was a major part of my childhood - though unlike some of my contemporaries, I don't feel strongly enough about it to consider George Lucas' work on the prequels an act of pederasty on a massive scale. I do feel strongly about it, though, to the point, at times, of religious mania - I wanted to be a Jedi as a child (and finally got my chance with the 2001 census), but as I grew older, I began to question my faith, rather as Anakin did in the third prequel - though I emerged with all my limbs intact. What caused me to doubt the Jedi cause? Was I groomed by some devious Sith Lord, during visits to slightly incomprehensible theatrical entertainments involving giant balls of liquid? Well, no; but a performance, of a sort, was involved, and a Dark Lord as well. I speak, of course, of Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will
, a film which features a lot less CGI than Revenge of the Sith, but compensates with a powerful performance from its lead actor, Mr Adolf Hitler.
If there can be such a thing as an intrinsically evil film, then Triumph of the Will is it. For those who don't know, it's a Nazi propaganda film, a record of one of Hitler's Nuremburg rallies. But the evil in the film doesn't just come from its subject matter. The Nazis produced lots of propaganda, but Hitlerjunge Quex and The Eternal Jew, as foul as they are, look as foul as they are. Triumph of the Will is far more insidious, because it's an extremely well-made film. Its cinematography inspired generations of later filmmakers (here's Clive James on the pernicious influence of Reifenstahl's little masterpiece.) And one of the people it influenced was George Lucas.
As can be seen from the comments on Roger Moore's review of 300, a lot of Star Wars fans don't like it when you suggest that the films have a fascist aesthetic, but it's clear that it has. The most obvious example of this is the medal scene at the end of A New Hope, which is practically a shot-for-shot remake of some of the scenes from Triumph, but it permeates the whole series. Although the prequels make an effort to mention democracy every now and again, the society of the Star Wars films' 'Republic' is one which is overseen by a superior warrior caste with mystical ideas, who initiate a eugenics programme with the aim of creating a perfect soldier. And they're the good guys. One of the most interesting things in the third prequel is the fact that Palpatine's comments as he leads on his apt pupil are actually pretty sensible: the Jedi do have too much power and they do need to be controlled. From one point of view, the Jedi are evil.
Fans don't like it when you bring this up, but the Star Wars films have a strong vein of fascism running through them. What lessons the impact of its problematized aesthetic is that, as Moore observes, if the goodies are fascists, the villains are as well. One of the reasons for the popularity of Han Solo in the series is that he's the only character who isn't fighting to restore the old Jedi-dominated system. He's a pirate: pirates are fun! And - for a viewer increasingly uncomfortable with the Jedis' place in the narrative structure of the war, the fun that Solo represents is worth latching onto.
Like a lot of people, Star Wars was a major part of my childhood - though unlike some of my contemporaries, I don't feel strongly enough about it to consider George Lucas' work on the prequels an act of pederasty on a massive scale. I do feel strongly about it, though, to the point, at times, of religious mania - I wanted to be a Jedi as a child (and finally got my chance with the 2001 census), but as I grew older, I began to question my faith, rather as Anakin did in the third prequel - though I emerged with all my limbs intact. What caused me to doubt the Jedi cause? Was I groomed by some devious Sith Lord, during visits to slightly incomprehensible theatrical entertainments involving giant balls of liquid? Well, no; but a performance, of a sort, was involved, and a Dark Lord as well. I speak, of course, of Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will
, a film which features a lot less CGI than Revenge of the Sith, but compensates with a powerful performance from its lead actor, Mr Adolf Hitler.
If there can be such a thing as an intrinsically evil film, then Triumph of the Will is it. For those who don't know, it's a Nazi propaganda film, a record of one of Hitler's Nuremburg rallies. But the evil in the film doesn't just come from its subject matter. The Nazis produced lots of propaganda, but Hitlerjunge Quex and The Eternal Jew, as foul as they are, look as foul as they are. Triumph of the Will is far more insidious, because it's an extremely well-made film. Its cinematography inspired generations of later filmmakers (here's Clive James on the pernicious influence of Reifenstahl's little masterpiece.) And one of the people it influenced was George Lucas.
As can be seen from the comments on Roger Moore's review of 300, a lot of Star Wars fans don't like it when you suggest that the films have a fascist aesthetic, but it's clear that it has. The most obvious example of this is the medal scene at the end of A New Hope, which is practically a shot-for-shot remake of some of the scenes from Triumph, but it permeates the whole series. Although the prequels make an effort to mention democracy every now and again, the society of the Star Wars films' 'Republic' is one which is overseen by a superior warrior caste with mystical ideas, who initiate a eugenics programme with the aim of creating a perfect soldier. And they're the good guys. One of the most interesting things in the third prequel is the fact that Palpatine's comments as he leads on his apt pupil are actually pretty sensible: the Jedi do have too much power and they do need to be controlled. From one point of view, the Jedi are evil.
Fans don't like it when you bring this up, but the Star Wars films have a strong vein of fascism running through them. What lessons the impact of its problematized aesthetic is that, as Moore observes, if the goodies are fascists, the villains are as well. One of the reasons for the popularity of Han Solo in the series is that he's the only character who isn't fighting to restore the old Jedi-dominated system. He's a pirate: pirates are fun! And - for a viewer increasingly uncomfortable with the Jedis' place in the narrative structure of the war, the fun that Solo represents is worth latching onto.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
Frank Gallagher pulls on his waterskis
One hates to accuse a television show of jumping the shark, but after having watched the second episode of the new series of Shameless, I think the accusation's justified. Which is a shame: for a long time I really liked this show. It was well-written, it had an interesting and varied cast of characters; most importantly, though, it managed to walk the comedy-drama tightrope with an aplomb rarely seen in that portmanteau genre. Shameless could, at times, descend into moments of astonishingly broad (and frankly stupid) comedy, but it was always able to pull back enough that you genuinely cared during its more serious dramatic moments. Being able to pull off that technical feat on its own would be enough, but as an added bonus Shameless had a deep vein of humanism and egalitarianism running just below the surface. It took a social group - predominantly white, council-estate inhabitants, trapped in a world of petty (and not so petty) crime and low-paid work, if any - commonly dehumanised as chavs , and made them human without being patronising or bashing the viewer over the head with politically correct dogma.
So it's painful to say that it's gone past its peak now. Especially because there were moments before when I worried about it. When, in the last couple of series, the cast expanded significantly, I feared that the rise in numbers would turn the show into effectively just another soap opera, but the writers, led by the excellent Paul Abbott , did a fine job of making us care about the new characters, involving them in storylines which added to the drama of the programme and enmeshing them in the fabric of the show. But it now seems that the overload wasn't prevented, just postponed: because now, six series into its run, Shameless has finally fallen victim to the curse of the long-running show: what I call the character-occupation syndrome.
It works like this. You have a show that's been running for a few years, and which has accumulated a large cast of characters. Almost certainly, every one of those characters will be the favourite character of someone in your audience. So you need to ensure that there is at least some narrative focus on that character at least once in the series, and preferably once every few episodes. The trouble is, you've pretty much used up what narrative arc that character has, so what do you do with them?
And it's at this point that you find yourself uttering the words which spell death for your show. You probably know it, too. But damn it, you've got ten episodes of this bugger to write, you've got a hangover, you haven't had anything decent to eat for hours, the coffee tastes like ground-up roadkill, and if you just come up with something then you can finish the script meeting and go outside for a much-needed fag. So you say:
'Hey, wouldn't it be funy if...?'
Wouldn't. It. Be. Funny. If. Those five words kill comedies, because they mean that, in the desperate quest for something funny, characters wind up being shoehorned into ridiculous situations to get a cheap laugh from the audience.
So in last night's episode, we saw Mickey Maguire, son of the Chatsworth Estate's organised crime dynasty, enrol at college in an effort to make something of himself. Nothing wrong with that as a premise: in fact, you could probably explore some interesting issues about class and education in the process, maybe even work a spoof of Educating Rita into the plot somewhere (Shameless actually does parody quite well: witness the riff on Brief Encounter which was one of the highlights of the last series). Instead, however, while at college, Mickey accidentally came across some erotic fiction written by one of his lecturers, decided to have a bash at it himself, and in the process wound up having a lot more than a bash at his lecturer and her bisexual swinger boyfriend. Because hey, wouldn't it be funny if that happened?
Similarly, Norma Starkey, the lorry-driving lesbian ex-love of Frank's wife (a character who, it has to be said, has been essentially just hanging around the plot for a long time now) discovered what she took to be the skeleton of a baby while decorating the estate's local pub. Shocked by this discovery, she investigated and discovered that an ex-landlord of the pub had murdered his child, then spent a great deal of time ranting about how, unless she could find 'closure' for the murdered infant it would be 'in limbo' forever (which makes less than no sense, unless you assume that the child was unbaptised, and Norma is an extremely doctrinaire Catholic of the Archbishop Lefebvre school - an odd theological position for a lesbian) only to discover that - get this! - it was a cat's skeleton all along! Ha! Wouldn't it be funny if that happened?
Well, no, not really. Nor was it funy when local policeman Stan Waterman bonded with his partner Yvonne's son by way of a session on the Nintendo Wii. But it gave the characters something to do. It allowed the narrative focus to dwell on them for an episode, thus satisfying their fans in the audience. It passed the time.
And that's the problem. Both this show, and the characters in it, used to be tightly written. Now it's treading water, involving characters in unnecessary situations just to pass the time. Worst of all, in what's meant to be a comedy-drama, there's no drama in any of these situations. No risk to the characters; nothing to make us care whether they resolve their predicaments or not. And in a show whose chief virtue was that it did make us care about a section of society that's often demonised by the mass media, that's a serious problem.
So it's painful to say that it's gone past its peak now. Especially because there were moments before when I worried about it. When, in the last couple of series, the cast expanded significantly, I feared that the rise in numbers would turn the show into effectively just another soap opera, but the writers, led by the excellent Paul Abbott , did a fine job of making us care about the new characters, involving them in storylines which added to the drama of the programme and enmeshing them in the fabric of the show. But it now seems that the overload wasn't prevented, just postponed: because now, six series into its run, Shameless has finally fallen victim to the curse of the long-running show: what I call the character-occupation syndrome.
It works like this. You have a show that's been running for a few years, and which has accumulated a large cast of characters. Almost certainly, every one of those characters will be the favourite character of someone in your audience. So you need to ensure that there is at least some narrative focus on that character at least once in the series, and preferably once every few episodes. The trouble is, you've pretty much used up what narrative arc that character has, so what do you do with them?
And it's at this point that you find yourself uttering the words which spell death for your show. You probably know it, too. But damn it, you've got ten episodes of this bugger to write, you've got a hangover, you haven't had anything decent to eat for hours, the coffee tastes like ground-up roadkill, and if you just come up with something then you can finish the script meeting and go outside for a much-needed fag. So you say:
'Hey, wouldn't it be funy if...?'
Wouldn't. It. Be. Funny. If. Those five words kill comedies, because they mean that, in the desperate quest for something funny, characters wind up being shoehorned into ridiculous situations to get a cheap laugh from the audience.
So in last night's episode, we saw Mickey Maguire, son of the Chatsworth Estate's organised crime dynasty, enrol at college in an effort to make something of himself. Nothing wrong with that as a premise: in fact, you could probably explore some interesting issues about class and education in the process, maybe even work a spoof of Educating Rita into the plot somewhere (Shameless actually does parody quite well: witness the riff on Brief Encounter which was one of the highlights of the last series). Instead, however, while at college, Mickey accidentally came across some erotic fiction written by one of his lecturers, decided to have a bash at it himself, and in the process wound up having a lot more than a bash at his lecturer and her bisexual swinger boyfriend. Because hey, wouldn't it be funny if that happened?
Similarly, Norma Starkey, the lorry-driving lesbian ex-love of Frank's wife (a character who, it has to be said, has been essentially just hanging around the plot for a long time now) discovered what she took to be the skeleton of a baby while decorating the estate's local pub. Shocked by this discovery, she investigated and discovered that an ex-landlord of the pub had murdered his child, then spent a great deal of time ranting about how, unless she could find 'closure' for the murdered infant it would be 'in limbo' forever (which makes less than no sense, unless you assume that the child was unbaptised, and Norma is an extremely doctrinaire Catholic of the Archbishop Lefebvre school - an odd theological position for a lesbian) only to discover that - get this! - it was a cat's skeleton all along! Ha! Wouldn't it be funny if that happened?
Well, no, not really. Nor was it funy when local policeman Stan Waterman bonded with his partner Yvonne's son by way of a session on the Nintendo Wii. But it gave the characters something to do. It allowed the narrative focus to dwell on them for an episode, thus satisfying their fans in the audience. It passed the time.
And that's the problem. Both this show, and the characters in it, used to be tightly written. Now it's treading water, involving characters in unnecessary situations just to pass the time. Worst of all, in what's meant to be a comedy-drama, there's no drama in any of these situations. No risk to the characters; nothing to make us care whether they resolve their predicaments or not. And in a show whose chief virtue was that it did make us care about a section of society that's often demonised by the mass media, that's a serious problem.
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
Third Bookshop review - A Love Supreme
(Note to readers of this blog: the following review does not, as yet, appear on my bookshop's site, so this marks its first publication. As such, I get to post it in its original form, complete with the veiled reference to a certain deeply irritating swing revival artist at the end.)
Music Choice: A Love Supreme by John Coltrane
This record is probably the most perfect distillation of everything that makes Coltrane great as a musician, the point of balance around which his development as an artist revolves. Before this, there were more conventional recordings like Blue Train, still great but in a recognisable jazz idiom; afterwards there was the more experimental work of his late period, perhaps more difficult for the casual listener to grasp. Throughout the middle period, then through his years at Impulse and the formation of the Classic Quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones, Coltrane groped his way towards the recording of this album, on which his ecstatic personal spirituality and his technical mastery combine with stunning effect to deliver a record which satisfies the heart, the head and the feet.
Comparing music and poetry carries the risk of sounding pretentious, but when I hear this record I'm always reminded of Whitman and Hopkins, poets who combine an almost prophetic enthusiasm (literally - the word 'enthusiasm' derives from the Greek en theos, 'full of God') with such mastery of their craft that they can do things which shouldn't logically work, which should in fact break the form completely, but which, in their sure hands, hang together in such a way that they feel more 'right', more deserving of a place in the world, than a thousand more orthodox works. Some of 'Trane's ideas about 'praying with music' may carry a slight whiff of patchouli oil these days, but at least they remind us that there was a time when jazz musicians had ideas about something other than getting on the Radio 2 playlist, and that's a very good thing.
Music Choice: A Love Supreme by John Coltrane
This record is probably the most perfect distillation of everything that makes Coltrane great as a musician, the point of balance around which his development as an artist revolves. Before this, there were more conventional recordings like Blue Train, still great but in a recognisable jazz idiom; afterwards there was the more experimental work of his late period, perhaps more difficult for the casual listener to grasp. Throughout the middle period, then through his years at Impulse and the formation of the Classic Quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones, Coltrane groped his way towards the recording of this album, on which his ecstatic personal spirituality and his technical mastery combine with stunning effect to deliver a record which satisfies the heart, the head and the feet.
Comparing music and poetry carries the risk of sounding pretentious, but when I hear this record I'm always reminded of Whitman and Hopkins, poets who combine an almost prophetic enthusiasm (literally - the word 'enthusiasm' derives from the Greek en theos, 'full of God') with such mastery of their craft that they can do things which shouldn't logically work, which should in fact break the form completely, but which, in their sure hands, hang together in such a way that they feel more 'right', more deserving of a place in the world, than a thousand more orthodox works. Some of 'Trane's ideas about 'praying with music' may carry a slight whiff of patchouli oil these days, but at least they remind us that there was a time when jazz musicians had ideas about something other than getting on the Radio 2 playlist, and that's a very good thing.
Second Bookshop review - Anchorman
(Note to readers of this blog - I think the main value of this review lies in the quality specimen of the cheesy ending with which it concludes.)
DVD Choice - Anchorman
It was a toss-up between this and Zoolander, but Will Ferrell's narcissistic 70s newsreader just edges it over Ben Stiller's cognitively-impaired pretty boy by virtue of a better supporting cast and a much higher laugh rate on repeated viewings. There are so many things that make this a near-perfect commentary: Steve Carrell's show-stealing performance as the impossibly brainwrong Brick Tamland; the vicious off-air verbal sparring between Burgundy and co-anchor Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate); Vince Vaughan's combination of frustration and villainy as Burgundy's chief-rival, Wes Mantooth; the newsreader gang fight (probably the best comedy rumble since the end of Blazing Saddles); and most importantly, the fact that this isnt yet another tedious sports comedy. That's about it really. This is Adam Fish signing off- stay classy, Readers (and thanks for stopping by).
DVD Choice - Anchorman
It was a toss-up between this and Zoolander, but Will Ferrell's narcissistic 70s newsreader just edges it over Ben Stiller's cognitively-impaired pretty boy by virtue of a better supporting cast and a much higher laugh rate on repeated viewings. There are so many things that make this a near-perfect commentary: Steve Carrell's show-stealing performance as the impossibly brainwrong Brick Tamland; the vicious off-air verbal sparring between Burgundy and co-anchor Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate); Vince Vaughan's combination of frustration and villainy as Burgundy's chief-rival, Wes Mantooth; the newsreader gang fight (probably the best comedy rumble since the end of Blazing Saddles); and most importantly, the fact that this isnt yet another tedious sports comedy. That's about it really. This is Adam Fish signing off- stay classy, Readers (and thanks for stopping by).
First bookshop review - Cultural Amnesia
(Note to readers of this blog: one of the things you need to take into consideration when working at a bookshop is that when recommending a book, you don't necessarily choose the book you think best, but the one you think the customer most likely wants or needs to read. Readers of this blog are certainly invited to read the book discussed below, but were I recommending a title to this more sophisticated audience, I would choose either Fadiman or Judt, both of whom are operating at the same level as James, but wear their intellect more lightly. And to those who enjoy browsing in second-hand bookshops I also recommend Edmund White's marvellous The Burning Library. Not only does it feature some great criticism and analysis, but White's interview with Burroughs has the effect of confirming once and for all that, yes, Burroughs really was that weird.)
Book Choice: Cultural Amnesia by Clive James:
I seem to have become addicted to reading collections of essays recently, and of the choice available to you in our store, this is the one I would recommend. That doesnt necessarily mean it is the best; Anne Fadiman's At Large and At Small and the new selection of essays from Gore Vidal, along with Tony Judt's Reappraisals are all equally valid contenders to that title. That Cultural Amnesia gets the nod is by virtue of the sheer heft of the volume: it is an absolute doorstop of a book and could easily act as a lethal bludgeoning weapon should the need arise. The length of the book alone cannot be enough to make it the best, of course: what does is the very readable style in which it is written and the sheer number of now-forgotten thinkers, writers, artists and intellectuals it introduces the reder to, while also providing fresh perspectives on well-known figures.
Some have argued that the style is too digressive, but I think this actually adds to the book's charm: like a good jazz musician, it's fun to watch where James can wind up when he starts riffing on the epigrams from other writers with which he begins each chapter (in one absolutely jaw-dropping essay, he manages to go from writing about Arthur Schnitzler to delivering a long and detailed critique of Richard Burton's hairstyle in Where Eagles Dare, and back again). A more serious criticism is that his habit of constantly reminding us that he's read so many difficult foreign authors in their original language, even when done with self-deprecating modesty, does get irritating after a while; but one has to admit that there is something a little petty in that complaint. If he's put in the hours with the dictionaries, who are we to begrudge him a small chance to show off? After all, if he hadn't, the book would probably have been half as long and ten times less interesting. My advice is to get this first, then read the other books listed, and then join me in twiddling your thumbs and waiting impatiently for Daniel Mendelsohn's How Beautiful it is and How Easily it can be Broken to arrive in this store.
(thanks to Simon Gallagher for tidying up some of the clumsier sentences in the above)
Book Choice: Cultural Amnesia by Clive James:
I seem to have become addicted to reading collections of essays recently, and of the choice available to you in our store, this is the one I would recommend. That doesnt necessarily mean it is the best; Anne Fadiman's At Large and At Small and the new selection of essays from Gore Vidal, along with Tony Judt's Reappraisals are all equally valid contenders to that title. That Cultural Amnesia gets the nod is by virtue of the sheer heft of the volume: it is an absolute doorstop of a book and could easily act as a lethal bludgeoning weapon should the need arise. The length of the book alone cannot be enough to make it the best, of course: what does is the very readable style in which it is written and the sheer number of now-forgotten thinkers, writers, artists and intellectuals it introduces the reder to, while also providing fresh perspectives on well-known figures.
Some have argued that the style is too digressive, but I think this actually adds to the book's charm: like a good jazz musician, it's fun to watch where James can wind up when he starts riffing on the epigrams from other writers with which he begins each chapter (in one absolutely jaw-dropping essay, he manages to go from writing about Arthur Schnitzler to delivering a long and detailed critique of Richard Burton's hairstyle in Where Eagles Dare, and back again). A more serious criticism is that his habit of constantly reminding us that he's read so many difficult foreign authors in their original language, even when done with self-deprecating modesty, does get irritating after a while; but one has to admit that there is something a little petty in that complaint. If he's put in the hours with the dictionaries, who are we to begrudge him a small chance to show off? After all, if he hadn't, the book would probably have been half as long and ten times less interesting. My advice is to get this first, then read the other books listed, and then join me in twiddling your thumbs and waiting impatiently for Daniel Mendelsohn's How Beautiful it is and How Easily it can be Broken to arrive in this store.
(thanks to Simon Gallagher for tidying up some of the clumsier sentences in the above)
I can do short too, y'know
What I notice about the three preceding reviews is that they're frackin' long pieces, and the reader's spirits may understandably sink when reading through, say the first umpteen paragraphs of my review of The Wrestler and realising that that's only the first part. The long review essay may not look out of place in the New York Review of Books (and the Wrestler review was a deliberate attempt to try writing an essay in that style), but when your reading medium is a bright light source that you read by scrolling down the page, you will probably find yourself praying for brevity when you encounter a piece of that duration.
Therefore, the next three entries on this blog will still be reviews, but shorter reviews. They were written under the aegis of the bookshop where I work, to be entered on the new store web site as book, CD and DVD recommendations for customers. They're a bit breathlessly enthusiastic, but I'm afraid that can't be helped given their mercantile intent. I include them above partly to show that I am capable of writing a shorter review if I have to (and that therefore, of course, when I write a longer piece it's because I have my reasons), and partly because I imagine that some of you actually might like to read something I've written that won't require blocking time out of your diaries.
Therefore, the next three entries on this blog will still be reviews, but shorter reviews. They were written under the aegis of the bookshop where I work, to be entered on the new store web site as book, CD and DVD recommendations for customers. They're a bit breathlessly enthusiastic, but I'm afraid that can't be helped given their mercantile intent. I include them above partly to show that I am capable of writing a shorter review if I have to (and that therefore, of course, when I write a longer piece it's because I have my reasons), and partly because I imagine that some of you actually might like to read something I've written that won't require blocking time out of your diaries.
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