“Thomas Pynchon will be appearing on The Simpsons”:http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/10/19/pynchon_and_homer/. What a very non-reclusive thing to do! What’s next — Cormac McCarthy on Malcolm in the Middle? J.D. Salinger getting a Queer Eye For the Straight Guy makeover? We can hope.
Via “Bookslut”:http://www.bookslut.com/blog/.
On Saturday, I spent several hours leaning against a tree, cleaning my gun. OK, it wasn’t _my_ gun, exactly, it was a prop, and since I didn’t have the first notion of how to clean a gun, I spent a good part of the time wiping the barrel with my bandana. Doing this without making it seem incredibly phallic was my first acting challenge — one that I’m pretty sure I failed at. My other acting challenge was to wrinkle my brow in a way that suggested brooding anger and not, say, constipation.
My role had been given to me that morning, as had the fake gun, the cowboy hat that was a little too small, and the boots that were so small that I wasn’t able to use them. I improvised my lines, since there was no firm script — just a vague notion of what should happen in the scene. All of this may seem like a terribly haphazard way to make a movie, but it’s _de rigeur_ for “The 48 Hour Film Project”:http://www.48hourfilm.com/. Teams of amateur filmmakers are given a genre on Friday afternoon, along with a character, object, and line of dialogue. By Sunday night they have to turn in a short film incorporating all of the above. It’s been going on periodically in D.C. for a few years, but is now taking place nationwide.
I know nothing about making films, and only a little about acting. For someone who acts regularly on camera, my task — lean against a tree, say the same four lines over and over again for long shots, medium shots, and closeups — must be fantastically boring, but since I never get to do this sort of thing, it’s kind of fun. I even got to have my costume distressed. For those of you unschooled in filmspeak, “distressed” in this context means “made to look dirty and worn.” My “costume” was my Levi’s and a grey longsleeve shirt. Kate, the costume lady, mentioned that I should probably look scruffier, and being one to sacrifice myself for my art, I immediately dove into the dirt and started rolling around.
“No no no!” she exclaimed. “It has to look real.” She grabbed handfuls of muddy dirt and started methodically working them into my clothes at strategic points — knees, collar, armpits, cuffs. When I mentioned that it seemed like she knew what she was doing, she confided that she had, in fact, worked as a professional costume distressor a while back. (I tried my best to locate the website for the Association of American Costume Distressors — please oh please let it exist! — but without success.)
Equipped with another item on my acting resume, I sent another letter to Peter Jackson stressing my availability for last-minute _Return of the King_ shooting. What with my additional experience, and the fact that I said I was willing to play either a knight of Dol Amroth _or_ an Easterling falling off a _mumakil_, I have high hopes for a positive reply.
There’s nothing particularly exciting to report, which is very good news. The country is quiet, or at least as quiet as it ever was. The Marines have gone home and UN peacekeepers are there for a year. Gyude Bryant, the leader of the two-year interim government, was sworn in a couple days ago. The main challenges now involve coaxing rebuilding funds out of the U.S. Congress and helping relief workers get stuff to where it’s needed. The Post has a good article about Kenneth Best, a famous Liberian journalist who’s going home to try to get a newspaper started again.
The biggest threat to the fragile peace appears to be Charles Taylor’s desire to stay involved in Liberian politics from exile. No doubt he envisions some sort of triumphant return, but is biding his time. Sierre Leone wants to nail him for war crimes, and the UN Security Council has issued a statement expressing concern that his continued interference could destabilize the region.
Presumably he’s just sitting around in a villa in Nigeria, making phone calls, but this raises a question: why can he get away with that much? Why does he even get a villa? He’s not the first—far worse dictators have lived much more comfortably. As a general principle, obviously it’s distasteful, but is it necessary? I have no idea. But I’ll see what I can find out about Taylor’s exile and exiled dictators generally, and report back in a day or five.
When Billy Joel’s “Keeping the Faith” is played through tinny laptop speakers seven feet away, it forms a distracting background fuzz, especially if you’re trying to listen to the _good_ music that’s playing in the coffee shop at the time. When the song reaches those points in the refrain where Billy sings “keepin’ the FAAAAAAAITH,” it is epochally irritating. I can’t even describe the headache that “Fai-ai-ai-aith” triggers.
When the guy seven feet away started playing the song, I assumed he was just listening to an excerpt, or maybe it was the soundtrack to some annoying website, and that it would end momentarily. But it kept on going and going — he must have had the song on continuous repeat or something. I glanced back his way surreptitiously to see if he was working with some sort of sound editing software — maybe making the KTF Super-Extended Remix — but no, he was checking his email and chatting with someone on MSN.
I waited to see if the song would end, and it didn’t. I waited to see if it would be possible for me to function in a meaningful way while it was playing, and it wasn’t. With a heavy heart I donned the mantle of the Coffee Shop Jerk.
“Excuse me, could you cut the sound on that?”
I even deliberately said “cut the sound” and not “turn it down” because I suspected that hearing it at half volume would have been even worse. He cheerfully (though not apologetically) turned his volume all the way down. Now all is pleasant again, except that there’s an invisible wall between the guy seven feet away and me. I have to avoid making eye contact with him. The sanctity of urbane coffee shop conviviality has been shattered. Curse that Billy Joel!
“Group Hug”:http://grouphug.us/ is a website where you can type in a confession about something you did, anonymously. It appears on the site in a bloggish format. The only sort of editorializing from the site admins appears to be the removal of stuff that doesn’t count as a confession.
It makes for interesting reading, but I can’t decide if it’s prurient or profound. Most of it is definitely the former; some entries are obviously made up, others are just jokes, but in among them you’ll find confessions that are genuinely disturbing, or touching, or both. Adolescents appear to be posting most of them, but who knows if that’s because younger people are more eager to confess, or just because they’ve heard of the site first. The vast majority of them are about sex.
And no, I didn’t post a confession while visiting the site, so stop trying to guess which one is mine. UPDATE: OK, now I did put a confession in, though it’s not appearing on the site right away. When it does there should be no trouble identifying it as mine. UPDATE: Actually, it appear that the entries are shuffled or randomly placed; at any rate they don’t seem to be added chronologically. Still haven’t seen mine yet.
Via “The Agitator”:http://www.theagitator.com/.
“Chad Engbers contends with a grade-A asshole”:http://www.locustwind.com/archives/000016.html.
This is why ordinary people should have ninja training. And booster rockets on their cars.
Halfway through Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, there’s a scene where the avenging Bride (played by Uma Thurman) walks into a rustic sushi joint on Okinawa, acting the flighty tourist but actually in search of the legendary swordsmith Hattori Hanzo. The dialogue between the man behind the bar and his bumbling assistant is a perfect pastiche of the humor you see in anime all the time—those Japanese jokes that aren’t quite funny and you suspect it’s because of some sort of culture divide but eventually you find yourself laughing anyway if only because it’s so darn wacky. Tarantino gets it just right. The whole scene is stylishly executed, culminating in the Bride’s slide from her flirtatious front into a dead-serious request to meet Hanzo, and the sound of the bartender’s assistant dropping a sake bottle, off camera.
It’s a scene that says everything about Tarantino’s genius, as well as his limitations. He’s not telling an original story, his characters are all sly references to ones from a host of media, and his dialogue goes out of its way to sound like something we heard somewhere else. But his pastiche is spot-on, and he puts it all together with a masterful eye and a quirky style that keeps every moment riveting in its own way.
Tarantino makes campy material transcend camp—something he’s uniquely qualified to do because, to all appearances, his love for Hong Kong action flicks, blaxploitation movies, and Leone westerns is deep and true and devoid of ironic detachment. Or maybe it’s that the irony is so fused into his being that he’s achieved some kind of post-ironic purity. Whatever the case, he gets away with having his cake and eating it too, since he revels in the over-the-top goofiness of his subject matter, hardly worthy of our notice, while still demanding serious attention from his audience. He earns that attention not because of his pastiche but in spite of it and because of everything else. He elicits sharp, memorable performances from his actors, most often to humorous effect, but with intense dramatic exceptions. (When the Bride wakes up from her coma and finds herself childless, her grief is genuine and poignant.) If I were a film critic I’d have a better way to put this, but—his movies just look really good. His visuals are playful, elegant, and arresting. His momentum sweeps you along. Unlike his inspirations, his stuff is the real deal.
Only in movies, where so much of the artistry lies in cinematography, acting, and editing, is it possible to make a solid work of art with a story that is cobbled together in a sloppy pastiche. That crime isn’t as heinous as “Aaron Haspel makes it out to be”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/archives/00000489.html; Kill Bill’s revenge theme makes for obvious comparisons to another great thiever of tales: Shakespeare. (Before I get ambushed I should clarify here that I in no way mean to equate the magnitude of Tarantino’s excellence with that of Shakespeare; of course they’re in differenct leagues entirely; yada yada.) The difference between Shakespeare’s debt to his source and Tarantino’s is that Shakespeare draws from one place, the Spanish Tragedy, while Tarantino mines dozens of movies and television shows, a little of this, a little of that. Tarantino isn’t plagiarizing, but neither are his stories worthwhile in themselves—they simply serve as vehicles for his expression. That’s why he’ll never be capital-G Great. (I recently wrote about another such master of style over substance, Thomas Pynchon.)
In Kill Bill, the scene in the sushi bar is unusual in that it does not not involve martial arts, swords, and fountain upon fountain of arterial spray. It is without question the most violent movie I’ve seen in recent memory. In your typical Hong Kong martial arts flick, Jet Li fights off a couple dozen swarming attackers, but we never see much blood or hear many bones crack—we do not, if you’ll pardon the expression, feel their pain. The vanquished either get up and scramble away, or the fight conveniently changes venues so that we never see the aftermath. Tarantino, by contrast, forces us to look at the awful consequences. After Uma Thurman fights a couple dozen katana-swinging yakuza, their moans and groans continue in the background, and the camera pans up to capture the blood-spattered dance floor where it all occurred—we see the dead and the maimed, some lying still, some crawling or trying to stand, one stumbling around aimlessly. We can’t get lost in the balletic grace of the fluid motions of the swordfights, because Tarantino makes us wince with each slice.
What do we make of that? We can hardly call it “realism” in a movie that has no such aspirations. It’s not a virtue, exactly. But neither can we fault the film for “glorifying violence”—after the fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you’re left with a sort of ethereal thrill, but in Kill Bill the thrill is paired with a sick feeling in your gut, with a sense of relief that it’s over. But by no means is it that Tarantino’s violence is meant to be cautionary—the second after you flinch upon seeing someone’s foot chopped off, you laugh at a quippy bit of dialogue. Horror and humor are never comfortably separated in Tarantino’s movies; often they are right on top of each other. He pulls it off in a way that is riveting and that I haven’t seen anyone imitate without becoming campy on one side or just plain sordid on the other. But whether there’s any deeper accomplishment here beyond the filmmaker’s task of grabbing our attention, I’m not sure. Tarantino’s greatest movie may be the one where he finds a way to keep his edge but leave the violence behind. I often think of people like the guys a few rows behind me in the theater, who seemed to find every single scene incredibly funny—especially the most horrific ones. It occurred to me as I heard them that reaching that point might be a decent milestone for losing one’s humanity.
Kill Bill’s score is by RZA (or is it The RZA?), co-founder of the Wu Tang Clan. It’s one of the coolest things about the movie. I wasn’t paying attention to it at every turn, but what I did notice was quintessentially (if I may) Tarantonian. At one point an upbeat pastiche of a Leone/Morricone riff segues smoothly into surfer rock. I’d be tempted to call it parody if it wasn’t so good—as it is, I’ll buy the soundtrack.
Splitting the movie in two was probably a very good idea; it’s episodic, not epic, and works better with a break. We even get a revelation at the end that promises to complicate the straightforward nature of the Bride’s revenge—not a new twist, by any measure, but one that you can bet Tarantino will find a fresh way to play with. It’s what he does best.
Further reading: Aaron’s comments cited above are well worth reading, if misguided. Via his blog I found Rick over at Futurballa, who has some worthwhile commentary across a number of entries. He in turn references David Edelstein’s review, which I mostly agree with. I’ll add more links if I find more.
UPDATE: Good quote by Stephen Hunter in the Post: “The thing is about as refined as watching someone feed hot dogs into a Cuisinart set on 10, except that it’s delivered with such high panache and brio, it’s mesmerizing.”
UPDATE: Added a bit about the music that I left out before.
Somehow, the bottom half of my “Quicksilver review”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000119.html disappeared. Not sure when that happened. I’ve put it back, so if you read it and it seemed to end rather abruptly, you can check back now for the whole thing.
It’s Public Radio Pledge Week Hell here in the nation’s capital. In the old days, when WAMU started filling half their airtime with shrill-voiced, guilt-tripping announcers and producers, you could just scoot up the dial to WETA. They didn’t have all the same shows, but at least you’d be covered for All Things Considered. A couple years ago, though, the two stations must have gathered together in a smoke-filled room and decided to overlap their pledge weeks, so that listeners couldn’t avoid them.
They’re also employing certain underhanded tactics with greater frequency, such as starting a segment that sounds like an ordinary news item or thought piece, but then suddenly segueing into one of the myriad variations of “it’s time to pay up, bucko.” Kojo Nnamdi isn’t usually like this. Bill Redlin isn’t usually like this. Diane Rehm — well, OK, I can see her getting into pledge week. But as for the rest, you can tell that when the marketing weasels descend they have to play along, though they bristle at the onerous responsibility. The producers have got to hate it, too — they’re people who spend their year working hard behind the scenes to make things run, and the only time the public gets to hear them, they’re engaged in the most grating behavior possible. Which raises the question: just whose idea is this? “Pledge drives are the best way to raise money” is a vicious meme that’s so deep-seated in public radio and television it’s going to take a long time to work free of it. Until then we must suffer and stew, all the while accruing mugs, sweatshirts, discount cards, and tote bags.
The sheer horror of the possibility woke me up. I sat there in bed, eyes wide open, and said to the ceiling: “Is there anyone out there, anyone at all, who is currently providing consistent ratings on window, door, and skylight products? What if there _is_ no nonprofit, public/private organization (based in Washington, D.C. or its environs) whose stated goal is to provide accurate information to measure and compare the energy performance of window, door, or skylight products — preferably one comprised of manufacturers, suppliers, builders, architects and designers, specifiers, code officials, utilities, and government agencies?”
Fortunately, the Internet is open 24 hours a day, so I was able to assuage my fear in no time. You’ll be glad to know that such an organization _does_ exist, and that it furthermore has quite a cool name, as miscellaneous podunk associations go. I give you the “National Fenestration Rating Council”:http://www.nfrc.org/. As soon as I saw the name I was taken by a wild hope that somewhere on their highly informative website they might have a handy brochure entitled “Avoiding Defenestration” or “Defenestration and Your Children” or “The Health Risks of Defenestration” or something to that effect. I looked — sadly, no such document exists. Still, it’s good to know that someone’s out there, standardizing the nation’s, er, fenestrators.