Year / 2007

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • So this winter thing — my first here in Brooklyn — seems to be setting in with the dipping temperatures. And I have to say that it’s pretty fantastic! Much preferable to the hot and humid summer in which I was stopped in my slumber by the logy sweat that started to appear in places where I hadn’t sweated before just in walking from one corner of the room to the other. Although I may change my tune when the balls-shriveling lack of mercury kicks in. For now, the crisp brisk cold leaves untold promising days for hot chocolate and ice skating: the former secure, the latter of which I will have to attempt! Why the weather reports? Incredibly deranged dreams — no doubt incurred from the crazy books I’ve been reading of late or perhaps the general burden of an imaginative mind — have jolted me out of bed. The good: lots of solid, hard-core sleep that has kept me rested and peppy through the day. The bad: dreams so intense that it can take me as long as an hour to recalibrate my bearings. So if I’m clinging to a conversational topic that is a bit safer than my usual repertoire, I hope you will understand.
  • Terry Teachout has a thoughtful essay in Commentary reconsidering classical music Neville Cardus and asking the question of whether his disinclination to embrace modern offerings has caused him to be forgotten. (via Books, Inq.)
  • Joe Bob Briggs — and his more sober self John Bloom — can be found (among others) at The Wittenburg Door.
  • I’ve felt that because Richard Donner was only half-justifiably fellated with that Superman II — The Richard Donner Cut DVD (which revealed that the best version of Superman II is probably some bastard hybrid we’ll never see involving Donner’s technical chops and Richard Lester’s light comedy), the incredibly talented Lester has been left unduly in the lurch. But thankfully, Lester’s two great Beatles films have been put out and Keith Phipps has managed to track the director down.
  • And in additional defense of the inventive Lester, who nearly every Superman fan seems to have declared an untalented hack, here’s “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.” (Part One and Part Two)
  • So will the WGA strike effect the literary world? A few agents now fear that many option deals may be quelled.
  • Margaret Atwood and husband Graeme Gibson brought their own dinner in a box to the Giller Prize reception to protest a Four Seasons development that threatens the endangered Grenada dove. They said they could not accept food and drink from the Four Seasons, although they seemed to have no problem occupying the premises. (Would it not have been more effective to simply not attend the ceremony, thereby protesting the Four Seasons and letting the Giller people know that there are consequences to scholarship? I can’t help but ponder whether this particular resistant approach is more of an upstaging of the nominees. Much like her LongPen solution, I simply don’t understand why Atwood would bother to participate in a process if it’s absolutely painful, unless there’s a self-serving satirical intent.)
  • Incidentally, it was Eliabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air that took the award.
  • It seems that Oprah isn’t a very careful reader. First James Frey, and now a book pulled from a reading list on her website: Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree. Carter, of course, was a speechwriter for George Wallace, giving us the mantra: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” Okay, not the most ideal thing you want to hear from an author. But I’ve long wondered, like Sherman Alexie (quoted in the article), if Little Tree was — in some sense — an act of atonement and whether it is entirely fair to dismiss a good book simply because it’s written by a racist. It’s a tricky question, but I submit to you that we have no problem accepting D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation or Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will as significant parts of the film canon. I, for one, absolutely despise Griffith and Riefenstahl’s life choices, while also appreciating the technical components of these two films. It’s possible that Oprah and other detractors may be clinging to a set of politically correct assumptions just as vile as racism: the tendency to conflate an author’s work with an author’s life and the discounting of the former because there are extremely unpleasant aspects within the latter. If Oprah “couldn’t live with that,” as she claims, then how can she have any reasonably sophisticated take on our complicated world? The world is not always a place where artistic achievement is grounded on a rosy Runyonesque life. Art often emerges from an ugly and turbulent existence. Must we discount some works of art because we learn unpleasant things about the artist? Or can we be mature enough to judge art on its own merits?

[UPDATE: George has more thoughts on the Oprah snafu: “But, besides raising the question of how to view the merit of a work vs. the author’s bio, what this does illustrate is exactly how far removed this woman is from both her books and the everyday impact of her opinion on the army of mindless couch weights (like paper weights for furniture). Does she ever even get near this stuff anymore or does one of her handlers just draw up a list and sign her name at the bottom? Does she have any idea how her purported love of books is being used for corporate shilling, base taste-making, and political gain? Did she even notice this herself or was it another handler who noticed? When your whole life is outsourced like that, what can people trust you take seriously?”]

by Edward Champion

Duck Hunting on Capitol Hill

Now here’s some absolute strangeness. Kucinich’s bill to impeach Cheney still has a chance. There was an effort to table the bill, but the bill survived the tabling vote and is now headed again to the Judiciary Committee. Could it be that some Democratic Congress members are growing balls? Or is it more Republican shaming, as Paul Kane suggests? You know, November and the threat of re-election does funny things to politicians. Too bad Pelosi and Hoyer are more interesting in taking all the fun out of politics by sticking with their non-impeachment agenda. Which is a bit like a bunch of six-year-olds insisting on keeping the tea party going in the playground while the school bullies keep beating the tar out of all the good kids.

by Edward Champion

Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show

A few prefatory words about this excerpt: Will Self is a tall, thin, vaguely cadaverous-looking man, with a triangular head and enormous eyes that blink sparingly. He is also quiet, curious, and considerably punctilious. His command of the English language is as present in his speech as it is in his fiction. I talked with Self right after he had checked into his hotel — this after a walk from LaGuardia Airport. He carried no luggage. When I asked him where he stored his change of clothes, he then proceeded to reveal several carefully folded squares of clothing that he had kept upon his person. Self challenged me on my assumptions about the dérive, the psychogeographical term for a “drift.” When I suggested that such a linear walking narrative might reveal recurrent patches of drab land, he suggested that I had a perceptive anxiety. I said that I simply didn’t have the time, but he may have been right. The day after the interview, I found myself immersed on a long walk around the perimeter of Prospect Park where I drifted into surrounding blocks and contemplated the insanity of a twenty-five mile walk. Perhaps this was just the beginning.

willself.jpg

Correspondent: I wanted to actually ask you about your observation in “Madame Jacquard,” about giving up cigarettes, and how cigarettes form this necessary unit to get from one place to another and how it’s part of this linear narrative “translated into a series of perplexing jump-cuts.” You’re down to three [a day] now. So I’m wondering if, speaking now, you have any kind of linear narrative now with these three or…?

Self: Three is not enough for a narrative. Then, it would be concision. It would be like haikus.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Self: And that’s just not enough cigarettes to provide a narrative anymore. You need the constant ebb and flow of nicotine in your system to provide that. It’s not working for me anymore. I’ve lost the cigarette narrative.

Correspondent: Yeah. Well, you have, basically, the walking narrative, I suppose.

Self: Yeah, maybe the walking narrative is there more strongly as a result. I’ve had some absolutely splendid walks during this trip. It’s been very exciting for me. The airport walks have been great. But perhaps the best walk was — I walked in from Pearson to Toronto. I walked in from Sea-Tac to Seattle. Big walks. Sixteen, seventeen mile walks. I had a good long walk in San Francisco out from Castro to Sausalito over the Golden Gate Bridge. I had a beautiful walk where I arrived at O’Hare and then kind of got off the subway the first stop — I think it’s called Rosemont. Within twenty minutes of leaving the aircraft, I was face-to-face with a deer in a wood by a river in this totally underimagined place. It’s a classic interzone — classic liminal place — and then found myself walking through the wood directly under the flagpole.

So I had this kind of juxtaposition — what I think of as the modern sublime. Jet travel is the strangest, fascinating, most awe-inspiring physical experience that most of us will have in our lifetime. It’s mediated by human society in that way. And yet everything about international air travel is arranged to make it dull and vacuous and boring. And yet the airport walk recovers the sublime aspect of air travel in that way. And then yesterday in Chicago, I walked to Wal-Mart, which was another kind of walk. Another sort of biopsy of the urban environment.

I mean, I think, in the way I do differ from [Guy] Debord is that, of course, I don’t believe in the act of the dérive. I don’t know what the L.A. Times critic thinks about it, but on the Debordian premise, a dérive should destroy the society and the spectacle.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Self: When Debord was writing, the Marxists still spoke quite fervidly about late capitalism. But how late it is. (laughs) And it’s later and stronger than ever!

Correspondent: (laughs)

Self: So I don’t have that kind of — and indeed I think that the kind of Marxian conception of what these sort of ants might be involved in is ridiculous and moonshine. But I do think there’s a different kind of insurgency involved in long-distance walking in this way.

by Edward Champion

The Radiohead Experiment

If you’re wondering what Radiohead’s total haul was, it was possibly about $2.7 million from downloads. Which has to scare the shit out of the music industry and present a considerable wakeup call for recording artists. Because Radiohead collected every penny here. And given that Radiohead’s last album, Hail to the Thief, sold an initial 300,000 (and apparently went platinum), let’s be generous and say that Radiohead collected 35% of the revenue — or $350,000 of the one million+ copies sold for Thief. That’s a considerable difference that not only demonstrates the possibilities of what artists can collect, but clearly shows that the middle-men are about to cast asunder from the vicious cycle. (And you may recall how Courtney Love computed that a band member gets $45,000 to live on, because royalties are often offset by recoupable expenses, even if a record goes platinum.)

Point being: The Internet, in one fell swoop, has changed the landscape with this experiment. And whether other arts — such as filmmaking or writing — can perform similarly is a question that any business-savvy artist should be seriously pondering right now. I wouldn’t dare suggest that the workers entirely control the means of production, but Radiohead’s experiment is an encouraging sign for any independent artist. Ignore the digital medium at your own peril.