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by Edward Champion

Return of the Reluctant — Robert Shields Version

5:10 PM-5:13 PM: I twiddled my thumbs, contemplating how to kill the last twenty minutes at work. I was sick and tired of answering email. So I figured another blog entry would do. I typed three sentences, then four. Pretty soon I was up to five. I leaned back in my Aeron chair at a 35 degree angle, staring out the window, which was still streaked by the telltale sign of sludge. Then I thought about how utterly pointless it was writing a blog entry in the style of Charles Shields. This wasn’t fair, given that I had only examined one page. And yet I found that this killed time quite nicely.

5:14 PM: Was the last three minutes of writing necessary? Probably not. But I shouldn’t be editorializing here. After all, I’m supposed to describe what I’m doing. And yet since I’ve been sitting on my ass, there isn’t much to say about this that’s exciting. Okay, I just scrunched up my left buttcheek for kicks. Nobody was looking. That’s worth something, isn’t it?

5:15 PM: I think about what happened during 5:14 PM. Did I really scrunch up my left buttcheek because I needed to write about something interesting? Well, yes, I did. Does this mean I’m a sex addict or an exhibitionist? Do I have an ass fetish that I haven’t sufficiently explored?

5:16 PM: I offer a Nazi salute to a co-worker and click my heels. He’s one of the few around here who understands my sense of humor. A risky proposition. I then say goodbye to another co-worker.

5:17 PM: I decide to stop writing in the style of Charles Shields and wonder if there’s any easy way out of this without drawing attention to myself. I scrunch my right buttcheek for symmetrical balance. I then Control-C and Control-V this post into Microsoft Word. 300 words. I’ve been doing this seven minutes. I’d feel a sense of shame if I fired up Accessories/Calculator. So I do the math in my head and it works out to about 40 words/minute.

5:19 PM: What happened to 5:18 PM?

5:19 PM, Part Two: That was too quick an entry for 5:19 PM. I don’t think I’ll ever have to take a nitroglycerine tablet. Or at least I hope not!

5:19 PM, Part Three: This is a long minute.

5:19 PM, Part Four: When will it be 5:20 PM?

5:20 PM-5:21 PM: I go to the restroom. I don’t really have to go, but it’s good exercise. I urinated more piss than I expected to. There is a man in one of the stalls using far too much toilet paper. I know who it is. This might explain why he walks funny.

5:22 PM: I think I preferred 5:21 PM over 5:22 PM.

by Edward Champion

Perhaps Dylan Stableford’s the Real Whore

stableford.jpgOver at Fishbowl NY, Dylan Stableford remarks upon Jessica Cutler’s last-minute cancellation for a Mediabistro panel. Where most professionals would let such a cancellation go without comment, Stableford, who couldn’t possibly be thinking about Mediabistro’s interests at all, writes, “we’re shocked…that someone known for exchanging sex for money would behave this way.”

Bad enough that such a pissy post would be considered pertinent, but the attempt to taint Cutler here as a virago, when Cutler herself offered a reasonable (albeit last-minute) answer, is sleazier than a weekend NAMBLA gathering. And apparently, I’m not alone: the panel’s moderator, Rachel Kramer Bussel, also has some thoughts, pointing to the lawsuit’s possible ramifications and the need for care.

In a later post, Stableford attempts to soften Bussel’s charges, without, of course, pointing to the obvious fact that Fishbowl is owned and operated by Mediabistro.

by Edward Champion

Look Out, Samuel Pepys

Liz Henry at The Other blog points to this fascinating entry on Robert Shields, a man who has kept up a diary for twenty years, working at it no less than four hours a day and recording everything that happens to him. His diary is 35 million words and a sample page can be found here. Apparently, the diary made its way to the Washington State University library, along with a $100,000 donation. Shields stopped in 1996.

by Edward Champion

So Great a Sweetness Flows Into the Breast, So Why Bitch About It?

Elizabeth Merrick pooh-poohs Susan Seligson’s Stacked: A 32DDD Reports from the Front. Without citing anything specific from Seligson’s book (Has she even read it? She doesn’t mention that the book received a starred PW review.), Merrick dismisses that anything chronicling one of the most beautiful anatomical parts is mere “tit lit.”

By this logic, I guess we’ll have to dismiss Robert Herrick as a hack. His poem, “Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast,” dealt with this subject as follows:

Have ye beheld (with much delight)
A red rose peeping through a white?
Or else a cherry, double grac’d
Within a lily centre plac’d?
Or ever mark’d the pretty beam
A strawberry shows half-drown’d in cream?
Or seen rich rubies blushing through
A pure smooth pearl and orient too?
So like to this, nay all the rest,
Is each neat niplet of her breast.

We can also dismiss Sappho’s invocation (“Beat your breasts, young maidens. And tear your garments in grief!”), Philip Roth’s The Breast, Nora Ephron’s famous essay, “A Few Words About Breasts”, and Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips. All to be thrown into the dustheap! For clearly there can be no literary value in breasts. They cannot possibly be written about with beauty, scrutiny, love, hatred, or any other value on the emotional spectrum.

I suspect Merrick might have an ally in John Ashcroft.

by Edward Champion

Let’s Hope It Isn’t Anything Like the Environment Depicted in Eisenstein’s Stachka

Any interview that begins with the answer “I’m waiting to find out whether we go on strike or not. How are you doing today?” is certainly worth your time. The Kenyon Review offers its first part of an interview with Philly Inquirer books editor Frank Wilson, who may or may not be exiled depending on how things develop. The interview yields an interesting glimpse inside the book reviewing world. Frank Wilson is one of the most forward-thinking and hardest working books editors in the business.

by Edward Champion

Superman II: Donner Cut vs. Lester Cut

supermanii.jpg

I don’t believe Richard Donner’s cut of Superman II (recently released on DVD) is necessarily better than the 1981 theatrical cut directed by Richard Lester, but it is still fascinating on its own terms. When Donner helmed the first Superman, he actually shot a good deal of footage for Superman II, much of it (including all of the Lex Luthor scenes) contained within the theatrical version that was subsequently released. Donner was kicked off the project midway through the film because of cost overruns, replaced by Richard Lester. Fans, tantalized by the footage that appeared in various ABC airings of the film in the 1980s, have long hoped for Donner’s vision to be reinstated. Warner listened and tracked down some six tons of film, restored all of it, and re-edited Superman II to reflect this what-if scenario.

This cinematic experiment certainly demonstrates what Donner would have effected, had he been left alone to finish the film. But it also indicates that Richard Lester’s contributions weren’t nearly as bad as Donner makes them out to be. (Donner’s commentary track is a veritable shitting contest. But Donner has produced many cinematic dogs himself. Exhibit A: Assassins.)

Donner’s version moves faster, with an opening sequence that dovetails Superman II‘s story into the first film quite nicely. (It is the missile aimed at Hackensack that causes the three supervillains to be released, not the nuclear bomb at the Eiffel Tower. Lester’s Eiffel Tower sequence has been removed.) Donner’s version takes more chances with the characters, particularly in an exciting early scene where Lois Lane throws herself out the window of the Daily Planet to test whether Clark Kent is actually Superman. Susannah York’s Lara has been replaced by Brando’s authoritarian Jor-El at the Fortress of Solitude. While these scenes play up the father-son dynamic, Brando is just as stiff as he was in the first film.

Donner’s panache for action sequences works well in the first hour, but I found myself missing Lester’s light touch, particularly with General Zod and company’s appearance on Earth. The two small town cops arguing about the restaurant (“They have a fine selection.”) are now one-dimensional characters for Zod, Ursa and Non to fuck with. Lester’s humor also worked effectively as the three supervillains let loose a gust of wind just as the people of Metropolis attempted a lynching (“Superman is dead! Let’s get him!”). The scenes of cars flying through the air and colliding into each other had a certain gravitas when edited against Lester’s slapstick contributions (ice cream flying from a cone onto another’s face, the guy still talking on the phone even after the booth has been knocked over).

The musical cues have also been seriously marred. In the Lester cut, when Superman flies into Niagra Falls to save a boy from falling into the waters, he was accompanied by a reprise of John Williams’ main theme. The Donner cut has opted for a more diluted theme and it makes Superman’s rescue of the boy nowhere nearly as dramatic as it was in the original. (A similar change has been made when Superman rescues the large antenna from falling onto a mother and her stroller.) Also greatly missed is John Williams’ menacing series of percussive quintets, which lent Zod’s takeover of the planet Houston a sense of dread. I’ve long considered Williams’ contributions to the Superman films to be among his best as a composer, but the Donner cut reveals just how naked the Superman films are without the score: a telling sign of its own.

But perhaps my biggest objection (aside from Donner’s bitterness) is that Superman’s sacrifice of his powers for Lois Lane feels more solipsistic in Donner’s hands. In the Lester cut, Superman sleeps with Lois Lane only after he loses his powers. But in the Donner cut, he gets bedtime action before. While it’s nice to see a postcoital Lois Lane observe Superman’s conversation with Jor-El dressed only in his shirt, Reeves’ conversation with his father (instead of his mother) is now laced with selfish import (“I deserve this!”) as opposed to a bona-fide declaration of his love for Lane (“Mother, I love her.”). Because of this, one views the diner scene that comes after, in which a powerless Kent is beaten to a pulp by a truck driving bully, in a new light. Clark Kent’s request to step outside is now guided more by hubris, rather than a desperate need to figure out where he stands and how to defend himself as a human.

Donner’s contributions were certainly essential to the Superman films. His camerawork was better. His action sequences were better. But I suspect he sometimes took Superman too seriously, considering him to be an almost Christ-like figure. I’d argue that Lester understood that Superman II was an entertainment and injected just the right amount of comedy into Superman II, giving it a more humanistic feel. It’s regrettable that Lester’s equally essential contributions are being pooh-poohed by the fanboys.

by Edward Champion

Michael Silverblatt on “I Will Survive”

You simply can’t make this shit up. You can find it here at the 3:13 mark.

“It’s amazing ’cause that song, for many people, I think, has the power of transport. Since it was such a popular disco song during the age of — the height of the AIDS crisis, many a time one would hear it at memorial services and be reminded of the unlikelihood of survival and the ferocity of the need to survive.”

Get out of the house much, Silverblatt?

by Edward Champion

When Music Journalism Goes Horribly Wrong

Eurotrash: “Dean starts off quite puzzlingly, in my opinion. ‘What do you get if you cross a festive cookie snack with a 70’s rock sound and some punk-punk-punk vocals (it has to be stressed)?’ Due to my inability to picture a ‘festive cookie snack’, I’m kind of stumped, but I suppose my answer would be: Dazzlingly bad writing, Dean.”

Personally I had thought two “punk” modifiers would be enough. It is either an intrepid or foolish man who dares three.

by Edward Champion

Writers With Drinks

A slight change in plans, through no fault of my own: I’m going to be at the January Writers With Drinks instead of the December one, where I’ll be reading literary fiction penned by…well, me. Or is it raunchy comedy laced with esoteric references? Or is it experimental poetry? One thing I can guarantee is a high-octane performance by yours truly, reading outside his traditional genre, with an element of absolutely essential audience participation. I may even be wearing a funny hat.

But there are far more compelling reasons to attend than me: Michelle Tea! Kim Stanley Robinson! Andrew Sean Greer! Michael Blumlein! Justin Chin! A cast of thousands!

It’s at The Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street, January 20, 2007, 6:30 PM.

Be there. You won’t want to miss it! Only $5 to $7 and for a grand cause: The Other Magazine!

by Edward Champion

Everyone Wants a Pony, Ben. Everyone.

Ben Stein: “People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?”

by Edward Champion

Roundup

by Edward Champion

Post-Thanksgiving Solutions

What is to be done? I have spent the past week gorging like Tip O’Neill at a buffet table and I have spent the morning sobbing into an empty cup of coffee, realizing that I no longer have the metabolism of a twenty-five year-old. How did this happen? Did I gain weight? Do I dare step onto the scale? Are these pants tighter or am I hallucinating?

There are, of course, solutions and I produce them here for the benefit of all parties:

1. Starvation.
Advantages: Dramatic weight loss, a test in ascetism.
Disadvantages: Hunger, low energy, an Auschwitz-like physique.

2. Salad diet.
Advantages: Healthy, calorie-conscious diet.
Disadvntages: A terrible betrayal to my carnivorous instincts. (Et tu, Brute?)

3. Running seven hours a day over the next week.
Advantages: Additional energy, a sudden fitness regimen.
Disadvantages: Potential hallucinations, no spare time, facing the terrible realization that I am out of shape, the possibility of turning into Jim Fixx and dying at 52.

4. Do nothing.
Advantages: No exertion of energy, getting in touch with my inner slacker.
Disadvantages: Nothing changes.

5. Option Five.
Advantages: It’s good to settle on something decisive if the first four options don’t pan out.
Disadvantages: What is Option Five?

by Edward Champion

The Rachel Papers

Rachel Cooke: “I’ve written before about the importance of critics. I said, in essence, that they were useful because they know a lot (also, you know who they are, unlike so many faceless bloggers and internet reviewers who hide behind the anonymity the web provides). Soon after, I found my name on a bloggers’ website called, charmingly, ‘shit sandwich’. I was the focus of a lot of anger and frustration; bloggers didn’t like my argument at all, seeing it as a way of getting at them and their amateur criticism. I was fine with that; if you dish it out, you should be able to take it.”

Why do so many pinheads named Rachel work in journalism? In yet another moronic newspaper-published hatchet job on litbloggers (I predict three more assaults before the year is out), Rachel Cooke, who does indeed possess a mouth running as redolent as a shit sandwich, deplores the “unwarranted and inaccurate personal attacks on me” and suggests that bloggers are lesser because they are not “professionals.” She further bemoans “the populist warblings of the blogosphere” and imputes, citing only scant examples, that all blog posts are “untrustworthy, banal, and, worst of all, badly written.” This declaration comes to us after Cooke has “devoted an entire day to book blogs, trying to give them a fair chance.” Yeah, and I can give Beckett’s complete works a “fair chance” by reading them all in one day.

Cooke, perhaps more terrified of what bloggers will say about her than what they communicate on a daily basis, doesn’t give them a fair chance. For unlike a constructive critic, Cooke doesn’t cite anything positive about them. She is content to write a smug and ignorant hit piece while simultaneously portraying herself as a victim. That takes some temerity. (Ironically, a Google Image Search turns up not a single photo of Rachel Cooke, suggesting that she is just as “faceless” as her apparent nemeses.)

This comes to us from a journalist who genuinely believe that Nick Hornby, a shiny happy blowhard loath to commit a single skepticism to paper, is “a good critic, and an experienced one; and because he can write.” Yup, and Keanu Reeves, never mind his thespic limitations, is such a nice guy too.

While I can agree with Cooke’s criticism concerning the mysterious editor’s provenance (are we all content to fall for such hearsay without proof?), reading Cooke’s Pollyanna schtick, one would assume that such a delicate soul wasn’t employed in the rough-and-tumble world of Fleet Street. But is Cooke really as circumspect as she suggests when she calls John Sutherland’s work “rushed and lazy” and cites another unnamed reviewer instead of an example she‘s actually bothered to locate within Sutherland’s work? Is she really such a stupendous thinker, by dint of being paid, when she offers such idiotic rhetoric as “What they wanted wasn’t the right to critique films or books for themselves (thanks to the net, they’ve got that anyway) but for those people who are paid to do so to cease to exist – to shut up.”

This isn’t the case at all. I don’t think any blogger criticizing the mainstream media wants these critics to shut up. I think they are voicing their concern about the current state of newspaper coverage, hoping that it will improve. It’s journalists like Cooke, terrified of seeing their words so swiftly responded to, who have a problem with their “professional” status being challenged by amateur upstarts who may know a thing or two about literature.

Isn’t there room here for all types of critics? Why indeed are we working in a dichotomy? But then I suppose Rachel Cooke is content to eat Jim Crow.

[UPDATE: More responses from the Kenyon Review, Dove greyreader Scribbles, Michael Orthofer and Frank Wilson.]

by Edward Champion

The “Why the Hell Does Anyone Bother to Work the Day Before Thanksgiving?” Roundup

by Edward Champion

On Robert Altman

Some filmmakers unfurl pyrotechnics at their audiences, flaunting their tricks like a crass magician. Others compensate for their inability to tap into the visceral by offering cerebral puzzles. Robert Altman simply wanted his audience to observe the human condition, however painful, baroque, or unappetizing it might be.

This is a rarer sensibility than one might expect from a filmmaker, which makes Altman’s death particularly shocking. And it’s no surprise that Altman was praised and marginalized, often both at the same time, as he somehow kept on making films, many of them financed by the big studios, that were irreverent, inexorable, and often misunderstood.

It is telling that Altman’s technical innovations emerged not from the need to show off (although The Player‘s opening shot, a fabulous riff on stylistic excess, might be exempted), but from a compulsion to chronicle humanity, whether contained singularly in Philip Baker Hall’s harrowing portrait of Nixon in Secret Honor or the considerable population of characters his films were known for. I could talk endlessly about his leisurely pans and zooms, executed as if a stoner had cross-pollinated with a nouvelle vague vanguard. For McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he erected a whole town and asked each extra to fully inhabit his part. There are his multitrack audio innovations seen in Nashville. Altman didn’t tell the actors when the camera and the mike would be on them and simply had them improvise their scenes, thus removing any lingering dregs of exhibitionism and ensuring that his cast would give naturalistic performances.

altman.jpgBut was Altman a true naturalist? Altman’s highly entertaining The Long Goodbye is, aside from Robert Montgomery’s The Lady in the Lake, the most idiosyncratic of Raymond Chandler film adaptations, transforming Marlowe into an inveterate wisecracker contending with 1970s Southern California. And in heightening Marlowe’s sarcasm and juxtaposing this against SoCal excesses, Altman, aided by Elliott Gould’s perfect casting and Leigh Brackett’s exceptionally witty script, managed to compartmentalize genre elements, dissecting Chandler’s narrative elements (the repartee, the ladies, and Marlowe himself) while entertaining us. Consider how the opening of Brewster McCloud, where we hear “I forgot the opening line” instead of the MGM lion roar. Altman was not only concerned with how films could reflect the human condition, but how the film medium could be manipulated, perhaps dismantled completely, to favor the human condition

Altman’s sense of play was so heightened that I’m tempted to call him the cinematic Nabokov. MASH was a film with cojones, one of the first films depicting malaise and arrogance in a horrific war environment with careful insouciance. Thieves Like Us took the great noir classic They Live by Night and turned its characters into slow-witted robbers with the radio constantly blaring in the background. Short Cuts featured Julianne Moore delivering a monologue about her troubled marriage naked from the waist down and also included the fascinating context of Jennifer Jason Leigh talking dirty into the phone while changing the diapers.

Where other octogenarian filmmakers rested on their laurels, Altman went to the grave directing. He simply could not stop. Even his most recent films reflected his almost constant curiosity: the dance world (The Company), a return to politics (Tanner on Tanner, the Garry Trudeau-Altman collaborative followup to Tanner ’88), the chasm between classes (Gosford Park, which included several wry homages to Renoir’s The Rules of the Game), and the humanity found within small town life (Cookie’s Fortune).

Only Altman could have conjured up the classic moment in Nashville where Keith Carridine sings “I’m Easy” to a crowd, where not one, but two women in the audience believe that the song is about them. In the next Carridine moment that follows, we see Carridine in bed with one of the women, who has made this decision at a tremendous personal cost. But we know that Carridine will go on philandering, not giving a damn about her.

Altman was unafraid to take risks. Even in his latter years, he was turning out idiosyncratic films like Dr. T and the Women, defying the MPAA with a closeup shot of a baby bursting out of a vagina and ruminating upon the gender gap at the risk of coming across as a misogynist.

Now that Altman is gone, I’m hard pressed to name another living filmmaker as playful or as fiercely devoted to depicting humanity in its simple yet multifaceted form. Mike Leigh comes to mind, but his subject matter is more committed to the caustic. Wong Kar-Wai is also close, but Wong’s visuals are as potent as his subjects. Jean-Luc Godard is still alive, but his pugnacity has overtaken his innovations.

I must turn back to Altman as sui generis: his perverse amicability, his love of jazz, and his incessant though unobtrusive experimentation. He was one of the best cinematic realists we had. And I don’t see any emerging filmmaker coming close to Altman’s accomplishments.