Seth Kupchick's Blog: Bet on the Beaten, page 10

It's my book!

Jack Kerouac famously said on the Jack Paar show that he was on the road for years, but he wrote the book in weeks. I'm not sure if the same holds true for me, but my book about a Beat legend, real or imagined, was written relatively quickly in the summer of '98, but I had a hard time closing the deal. I'm really into astrology, so I've come to the conclusion I wasn't meant to finish "If So Carried by the Wind, Become the Wind," until about now. I'm definitely going to change the Kindle version, so if you've already bought the book, I'm sorry, but like a painting you can appreciate it for what it is. I'm rewriting it because I was encouraged to do so by the artist who made the cover, and he was right but maybe it was never intended to be finished, and yet it was so close once upon a time. I'm not really sure what caused the delays, but there were reasons: I felt beholden to the characters in the story, and this is never a good thing for publication. I'm sure lots of artists feel this towards their art, and thankfully I'm not really in that category, though I'm sure I hold up, but everyone does. I mean there are people who never write an honest word because they are too afraid of hurting someone, and I'm not one of those people. The second reason I never published it was that I never really finished it, but this also gets confusing. I typed it up years after I initially 'penned' it in my notebooks, because I used to write by hand, and then type my stuff up, but I don't do that as much anymore (the computer has ruined me!) I knew I'd done something important when I first typed it up, but I wasn't ready for the adulation that came my way, even though it only came from two people, my mentor whose in the book, and Stan Rice, a friend of his, and the (deceased) husband, of the famous novelist. Stan read it and gave me a strong review, that kept me going for years, and I mean years.

When is a work of art finished? How is it finished? Why is it finished? I never answered these questions well enough in "If So Carried," but hope I've finally finished it, though I've come to realize it will never be finished. It didn't start out trying to be a perfect work of art, or a monster, like my mentor's book. It's a relatively short and quick story, actually, that you can read in a day, and that's the way I like them, so I was true to myself. My mentor pretty much hates most art, or thinks it is worse than his, and he may be right, but he really liked this book, and he hasn't liked much else that I used to send him. He's a purist and looks at art like a religion, and would never lie, so his criticism meant the most to me. In some ways, my life as an artist was nothing more than to gain his approval, and my parents, though I failed at the latter. "This puts you on the map," he told me, and that was my life's ambition, so to hear it at 33 years old, was a relief. I'd almost died once already (you'll have to read it in the story), but this was a second death, and a much more rewarding one. I saved his message on my voice mail for months, and then had a long talk with him while the U.S.C./Notre Dame game played in the background, and my mentor marveled at how I wrote like Artaud, his hero (mine too!). I only sent my mentor the story about him, but in the summer of '98, I also wrote about 'the mad captain,' my roommate who drove me crazy with art, kind of like Rimbaud. I'd say living with 'the mad captain' in a house that I did my best to describe in a story I wrote simultaneously with the one about my mentor and a beat legend, in the rolling hills, was my artistic spark. I typed it out as a separate story, thinking it had nothing to do with Los Reyes, but boy was I wrong, and I'm baffled at how I didn't see it. I know they are two separate stories, but the themes are completely interrelated, and the stories even reference each other at times, though they could be read independent of each other. The Los Reyes story was more important to me so I typed it up first, and I felt like Jack Kerouac, or S.E. Hinton, or John Steinbeck, in "Cannery Row." I'd really tapped into something and this was in an age before kindle and amazon had wiped out bookstores, but that's not to say we were in the halcyon days of literature. There was a book fair in Seattle, with publishers setting up tables, and I thought the story was so hot I could go right down there and sell it that afternoon.

I was up early writing the synopsis, looking at the snow glowing on the Olympic Mountains, and felt invincible, but I didn't go to the fair. My mentor was still alive, and I thought he had to read it before anyone else did. He told me it was the best thing to happen to him in years, but I couldn't publish it. It went against his credo, and the Beat legend's, I traveled to California in December to commiserate over the book, and we both decided there wasn't much work to be done on it, but some work. I took notes and then got a letter from Stan Rice, telling me what he thought the manuscript needed, and I went on that. My mentor thought the manuscript wasn't funny enough, or something like that, and that I could pepper it with dialogue, and make it better. "The characters are sitting at a table, nothing happens, so why not have dialogue," he said. I agreed, but instantly we had a disconnect, because my mentor wasn't thinking of how little I was writing.

Another big point, that I should give credence, was I hadn't done a hard edit on any of the manuscripts I wrote in my twenties. I was obsessed by them, to greater or lesser degrees, but once I typed them up, I didn't really consider how crazy they sounded. I also didn't know the tricks of the trade, like shuffling sentences, and paragraphs, that my mentor taught me (like my master in "I Dream of Jeannie"), and the process was new to me. Remember, I was ready to hand this into publishers, and thought they should be happy to publish me, and I'd received glowing praise, so I wasn't sure what was being asked of me. Emotionally, I didn't really want to rewrite it, and saw the whole thing as a drag. In one of the most blatantly self hating things I've ever done, I wiped out all the poetry of my masterpiece, and made it sound like a bad joke. I'm sure I was trying to please Max, who wanted it funnier (he wanted his book on 'X' funnier too, and used to tell me how Kokoschka only liked the students who painted like him). For whatever reason, I took my mentor's approbation and turned it into opprobation. I gutted the manuscript, and not surprisingly my mentor liked it, because he'd already got the tough poetic version, and now he got the fluffy stupid version, painting him better. Stan wrote a scathing critique of this version, and I'd say in many ways I never recovered from it. He really knocked me out, but rightly so. He told me to go back to the original, but that wasn't done, either, and I was lost.

My mentor thought the Beat legend would hate the book, and publishing it would go against both of their principles. I agreed not to do it on my first visit, but changed my mind, wanting the fame that I thought awaited me, but that was folly. Writing this, I realize that it sounds simple if my only problem was the FV (first version, in Stan's words) was the shit, because I hadn't lost it, but it never felt this simple. We'd all agreed the book wasn't done, and this took on several dimensions, from grammar, to content, and it was hard for me to tell where one began, and another ended. I'd never done a rewrite before, and I felt under a lot of pressure, thinking I could only ruin what I had done, so getting the manuscript back to its pure form, albeit a little better, turned out to be a Herculean task.

I published a decent version of the "Jake" part of the manuscript a year and a half ago, but it wasn't right. I tagged on "the mad captain" to the end, thinking that would explain something, but now I've weaved it into the text, like I first wrote it, and it feels right, even if it makes "If So Carried" less accessible. I wrote it that way, and I can't help but feel that's how it was supposed to be all along, and if you don't like it skip the italics and read about Jake.

*My book is changing radically, my friends. The parts in asterisks are gone, and it's one unbridled story, full of poetic grace. I'm going to get it polished by an editor, and hope for the best.

* I took out the 'interweaving' plot and made the story clear. I also added an intro from a historical point of view, that is always of the dead, and feel relieved. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, and that must be a civil liberty that the great Jack Webb show "Dragnet" must have taught to me. God bless our liberty!

Woody Allen's last twenty years

I read a couple of the generic screenplay books that you are told to read when you want to write a screenplay, but I did it kicking and screaming. I thought I was far too brilliant to read a hackneyed critic's interpretation of what made a movie good, and thought art was too complex to break down so easily, with great exceptions to the rules, and I was the exception! Unfortunately, I was having a hard time writing a screenplay. I succumbed to one about three act structure and I'm not sure I'd ever broken down a script so succinctly. The first act was the set-up introducing the characters, along with the setting, and the conceit. The second act, or the central act, was the meat of a story and where a movie usually took off and really became about something far greater than a conceit. The third act picked up where the central story left off and tied everything up. The books made it clear that lots of writers could write a great opening, but more often than not a script fell flat on its face in the second act, leaving almost nothing for the third act except a smash 'em-up, crash 'em-up, barn burner but without any substance. I was told the second act usually introduced a new memorable character, who kind of gave a movie a second life, or an unexpected turn, and that it was largely carried by a subplot that came to define the movie, making it far greater than a mere conceit, since art required more than an idea.

I watched "Magic in the Moonlight" tonight and my relationship to Woody Allen is so complicated that it would take years of psychotherapy to understand, or at least a good essay or two. It's safe to say that Woody Allen's career is divided into two big categories, and then a couple of major/minor ones. He was pretty much on fire from the late Sixties until the late Eighties, or early Nineties, and that is more than enough to preserve his legacy, so understand that anything negative I say about his art from here on in takes that into account. I'd actually say Woody's career has its own three act structure: he had the early funny movies that were screwballs in the tradition of the Marx Brothers, but timeless: his second act started with "Annie Hall," and had Woody blending his comedy with serious drama and this worked to greater or lesser effect for a few years, but most critics of the day saw it as a huge breakthrough, and an unexpected turn, like went Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Many of his old fans wanted him to be funny, and he directly addressed this issue in "Stardust Memories," one of my favorites, but Woody made so many good movies in this period, there are a handful, that could be anyone's favorite. The promise of his first act, the early comedies, came to complete fruition in the second act of his career, that started with Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and ended with Mia Farrow. We're still in the 3rd act of his career, and it has been an awfully long third act that shows no signs of ending. In some ways, Woody has gone back to the 1st act in the 3rd act, like movies will often do, and seems to be answering his own conceit. The movies are funny for the most part, or almost void of any of the tension that defined his middle period, and made for some of his most serious art. At the same time, the last twenty years aren't always light, and there have been some heavy handed dramas that hearken to the middle period, but in a much less dramatic or forceful form. "Match Point" comes to mind, or "Blue Jasmine," but even those movies feel like exercises compared to "Crimes or Misdemeanors," and don't have the same uuuuumph.

"Magic in the Moonlight," started off good like many of Woody's later movies, but they are short and fall apart awful fast. The credits are the same and so is the music, not to mention he's a great talent, and still capable of writing some good dialogue, so I get suckered into these films thinking I'm about to watch something important, or that Woody will redefine his twilight years with a masterpiece or two, before he kisses us all goodbye, and that happened to me tonight. I'm a big fan of astrology and I liked the way he had a rationalist attacking the spiritualist, and that this might be the later period Woody I'd been looking for, a man willing to make a weird penetrating insight into an odd subject, and I'm sure that's how it struck him when he decided to have two top notch magicians inquire into the veracity of a psychic. I was fooled by Woody like I feel everyone still is, even though I knew that I'd seen a handful of movies of his in the last decade that started well only to completely fall apart, and "Magic" was no exception. I started to realize that the later Woody had given up on a second act, and just like the tantalizing possibilities of an opening, with an ending that asked a hard to answer question or two about life, and summed it up. Woody didn't used to be this way when he was in the second act of his career, or even the first act, and seemed genuinely interested in losing himself in his characters lives, but that part of him is gone. He barely cares about his characters anymore, other then as mouthpieces for his own wayward philosophical ideas, and this doesn't make for a refined study. Woody is like those guys in the screenwriting books who had drawer's full of screenplay's that stopped at about page thirty, a 1/3 of the way into it, because they had nothing more to say, and had no story to tell. The second act is the story, and nine times out of ten the only reason we remember a movie is for the story, not the set up or the ending. The best movies surprise us with either their intensity or direction, but Woody doesn't write second acts. He writes coming attractions, and has plenty of witty brilliant dialogue to dazzle us for a minute or two, but eventually we want more as a viewer, or I want more, and there's nothing there.

In screenplay time there are no hard set rules on how much time elapses in an act, but there are on how long the acts are, and the first and third are the shortest. Granted, a third act can span twenty years, and a second act can span two days, but the second act will be longer than the first act. Woody Allen's life would seem to be going this way since his third and final act is going on forever, much longer than his glorious second act, that saw him rise to the upper echelons of critical and popular success, without his reputation being tarnished. In real time, I'd say his second act ended right around the time he broke up with Mia Farrow, his last relatable serial monogamist love affair to his fans, and he wed one of Mia Farrow's adopted children who he helped raise, Sun Yi. It was the darkest moment of his life and Woody ended his second act on a down note, but he has completely rehabilitated his reputation with a slew of mediocre movies that only hearken to his past, but have made his fans forget about his personal foibles that would bring many others down. Even the accusations of child abuse in the Dylan Farrow affair, have been overshadowed by his movies, that just keep coming, and that his fans eat up like ice cream since he became a brand long ago. If anything, I'd say the third act of Woody Allen's life has been the solidification of his brand, with the creativity dying long ago. At the moment, he's the grand old man of filmmaking, the boomer who outlasted even Martin Scorsese, whose biography is nowhere near as entangled as Allen's. Somewhere in the second act of Woody's life, between the late Seventies and the late Eighties, he became more than a funny filmmaker, or even a brilliant one, but an archetype who taught a generation the art of living, blending his autobiographical movies with his real life, and creating a fictional character outside of the movies, that seemed less real than the one he played. Woody Allen became a lifestyle and his fans all saw themselves as little Woody's wanting a sophisticated New York City existence, with interesting friends writing books, or starring in plays. He was a generation's go to guy, but he's not that anymore. Woody has disappeared in his third act, because his personal life has become problematic, and I'm not sure anyone looks to him as a real life replica of a poetic personae they'd like to emulate. He's a trained professional behind the camera who has become an auteur, albeit a limp one with nothing to say, but an auteur nevertheless, and that's all part of the branding. In the words of the Coen Brothers, he gives you that "Woody Allen feeling." (A producer called it that 'Barton Fink' feeling, in "Barton Fink," even though Barton had yet to write a screenplay!) I know that all of his ex-fans, and maybe even the literati of today, see those credits roll, hear the ragtime music, and know that they are in for a Woody Allen movie, one like no other. I'm suckered into this feeling too, and thought "Magic" might be the grand exception I was waiting for, a screenplay where Woody really worked out his ideas on the metaphysical. Unfortunately, it was another excuse for him to film in Europe, where they love him like a second son.

6/1/2015 I heard on the radio tonight a new (Ha!) Woody Allen movie was coming out this summer, and they had an audio snippet talking about the despair of life. It sounded like nihilism for idiots, and made me wish Woody would just stop, and enjoy his golden years going to Knicks games, and taking a break from deep philosophy.

What's old is new, and what's new is.....

TV has never been better, but I wonder if that's a good thing. Part of the joy to TV was that it was bad, and movies were good (the smart ones), and you had one or the other. Now you have neither, and we've lost something. I'd say I lost something, and I have, but that almost makes it sound trite. The art of movies is over, the two hour bit with perfect cuts and music, expressing a range of emotion, in the whirlpool of an event, is over. Now we have serialized shows that take the best of movies, and the best of TV, and mix them into one (the MadMen, House of Cards group), and this is thrilling, from a TV historical perspective. They really speak to the people, something movies almost intentionally stopped doing years ago in favor of a blockbusters only mentality. Now I know, Mr. Movie Producer, would tell me that the people want 'blockbusters' but I'd argue only a sliver of the people want them, but it's a predictable sliver, and perhaps the biggest group out of a pie, an easy and safe bet. It's mainstream geek culture that lives and dies on the next Harry Potter book, or the final edition of Game of Thrones, or goes ga ga over "Batman," and I liked the Batman/Christopher Nolan franchise, but the word franchise say's a lot too implying that the movies themselves are bigger than the studio, and are almost like the big star on a basketball team, who make everything happen. These blockbusters aren't really speaking to the people but the stockholders looking for the weekend gross numbers. The alternative, Sundance, got sold down the river, and became another niche market that stopped speaking to the people too. The only genre that tried was 'mumblecore' and that say's it all.

A big point in assessing an era is to really listen to it all. I spend whole nights at work listening to 'Lithium' the grunge station, and I'm amazed and impressed at how much depressing and deep rock n' roll my generation spewed out. It makes me smile inside, but it also makes me aware of the totality of an era, and how a time period of music or art is not judged solely by the one or two breakthroughs but the feeling or mood of a time that one or two big acts end up embodying. Any era is judged on its totality, more than its individual songs, though songs make up the whole, but taken in a totality they sound different, or become part of a mix. Lithium makes it clear we all live in a collective generational consciousness and are reflecting it in our own way.

Movies in three act structure have a way of compressing time that makes them very dreamlike, and indeed movies at their best have the logic of a dream. The new shows have the logic of real life, which is like a dream, but in a different time. If anything, the shows have more of an opportunity to really get into the sociology of an era and exploit the recent past in a way that movies can't as much, existing in real time like potent bursts of poetry. The shows are stretched out family trees about every men but I'm not sure the writing or acting ever elevates them to mythic characters, in the way that movies did, and that could be the size of the screen. The stars of the past were literally 'larger than life' and though they may have been every men, they loomed like great Gods in a dark theater, enrapturing audiences (me!). I'd also argue the time compression of movies made even ordinary men seem quiet heroic in a way that a long series stretched out on a TV screen just doesn't capture. Instead, we get the ins and outs of a hero or heroine, but we see them more like us, because their lives become stretched out and flat over a matter of time. TV shows have been doing this since "St. Elsewhere," but the new show has become more cinematic, but less TV. I know trashy TV will always survive, and any fan of "Revenge" or "Scandal" knows what I mean, but the trashiness seems calculated now, and not so much a byproduct of ignorance, or bad taste, but a manufactured trashiness, that sometimes leaves me empty. There are no more thoughtful movies that echo the best of photography, concerts, or theater, so we're left with TV to supplement us, with a new form that may have already peaked, but TV will probably keep getting better and though I long for trash there's more than enough of that now, so there's nothing to fear. TV will get better but movies in two hour three act structure time will die and I'm not sure what will replace them because the greatness of the characters was exacerbated by the larger than life screen that made movies come alive in a way that TV never could, or as Ernie Kovacks famously realized a TV personality was like a friend in a living room. A movie personality was more like a Greek God, whose life you were allowed to glimpse in compressed time, making his tales epic. TV serialized dramas even at their best aren't so epic because they almost intentionally focus on the minutiae of the characters lives, if only to set up more episodes, since they have much more time to kill. They are more about down time than movies ever were, and in this way are true to a TV tradition. So, what will take over the movie tradition? TV movies about how great movies used to be?

I've been daunted to write this review and don't really know where to begin, and still don't. The movie industry and the TV industry have always walked a tight line, since they employ many of the same people. The politics of the Seventies were that TV was for idiots and movies were for adults, and that if you wanted to be something as an actor, you went to the movies, and if you were a washed up has-been TV was your bag. Of course, there were exceptions but shows like "The Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" were full of washed up has-beens from another era. I know that still exists to a degree, but what is happening and what will continue to happen is that A list talent will no longer think TV is somehow beneath them, and the TV shows they produce, direct, or write, will become the new gold standard. (It's interesting to note that Richard Nixon got rid of the old gold standard in the early Seventies in favor of paper money and credit, and I'd say soon after a new artistic gold standard was being created too, and the idea of the corporate Franchise came into being.) The old Boomer idea that TV was for retards seems so dated today that I laugh when I see it promulgated on old sitcoms. TV became cool and the impending mediocrity of movies, that strove less for art, and more for materialism, so that TV didn't look so bad. The media landscape has never been more divided, and I can only guess that my generation made the shift complete, the first real "TV Babies," who Matt Dillon warned everyone about dying in "Drugstore Cowboy." The 'TV babies' have really taken over, and movies are toast, but the three act structure lives on. The shows have it, of course, but within episodes that exist within a larger framework, so the structure isn't as tight. It's the everyday looseness that TV brings, and what will be missed with the movies. We're getting novels now not poetry, but what's wrong with that? Well, we live in a Country that doesn't like poetry much, and yet poetry is the underpinning of all great characters and story. What does that say about America? That we don't like stories, or that we can only take our poetry in a watered down novel like splaying out of shows, that hearken to TV. Maybe we just like poetry in a new way. I'd say the rise of TV serialized dramas show that novels aren't really dead at all but transforming into a new form, and poetry is now an unspoken subset of drama.

Hooray for Hollywood, I'll miss 'ya.

I was let down by the Oscars this year but that sounds almost trite. Who wouldn't be let down by the Oscars, if they got their hopes up for such a politically financed event? It's true and yet like national elections, I get excited every time the Oscars come around. I'm sure it links back to childhood when I used to come home on Monday night excited out of my mind to see which movies won, because the buzz in L.A. was palpable, and a little bit like when the Seahawks made it to the Super Bowl, and I got caught up in the public fever, and it was exciting. My parents were also huge movie fans and sometimes we'd go to parties at other people's houses, or invite a few people over, and make a real event out of it, like the Oscars were meant to be. It was a rude awakening but when I left L.A. I soon learned most of America didn't care about the Oscars in the same way that I did, looking for the political overtones and the trends of the winners and losers. America was more interested in the fashion show that is the red carpet. It always seemed like a freak show to me, or the last apocalyptic scene out of "Day of the Locust," but now even the red carpet feels formal and without a hint of the hick feeling of kids from Nebraska and Arkansas sitting in the makeshift stands on Hollywood Blvd., waiting to catch a glimpse of their heroes. They've pretty much made the idea of the red carpet a nightly event on 'Hollywood access' and the nine million shows like it, so there's nothing much special about it, though I know it's a bellwether for every designer in the world. I think my building manager said it best when I saw him in the hall with a vacuum on his back, doing some cleaning, and said 'you're not watching the Academy Awards,' careful not to call them the Oscars, realizing few people outside of L.A. have the cache to call them that, making them all too familiar. "Are you?" he said, laughing, and walked away to vacuum.

Movies are in a really weird place right now. First and foremost, movie theaters are just kind of dying, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the box office numbers, but what do those tell you? I'm not an economist, and they still spout the top grossing film of the week on NPR like it's a blue chip stock, but is it? I really don't know. I do know that for the movie fan who lived to get out of the house and hide in a theater there is not much to see, but this needs clarification. I would say the true cinephile is a fan of every genre, but like every person, will inevitably have his favorites and be the most excited to see those, but he'll see anything, or almost anything, and that's what makes his perversion fun. He can sit in a dark movie theater and watch the worst movie in the world just to get out of the house for a few hours, and the doldrums of everyday life. Those are the true movie fans, actually, and the ones who made a subculture of moviegoers, not some kids on a first date necking in the back. I was so much one of these people full of romance and despair, that when I started reading serious literature in my twenties, I looked for books about moviegoers, thinking I'd really relate to them but there weren't many except for Percy Walker's "The Moviegoer" but he didn't say what I wanted him to, and I was alienated from that one too. It's hard making movies about people who hide in the dark losing themselves in other people's lives, but at least Woody Allen made "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and created a genre. It is the penultimate example, and that's a rare compliment to Woody from me, since I prefer bashing him lately, but it's not a very rich genre, and I realized I'd have to live at least a little to write something.

The best thrill I used to have as a movie fan was when there were a number of movies in the theater I wanted to see. My Mother would save the Calendar section of the paper every weekend, and just leave it open downstairs, so I could see what was playing, and I'd create lists in my mind. I could usually tally up a few right off the bat, and then among those, there'd be a favorite I'd speak up for, but would relinquish control of my taste for a second tier movie in my book, or just a stupid comedy that I really wanted to see, but I'd save those for my friends, and watch the more serious dramas with my parents. But I had a list that could fill up a month of weekly movie viewing with ease, but that ended a while ago. The last time I remember feeling that was in the late Nineties one Christmas season, and I don't remember the movies, but there were so many that "The End of the Affair" was down a couple on my list, and it could have easily vaunted to the first tier. Sure, there was always that movie that pushed the true cinephile to the edge of what was acceptable to him, and he'd put those way down on the list, but the idea was there were so many movies you could never see them all. I'm sure a film producer would tell me that there are still so many movies I could never see them all, but what I'd argue back to Mr. Film Producer, is that there aren't that many theaters to see them anymore, but more importantly the list I make in my mind is very short. I read through the Stranger movie times and think of what I want to see and I don't tally much, sometimes nothing at all, sometimes a movie or two, but even then I'm dubious, and have very little excitement brewing inside. I've wondered if I'm just too old to appreciate movies anymore, since they've always been for the young, because I am getting older, and I'm sure there is a disconnect happening, but.... I'm also an aesthete and this only explains my disillusionment so far. "Mr. Producer," I want to say, "I was a huge movie fan, and I want a reason to go to the theater, and I'm not being a critical prick because I'm an Ivy League guy who thinks he's superior to movies, or a jock who just doesn't get them. I'm a big movie fan, goddammit, and I want my entertainment!"

I'm sure the movie producer would tell me I was the problem and there was plenty of quality entertainment out there, but I'd have to disagree. There's a lot of shit out there that costs a lot of money, and movies do more to appeal to the video game crowd than they did when I was a kid, so they may look incredible, but usually are lacking any story, character, or idea. I know that big brand companies bought up all the studios and theaters in the Eighties and Nineties, and created the cineplex, a conversation of its own. I knew something horrible had happened when I first saw "Robocop" (a great movie) at a cineplex in Universal City, sometime in the late Eighties, but I didn't know what. The cineplex was sold to people like me that wanted to get out of the house and didn't have to worry about going through my lists and figuring out what I wanted to see, since it would all be there, like a magic movie world. You wouldn't even have to pick the time, you'd just show up and magically a movie would appear from any genre: an action movie, a kid's movie, a comedy, a RomCom (I hate that acronym!), something a little arty, or maybe a good old fashioned tear jerker. I'm sure this was the dream of the multiplex but to the real cinephile the experience was already being tarnished. It was the old grand theaters that drew him in the first place, with their gilded ornamenation, but these theaters were soulless like the companies who owned them and didn't give a hoot about the moviegoing experience.

Cineplexes became part of the homogenization of America that had started with fast food chains making every city a little bit the same, and the cineplex did the same, promising the true blue cinephile there'd be more movies than ever, and the kid in Dubuque that he'd be able to see anything now, and wouldn't have to move to the big city for his films. I was of a time when most of my friends were rebelling against the homogenization of America, or what Henry Miller dubbed "The Air Conditioned Nightmare," but cineplexes defined my youth, and you either accepted them or you stopped going to movies, a fate worse than death for a cinephile. So, we all sucked up the artificial popcorn smell and the high prices for an inferior experience, and I'd argue movies really died then, but you wouldn't have been able to tell it from the stock reports as big budget movies with millions of dollars of advertising behind them kept breaking records and was a lot like the stock market of today, though no one thinks we're living in an economic golden age. There was a time in America where theaters were independently run and they'd show movies that would make a profit, but they weren't taking that to Wall St. to prove to hedge fund managers that they were a blue chip stock. I'd imagine lots of theater owners in the Sixties were making a middle class living showing Roger Corman's B movies, or teen exploitation movies, or the ones people think are so cool nowadays, and would never make it to a more reputable theater. I also don't want to sound like a curmudgeon since I know this was a complaint that my parents generation made when I was a kid, but all of the movies are for kids, and that's truer than ever. The era of the character study would seem to be over.

The Oscars were an afterthought to me last night, since I thought it was a bad crop of films this year and given that they've expanded the best picture category to eight there was no excuse not to have "Gone Girl" in there, but that was only my first disillusionment. Even in the golden age for the moviegoer, the Oscars have been a political event, but this one stooped to a new low to me. I haven't seen every nominated picture, but I've heard about them all, and have probably seen more than half. I can't believe that there was a better movie in America this year than "Boyhood," and that's from an aesthete, not a movie fan, with popcorn butter stuck on his shoe. Yes, it was nominated, but it fared poorly last night, and while this shouldn't surprise me, it did. I feel if you're going to have a Hollywood not geared for the movie fan, but for big profits and the one or two great movies a year that still come out, then you should really celebrate the good ones, and at least make a political argument that movies are still vital. Let me be clear, I do think there still is a movie or two a year that will stand the test of time as a real work of art but that's not much of a consolation for a movie fan, that needs to lose himself in illusion a couple of times a week if he is lucky! "Birdman" was not a great movie, and yes I saw it. It was a top-tier second-tier movie that got me through a bad day, like movies used to do, and for this I am thankful to Inarritu, and the crew. They made a light, intelligent, well crafted, entertaining movie like people look to Woody Allen for nowadays, and it was better than his, so here's to the "Birdman!" But this wasn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. It was a story that Hollywood has been making for years, a behind the scenes glimpse of putting on a Broadway play, an obsolete enough art form itself.

Aging at the Grammy's

Like I revealed in my 'Defense of Miley Cyrus' post and 'In Something with Lana Del Rey,' I am a fan of pop music, or at least a detached observer, looking in with fascination, though admittedly the fascination part might be wearing off. I was in my early 40's when I first started listening to top 40 pop music, and was at a time in my life when I really felt I was going through a personal reawakening after feeling emotionally dead for my mid-thirties. I started listening to the lyrics and I couldn't deny that their ultraromanticism spoke to that little spark reawakening in me, and I related to the life and death sentiments the singers were trying to express nor did it hurt that Adele's great song "Someone Like You" was a hit. Most of the songs were about love but more importantly a reason to be alive that had nothing to do with real estate, children, higher education, national politics, or anything that had come to define my life almost unwittingly. I used to feel love in a life and death way too just like the singers were, and I couldn't help but feel they were singing my song. I even liked the kind of space age sound of the music, and how the songs were becoming mash ups incorporating all eras, and I knew that if I listened to this music all the time I'd grow as an aesthete unlike my coworkers who mostly saw the top 40 as atrocious. I'm a pizza driver and I started listenin' to Movin' 92.5 in my car, and I chose this station out of a possible two or three, because it really tapped into the culture of the music more than the others that seemed to be missing the fun. The 92.5 DJ's would make little pop culture references and jokes between the songs, but in a familiar way so that when they first mentioned Lorde or Lana Del Rey it almost felt like they were talking about a new kid in school, and I loved it. I started feeling closer to the singers I was listening to because they familiarized them like Greek Gods and Goddesses struggling on some big stage with all the foibles and charms of us mortals, and the crazy names of the new stars helped (Bruno Mars, Lady GaGa, Rhianna etc.), and I started having my favorites. I'm not sure if I hit a good mix or not because I came in right when autotune was going out even though one of my first favorites was "5 o'clock in the Morning" a duet by T-Pain and Lily Allen, but he's not on anymore. Eminem is an old man on Movin' and though he's had a couple of great duets with Bruno Mars and Rhianna, I wonder how many more chances he'll get at the big time, and Movin' is the big time!

I'm not sure what this says about art in our culture, but there's almost a "Logan's Run" like feel to the pop music industry, and if you're 40 you're out. (I know, they terminated you when you were 30 in "Logan's Run" but that was 1976 and this is a new generation.) Ironically, I started listening to Movin' because I didn't want to think of what it meant to be 40 and went into a day dream of a time when you felt so immortal something like a bad date was life and death. I wanted to feel new again, but if I was listening to Dylan, Springsteen, or Eminem, I wouldn't have had the same feeling of being contemporary, and in a pop culture whirlpool the way Movin' made me feel, because it was really about more than the music. It was the entire carefree attitude of the DJ's spearheaded by Brook and Jubal, a kind of comfy guy/girl comedy team, who make jokes about partying in Vegas, or doing a happy hour in Bellevue, all in the same breath. They posit themselves as the cool observers of the pop culture scene that they paint as existing in a make believe nimbus, and you can almost imagine them sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a herd of geeks and nerds, and cluing them into whose cool or not, while the real stars moved outside of their circle, but would come over and shake their hands once in a while, or give them a smile. The other stations were missing the magic of this world where mostly women stars were taking over Mt. Olympus like amazons.

I haven't listened to the mix much lately because a lot of the artists that I came to really enjoy on the Stockholm Syndrome like loop that I think simulates an album are gone, or have had their first big rush of Movin' fame. They have been voted prom king or queen one too many times, and have to give up their tierra or crown, as the case may be, and I'm just not that into the new crop. There is no Rhianna, Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey, Macklemore and Lewis, or Lorde, and I really belive all of those singers/performers are great, but that can't be said of everything they play on Movin'. Brook and Jubal's goal is to find enough good songs in the loop that you really look forward to so they can keep you going for hours like a good crush but if you only like one it is going to be hard to submit to the half-hour between hearing it and that's where I'm at. Don't worry, I like "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift, but it's just not the same as when I heard her burst onto the scene with "Trouble" a few years ago seguing from Country to Pop. Or maybe I'm just growing older and the feelings Movin' were inspiring in me have come and gone like a season in my life that I'm sad to say goodbye to but I'm happy I lived.

I watched the Grammy's a couple of years ago... I meant to write nights but it felt like years! I had a strange disconnect with the music that I wasn't expecting, thinking I'd be right in the groove, but I wasn't. Sure, I knew the songs, the artists, what to expect, but I didn't get the feeling and felt like Sir Paul McCartney dancing all alone to ELO, while he wanted some of his fellow musicians to join him. I had a really weird feeling watching the video to Pharrel Williams's "Happy" a song that was the beginning of the end of Movin' for me, not that I hate it so much but it's a Marvin Gaye rip-off that's kind of empty like Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy," a song that made me want to kill as a teenager. The image that really got me was of Williams in a gospel church singing "Happy," and maybe it was just a bad image from a bad video but for a moment I really felt like I didn't have a clue what the song meant, or what Country I was living in, an almost eerie silent feeling that came and went as quickly as a slit to the throat. Whatever context I was putting the music into had evaporated almost instantly, and though I'd already left the loop, I was still in it, but like a shirt that had been left in the cycle too long, and was ready to be dried. I wasn't in the washing machine of pop culture anymore, the mash up, mix up, of adolescent feelings, and it was a strangely nerve wracking sensation. No, it's not easy growing older, even when you're going through a third or fourth adolescence in your Forties.

Boyhood, Linklater's grand redemption

There are very few movies, songs, or artists, who are game changers, but I really think that's where "Boyhood" is at, and the critics who see it this way are right on. I'm not sure if it was the experimental nature of the movie, or that it managed to break all rules of formal structure, by creating its own structure, but it found a completely new way to tell a story, that all but threw the three act idea of storytelling out the window, or maybe redefined it in a whole new way. Sure, there have been experimental movies where nothing happens for hours like Warhol's "Teeth," or films that have tried to replicate Joyce's "Ulysses" and told a story in a day (Linklater famously made one of them called "Before Sunrise" with Ethan Hawke, also in "Boyhood"). More often than not these avant garde pieces, and they really are like pieces more related to art than anything a Hollywood producer would imagine, feel like the kinds of movies the best guy in a film class would show for his dissertation, but "Boyhood" was made by a man. It's odd to say because I had a really so-so view of Linklater that saw him almost like a punk act who made a great first record, and everything else was trying to either emulate it, or just emasculate it.

I'm not sure "Slacker" was a game changer, but it was a very good movie about my generation that made me feel like I could be living in Austin, Texas, in the late Eighties, rife with conspiracy theories and people hanging out getting high, drunk, philosophizing, and drinking coffee. It was my kind of movie with a creative way to tell story, but I started to think this initial creativity had been usurped by Linklater's natural instincts as an artist, and he just took to copying himself ad infinitum. Maybe if I had a hit movie that spoke for my generation I may have done the same, but "Slacker" didn't scream like Kurt Cobain did singing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and I'm not sure the youth of today thinks much about it, but music is really the everymans art now, not movies. I loved "Dazed and Confused" when it came out but I saw it recently and thought it was a piece of shit, and this reversal on "Dazed" was so extreme it literally sent me into a depression trying to imagine who I was at 24 when I saw it and made me feel superficial. (No, I don't think I'm going to go back to it). I really thought Linklater was a minor artist with one good song, and that was an accomplishment, but I never thought he would've been a director I'd cite as the most influential, since he only seemed to influence himself except for "Two Days in Paris" by Julie Delpy (she was the co-star in "Before Sunrise" and made her own good version of a Linklater film). It was almost like Linklater took everything that was good in his style and pared it down to its essence, making every small moment in a boy's life terribly profound without any real story at all save growing up, but that may be the biggest story of all.

The movie took 12 years to make, but 12 years of real time, not 12 years of a writer locked in his room, or a filmmaker stuck with funding issues. Linklater took a week out of every year to work on "Boyhood" and I'd imagine the script had a bare bones structure but the year in between shooting must have given it a freedom too, or a mutability that most movies can't afford, and must've been like watching a tree grow from a seed. It would be hard to say there is any traditional three plot structure in "Boyhood" since it is based almost solely on incidental moments that seem to ground most lives, or at least I'm becoming aware of how fragmented and impressionistic life really is the older I get, not to say there isn't a narrative thread guiding us along, or great days that reek of narrative structure, but it's really in the subtlety of life that we tend to gain meaning as people and give off our essential nature. "Boyhood" grasps this perfectly, but its impressionistic nature doesn't at all deter from the depth of the characters its portraying, nor does it stray too far from the eternal themes of what it's like to simply grow up, a theme Mr. Linklater has devoted much of his life to studying.

There is a very suburban white sensitive boy from Texas iconography to all of his movies that may isolate or alienate women, not that he's a misogynist (I don't think), but he's focused on mostly only writing from his point of view, so I'd say where the movie really branches out and becomes something other than a typical Linklater film is in the treatment of the parents, that felt incredibly sensitive, and removed from the child's point of view from them, so that we're not getting a skewed adolescent version of what it feels like to grow up but rather a very non judgmental version of what it's like for a family to grow up together, and this made it very unique to me, and was "Boyhood's" great surprise. I don't want to spoiler alert it here but as Mason, the boy, grows older and gets more of a role I'd say some of the beauty diminishes, because it's really Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette who steal the show, and raise this Indie Pop song experiment of a movie to another level, that I found completely refreshing.

Linklater was able to get out of himself and his own now cliched tropes about sensitive adolescence, or heady young youth, that he drifts into towards the end, but it's only at the end, and the rest of the movie is just a beautiful thing to watch. It feels more like "An American Family" (see previous blog) than an actual Hollywood movie, though it never makes any pretense at being a documentary, nor does it really get boring even though it's almost three hours long. I also think it may be one of those movies that you never look at the same way twice and while you see one characters point of view a certain way at one stage of your life, you'll see it another at a different stage. I question if I'll feel the same about the boy in twenty years, or maybe I'll think he's the best character, but I don't think "Boyhood" will give me the "Dazed" effect of wondering why I liked the movie in the first place, because it's too rich a character study. Most of Linklater's other films are actually hyper intellectual glimmerings of character that rarely scratch the surface of someone's mind but "Boyhood" goes right to the heart and the character study is sustained.

I'm sure the growing up together feel "Boyhood" was able to extricate had to do with the way it was shot but the experiment rarely intrudes on the viewer, so that we're not banged over the head every time there is a jump of time. We don't imagine the jumps in a way that blocks us from losing our suspended disbelief but rather they feel like one of those scenes in a movie where a character gets a new haircut, or an outfit, and we know something has changed in them internally. I couldn't help but feel that the actors seeing each other once a year made these changes appear more natural than a typical movie, and why the piece has an almost documentary like feel, even though it's beautifully shot and composed, not to mention it must've kept the experience very fresh for the actors, who I'm sure looked forward to this once a year meeting the way lovers do. Linklater is one of those directors who I gave up on a while ago because I thought his movies were boring, or highly predictable, and relied on a sort of quasi philosophical humor common to college kids, who don't join frats, and maybe a distinguishing characteristic of my generation, or at least the sub cultural side, and I'd thought he'd done this so well in "Slacker" that everything was just a repeat performance without any of the initial inspired creativity, a problem with lots of artists. Linklater really overcame his own flaws in "Boyhood," by seeing outside of himself to the whole family, and like I heard him say in an interview it could have just as easily been called "Struggling Adulthood." I have to believe that "Boyhood" captures the first decade of the 2000's , the Bush years, seguing into Obama, more truly and sensitively, than I thought an era could be captured, maybe because it's not quite retro yet, and we really did go through lots of changes as a Country during that time full of history, yet not often seen in art as a time worth capturing, like the revolutionary Sixties, the swinging Seventies, or the Go Go Eighties. It's almost like historical time filtered through art had stopped existing in American cinema around the Eighties, because there was a notion that all we were doing as a culture was repeating ourselves, but of course lives go on whatever the historians think about certain eras, and people really do grow up. It may be that the film was shot in real time with the actors and writers going through those changes, so they had time to absorb them and get them down on film, but he shows the way our personal eternal themes of growing up are strictly linked to the time we grow up in, and that the two can't be divorced (no pun intended).

An American Family

I was brought up on the myth of the Loud family and how they changed the face of America forever. I didn't watch "An American Family" in real time but must have heard about it in my teenage years, and the raw footage of this family breaking up in Santa Barbara was immediately intriguing. I was amazed that an actual divorce was caught on film but thought the Loud's were chosen as an anthropology experiment for being the seemingly perfect family somehow symptomatic of exactly where America was at in the early Seventies, and the divorce an accident. I was wrong about the first part and later learned that Craig Gilbert, the documentary filmmaker, chose the Loud's for aesthetic reasons, but they were ones that made me relate to them all the more because I was also from Southern California and must have seen myself reflected in them. The children were about a decade older than me so that they were just close enough in age for me to really feel what they were going through, and yet slightly out of reach, like older siblings. I learned about them in the days before VCR's and recorded television making it impossible for me to watch the mini-series that I was told captivated America, and yet I watched an Albert Brooks mockumentary "Real Life" before I ever saw the Loud's though I knew it was ostensibly about them and made me all the more intrigued to watch the real deal (I was a big Albert Brooks fan). Given all of this, it came as a great surprise to me when I recently discovered a made for HBO movie called "Cinema Verite" and couldn't believe that there was a fictionalized version of the Loud's that I hadn't discovered starring Tim Robbins and Diane Lane. I didn't know what to expect of it, but in the intervening years I had seen "An American Family" on DVD, and for all I know had actually seen the abridged DVD version on PBS somewhere in my adolescence, but always thought there was more, since I was told that America had sat in front of their TV sets captivated in 1973 for 12 hours of documentary TV, but there's not. I don't think the unabridged version exists, and that alone is remarkable.

I learned from the commentary on one of the DVD's that Craig Gilbert was accused of having an affair with Pat Loud to influence the outcome of the documentary, and this was a heavy accusation because "An American Family" was being presented as a sociological breakthrough that really changed the way that America looked at itself. This somehow made it more than a work of art, but rather a piece of history, and all art ever wanted was to be a part of history, so this vaunted "An American Family" to another level. So, why did the Loud's agree to the documentary in the first place and let their life be filmed six days a week when their marital life was falling apart? There was definitely terrain for "Cinema Verite" to explore but I knew however good the film it would only be an afterthought to the original Loud's who redefined TV forever. It would answer questions that the documentary begged but it should be said that part of the mystery of "An American Family" was that even with the revelations and accusations that followed its success it was clear the audience had asked the questions themselves, and had come to no answer. In their own ambiguous way, the Loud's mixed life, art, and anthropology, nor had this been to human consciousness on a mass level up until that point making them an experiment. I'm not sure anyone can be aware of such a massive undertaking as it is happening because if they did it wouldn't have the same effect. Still, "Cinema Verite" confirmed that Bill and Pat Loud had revealed indiscretions to Craig Gilbert behind the scenes and the original documentary didn't let the viewer in on this thus skewing the experiment. The Loud's were presented as anthropology but this may have been the seriousness of the times, and the ethical code of documentary filmmakers before reality TV swept up the Nation in an entertainment extravaganza.

"An American Family" is often credited with being the first reality show, and in some ways this makes sense. Yes, it was the first time 'real people' let themselves be filmed living their life as if they were somehow movie stars but "An American Family" was a PBS show aired early in the Seventies that all but predicted the divorce generation, not to mention watching the Loud's really felt like real life, and that was the credit of the camera crew, who I don't remember being mentioned in the documentary but played a huge role. Their names allude me but "Cinema Verite" shows that they were Newlyweds in their early to mid-twenties and took their role as documentarians very seriously. They wanted to develop a close one-to-one relationship with the family and thought the only way to do this was to gain their trust and not film them in their most uncomfortable or awkward moments (or so I perceive). This in turn would produce true results, either artistically or anthropologically. "Cinema Verite" shows the battle between the two person camera crew and Craig Gilbert, though this wasn't the focus of the movie. Rather, it centered on the Loud's and how they navigated their public and private life, an interesting enough subject. But the film on the making of "An American Family" was wise enough to entertain the conflict between Craig Gilbert and his film crew that results in a fist fight. If "An American Family" was the first reality TV show it also shows how ethically wayward the genre has become. It would be hard to imagine anyone on "The Bachelor" arguing against drama.

Aesthetically, "Cinema Verite" had the feel of a TV movie, but it was made for HBO and about a TV family, so it would be hard to imagine it being anything else. It was one of those rare TV movies made with immaculate care and the acting was really good. Tim Robbins and Diane Lane both put in some of their more memorable performances as Bill and Pat Loud, and whoever played Lance their homosexual son was also very good. Not to mention the way the movie itself played against the family being filmed was also very interesting, because the original did its best to pretend this wasn't happening for ethical concerns, that I can only imagine stemmed from the popularity of anthropological thinking at the time. The sets were also great and though a set doesn't make a movie it sure doesn't hurt.

It's funny, I just took a break from writing this review and "The Office" was on, one of my favorite shows. The conceit of "The Office" that is almost forgotten by its fans (including me) is that they are being filmed by a documentary crew that you never see. The characters are shown being interviewed privately every episode, but never once do we see a camera, or hear a voice off screen. In some ways, this was the true intent of "An American Family" except they would have never had an interview. The genius of "The Office" is that it mixed the real anthropological genius of Craig Gilbert's original experiment for PBS, with a touch of the tawdriness of contemporary reality TV, by having the interviews that are meant to create a sense of drama and intrigue in a rather manufactured way, though the characters would probably be careful of what they were saying if "The Office" was an actual documentary, or maybe not, since the whole genre relies on the reality stars to play to the audiences expectations. I'm sure this is literally what the Loud's were accused of doing, and the narrative segments of "The Office" that comprise the majority of the show, are very much true to the ethics of Loud era cinema verite. We're supposed to think we're watching an unscripted real day at an Office in America, and Dunder Mifflin happened to be the every man's office, or maybe it was selected for its unique characters, the way the Loud family was selected by Craig Gilbert out of many possible choices, and without any scientific qualification at all. I'm not sure if these questions are ever answered but I love that they finally confront the film crew question in the final episodes, and how the documentary was made for PBS. It makes all of the characters stars and all but saves Pat's art career, and more importantly Michael Scott's desire to be a great leading man.

Pynchon meets PTA productions

I was never a fan of Thomas Pynchon but I did have a good day with him at the beach in Santa Monica in the late Eighties, when I still read books. I'd found it on the caroussel rack of a used book store, when they still had those, and back then I had the feeling that any book I found randomly that shined on me for a moment I was meant to read, and I tried not to use too much intellect when this happened (as if I have much intellect!). I'd heard of Pynchon from working at Book Soup when "Vineland" came out and it was the book du jour, but it didn't interest me in the least. I knew he was one of those hard to read writers that people boasted about reading more than they actually read, and his most challenging work was "Gravity's Rainbow," a tome that was compared to Joyce's "Ulysses," the other great tome of the 20th century up to that point, but I never met anyone who read it outside of academia, nor did I crack it. I took "The Crying of Lot 49" to the beach on a weekday and there was no one there and I really felt like I'd never like Pynchon more. I still remember walking down the stairs to the big empty beach, and sitting on the sand for hours leafing through the small paperback, and thinking that's all I had to do with my life. I really clicked with the L.S.D. tinged Sixties prose that reminded me of Thomas Wolfe's "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test," yet Pynchon was writing about a new kind of electric suburban housewife, who wouldn't have been 'on the bus,' and in the words of the Merry Pranksters from "Kool Aid" 'you were either on the bus, or 'off the bus.' Pynchon may have been that middle ground Sixties figure who was neither 'on the bus,' or 'off the bus' but watching it roll by out his modern appliance kitchen window and marveling that the bus existed like his heroine Oedipa Mass. I never finished "The Crying of Lot 49" nor do I remember really trying to, or thinking I had to. To me, it was more like a painting that I'd been allowed to glimpse for a couple of idle hours, and I loved the photographs of California, even though there were no photographs in "Crying." It was like watching a hyper exaggerated version of "The Partridge Family," or "The Brady Bunch," from a Gen X perspective.

I saw "Inherent Vice" the other night and I was reminded of all the reasons I was never interested in reading Pynchon. The most I got from the Paul Thomas Anderson's film was that everyone in the Sixties counterculture spoke in an unintelligible rap that really didn't lend itself well to literature, let alone conversation. It was almost as if Pynchon, or Anderson, got this because at one point Josh Brolin, a cop who also talks in Sixties Nixonian jargon, says "I hope this report is not another of those unabridged hippie monologues that have no beginning or end," or so I paraphrase, and I couldn't help but think Pynchon via Anderson was poking fun at himself, because "Inherent Vice" made no sense, nor was it particularly entertaining. Watching it, I thought of Pynchon more than Anderson, for some reason, because it wasn't really a Paul Thomas Anderson movie in the least, or not how I think of the great director/writer/visionary of such masterpieces as "Boogie Nights," and "Magnolia." I couldn't really blame Pynchon for writing like he was in the Sixties, because he was in the Sixties, though even this is up for debate because he's one of those writers who has spent his life in hiding. (In a case of art imitating life, many believed in the Nineties that there was no Thomas Pynchon and he may have been J.D. Salinger, or an alien because he was never photographed, or hadn't been for a long time, and no one knew where he lived, unlike Salinger who had been spotted in New Hampshire). But Pynchon probably existed in real time and I suppose it was courageous that he tried to make literature of a hippie rap that tore the language to shreds with new words that hadn't stood the test of time, but it may mean that Pynchon won't stand the test of time, or maybe he will, but if he does it will be as a speicific example of what L.S.D. did to the english language, and I don't think many consider it a very successful experiment circa 2015. I can't blame the movie "Inherent Vice" on Pynchon since I doubt he had much to do with it, and yet I felt like I was watching a strangely faithful adaptation.

Artistically, I'm really not sure why Paul Thomas Anderson made this movie except that he's obsessed with making art of California. In a way, it's almost a prelude to "Boogie Nights," one of his best films, that segues from the Seventies to the Eighties in broad sweeping strokes. Even Anderson's recent biopics ("There Will be Blood," and "The Master") are insights into giant figures in the world of business and spirituality who made their mark in California, so this is his terrain. I understand that Paul Thomas Anderson was perhaps trying to understand California through Pynchon, but the movie was a mess on so many levels it's really hard to know where to begin. For starters, it's just not funny and it was a comedy/drama, though not a dramedy, but a comedy/drama in the great tradition of Robert Altman, Anderson's hero, with each scene intended to slip between profound reflection and absurd humor like a knife cutting through air. I'll admit that "Inherent Vice" is so verbally dense that it could take repeated viewings to even begin to understand what the characters are saying to each other, so I guess it's interesting on this level, but it's not visually dense and this may be my biggest critique. There's almost no visual poetry to the movie at all, save a shot or two, and I thought this was its greatest failure, aside from it making no sense, since Pynchon doesn't always make much sense, or more kindly put writes challenging prose. Almost every scene in "Vice" is a close cropped dialogue between 'Doc' (Joaquin Phoenix) and one of the many characters who drift in and out of the neverending script. If I were a professional movie reviewer I would've written down how many close ups Anderson did of Phoenix talking to either Brolin, Witherspoon, Del Toro, or many others, and these scenes had the creativity of watching a "Charlie's Angels" episode. There was almost no rhythm or movement to the camera at all, and coming from a director so blessed with visual poetry I found this odd. Sure, he captured a sort of grimy early Seventies wasted feeling that was the opposite of the clean hyper futurized vision of "The Crying of Lot 49," when the Sixties were ending, but these snapshots were few and far between.

"Inherent Vice" is being compared to Altman's great "The Long Goodbye," but it's not a fair comparison. Sure, Doc is a P.I. like Elliot Gould playing Marlowe, but he's not a man out of step with his times, but rather one right in it, or trying to carry on his times to a new age. The name 'Doc' is an obvious literary reference to 'Doc' in "Cannery Row," and the character leads a similar life. He lives by the ocean like 'Doc' in Cannery Row, but he's neither a romantic character, or an anti romantic character, and he mostly mumbles through the movie so that we can only understand a word or two of every sentence, and this becomes very frustrating considering how much dialogue there is. To be fair, Altman's "The Long Goodbye" really moves in classic three act fashion, and is one of his more coherent movies, though I love them all, but it really does set up a murder mystery that Marlowe really tries to solve in drugged out Seventies L.A., but the movie was shot in real time, so Altman wasn't homaging Seventies L.A., he was living it through a classic hard-boiled detective born too late and it's very funny, deep, and endless. "Inherent Vice" is a reimagining of the Sixties but has nothing to do with the present, and made me wonder how well the characters understood the past. I'll admit Paul Thomas Anderson via Pynchon may have nailed something of the era, but the movie mostly made me glad I didn't live through the Sixties and could sometimes speak in the English language.

social media prediction

I predict that the anti-like will become as popular as the like on FB, much in the same way that Punk broke in 1991 according to the documentary with Sonic Youth and Nirvana touring. The anti-like will turn into a like just like two negative numbers multiplied become a positive number, and the world will turn topsy-turvy. I only recently got on FB but am pretty sure they had a thumbs-down icon that was bumming people out, so the marketers and the racketeers got rid of it for financial reasons, but the anti-like will seemingly be much worse than a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down (like Siskel and Ebert, so give it up Zuckerberg, you second rate social critic!). A no statement is much greater than a statement, whether positive or negative, and the un-like, a non-take, will become ambiguous and if my generation is anything it's that. How do I know this? An English teacher called me ambiguous in and 8th grade evaluation, because Oakwood was so hippy we didn't have grades.

7/14/15 (six months later)

There are different phases of fame on FB. The first level are the directors, politicians, actors, rock groups, and solo stars, that take the stage. These profiles get thousands of likes and only post to the multitudes, with no personal contact. They are the famous establishing their position, and I'd imagine most agents in Hollywood get their clients to this level, or try.

The second level may be for those without an agent, but famous enough to matter. Those who make it to this from my group are Dan Epstein (author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass), Danny O'Connor (from House of Pain), and Legs McNeil, the ultimate punk fan from the Seventies, but I'm only friends with Epstein from this group, since the other two can only be followed (something I did accidentally). There are others from my friend base who can post almost anything and anywhere from twenty to over a hundred are going to like what they did, something a neophyte like me can barely understand, in spite of whoever I knew. Personally, I can't see ever reaching this level. I'm more inclined to stay in the political wilderness on FB, or to become so popular that I all but overwhelm the circuit board, and get thousands of likes, but that's unlikely.

I exist in the third level of FB fame. I'm someone who posts somewhat creative posts and gets less than ten likes or comments. Five likes is a lot to me, and ten is astonishing, so I'm like Jesus in the desert, but I feel like I'm making headway.

I remember thinking how weird it was when I started FB that more people weren't commenting on how weird FB was, but that would be like calling BS on the party, when people are trying to have a good time, a contrarian thing to do. No one is going to get a lot of likes by doing this just like a politician won't win an election with this strategy, and yet I wanted to do it. When I first got on FB a stoner/friend who'd moved from Washington did this once or twice, and I was overwhelmed by his sincerity, and yet he painted himself in a corner. The only thing he could to stay authentic would be to quit FB, but he'd return a day or two later with a typical post making soft reflections, and making me forget he ever lost his mind one night. Maybe this is a natural tendency to such a social attempt at hierarchy, the slave screaming out only to be beat back to submission, a universal position.

New Year's goodbye!

I feel the movie is ending on my generation, and it never really began. There are no more rock stars or movie stars, or too many, and the only thing that exists is the cult of personality on FB. I just read an article where David Byrne was mourning the loss of culture on Spotify, but he's a boomer and was thinking of the groovy Seventies when bands like the Partridge Family could dream of having a number one hit overnight, a dream that drove the great band "Big Star" crazy with failure. I just learned that Spotify started in Scandinavia and I'm not surprised because if you lived in a socialist society where no one really had to work then music, love, and poetry would be free, but that's not the U.S. I'm a writer and I've been a pizza man (yes, Man!) for about 15 years, and I'd imagine this is what most artists have to do from any generation, unless you were born in that rare moment in American society when the greatness of F.D.R.'s New Deal intermixed with the rise in entertainment culture and you could be David Byrne losing his mind in "The Talking Heads" and making millions, but it was a moment in time.

Economics have changed and right now America is a wasteland of rotting dreams, and ruined hopes. Maybe a painter or two will figure out how to get a mogul to buy their paintings, but the arts have no place in a culture built on Wall St., so let it all be free, David Byrne. You were just a lucky motherfucker at a moment in time who could dream big but not everyone is so lucky, and not every generation hits a perfect historical pocket where the socialist ideals of the past mix with the hyper capitalist visions of the future to create Tower Records! The world changed, David Byrne, and from this isolated artist's perspective for the better. I'm not sure what model you were working from, Byrne, but it wasn't one that fomented in the Eighties and crystallized in the Nineties, when the mega corporate mall vision of consumption took over, and sucked out our thoughts. We are what we believe ourselves to be at any moment in time, and right now everything is free... Marijuana is becoming legal, and music has no boundaries. Neptune is in Pisces and illusions will reign supreme!

I suppose that Byrne is looking out for the artist that has a hit and wants to keep their career going without 'flyin' pies' for a living. A long time ago when Bill Clinton was President, I would've understood this dream, since the U.S. was still raining money, but there have been chinks in the armor since then, and the society has made its priorities clear. The artist has no place in America, but what's sadder and that Byrne isn't addressing is that the kind of art he made with "The Talking Heads" wasn't exactly classical music but tied directly to the pop world of a moment, and seeking to be a brilliant voice among the masses, instead of a cellist in a symphony. Amazingly, the "Talking Heads" lead by David Byrne, may have achieved this kind of sanctity, in spite of whatever rock criticism can be thrown their way, but even the "Talking Heads" didn't have more than a five or six year run, when their music was relevant, and the same can be said of most pop bands. They have their moment, their sound, and it's over, so why should the market support them for so long? If they are smart they will make sound investments in real estate or annuities, and if not they'll toot it up their nose, but either way they had their moment in the Sun, and what more can anyone ask????

I was a very big Hunter S. Thompson fan when I started writing (can you tell?), and loved how he went wild on the Rolling Stone expense account, buying drugs, renting cars, buying guns, buying people, buying lunch, buying everything. Rolling Stone let him get away with it because Hunter's rock n' roll lifestyle and Gonzo journalism created a literary equivalent to "The Who." At the same time, Hunter S. Thompson made it impossible for another journalist to get away with what he did and kind of self destructed his own creation. I never thought of it before but Thompson was very indicative of his generation in that way because they had more hope for the future than any preceding generation on the earth due to the wealth in the Country that was spread out, and their rebels were the ones that abused the wealth for their own ends, or to bring the establishment that had fed them down, though that didn't happen, did it?

I'm posting the article at the bottom for journalistic reasons, but it's a piece of shit interview from a privileged man who has no idea what he's saying, even if he means right. I sure never wanted to think this but David Byrne reminds me of my Mother, along with the guy from Radiohead, and to think Time magazine once put Byrne on the cover and compared him to a renaissance man along the lines of DaVinci. Ha!

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013...