Seth Kupchick's Blog: Bet on the Beaten, page 11

The great American novel

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"Winesburg, Ohio," is for sure one of the best fictional imaginings of man's inner emotions that I have ever read. Anderson was able to imagine a small town in America around the turn of the century, and realize that everyone's life in the world was summed up in that town, because there were only so many emotions wherever you lived, and only so many people. Anderson wrote what he knew, but he also hid himself as the narrator, so the collection of stories doesn't so much feel like it was written by anyone, but rather transcribed from a ghost, who was lurking above the people in the town, seeing into their deepest most thoughts. "Winesburg, Ohio," might be the best example of 'negative capability' in American literature because Anderson literally obliterates himself for the sake of the stories that could each be read as perfect little portraits of small town life but blown up to humongous dimensions so that the frustrations, hopes, loves, and failures of mankind can be seen through the eyes of those living in a place outside of history and time, a small town. Perhaps Anderson had to put these characters in a small town because urban dwellers were living in 'historical time,' oppressed by the trends of the day, and may not have been able to represent the eternal poetic longings of the soul outside of time and place. I don't think Sherwood Anderson ever wrote a book as good as this and it would be very hard to imagine how he could because "Winesburg, Ohio" really has nothing to do with him. Anderson the writer obliterated himself to such a degree that it's almost impossible to see him buried beneath his endlessly deep poetic illuminations, and this is almost impossible for a narrator. Technically, he's a third person omniscient voice looking into the lives of his characters, but emotionally the stories feel like they are written in the first person by God.

Conceptually, "Winesburg, Ohio" is also a masterpiece and may be the best example of turning a collection of stories into a novel, that can also be read as a collection of stories, without any rhyme or reason to be read as a whole. "Winesburg," really leaves it up to the reader to decide what kind of experience he wants but if you're like me and think it's great you'll read all the stories and realize that they all echo and resonate off each other making a whole. The only other collection that comes to mind attempting this would be "The Dubliners" by James Joyce, that also created a collage of a town through ten or twelve separate stories focusing on a time and a place, but "The Dubliners" felt cold and removed compared to the citizens of "Winesburg." Joyce didn't realize the same kind of intimacy, though he strove for this and may have reached it in the final story "The Dead," where a man imagines love leaving him on a walk in the snow, but it was the stand out of the collection, whereas every story in "Winesburg" is absolutely essential to understanding the hidden dreams of a man, and proving Thoreau's line that most men live lives of 'quiet desperation.' "The Dubliners" almost felt like an exercise by comparison and it may have been since Joyce went on to write "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake," and I'd imagine Sherwood Anderson went onto be a drunk (just a supposition). I remember reading that Sherwood Anderson had a kind of awakening in his thirties and quit his job in advertising, left his wife and children, and went onto be an artist. He kind of sounded like an American Gauguin without the dream of Tahiti, but rather riding the rails like a hobo, and I'd imagine he wrote "Winesburg" in this spirit, freed from the strictures of everyday life, and on the road of self discovery. A collection this good really makes the argument that when judging a man's work it's really quality over quantity, though one can never measure how much a man goes through to reach the point of creating a masterpiece.









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From the 310 to the 206, a comic journey

'The 206' is a local comedy show (cough, cough), that comes on after SNL and since I end up having that on the TV every week if I don't go out (and I never go out) it just sort of comes on like a friend who invites themselves over. Obviously, I get a perverse joy out of watching it, but it's easily one of the worst comedy shows I've ever seen in any medium, and that would include local access in the Seventies when I lived in L.A. (channel 3), that at least had a sense of amateurish fun at being in the city of lights and playing with celebrity. There is almost no fun to 'The 206' on any level, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since Seatlle is one of the least funny cities in America, or if that's a little much, let's say it's not L.A. or New York, that have a diverse population fueling the humor. Describing Seattle, a good friend commented on the 'honky factor.'

"The 206" is the worst half hour of TV on the air, and I often find myself slinking into a depression when it's on, but it's a feeling I just can't stop, or give into for the sake of art, and I'm not sure why. I could turn off the TV, or change channels, or put on a movie, but 'The 206' has a blinding momentum that's hard to deny, or understand. It's only two people now, a father and son team, with the Dad in his early Sixties, and the son well out of college, and it's just creepy watching them together. The son, Chris Cashman, looks like he's in his thirties and should probably be starting a family, or at least separating from his father, but instead he's doing sketch comedy with him: this week they were 'The Pervs' two leches in fake moustaches and wigs, and it was disturbing watching them try to pull it off as if they were any two comedians given the obvious Freudian implications, but they seemed blind to this, and had no idea how to play it for jokes, acting like they were on Cashman's old show "Almost Live."

There were three people on last year and the unofficial leader was Seattle comedy legend John Keister. (I say that tongue in cheek because with the exception of Rainn Wilson I'm not sure there are any comedy legends on the local scene, since Seattle has a very small ethnic population... wink wink... and demographically makes it closer to "Hee Haw" than "Seinfeld.") Keister was the MC, or leader, of "Almost Live," a local comedy show that ran throughout the Nineties when Microsoft was booming, and Grunge was king, so it must've been yet another affirmation of Seattle's cultural push to gain respectability for doing something other than building airplanes, and creating a basketball player as great as 'Downton Freddie Brown,' or 'Slick Watts.' "Almost Live" came on before SNL and to this day is replayed late at night on Saturday even though it wasn't that funny, but at least it had a full fledged ensemble cast, and I'm sure the comedian/actors on the show all dreamt of going to L.A. and making it in the Groundlings, or Hollywood, or late night TV, or all of the above.

"The 206" has none of that magic. It's an appendage of "Almost Live" down to two of the three cast members being on that show, and the odd man out a relative. As far as I can tell it has no reason for existing, which could be charming in an obscure late night TV way, but that would take a genuine punk attitude that could give a shit. "Fishmasters" was that kind of show and it also came on after SNL and had two guys drinking and fishing in San Luis Obispo (I watched it in Santa Cruz in the Nineties). It was designed as a crash landing after a night of drinking and it was impossible to imagine the 'Fishmasters' were somehow plotting out a career path to make it to the big time.

The same can't be said for "The 206," or "Almost Live." Both shows perceived of themselves as minor league hopefuls but in the case of "Almost Live" it was triple A ball (Bill Nye, the science guy cut his teeth on that show, not to mention the screenwriter of "Nebraska"). "The 206" is single A ball at best like "Fishmasters" and yet you can just tell watching it that the father and son team who now compose the entire cast don't see themselves that way at all. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how Pat Cashman thinks he's going to break into Hollywood but it's hard to find older actors, and I'm sure his very untalented son also thinks he's one step away from being the next.... Bill Nye the science guy!?!?!?! I often wonder if anyone else feels the same about the show as me, or if Seattleites are charmed by it in a very provincial way, since it all but sums up how the city sees itself. I chalk that up to what I call the island mentality, not quite the honky factor, but the sense that we're all islands here, since you can see them from all points in the city, and that the great comedy of the world is just sort of lurking out there beneath the mist.

10/6 Now the 206 is called Up Late. Sure, the title 'The 206' was about two decades too late, but at least the hip-hop slang showed the honkiness of the Cashman clan. Up Late sounds like some bored midwesterners at a convention who tried scoring some chicks but failed and went back to their hotel room.

Eat the Devil

I just saw "Beat the Devil" for the first time and don't think it can be so easily summed up as a spoof, or a comedy, although it is very funny, but it's more sublime. Truman Capote wrote it in what I can only imagine was a burst of creativity and it feels like all of his love of movies and screen stars just came bursting out of him in an unparalleled sort of rush, that leaves the viewer just dizzy with joy, because he made almost every line of this script a zinger. The plot is confusing too, in a grand Noir tradition, but it almost unravels on itself, and the plot becomes secondary to the sheer fun that Capote and the actors are having with the script, but it's more than fun, and it's more than comedy. I'd call the film 'surrealist' (and yes, I use film, because it's beautifully shot in an Italian sea villa by John Huston, a director I usually find over rated, but not this time, and read that he'd take extra long to set up because he didn't want the actors to know a 28 year old Capote was writing the script on the spot.) What emerges almost accidentally, aside from the whole movie, is a sort of existential feel that reminded me a little of "Wages of Fear," or Bunuel's, "Exterminating Angel," so maybe I'd say the young and brilliant Capote hit on a mood of the day, but presented it in the guise of a Noir (like "Wages"). It's no secret that Capote was gay (though it may have been back then, if you were clueless) and he also gave the script a sort of American camp that may not have been invented yet, and it makes it so fun, that it's hard to really describe. It just has that great movie feeling where one outrageous thing after another keeps piling up, and the goal becomes to show the insanity of the world, in a sort of blindingly witty way that wasn't exactly spoof like "Airplane," or black comedy, like so many English movies, but an existential surreal vision of life, that is actually quite brutal at bottom, like the two other movies mentioned. The brutality is so funny we just laugh, kind of like Beckett wanted us to in "Waiting for Godot," but that was a play with great characters. The charm to "Wages," "Exterminating," and "Devil," is that they are not so much character driven, as idea driven, with a thick plot that gives away at a certain point to a mood that makes the film more like a painting, than a night at the theater. It's a mad museum of humanity, where the characters smile, sneer, and laugh in the most witty way about the useless absurdity of life, but they are not remembered so much for their depth of soul, or wit, like the tramps in "Godot," but their reaction to an existential crisis, wrapped in a crime era plot. Again, "Beat the Devil," takes it a little farther than those other two films because I'm not even sure the characters will be remembered for their reaction to the events, but the insanity that it causes in them. The last scene in the film has Bogie literally laughing hysterically at the final plot twist that comes Western Union, and you can almost see him fall off his seat as the film dissolves.

Neil Simon with Woody Allen in relief

I'm sure this say's more about me that I loved Neil Simon as a kid than all the drivel I've written about my Mom or Dad. "Chapter Two" was a movie that I saw when it came out at the Bruin, I'm sure making me feel very adult, and that I watched on cable everytime it came on. For some reason, I was always haunted by James Caan calling up Marsh Mason (star of "The Goodbye Girl," a poor man's "Annie Hall") with a Yankees game on TV in the background, a charming yet sane bachelor looking for love, who was described by Valerie Harper as "not being gorgeous, but having an intelligent face." It was a glimpse into an adult relationship that I saw coming my way and everyone thought "The Goodbye Girl" was one of the great romantic comedies of my childhood, considered on par with "Annie Hall," but Mel Brooks was also considered as great as Woody Allen, but no one thinks that anymore. Marsha Mason was Neil Simon's wife, kind of like Diane Keaton and Louise Lasser to Woody Allen (Mia Farrow had yet to date him). Neil Simon was often talked about in the same breath with Woody Allen but in the way that Neil Diamond was compared to Bob Dylan, or at least how the Boomers saw Neil Diamond, but not Gen X, that embraced the latter as a God. We don't embrace Neil Simon as a God and I doubt anyone ever will again because he was one of those rare breed in American letters, a popular playwright that stayed almost entirely within the realm of light melodrama. His plays hinted at heavy relationship themes, with a heavy heart rending talk always waiting in the third act, but these 'I love you, stupid" speeches were never memorable, and not what the plays were about. The "Odd Couple" was far and away Simon's best play because it transcended the mood of his day and hit on a couple of classic characters just duking it out for the ages (Barefoot does the same for newlyweds), but the rest of Simon's work as I know it wasn't this free. It seemed more like an attempt to ape the early Seventies romantic comedy mood set by Woody Allen. Simon's light touch and good ear (he's blessed with a gift for dialogue), made him a natural except that he was completely out of touch with the alienated heroes who represented the fall of the Sixties, nor did he embody a new kind of eccentric oddball like Woody Allen, who all but redefined the sex symbol. Simon was from another time when hope in the American middle class was an innocent and fresh dream, and being a popular playwright he was in no way trying to peel the curtains on the dream, like say John Cheever. Simon's characters were very happy to be living when they were and their only problems were the eternal ones between men and women. Time catches up with some artists and leaves others behind, and I thought as a kid Neil Simon was speaking for a generation, but by the early Eighties it was clear his star had fallen, and Simon couldn't fake new wave, or yuppie.

It's funny that I'm going so critical on Neil Simon but I really don't think he appealed to my generation so much, and I doubt he will to the ones coming up. I don't hear Lena Dunham talking about him (and if she's not talking about you you don't exist, baby!) I'm almost embarrassed to admit I liked him because in much the same way that punk was a reaction against the sell out of Rod 'the mod' Stewart, the same could be said of Neil Simon, even though he never really sold out to anything. It's a guilty pleasure for me to watch "California Suite," or "Chapter Two," because they were so out of touch with the zeitgeist of my generation that I would've been laughed off the bus for saying I liked them, so the little drama critic/playwright in me just shut up, and enjoyed them on my own, knowing that Simon was great at writing dialogue, even if his movies were somehow out of touch. Simon was also out of touch with L.A. in general because he was a playwright with a capital P, unlike Woody Allen, who was an auteur, not only writing movies, but making them little replications of his own soul, like a painter. Simon saw himself as part of a team in the great Broadway tradition, and he took this feeling to the movies. Simon's screenplay adaptations of his own work never really felt like a Neil Simon 'joint' in the way that Woody Allen's movies did with the Twenties jazz playing at the beginning, and his classic credits rolling down the screen. Simon really was from another time when a playwright was invisible and we weren't all thinking that we were getting a glimpse into Neil Simon's actual life by watching his movies like we did Woody Allen, because the cult of personality had yet to subsume America. Woody mixed art and life in a very 21st century way, but there was nothing 21st century about Neil Simon. He was a man very much of his depression era, with a real gift for comedy writing that few had (have), and it was undeniable Simon was a great talent, but maybe not the greatest. In our hypercritical times, not to mention egoistic times, this is the kiss of death because if you're not the greatest, or at least great in an obscure way, there is just no hope for you. I'm sure lots of Gen X snobs just sort of write Simon off as a popular artist akin to the characters of the "Big Bang Theory" and consider him awful for not tackling really deep heavy issues, or just flipping the bird at society, like a real avant garde rebel, but Simon was never trying to be these things. He was a rather middle class mirror of his times that wanted a sane world even if he recognized the topsy turvy craziness of it.

In a way, it's weird that time hasn't caught up to Neil Simon in the Sundance era, since the mood and tone he was going for would seem to fit the Sundance aesthetic to a T. They are almost all light comedies with a deep undertone, that never get too deep to make anyone in the audience too uncomfortable, but just deep enough to tickle their intelligence, and leave an indelible impression. It could be that the economic/historical perspective that Simon was writing for just has no place today, because he had a decidedly depression era sense that family was important and needed to be maintaned at any cost, but he was writing for a post WW II affluent society, that had lots of opportunity missing today. I'm sure for the boomers Simon must've seemed like that uncle who you always liked a lot, but was warning you not to get too crazy with the sex and drugs. Woody Allen had his girlfriend/leading lady personae and Neil Simon had Marsha Mason, his second wife, and was going through divorce along with his peers and those he was writing for making him oddly relevant but he was also writing for an affluent society that was still in the process of creating itself. Modern ennui will not allow for this perspective with little creativity left in the society for people to imagine particularly new lives, within the context of the whole, and thus the rise of the ego on social media (me included). Simon's hope in the Country comes off as so dated now that I cringed at the way Marsha Mason as a struggling actress in New York (think "That Girl!") was getting big part after big part in "Chapter Two,", and how James Caan was just another popular writer in New York moving to Hollywood to make a killing in the biz. I know these were thinly veiled portraits of Simon himself, but in some ways he was the ultimate depression era success story, and it just doesn't make sense nowadays. Woody Allen had real ennui and nihilism in his movies, even if he too was living out a generational archetype, and that plays much better for a society at a dead end.

Bob Dylan or Bust!

Bob Dylan: A Biography by Anthony Scaduto

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was probably one of the most important books that I ever read, and really pointed a way for me to go in my life, and since there are so few biographies that have done this, I don't feel like I can give it an accurate review, but I can try. Anthony Scaduto wrote about Bob Dylan in the early Seventies, so that his instant myth was kind of sealed, but he was still young by the standards of today, though not to the boomers, that thought you shouldn't 'trust anyone over 30,' and the biography kind of paints him like an old man, or if that's too harsh, an artist that has reached their prime, and while they still may know greatness, have seen their greatest days. I must've indirectly taken this notion to heart when I first read it as a freshman in high school, because I remember telling my Mother that 'Bob Dylan should have died in that motorcycle crash in 1966, right after he released 'Blonde on Blonde,' his best record, because there was nowhere to go but down there.' 'I bet he doesn't think that,' she said, a few years younger than Bob Dylan, but she made her point clear, and yet I felt I was right (and still do!) It pains me to say that Bob Dylan was the Sixties, and they were him, and everything after was just afterglow, that really didn't amount to much, even if he brought a lot of people joy, and I think that Scaduto unconsciously makes this clear in his biography, that is a real classic of the era, along with Thomas Wolfe's' "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," about Ken Kesey's journey across America on L.S.D. in '64 during the Presidential campaign, and what he admits was the greatest act of his life. Scaduto writes in a beautiful Sixties lingo, that Bob Dylan liked at the time, but as a caveat said 'I'm a Gemini, and I might not like it tomorrow,' but it's unforgettable prose, written in hip jargon, like the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and the 'Dig' movement tries to replicate, but will never get as 'right on!' It unflinchingly tells the metamorphoses of Bob Dylan from high school loser growing up in nowheresville in the Minnesota Iron country, moving to 'Dinkytown,' the bohemian neighborhood of Minneapolis, next to the University that he briefly attended and joined a frat (how Gemini!) and onto Greenwich Village. Scaduto interviewed everyone that knew Bob Dylan, and though he wouldn't admit it, Dylan knew everyone, at least as an outpost, or a crash pad, and they were all still young when he interviewed them and their memories of the Sixties were fresh, so that his concert at Berkeley in '64 during the free speech movement, almost reads as a holy experience, both in the prose, and the memories, that reflect the 'dig it' style of writing, so prevalent of the times, since disco had yet to takeover America, and the Sixties were trying to be remembered through lots of sad 'singer/songwriter/confessional' music by the likes of James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and Joni Mitchell, that all had their roots in Dylan.

I first read this book when I'd started going to a big public high school of 3,000 students after being in a class of 50 for almost a decade. I was trying to be anonymous like Bob Dylan, an everyman, and I checked it out from the library, and I remember thinking that if that was all that I got out of switching high schools it would be enough. This book literally made me fantasize that I'd move to Greenwich Village when I graduated high school, and become a folk star at 'Gerde's Folk City.'



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Gone on 'Gone Girl'

This was my movie, and I can't say exactly why. I know it's harder to write about movies that you like, than ones you don't, because the ones you like are more personal, and don't create the same visceral response, as the ones that don't, and that you almost have to get out of your system, in some kind of ritualistic purging. The ones you like are in your intestines forever, and there is no getting them out, no matter how hard you try, and ultimately that is the measure of art, far more than what you hate, or what you should like more. "Gone Girl," is this to me, just a horrifically beautiful work of art that I feel privileged to have seen, and really set the world on fire, for a moment, and that's getting harder to do than ever. I don't know who the woman actress was in it but I thought it was one of the sexiest most elusive performances I've seen in years, and Affleck was the straight man to her madness, and he was good. I'm not sure what the movie said to me, and yet there was one scene that must be the literary kernel, and that I told Jenny on leaving the theater that grad students would be writing about for years, and it was when the female lead gave the voice over about how she played the 'good girl' that watched sports with her man, and got a kind of thrill of playing a stereotype, but knew she was doing it all along, and ultimately lost her mind, as the woman in the movie does, one hundred percent, and why feminists may hate her, but I really don't care. I know critics complain about the plot, and there are parts that are just kind of unbelievable, but it's a noir in the traditional sense, and they were always intended as B-movies, even though film snobs have turned them into A movies, and like all B-movies bang your head with the obvious until you start to bleed, or laugh, or both. "Gone Girl" was a curse on marriage, and the way that contemporary culture follows us, and makes us unreal, so that we play out movie archetypes, like noirs, in an attempt to feel something real. The couple in the movie literally becomes a reality TV show that people watch for entertainment, and they start off as a game, since Allison's parents made her a fictional star through their narrative comic art. In a way, the leads (the luminaries in astrology) are begged to 'give the people what they want' (like the Kink's song), and they fall apart in real time, with no one knowing whose guilty or innocent. It's really a story about how impossible marriage is but I think the real allure is that it is David Fincher and he just pushes me to the limit, maybe like Hitchcock used to do for the older generation, or Kubrick for my parents. He must be the best filmmaker of his generation, even more than Nolan, a close second, but Fincher has amassed a haunting totality that could be watched back to back to back, and I'd never be bored, but maybe that's me. A friend of mine loved "St. Vincent," and I thought it was pretty pis-poor, and wrote a review of it, and he wrote me back that 'there is no accounting for people's taste.' In the critical wars that rage in our society, all but defining us, like wars used to define older generations, I'd have to admit that I have a predilection for Fincher, that took me years to understand, but when I finally did, there was no going back.

big star rules!

I didn't think I had enough time left enough in my life to get into an old band, but then this one hit me, though I first heard about them a long time ago, in another time, another place, and had already seriously considered them, and yet their impact has had an almost time-delayed effect in my life, so that I'm still feeling this 'Big Star' almost thirty years later, and maybe stronger than ever, so their frequency is immense, to me. I had a friend that was really into the Replacements, and on their final album, their worst, but still a classic, there is a song to Alex Chilton, Paul Westerberg's long lost idol, about being in love with a song, and this indirectly gave Big Star notoriety. Everyone loved "Sister/Lovers," more than the first two, and I'm not sure why, since Chris Bell, the founder and creator of the sound, was gone after the first album, and Big Star "Radio City" was as much of an Alex Chilton record as Sister Lovers, but that's how it was in the critical circles I ran in that went to the Hollywood bar "Small's" five nights a week, looking for rock stars.

The Replacements and R.E.M. were my two Eighties bands, and in the long run I like the 'Mats' more, but that might be really arbitrary, and pointless. Its only relevancy is that my interest in them lead me to Big Star, and I really liked the futile melodic sound of "Sister/Lovers," that weaved within itself, and really is a poetic document of a man, an artist, a spirit, a projection, an illumination, a prophecy, coming undone. I liked the second half of the album so much, that I was convinced it was the best of Big Star, or the heaviest, and the rest was second rate by comparison, aside from a great song or two, like "September Gurls," otherwise it was kid's stuff. I've been strangely faithful to Sister/Lovers since the Eighties, but had pretty much ignored #1 Record, and Radio City, until now, and I'm pretty much blown away. I think all the hype for the final record without Chris Bell might've been overblown, not to denigrate "Sisters/Lovers," but there's definitely way more to Big Star than I understood. For starters, I finally see Paul Westerberg's love of Alex Chilton that is the most pronounced in Radio City, and there are several songs on there where I literally think Westerberg was saying to his band we're going to do it like Radio City, and they basically agreed but fucked it up just enough. I can't listen to these two albums enough.

Broken Flowers meets Disney

I just saw St. Vincent, because Jenny is out of town, and I didn't know what to do with myself, and there's really only one other movie out there that I haven't seen yet, but would like to, and that's "Interstellar," and I'm saving it for a date night, or if that's too ambitious, just going to the movies with a friend, but either way I'm saving it for her. I really wanted to see St. Vincent, hearing that it was a great Bill Murray performance, but the movie had mixed reviews; the Stranger, Seattle's weekly, said that 'Murray was great, but the movie sucked,' and I'd have to say they were right on, and yet it was bad in the most frustrating way, because St. Vincent is not a bad movie, per se. It's almost like the mainstream version of Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers with Murray, and I've read that Murray thinks that was his best performance), met an even more mainstream version of Jarmusch, that wasn't scared to put a cheesy kid subplot into the movie that did its best to subvert whatever was good in the intent. No, St. Vincent wasn't bad enough to be truly bad, because Bill Murray was really great, and if you were going to do an old school Bravo Network 'actors studio' you could talk about this performance for years, I'm sure, just like so many of his performances since "Lost in Translation," when Murray made the jump from all time funny man, to all time depressed man, and now fuses the two seamlessly, in what are inevitably deep performances, but in some ways all of the performances Murray keeps giving are the same; whether the character he inhabits has money or not, Murray is the same kind of lovable deadbeat yet poetic louse in all of the pictures, kind of like Buttermaker from "The Bad News Bears," but for a new generation, and you kind of just have to love him for it. There is no doubt that all of the comic gold that came from the firstwave of "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," on SNL, Murray is the one that really took the ball and ran with it. Akroyd and Murray were my favorite on the original cast (I know Murray came a year or two after the first season, but he counts), though I loved everyone on the cast, including Belushi, so don't think I'm somehow going to diss on one of the great comic actors just to get a rise on the internet, but Akroyd and Murray were my favorite: Akroyd for his impersonations of fast talking midwest salesman, that just reeked of comic talent to me, and Murry for his ease, that he has never lost.

The movie put me to sleep in the third act, and gave me some pleasure along the way, watching Murray, but not enough.... like watching a basketball star on a shitty team, losing in spite of his greatness, like Pistol Pete Maravich, on the New Orleans Jazz. I had two HUGE problems with the movie, and I'm putting on my critics hat, with a pencil behind my ear, so you've been warned, and can stop reading this anytime you want. My first was that I just hated the kid's lines; the screenwriter/director tried to make the boy an exceptionally smart and wise kid, but not a wise ass, kind of a smart loser, that Murray makes a little bad, and therefore makes the kid a little better, or something like that. The conceit was cheesy, but even cheesier was the script, and I wanted to rewrite almost every line of dialogue that stupid kid was reading off, to no one in particular. The heart of movie was supposed to be Murray's relationship to the kid, but this just doesn't gel, and it made me think of how good Quinn Cumming's was in "The Goodbye Girl," and I'm proud to say she went to Oakwood, I'm pretty sure, but she gave a great kid's performance. The kid in this movie sucked, though it wasn't all his fault, but his cheesy lines might've gone over a little better if he was a little more likable. More than this the entire movie sort of changes tone whenever the kid's story comes into view, and makes the viewer feel like he was watching a run of the mill sappy Disney story, but when Murray comes on it becomes mainstream Jarmusch. In some ways, the creator of the film really gives it over to his star, and that's okay, but every star needs a sidekick, and let's face it, Murray had Scarlet 'Jo in her best performance, and they had real chemistry, something completely lacking in "St. Vincent," where Murray performs in a void, and yet he's so comfortable there, that he sweeps you up, and I may remember "St. Vincent" like I remember "Broken Flowers," even though Jenny and I talked about how much we hated that movie. The best way I can sum up this sentiment was something rather peculiar that happened when the credits were rolling; Murray basically sings along to Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate," while sort of gardening in his backyard, but just kind of wasting away humorously, with his classic deadpan face, and NO ONE left the theater, and there were about twenty or thirty people there. I mean the credits were rolling, my fellow movie fans, and no one got out of their seat, and I really don't think it's cause they were blown away by the movie, but they sensed the greatness of Bill Murray's performance, and it was great comedy. I didn't leave, either, even though I'd slept through the whole dreary third act, that turns really corny (spoiler alert!! he gets a stroke, but pulls through!). I did lose myself in this movie a little, but just a little, and even thought of leaving once or twice, but there really wasn't anything I wanted to sneak into.

I'm not a big moviegoer anymore, but I don't know if anyone is anymore, and this used to make me very sad, since it was one of the things I was best at, but I'm not so sad anymore, just accepting. People don't really go to the movies anymore, because there's not much to see, and anything that is worth seeing, you can download or rent, and be happy watching it in the comfort of your home, but this destroys the point of the movie fan, that has to get out of the house, because he's going batty. When I was a real movie fan, I was seeing one or two movies a week, and this would add up to about 60, and there must've been that many I wanted to see, but not anymore; if I wanted to see two movies a week, I'd be done very quickly, and not particularly satisfied. For the real moviegoer, there used to be a slew of second tier movies that were so good, they actually competed with the first tier, but there are almost no worthy second tier movies anymore, as the subset has eaten itself. It's funny, because a great friend of mine from childhood recommended this movie, and I don't blame him for it, and thought in a moment of nostalgic glory, I'd really fathom the evolution of Bill Murray as the camp counselor in "Meatballs," easily one of my favorite as a kid, and in some ways he's no different, just older and more beaten down by life, but the same Murray mentoring oddball youths to be subtly intelligent outlaw rebels like himself, and endearing them with his almost Cary Grant like charm, but for a new generation. It really is amazing what Murray has done, and in some ways he's become the ultimate performance artist, roaming the streets of Brooklyn looking for action, and yet I can't recommend this movie, unless you're an actor studying the theater, but I sure wanted to like it, and really tried.

8/19/2015 I saw St. Vincent on Thanksgiving, and that may have just been too loaded a day to see it. Eight months later I rented it for Jenny, and the DVD cover made me want to watch it with her, and all the bad feelings I had about it melted away. I knew we'd have a good night with St. Vincent, because something in me realized that the comfort of watching it at home would fit the mood of the film. St. Vincent is a homey movie, not the kind you should see alone on Thanksgiving, half drunk from football.

I came home from work and Jenny said she loved it. She's a tough critic but I intuitively knew she would love it, and wanted to see it with her on Sunday. My great friend, Sean Barth, criticized me for not liking it more when I wrote the review, but worse thought I didn't want to like St. Vincent, and maybe he was right. I saw it alone on Thanksgiving, and there was almost no one there. The few people in attendance were boomers, even older than me, and it reminded me of seeing "Blue Jasmine," the awful Woody Allen movie. Uncle Ike's had just opened, and I ate some lemon lozenges, and felt dreamy. I'm not sure if I ate enough before the movie or not, but I wasn't feeling homey..... dig, homey.

Carve a Turkey into two

Thanksgiving is movies to me, like everything else, and the best are the ones that remind us of why we're American, since the movies are the best thing this Country has produced, aside from rock n' roll, and we just sort of own them, so "Hurrah for Hollywood!" My favorite Thanksgiving movie is "Alice's Restaurant," from the late Sixties, around when I was born, and I guess speaks to where I'm really from, more than where I came to, and I don't mean that as pithy nostalgia, but that movie was really my idea of what Thanksgiving could be. For starters, the holiday is free of the religious constraints of Xmas and Easter, or the ultra-patriotic fervor of the 4th of July. It's a holiday free of much, save it's one of the most important of the year, and a time for loved ones getting together. The folk epic "Alice's Restaurant," by Arlo Guthrie, a talking blues in the tradition of his dust bowl balladeer Father, Woody Guthrie, one of the greats, yet modernizing it for the next generation, so Arlo became something Woody could never imagine, a hippy rebel, instead of a socialist, somehow advanced to the point where politics no longer mattered, though their feelings on the world coming together in a brotherhood against the ruling class was very much the same. Arlo was just a lot richer than Woody, with much more privilege, and why he was sitting at a table all alone half-naked with a bib on, mocking and homaging the ruling class that became America, and in some strange way Arlo Guthrie stands for Thanksgiving for me.

I think "Alice's Restaurant," really tried to reinvent the idea of Thanksgiving, or giving thanks, and instead of spending it with your family, if you spent it with your friends, it could be the best day of the year, even better than the 4th of July, because you'd be stealing a holiday in a sense from the old order, and reinventing a tradition. In the movie by Arthur Penn, the one he may have made after Bonnie and Clyde, the commune is presented, and this is where the movie is really brilliant and unforgettable, but let me take a breath to explain. I think there were a lot of lessons from the Sixties that were contradictory; there was the Manson Family that is mostly seen as evil, but yet romanticized, and even by people like me (yes, ME!), and then there were 'Bonnie and Clyde' themselves, killers, but romantic heroes at the same time, and somehow embodying the mythic Sixties anti-hero. There really aren't any anti-heroes in "Alice's Restaurant," and yet it forces you to take on an almost anti-romantic posture that ultimately reeks of romanticism, just like Manson somehow ultimately reeks of rock n' roll heroism, because the movie isn't about success but failure, and the failure is of a beautiful dream that a bunch of people got together, decided to live communally for the sake of art, and were ultimately taken down by forces greater than their control. Make no mistake about it, "Alice's Restaurant," is a very sad movie that the studios tried to sell as a hippie celebration of love and life, but I don't think anyone who has ever seen it would come to that conclusion, whether you liked it or not. Along with "Easy Rider," it's one of the great studies into why the Sixties "blew it," and if a video store were open right now I'd go rent it, because it's timeless; it's a sad recitation on the failure of a beautiful dream, made all the more tragic, because the movie is light, and has a 15 minute 'video' montage of Arlo's folk tale about taking the garbage out on Thanksgiving, and almost going to jail, expressing the absurdity of our society with such clarity it made sense that Woody Guthrie was his Father but a son to make Daddy proud.

The greatest Thanksgiving movie of the last twenty years, and I don't think I'm exaggerating, is "Pieces of April," so... "Pieces of April," and "Alice's Restaurant," would just make a devastating double feature, since they are both about Thanksgiving in the Northeast, and both paint a larger than life generational meltdown, because there's no doubt that the holiday's make us think of family and friends. In "Alice's Restaurant" Arthur Penn all but murders the idea of the commune, by taking the most idealistic funky hippie vision of converting a Church into a Hippie love shack, with only the best intentions, the new Church, and they have a core group living there, including Arlo Guthrie, but Ray and Alice start crumbling under the pressure (great performances by James Broderick, and Pat Quinn, and if you can believe this Quinn doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and yet she starred in a major movie, and gave a dynamite performance, in her big black boots, and all loving nature, that was broken inside. James Broderick was the father on "Family," one of my all time favorite soapy family dramas.

"Pieces of April," was literally broken in the very title by the implications of the word 'pieces' and the name April is out of season with Thanksgiving. I saw this movie with my girlfriend and both of us came out from it very emotionally affected in a self-reflective way; we come from fractured families, and I don't mean to embarrass her by saying this, or putting us on the spot, but the movie hit close to the bone of how we were living. "Pieces of April," takes place in the East Village, and has my favorite Katie Holmes and Patricia Clarkson performances, as the Mother and Daughter, that just don't know each other, either economically, spiritually, or emotionally, and Clarkson is dying of cancer, and it makes the meeting all the more loaded, but it's not corny. It's a very real movie in real time about a family breaking down over a turkey.

The movies generally gloss over Thanksgiving and go right to Christmas, making the X-Mas movie a national pastime, requiring its own classification. I think that's because the first generation immigrants from Mexico, Europe, Africa, Asia, Japan, or China, just don't seem to understand Thanksgiving, and I don't blame them for this in the least. It's a very uniquely American holiday, created in the Northeast, and why I think the movies that best reflect Thanksgiving take place there, but the only other one that comes to mind is "The Big Chill," and this may not have been exactly Thanksgiving but was awfully close, because they were playing football on the lawn at half time while watching the Ohio State/Michigan game, a great gridiron tradition, but in the Northern mid-west, with the leaves scattered on the ground.

When I was nineteen, I thought that Thanksgiving was my holiday, everyone else be damned, and that it was for me to own, so I owned it, with a kind of beautiful youthful reckless freedom, that I showed from time to time, thinking I could give the finger to my family, and reinvent Thanksgiving, like they did in "Alice's Restaurant," and that's a weird thing to say, because the movie ends in disaster, but I guess the vision was so beautiful, that those parts linger in the memory too, creating a mixed picture of an event, kind of like a childhood invariably is to the siblings that lived it, though I used to think otherwise, but I was very naive.

In my mind, "Ordinary People" will always take place at Thanksgiving, because it may with the Grandparents coming over and wondering if Conrad's shrink is Jewish or not. I was on the set of "Ordinary People" because my next door neighbor was working on the movie, and our families met for the holiday. They were shooting the movie on location in a northern suburb of Chicago, and I went through a transformative experience there that ended with me seeing the set that Michael was in charge of designing. The set reflected my life that was breaking down, so that movie might be in the running but Thanksgiving might just be the beginning, leading to Xmas. But again it's an emotionally difficult movie, like the Thanksgiving ones almost always are, perhaps due to the shady circumstances that had the pioneers cheating the Indians, and though I hate to put it so bluntly, it kind of ranks right there with Columbus Day, and yet both are marked in the memory, with joyous resolution, in spite of their mixed message, wishing a Country well.

A bratwurst mash-up

I just read a New York Times article on FB about how a 17 year old author in Germany is all the rage, but someone discovered that she had lifted some paragraphs from someone else's work, and put them into her novel, without telling anyone about it. My first reaction was to think of her as a plagiarist, and though I haven't read the book, or even heard of the author, the article gave the idea that only some paragraphs or pages were lifted and that the novel had a 'mash-up' feel, and I couldn't deny that in the 'post-post-postmodern' era we live in, that her literary mash-up might be very little different than listening to any pop song on the radio that mixes old beats with new beats, to make something new, or as Helene Hegemann said, "there's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," and this struck me as true, given the age we live in, because postmodernism branched out from modernism (Van Gogh, Picasso), when artists and thinkers thought that you could still make something new, like an explorer dreams of discovering a civilization. Well, we think that most of the world has now been discovered, and I guess this radical idea has lead us to believe that with geography goes art (and politics), and there is 'no originality anymore, just authenticity.' When I first learned about postmodernism in the late Eighties the big idea for me, since I can only think in terms of art, was that 'collage' was the only form of museum like art left that had any validity, since you were making it from newspaper, magazines, old books, and anything else lying around, but were reinterpreting the old in a way that made it new, and then Hip Hop came along (I was late), and made this painfully clear with its endless samplings of old hits that we all knew and loved remixed into something new. I also know that 'sampling' took a real hit when the DJ's and artists doing it were forced to pay songwriting royalties, and I'm not sure what I think about that, wavering between wishing everything was free, and realizing that artists need to live too, including me, but deep down I think everything should be free, and it would be a better world.

I don't want to defend Ms. Hegemann too much, because I just glanced at an article and saw some photos where a journalist was calling her the 'enfant terrible' that Germany had been looking for for generations, so 'plagiarizing' just might be part of her bad girl personae right now, that she's cultivating, if the photos are any proof, and I'd hate to blindly support that, but the questions she raises are fascinating. Is the novel ready for an infusion of Hip-Hop cool? Maybe.... though I've never done this myself, and would sort of shy away from it, and yet that makes me sound old fashioned and conservative, so I've got to really re-evaluate my position. I'm not against a literary mash up, and actually think it might be the only way to get back to true art, or a primal kind of poetry, but where I get tripped up in this story, and where my ignorance is revealed, is that I'm not sure if the way that Hegemann used the lifted paragraphs, somehow flowed naturally into either her prose, or that of someone else, that she'd mixed and matched perfectly, like an interior decorator, or a postmodern artist. If she did either of these things, she is a talented artist, and I can't really critique her, so I guess the question becomes an economic one more than anything, and this is always sticky in the realm of art, but legally speaking should Hegemann a) pay a royalty?, or b) acknowledge the writers she lifted and made new again. I certainly think she should do 'b' because that's what I'd do, but I was accused of plagiarism in high school and took the charge so personally, that I just haven't been free enough to make this step, that just kind of blows me away, and makes me want to read the book. Or maybe I don't have to and have already intuited the genius of Hegemann's post-post-postmodern novel, since the idea ultimately trumps the art in a true postmodern ethos, the idea being everything, and the art secondary.

I'm jealous of Helen Hegemann and for the first time in years realize how behind the times I am but I don't have a literary agent and was never geared that way, but still this is an impressive feat, kind of like 'Bagism,' an artistic movement that lasted a year or two. She has really turned the novel upside down.