800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 20, 19

20. Casino


(Casino Censored)

The embarrassing confessions just keep pouring out on this blog lately. Until this year, I’d never watched Casino all the way through. I’m pretty sure I’d seen something approximating the whole movie over the years in the bastardized version that plays on AMC and Bravo in which a bad Joe Pesci imitator interjects a fulmination about whatever ‘mother-lovin’ rock-chucker’ he happens to be mad at at that given moment. I don’t know why so much of this movie’s essence is lost without the profanity..... but apparently many people thoguht something was lost even with the profanity.
The original reviews of Casino were unforgiving. Scorsese had spoiled us, and it wasn’t enough that he gave us another movie so close in spirit and quality to Goodfellas. People were mad that he issued yet another masterpiece about macho hoodlums from Brooklyn. It’s only with a decade’s distance that people began to appreciate what Casino was: perhaps the last great film of Scorsese’s long Golden Period. What we all would give for Scorsese to consistently make movies as great as Casino again....
Recently, a piece ran in GQ that made a case not as controversial as it once was: Casino is in fact a better movie than Goodfellas. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s a perfect companion piece that, if anything, deepens our appreciation of Goodfellas. Both movies are epics, Casino is a great look at the corruption which made and unmade Vegas, but Goodfellas is about the romance and rot at the core of the Mafia itself. It’s foolish to compare two movies so great, but I can’t shake the feeling that Goodfellas is still slightly better.
Goodfellas is a movie with an incredible amount of detail, but the details are secondary to how the characters perceive the details. What matters is not how Henry Hill steals but the joy he takes in stealing. In Casino, the encyclopedic detail is the whole point of the movie. Ace Rothstein has a job to do, and he does it, with absolute doggedness and compulsion. He does not feel joy or love, only monomaniacal obsession. The obsession itself is compelling, but it doesn’t make him quite as compelling as the much more human protagonist of Goodfellas.
What gives Goodfellas a run for its money is Ace’s wife, Ginger. Scorsese has never seemed much interested in women - he tends to portraythem more as objects for male lust than people with their own motivations. In Goodfellas, Scorsese finally gives us a very human woman in Karen Hill. But in Casino, Scorsese finally seems to tackle his Hitchcockian obsession with beautiful blondes. Yes, Ginger McKenna is very much a sex object, a pure incarnation of Vegas lust. But few movies are brave enough to show the emotional damage that goes into a desire to maintain that facade. Ginger is like a caged tigress, supremely dangerous and possessing no idea what she wants except a vague longing to be free from men’s influence. She’s also the emotional heart of the movie and easily the most fully human of Scorsese’s women.
The mafia’s decline has taken an interesting turn in movies. Hollywood took great pleasure and pains in romanticizing gangsters in the years that the Mafia was at its height. But there was no real attempt to document it realistically until The Godfather, which dealt with the experience of life in America’s top crime family. As mafia movies became more common, the portrayals worked their way down the gangster heirarchy. In the 80’s, we got moderately successful mafiosi in the form of Tony Fontana in Scarface, and Noodles and Max from Once Upon A Time In America. By the early 90’s we were getting stories about gangsters stuck in the mafioso equivalent to middle management like Henry Hill in Goodfellas, and Vincent and Julius from Pulp Fiction. By the second half of the 90’s, we were getting portrayals of low-level gangsters like Lefty from Donnie Brasco and Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects (ok...not necessarily low level). By 2000, we were ready for The Sopranos, a panoramic map of gangsterism at all levels in America. And now we’re living in the age of Boardwalk Empire, which reboots gangsterism as something so alien to our time that it can only be a costume drama.

19. Ron Swanson



I watch Parks & Recreation every week. I’m well aware that it doesn’t reach to comic glory often enough. In terms of actual laughs, it doesn’t equal the standards set by NBC’s other great but fundamentally standard issue sitcoms like The Office and 30Rock. But I don’t care. Why? Because Parks & Rec has one asset on hand which nothing on either The Office or 30Rock could ever hope to equal.



In each of their standard issue sitcoms, NBC seems to allow only one character to break free from assembly line sitcomery and to become something far more - a character without any predisposition to being liked or relateable or sympathetic that seems to have wandered from the set of Arrested Development or Monty Python. At times, these characters may earn our sympathy, but only because it makes them more complex, and therefore funnier. The Office has Dwight Schrute, 30Rock has Jack Donaghy, Parks and Rec has Ron Swanson.



Neither Dwight or Donaghy were ever drawn with the incredible specificity of Ronald Ulysses Swanson - the well-mustached, meat tornadoed guardian against government encroachment who heads the Parks and Recreation department of Pawnee, Indiana with the singular goal of destroying it. Every episode seems to have its own Ron Swanson moment (see above), and whatever else happens in the show, the Ron Swanson moments will be almost guaranteed to make any amount of dithering about the irritating subplots involving Tom and Chris worth sitting through.



It must have been tempting to make Ron Swanson into a cartoon villain against whom his assistant, the liberal idealist Leslie Knope, must always take a stand. But that would have been far too easy. Instead, we see Ron as a hypocrite and not a little self-loathing, who maintains his ultralibertarian facade as a way of distancing himself from people after a series of bad life experiences.



At its best, Parks and Recreation taps into a certain kind of America which we don’t much see on the coasts. Ron is such a specific character that he taps into an American character. He’s the epitome of a certain kind of American for whom life has not worked out as he planned, and therefore wants to simply be left alone. He’s the archetypal Angry White Male. Because Parks and Rec is a network comedy, he invariably displays a hidden side as a friendlier, more caring person. But in reality, it’s the anger of people like Ron Swanson whom Americans most have to fear lest Ron turns America into the country he thinks it already is.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 22 & 21

22. Nixon in China at The Met


(News....News....News....)

I’ve probably gone up to New York for the Metropolitan Opera as many times as a would be musician in his 20’s who tries and fails to be a cheapskate could permit. But until this trip, I wouldn’t dare take the step I’ve taken hundreds of times in Baltimore and Washington. At the Meyerhoff or Kennedy Center, I routinely make it a point of honor to buy the cheapest ticket, then sneak into the front rows while dragging friends kicking and screaming for their lives with me. But the Met is far more intimidating - not because it’s such a legendary opera house, only because the front rows are so expensive that I have fiery visions of getting assaulted violently by ushers for even trying.
But necessity dictated what followed. I could barely hear the singers from my top-tier back-row perch during Act I. So after intermission, Il Giovine and I moved up to coveted (by me at least) mid row seats of the orchestra. There I was, finally, at the very nexus of American opera - witnessing a show dismissed by many as the ‘CNN opera’ finally accepted as the classic of the American Stage which it deserves to be called.
Adams has gotten all sorts of derogatory commentary for the perceived leftist slant of his operas, particularly for The Death of Klinghoffer - his opera about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. But the sniping was already present in the reception of Nixon in China. Many people alleged that the creative team of Nixon in China was drawing a kind of false moral equivalence between market capitalism which kills thousands and exploits millions of workers for lower wages and the dictatorial communism that murders hundreds of millions of its own people. Obviously, if this were the case, there would be a problem. But it’s not. The point of Alice Goodman’s (rather abstract) libretto is to get inside the heads of the people portrayed in this work, what makes Richard Nixon, Pat Nixon, Mao and the Madame, think as they do. And in order to do that, she had to take it as a given that each of these players felt they were justified in believing everything they do. In almost every case - the sole exception of Henry Kissinger - Goodman accomplished that rather brilliantly.


(I am the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung)

And therein we come to the opera’s biggest problem, which is also it’s greatest strength: The Chinese Ballet in the 2nd act, which contains an evil capitalist landlord that is portrayed by...Henry Kissinger!...or is he Henry Kissinger? We suddenly find ourselves in a thoroughly strange hall of mirrors. Is it Kissinger playing the landlord in the Chinese ballet, or is it an actor meant to resemble Henry Kissinger in voice, mannerism and oafish behavior (in the opera that is), or is it just a coincidence? But it’s precisely this hall of mirrors which makes the work so compelling, Pat Nixon watches the whipping of an innocent girl and thinks it’s so real that she rushes onstage to help her. Madame Mao watches the same incident and sees a vengeful vindication of everything about the Cultural Revolution. The opera takes no side, it merely asks us to consider two virtually opposite views of the world, and to ask if an attempt at understanding between them is possible.
Once again, nothing about the libretto would matter if this were not tied to an absolutely brilliant score - exciting and gorgeous in equal measure - composing music fundamentally in the Philip Glass idiom that goes well past what Glass does within it. The minimalism itself is just a clay which Adams can mould into different patterns, here a little Glenn Miller to represent Richard Nixon’s thoughts, there a little Aaron Copland for Pat’s, here a little Wagner for Madame Mao, there a little Mussorgsky for the Chinese Crowds.
The end result is a myth for the 21st century, asking us to deeply think about the chances for understanding between cultures which still understand very little about one another.


22. The Barber of Seville


(Thomas Hampson singing Rossini the way it should be)

OK. Time for another confession. In over a quarter century of obsession with classical music, I‘ve barely listened to any Rossini. For me, he was fundamentally that guy with the cool overtures which the classical radio stations would put on as filler in between a Beethoven Symphony and some snoozer of a Baroque concerto from the Corelli/Tartini/Tortellini epoch which could make even me extremely happy to change the station to 98Rock.
I never had much prejudice against Rossini. The thought of really sitting down with the output of the other big Bel Canto composers like Bellini and Donizetti never filled me with excitement. But Rossini is another matter: Rossini knows exactly how absurd his operas (all operas?)are, and so he plays up all the ridiculousness - the incessant patter songs, the constant vocal runs that sound like machine gun fire, the obsessive rhythmic figures, the almost cocaine-binge level of propulsion, all sold to us at such a manic pitch that we don’t have the mental space to remember how ridiculous it is.

But with regard to Rossini’s most famous opera, there’s one other reason: Bugs Bunny.



Thanks to Bugs, I will never be able to listen to the opening melody to the Overture to the Barber of Seville without thinking “Welcome to my shop/let me cut your mop/let me shave your crop.” And it’s all over from there. It’s amazing that I’ve gotten this far in my life and until last month I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to The Barber of Seville all the way through It’s partially due to Bugs, a larger part was intellectual laziness. The fact that The Marriage of Figaro (which Mozart based on the play that was a sequel to the play this opera was based on) is probably my all time favorite opera/piece of music/experience in life makes this omission all the more humiliating. But the largest part was due to the fact that lots of recordings of Rossini bored me. Rossini is one of the ultimate singer vehicles: in Bel Canto repertoire, conductors let singers who are famous for their heavy voices get away with all sorts of unimaginative phrasing, monodynamic singing, and too-comfortable tempos which would enrage them if they were working on Verdi. The result was that Rossini sounded like a half-way rest area between Mozart and Verdi: lacking the beauty of the former and the drama of the latter.


(The amazing Act I finale courtesy of James Levine. As good as you could get in 1975.)

So this fall, I finally resolved to do one thing that I probably should have done years ago. I skipped the overture and searched for a recording that
might change my point of view. It took two minutes of searching through Napster’s excellent $15-a-month music service (RIP) to find a recording that looked interesting - one that starred Placido Domingo, not in the tenor role but in the principal Baritone role of Figaro himself (made long before he switched to Baritone repertoire). I looked at the rest of the cast-list, Kathleen Battle, Ruggero Raimondi, Frank Lopardo - almost every one of them singing half a fach (voicetype...roughly) heavier than the roles they usually play. And all of this with Claudio Abbado and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, whom years of radio experience taught me made easily the best of all Rossini overture recordings. Lo and behold, this opera really is as good as people say it is.
It’s still fairly common to view Rossini as a sort of layover in the journey of opera between Mozart and Verdi who wrote mostly comedies because he wasn’t great enough to write profundity. But Rossini is far too unlike either Mozart or Verdi to be compared to either. If there is anyone he could be compared to, it’s Gilbert and Sullivan - not for the incessant patter but for what the patter serves. In both cases, the high spirits are part of a greater desire to entertain. It simply does not take bad feeling for an answer.

800 Words: 35 Favorite "Cultural Stuffs" in 2011: #23

23. Imogen Heap/Regina Spektor

I was discussing Mozart operas with the McBee last night over drinks (as I’m wont to do when I have too much alcohol), and the McBee made an argument which I can’t totally refute. How can people who aren’t familiar with opera’s aesthetic not be put off by the literary silliness of it? Even a piece as great as Don Giovanni (which certainly has one of the better librettos) has a libretto (script) that can be charitably described as ’dumb.’
My only argument against this is that much of the pop music we love would be considered just as absurd if not more if we weren’t raised on its aesthetic. Unless you’re a talent on the level of Bob Dylan/Leonard Cohen/Neil Young etc., your lyrics are no less dumb than anything in opera. And musically, rock’s aesthetic is so simple and predictable that in two centuries, it shouldn’t surprise any historian if people look at the Stones or even The Beatles with all the same incomprehension to which so many in my generation give even the greatest operas.
It shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone who loves either Imogen Heap or Regina Spektor that they both grew up with the intention of being classical pianists. They are both top of the class exemplars of pop-rock’s latest (post-Bjork) generation: which bring a far heavier dose of classical music sophistication to pop music.
Imogen Heap won’t win any awards for lyrics in the next millennium, and her partnership with Guy Sigsworth in Frou Frou is nowhere near as good as her solo work, and even her last album was a bit of a letdown. Even so, Imogen Heap’s music has the clear elegance of a rare musical mind. Experiencing what Heap can do with music is a bit like a meeting with an encyclopedia. Her music should be used by less imaginative musicians as a manual of how to elicit sounds that would otherwise never occur to them. At her best, her albums strike a very rare balance: an attentive listener should be dazzled at the sheer virtuosity of how the music is put together, yet the technique rarely feels like overkill. In its own way and its own degree, the effect of her music is Mozartean.
For a lot of music lovers, Imogen Heap draws much more attention for how well she’s marketed her music than for the music itself. When she wrote her second album, ‘Speak for Yourself’, she used her website as a blog to update fans about the album’s progress. For her third album “Ellipse”, she used twitter to post updates, and acquired 700,000 followers in the process. Her latest album is being released piecemeal, each song as its own as soon as its completed with an accompanying music video. Four songs have been released so far, and at least two of them recall her best work. My favorite of the new songs is called ‘Propeller Seeds’, which has the fragile delicacy of a glockenspiel solo in The Magic Flute. Delicacy is perhaps the operative word in describing the Imogen Heap sound-world. Heap is an expert purveyor of delicate sounds, and that she does so in a music world where delicacy is often viewed as record sale poison makes her music that much more special.
It’s not saying much to state that Regina Spektor’s lyrics are better than Imogen Heap’s. But to say that Regina Spektor’s music is even better than Imogen Heap’s, while also saying that she’s also a reasonably good lyricist is probably to say that she has a once-in-a-decade talent. I’m not sure I’d go that far: her songs are deceptively simple. The harmonies are always effective, but they rarely go past the four-chord, simple meter pop song paradigms, albeit always arranged beautifully. Whereas Imogen Heap tries to stretch her musical imagination to the breaking point (and sometimes past it), Regina Spektor’s music stays on more familiar ground. She takes less risks, but within her more modest territory, she never stops being stunningly consistent. Spektor might be listed as a member of the genre, ‘anti-folk’, whatever that means...but she’s clearly a musical all-rounder whose vision is larger than any genre.
Whereas Imogen Heap’s music often thrives on sounding disquieting, like the strange music of a moon species, Regina Spektor’s music sounds completely unafraid of human sentiment. There are songs of hers that are almost shockingly self-revealing. To be sure, there are all sorts of oblique literary references, multi-lingual lyrics (she lived in Soviet Moscow until she was nine), odd instrumental flourishes that sound strange on first hearing, but underneath it is music that is more occupied with sounding human than sounding weird.
All sorts of big deals have been made about Spektor’s (rather familiar sounding) childhood, in which she grew up the piano-playing daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, solely interested in classical music. and discovered that she could write songs while on a trip to Israel. But this is partly because most people don’t realize how important it is that musicians can get some kind of proper training (and that people pay more attention to a musician when the musician is hot..). A kid classically trained as a musician can become a great ‘pop’ musician in adulthood, but it’s pretty much impossible to go the other way. In fact, perhaps this remnant of her classical background is her most impressive quality (and what makes her a featured performer in my dreams for the last year...). Begin to Hope has a classical musician’s long-range hearing which makes each song feel like just a small part of a cumulative whole that can take in everything from Joanie Mitchell, to Tom Waits, to Schumann, to Mussorgsky yet feel completely personal (call me!:).

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 12 & 11

12. Peabody Opera: L’Enfant et les sortileges (The Child and The Spells) by Maurice Ravel

(dancing math homework: every child’s nightmare)

It’s a shame that Ravel only wrote two operas. His imagination was probably too unique and too strange for the world’s most expensive artform. But that does not change the fact that Ravel’s forty-five minute opera is one of the very greatest ever written - a masterpiece of pure imagination, so different from any other opera that it would probably require its own genre if it were staged more than once a blue moon.
This opera could frankly work as either an acid trip and an absinthe burlesque. It should be impossible to describe the plot as incomprehensible without being unclear, but that’s precisely what the plot is: An obnoxious boy breaks various objects in his room, and the objects in the room come to life, as well as his homework, and furniture. His room then turns into a garden with various animals and plants whom the child has tortured. They all gang up to attack him, but wind up attacking each other. However, when the animals see the boy bandage a squirrel, they realize that he is not a monster, and help him return home.
On it’s face, the plot is bizarre. As a modern allegory for growing up, the terrors of childhood, how we mature, and how one learns compassion and love, it is extraordinary. It also helps that Ravel writes one of the all-time great scores - almost like a vaudeville variety show in which he finds a perfect musical nuance for everything from dancing sofas to a Wedgewood Teapot. Ravel’s great models for the score was Gershwin and Victor Herbert, which gives the score a distinctive jazz tint which is handled with an imagination which often eludes other French composers of the era who constructed whole careers around creating a classical/jazz fusion. But there is equal time given to passages that seemed ripped from the pages of Wagner, Verdi, Debussy, Stravinsky, Bellini Bel Canto, Gregorian Chant, Chinese Folk Music, Dixieland Jazz, Tchaikovsky Ballets, and an unmistakeable reference to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony - all processed through the unique Ravel tint that deftly navigates a middle ground between parody and tribute (except the Wagner..).
When I saw this at the Peabody Opera Theater back in March, I was both elated and saddened. It was a first-class performance of an all-too rarely performed masterpiece that should enchant anyone who’d ever heard it. But I could only lament the fact that I probably won’t hear this opera live for another thirty years. It is an all too sad fact that the classical works of true imagination which would probably impress music lovers best are the ones least likely to be performed. Once a music lover hears Verdi or Wagner, they pretty much know what to expect in every Grand Opera. Fortunately, Grand Opera is only one (overperformed) substrata of the opera world. Unfortunately, few people outside the world of opera know that. So when they have the chance to see something different, they’ll think it’s like any other opera they’ve ever seen. Furthermore, opera companies do themselves no favors in the long term by putting the same twenty operas on over and over again. If the opera world wants to entice a new audience, they have to find new repertoire.

Here are twenty-five operas (in no particular order and not counting L’Enfant et les Sortileges) that I would venture a guess would turn upside down every preconception you ever had about opera. This is not a list of the best operas, just a list of atypical once and a twitter length description about what makes it atypical:

1. Cunning Little Vixen by Leos Janacek

2. The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz

3. Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin (yes, it’s an opera)

4. Wozzeck by Alban Berg

5. Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi

6. The Nightingale by Igor Stravinsky

7. Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten

8. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle by Bela Bartok

9. The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill

10. Gianni Schicchi by Giacomo Puccini

11. Showboat by Jerome Kern (opera houses are the only places that perform it anymore)

12. Boris Godunov by Modest Mussorgsky (original version only)

13. The Abduction from the Seraglio by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

14. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Dimitri Shostakovich

15. The Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev

16. Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass

17. Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg

18. West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein (Yes, that’s an opera too)

19. Nixon in China by John Adams

20. Sweeney Todd (So's most Sondheim)

21. Saint Francis of Assisi by Olivier Messiaen

22. The Dialogue of the Carmelites by Francis Poulenc

23. Le Grande Macabre by Gyorgy Ligeti

24. Der junge Lord by Hans Werner Henze

25. Ainadamar by Osvaldo Golijov


11. Big Love Series Finale

If I do anything longer than a short post, I’ll probably never finish it. I’ve been putting off a long Big Love post since I began these ‘800 Words’ things, but a post about my thoughts on Big Love could easily go upward of 4,000 words. In some ways, it’s the riskiest show HBO has ever done (at least since I started watching). This is the only HBO show which tries to enter the minds of the people who would view the network itself as a sin. And unlike Bill Maher or HBO’s political films, this is a work that takes truly enormous pains to demonstrate why Americans who view the world differently from us believe what they do. Big Love was not a perfect show - it presented us with an alternate universe populated by a byzantine network of religious cults and century-old blood feuds, in which prophecy and revelation was not a matter for bygone eras but an utmost concern of the present. There were times (even a whole season) when there were too many characters to follow and not nearly enough time to explore them. But at its best, this was a TV show of extraordinary power. On the one hand, it had the intimate and human concerns of characters that are exactly like people we know, even as they are extremely different. On the other, the show had all the power of a biblical epic - culminating in a final episode which is either a simple summation of the show’s story, or the summation of a new (fourth?) testament. Like The Sopranos finale, it all depends on what you believe happened.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. # 13

13. Mavis Staples/Charles Bradley


(Eyes on the Prize)
I feel like I’ve encountered the alpha and omega of soul music this year - not because Mavis Staples and Charles Bradley are the greatest soul singers you’ll ever hear, though you could do a lot worse. I say this because between these two singers, you get the two twin polls of soul music.
Mavis Staples’s music is pretty much unceasingly, assaultingly optimistic. This is one lady who will not take your gloom. If the sheer happiness of her music didn’t shake you like an earthquake, it would feel totally false. As it happens, Mavis Staples (both as part of her family and apart from it) sings music that is almost hilarious in how good it can make you feel. The only problem with it is that it’s all pretty much the same - mostly effervescent, meant to uplift, with an unceasing chain of five-six-and seven chords, and no end to lyrics about how our troubles are over because we put our trust in the Lord.
And no wonder Staples is always happy, Staples is a gospel singer born into musical royalty who once got a marriage proposal from Bob Dylan, and whose equally famous father was friends with Martin Luther King, Robert Johnson, and Mahalia Jackson. Her family was one of the great symbols of the civil rights movement. She was singer worshipped as a goddess of gospel from the time she was a teenager. Fortunately, she at least seems to have done the only logical thing: be happy about it and make others as happy as she is, for a little while.

(I’ll Take You There. So amazing.)
When I saw her set at the Newport Folk Festival this July, I was spellbound. My friends wanted to leave so they could see Devil Takes Three. I told them to go without me, I was staying until the unbittered end. This set was one of the great concerts of my life. Unlike so many soul singers, she’s just improved with age. I remember seeing James Brown in 2004 and thinking how sad it was. Brown clearly wanted to make himself feel more contemporary to his audience, so he had his band started chanting catchphrases like ‘Whoomp There it Is,’ a song from 1980. But Staples clearly knew exactly what she was. The music was almost all gospel, and her bluegrass ensemble was bluegrass and her young backup singers had half her energy level, it worked. Her voice may now be an octave lower, but it’s in stunningly good health. When she got to her famous closer, ‘I’ll Take You There’, I had moved up to the second row just so I could sing along with the true believers. I may never have seen Otis Redding or Ray Charles or James Brown in better days, but I’ll be able to tell grandchildren that I saw Mavis Staples.

(The World (Is Going Up In Flames)
It is very sad to see that Charles Bradley is considered part of a genre called ‘Retro Soul.’ Bradley’s been singing nearly as long as Mavis Staples. But if Staples forged her craft on the stages of music halls, Charles Bradley forged his on the streets of Brooklyn. He heard James Brown in 1962, and immediately knew his destiny. Fifty years later he finally got his debut album. This comes after a decade of making a living as a handyman while impersonating James Brown on the side. Before that working as a cook at a mental institution, and was laid off right after he made a downpayment on his house. Shortly before his debut, his brother was murdered.
If Mavis Staples was a queen of life, then Charles Bradley was a footstool. If Mavis Staples’s music is unending joy, then Charles Bradley’s is raw, cathartic pain. If Mavis Staples’s music is a testament to the optimism of the Black America during the Civil Rights era, then Charles Bradley’s is a testament to all the struggle and heartbreak that followed.

(Why Is It So Hard?)
For me, the most powerful song on his album, No Time for Dreaming, is How Long. Imagine, if you can, that Otis Redding had a few more years and lived to see the MLK assassination and the 68 riots. What sort of music would he have written? Perhaps he’d have gone the sellout route, but I’d like to think that he might have been the great documenter in music of urban disintegration that we’d never had. If this song had come out forty years ago, it could have been the most potent soul song ever sung. And for all we know, as Le Malon pointed out to me, Bradley might have written this 4 decades ago. As it is, what he says in this song is nearly as true today as it was in the days following MLK’s death.
In talking about both of these artists, I’ve missed a crucial element. Both of them very clearly talk in their music about where their attitudes to contemporary America were forged. For Mavis Staples, her worldview comes straight out of the optimism and determination of the 60’s. A fact which you can readily see in the lyrics to Freedom Highway:


(1965)

March for freedom's highway
March each and every day
Made up my mind and I won't turn around
Made up my mind and I won't turn around
There is just one thing
I can't understand my friend.
Why some folk think freedom
Was not designed for all men.
...
Yes I think I voted for the right man
Said we would overcome.

But Charles Bradley, a man formed by the 1970’s projects, is clearly a much more despairing about opportunities, about hopes for our country, about life itself. Just read the lyrics to How Long:



How long
Must I keep going on?
To see all this pain in the world
How long, oh
Tell me, tell me
tell me
How long? o.

Ooh, oh, ow, oh
I talked my brother the other day
he said brother
please, gimme a little fix
huh
I look at him and said
brother, don't leave me (repeat)

How long?
Must you keep suffering like this?

You know how people suffering
they looking for something, something to look up to
they looking for a change

How long?

Well

what I'm gonna do
what i'm gonna say
America!
please hear me...
make this world right, ooh people

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011 # 14

14. Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins

Reading Watchmen has to be one of the oddest aesthetic experiences I’ve ever had. I believe it was only a night or two before my 27th birthday that I saw (was dragged to) the DC premiere of the Watchmen movie. It was, to put it nicely, a piece of crap - unpleasantly violent for no reason, stuffed with heavy-handed symbolism, given to a creepy admiration for authoritarian ideas, and containing the single most awkward sex scene I can remember in any movie I’ve ever watched. Yet I found myself transfixed by the graphic novel on which it’s based.
There’s nothing strange in liking a book of whose movie you hated. What’s weird is that the book was as close to identical to the movie as a book can be - frame for frame by image, word for word by dialogue. Yet things that seemed incredibly stupid on the screen were transfixing on the page.
This graphic novel is as masterful as the movie is incompetent. By now it's a cliche to say that Watchmen is a brilliant sendup of the superhero archetype, or that it describes the dark underbelly of the heroic qualities which Americans venerate, but that doesn't even begin to describe what it accomplishes.
Watchmen is of the few works of art that successfully entertains the disturbing idea that, perhaps, human compassion can and should be subverted. Perhaps it is justifiable to kill millions in an effort to save billions. There is a dark nihlism which pervades this book, not unlike what one finds in Dante or Wagner -- a dispairing disgust at mankind's ability to inflict suffering and destruction on itself. One cannot deny that the message of this book is, in the most profoundly serious way, authoritarian and anti-humanism. Yet so overwhelming is the power with which it argues its point of view that we're compelled to entertain the possibility that such despair is the only legitimate way of looking at the world. We are compelled to be compelled by Watchmen just as we are in a work like The Inferno or The Ring Cycle. It may not give pleasure the way in which Mozart or Calvin and Hobbes do, but it secretes a powerful spell that easily leads to infatuation. Like Dante and Wagner, Alan Moore had to stand the conventions and trivialities of his genre on their heads. In each case, the result is something so imposing that it can haunt you for days afterward - even if you don’t agree with it or find it creepy and sickening.
This is a story which neither a traditional novel nor traditional artwork could render half as effectively. Like all great works, it's form blends seamlessly with its content. A mere look at a panel is all it takes for us to understand the three-dimensional complexity behind each protagonist's archetype with an immediacy no novel can give, and we watch them progress through a narrative which requires enormous virtuosity both in the art of story telling and in the art of making characters' speech sound distinctive. In that way, it reminds me of an artform I know all too well...
All the way back in entry #34 (Game of Thrones) I already admitted never felt the need for comic books or fantasy literature when I was growing up. Both of them deal generally in larger-than-life situations and drama far more extreme than anything we could experience in daily life. How could I feel the need for either comics or fantasy lit to provide that kind of grandiosity when opera already served me so well? It’s only now, in the dotage of my youth, that I’m beginning to understand what I’d been missing. My resentments that the larger world seemed indifferent to the music that obsessed me made me blind to worlds other than my own. Not that it mattered, the worlds of comics, non-classical music, and blockbusters would have done perfectly fine without me. And let’s be clear, the resentments still remain, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate what else exists, nor does it mean that you can’t. If most people reading this can’t love classical music anymore, or any other of the old artistic cultures that seem to be quickly disappearing in our time, the loss is yours. I consider myself enormously lucky that I was able to learn how to deeply love this music in what might be the final years before it disappears from the world’s common vocabulary. I now have the rest of my life to appreciate all the other pop stuff that everybody else already knows. But how long do you have left before your local symphony orchestra disappears? Or your local repertory theater? Or your local art-house cinema? Or even your local library? I’d venture a guess that I’ve spent more time at each than at least 99,999 out of 100,000 people my age at these places. I say that neither to brag nor to regret, merely because I’m thankful. I had supportive, intellectually engaged, parents who never pushed any of this on me, they just saw that I was interested and gave me outlets for it. God knows, I didn’t have ‘normal interests’ as a kid, but as I was growing up I had a bevy of amazing experiences in these regards which no one else my age whom I knew ever did (certainly not as a kid) - and perhaps amazing experiences which few people my age ever will. And that makes me very sad - you’ll never know what you missed.
This is clearly turning into a rant against my fellow nerds and their own cultural prejudices. That was not at all my intention, but I suppose it was inevitable that when I start praising something so seminal to the ‘Nerd Canon’ as Watchmen that I have to show whatever friends might start chanting ‘One Of Us!’ that I’m still not capitulating to the cliches of nerd taste.
I was more ignorant than dismissive of graphic novels. Even after I read Maus when I was 16, it never occurred to me to think of comic books as an artform. From nearly the earliest age I'd loved Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Doonesbury and especially Garfield. But the question of whether comics could be more than mere entertainment had never occurred to me to ask until I was in college. Like all kids, I had the ability to be completely spellbound by what I saw without thinking about its source so long as it was good. It is an ability which we as adults can only strive to emulate.
Which is why I feel comfortable saying that if there is any book of which I’ve ever been sure would make an incredible Wagnerian opera, Watchmen is it. Wagner took the heroic myths of his time and used them as a linchpin for his operas to demonstrate how impossible the dreams of his civilization were to implement in reality. Anyone who loves Watchmen (or V for Vendetta for that matter) should find themselves in a familiar room if they’d ever listen to Wagner. Both opera and comic books share an ability to express emotions on the most primal level. Films get much of their power from implying things that remain unsaid, but in either opera or a graphic novel, most anything that remains unspoken is immaterial to our appreciation of the story.
Paradoxically, this leads to the ability both genres to subtly imply certain things which films and traditional novels never could. Dr. Manhattan's omnipotence does not compel awe on a movie screen, because there is nothing a movie screen cannot show us. But the limitations of a comic strip are such that anything we can imagine Dr. Manhattan doing in our imagination is far more powerful than any feat we watch him do as a movie spectacle. Imagining Dr. Manhattan's inner life would be, I believe, a task which music -- the language of suggestion itself -- can be even more capable of rendering with vividness. Similarly, the sympathetic side of Rorschach's character is dulled by so vividly showing him commit acts of gory violence. Rorschach is the driving engine of the story, we are asked to view most of it through his eyes, and it is very hard to feel any ability to care if its de-facto narrator seems like a cartoon psychopath. In both of these cases, we must imagine what they're thinking even as they seem to speak their minds with total candor. A comic book allows us to use our imaginations to give their actions personal qualities which a faithful movie adaptation, which inevitably does so much of the imaginative work for us, never could. The only artform of which I know that could render this story with similar vividness is opera. A great score could suggest every quality about these characters which a movie never could. Opera, like the comic strip, is a naturally 'hot' medium which values the ability to emote well over subtlety. There will always be a place for subtlety in both genres, but both must firstly tell their stories in vivid, bold emotions and leave their inhibitions at the door. The marriage of opera and comics may seem ridiculous, but the two are natural fits with one another, and experiments to find out if they can be welded together are long overdue.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 17, 16, & 15

I'm finding it tough to write about some of the ones from 23-18, so I'm skipping ahead for the moment to the 'stuffs' I feel really strongly about.


17. A Bend in the River
Read this. My first ever 800 Words entry.

16. How I Met Your Mother


(Pathos, humor, and narcissism in perfect balance)

This was definitely a ‘TV’ year for me. It’s just as well, because in case you haven’t noticed, we’re living in the wake of TV’s true golden age. It’s often said that the Golden Age of Television was the 50’s, when TV was entirely new and before corporations realized how to maximize bottom line profits. But what was greatest about 50’s TV was completely different than what we understand as TV today, it was simply the best of culture transferred to a smaller screen. In television’s beginnings, great writers got a playground to experiment with their most daring ideas. But how can even the best fare of the 50’s can compare with today, when we understand exactly what makes TV effective. Just think of all the cultural monuments TV’s given us in just the last twenty years: Seinfeld, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Stewart and Colbert, Arrested Development, South Park, Big Love, The Office (either/or), Flight of the Concords, the Star Trek resurrection, Big Love, Everybody Loves Raymond, Frasier, Rosanne, The Larry Sanders Show, The West Wing, Family Guy, Six Feet Under, 30Rock, Parks and Recreation, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Weeds, King of the Hill and for those who like the shows more than me, even Lost, 24, Deadwood, Futurama, and The Wire (and these are just the shows that I’ve watched...feel free to beat me up later). Nothing in any artform, not the movies or books or theater or music, can compare to the richness of what’s offered on television today. Will all of these shows hold up in a generation? Certainly not. But I’d argue that future generations will be stunned by just how many will. We’re living in a kind of golden age for television like movies had circa 1940, or the novel circa 1870, or Jacobean drama circa 1610. Somehow, the conditions in Television are such that great art is a little bit easier to make. And the result astonishes the world.
But in the wake of this golden age, there are many shows that strive to be Important with a capital I. Some of them achieve their grandiose ambitions, though not without enormous struggle. But some of them are just stupid. In the same way, some shows are meant to be stupid, and they’re actually amazing with a capital A.
How I Met Your Mother is not just one of the greatest stupid sitcoms ever made, it is one of the greatest sitcoms ever made - and done in an age when the ‘stupid sitcom’ (re: four camera) is supposed to be dead. It is meant to be a harmless show, always pandering to a broad audience, with lots of product placement, and never crossing a line that would offend anyone. The result should be like Two-and-a-Half Men or thousands of sitcoms that were mercifully cancelled before we could remember them. But good television depends on three things: amazing writing, amazing performers, and a camera that stays out of the way. In each case, How I Met Your Mother has that in spades.
Don’t be fooled by the surface schtik and catchphrases, this is a show written and acted almost solely by people who could hold their own in Golden Age Hollywood. Like Golden Age Hollywood, their specialty is pitch-perfect entertainment. Just when the show looks as though it’s about to slip on its own schmaltz, it pulls out a perfectly timed comic gag. Just when it seems like it’s bent the realm of plausibility, it pulls back into a situation of complete relateability. The result is precisely the opposite from the ‘No Learning, No Hugging’ motto of Seinfeld, a comedy in which you’re supposed to care for the characters. Audiences were supposed to be sick of comedies like this twenty years ago, and anyone with half a brain most certainly is (anyone who tells you that Friends is as good as How I Met Your Mother should be shot).
There are a number of difficult tricks which the writers and performers have to execute in every episode. They have to seem like ordinary people, and yet they also have to seem cleverer and more glamorous. And at the same time as that, the characters are routinely put through situations in which they seem arrogant, narcissistic, and downright unlikeable. Yet all throughout, they have to seem as though they are regular people, like the people we know next-door through a flattering enough mirror that we’d want to be around them every week. The result is still more extraordinary, an entertainment that is fundamentally about life as we know it - life as anyone their (my) age might experience it. With all the mundane concerns and unflattering moments intact.
But what’s most amazing is that only now, in the seventh season, does the show seem to be reaching its zenith. The last few weeks have seen the characters at their most solipsistic and messy, with devastating conclusions which yourself caring about in spite of the fact that you tell yourself ‘This is a stupid sitcom, how can I possibly react this way?’ yet the deft comic touch remains even in the most dramatic circumstances. So yes, How I Met Your Mother is a bad sitcom crossed with a bad soap opera. It’s also calls to mind what Chekhov and Hawks could have done with such unpromising material.

15. Boardwalk Empire/Boss:

Here are two shows which both benefit and suffer from the ‘post-Sopranos’ glut. Both of them are trying desperately hard for some sort of ‘definitive statement’ on corruption in American life. Both of them can fall flat as a pancake, but what amazes is how often they succeed.

(In case you’ve forgotten how great an actor Kelsey Grammar is)
Whatever else Boss is, this is the single best written show I have ever seen. It might be betrayed by much of its directing, but nobody can take away the fact that this show has the greatest script of any show I’ve watched. It makes the banal details of politics interesting, it taps into all of our fears of how American politics works, and it has a whole gaggle of larger than life Shakespearean characters. But every episode has directorial choices which threaten to turn the show from potentially the greatest show about politics we’ll ever see into a ludicrous pot boiler. In order to suspend disbelief, we have to edit moments out of the show in our minds. Just after a scene of stunning high drama, we’re plunged into a softcore sex scene which has no reason to be there except that the show is on a network which can do that. Every time the Mayor has an attack brought on by his (fatal) illness, the soundtrack introduces a synthesizer riff so blatantly obvious that the creators must think we’re idiots (and what’s with filming everybody’s eyes?).
It’s doubly a shame, because so much of this show is truly amazing. Ultimately, this is a show about nothing less than the will to power - the person with the will to go to the most extreme lengths for control is the person who succeeds. And those who succeed can only become empty shells, completely alone at the top because they’d long since sold their souls to get there. No doubt, there are people whom the show will strike as heavy-handed. The characters often speak in a kind of elevated American colloquialism that is much grander than most TV fare. Furthermore, most people don’t want to believe that American political officials behave with the kind of sociopathic will to murder, maim, and betray people that we see on Boss. But what ultimately makes Boss such a promising show is that it leaves such concerns at the door. It is an unapologetic, brutal vision of American politics which tells us that we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready to do violence on those who would do us harm. Is it right? I hope not.

(from one of the best episodes of Season 1)
If Boss is trying to say something about the nature of American politics, then Boardwalk Empire is saying something about the nature of American history. It’s yet another show that tries to be ‘important’, and this one catalogues the rise of organized crime in America - displaying the Roaring Twenties as an era over which corruption had absolute control, with The Great Depression as the only possible result.
For a show that went in with hopes so high (its premiere was directed by Martin Scorsese), excitement and disappointment in equal measure is almost a given. This show was supposed to be HBO’s answer to Mad Men, combining Mad Men’s larger statements about history with The Sopranos’ insights into the nature of violence and evil. It was inevitable that the show would not quite meet its expectations. But that it’s come so close as often as it has should amaze people.
Boardwalk Empire has frustrated a lot of critics - every episode seems to introduce a new cadre of characters, and a lot of the episodes are spent with an almost incomprehensible amount of exposition on more story rather than on the characters they have. I think that this perhaps misunderstands the point of the show - we are seeing an entire new world born and in order to see the birth of the Mafia, we have to get the whole picture from Chicago to New York to Atlantic City to Washington to Cincinnati.
But there are certain episodes as powerful as anything in Mad Men or The Sopranos. The last five of this season in particular have been stunning. After a season in a half, the true plot of the show was finally in motion, and once the momentum of tragic events began, it was unstoppable, each new tragic turn more powerful than the last.
One of the more interesting touches of the last five episodes was a flashback to one of the gangsters’ studies at Princeton. The script centers around a literature class in which the Jacobean dramatist, John Fletcher, is studied. I wonder if this wasn’t an admonition and explanation from the writers. If The Sopranos is Shakespeare, then Boardwalk Empire is Jacobean drama: more heavy-handed, not as insightful, often veering into the melodramatic. But nobody can or should deny the visceral thrill it gives.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 25 & 24

25. Treme



(I think this is one of the great finales I’ve ever seen on TV. Nothing happens and yet...)

I like the The Wire. I just don’t think it was the greatest TV show ever made. It’s a Washingtonian’s view of Baltimore - if it can’t show up on a police blotter or in the Sun’s front page, it’s not interesting to the writers. Two of the the show’s three main writers (David Simon and George Pellecanos) grew up in Washington, and it’s at least clear to me that there are certain views of Baltimore that they’ve missed. In The Wire, Baltimore is not Baltimore, Baltimore is a metaphor for the dysfunction of American cities. Granted, I have not seen the whole show (probably I’ve seen about 18 episodes), but it’s clear that there are views of Baltimore which The Wire is plainly not interested in seeing - particularly the history of White Flight and how it contributed to creating today’s Baltimore. The Wire is interested in showing the inner workings of today’s city, but not particularly interested in how the city became what it is. It is interested in the types of people who populate the city, but not particularly interested in what makes the people individual and three-dimensional. And it’s certainly interested in decrying people whose morals are lax, but less interested in portraying the inner conflicts within them.
I can certainly concede that The Wire, in its way, is a great TV show. But it’s great TV in the same way that Emile Zola is great literature - both are examples of kind of naturalism that strives to capture the realities of people’s lives without feeling the need to portray the reality of people. The huge acclaim given The Wire was in part due to people rightly celebrating a show that gives much-needed attention to life in the projects, and partially due to prurient interest and liberal self-congratulation. There is certainly an important place for shows like The Wire, but my inner monologue tends to go apoplectic when people suggest The Wire is the best thing to come out of television. Nobody mistakes Germinal for War and Peace, yet in so many people’s estimation The Wire is a greater show than The Sopranos.
And so I’m going to make a controversial claim (or a claim that would be controversial if anybody important said it): David Simon’s next show, Treme, is better than The Wire. The reception of Treme has been decidedly mixed, and there are lots of people view the show as a terrible letdown after the The Wire’s gritty naturalism. But I personally think it’s a step forward. David Simon knows what works on television better than he did before, and the result is in many ways more interesting.
It’s not like Treme is at all missing The Wire’s grit, but the grit is no longer omnipresent. After a while, the unremitting drabness of Baltimore lives as The Wire depicts them becomes exhausting. But the bright colors of New Orleans come to us screaming with life. Yes, there is still all the murder, and loss, and depravity that you’d expect from New Orleans. But not for a moment are we allowed to forget about the New Orleans of the living. The show gives us a sense of New Orleans through its music, its art, its fashion, its cuisine - you turn the TV off craving Jambalaya. This being a show about New Orleans, it was obvious that Treme would have to delve far more deeply into local history, culture, and customs than The Wire ever did. And so we watch characters whose personalities are far more illuminated than The Wire’s characters ever got the chance to be.
Treme is far from a perfect show. It still retains all of the The Wire’s preachiness, and all its melodramatic caricatures of evil businessmen, power-mad bureaucrats, corrupt politicians, etc. Even so, the very fact that TV now has a showrunner like Simon, so willing to talk about the problems of the underclass is a great start - but it’s only a start. And now he’s making a show in large part about what makes the lives of poor people worth still living. But why couldn’t the poor of Baltimore get this kind of treatment?

24. Hitchens and Ebert - Lions in Winter


I wrote this up last year for a similar list that I never finished. All I can say is that I agree with everything I wrote last year, and I’m glad they’re still around.




It amazes me how often we hear this same story: so many people of our generation didn’t come to reading Roger Ebert through developing a passion for movies. They developed a passion for movies through reading Roger Ebert. There was a period in the early-to-mid-90’s when every middle-class household seemed to have an Ebert movie guide. Soon thereafter, every one of his movie reviews and articles got posted on CompuServe, and soon after that he started his own website. For all those decades when Ebert was so omnipresent, it has been fashionable to rag on him for being too generous to mediocre movies and dumbing down criticism with the TV show "Siskel and Ebert" (would that most of today's TV critics could discuss movies on their level...). But what they (at times ‘we’) all missed was that Ebert’s zealous passion for all aspects of his job was clearly just a facet of his larger zeal for life: for food and drink (obviously), for books, for art, for women (and apparently they loved him right back..), for friends, for family, and anything else that enriched. But it was not until Ebert was so debilitated that he found a metier through which we could perceive his life for everything it is.
And with his Pulitzer for Criticism now thirty-five years in the past, Ebert may have only reached the peak of his influence in the past year. Horribly disfigured by thyroid cancer and left without the ability to eat, drink or speak, Ebert has taken to the age of blogging and twitter with a naturalness stunning for anyone in their late 60’s. But there’s simply no adjective to describe the stunning ease with which a person in his condition took to an entirely new technology. Perhaps he understands things about how to use the internet that younger, more fit people never could. Roger Ebert’s blog is simply like nothing else on the internet. Like clockwork, a fully formed essay arrives every week on topics ranging from loneliness to alcoholism to politics to illness. Ebert delves into the most personal crevasses of his experience, and perhaps for the first time in my experience of the blogosphere, the result is wisdom instead of TMI. Self revelation rarely results in deeper appreciation, but Ebert has a humanity that few people are capable of allowing themselves, and through his emotional generosity he’s created a community of ‘the neglected.’ The comments section is filled with posts from all sorts of people who for the first time in their lives feel confident that there is a place where they can share the most personal parts of their lives, openly and without judgement or prejudice. Go to any Ebert blogpost and you find hundreds of extraordinarily well-written essays in of themselves which seem to be written by a confluence of hundreds of articulate, lonely teenagers looking to find a place where people like them belong, unwell people who are desperate to remember how they functioned in their illness’s remission, unhappy people who never got the chance they should have for life to hear their voices. These are all people who thought the world was divided into those who are broken and those who are not, but through each other they all seem to have realize that there is no such division....Or at least there should never be..
It is through Ebert’s example that so many of them found the courage to tell stories of their own: lives torn apart by tragedy, by mental illness, by the unfairness of circumstance. And yet through Roger Ebert each of them has discovered that they have a story to tell and a public who will listen. Only a man of very deep good will could have created something so consoling, so unique and so unforseen that (I don’t use this word lightly) it has enriched the lives of so many whose lives desperately needed enrichment. Had Roger Ebert died on the operating table, life would have been far the poorer for what all these people would have lost.



Christopher Hitchens is, in so many ways, Ebert’s polar opposite: A professional quarreller who derives relish from mutual hatred, a stubbornly analog bibliophile in the Age of the Internet; a thinker with revulsion for doubt, and a contrarian who asks no corner in public debate because he gives none. And yet through all that bombast, he carries in tandem an elemental force of personality capable of convincing anyone of his beliefs simply by the gusto with which he argues. Abrasive as he is, his whole career as a political commentator is marked by an eagerness to face all challenges, stand by the tenets of his beliefs, and blithe unconcern with whom he alienates. Even if Hitch is wrong much of the time, his wrongness feels right. In France it used to be said "better right with Sartre than wrong with Raymond Aron." Sartre may have been a terribly sloppy thinker and a pernicious influence on all sorts of people (no doubt Hitchens agrees), but he defined 'engagement' in an era when so much of the world wanted to turn its back on all but the most narrow self-interests. When I was a wee college lad, I'm a little embarrassed to say that Hitchens became a personal role model - and thanks to him I styled myself a corduroy-jacket wearing, chain smoking booze hound. I had a column about various campus goings on at American University, and I put whatever gift for writing I have to writing about all sorts of people around the AU campus with the kind of hatchet job execution-style which I learned from reading the Hitch (it made at least a little more sense at the time). It was the most fun I've ever had writing, it also ruined whatever little career as a writer I could have had after college.
Political policy, in reality, should always be an extremely boring thing: full of endless meetings, charts and bar graphs. But most people come to politics through romantic notions and dreams of standing the world on its head. Even if people who believe so fervently are dangerous, they are absolutely necessary. Without developing a youthful passion for engagement and causes, there would be no one willing to carry on the endless, boring hurdles of affecting change.
I remember seeing Hitch earlier this year on Jon Stewart and thinking that he looked terrible. As it turned out, that was the very same day on which he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Within a matter of weeks, Hitch had written multiple essays on the experience of receiving the news, its development, and its metastasis. And all these were written in addition to the regular political columns and book reviews which he continued to provide. Hitch was never the loose canon everyone thought him to be, but in what may be his final illness, the world is finally discovering his human side. The barbs are still there, but for the first time in his writing life, Hitch seems to have some curiosity about and compassion for his opponents. His rage is no more temperate, but the illness seems to have given him more compassion about the people at which he rages.
If anyone doubts that in illness, Hitch is a more compassionate man. Read this essay. For the first time that I've read, he has nice things to say about his opponents. And maybe it's simply because they have nicer things to say about him than he thought were possible, but they've endowed him with the one literary gift Hitch always seemed to lack: empathy. But even as he softens, none of his other literary talents have weakened along with his body. Hitch may well be dying, but he seems determined to chronicle to chronicle his physical breakdown with all the foolhardy courage that he brought to every other endeavor. In the words of Andrew Sullivan, ‘cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against.’

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 27 & 26

27. George Steiner - My Brilliant Idiot



Of all the brilliant idiots in all the world, George Steiner is my very favorite. Oh my is he brilliant, and oh my is he an idiot. Here is a man who seems able to quote the entire Western Canon on instant neurological recall, yet can’t see anything about the world further away than what he reads on the page. I once saw a video of him at a gathering of intellectuals, he was sarcastically asked by Martha Nussbaum if he would give up Proust to abolish slavery. His immediate reply was ‘Absolutely not.’ Everything in his scholarship has sentences which read like "Arthur Koestler’s adnumbration of the mimetic is one of the seminal conceptions of the transcendental mysterium in our epoch." Like the similarly grandiloquent Harold Bloom, George Steiner doesn’t write literary criticism, he writes literary criticism porn (y’know...I’m a bit weirded out by how often porn comparisons are appearing on this list). And the intellectually insecure among us thrill to the very idea that someone could be so very learned, and we drink in that thrill with relish. Who knew that within a single sentence, a writer can advise us about the connections between Proust, Plato, Pythagoras, Pasternak, Pound, and Plotinus which we would never think of on our own, even had we read all of their complete works a dozen times?
But even so, there is something about Steiner that I can’t help finding wonderful. I first wamed to George Steiner when I watched the interview I embedded above. At 4:20, Steiner tells the story of being a disabled child and the absolute joy he derived when he was finally able to do something as simple as tie his shoes. As it happens, the day I finally learned to tie a knot when I was ten years old was also the most thrilling day of my entire childhood. From the moment I heard this story, I could not help but see Steiner with more sympathy than many other readers (perhaps rightly) think he deserves. I may disagree with the conclusion he takes from his story. I may think that if I’d grown up in the highest Viennese/Parisian society (like Steiner), I’d have had a lot more willpower to overcome my own childhood handicaps. But I can’t help thinking that I understand why this brilliant moron feels the need to be so brilliant and so moronic.
Steiner’s work is as unfashionable as unfashionable gets - reverence for high culture, for the importance of book learning, the belief that ideas are a matter of life and death. These are all precepts that you have to believe in if you read even an article by George Steiner with anything but agony. But all these ideas, if they’re still considered by people at all, are remnants of the bygone middlebrow era. Perhaps it’s the middlebrow of Postwar America that would tune in to hear Toscanini conduct the NBC Symphony after the Notre Dame-Michigan football game was over. Perhaps it’s the middlebrow of 19th-century England and Germany, in which a father would attend to the parlour piano for an evening of accompanying his cello-playing daughter and then abscond to a night in the whorehouse. Either way, there is something extremely commonplace about the idea that great art, whatever your definition of that term may be, can and should be spiritually sustaining. If you want to be viewed as a true highbrow in today’s world, you have to scoff at the very idea that an attempt at profundity can ennoble.
And perhaps today’s highbrows are absolutely right. Perhaps ‘great art’ is a racket that allows theater groups and symphony orchestras to pull in money that would otherwise be spent on more absorbing entertainment like sports or fashion. But if you believe that there is something about art which sets it apart, or perhaps ‘higher,’ than various forms of entertainment, then someone like Steiner has incredible value.
But if Susan Sontag ever wanted to treat these ‘lower-brow’ artforms with any more reverence than a cheap thrill of something ephemeral and lower class, she would be completely at a loss to describe it (though Camille Paglia did better). It’s probable that there is just as much ‘art’ in the best played games of sport or the best-designed clothes as any great novel or play. But even if there is, there will have to be gatekeepers who separates the great from the good from the bad, and shows what makes each of the great works something more than a toy to be discarded when we lose interest. Perhaps someone like George Steiner (who also claims to be a college football fan) will never understand what is great about clothing styles (to say nothing of movies and rock music), but if critics ever want to treat De La Soul and Coco Chanel as artists whose accomplishments are on a plane with Picasso and Stravinsky (and lest there be any doubt, they should!) it’s the example set by critics like Steiner that we will have to follow if we want to continue to talk about what makes great art great.
George Steiner is an inveterate intellectual name-dropper whose inaccuracies have been extremely well documented. But to read him is to have a genuine sense of the awe which great artistry should instill in all of us. There are many things in his writing that feels synthetic, but his love of artistic greatness is not one of them.

26. HiLoBrow.com

I’d be hard pressed to find a website I find less addictive - but it’s surprisingly difficult to say what it is. So I’ll leave it at a very, very basic description. In brief, it’s a veritable encyclopedia of brief tributes to cultural artifacts, figures, and ideas from around the world. The sole criteria for a tribute is that it cannot be ‘middlebrow.’
Its current front page has a wonderfully thoughtful review of Rise of Planet of the Apes, a tribute to Ted Knight (Ted Baxter from the Mary Tyler Moore show), a piece of poetry from one of the site’s ounders, a suggestion of an unmarketable comic strip about the 60’s that was just released for the first time as a gift idea, a tribute to Nazi deconstructionist Paul De Man, a brief disquisition on wage slavery, a consideration of space in the photography of Jan Lemitz, a tribute to Damia the French Chausoniere, an essay on Orson Welles’s movie Touch of Evil, not to mention tributes to Ozzy Osbourne, Stefan Zweig, Etta Jones, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Botho Strauss, Katheryn Bigelow, whaling songs, a Philip K Dick novel, moths, beards, junkyards, and cornbread.
In the various sub-pages we find descriptions of each generation of Americans from the founding of America onward. But they define a generation as no more than a decade, so there will at some point be 37 different sub-pages to describe the particular characteristics of each American generation. Recently an entry appeared called the ‘Civil War Facial Hair Smackdown.’. All sorts of observations appear on contemporary politics and culture, but they’re mostly from an aesthetic point-of-view rather than a moral/political one. There is all sorts of poetry of a different variety (one recent one is called the Gothamiad, one chapter of that is called ‘Batman in the Garden of Eden’). There’s a whole section devoted to Science Fiction, another to weird images (no other specified criteria), and simply another to weird things that happen. Numerous entries have appeared recently for retro pictures of people who look like hipsters (rather than the other way around)...if Borges and John Waters made a website....
There’s only one problem with this. Once you collect enough high and low brow stuff and mash them into a single currency, all you’ve done is create a new concept of middlebrow. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, except that a site like hilowbrow effects precisely the opposite sort of change from what it wants.
Such is the way of the world. When people are starved for new ways of looking at themselves, they search far and wide for new perspectives, from sources both high and low. The end result invariably is a new middlebrow currency that can be digested by people from all walks of life. Middlebrow is as much part of the solution as high or lowbrow, but it requires intelligent people on society’s margins who will introduce new concepts that may prove shocking at first. But eventually, the ‘common folk’ assimilates these new concepts and accepts them as self evident. Which of course means that people on the margins must start looking for new ways to rebel. And the cycle continues...

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 30, 29 & 28

30. Actually Reading The Bible, er....The Book of Genesis

What the f(*& am I going to say that’s new about The Bible? I know it, you know it, we all know The Bible. God makes the earth, tells Abraham to go to Israel, tells Moses to get the Jews out of Egypt. Then David kills Goliath, and God’s son dies for saying that we should all get along, and eventually God destroys the earth. Booyah.
Apparently, religious people actually read this thing all the time. But I find it hard to believe that anybody except for some particularly autistic Rabbinical students actually get through Leviticus. When people say that they read The Bible ‘cover-to-cover’, my first reaction is ‘No you didn’t,’ my second is ‘Why?’ I suppose the inevitable answer is some variation of ‘because it’s the truth.’
I’d estimate the actual times in my life where religion seemed compelling adds up to a combined three weeks. But after actually reading Genesis, I can understand why others find it much moreso than I do. I’d have been much more malleable if I went to a religious school that doesn’t skimp on the stuff we never hear about in Parochial/Day/Sunday/Hebrew School. There’s something bizarrely comforting about knowing that the wrath of God might deign to destroy us in ways that we would find really cool if we weren’t the ones being destroyed. Religion brings out our inner sadist, and we all have one. How else can anyone explain an auto da fe? Or religious sacrifice? Or responsive readings? There is always comfort in knowing that they’re the problem, not you.
There are reams of The Bible as dry as any academic paper. There are also passages of prose and poetry, images, thoughts, epigrams in Genesis alone that resound so powerfully as to compare to anything in Shakespeare, Chaucer, Chekhov, Kafka, Auden etc. (make your own list).
So if so much of The Bible stands up to critical valuation, why does it need to be true? Ah yes, people are dumb.

29. The Google Reader Utopia (RIP)

Google giveth, Google taketh away. God rest thy soul Google Reader. From dust (bytes?) thou art and to dust thou hast returned.
Google has reformed GR so destructively that it is now like a friend had a stroke and lost everything that once made him interesting and fun to be around. Going on there is now as sad as it is unfair. Google Reader was what Facebook should be - a place that encouraged people to be smarter, better informed, and to engage with one another.
The premise was simple - whoever went on GR could share whatever articles, blogposts, and images they particularly liked and disliked with friends, often with their own commentary provided above, and if the friends wished to they could then comment below. And whatever was stirred up in our thoughts of the moment could turn into a discussion about permanent things - a protected online space where we could share our deeply held ideas, beliefs, feelings, and occasionally even secrets.
It might be true that the only paradise is a paradise lost, and certainly there are arguments for Google Reader as something far less than an Elysian social network. Over and over again, heated, personal disagreements could break out among friends that threatened to break up friendships. But the people who shared on GR (at least my people) resembled a family like any other, and families will always fight about many things.
And now this little family of ours is like intellectual refugees, displaced without a home, without roots, and only the wistful nostalgia that lets us remember better days.

28. Fall Baseball

It began with the most important Oriole game since 1997. On September 28th, 2011, the Baltimore Orioles put the Boston Red Sox out of contention. For fourteen years, 2,267 games, there was not a single game of consequence for the Orioles. My team had finished below .500 every year. The Orioles had two types of seasons: seasons when all our high hopes for quality in the season’s first half were proven utterly futile, and seasons when hope for quality was futile from the first game onward.
Here, finally, was a game worth watching. But the truth remains that even this game looked to be yet another mediocre abortion of an O’s game until two were out in the ninth inning. We were behind in a low scoring pitchers game that we were as always going to lose. When the seventh inning saw a rain delay, I left the TV and went back to my room. Two hours later, Jordan yelled at me from across the house to come back. Chris Davis had just doubled with two out in the bottom of the ninth and Reimold was up. I got back just in time to see Nolan Reimold hit another double which for a split-second looked as though it would go out of the park. Finally, Robert Andino hit a bloop single to left which not even Carl Crawford could catch on a slide, and the game was over.
We won, we may have lost 93 games this year, we may have lost Oriole legend Mike Flanagan to suicide, but we stopped the hated Red Sox from going to the Post-Season - the hated Red Sox, whose fans would occupy our stadiums for two weeks of every year and berate whatever few Orioles fans were still loyal enough to go to Oriole Park. The invincible Red Sox, who until then were 77-0 this year in games they were winning after eight innings. And even that shouldn’t have mattered, because the only way that the Red Sox were not going to the playoffs was if the Tampa Bay Rays beat the New York Yankees. The Rays - an expansion team which still hasn’t won a World Series and was 9 games behind the Wild Card race on September 1st. And in the last game of the year, the Yankees were leading the Rays 7-0 in the eighth inning! The Rays scored 6 in the eighth, and tied the game on what otherwise would have been the very last pitch: a two out, two strike solo homer from a player so bad that his last hit in the major leagues was on April 27th.
And that was just one of the amazing stories of September 28th, 2011 - a day they’re now calling the greatest day in the history of baseball: A two-hit complete game shutout against the Reds from the Dodgers’ Miguel Batista. The underachievng Chris Carpenter threw a similar two hit complete game shutout for the Cardinals against the Astros, catapulting the Cardinals over the Braves for the Wild Card berth. The Braves, who in late August were 101/2 games above the Cardinals, lost in the thirteenth inning because Rookie of the Year Craig Kimbrel couldn’t close a game for virtually the only time the whole season.
The Pennant Chase is often an unpredictable, wildly exciting part of baseball. But there haven’t been two simultaneous pennant chases with results this improbable since 1973. And that was only the beginning.
When the dust had cleared on the Postseason, it had 13 one-run games. The two perennial favorites to win (the Yankees and Phillies) were knocked out in the first round in the last games of their respective series, both losing in their home parks by only one run. In the second round, the Rangers’ Nelson Cruz hit the first ever game winning grand slam in MLB history, and did it in the eleventh inning. Two games later, Cruz hit a game-winning three-run homer, it was also in the 11th. And then came the World Series...
Let’s forget that it went to seven games. Let’s forget that Albert Pujols tied virtually every single-game hitting record in existence in Game 3. Let’s just focus on the inevitable, Game 6 - already being spoken of as the greatest individual baseball game ever played..The only world series game in which a team came down to its final strike before losing the entire series twice and still won. The only World Series game in which one team trailed five times and still won. The only World Series game in which a team found itself losing in the ninth inning and in extra innings yet still won. The only World Series game in which two players hit go-ahead runs in extra innings. The only World Series game in which players scored in the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh innings.
When it comes to sports-music analogies, baseball is as much classical music as basketball is jazz and football is rock. Yes, sometimes the boredom label synonymous with baseball is quite deserved. But anyone with the patience to not demand instant gratification every moment will see a level of suspense and intensity which even the most exciting football and basketball games would be hard-pressed to match. I’m reminded of my old high school teacher Mr. Lord’s comment on baseball: only boring people can think baseball is boring.
It was a postseason so fantastic, even the Orioles got to contribute to it. 2011 will go down in baseball lore as the most exciting postseason baseball has ever experienced. But this is baseball, records are made to be broken.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 33, 32 & 31

33. Jack Black - Gulliver’s Travels (that’s right, it’s good)


(If you do not laugh at this...this movie is not for you. Kind of NSFW, language.)

For the last ten years, there is one question that preoccupies my every waking moment; how can Jack Black have a good movie career? Like all the great movie stars, Jack Black is one of the world’s most indelible brands, a one-joke comedian whose joke never ages. In everything he does, he is Jack Black - the force of nature with entirely too much confidence for a fat guy, and that confidence is hilarious. Virtually every Tenacious D song (that I know) is a mock tribute to the epic power-ballads of the early 70’s, with Jack Black inevitably cast as the hero. Virtually every movie in which he stars asks us to consider Jack Black as a heroic character, and it never fails to be funny, just because the very idea of Jack Black as a movie hero is hilarious in itself.
But it wasn’t until I saw Gulliver’s Travels that I finally got my first good night’s sleep in a decade. Critics hated it the movie being unserious to the original, and moviegoers ignored it doubtless for fear that it might be too literate. The truth is, no, it’s not a faithful adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, nor is it quite as fantastically juvenile as some of his other movies (though it comes close many times).
Basically, this is a movie where nobody has a pretense to act as though playing at anything but ‘hey, this is Jack Black in a literary adaptation,’ and Jack Black’s brand seems to rub off on everything from the screenplay (my personal favorite line: ‘Please use your indoor castle voice.’), to the casting choices (only in a Jack Black movie could Billy Connolly be a legitimate choice to play a King), to the production (my favorite set-piece is the Lilliputians enacting scenes of Gulliver’s stories of adventures in his world: which consist of scene from Star Wars, Titanic and Lord of the Rings).
It will probably never happen, but the way to save Jack Black’s career would be to create a whole series of literary adaptations around him: Jack Black’s Faust (with Vince Vaughan as Mephistopheles), Jack Black’s The Odyssey (with Jonah Hill as Telemachus), Jack Black’s Don Quixote (perhaps as Sancho with Will Ferrell as the Don), Jack Black’s Metamorphosis. Jack Black could get through the entire Great Books catalogue and middle schoolers would never have to get through another book report....though I’m not sure how you could film Spinoza’s Ethics.

32. Vinni Pukh - The Soviet Winnie the Pooh



(Is what I’ve written below some kind of parody? I’m not sure.)
It’s a little amazing to think that the Soviet Union would ever allow a book like Winnie the Pooh to be filmed. Winnie the Pooh is exactly the sort of book which you’d think the Soviet authorities would find offensive - a bear who steals honey from worker bees, visits friends during the work-day, and consumes every last bit of other people’s hard-earned honey. Winnie the Pooh is precisely the sort of 100 Acre Wood bourgeois plutocrat to which the Commissars would take offense. What made the Soviet Union such a scary place was that this is precisely how Soviet bureaucrats thought, even if it seems absurd to us. But these shorts were made in the early 70’s, when the clampdown on freedom of expression was relatively lax in comparison to what it had been earlier in the Soviet Era.
But frankly, this Winnie-the-Pooh blows the Disney version out of the water. The Disney version is what it always is: well-drawn, with good production values, and an eye for the kind of adorableness that can sell billions of dollars in merchandise. The drawing in Vinni Pukh is extremely crude (Vinni doesn’t even have thighs to connect his torso to his knees), but it hews closer to the source material than Disney ever dared. In some ways, this Winnie-the-Pooh is nowhere near as loveable - he’s seen in no uncertain terms manipulating his friends, putting his own desires over friends’ needs, oblivious to his friends’ wishes. But this is a kid’s tale so he always gets his comeuppance.
I suspect that this is much closer to what A A Milne had in mind. Winnie the Pooh is unfailingly polite, with all the old-world courtliness of a country gentleman, and concealed beneath his manners and deep-sounding ruminations beats the (undoubtedly clogged) heart of a sociopath.
Then again, Winnie the Pooh was always my favorite character as a kid. Pooh’s a lazy fatso who’s always hungry and says extremely dumb things as though they’re intelligent....I’ve seen someone like that somewhere else....

31. The Borgias - The TV Show



I hated, hated, hated The Tudors. I didn’t hate it because it was a travesty of history, or because the production values glammed up a world shaped by diseases transmitted through feces. I hated The Tudors because it reduced one of the most fascinating epochs the world had ever experienced to a midnight Skinemax soft-core. It was literally soft porn masquerading as history. One of the least commented effects of easy access to internet porn is the disappearance of allegedly high-class movies which were really an excuse for pornography - these movies can be as different as Last Tango in Paris and Lady Caroline Lamb, but in both cases the primary objective was arousal and both provided an intellectual high-gloss as cover. There is still an audience for work like The Tudors, but it’s fundamentally an older audience.
It would be lying to say that The Borgias does not have a similar soft-core element to it. And as a portrayal of history, it’s not great (even if it’s leagues better than The Tudors). But as an introductory discourse on what makes Renaissance Italy an even more amazing period of history than Renaissance England, The Borgias is superb.
If The Tudors is about putting a gloss on history which it didn’t have, then The Borgias is about showing the motives of powerful people as they actually are - with all the evil, betrayal, perversion, greed, hypocrisy, and ugliness that should imply. There is no attempt to hide the fact that The Borgias were anything but evil people whose moments of goodness were all too rare. Yet just as in The Godfather, we invariably side with them. It seems as though their way is the way things are done, and they just happen to be still more ruthless than anyone else. But who’s to say The Borgias were not the lesser evil? When evil ruled a land as it did for so long in Italy, perhaps some family would have come along that made The Borgias seem like saints.
Few things in The Borgias are prettified. Yes, the sex is often prettified, but the violence is most certainly not, and the motives of the people are always precisely as ugly as they seem. Like all the great movies about crime, what makes The Borgias work is that it dares us to like people to whom we should be repulsed, and we like them because some demented recess of our psyches encourages us to do the same.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 35 and 34

I am not a typical blogger. I do not falsely claim knowledge of every movie, book, or album to come out in the last year. I’m merely a smarty-pantz who has occasional delusions of grandeur that one day he could be that guy who can claim knowledge of every movie, book, or album ever made when we’re all too old to beat each other up for being nerds.

This list will be about new ‘Cultural Stuffs,’ meaning ‘cultural stuffs’ that is new for me, and no one else. I’ll be ranking it in terms of what blew my mind the most. So...let’s get to it.



35. Animal Collective Fans


(Soooooooo deeeeeeeep.)

I’m only three years younger than Animal Collective’s musicians, and I grew up not ten minutes away from all four of them. I have a cousin who was their high school classmate and friend. But I have to be honest - Animal Collective’s music is hilariously overrated. I once heard their music described as “two Beach Boys’ albums playing simultaneously,” but it’s too complementary by half to mention them and The Beach Boys in the same sentence. Some artists create a kind of self-consciously lofty kitsch which is at best entertaining and at worst a last word in boredom. But intellectually insecure people inevitably mistaken this kind of kitsch for profundity. I have a personal list of artists who play that trick on people that goes on for ages and would seem like intellectual namedropping even for this blog (because whatever my intellectual faults, insecurity is not one of them:).
As music, the Animal Collective Concert which I went to this summer was pretty dull. As an experience, it was one of the most amazing concerts to which I’ve ever been. I have never seen an audience so enraptured, so viscerally involved in a performance as Animal Collective’s fans were this July at Merriweather Post Pavilion. It seemed less like a concert than a religious rite. Not a dull Anglican church service, but a Revivalist Mega-Church where half the people convulse while speaking in tongues and the other half sit in reverential silence until the music ends, at which point both halves explode as a single body into a frenzied roar. And lest my prim and classical self get called out for being naive, let me assure you, I’ve been to more than my share of concerts where the druggie contingent was plentiful and quite visible. But the hard drugs contingent usually takes up their own corner of the concert and make at least a pretense to discretion. I suppose drugs could explain part of this euphoria, but nowhere near the whole. The ecstasy on display at this concert was far more primal than drugs. There is clearly something in this music which inspires a euphoric sort of experience in people (though not in me). Perhaps what I was seeing was just mood music, a soundtrack for a lifestyle. But I felt exactly like what Mark Twain described about visiting Bayreuth, sight of the still-extant (and how) festival of Wagner operas: “I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in the community of the mad.....But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life....I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.” What Twain saw was something far more spiritual than most organized religion. He saw people mesmerized, infatuated, spellbound, by the kind of music that gives a far more religious experience than religion. That is what I saw in Animal Collective: a band not good enough for The Beach Boys, but good enough for Wagner.

34. Game of Thrones - The TV Show


(Some critic I can’t remember called this “The Greatest Use of Nudity in TV History.” I can’t help agreeing. As trash goes, this is utterly fantastic and tells a primal myth with awesome urgency. In case you’re too dumb to get it from the first sentence, it’s NSFW.)

Fantasy Literature is not for me. It’s a shame to declare this, because the list of people whom Fantasy Literature is most definitely ‘for’ numbers half my friends and one of my brothers. But I just don’t see it. And I can’t help thinking something a little creepy about privileged American kids in the 21st century spending years of their lives learning about fantasy worlds - particularly Jewish kids. Ashkenazi Jews spent a millenium trying to escape the brutality of precisely the sort of medievalish Northern European realms which fantasy literature is inevitably meant to recall (come on people, ‘dwarf’ was a euphemism for ‘Jew’ long before the Brothers Grimm and Wagner), and only a century after they got out, their spoiled American great-grandchildren want to go back.
I certainly understand the appeal of the sorts of parallel worlds one finds in fantasy books, but I frankly have enough trouble understanding our own to start thinking about a different one. So if there isn’t some sort of vast network of ambiguous motivations in either the human or the idea realm, I generally read about all those swordfights, spells, mythical creatures, and medievalish battles with disinterest well past narcoleptic. For all those reasons, I can like the Harry Potter series very much at the same time that I think The Hobbit is the worst book I’ve ever read - a title which I’m sure would be supplanted by Lord of the Rings if I ever finished it. There are plenty more fantasy books that I’ve read...er...started, and one day I’m sure I’ll make a concerted effort to finish them. Perhaps I’ll then discover that I adore everything about Fantasy Literature, but until that day, Fantasy Lit. is not for me.
When that day arrives, I will read more than a couple chapters from the Song of Fire and Ice which my brother Ethan, my resident fantasy lit scholar, swears is the best series he’s ever read. I certainly see the appeal - sex, murder, S&M, betrayal, fetishes, torture, who doesn’t like a story with all that? But let’s be honest here - everybody has their own outlet for those sorts of primal tales. And I never needed superhero comics or fairy tales, I had opera.
As a book, my problem with Game of Thrones was that the characters seemed uniformly wooden and boring. Yes, they die and dismember and fuck with impressive frequency, but not for a moment did I believe in them as anything more than plot points. It’s all too easy to read about the death of a character in which you have no investment. And the end result of Game of Thrones seemed to be a bunch of characters whose sole reason to exist is for us to watch them killed.
But the TV series is entirely different. On the page, Game of Thrones is dreary and heavy-handed. On the screen, Game of Thrones comes to wonderful, trashy life. Scenes that take an eon in the book to describe are dispensed of in two minutes. Scenes of unprecedented violence in the book whose descriptions feel creepily loving are played up with comic hamminess in the TV show. All that sex and violence which the books make lugubrious and funeral spring to an incredible comic vitality on the screen. The sex on the screen is very funny at worst, and at best it can be genuinely hot. Furthermore, violence takes far less time to describe with images than with words - so the audience is not left to wonder why the author cares more about violence than he does about character motivation. As a TV show, Game of Thrones is total and unapologetic trash. And for that quality, I think it will never be forgiven by many people who take the books seriously as high literature. But as far as trash goes, this is awesome.