JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Steve Martin keeps churning out the yuks at his twitter feed. Martin is such a witty, talented fellow.

He sets a premise and then comes up with a laugh out loud tweet. Most recently — the setup being he is trying to “class up” his tweets — Martin offers quotations:

“Armpits are funny.” Aristotle

It was Charles Dickens who said, “A Tale of Two Cities is a great title for one of my novels, but which one?”

Lie to Me is a show that was a good idea but never worked. Tim Roth has a bad case of Jon Lovitz’ SNL Great Thespian. The entire show is about Tim and his acting turns. The Other Great Thespian James Woods had the same problem in his last TV outing. Too much James. In every scene, always right in any disagreement, always the center of attention. Remember Seinfeld? Everyone on the show had their star turns. Seinfeld understood and was generous to his colleagues. Michael Caine said that when another actor does a great job in a movie he is overjoyed. It makes his job easier. Caine understands.

House as well has tanked after hardly surfacing. It was a show that worked for awhile but turned into another show with cute relationship David Kelley banter. What happened to the creator’s idea that House would be a mystery where the criminal was the disease? The writers don’t trust the premise of their own show and go for mawkish and ingratiating. BTW, What is it with TV lead male actors and their unshaven slovenly presence onscreen? Is that more real? The Great Thespian drools for the camera; no real plot, gibberish interactions with clever jokes. The only game in town and they know it.

With so much to think about in this time of recession and international turmoil, the press continues its own celebrity turn — the intolerable commentators serving their affinity herd or the corporation. Evan White on Inside Washington has become nearly the only commentator who appears to be parsing events rather than looking over his shoulder.

Netflix, which was supposed to be a refuge from all of the above has been for awhile the world’s greatest bin of B movies. Movies you would never watch but for what else is on. Once in awhile you hit something but it is rare indeed. One thing you learn is how hard it must be to make a movie, or perhaps how little anyone cares if it is good or not. Make it and they will come, seems to be motto. The only game in town.

We’ve been listening to audiobooks downloaded from the library using the Overdrive console. They are heavy on WMA format, leaving Mac users in the lurch, but have enough to divert. We have been listening to Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami’s excellent mystery, given a good performance reading. It is a little harder going with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, a Chilean high-mystery conundrum of a book. You don’t feel you are wasting your time at least.

The real problem with herd mind is there is no responsibility. No responsibility, no shame, no accountability. Read the Comments sections of online discussion sites and you can see the struggle both to expel the impure (being wrong) and to affirm purity. In those venues this is expressed as an attempt to look smart; or at least smarter.

Lost like the rutting creatures in the street in Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, ideologues are part of a frenzy group. That is what ideologues seek — belonging. In the modern world, so alienating with its virtual friendships, it is understandable. Hollow belonging is better than no belonging.

Ideologues are conformists. They are called partisans in the media, but they are conformists. Ideologues do have distinct beliefs, but they are so mangled by their need to affirm their affinity group they squander their common sense along the way.

Those who seek the herd with such alacrity have numerous examples of the ostracism that comes with not uttering the (politically) correct meme, so they trade their individuality for their belonging. On the left you are a bigot if you don’t agree. On the right you are a socialist (it used to be a commie).

Herd mind gives us clichés, memes, TV nightly news, and the deadness of media culture. The throb of the personal, with its individuality and surprises was easy to discard in the public square — it is uncomfortable to adjust to ambiguities or try and expand your thinking.

Where can you run when they are all rutting in the streets?

REPORT FROM JURY DUTY: Attorneys presenting “evidence.” Since when are security photos, DNA, and testimony evidence? Trusting intuition.

 
That’s a tweet from Steve Martin The Comedian at jury duty. He has a longer job title but for me he is a comedian. A very gifted comedian.

The jury duty idea is really a setup for a series of gags. Hilarious.

These others were culled by deadline.com:

REPORT FROM JURY DUTY: guy I thought was up for murder turns out to be defense attorney. I bet he murdered someone anyway.
REPORT FROM JURY DUTY: Prosecuting attorney. Don’t like his accent. Serbian? Going with INNOCENT. We’re five minutes in.
REPORT FROM JURY DUTY: I’m cracking up defense with my jokes. Judge not pleased. Defendant finds me funny. Nice guy!
REPORT FROM JURY DUTY: Defendant’s hair looking very Conan-y today. GUILTY.
REPORT FROM JURY DUTY: Finally, jurors are deliberating. I’m bored, so I’m making a list of my films in order of greatness.
REPORT FROM JURY DUTY: Lunch break. Discussing case with news media gives me chance to promote my book.
REPORT FROM JURY DUTY: Now forcing my autograph on other jurors. Also starting whisper campaign of innocence based on Magic 8 Ball.

Captain Beefheart died on Friday. He did not want to be known as Captain Beefheart, but as an artist using his real name, Don Van Vliet. He wanted to distance himself from his musical beginnings. Why I do not know. Tom Waits, and many others, owed a debt which they acknowledged. Part performance art, part Dada goof, part interesting music —he was an original. He and Zappa mapped a unique region in the popular culture.

His obit says,

By shunning commercial success and a more accessible sound, Van Vliet became a role model for subsequent generations of musicians. His music is cited as an influence on the rise of punk, post-punk and new wave. Beefheart is also claimed as a kindred spirit by free jazz musicians and avant-garde classical composers.

Maybe he was concerned his paintings would not be taken seriously if his other life as Beefheart were attached. He must not have realized that what is taken seriously in the pop world and art bureaucracy as well is making lots of money.

He considered himself a painter. He got his break when Julian Schnabel had a show at the SFMoMA and was asked by the director if Schnabel knew of any interesting artists in the area. This is an odd question for the director of a San Francisco museum to ask of a NY artist, but such is the art world. Schnabel was hot at the time; the museum had raised something like a million bucks for one of his paintings. Schnabel’s art dealer put together the art collection of Hollywood Guy Michael Ovitz. Now Schnabel makes movies, as does his art dealer. Such is Hollywood.

So Schnabel by recommendation anointed Don Van Vliet and subsequently Don Van Vliet had a survey show at the museum. He was so shy that he stayed in the hall leading to the main exhibition area for much of the event. He stood there in the hall with his wife. He was married for 40 years.

He was a good and true artist, an authentic creative spirit, was Don Van Vliet.

The public dump of documents by Wikileaks was characterized as “an attack on the international community” by Clinton.

Australian Julian Assange says he is “deeply satisfied” at stirring the pot. Look at the attention this son of a theatrical family is getting. That is not how he characterized his delight it is just what he meant. You don’t need to be Tim Roth’s histrionic character in “Lie To Me”, an insight superman, to see in Assange’s face the arrogant and smug expression of the toxic provocateur.

Although Julian Assange thinks he is a truth teller he is really the town gossip, leaking his poisons into the town well as he celebrates his cluelessness — which he mistakes for bravery. The expected trivial sarcasm in diplomatic back channel communications, leaked in thousands and thousands of pages by Assange The (self-described) Editor, adds up to what it is, junk that people say to one another privately. Shocker.

An interesting side-note: While Jew-haters have used Israel as a proxy, suggesting manipulation by a foreign government in American policy (“they have too much power” slander), these leaks make it clear Israel is not in the lead in its horror at the thug-run regime in Iran — even more keenly than Israel, it is leaders in the Arab world who see Iran as run by a Hitler.

The post title repeats the unfortunate title of a great movie. In browsing, we saw it at Netflix and thought it was one of those dreary PBS historical dramas. Sometimes an exotic setting, as in this movie which is set in Shanghai, are enough to overcome the worst movies, but with the title as an added incentive to go elsewhere, we blew past the movie. However, the sorry library on Netflix eventually forces you to revisit possibles and we gave it a try.

Lust, Caution is a beautiful, thoughtful, substantive movie directed by Ang Lee. Like all good movies it starts with the script and then relies heavily on the director. If those two pins are in place, the rest usually works. Actors always look good and do their best with the words and pictures framing and underpinning them. The actors were great. A revelation really.

Although there was a to-do about eroticism-graphical violence in the rating (NC-17) it received, it is really a disgrace to lump this movie with mind-numbing exploitation movies. This is not a cynical movie, but one in which the human relationships and the drama of the setting play out with the truth of art.

Apparently it is loosely based on true events — it is an espionage movie; but it is fictionalized. Frankly, if the law suit which ensued, which claimed the main female character was not an infatuated whore for a cause, but in fact her gun jammed were accurate, that story would have been more satisfying. This will all be obscure until you see the film and then read Wikipedia. So do both and you will be rewarded by a great movie.

An article in the NYT describes a controversy over giving an honorary Oscar to Jean-Luc Godard. Godard walks, talks and sounds anti-Semitic but the Oscar committee is debating if his work should be honored nevertheless. The NYT says,

…a debate that has raged around artists as august as the poet Ezra Pound and as popular as the actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson: Is the work somehow tainted by the attitudes of the man?

Ezra Pound, mentally ill and a poet, has no relation to dim entertainment guy Mel Gibson with his Holocaust denying daddy.

The best approach would be to parse the work itself. Years ago Susan Sontag wrote a NYRB review of a book of photographs by Leni Riefenstahl which incorporated, Sontag felt, Riefenstahl’s aesthetic — a grim fascist “taste” that was reflected in all Riefenstahl’s work. Leni was a fascist, through and through Sontag cogently asserted.

Degas, Cézanne, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf … a slew of artists have been tainted by endemic European anti-Semitism. Except in the case of Shakespeare’s Shylock, the work of those artists doesn’t present their bigotry. People come out of a time and we make allowances for the currents in which they swim. Also, and most significantly, of their reaction to the toxic fumes wafting over them. How much has their spirit been infiltrated by the hate of their contemporaries? Does the work itself reflect the mental illness that is bigotry or does such malevolence live only in the quotidian life of the creator?

The secondary issue is a tough one in contemporary society: the issue of morality and fairness. Sometimes they are not the same thing. It might be fair to give an award to an influential filmmaker, but would it be right? Isn’t the work tainted? Again, you have to take this on a case by case basis.

In the case of Godard no award should be given. Ironically, Godard could care less, so this discussion in Hollywood is more — as usual — about Hollywood’s self-image than about the real issue of bigots who make films.

We just saw Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and once again he was able to marshal so many disparate elements and make it work. The movie doesn’t retell the story but glances off it and carries it forward so that Alice is more in tune with contemporary social politics. The actress who plays Alice is the actress who played the gymnast in In Treatment. Once again this fine actress goes off into a brave new future — affirmed by her personal courage.

Anything Johnny Depp is in is worth watching. For someone who seems completely devoid in interviews, he manages to find resources galore to pour into the characters he depicts. You are reminded of his moving character Edward Scissorhands in his portrayal of the Mad Hatter. Burton in interviews himself seems so unpretentious it is hard to understand how he manages to pull so complex and tightly woven a movie together.

Burton said that he felt the original Alice was a girl going from one weird character to another. Burton’s Alice is different, it is a movie that is affecting at moments, but not emotionally satisfying. Lewis Carroll was in love with mind and imagination, while Burton is a director of instinct, which pulls him too close to earth and its guttural sounds, losing sheer delight in the process. And that delight is the point of Alice in Wonderland.

[spoilers alert]

Stieg Larsson’s books and the movies made from them are an extraordinarily popular phenomenon. We haven’t read the books, but have just seen the two “Girl Who/With…,” Millennium movies. I’m not sure if the real interest is Larsson’s work itself or in the, perhaps, self-replicating popularity — 27 million copies of his books sold — that does fascinate.

Sweden has a Nazi past folded into its halcyon reputation. In fact, it turns out there is currently a creepy skinhead presence in Sweden. So much for New Age beautiful people swathed in health care hardly harming a fly fantasies.

Larsson was a communist and avid feminist. The original title of the Dragon Tattoo was Men Who Hate Women. Oddly, Larsson’s money was not left to his long time lover, but to the Communist party.

Hitchens notes about the Gothic subject matter:

… child slavery and exploitation … are evoked with perhaps slightly too much relish by the crusading Blomkvist.

His best excuse for his own prurience is that these serial killers and torture fanciers are practicing a form of capitalism and that their racket is protected by a pornographic alliance with a form of Fascism, its lower ranks made up of hideous bikers and meth runners. This is not just sex or crime—it’s politics!

The movies are tightly plotted, satisfyingly convoluted, and simple fun in their characterizations. The damaged grrrl genius hacker and the sad journalist teeming up as the familiar unlikely duo to do in the bad guys.

The second movie gets as Goth as main character Lisbeth Salander herself, who crawls out of a grave at one point. As in most victim movies, the victim is a flailing karate windmill, defeating nearly all but a monster man with an affliction — he feels no pain.

When we started watching the Season 3 Netflix DVDs of Mad Men we were sure things would lighten up. They would have to. That turned out not to be the case, big time. At the end of Season 3 we hung our heads with Don Draper at the collapsing of all the character’s lives.

Their new agency did not look auspicious, but even more telling, except for Pete, the lives of this dreary bunch was devolving to the point where you questioned why you were watching at all when you could get your fill of despair nightly on the TV news.

This NYT review of Season 4, now coming to an end, indicates that things are spiraling into yet a lower circle of the dark kingdom.

The only good news was surprisingly, for a change —  in the news — which had pictures and stories of the Chilean miners and their escape from certain death by a sustained unified human effort to save them.

Although nationalism is unfashionable, the rousing affirmation inherent in one clip of a miner leading the Chilean anthem had a stirring, moving quality, reminding me of Renoir’s movie Grand Illusion where La Marseillaise was sung to even greater effect in the WWI POW film about the dissolution of class at times of extreme stress. (The moving nature of the moment different in intent for Renoir who, like many, seeing the specter of fascism in Europe’s future, decried nationalism.)