Steve Reads

 . . . is “Winsome Smile” by Chris Smither. Smither is a blues/folk musician whom I first heard at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, whose music is lyrically wonderful and musically uplifting. He’s one of the few musicians with whom I could imagine sharing a cup of coffee (or more likely a beer); the guy seems like Johnny Cash with a sense of humor. And remarkably, I couldn’t find the lyrics to “Winsome Smile” anywhere on the Web. So I had to transcribe them myself (below); they really are gorgeous. Enjoy.

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I’m nearing the end of Martin Amis’s book The Information, and this one recurring joke/really sad thing keeps making me laugh: every time anyone reads this one book that the main character wrote, they get some disfiguring ailment. He goes on a radio show, where the host has read five pages of the book just before airtime. Throughout the show, he keeps trying to refocus his eyes. Or earlier in the book, the narrator’s agent tries to sell the book to a number of publishing companies; after every rep reads the book, he or she ends up having to go in for surgery on his or her sinuses or somesuch. It’s a recurring theme, and it’s absolutely horrible in context, but I can’t help laughing.

A long sequence of events conspired to make this morning less than fun. First was last night, when I did one of the more dumb things in my life: walking down the stairs with a cup of cocoa in one hand and a cell phone in the other (talking with my parents), I tripped and slid down the stairs, thereby splattering cocoa over everything: my clothes, some books, the walls (even a wall that doesn’t seem like it would have been in the line of fire — some kind of Magic Cocoa Bullet), the stairs  . . .  everywhere. My roommates — after they stopped doubling over from laughter — helped me clean it up, and it’s all fixed now. To clean my clothes — including the fleece that I wear every day — I had to soak them in the bathtub. They were still wet this morning.

I didn’t sleep particularly well last night, either, so when I woke up this morning it was really hard to get out of bed. It’s also in the single digits in Boston, which made it extra-special-hard to get up.

I got to the bus stop a little early, but it got there late. Consequently, I missed the T by a moment (I was running down the stairs as it left the station). Right after it left, the station announcer said that there was a disabled train a few stops away, hence delaying the trains at our station. They were delayed by half an hour. In case you failed anatomy, it’s safe to say that standing in single-degree weather for half an hour is not good. I was so pissed off, and really wished to sue the MBTA for crossing over the line of “just a little late” into the realm of “a public-safety hazard.”

I got to the train station with moments to spare before my train took off. The train itself then managed to arrive 10 minutes late at its destination. The cab that I had called to pick me up there was about to leave, and the cab driver was irritating (and nearly deaf) to begin with.

Added up, this isn’t the best way to start a day. I’m feeling angry, anxious, and very  . . .  fragile.

My funny friend Josh recently wrote this letter to an advertising agency. I thought it deserved to be printed:

To whom it may concern:

It is my understading that you do the ads for Dell, which feature three interns performing various menial tasks for the company. I think that your casting decisions are particularly worthy of note. Whenever the ads come on, I find myself captivated by the young woman’s dimples. She smiles to the other interns, but she sings to my heart.

Anyway, I am a 24 year-old, single guy originally from NY, now living in Pittsburgh. I consider myself to be a pretty smart, good looking person, currently going for my PhD. I’ve attached a picture of myself with my godson Cole if you don’t believe me. If you could make sure that said actress receives this information, I would greatly appreciate it. Also, don’t forget to send along my email address, so that she can get in touch with me.

Thanks for your help,

Joshua Wretzel

should the picture not convince you of my good looks and intellect, I can refer you to my mother, who says that I have “Einstein’s brains and Tom Cruise’s looks”.

I saw The Hours last night. Have you ever read a book that assumes you know something from the start (e.g., “Things hadn’t been the same since Jared died”), even though you don’t? It’s a pretty common technique in books, meant to keep you reading at least until you figure out what happened to Jared. The good ones keep stringing you along in this way, and before you know it they’re over.

The Hours kept me hooked in this way for the first 45 minutes, then spent the next 75 minutes transfixing me with the characters’ eyes. Nicole Kidman’s eyes always looked distant, as though she was thinking about something else (which is exactly what her character — Virginia Woolf — was supposed to be doing). Julianne Moore’s eyes were dreadfully sad throughout, tinged with a bit of fear; I spent most of the film trying to figure out what frightened her so much. Meryl Streep brilliantly played the part of a woman who was always an inch shy of breaking down.

The film succeeds when it lets these characters’ faces speak for themselves, or when Julianne Moore describes the book Mrs. Dalloway to a friend as a book about a woman who seems like she’s all right, but isn’t; the dialogue is spare and revealing without spelling it all out for the audience. The film fails when it tries to establish through dialogue what the audience is smart enough to infer through images — for instance, Julianne Moore returning as an old woman (in unconvincing makeup, particularly since we’ve spent 90% of the movie seeing her in her youth) to explain what happened after we last saw her. The film spends most of its time on a single day, then drops all focus and speeds through the next 30 years of her life. It’s jarring, and doesn’t really buy us anything that we didn’t have before — except for a bit of resolution, which we didn’t need.

I’ve not read the book on which this film is based. Perhaps the film’s resolution makes more sense there. All I know is that I lost a lot of love for The Hours within its last 20 minutes. Other than the end, it’s a moving and cinematically beautiful film.

I just watched David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, about an immersive videogame that looks an awful lot like real life. It’s all right, and interesting at points, but Cronenberg isn’t really my cup of tea. I’ve now seen two of his films (the other being Videodrome); both seem like they really want to be profound, but aren’t. Both diagnose problems in the movie industry and in society’s relation to the media. At least eXistenZ is very meta, with characters inside of eXistenZ (the game-world) suddenly fornicating with one another for no reason, but observing that the game has probably ordered them to do it to set up some emotional resonance in the next scene. It’s kinda funny, but it’s also very, very well-trod.

Cronenberg also likes disgusting things, and as far as I can tell they add nothing to his films. People are often dissecting strange-looking animals, or putting their fingers inside of suppurating gashes (accompanied by squishy, liquid sound effects). The acting is decent: Jennifer Jason Leigh does a good job as the experienced partner in the naif/expert duo, and Jude Law plays the new guy pretty well. The cinematography in both these films was only average — nothing to write home about. They were hardly worth the DVD rental.

Today is my day to work through the films I either own or have rented through Netflix and have not yet watched. Earlier was eXistenZ; just now was A Man For All Seasons, about Sir Thomas More. It’s an inspiring and sad story: More refused to sign an oath affirming that King Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn was legitimate, and for that he was beheaded. The film tells the story very well, with a complete lack of cliché and affect. It’s a dialogue-heavy film that turns each of its actors into a brilliant monologuist. It also makes me want to read more about More (pun not intended, but if I said it anyway I guess I’ll stick by it), who sounds like an inspiring and brilliant character.

I stopped watching Sergei Eisenstein’s Aleksandr Nevsky with about 30 minutes left to go. It just bored me. It was an hour and a half of continuous boring battle scenes — horses swoop in, people swing swords; repeat. At least I’m consistent: the sixteen hours of battle scenes in The Two Towers bored me to tears too.

Thus far this weekend, I’ve seen three movies. I inadvertently saw them in increasing order of “seriousness,” though I enjoyed them all in their own way. The first was Wet Hot American Summer, which is a hilarious spoof on nearly every other teen movie, along with ample doses of the late, great MTV sketch-comedy show The State (two State alumni directed WHAS). Next — last night — was Chicago, a totally uplifting and visually stunning film that had me dancing in my seat and dancing around for hours afterward. It is a very catchy movie, and had me totally hooked for two hours. The time absolutely flew. It’s a movie that you definitely ought to see. If you do, make sure to catch it on a big screen with good sound; I saw it in an AMC theatre with 750 seats and THX sound. So much love. Watching it on DVD could never reproduce the theatre experience.

I just got back from watching Talk To Her, directed by Pedro Almodóvar. I’ve not seen any of his other work, but now I must. The film was visually stunning, featured characters that you couldn’t help but love and pity, and was scored in such a way that I found myself helplessly desperate. It’s rare for a film to produce desperation, but this one did — at least until the very last shot. The cumulative effect of Talk To Her was, for me, quite a lot like being in love: a strange, not-unpleasant pain in my stomach, along with a weird sense of displacement. I didn’t want to move until the credits were over, and even then it was strange reëntering the world. I’d love people to go see it and tell me what they think.

I saw the first two films in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog series last night. Normally after a day of work, I get pretty sleepy — especially during films that are so image-laden, with very little dialogue and a slow soundtrack. But I was completely transfixed. I’ve had good luck with that sort of film, recently; last week I saw The Princess and the Warrior, directed by the same guy who did Run Lola Run. Both The Princess and the Warrior and the first two Dekalog films have very little dialogue and a lot of focus on the characters’ eyes. To make any of them work, the actors needed to have remarkably expressive faces, and they did. I couldn’t take my eyes off their faces during any of those films.

The Dekalog is a series of ten films, each treating one of the Ten Commandments. Last night’s Commandments were the First (“I am the lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”) and the Second (“Thou shalt not take the name of the lord thy God in vain”). I’m still deciphering them (beautiful imagery; lots buried under the surface), but they were astonishing in any case. In the first, a man becomes so dependent on his computer (his new God) that he effectively sentences his child to death; in the second, a woman who’s pregnant with her paramour’s child asks a doctor to predict whether her husband — suffering from cancer — will die. If he will, then she’ll keep the baby; if he won’t, then she’ll have an abortion.

I was expecting these to be heavy-handed — à la “Look at the evil of computers and abortion” — but they weren’t at all. Every time I expected a cliché, Kieslowski surprised me. And throughout, the imagery was spare, rather sad, and beautifully constructed. And Wojciech Klata is an amazing child actor; turns out he’s been in a few well-known movies (like Schindler’s List) since The Dekalog. All of this together added up to a remarkable two hours; I didn’t want to be anywhere else last night.

I read the majority opinion in the Eldred case on the way home from work. I guess there are two levels that jump out at me:

1. Precedent and judicial minimalism. I don’t know much about the precedent, but the general idea here is clear: the Court wanted to give Congress leeway to decide the appropriate bounds for copyright law.
2. Policy: the Court probably shouldn’t make policy, and didn’t here. I’m glad they didn’t try, because they clearly misunderstood the petitioners’ point: that copyright is a bargain struck between the public and copyright-holders. Copyright-holders need to give something back, namely their creative work. But most importantly, the public needs public domain. The Court refused to see the connection between the First Amendment and public domain. They only focused on how much copyright helps authors, by encouraging them to produce; they did not focus on how copyright harms society by denying it a rich public domain. They very clearly missed the point.

They cited some remarkable quotes from the Congressional hearings around the copyright act. One of them said, in short, that we need longer copyrights because people are living longer. But wait: copyrights already last for the life of the author plus 50 years. Even if people are getting older, copyright law can handle it. Why do we need to extend the law for 20 more years after the author dies?

The decision, and the policy, are rankly incoherent. I’ve lost a lot of respect for the Court since the baffling thermal-imaging decision.

I think I’m getting some kind of a reputation as a film snob. I don’t think that’s right, but let me explain why I tend to dislike films that a lot of people like:

1. I’ve grown tired of films-as-entertainment. We have enough entertainment in this culture; hell, CNN is now more entertainment than news. I think my memory for every other movie must be too good, because in the middle of a shoot-‘em-up movie whose action I’ve seen a hundred times, it’s rare that I can forget its precedents. A new stunt — two pistols this time, in midair, with sharks — isn’t enough to offset the essential lack of originality in the storyline.
2. I do like to be entertained sometimes, if the film is good enough. Normally it’s not, though, and you can’t overlook the clichés, the ridiculous dialogue and bad acting (I’m thinking of Attack Of The Clones here), and — ultimately — the lack of respect for the audience.
3. I’ve seen a lot of good films since I joined Netflix. I know what the medium can do, and I’m disappointed when I see it not living up to its potential.
4. I’ve grown to dislike the media industry. This country’s films, throughout its history, have been very focused on money, whereas other nations have a long history of state-sponsored artwork. I think that helps to explain why we gave rise to Jerry Bruckheimer, and France gave us François Truffaut.
5. A film doesn’t even have to be classified as “art” for me to love it; I just have to enjoy myself while I’m watching it. My canonical example here is Amélie: fun, snubbed at Cannes, and just beautiful. Ditto Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. They’re fun. At a very visceral level, I just don’t consider a movie like Lord Of The Rings fun.

And I guess that last point is the big thing: my distaste for a bad movie — or respect for a good one — is ultimately quite visceral. I sit through a movie, realize I don’t like it, and then try to figure out what bugs me so much about it. Normally, it’s pretty clear what bugs me; Hollywood is great at clichés, so finding the annoying cliché is not hard.

I don’t think I have different tastes from most people. I just think I have less patience.

Why do movie critics spend so much time fellating Steven Spielberg? I don’t understand. People loved Minority Report, whereas I found that it suffered from at least three huge flaws:

1. Failing to address the most important question. He was creating a film, which means he could create an entire world. He could have addressed the difficult question, “If the system never made any mistakes, would pre-convicting people be justified?” Instead, he answered the far easier question: the system does make mistakes, so obviously we shouldn’t pre-convict.
2. Needing to resolve everything, and general Spielberg cheesiness: for no good reason at all, the albino pre-cog, while bathed in white light, describes all the joy and wonder of meeting someone’s mother and blah blah blah. Can’t Spielberg avoid cheesy endings? Did anyone else nearly choke on his own sense of decency at the end of A.I.?
3. Superfluous scenes that contribute nothing to the film, or lack all plausibility. In the former category lies Tom Cruise’s trip to The Gap, which was clearly a product placement. In the latter goes the scene in which Tom Cruise gets his eyes replaced by someone he once put in jail. This man, his enemy, gets back at him by – are you ready for the sheer evil of it all? – putting a rotten sandwich and a spoiled glass of milk in the fridge next to the good sandwich and good milk. Tom gags! Can you believe it? I sure couldn’t. Poor Tom! Tom’s nemesis lost years of his life because of Tom’s work, and the best the guy can do is give him a rotten sandwich? The guy has Tom under anaesthesia, and is replacing his eyes, for God’s sake.

I accuse Steven Spielberg of a terminal lack of imagination. I don’t care that he’s popular; Roger Ebert has accused Spielberg-haters of resenting his popularity, in the grand tradition of effetes who imagined that Hitchcock’s popularity made him untalented. I’m not that shallow. I do, however, expect more from movies than Spielberg has brought me, as of late.

I just finished watching Michaelangelo Antonioni’s film about industrial despair, entitled Red Desert. I gather that a lot of the film’s effect has been lost as the film stock has degraded; the movie is partly about color psychology, with intense colors representing different moods and points of view. The restoration I just saw on DVD has very strong colors, but not the breathtaking intensity that I’ve read about. In his book How To Read A Film, James Monaco writes that modern viewers of Red Desert will “wonder what all the fuss was about.” He’s quite right; it’s good, and thought-provoking, and definitely worth seeing, but it didn’t astonish me.

I suspect a lot of this also has to do with watching the film on the small screen. It’s too easy to be distracted by the world around you when watching a film on a television. There’s something immersive and enveloping about a theatre. I watch so many movies that it’s probably worth my while to reconstruct as much of the theatregoing experience in my home as possible — a large, color-correct TV, surround sound, etc. It might be expensive, but it’s probably also worth it.

Pauline Kael said of Red Desert back when it was released, “Despite this relationship to the world around us, I found the movie deadly: a hazy poetic illustration of emotional chaos — which was made peculiarly attractive. If I’ve got to be driven up a wall, I’d rather do it at my own pace – which is considerably faster than Antonioni’s.” I’ve only read that quote (in a tribute to Kael soon after her death), not her full review of the film, so I might not have the right context. But surprisingly, I didn’t find his pacing here terrible. There are faster-paced ways to express the same ideas, but those seem like they’d be too easy: the rapid soundtrack, the quick cuts, and so forth. Instead, Red Desert plays like a dream, where the audience knows what should happen and is maddened to find that what should happen doesn’t.

A chain of writings last night led me back to a hilarious essay collection of S.J. Perelman’s. My roommate and I were talking about something or other, which reminded me of my devotion to William Zinsser. I picked up On Writing Well for the first time in a while, and went to the section on humor writing. This reminded me of Fierce Pajamas, the hilarious collection of New Yorker essays that I devoured around Christmas. Fierce Pajamas contains a bunch of great essays from, among other people, S.J. Perelman, so I picked up Most Of The Most Of S.J. Perelman. I hadn’t gotten into it before, for whatever reason, but last night I slowly accumulated a sense of pure joy as I zipped through his essays. What a hilarious man. If I get the time, I’m going to transcribe an essay by him on his fear of electric blankets. You wouldn’t imagine such a simple topic would be such great comic fodder, but it is.

Today was one of the occasional bummin’-about-girls days. The general feeling is that I pour my heart out, and it just evaporates (if you’ve not heard the Ben Folds Five song “Evaporated,” you really should). It’s like I spend all my time letting other people know how much I care about them, and it’s the rare person who reciprocates — and the even rarer person who gives back as much as I give. Or so I feel.

This isn’t a pity party. Even one whiny person in anyone’s life is too many. It’s just frustrating, and I get this way now and again. Sleep, reading a good book, and spending time with friends will cure a lot.

I don’t think it’s possible to see a photo of my amazing friend Josh with his godson Cole without cooing. Go on; I dare you.

I’m getting into the rhythm of Swann’s Way, which is the first book in Proust’s Remembrance Of Things Past. The sentences just carry you along. In the middle of one sentence, you’ll start in the present day, get carried back to his youth, wander even further back through the memory of his grandmother, take in a story from his aunt, and wander back to where you are. The whole book reads like a dream. It needs to be read slowly and visualized, just like the famous cup of tea that reminded Proust of his youth. (Funny thing about that cup of tea: everyone always quotes it as a madeleine dipped in lime-water, when in fact it was a madeleine dipped in tea, which reminded him of his grandmother’s lime-water concoction. I imagine that most people quote it without having read it.)

I’d like to quote one sentence in which Proust discusses that cup of tea, just because I think it’s so beautifully tied together:

And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

Around and around we go — to Japan, into the water (it looks like a carnival hall of mirrors, doesn’t it?), back out, through the garden, visiting along the way the sad M. Swann, through his little town, back out of his memory, out through his cup of tea and back to the present. Every sentence I’ve read thus far is like this. It’s really an extraordinary book.

The thing that strikes me most about Anna Karenina is that Tolstoy was just paying way more attention to the world around him than I, or anyone I know, ever has. That’s the genius of the book: at every moment, the narrator knows what’s going through each of the characters’ minds, and it always turns out that they feel just like we do. Imagine you were so aware of yourself that you could put into words every single feeling you had — every strange bit of discomfort at a party, every infatuation, every emotional twinge that led to a strange facial expression. Imagine you wrote down all of these sensations with perfect eloquence. Now take that up one notch: imagine you could describe the feelings of everyone around you in the same way, even when they’re going insane and contemplating suicide. What you’d be attempting is something like what Tolstoy accomplished in Anna Karenina.

Today has been a really mind-numbing day, spent in front of a computer repeating test after test  . . .  on whatever it might be that I’m testing, since I’m not going to mention my company even vaguely  . . .  if it’s indeed a company that I work for, and not a non-profit or a church.

Anyway, it was mind-numbing. I only survived with the help of my friend Sarah, AOL Instant Messenger, and Ani DiFranco (and less essentially, WinAmp). I was productive, and yet I had fun. Rock on.