“Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, “Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in ‘The Iron Lady.’ “

—

Lana Del Rey’s Image on “Born to Die” : The New Yorker

(via judyxberman)

SFJ is on the money, per usj. And the other question to ask:  why are female artists the only ones who inspire such “discussion”, or “authenticity” “discussions” where sexism is masked as discernment? I am literally counting the hours until the long thing I wrote about her/this for SPIN comes out. Spoiler alert: I did the homework no one else was interested in doing. Ze End.  (link)

I agree with this to some degree… in that, yes, debates about the authenticity of pop music performers tend to be tedious and beside the point when they relate primarily to actual identity (as in, passport/ driver’s license/ hospital birth records).  I could not care less if “Lana del Rey” is middle-class, from Compton, raised by folkies and trained in fiddle camps in the woods of far Northern California, or whatever.  I do know however that in “Video Game” (albeit undeniably somewhat catchy/ eye-and-ear-grabbing) and especially on the SNL performance, she comes off as a weak actor.  A poseur, someone trying to put on an identity (in this case, some kind of tragic noir ice queen) and missing her marks.  This kind of authenticity failure can sometimes actually be compelling in pop music, as when someone tries to become one thing, fails, and ends up somewhere else unforeseen (Darby Crash?  A lot of early work in any evolving genre?) but often, Occam’s Razor or “the law of parsimony” leads one to conclude in this kind of situation that the artist in question is simply a poseur, or is such within these uninteresting/ not-very-good performances (again, it’s not unchanging identity we’re looking for, but the effect of the particular performances).

So, Sasha Frere-Jones’s imagined example about Meryl Streep seems like a straw man (at least, ruling out the most obviously stupid commentary).  Someone very well would say, “this actor, attempting to play Margaret Thatcher, comes across more like an over-eager associate in a prime-time network law firm” or whatever.  Inauthenticity of performance remains a fundamental target of criticism of popular forms, and there is no reason is should not be.

For example, here’s a question, why is Blue Hammer’s “real down-home Delta blues” music bad?  Is it because the performers are not actually poor African-American musicians from the mid-century South?  Or could there be something else involved in this judgment?

That said, I will maintain an open mind about the Lana del Rey album.  If she manifests any sign of a sense of humor, that would be a plus.  And I will look out for this Spin profile.

Things that happen in the animated stop-action film A Town Called Panic, featuring lurching plastic toys prone to voluble shouting in French, available streaming on Netflix:

• For Horse’s birthday party, a little temporary bar is set up in the basement and everyone drinks too much.  Afterwards the policeman’s wife comments, “I should’ve charged more for beers.”  I have never seen so much drunkenness in a kids’ animated movie!  This must have been part of what prompted one dissatisfied Netflix commentator to opine, “This is presented as a children’s movie but it is not. Maybe in France children are exposed to such language and debauchery but not in my house.” Another review: “This should have been called, ‘A Town Called Hypertension.’ It was like being yelled at non-stop by an angry, coke-snorting Frenchman.”  Not coke, though: just lots and lots of coffee.  At one point Policeman devours a piece of toast several times his size spread with Nutella and then actually smashes through the coffee mug in his passionate enthusiasm.
• Cowboy and Indian go online to order 50 bricks to build a barbecue for Horse’s birthday, but the key sticks and they accidentally order 50 million bricks.  To hide them, they stack them in a huge cube on Horse’s house, which collapses that night.
• Horse sets Cowboy (which he pronounces “Cowboy” in his old-French-man accent) and Indian to rebuilding the house, but when they wake up, their walls are missing.  It turns out they are stolen every night by sea monkey creatures (with plastic flippers) that emerge from the pond.  The thieves carry down the wall into an undersea world where they construct their own home.  It takes a while to figure this out, however.
• Oh, I should stop, there is too much.  Eventually Horse, Cowboy and Indian, along with one of the sea-monkey thieves, Gerard, fall to the core of the earth where their cellphone falls into the lava… And then end up on the North Pole, where they discover some brilliant and possibly evil (?) scientists who live inside a giant robot penguin they’ve created, passing their time manipulating the penguin robot to form huge snowballs which they throw hundred of miles at targets chosen for fun.  Eventually our heroes escape by planting themselves into one of these snowballs, which they have aimed back at the bucolic French village where they live (and where Horse is late for his music lessons taught by the sexy lady horse).  But, Gerard the sea monkey has re-directed the penguin, so when they are all tossed through the air, they land in the middle of the sea…

In sum, this is a truly demented movie and very fun… we all loved it.  As another Netflix commentator observed, “The characters act just as if we are watching children playing with them, wild imagination and all. You have absolutely no idea of where this is going, what is going to happen next. The events only make sense in the framework of some kids playing.”  This is true–  the storyline can only be rationalized as some kind of extrapolation from a crazy kids’ game.

The closest parallel would be the early Aardman Entertainment Wallace & Gromit shorts, yet those are models of sober, careful, traditionally crafted plot development by comparison.  (Of course there’s a certain parallel with the Toy Story franchise, too.)

The Frenchness of it all is wonderful, too.  The drinking, coffee, the “ohh la las!” and “ah no!”s,  Nutella, the charming village in which people get drunk, argue, take music lessons, and bicker about their walls, gardens, and ponds.

Materials mostly gathered on walk to park:

• sticks
• milkweed (or something) fluff
• seeds
• berries
• acorns
• one round box

Tools: saw, hot glue gun.

And here is the finished product, so far, the house of two fairy children and their pet mouse Rollo (made from an acorn, with felt ears and tail, unfortunately not pictured).

I especially like the seed-pod chandelier, the little canoe-like fluff beds, the leaf rugs, the table, the bowls of seeds…

N.b. I had almost nothing to do with this…

Has anyone in Ethnic Studies grappled with this one?  “Racism is still alive” — what exactly is he saying about that statement?  Is he saying it’s wrong?  Presumably not, maybe just that he’s sick of hearing it, or thinks it’s a banal/boring thing to say.  Or that race/ethnicity doesn’t have much to do with the music he makes and why he loves it; or that he feels bullied when he’s told that his music must express his racial identity above all (“everybody lied to y’all, and you believed it”).

“I mosh pit”: I guess he likes punk — reminds me of Canadian rapper K’Naan’s “If Rap Gets Jealous” (“I’d rather do a stage dive”).

Wizard!

Now I don’t give a fuck if you
Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, Goddammit
That don’t mean shit to me
Fuck your ethnicity

Fire burning inside my eyes
This the music that saved my life
Y’all be calling it hip-hop
I be calling it hypnotize
Yeah, hypnotize
Trapped my body but freed my mind
What the fuck is you fighting for?
Ain’t nobody gonna win that war
My details be retail

Matter of fact, don’t mistake me
For no fucking rapper
They sit backstage and hide
Behind the fucking cameras
I mosh pit
Had a microphone and I tossed it
Had a brain, then I lost it
I’m out of my mind, so don’t
You mind how much the cost is
Penny for my thoughts
Everybody, please hold up your wallets

I had been looking forward for quite some time to seeing this strange-sounding Finnish film, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a sort of Finnish Santa Claus horror movie.  Very high-concept: evil Santa (one-upping Bad Santa).  Brief synopsis from Wikipedia:

The film focuses on a group of local reindeer herders whose Christmas is disturbed by excavations on the mountain. A scientist has ordered a team of workers to dig open what he calls “the largest burial mound in the world”. An explosive used by the team uncovers what is referred to as a “sacred grave”. However, the occupant of the grave is still alive. Soon, the reindeer important to the local people are mysteriously killed, and children and supplies begin to disappear from the town. It emerges that the occupant is the source of the original Santa Claus myth; a supernatural being who, rather than rewarding good children, punishes the naughty. One family, however, manages to catch the culprit in a trap, and plans to sell it to the scientist to cover the losses caused by his excavation.

The movie reminded us in various ways of the great Trollhunter (here’s my earlier commentary on that one): a smart & scrappy low-budget Nordic independent film that draws on indigenous mythology & folklore in clever ways to make a fresh kind of American-style action/horror genre film.  Rare Exports is not quite as thoroughly excellent as Trollhunter, IMO, and is a bit more of an extended high-concept joke.  “Evil Santa Claus as Finnish legend” is a good enough joke to sustain the movie, though.

I read the film as being an allegory about Finnish/ Nordic cultural production and “exports” in a global cultural marketplace.  It begins with young Pietari and his friend Juuso peeking through a fence at a group of Americans conducting an high-tech anthropological dig with explosives.  There’s an evil-seeming group leader with a strange pseudo-American accent whose manner suggests that there’s something nefarious going on.  Meanwhile we learn that Pietari lives alone with his angry single father Rauno — the mother has died — and that the family subsists on reindeer herding and hunting.  First, a vast herd of reindeer is found slaughtered, apparently by wolves, but what kind of wolves would kill so many deer indiscriminately and leave the corpses untouched?  Next, the town’s children (including Juuso) start disappearing.

Pietari, who has a bedroom filled with books about Finnish folklore, has a better understanding than anyone else in the town of the old legends of an evil, terrifying Santa Claus figure who was buried in the ice by Laplanders thousands of years ago.  The rapacious Americans have hatched a plan to dig up Santa for profit– but where did Santa go?

So, we have a closed-off, local, indigenous Nordic community scraping by on traditional pastimes, particularly hunting reindeer.  In a globalized 21st century run by multinational corporate types like the Americans, this is not sustainable (not much of a market for reindeer, which is local and Finnish in ways that don’t translate or “export” well).  The American crew plans to swoop in and steal local Finnish culture (in the form of Santa Claus) to monetize it for an international market.  But a scrappy, abandoned Finnish boy and his angry father save the day by using their wits and strength and understanding of local traditions to seize control of their own native culture for themselves, thereby gaining economic self-sufficiency and healing the wound left by the absent/dead mother (= an original older form of local culture, pre-globalization).

This is a spoiler: In the movie’s surprise ending, son and dad and a friend package Santa (sort of) and his elves and literally ship them off to a global audience that is eager for examples of authentic local culture.  This seems a pretty direct allegory of the film itself.  The rapacious Americans represent global/Americanized popular culture, which strip-mines the world’s heritage and profits from it.  But resistance is possible for those who can combine techniques, forms and methods from that 21st-century global pop culture (e.g. Hollywood-style horror/suspense genre film tropes) with authentic, rooted local materials (e.g. the Finnish folklore that goes into the film).  So when Pietari and his dad are boxing up the elves for export, they represent the filmmakers themselves, Pietari embodying a new generation of Finns who can break free of old assumptions of what constitutes tradition (i.e. his father’s previous belief that hunting reindeer is the only way to make a living) and find savvy ways to market their heritage in forms palatable to the new global world.  (Of course the critique would be that in this process, the putatively authentic culture gets homogenized, rendered bland: no more truly scary Santa Claus.)  A clever horror film proves a more sustaining way to put food on the table than reindeer meat.  And these local reindeer-hunters transform themselves into savvy global marketers, a bit like the kinds of entrepreneurs who figure out new ways to export local/native crafts or artwork for the 10,000 Villages kind of marketplace.

You could think about the excellent 2008 Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In as an example of this dynamic, too.

I also have to cite this amusing Netflix review by an aggrieved defender of Santa, Christmas, and Christ:

Horrible film. Whoever created this film sure has a beef with Santa Claus. … Santa Clause and his elves are depicted as creepy, skinny, buck naked, evil beings. Hmmm, Santa Claus historically is part of the celebration of CHRISTmas and if Santa Claus is evil then….. Poor Santa gets a double whammy, first he’s evil and at the end of the film, he’s massed produced (a market commodity) on an assembly line and “programmed” by the boy who makes these Santas into droid-like Santas. If you don’t BELIEVE in CHRISTmas or Santa and want to strip your child of the pleasure, magic and joy of Santa and the hope, joy and love that CHRISTmas brings to the world, here’s your film.

Actually this reminds me that Trollhunter had an interesting anti-Christian theme to it (the trolls despise Christians; of course one could possibly interpret this as pro-Christian, defining them as martyrs, but I don’t really think it plays that way in the film).

Here’s the original 2003 short film that was the first version of Rare Exports– more sheer comedy/satire:

Another English-professor blog I always check is Moonraking, a series of ruminations on popular music, concerts, books, movies, and anything else Prof. Moonraking is thinking about.  These posts combine erudition with rock-critic brio.  Be warned:  following his links can eat up your day.  But it will be a day well spent.

Thanks Lisa, I appreciate it!  This inspired me to update my moribund Blogroll by adding Sister Arts to it…

As a kind of followup to the Kael bio, I also read the James Wolcott memoir,  Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York.  I somehow did not realize that Wolcott (whom I associate with Vanity Fair) began his career and was generally known for years not only as a Village Voice writer but as a sometime rock critic.  (“Somehow” because I was a devoted reader of the Voice, especially its music section, in the early & mid 1980s, not long after his time writing for it.) Walcott dropped out of Frostberg State U. in Maryland as a sophomore after he sent a piece of his to Norman Mailer, who promised to put a word in for him to a Voice editor once Wolcott graduated.  Wolcott proceeded to quit school on the spot and move to NYC and eventually, through persistence/ refusing to go away, parlayed that recommendation into a job answering phones, from where he began to do some writing.  Pretty soon, at age 19-20, he was covering the nascent punk rock scene — he published one of the first raves about Patti Smith, well before the release of Horses — and covered television as a regular beat (not to mention the band Television, along with Talking Heads and other CBGBs bands). He soon became a protege/buddy of Pauline Kael’s (he became somewhat notorious for a later Vanity Fair take-down of her followers “the Paulettes,” which was taken as apostasy and an act of betrayal –one of her other rival proteges labels him a “self-promoting asshole” or some such in her biography; he does not discuss this in the book but it came up in the Fresh Air interview); became obsessed with the New York City Ballet; and he also dedicates a section of the book to Times Square pornography in the 1970s.  He doesn’t push this too strongly but there’s an implicit thread in the book in which Wolcott charts his own experience as a fan, critic, and consumer of these different parallel art forms and media (punk rock, movies, ballet, porn), within all of which in this period the representation and expression of bodies, sexuality, physicality, gender transformed.  Wolcott is very much a critic and an observer; he refers in passing to his own sex life, for example, but greater emphasis is placed on the represented bodies and lives he wrote about.  As “semi-dirty” in the title hints, Wolcott portrays himself as a watcher, a bit prudish and reserved even in the grimiest occasions in Times Square or the Bowery or otherwhere in a NYC that was close to falling apart entirely:

It wasn’t just the criminality that kept you laser-alert, the muggings and subway-car shakedowns, it was the crazy paroxyms that punctuated the city, the sense that much of the social contract had suffered a psychotic break.  That strip of upper Broadway [where Wolcott lived] was the open-air stage for acting-out episodes from unstable patients dumped from mental health facilities, as I discovered when I had to dodge a fully-loaded garbage can flung in my direction by a middle-aged man who still had a hospital bracelet on one of his throwing arms.

By and large he managed to side-step the garbage and keep himself more or less clean (not a drinker or much of a drug user).  Wolcott is an aesthete and a literary stylist — you have to have patience for his kind of elaborate sentences to enjoy the book — and you get the sense of this style as something he developed, in part, as a protection against the threatening urban scene.  (He talks about giving up on punk rock in the late 70s when it became too much about bad politics, skinheads, vomit, and spit– you can feel a visceral distaste.)

I was just checking out the customer reviews of the book on Amazon.  One person comments:

For anyone even mildly curious about New York, movies, punk, journalism, writing, ballet, or the Times Square of the “Taxi Driver” era, this book should not be missed. Think of it as Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” only with real intellectuals as opposed to fake ones.

Another less appreciative reader observes,

Just can’t imagine many general readers caring about office politics at the Village Voice, fringe critic Lester Bangs, punk rock at CBGSs, why ballet makes him woozy, the seamy 70s porn scene, Wolcott['s] relationship with movie critic Pauline Kael…

Ha!  I guess I was a perfect reader for this, as just about all of those topics interest me to some degree.  (This reader does not mention Wolcott’s discussions of Ellen Willis and Robert Christgau, a power couple in counter-cultural journalism in the early 70s; especially indelible is an account of Christgau walking around his and Willis’s tiny downtown apartment in tight red speedos.)  As an occasional writer for the Voice’s music section in the 1990s, I was fascinated by the account of earlier days at the paper, and I thought Wolcott evocatively captured the special feeling of the Voice in the days before email, when all copy had to be dropped off on paper in a physical file.  Human presence, embodied personalities, were so much more central to the operations of publishing, criticism and writing, all of which, Wolcott suggests, have now become much more “lonely.”  When I was first doing freelance writing circa 1991, this was just beginning to change and I too remember dropping by the Spin offices to leave my copy (offering opportunities for schmoozing/ gossiping) or sitting down with Voice music editor Joe Levy to line-edit my reviews (of American Music Club and the Go-Betweens — those are the first two I remember); I recall those sessions as an intensive education in journalistic writing that I expect is difficult to come by today.  (I never did meet Robert Christgau, although he was around.)  Wolcott’s example shows that counter-cultural/arts journalism in the 1970s was a place where an (exceptionally) smart lower-middle-class kid without even a college degree could get an apprenticeship and eventually transform himself into a well-known writer and intellectual.  This is no longer true — that arts weekly journalism institutional space no longer exists.  Blogs to some degree have replaced it, but serious/rigorous arts criticism as such offers much less of a career opportunity these days (to understate it).

[btw, Wolcott comes up several times as well in Will Hermes's new book, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, which I've so far only skimmed a bit.]

There’s a funny/poignant moment when Wolcott speculates about what might have been if he had specialized and chosen a stronger focus, as a critic, on literature, rather than covering such a wide range of topics.  “I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had found true fruition in book reviewing and taken up literary criticism as my sole vocation, putting aside childish things” (he means here primarily writing about t.v.).  Next line: “I bet I’d be real bitter now.”

Slight ambiguity there: does he mean “real bitter” as opposed to just slightly bitter?  The title of the book underlines Wolcott’s sense that he was very lucky in his lucked-into career, but does he feel lucky now?  There’s an elegiac feeling to his story of, among other things, the decline of the Voice and of arts journalism and reviewing generally (film critic J. Hoberman was apparently just laid off from the Voice as I write this, by the way, eliminating one of the last remaining great arts critics there).  I’m not sure how secure Wolcott’s present position is (he is among other things a blogger for Vanity Fair), but he obviously feels something has been lost both personally and for the intellectual scene more generally.

Of course, there are other explanations for an elegiac sense to the book, such as Wolcott’s references of the coming onslaught of AIDS in the early 1980s, at the end of his narrative.  On a more personal note, his friendship with Kael also has a bittersweet feel, at least for a reader coming to his book from the Kael biography, which explains how she cut him off following his publication of the “Paulettes” piece in Vanity Fair.  I was a bit surprised he does not address this falling out, perhaps because it is still too painful?  or possibly simply because it occurred outside the 70s time-frame of the book, although Kael is such a major mentor figure here that it feels odd not to mention it.

Well, not really, I just finished it (Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: a Life in the Dark)… It might be of limited interest to anyone lacking at least some pre-existing interest in Kael’s career and movie criticism — most of the key events of her life did involve movie reviews — but it was irresistible reading for me and made me realize how influential Kael was on my thinking as a kid/teenager.  Among other things, the book is simply a great chronological digest of some of her most memorable pieces and greatest lines.  It would be a good double feature with the great Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (by Peter Biskind).  Kael with some justice viewed the late 1960s through the mid 1970s as “equivalent to some of the great literary epochs in history,” and she was lucky enough to take on her perch at the New Yorker just in time to cover this epoch.  She didn’t just cover it, she influenced it in a major way, the biography shows, including in some ethically questionable ones: she palled around with many of the directors and writers she wrote about, advised them about casting and script choices, visited them on set and engaged in overt boosterism (Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah are the most obvious– she had very close relationships with them both, and unfounded rumors circulated that she was sleeping with one or the other.)

Part of her genius lay in her obsessive/overwhelming love for movies, a love so strong that it trumped almost any consideration of personal feelings.  You can see how she believed that her relationships with directors did not affect her judgments, since she was willing to turn rather viciously on anyone whose work took a direction she found mistaken (although someone like Altman seemed immune to such reversals).  In her writing, she talks you through her own process of response to a film, drawing you into the complex judgments and emotions she herself experienced.  She thought critical objectivity was a crock/delusion, and this sometimes led her astray, but also invested her writing with a special kind of passion.

A few memorable details/moments:

• She grew up in a Jewish chicken-farmer family in Petaluma, CA.  “She was extremely precocious, and her older siblings delighted in the astonishing observations that routinely popped out of her mouth.”  One thing I’ve always loved about Kael is her late-bloomer quality.  She was a single mother (with a daughter with a congenital heart defect) who got by for years doing odd jobs like managing a dry-cleaner’s and, eventually, working as the manager of a repertory theater in Berkeley.  This is where she really got her start, writing eventually-legendary program notes and programming innovative double features in the 1950s.  (She was also an unpaid film commentator on WKPA, Berkeley’s listener-supporter FM station).  She didn’t write her first piece for the New Yorker until in her late 40s.
• Her time in the 50s in Berkeley has a slightly idyllic quality in this account– it was the period when she found her voice and acquired a reputation but was still quite poor and mostly known only in film-aficionado circles.  She entertained all the time:  “She had two beloved basenji dogs, Polly and Bushbaby, who frolicked with her guests, and several of her friends noted the irony that a compulsive talker like Pauline chose to have dogs who couldn’t bark.  There was an upright piano in the living room with characters from The Wizard of Oz painted on it, and Pauline loved to sing Gilbert and Sullivan songs, with The Mikado‘s “The Moon and I” a particular favorite.”  She was always a Westerner and a rural California girl, never seemed completely to view NYC as a home.  (Once she made some money, she and her daughter moved to a big house in Great Barrington, MA, where she did most of her writing.)  There’s an intense moment late in the book when Kael is sitting at lunch with someone in the city in 1989 and sees a man knifed on the street; she goes out and holds his hand until the ambulance arrives.  “That cemented her loathing of New York.”
• She could be hilariously crude/vulgar.  She found Billy Wilder’s 1961 comedy One, Two, Three, for example, “overwrought, tasteless, and offensive – a comedy that pulls out laughs the way a catheter pull out urine.”  A very funny developing theme concerns her endless battles with William Shawn at The New Yorker over her use of slang, vulgarisms, and references to violence and sex.  Here’s my favorite passage along these lines:  “In the opening sentence of her review of Goin’ South, Pauline rendered a vivid description of [Jack] Nicholson, an actor she was still trying to come to terms with: ‘He bats his eyelids, wiggles his eyelids, and gives us a rooster-that-fully-intends-to-jump-the-hen smile.’  Shawn’s note in the galley margin read, ‘This piece pushes her earthiness at us, as if she wants us to see how far she can push us, too.  It’s the tone of the whole review.’  Later in the same review she wrote of the actor, ‘He’s like a young kid pretending to be an old coot, chawing toothlessly and dancing with his bottom close to the earth.’  Shawn wrote in the margin, ‘Her earthiness, her focus on body functions.’  The description on Nicholson’s bottom being close to the earth was deleted, as was a later reference to Nicholson’s being a ‘commercial for cunnilingus.’  Shawn circled the phrase and wrote, ‘This has to come out.  We can’t or won’t print it.’”  !!  I really wanted to use that phrase as the title of this post but decided it would attract the wrong audience.
• Another famous one along these lines: she pans Terence Malick’s Badlands and Shawn (whose son Wally Shawn was college buddies with Malick) tells her, “I guess you didn’t know that Terence is like a son to me.” Her reply: “tough shit, Bill.”

Don’t have time right now to write more, need to pack and return the library book!  The book ends with her memorial service at which Pauline’s daughter Gina delivers a rather sharp, albeit appreciative judgment: “When Pauline spoke to someone about their work as if it had been produced by a third party, it had repercussions.  There was fallout.  In my youth, I watched what she left, unaware, in her wake: flickering glimpses of crushed illusions, mounting insecurities, desolation.  Those she was not dismissive of, those who valued her perception, judgment, integrity, and extreme forthrightness, did feel her sting, but also felt that she was totally real and that she affirmed and valued them as human beings…. Pauline’s greatest weakness, her failure as a person, became her great strength, her liberation as a writer and critic.  She truly believed that what she did was for everyone’s good, and that because she meant well, she had no negative effects… She denied any motivations or personal needs.  This lack of introspection, self-awareness, restraint, or hesitation gave Pauline supreme freedom to speak up, to speak her mind, to find her honest voice.  She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.”

I gotta say, I kind of love her, I would probably have been thrilled to be a Paulette.  Sarah got sick of me reading excerpts out loud.

This is my favorite image of her, from the mid 1950s when she was programming the Cinema Guild theater in Berkeley: “Friendly, gregarious, and bawdy, she was becoming something of a local character…[L]ocals grew accustomed to seeing her up on a ladder changing the Guild’s marquee, a hip flask filled with Wild Turkey dangling from a belt loop.”

By the way, this A.O Scott/ Manohla Dargis discussion of the biography is worth reading.  Also, here’s a chance to hear her voice — & check out the cute sneakers.

I am 3/4 or so through (to 1942) A. Scott Berg’s 1989 biography of Samuel Goldwyn and loving it.  Really juicy, filled with great/hilarious/unbelievable tales about movie stars, directors, and producers of the 1910s-1950s (with an emphasis on the earlier decades), and offering a well-informed, panoptic history of early Hollywood– I’m learning a lot.

• This is one of the best Americanized-name stories I’ve heard.  Born Schmuel Gelbfisz, Goldwyn became Samuel Goldfish in the ghetto of Birmingham, England in the 1890s. (If you’re going to Americanize your name, do you really want to choose “Goldfish”?)  In 1916, Goldfish and Edgar Selwyn formed a film distribution company they named “Goldwyn” (a portmanteau name combining Selwyn and Goldfish).  A few years later, audaciously, Goldfish changed his own name to Goldwyn.  What a power move.  His partner sued him, but a judge ruled that the name change was legal.  The now Samuel Goldwyn was subsequently forced out of Goldwyn Pictures, the company that now bore what was his name, and he was never (bizarrely) part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  Very weird.

• Gelbfisz/Goldfish/Goldwyn’s emigration story from Poland to the U.S. (he arrived Jan 1, 1899) is pretty wild.  At age 16, “in 1895, Schmuel Gelbfisz walked alone, almost three hundred miles due West to the Oder River.”  After paying off border police guarding the German/Russian border, “he walked another two hundred miles to Hamburg.”  There he stayed with some family acquaintances who put him to work learning glovemaking, and then raised money from neighbors to pay for his ship fare to London.  “The next leg of his odyssey was the 120-mile walk from London to the Midlands.  He lived for two days on a single loaf of bread.”  He found his mother’s sister in Birmingham and became an apprentice to a blacksmith and then worked as a sponge salesman.  “By the fall of 1898, Sam Goldfish felt the urge to move on.  He journeyed another hundred miles, northwest to Liverpool and eventually got a boat that left him in New Brunswick.  “Once he had his legs back, Goldfish took to the road again…. Over the next month, he trudged through more snow than New England had seen in ten years.  Sometime in late January 1899, he arrived in Manhattan.”  Wow!  That’s a tough dude.

• It’s just amazing how many of Hollywood’s biggest moguls were Jews from modest (or impoverished) backgrounds in Eastern Europe.  “In the 1880s alone, the  family of Louis B. Mayer left Demre, near Vilna, in Lithuania; Lewis Zeleznick (later Selznick) ran away from Kiev;  William Fox (formerly Fuchs) imigrated from Tulcheva, Hungary; the Warner family uprooted itself from Krasnashiltz, Poland, near the Russian border; Adolph Zukor abandoned Ricse, Hungary; and Carl Laemmle left Wurttemberg, Germany — gamblers with nothing to lose, all from within a five-hundred-mile radius of Warsaw.”

• The first part of the book, about Hollywood prior to the advent of sound in 1927, is full of amazing stories about silent-movie stars I’d never heard of or knew almost nothing about.  E.g. Banky Vilma & Rod La Roque.  Or Mabel Normand:  “One interview for a family magazine [in 1917] went well until the reporter asked her hobbies.  ‘I don’t know,’ Mabel replied.  ‘Say anything you like but don’t say I liked to work.  That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch.  Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs.  And get drunk.”

• One of my favorite strands in the book has to do with Goldwyn’s famous malapropisms and vexed relationship to the English language.  During the editing of the 1929 Bulldog Drummond, Goldwyn noticed a line in which a colonel declares, “the eternal din around this club is an outrage.”  “Goldwyn asked his staff, ‘what is that word “din”?’  He was told it meant noise.  ‘Then why didn’t the writer say noise?’”  He insisted that the actors be called back into the studio and the set rebuilt in order to re-shoot the entire scene, until someone finally convinced him that “din” was a real word.   More Goldwynisms: of his Russian discovery Anna Sten, whom he thought would be the next Garbo (she flopped– that whole story is great, albeit slightly tragic): “She has the face of a spink.”  Or the time the Gershwins, Lillian Hellman, and George Balanchine were waiting for Goldwyn in his living room.  “Goldwyn appeared at the staircase in his bathrobe.  ‘Hold on, fellas,’ he yelled down.  ‘I’ll be right there.  And then we’ll get into a cuddle.”  “Include me out” was his most famous coinage.  “Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist needs his head examined” another famous line.  William Wyler called him “a titan with an empty skull, not confused by anything he read, which he didn’t.”  Wyler still liked him, however.

Someone comments at some point that all of the studio heads, without exception, in this period were “monsters,”  but that Goldwyn at least could laugh at himself.  He was a terrible person in many ways (treated his children really badly, was always chasing starlets), but possessing a certain charm all the same… You have to admire him, to some degree, for his bald bull-headed energy & determination & hook or crook determination to get movies made (often by lying, cheating & stealing). He bet incredible amounts on cards (in 1940 he calls in a gambling debt from fellow mogul Jack Warner for $425,000 — imagine what that would be in today’s currency) and for much of his career was continually leveraging his own company such that a major flop at the wrong moment would have bankrupted him.  (“The only way he could tolerate a baseball game was by betting on every pitch”).  The whole enterprise was high-end, high-risk gambling based on bluff and bluster, and producing strings of masterpieces and great movies.

Here is the book’s arresting first sentence: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.”  The book is pretty daring for several reasons, one that it gives everything away immediately.  Early on I did feel, “gee, can I really wade through all this, waiting for the final bloody end that has already been described to me” (although we have to wait for the end to learn most of the details of what went down).  But it works very well and you get caught up in the psychology of the murderer and your curiosity about how exactly things will go terribly wrong.

The premise is also daring because so apparently prejudicial.  Here we have an ignorant, illiterate working-class woman who, we are told, commits motiveless mass murder because of her ignorance and illiteracy.  On the one hand, the novel is so well-done that one can defend it by pointing out simply that this is a very particular story about particular circumstances — a knot of events and actions that can’t be reduced to sociology or generalizations about types of people.  On the other, this is a nasty piece of work, in some ways, and I wouldn’t be prepared to defend it absolutely against class bias in its depiction of a psychologically stunted, uneducated woman whose unreasoned hatred and resentment of her, yes, slightly smugly rich and liberal (but far from cruel or unkind) employers leads her to a senseless act of violence.  (They are educated, cultured people and Eunice’s phobia about writing, and her defensiveness about her concealed illiteracy, plays a strong role in the events.)

Rendell reminds me a little bit of Patricia Highsmith, partly in her willingness to ignore liberal or right-thinking pieties in her cool, sometimes slightly amused from-the-inside depiction of murderers and other criminals.

The novel also made me think of the brutal and random 2007 Connecticut home invasion murders committed by Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes.

Here’s a transcript of a BBC interview with Rendell about the novel in which Rendell defends herself against a charge of cruelty or prejudice in her depiction of Eunice by saying,

I’ve had quite a lot of protest from people saying that this is cruel, including various societies who are proponents of illiterate people and who champion them, but I don’t think it’s cruel because I particularly feel that it’s unjust to say that I am stating that every illiterate person is likely to commit murder, which was alleged against me. It’s no more really than saying that every woman in my books where there is a female murderer is capable of murder, or every man is in that case. I don’t think it’s cruel but I do think, and I hope this isn’t harsh, that any illiterate person who feels burdened by his or her illiteracy can go to classes to learn to read. There are ample opportunities, even more these days than whenever I wrote that book, which I think was 1975.

Not too sympathetic…

The illiteracy angle is important enough to the book that it crossed my mind that perhaps this could be a text in our Introduction to Criticism and Theory course in a cluster on literacy — including Levi-Strauss’s famous passage from Tristes Tropiques in which he describes literacy and writing as a malign invading force in the lives of the Amazonian tribespeople he studies, bringing with it new priestly hierarchies, deceptions, and forms of oppression.  (This Levi-Strauss passage is one of many Jacques Derrida analyzes and criticizes in Of Grammatology).

The book made me think about the novelistic history of depictions of the illiterate.  Dickens’ Jo from Bleak House is one that comes to mind:

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!

Hmm, that line “stone blind and dumb” makes me think that Rendell may have thought of Jo too.  Although whereas for Dickens, Jo is “stone blind and dumb” to the meaning of writing but is otherwise deeply feeling, Eunice is herself stone-like.