Recently in Reviews Category

This is a plug for a blog I happened across a while ago. Eve's Alexandria is a lively and intelligent site chock full of book reviews. The young British women who run the site review a wide range of literature: classical, medieval, neo-classical, Romantic, modern, post-modern; science fiction, fantasy, mainstream; whatever catches their fancy. The reviews often are better than one finds in newspapers. There is a bit of a feminist agenda, but not overpowering and not unreasonable. Good site, good reviews, friendly people. Well worth the time. Anyway, there's a permanent link in the right-hand menu of this site under Nifty Reading.

Hrrrrrrm. I read today that a movie based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera will be released in November. Love as a romantic ideal or love as a debilitating illness -- the novel seems to have it both ways. It's hard to resist being seduced by Marquez's prose, even when you know you should. Much of the novel's power comes from the narrator's voice, which slides effortlessly back and forth through time. I assume the movie will rely upon extensive voice overs.

I find the novel irresistible, but I'll read the reviews before deciding whether to see the movie.

Update, Nov. 22: The reviews haven't been kind. I'm not certain if that makes me happy or sad.

Does anyone remember Stanley Elkin? You didn't read his sentences as much as you rolled with them. They sped on highways past neon-bright strips of American ephemera, they cruised like big Cadillacs with floating suspension on and off highway ramps, they flung themselves high on concrete-ribbon overpasses, they didn't stop for nothing because there was always a lane or shoulder open. Someone once said, What William Gass was for the sentence, Stanley Elkin was for the list. Bold and exuberant, lusty, his sentences piled on detail after detail; the effect was a blur like scenery from a bullet train or glances through windows as you fell along a skyscraper, but if you were falling, you knew you were attached to a bungee cord because there was no way you were going to stop dead, you knew you'd bounce up and catch more fleeting glimpses and maybe holler a few words to a window washer as you sprang by.

Elkin was hot stuff in my circle. He got critical recognition -- a couple of National Book Critics Circle Awards -- but never had much of a popular audience. He died in 1995, by which time I had moved on too. I can't remember the last time I saw his stuff in a bookstore.

I've been reading Doris Lessing's two-volume autobiography. It's full of brutal honesty and (often) painful psychological insights. In the early '50s, she was invited along with some other writers to the Soviet Union. Here's an excerpt from volume two, Walking in the Shade:

We were taken to a building filled with presents to Stalin from his grateful subjects. It was sad, because they were mostly hideous, derivations or fallings-off from some genuine peasant or folk traditions, like carpets with his face occupying all the middle of them, or carved boxes or metalwork -- all with his face. It was there I decided to try and write a story according to the Communist formula, because I was uncomfortably aware of our smugness and superiority. It would have very good and very bad characters in it, like Dickens. I wrote it. It was called 'Hunger.' It was about a youth from a village in Africa, risking his fortunes and his life going to the big city, this being a basic plot of our time, not only in Africa. The background came from Africans I knew, who would describe, when I asked, exactly how this or that was done in a village, how things were in the locations and shebeens of Salisbury. This story has been much translated and reprinted, and yet I am ashamed of it. Quite a few of my early stories I would like to see vanish away. What is wrong with that tale is sentimentality, which is often the sign of an impure origin: in this case, to write a tale with a moral.

Oh my, I've just finished the best fantasy novel I've read in many, many years: Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It's funny, erudite, loaded with fascinating characters, told at a leisurely Old World pace, and packed with gentle satire.

"Can a magician kill a man by magic?" Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. "I suppose a magician might," he admitted, "but a gentleman never could."

We saw 300 the other day and, afterward, while walking back to the car, began forgetting it. Our judgment? "Silly." That's all that needs to be said, but what the hell, here's more. If you love stylized violence or desire to misattribute a few famous Spartan apothegms, then the movie's for you. If not, do something more productive with your two hours.

I wish I had done my laundry.

I've been reading Roman history, but because I knew 300 was going to hit the theaters, I took a break and returned to the Greeks. Paul Cartledge's Thermopylae: The Battle that Changed the World is decent reading; he appears to take a reasonable line with the available evidence, though the book shows signs of being cranked out. As an introduction to the topic, it's fine, though marred by rather glib parallels between the state of things 2500 years ago and now. I guess Cartledge saw a need to be topical. Ignore those sections; they are obvious and sophomoric. For that matter, just read Herodotus and save the revisioning until after you understand the original vision.

Ye gods. On a hunch, I searched for Firefly scripts, and found a site that's got them all. They're listed in the order in which Fox aired them, not in the order creator/writer/director Joss Whedon intended (the DVDs got 'em in the correct order).

For the uninitiated, Firefly is probably the best damn science fiction television series ever created, but Fox didn't know what it had and cancelled the 2002 show before it had aired an entire season. Fox also aired the episodes out of order, thereby confusing the hell out of everyone and making it difficult for the show to build an audience. Anyway, after the 12 aired and three unaired episodes came out on DVD in late 2003, it sold a gazillion copies and built a huge fan base. Universal Studios then gave Joss the go ahead to make a movie based on the series. Serenity comes out Sept. 30. (Firefly is the type of spacecraft used by our heroes; Serenity is its name.)

The series has a cool premise (frontier life 500 years in the future; American and Chinese cultures dominated the original colonization of space), but what makes it fun are great stories and great characters.

Here's the order in which you should read the scripts:

Serenity -- Parts 1 & 2
The Train Job
Bushwhacked
Shindig
Safe
Our Mrs. Reynolds
Jaynestown
Out of Gas
Ariel
War Stories
Trash
The Message
Heart of Gold
Objects in Space

Update: A new Serenity trailer was released a few days ago. Here's the old trailer, released in April.

Another Update: Here's the Firefly theme song.

I've been watching a lot of movies lately. Here are some quick reviews:

Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds: Classic Spielberg in many ways: good acting, suberb directing, amazing special effects -- regardless of what you think of Tom Cruise, under Spielberg's direction he usually does a good job. There is much to appreciate in this movie, which is essentially the story of a divorced father rising above himself and his past failures to protect his daughter and son. What bugs me about the movie, though, is that the lesson -- don't fool with mother nature -- is hammered into us by the frame at the beginning and ending, but isn't thematically supported by the story inside the frame. It's been a quarter century since I've read H. G. Wells' novel, so I can't say if the movie is faithful to a structural flaw in the book itself. In short, this is a very good movie, but not a great one.

George A. Romero's Land of the Dead: If you can get past the fact it's a zombie movie, it's not half bad, and maybe even half good. Now the zombies can learn a bit, at least as much as a brain-damaged dog. They are even sympathetic to a degree, and that's no mean feat -- after all, these lurching, speechless walking dead still want to gorge on human flesh. High camp, often funny. Go to a matinee and you might get what you paid for.

Doug Liman's Mr. and Mrs. Smith: It got mediocre reviews from the critics so I expected little. To my surprise, I liked it. Good acting, believable marital relationship, great action -- it's true the plot is just a device to get Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on the screen together, but it does work. A cross between True Lies and War of the Roses, this movie has its own flavor. And, let's face it, Jolie's got the best blow job lips in the business.

Christopher Nolin's Batman Begins: Batman without bullshit, without the Tim Burton excess. Easily the best Batman movie yet, and a decent movie to boot. Donning a bat suit and fighting bad buys has never seemed so plausible. Good summer movie.

George Lucas' Star Wars Episode XXX or whatever: The most that can be said for it is it didn't suck as much as the last two Star Wars movies. This franchise hit its mark in the second movie released a quarter century ago -- it's been downhill since. Don't waste your money.

Toni Marshall's Vénus beauté (institut): This 1999 French romantic comedy is understated though paradoxically loaded with quirky dialogue and episodes. If Hollywood could make romantic comedies this well, I'd see more of them. A very young Audrey Tautou plays a supporting role. Pleasant, character-driven, well written, it's a fine movie, slightly spoiled by a cop-out ending.

Hard to know if this is good news or not, but there's a Watchmen movie slated for release in 2006.

Alan Moore's Watchmen, published in 1986, is a contender for greatest graphic novel ever. At the risk of again being accused of engaging in "identity politics," I'll venture that Watchmen is a geeky comic fan's wet dream, a densely layered, brilliantly written inversion of conventional superhero tropes, a vindication for all those who held out the possibility that mass-produced superhero comics could break out of the literary ghetto.

A decade or so ago, during a conversation I had with a critical theory professor, Watchmen reared its head. Acknowledging the literary merits of the comic, the professor then went on to criticize it for its "downbeat" ending. I'm still at a loss as to how to respond to that. After pointing out that other interpretations of the ending were possible, I then asked, "So what? Does literature always have to be life-affirming? Isn't there room for something darker?"

After admitting that he'd used that very argument himself in other contexts, he then claimed he wasn't a simple moralist, and I believed him, because there is nothing simple about his critical views. He was, without a doubt, one of the best professors I ever knew. On this issue, though, either he couldn't articulate his position or I couldn't understand it. Watchmen is a reader's delight, a classic of the medium, and all I could wonder was, "Is Hamlet saved just because Fortinbras shows up at the end and restores order?"

Anyway, he was the only person I've ever encountered who read Watchmen and didn't like it. So why am I and my friends ambivalent that it's being made into a movie? Simply because it's hard to imagine that a movie could do it justice. Multiple narrative threads, linked by plot and sometimes just by symbology, comprise the work, giving it a complexity that at first blush would be difficult to capture in a single movie.

Rumors about the casting also give me pause. John Cusack to play Nite Owl? I enjoy Cusack's movies, generally; High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank are great fun. But he seems too young to play the tired and weary Nite Owl. And I'm not thrilled about the director, either; Paul Greengrass directed The Bourne Supremacy, that blurry, nearly incomprehensible mess that left me rubbing my eyes and wondering if I needed a new lens prescription.

Anyway, here's the obligatory link.

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain from the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair; in fact, he had bugs all over him. A month later he had bugs in his lungs.

      ----Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

That's the first paragraph of A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick's darkly comic novel of drugs, insanity, friendship, reality, and identity. Nominally a science fiction writer, PKD uses the detritus of SF to examine the nature of reality, the strength of societal bonds, and the possibility of redemption. Over the past couple of decades, PKD has received the critical acclaim he's due. And naturally I pat myself on the back for appreciating PKD way back when no one outside of SF had ever heard of the guy.

The occasion is the release of a trailer of Richard Linklater's upcoming movie based on the book. PKD, of course, has had more novels adapted to the big screen than any other "SF" writer, but most readers of his work know that Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, and other "PKD" movies take an idea or device from PKD's work but don't attempt to adapt plot in any comprehensive way. This is not to say the movies are necessarily bad; Minority Report, in particular, is a very accomplished film. Linklater's A Scanner Darkly is purported to be the first faithful adaptation of a PKD novel.

Unknown by the wider public during much of his life, PKD is now the subject of much critical study. Fredric Jameson, one of the more influential Marxist critics working today, published on PKD as early as 1975. The best critic of PKD, though, to my mind, is Stanislaw Lem, whose "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans" and "Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case -- with Exceptions," both collected in Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy, are penetrating analyses of PKD's work. Many science fiction writers hate Lem for claiming, truthfully, that most science fiction is garbage. (I speak as a well-read fan of the genre.) It's always been curious to me that few SF fans are even aware of Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos series, which is among the best SF ever written. Regardless of the myopia of many SF fans, good SF can be found if you're willing to sift through all the trash. PKD (and Lem, for that matter) prove that SF isn't a completely hopeless case.

PKD may have been nuts (he apparently believed we are all living, in truth, in Biblical/Roman times), but if so, it was a special kind of insanity that allowed him to write strikingly original fiction. Unfortunately, PKD died relatively young; for his biography and for details of his life-changing "2-3-74" experience, check out this link.

Anyway, the trailer looks interesting. Linklater, by all accounts, is giving the book its due.

Update: I just came across a nice overview of PKD's career and influence; check it out.

Another Update: Robert Crumb's famous "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick," first published in Weirdo #17, is available here.

Brave Combo, perhaps the best party band in the world, just won its second Polka Grammy for Let's Kiss at the 47th annual Grammy Awards.

Elsewhere I've written an appreciation of Brave Combo, so here I'll just give a tip of the hat to the Denton, Texas-based group.

Last night the first graders performed "A Rainbow Christmas," a musical about color and, of course, racial tolerance and acceptance. This group of penguins, you see, was all hung up on white and black, the only colors they thought were cool and worthy of Christmas. Well, naturally, a frog, a canary, an elephant, and a tiger each in succession tried to gain admittance into the Christmas club, but you know, green, yellow, grey, and orange just aren't cool colors.

The penguins, all formal and stuffy with their white bibs and bow ties, occasionally broke into song. They first made their views known in "Black and White." For the past two weeks, I've heard my daughter sing the chorus to this song: "Black and white, it's a perfect combination; white and black, it's a perfect combination." I thought the song was about racial acceptance, something on the order of "Ebony and Ivory." But no, those stuffy penguins were singing about their colors.

Eventually, Santa, his elves, and his reindeer show up, seeking acceptance, asking to join the cool Christmas club. Nothing doing, the penguins sang in "This Guy's Not Right." Fortunately, the reindeer and elves in a series of solos and duets show the penguins that "Christmas is a Rainbow" and everyone breaks into song.

It's a nice little musical with a message suitable for six-year-olds.

However. What I liked was my daughter, one of the penguins. Formal and stuffy she was not. She swayed and swaggered like an enraptured gospel singer; she clenched her white and black gloved hands above her head; she tossed her locks like a head banger at a heavy metal concert. She jumped off her row to the row below so the audience could see her; once she turned and "shook her booty" at the crowd. When the audience applauded, she bowed, big flowing bows that swung her bangs forward to be pushed back with dramatic, two-handed sweeps. After I got into the spirit of it and made faces at her, she thumbed her nose, stuck out her tongue, struck disco poses.

My little girl is not shy.

When it was over, I moved up a row or two to talk to my soon-to-be ex-wife, idle chit chat about our daughter. After I left, Keith overheard the couple sitting one row up talking and laughing about my kid by name. At the mini-reception afterward, I heard someone say, "No one had more fun than Zoe." Somehow my kid has become famous, known and liked by all the parents.

As we left the school, my daughter turned and yelled at the top of her voice, "Merry Christmas and good bye, everyone! My name is Zoe!"

Where she got her social derring-do, her fearlessness, I have no idea --- not from my wife or me. If someone is rude to her, she gets upset momentarily, but then brushes it off, sometimes repeating what I've said many times to her over the years: "If someone is mean to you, it means they are unhappy for some reason. It doesn't mean there is something wrong with you." Easy words, easier to express than to apply, but somehow my daughter gets it, knows it in her bones.

She wouldn't keep Santa out of the cool Christmas club.

The other day, Keith and I saw Alexander. Our expectations were very low -- we'd read the critics and, besides, it was an Oliver Stone film. There is nothing in the movie to redeem it, though Gore Vidal does praise it for its portrayal of bisexuality. But the notion that bisexuality and homosexuality did not carry the stigma in the ancient Greek world as it does now is hardly news. At any rate, this humorless movie, full of bathos, missed virtually every opportunity the incredible story of Alexander offered. One line -- and one line only -- got a reaction from Keith and me: After reading a nagging letter from his mother, Olympias, Alexander says, "She exacts a high price for nine months lodging in the womb."

Just now, while steam cleaning the carpets, I happened to think of another line from this sorry movie. Someone tells Alexander to love with irony. Now, of course, love with irony is no love at all, but to be fair I'm sure Stone intended for us to realize that. No, what came to my mind has to do with the word itself. Irony is from the Greek eironeia, which meant falsehood, lying, deceiving -- at least until Socrates and/or Plato got ahold of it. Socrates' practice of speaking falsehoods without the intention to deceive is what gave the word the meaning we still ascribe to it.

Here is an example: Phaedrus recites to Socrates a speech he just heard from Lysias, in which the orator claimed that it is better to yield to someone not in love than to someone in love. Phaedrus then asks, "What do you think of the speech, Socrates? Is it not extraordinarily fine, especially in point of language?"

Socrates replies,

Amazingly fine indeed, my friend. I was thrilled by it. And it was you, Phaedrus, that made me feel as I did. I watched your apparent delight in the words as you read. And as I'm sure that you understand such matters better than I do, I took my cue from you, and therefore joined in the ecstasy of my right worshipful companion.

To Phaedrus' credit, he immediately understands that Socrates is jesting, and thus Socrates achieves his goal of speaking falsehood without deceiving his young friend.

In the interest of full disclosure, inspired by the implied courage of the impending revelations in my colleague's Mirkwood entry, I find it necessary to show to the world that mishap, that summit of silk-screen shame, the very artistic albatross hung round the neck of a weekend's desire that has been cited in entries apropos art and painful pulchritude. Go read the entries, then return here and gaze upon the wages of a moment's madness.

My peer's explanation for his appreciation of Kandisky is an erudite version of justifying a sofa painting. You see, I find it difficult to have a discussion with him about Modern art, one which doesn't include a comment akin to "I think it looks good, or doesn't, and that's my standard." Modern art (the plastic arts of painting and sculpture are on the table here, I think) is a mixed bag, full of extraordinary talents and shameful charlatans. But so is any era. And taste is taste.

My main complaint is the dismissive backhand towards Klein's "IKB 79," as though it could not be considered art. Klein was a conceptual artist, working in many media. Conceptual. I think that the ideas he's working with, particularly with color in this case, should be considered as part of an aesthetic response. A big blue rectangle, yes with hue and texture, presented as art. If my friend doesn't like the thing, fair enough. It may not match the new color scheme in his house. But to snicker as though it has no artistic value, well that's quite a different matter.

The painting on the right is Mark Rothko's "No. 10." Rothko is considered an absract expressionist, in the same league as Kandinsky. Do we dismiss this? Or Pollock, for that matter?

I'm just now finishing up, as I fold a few shirts and wash a couple of dishes, my first viewing of Disney's The Lion King. I've heard about this slab of dammit of a movie for years now, first perhaps when I was writing for the MUD, and thought I'd give it a watch.

See, I've become something of a NetFlix addict, a service which sends you three DVD's, then, as you return 'em, sends you the next in a queue you set up on their website. For a set fee per month. Simple. Thing is, you have to watch and mail, watch and mail, like a Tammy Faye fan on crank, to get the thing to pay off.

At any rate, I tossed The Lion King in my queue and it showed up today. No wonder the folks at church love it and show it to their wee ones. This big ol' lion, ruler of everything as far as the eye can see (except for evil little hyena land), fathers a son, who, after watching dear ol' dad sacrifice himself on the altar of wildebeast to save him, wanders into the wilderness to find his inner king. Mystical Messianic stuff this. Our society moved on from this crap sometime just before the Magna Carta, I think. Did I mention the evil, organized hyenas? Damned liberals—wanna bring down the king and put their own guy in. Jesus freaks see this as a parable, I promise.

This woulda been my only movie of the evening, as I had plans to go out on the town, perhaps shake a leg with this interesting woman. But there's been a change in the weather and I'm staying in. Trent's the second string and he's coming over in an hour or so, when we'll settle in to watch Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and nod knowingly at the Lady Macbeth parts.

"I applied streaks and blobs of colours onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could..."

       -- Wassily Kandinsky

One of the cool things about sprucing up empty space is acquiring new stuff for the walls. In my bedroom are stacked paintings, prints, posters, all awaiting their eventual placement on walls throughout the house -- once I finish painting, that is.

The print posted here is of Wassily Kandinsky's painting "Yellow - Red - Blue," which I'm on the verge of ordering from art.com, a truly terrific site to shop for cool art. My Nifty buddy Keith was surprised to learn I liked Kandinsky; over the years I've let be known my distaste for much of modern art. To me, art is first and foremost about beauty; the ideas behind a work may be important and interesting, but the aesthetic experience is what distinguishes art from other forms of expression. Now, I don't want to come across as a philistine; I have a taste for philosophy, critical theory, history, biography, etc., but if I buy a painting, I want it to be visually pleasing -- any extras are welcome and appreciated, but, essentially, I turn to art for beauty, not ideas.

Kandinsky understood that art is about the beautiful. He famously said that

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

And claimed that when he saw color he heard music.

Kandinsky, a Russian expressionist and perhaps THE father of pure abstraction in modern art, died in 1944, but the beauty he created persists.

Eight years or so ago, I had the chance to visit the Tate Gallery in London, and there I saw many beautiful paintings, including some of my favorite Pre-Raphaelite works. But I also saw Yves Klein's "IKB 79," also posted here. Keith and I have had many arguments about this painting. I hate it. It's just a blue rectangle, though Keith always points out that it's not a uniform blue, that there is some variation in color and in texture. I don't care. It's a blue rectangle, and while I have nothing against the color blue or rectangles, it just isn't very interesting. Of course, there is an IDEA behind the painting. ...

In a book I bought at the Tate Gallery are these comments about Klein: "He took the view that the essence of art lay in colour and in one primary colour in particular, blue. He expressed this view in a truly extraordinary series of blue monocrome paintings of which 'IKB 79' is one."

Ummmm ... ok, but as Kandinsky proves, yellow and red are all right too.

In the past couple of months, I've found myself drawn to re-read a particular play: Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

In the mid 90's I really got into the plays of Bertolt Brecht. I had always loved drama—perhaps because I didn't spend a great deal of time criticising it (most of my middling, amateur, graduate-school scholarship I wrote on poetry and poetic theory), but mostly because I dug reading it aloud whilst meandering around the house; I found it easy to enjoy and digest. Even those 20th century dramatists I considered difficult at the time, like Dürrenmatt and Arrabal, I read with a kind of glee. But Brecht has always been my favorite dramatist, excepting Shakespeare. (That's a phrase I think all competent literary critics employ when proclaiming favorites.)

When starting on Brecht, of course one should read all the big ones. I suggest the following order: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, then Life of Galileo. But get Resistible Rise in there somewhere. It will serve as a completely clear example of what Brecht means to accomplish in his didactic theater, an example that can be applied to his more difficult plays noted above. Then, I think it might, especially in these times, accomplish something else.

In The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: a parable play, Brecht presents the troubled Chicago Cauliflower Trust and documents its increasingly compromised attempts to survive a bear market. They start with the simple bribery of a city hall official named Dogsborough in order to obtain a loan. Sooner rather than later they are involved in a protection racket with the gangster Artuo Ui and his henchmen. The move from one to the other happens almost imperceptibly to the characters, but nakedly to the audience. As the play moves on, one sees the bald avarice and evil of Ui as he manipulates petty jealousies and entrenched prejudice to set one side against another, stepping in with a smile and a gun to bring a sort of peace.

Ui saves Dogsborough from scandal in exchange for power and access. He then brings violent protection to the greengoods dealers and the Cauliflower Trust, thus spawning more violence. Ui becomes a statesman of sorts, taking acting lessons to appear less the gangster and more the trusted leader. A suspicious warehouse fire blamed on a man not in his right mind (who at his trial can only answer in gibberish), a dead Dogsborough, and a conquered Chicago completely in his control lead Ui to grander notions: "Vegetables," he says, "are sold in other cities."

He chooses a small town, nearby, on which to test his plans. He overwhelms Cicero and, after a small bit of violence, is accepted with open arms. Ui moves on:

For Chicago and Cicero
Are not alone in clamouring for protection.
There are other cities: Washington and Milwaukee!
Detroit! Toledo! Pittsburgh! Cincinnati!
And other towns where vegetables are traded!
Philadelphia! Columbus! Charleston! And New York!
They all demand protection! And no 'Phooey!'
No 'That's not nice!' will stop Arturo Ui!

And so ends the play. A parable. Humorous to read or watch, and yet it becomes horrifying when a reader or member of the audience considers how so small a thing became so large a political crime. Brecht provides for the reader a chronological table of the rise of Hitler, cross-referenced to scenes in the play, but it is nearly unecessary save to drive the point further home.

Brecht ends the play with this Epilogue:

Therefore learn how to see and not to gape.
To act instead of talking all day long.
The world was almost won by such an ape!
The nations put him where his kind belong.
But don't rejoice too soon at your escape—
The womb he crawled from still is going strong

I'll leave contemporary parallels up to you, offering only Thom Hartmann's "When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History" as reference.

Footnote:

Brecht on Theatre is a fine place to start when reading about Brecht. Examing his plays in context of the many essays is valuable because Brecht's goal is to present dramas with a didactic purpose. With the aid of his essays one learns more of his method and thus learns quickly to recognize allegory and thus find in the reading or viewing that extra level of pleasure in his craft. In truth, Brecht wants the reader to "like" his didactic, epic theater, to pull them in in order to deliver the message. That's the cool part of Brecht. His lessons are entertaining, comic, and intensely politically and socially aware. Students, the ones I've seen coming back from seven years in a Levi's factory and the ones right outta high school, can understand the pleasures of reading and/or watching social satire or political epic that mirrors their lives. They only need the chance and a little context. It's not given to them as an opportunity in their entertainments very often (witness the bland comedy of Everybody Loves Raymond and The Drew Carey Show—least common denomenator, cheap-comedy pieces with no real social satire). My students aren't blind; when they discover what passion is and how bright its fire burns they can and do move from the self-absorbed to the social. They can find pleasure beyond necessity— inclusive of progressive social values. How good a thing. Brecht recognized it in his day. And he wrote other things, essays, about how better we can teach others to see political and social commentary as tremendously entertaining and engaging, even if they know the plot ahead of time, as is often the case in Brecht's epic theater.

I post this picture of John Reinhart Weguelin's Lesbia because it's lovely and I can. Painted in 1878, Lesbia depicts, of course, the frustrating love of Catullus' life.

Friends remind me that not everyone knows of Gaius Valerius Catullus. He was a Roman poet of the first century B.C. famous for his lyrical and often scathing verse. Lesbia was the subject of much of his poetry -- poetry often surprisingly tender or shockingly vulgar. He's also one of history's great masters of invective:

I laughed. Calvus. I laughed today
when someone in the courtroom crowd, hearing
your quite brilliant expose of
the Vatinian affair, lifted his hands up
in proper amazement, and cried suddenly:
"A cock that size ... and it spouts!"
I laughed. Calvus. I laughed.

But he's most famous for his 26 Lesbia poems. Usually, Lesbia is identified as Clodia Metelli, the wife of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer. If this is correct, then she's the same person accused by Cicero of poisoning her husband and committing incest with her brother. Of Catullus' 26 Lesbia poems, 10 are homages to his love for her; two compare her to other women; four gripe about their quarrels; six accuse her of infidelity to him; three charge her with specific affairs, including the rumored liaison with her brother; and four are just outright abusive (some of these categories overlap).

Catullus apparently had an affair with her before her husband suddenly died. That it was tumultuous is apparent from the poems, many of which are downright misogynistic. That it also inspired lyrical love poetry is testimony to the conflict in Catullus' head and heart.

Lesbia loads me night & day with her curses,
"Catullus" always on her lips,
       yet I know that she loves me.
How? I equally spend myself day & night
in assiduous execration
       -- knowing too well my hopeless love.

Like much we have of the ancient world, Catullus' poems survive by a fluke. In 14th Century Verona, a rolled-up manuscript was found in an old jug in the wine cellar of a rich merchant. The manuscript contained more than a hundred poems, ranging from two-line epigrams to 400-line extended riffs. The original manuscript disappeared a few years after it was found, but not before two copies were made. The copy that survives is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Curious to know how many kisses of your lips
might satisfy my lust for you, Lesbia;
as many as the sky has stars at night
shining in quiet upon the furtive loves of mortal men.

Hanging on the office wall, above my computer, is this Lord of the Rings poster created in 1973 by Jimmy Cauty. Ever since I was a teenager, I've had a copy of this poster. Last night, Keith and I, after surveying our most recent wrecked relationships (see...oh hell, just about any entry) -- anyway, afterwards, we got to tracing the minutia in his Cauty poster, which of course led to getting online and looking stuff up.

Jimmy Cauty was born in Devon in 1956; when he was 17, he designed the poster for Athena. Since then, more than six million copies have been distributed worldwide.

Cauty, aka Rockman Rock, is a quite the character. He was a co-founder of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMS, earlier known as KLF), an art-music band that had seven consecutive Top 10 singles. Iconoclastic to the core, Cauty's been involved in a number of subversive hoaxes, pranks, and public statements.

But for me, Cauty's the kid who created the coolest Lord of the Rings poster. Yes, it looks like student art; yes, it's kind of crude. But the sheer obsession that went into its creation -- that I can appreciate.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld continues to pump out both blather (by confusing bin Laden and Hussein) and bluster (by promoting the nonsense of achieving fair Iraqi elections in January) rather than anything approaching a cogent understanding of the mess in Iraq. Even the now quite discredited Colin Powell understands the problems.

Meanwhile, Bush's adopted hometown of Crawford, TX has endorsed Kerry, calling Bush's proposals a "smoke-screen agenda." This from a small town newspaper deep in the heart of Texas that endorsed Bush in 2000. I think the word is getting out. I've said it before but will echo Clinton again many times before election day: there are more of us then there are of them. If we vote, if folks from the erroneously supposed Bush supporters in Crawford, TX to the nearly disenfranchised in Orlando, FL, go to the polls, Kerry will win and we'll have four years to repair our democracy, our image around and relations with the world, and our self-esteem. If we can get enough folks to see the truth and get them pissed off enough to vote, Kerry's election is assured. Sounds obvious, eh?

—

The Time cover is by Boris Artzybasheff, a mid-century illustrator who had immense range, from anthropomorphized helicopters in advertisments to bawdy line drawings in the Balzac Droll Stories volume I have on my shelf. The Balzac is one of many books that Trent and I haul off the shelf to amuse ourselves after we've looked over this or that theorist and offered the same opinions we always do. Take Fredric Jameson: the only valuable Jameson is his first chapter of The Political Unconscious. The rest of the book (especially that crap on Lord Jim) is unreadable; subsequent volumes put the reader off and don't offer much for the effort. I first encountered Jameson some fourteen years ago in a Political Theory class, which occasioned relations with a fantastic woman that were more than theoretical and might just have been Balzac farce if they weren't so imperative as to bring me to tears fourteen years later.

Brave Combo, perhaps our favorite party band, just released its latest CD: Let's Kiss. For 25 years, on more than 30 albums, and at countless festivals, concerts, nightclubs, bar mitzvahs, and weddings, the combo has redefined musical cool. Polka, jazz, blues, Latin, cha cha, zyedeco, salsa, schottische, acid rock, bubblegum, cumbia, classical, the twist -- Brave Combo is dedicated to the proposition that all music played with zest and love is hip.

In 1999, the Denton, Texas-based group won a Grammy for Polkasonic, a great straight-up polka album, but my favorites are A Night on Earth, Polkas for a Gloomy World, and Kiss of Fire. Robert Crumb called Brave Combo the only band he'd pay to see, David Byrne flew BC in to play at his wedding, Matt Groening animated the group for The Simpsons, Harvey Pekar credited the combo for brightening his sour outlook, and Tiny Tim recorded perhaps his most interesting album with the gang.

Do Something Different

Don't believe anyone.
Don't read your mail.
Make light of every word you hear.
Turn off your radio. Quit your job.
Do something different. Disappear.
Do something different. Disappear.

Think like a child. Laugh at cocaine.
Never ever ever do what's proper again.
Understand everyone crystal-clear.
Rid yourself of fashion. Disappear.
Remove yourself from fashion. Disappear.

Reverse your morality. Listen to bands
That play only music you can't stand.
Forget how to worry. Enjoy your fears.
Stop your life insurance and Disappear.
Stop your life insurance and Disappear.

--Carl Finch

A Bit o' Nifty reader sent me some E-mail commenting on an earlier post where I asserted that a quality of good music is that it does not seek conversion. I was directed to Beethoven's Missa Solemnis as an "exception that proves the rule."

After spending some time with it, I find that the very section in which doctrine is espoused, the "Credo," is the section I have the most trouble with, not on a doctrinal or music-theory level, mind, but as a listener of music. (I know nothing of music theory except those moments when it's hijacked by literary theory, and that from some time ago.) I'm listening to the 1989 John Eliot Gardiner version (Archv #429779), and the liner notes, which I don't intend to rely upon here too terribly much because they color my reading, quote the music historian Donald Tovey: Beethoven "brings out an overwhelming and overwhelmed sense of the Divine glory, with which he invariably and immediately contrasts the nothingness of man." That's certainly somewhere to start when listening to this Mass. More on the "Credo" below.

Theodor Adorno (if Trent's not going to use the big heavyweights, I am) says that, "there is something peculiar about the Missa Solemnis." And there is. The opening "Kyrie" is a glorious plea for the Lord's mercy--seriously, if you're into the Romantic, you need to listen to this. But nothing abnormal or "conversion-oriented" struck me in this passage. After the "Kyrie," things begin to get complicated and one's mind runs to the Ninth Symphony for something to compare. I'm not so sure this is a Mass by the time I get halfway through the "Gloria" section and certainly not, oddly enough, by the end of "Credo." "Credo" is complicated and tough; it's surprising the soloists can get through some of the passages. Over and over, Beethoven asserts a belief system that will serve as the underpinnings for his later petitionary position before God. And so I can't ignore the "Credo," and thus the focus on conversion in the piece. Again, Beethoven asserts absolutely that one must buy into the belief structure if one wants to approach God in the later sections, "Sanctus" and "Agnus Dei." That's not to say that the two sections after the "Credo" ("Sanctus" and "Agnus Dei") aren't accessible and enjoyable and transporting listened to by themselves. It's just that, having listened to the "Credo," I find that I'm lying to myself if I ignore it. Missa Solemnis is certainly a piece intensely and intimately concerned with faith and belief, with the relationship between glorious, omnipotent God and feeble, lowly man, but it goes one step beyond to raise a question: are we worthy to experience God's mercy and, then, to receive his peace, especially when we are so bent upon our own destruction?

The concluding "Agnus Dei" I listened to over and over with wonder and delight. I've never heard such a petition for the mercy of God, then the peace of God, delivered so far beyond the personal. The personal is in the piece, but Beethoven moves to the greater scope of the world and politics to consider the larger body of mankind. The music, near the end of the Mass, begins to echo war—at one point the tympani go way over the top, like cannon fire. Certainly, this is the context in which we most need to be granted mercy and peace.

Never so much than now, when war rages and the dominant Christian option in this country is to use God as a foundation for rage against the heathens. Beethoven gives us quite another option. If you're going to ask for peace, you'd better have a foundation in doctrine. But also, if you're going to believe, ask for mercy and peace, not a sword.

Dona nobis pacem: Grant us peace.

Thanks, Roy.

After Trent wrote a response to and review of Bagge's Hate, I asked to borrow the whole series for another read on the condition that I write a response.

I like Hate. I do. It mirrors a strain in my way of thinking that dominated several years of my life, perhaps as much as a decade. The early, b/w issues especially. Not because they are without color and somehow "purer" to the independent comic scene/concept/vision/whatever, but because they are a distillation of what it meant to be living in a cheap apartment, often a chopped-up part of a larger house, with sometimes cheap and petty people all involved in arts or music and sometimes quite unhinged. And the girls, the girls. When I finally discovered that some women liked me genuinely, I was baffled. Buddy makes sense. He's baffled but quite willing to take advantage of it having never quite gotten an education on how to deal with the world. [This part does come up in the later, colored issues, and so I find them necessary. Less appealing, but necessary.]

The connection is first with the humor. Buddy is plain funny in his reactionary oddities that sound familiar to some buried thought process roiling behind my immersion in college and the first years of grad school--from 86-93 or so, give or take. You see the second connection is autobiographical and though my present-day life bears nothing in kind to Buddy's early or late or current life (in the Hate annuals), I find the connection comforting. Third, the artwork is fantastic. It is. I hate to put it this way—it seems like a tired term to use—but the ID was ne'er so well expressed.

Bagge's run of Hate is satire that eclipses the work of both R. Crumb and Woody Allen, two artists I connect with similar investigations of the male ID. You see, Bagge and Buddy are humanists. Crumb is like Candide's Martin with a filthy imagination and artistic talent—a pessimist who does things and enjoys certain things because there's nothing else to do. Allen is a fake philosopher, and in keeping with the Candide analogy, something like Pangloss—Allen can't be shaken from his beliefs in some weird existential idea of meaning and so he becomes a caricature. He no longer makes me care about anything. Even Manhattan is beginning to feel trite. I have a suspicion that Bagge (and Buddy), like Candide himself, learns to tend his garden.

The run of Hate is over, and that's a good thing. The episodic satire is done. Good. It was very good.

In a recent piece, I mentioned the painters Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. How I forgot Thomas Lawrence is a mystery; in 1794 he painted Sarah Goodin Barret Moultin, Pinkie, and created perhaps my favorite of the Grand Style or Grand Manner portraits.

Pinkie, born in Jamaica and brought by her grandmother to England to continue her education, died, presumably of tuberculosis, shortly after the portrait was completed. Her brother was the father of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

As a high school student and early college student, I had a nice print of "Pinkie," but somehow over the last 20 years I lost it. So this is for me, and for anyone else it may move.

------

I fear this may prompt the piece on modern art Keith has threatened. ...

I thought it would be nice to get something beautiful up -- pictures of Dick Cheney give me the creeps. This is a still from Hero, a Chinese movie made two years ago but just released in the states.

The movie is lyrical color, a visually gorgeous, beautifully told fable on an epic scale. It's been compared to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, but it brings to my mind Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities or even a good version of 1001 Arabian Nights. Pure hypnotic cinema, why film was invented.

That's about all I can say.

The love affair started during a history of film class in 1984 at North Texas State University in Denton, TX.

After learning from the unbearably slow and silent Potemkin that bad meat sparked the Bolshevik revolution, and after delighting in the iconic Stagecoach that featured the rifle-propped-against-cocked-hip first film appearance of John Wayne, we settled in to watch the strangely titled Rashomon, the subtitled 1951 film by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

I was prepared for another bit of Potemkin-esque agony, one of those experiences we’ve all had suffering uninspired sermons, enduring droning lectures, or, because you want to get laid, stomaching insipid chick flicks that go on and on and on about finding, 50 years too late, misplaced love letters, when all the guys in the theater just want the stupid old geezers on the screen to hurry up and for god's sakes die.

How was I to know, then? The lights dimmed, the students sank back into their seats, and, sometime during the next 88 minutes, I fell in love.

Rashomon, the movie that made Kurosawa an international figure and pushed Japanese cinema into the world's spotlight, is a tale of love, murder, rape, betrayal, all told from four different irreconcilable points of view. In one sense, it's classic courtroom drama; in another, larger, it's philosophical meditation on truth and humanity. Oh, how I tried to make the varying accounts of the crimes fit together. My friends and I spent hours trying to work it out. In the end, though, that exercise was not only fruitless but also pointless. Kurosawa wasn't about to cheapen his movie by making it a detective thriller an observant audience could piece together.

After that, I was mad for Kurosawa. Fortunately, Denton had a funky old video tape store on The Square, and I found quite a few of the master's movies: The Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Dodes'ka-den, Kagemusha, Ran, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams.

Sometime in the late 1980s, I invited friends over to a little trailer shack where I was living just behind the big white house on Fry Street where I had lived before. Five us crammed together on my dinky bed and watched, on an itty bitty television, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, a collection of eight hypnotically beautiful stories, all presented in exquisite, bold color. (When Kurosawa finally went color in Dodes'ka-den, he did it in a big way.) For two hours we sat on each other's laps mesmerized. When it was over, my friend Brendan said, "That was the best fucking movie I've ever seen." While I didn't share that opinion, I understood the sentiment.

Not all my attempts to share Kurosawa were fruitful. Years later, while teaching freshman English students at The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, I showed The Hidden Fortress, the classic black-and-white adventure that inspired George Lucas' Star Wars. But the 139-minute movie, edited with an aesthetic far different than the fast-cut MTV video-style editing so prevalent today, tortured the students beyond their endurance. Two of my friends and fellow teachers came at my invitation to see this fabulous movie, and we watched as, one by one, the students slipped out. Finally, only one poor soul remained, squirming in agony, until with a jerk he stood up, muttered something about a frat party, and rushed past us and out the door. We teachers glanced at each other, one of us snickered, and then we all roared with laughter, not recovering for minutes. I had stumbled across my students' Potemkin.

Over time, I've managed to see most of Kurosawa's films, though a few still elude me. It's been almost 20 years now, but sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and even the cat is asleep, I pop in my dusty videotape of Rashomon and experience again my first real cinematic love.

Sometimes you skim over the best moments the first time through. I missed this little beauty at first, but whilst egotistically cruising some past entries of A.J.'s over at Toadking to see if I'm mentioned anywere (the dirty little secret of blogging, my friends), I read his wonderfully compact entry on the process of using figurative language to capture, as Donald Hall puts it, "the unsayable said."

A.J.'s entry brings to mind Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons," which, though it suffers from the stigma of the oft-anthologized, distills the agonizing desire, the need we have for precision--a need that can be met only by the figurative.

Hall practices what he preaches, by the way. "Affirmation" is a fine example, a fine Bit o' Nifty.

Rob Long, writer/producer, self-confessed "ultra loyal" Republican, and contributing Hollywood editor to the National Review, writes in Friday's edition of Slate that "the sad truth is, the real difference between Democrats and Republicans is that their celebrities are, like, actually famous and ours are, well, singing weirdly erotic songs about Our Savior."

Brushing aside that the relationship between Christ and his church IS an erotic one (the Hebrew wedding ceremony metaphor of Christ and church as bridegroom and bride ends in consummation, after all), Long has provided for us a nice little insight:

The ultra-right and left wings of whatever party misapprehend the power and misunderstand the purpose of music.

The most powerful religious music addresses the human struggle between the flesh and the spirit: agony, joy, celebration, dejection.... When music attempts conversion of any kind it loses its power because it loses its humanity--witness any number of examples, especially from the left when it gets really preachy, as in the worst moments in the career of U2.

I realize I'm admitting to a certain distaste for some songs from a band well-represented on my shelves.

Shostakovich's 5th symphony isn't powerful because it attempts any kind of conversion--get a copy (I like the Jansons) and listen....

A friend recently recommended for my listening pleasure Lucinda Williams. There was a time I often listened to music, when I had music for every occasion. Somehow, with a new job, a new wife and child, a new life, I had lost that. But then I listened to Lucinda, an alternative country singer and songwriter who oozes soul. From the first track on Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, I was a goner.

Not a day goes by I don't think about you
You left your mark on me it's permanent a tattoo
Pierce the skin and the blood runs through
-- "Right in Time"

Good god. Rough and weathered, her voice is beautiful because anchored by pain and passion; her songs are edged with hard-won experience. My tastes generally run to blues and early jazz, but much of what turns me on in, say, Lou Rawls or Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald is here, now, in Lucinda's aching songs.

In a yellow Camino
Listening to Howling Wolf
He liked to stop in Lake Charles
Cause that's the place that he loved
--"Lake Charles"

This stuff plucks heart strings you forgot you had. Sometimes wistful, nostalgic, other times raw, angry, Lucinda gives you both barrels.

I don't want you anymore
cause you took my joy
I don't want you anymore
you took my joy

you took my joy
I want it back
you took my joy
I want it back
--"Joy"

Three years and seven months is starting to take its toll.

Weariness.

I talk to my peers, my colleagues, my friends, my students.... They are tired of pursuing better jobs, healthcare, education for their kids, tired of living through and talking about war.

During the summer semester, I ran into a group of students who spent the last three years of high school under the Bush administration. Most of them have no illusions. They know they'll have to beat the system and claw their way to the top if they want to succeed in this country in its present state. Some are excited about it, some are resigned to it, some are mad as hell.

But all of them, no matter how "patriotic," are cynical. They know fear--not just because of bombings in New York, but because it is broadcast by our government. They know anger--not because of righteous indignation, but because it is preached from the seats of power. They know resentment--not because of personal injury, but because it is taught to them each day on cable news.

They hear that America is a land of promise. But when talking to them, I get the feeling that they think it only holds promise for those willing to drop the idealism and get busy with climbing the ladder.

Three and a half years ago, we Americans had spent a decade repairing ourselves. The place felt good. More of us were healthy, less of us hungry. That wonderful quality of these United States--the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--was true for more of us than ever before.

I miss it. I feel like a little kid asking where my childhood went.

Terrorists didn't take it away.

John Prine knows where it went.

Had a wonderful time last night getting enthusiastically blasted with my poet and technogeek buddies at an Old City tavern. I remember we came to marvelous conclusions about life and passion but, dammit, no one wrote them down and I suspect they're lost in the post-fun brain cloud.

Later, we retired to the poet's house, listened to the wonderfully evocative Lucinda Williams, and watched Some Like it Hot, my nominee for greatest comedy ever, slapstick division. ("Like JellO on springs," oh my dear god.) We had to create lots of divisions because, heck, Breakfast at Tiffanys is the greatest something or other, and Roman Holiday takes the top spot on some sort of list.

Some Like it Hot sparked intense debate amongst us regarding what's sexier: beautiful women clothed or unclothed. Generally, I'm in the clothed camp (I mean, come on, that incredibly slinky dress Marilyn wore in the last third of the movie, virtually transparent in the front and wafting gently in the back). But the famous calendar photo of her nude on red satin sheets that got reprinted in the first issue of Playboy -- that image is just iconic and has fueled many a fantasy for decades.

The dialogue in the movie just sparkles:

Tony Curtis: "It'll take awhile to get to the yacht" (or something like that). Marilyn: "It's not how long it takes, it's who's taking you."

Lecherous old millionaire: "Do you use a bow or do you pluck it" (referring to the bass fiddle Jack Lemmon, in drag, brought to the Florida resort). Lemmon: (with a wicked gleam in his eye): "Sometimes I slaaaaap it."

Anyway, great conversation, great friends, great fun. It was a blast, guys; let's do it again.

I've been digging through old comic books lately, and I always pause when I get to Hate. Starting in 1990, Peter Bagge's Hate, which chronicles the life of average guy Buddy Bradley, ran through the '90s, finally ending with issue 30. I was in on the series from issue 1. It was a sad day when the run ended.

They may be the best 30 comic books ever created. Peter Bagge's outrageously exaggerated drawing style combined with an absolutely spot-on depiction of the life of a 20-something slacker -- it's an amazing thing. Hilariously funny, heart-wrenchingly truthful, this bitter, angry, resigned, and, at times, hopeful series became one of the most successful "underground" comics of all time.

You can still buy the original comics online; they've even been compiled into softcover trade books (I tell you this because you ain't getting mine). For everyone who's ever lived in crummy apartments, had insane loves, and woken up drunk on strange lawns, Hate's got your number.

Update: My poet buddy KSN brought intoxicants over last night and, under the influence, I agreed to let him walk out with my entire Hate collection. I did win a concession: when he's plowed through the stack, he's got to write an extensive piece on the art and wonderment that is Hate. Look for it.

The other night a friend and I watched one of our favorite flicks, High Fidelity; it's an amazing movie that captures so much of what it's like to be a guy. Everything in the movie rings true -- hell, most of it is true, could have been lifted straight from my or my friends' biographies -- except the happy ending. Freud, Derrida, and Lacan give us a progression from the deferment of desire, to the deferment of language, to the deferment of desire in language. A more optimistic formulation (as I've taught my six-year-old daughter to sing): "You can't always get what you want."

Anyway, that's not the point of this post. This post is supposed to ask, what are good guy movies? Now, when guy movie lists are created, usually you get movies with lots of explosions and guns. Perhaps I'm not the typical guy, but explosions are not part of my daily life, and certainly not what I'd consider part of the essence of being male. The guy movies I'm interested in are ones that explore what it is to be a guy.

So, here's my current list of the Top 5 guy movies, not necessarily in order, and subject to change whenever I want:

High Fidelity
The Tao of Steve
The Big Lebowski
Office Space
Manhattan

These are not necessarily the best movies I've ever seen, though some of them would make my Top 20. I wanted to find a way to work Amelie onto the list, but try as I might I just can't make that movie fit the parameters. It's curious that the movies that did make the list are comedies, for the most part. I suspect that's because the truth about men can't yet be depicted outside of the bounds of comedy. I'm sure there are exceptions, but none comes to mind at the moment.

Sitting beside me is The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, a gift a few years back from the Toadking. He knew I read and collected Crumb. Long ago I stopped apologizing for liking this stuff. Some of it is shocking, true; some of it you can't believe he drew. Infantile, racist, sexist, pornographic -- I can't even try to defend this stuff, and if anyone indicts me for liking Crumb, I'll just shrug my shoulders and say I don't give a damn. (That's one nice thing about getting older -- it's easier to shrug your shoulders and not give a damn.) I've been flipping through it and other Crumb stuff the past few days, looking for something to steal for a story/essay I'd written. (No worries, copyright police, the thing won't have a greater readership than one or two writer friends.)

More than any artist I know (and Crumb is an artist, the genuine deal), except maybe Bosch, Crumb lets it all hang out. He can't hold down his slavering Id; it long ago won that battle. That Crumb often shows embarassment and remorse in his comics for what he has depicted only strengthens the notion that the ugly Id, with all its desire and need, just cannot be controlled. I actually consider Crumb's life story to be one of triumph. He found a niche in which he can do whatever he wants, doesn't have to give a damn what anyone thinks, and makes enough money to survive. This is a guy who has turned down movie deals and zillions of lucrative opportunities just because the people he'd have to deal with make him sick.

The fact that Crumb's work is often hilariously funny social satire makes it easier to take. Does that make up for all the rest? I don't know, and -- I don't give a damn. He's an American original, an American treasure.