Dept. of Really?

A plan to ask J.D. Salinger for his unpublished work. (More Intelligent Life)

Their plan was to rent a couple of cars and drive up to Cornish, find his house and deliver their message to him. This visit was to be preceded by a letter to Mr Salinger warning him of their impending visit (but leaving the date of their visit vague so that he would not know when to expect them). I read a version of their letter-an imploring manifesto asking for more of the stories that had already affected their lives so deeply.

I found this trip to be a bad idea, and I told my friend so. I recall having a spiteful little thought: that I would have preferred it if these artists had chosen some other writer, perhaps any other writer, and gone to his house to urge him never to publish anything ever again. That is a manifesto I would have enjoyed.

NP and the stage

NP considers stage work, worries Broadway is too commercial...(Broadway World)

IMDB News is reporting that Broadway vet and screen star Natalie Portman is hopeful to return to Broadway, but fears that the high ticket prices has changed the nature of the Broadway roles available to young actresses like herself.

As she recently explained to the New York Post: "It's gotten so expensive that the audiences you get aren't up for something experimental."

She especially fears that due to the expense, people are seeing less shows and will chose instead to spend on the bigger blockbusters or musicals, as opposed to with meatier, lesser-known plays.

Monday Music (and thoughts): The Importance of Being Josh Ritter

I'm a fan of the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, who I first discovered a few years ago after hearing the song "Good Man" on the radio and thinking it was a lost Springsteen track. Ritter has that effect; his songs are so good you'd swear you'd heard them before. Ritter has been putting records out since 1999 to critical acclaim but is famous primarily to the crowd that follows "alt-country" and "adult alternative" music thanks to places like Paste Magazine and the No Depression website. That didn't stop one music blogger from referring to Ritter (after hearing a track from a new album) as one of the "...most important songwriters of our generation" and another from firing back that the claim didn't hold up because Ritter's music hadn't been heard by enough people. (Green Day is used as a point of comparison) Like so:

Important songwriters of our generation (I guess that’s applying to Generation X) would be more like Billie Joe from Green Day, whether you like his music or not with American Idiot he said some pretty unpopular things to many people & received quite the backlash for standing on principle. Another would be Jeff Tweedy who revolutionized the alt-country genre twice with Uncle Tupelo & then Wilco. Ryan Adams has such an amazing body of talented work that he is a better example of one the most talented writers of our generation.

Tweedy and Adams, who have both made a good deal more music than Ritter, are indeed pillars of the alt-country genre though each have their detractors. They could each be accounted more "important" than Ritter because they've influenced more artists. (Ritter's music is less obviously influenced by country than either Tweedy or Adams's) Billie Joe is a different case, part of a hugely successful band with a built-in audience that has become fashionable for expressing banal anti-war and nonconformist attitudes. To put it another way: Who needs a civics lesson from a band that once released an album called Dookie? Billie Joe's songs have reached more listeners than those of anyone else under discussion, but will they last? The fact that some of his work has already been sentimentalized and contextualized in a musical isn't a good sign. What's the answer? Ritter will never sell as many records as Green Day (unfortunately) but I think he's far more likely to produce work that will endure, and for an artist isn't that really what's "important"?

Josh Ritter hasn't weighed in on his own importance, but he is blogging about his current tour.

To describe the cities we've been in I would have to use all the same old adjectives that you've read before, so I'll try to avoid a straight forward accounting. Suffice to say that Prague wows even those who have been there before and aren't looking to get wowed. Art seems to spring up from everywhere, and the omnipresence of decoration new and old makes the new art seem on a par with the old art and vice versa. Stoop shouldered statues, mysterious saints, concert posters, enormous metronomes, cathedral spires, communist-era TV towers; it's all there for your eyes to see if you're looking.

That's Sixty.....

A troubling post that indicates all that filibuster rhetoric is falling on deaf ears. (US News)

...all of 26 percent of Americans know that 60 votes are required to break a Senate filibuster. Almost the same number (25 percent) think that a simple majority (51 votes, for those of you scoring at home) can break a filibuster. Seven percent of Americans think the number is 67 votes and five percent think it's 75 votes. And 37 percent had the good sense to throw up their hands and admit ignorance.

Figures like that make me glad that President Obama made a point in his State of the Union address of admonishing the GOP that if they "insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town -- a supermajority -- then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. " I might have liked him to spell things out a bit more explicitly, pointing out that such a blanket insistence on a supermajority is a recent development, and not in keeping with how the filibuster has been traditionally used. But I'll take it.

Crazy Heart

Easy stuff first: even if Jeff Bridges didn't have the resume that makes his pending Oscar at least in part a lifetime achievement award his performance as Bad Blake in Crazy Heart would still be good enough to merit a statue. He's that good; it's there in the details, the way the fading country legend Bad lurches out of a club drunkenly to vomit or the way he casually gestures to a sideman to take a guitar solo. Many rapturous descriptions of Bridges's acting use the word "disappear" to describe the unfussy way he slips into a role. Whether that's the right term is a matter of acting semantics, but if there was a any doubt on the subject then I'd say Crazy Heart proves Bridges as capable of projecting more charisma with less sense of effort than any film actor I've ever seen.

If only the movie hanging around Bridges were as strong as his performance. Writer/director Scott Cooper gives Bad a good deal to think about; there's his drinking problem, his protege and possible benefactor Tommy (Colin Farrell), and his new relationship with single mom Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Alcohol is the central issue in Bad's life. It's the thing that occasionally keeps him from completing a show coherently and it's what preys on his mind during his time babysitting Jean's young son Buddy (Jack Nation). Not to belabor a point but Bridges is expert at portraying both the ravages of drinking and the need for alcohol that has been the fuel to some of Bad's best work. When a drink-fueled crisis jeopardizes Bad's relationship with Jean things spill over and Bad enters rehab. One of the most common complaints I've read about Crazy Heart is that Bad's time in rehab feels rushed and inauthentic; when a pal (Robert Duvall) comes to pick Bad up it's as if he has finished in 45 minutes. I can't deny that the rehab stuff feels like filler, at one point Bridges is wandering through a garden and I thought I was watching a "Deep Thoughts" from Saturday Night Live. Yet I would also add that I think the choice to enter rehab is a good deal more important to Bad's story than the actual process of getting well, and that I don't know what Crazy Heart could have added to the countless depictions of detox and AA meetings we've seen in other films and shows.Better to have skipped the rehab center scenes altogether and used a "30 Days Later" title card.

The issue that almost sinks Crazy Heart isn't Bad's recovery but the fact that Jean is inexplicably coming on to Bad from the moment she enters his hotel room to interview him. If you can't figure out why an attractive young professional with a kid would be attracted to a older man whose face looks like an abstract painting then you're not alone, and I don't think even the talents of Bridges and Gyllenhaal (whose no-nonsense sweetness is enormously attractive) quite made me believe this relationship. Jean and Buddy are too obviously on hand as engines for Bad's redemption, and when the moment comes it works but we can see it from much too far away.

Nevertheless there's a raucous Americanness to Crazy Heart that I love, from Duvall's seen-it-all bartender to the culture of bowling alleys that put on country music shows on Saturday nights. (Bad's downscale Texas home feels exactly right) Bad Blake feels like a capstone role for Bridges but perhaps the best thing about Crazy Heart is that it might not be. As a newly certified film legend Bridges will have his pick of good roles for awhile and we'll all be better off for the results.

Shepard on acting

Should have included this in the previous post, but I love this Shepard quote on acting from a '97 Paris Review interview.

"I am not a Strasberg fanatic. In fact, I find it incredibly self-indulgent. I've seen actors come through it because they're strong people themselves, because they're able to use it and go on, but I've also seen actors absolutely destroyed by it, which is painful to see. It has to do with this voodoo that's all about ...the verification of behavior, so that I become the character. It's not true Stanislavsky. He was on a different mission, and I think Strasberg bastardized him in a way that verges on psychosis. You forget about the material, you forget that this is a play, you forget that it's for the audience. 'Hey, man. I'm in my private little world. What you talkin' about? I'm over here. I'm involved with the lemons.'"

Late Shepard

A long profile/analysis of Sam Shepard in The New Yorker. There's some gushing, but the piece puts many things in context for me; he seems to be combining early style with themes of his classic plays.

Shepard’s early plays, written between 1964 and 1971, were full of surprises and assaults on the senses—people spoke from bathtubs or painted one another, colored Ping-Pong balls dropped from the ceiling, a chicken was sacrificed onstage. The plays express what Shepard called the “despair and hope” of the sixties; they act out both the spiritual dislocation and the protean survival instinct of traumatic times. Better than anyone else writing in that fractious hubbub, Shepard defined the fault lines between youth culture and the mainstream. “You were so close to the people who were going to the plays, there was really no difference between you and them,” he said, pinpointing both his work’s value and its limitation. The mockery, the role-playing, the apocalyptic fears, the hunger for new mythologies, and the physical transformations in his work gave shape to the spiritual strangulation of the decade—which, in Shepard’s words, “sucked dogs.” “For me, there was nothing fun about the sixties,” he said. “Terrible suffering. . . . Things coming apart at the seams.”

Precious problems

Ishmael Reed in the NYT today nails what's wrong with Precious.

The blacks who are enraged by “Precious” have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is about 40 years behind Mississippi. In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more “middle-class white Americans” to his film.

Is the enthusiasm of such white audiences and awards committees based on their being comfortable with the stereotypes shown? Barbara Bush, the former first lady, not only hosted a screening of “Precious” but also wrote about it in Newsweek, saying: “There are kids like Precious everywhere. Each day we walk by them: young boys and girls whose home lives are dark secrets.” Oprah Winfrey, whose endorsement assisted the movie’s distribution and its acceptance among her white fanbase, said, “None of us who sees the movie can now walk through the world and allow the Preciouses of the world to be invisible.”

Are Mrs. Bush and Ms. Winfrey suggesting, on the basis of a fictional film, that incest is widespread among black families?

That just happened

There are too many online reports of NP being "terrified" of shooting her much-anticipated sex scene with Mila Kunis in the upcoming Black Swan for me to link to just one, but they're all pretty much the same inconsequential wire-service type blandness. Part of Portman's anxiety is the usual awkwardness of filming a sex scene, but as previously reported here she's also attempting to both redefine her image and to stay away from screen nudity. Good luck on accomplishing both of these, since I'm sure there are more than a few producers and writers out there who would have no problem turning Queen Amidala into a sex object. For now I'll be content to admire the diversity and varying scale of her upcoming projects while waiting for that "Oh, now she's an adult" role to come along. (photo by Armando Gallo)

That's 65 times more...

Do you know why KSM and other terrorism suspects should be tried in a civilian court? Because courts are better at prosecuting terrorists than military commissions. (Democracy Arsenal/Obsidian Wings)

The record of federal courts for trying terrorists, particularly since 9/11 is formidable. Former Republican Congressman from Oklahoma Mickey Edwards writes: “[Critics] scowl and declare that our American courts will not, or can not, convict terrorists. They seem pretty damned certain of that. Which is weird since nearly 200 terrorists have been convicted in our federal courts in the last nine years (that's 65 times as many as have been convicted by military commissions).” A 2009 report by Human Rights First written by a team of former federal prosecutors found that terror trials in civilian courts had “a conviction rate of 91.121%.” And for those still think the NYC issue somehow stems from the courts effectiveness at prosecuting extremists, a study by NYU’s center on Law and Security, found that NYC courts have a zero acquittal rate for terrorism cases.

Dick saw God

The mystery of Philip K. Dick's religious "vision," and its affect on his work. (Hero Complex)

“In the grandest Dickian sense, it’s a mystery that will never be solved,” says David Gill, a San Francisco literature professor who runs a website devoted to Dick's life and work. “Whether it was real or imagined, it was important to his life because it really mellowed him out. Dick felt, I think, like the Universe cared about him, and that all his suffering had not been in vain.”

Some think that whatever the cause or meaning of the 2-3-74 visions, they were valuable as a way to focus Dick’s thinking and writing. Mysticism and religion -- which had interested the author deeply from at least the early ‘60s -- became his abiding concerns in the years after his visitation.

Sontag the Novelist

Susan Sontag, a genius who used her imagination in the wrong way. (The idea of Sontag has always been more interesting than the reality to me, but it's time for a reread.) (Bookforum)

Susan Sontag became famous in her late twenties for her bold essays of the '60s, the ones announcing that sea change in tones of high seriousness. From the beginning, hers was the voice of an educated urban intellectual, free of inflection or nuance, in rigorous possession of a strong, stimulated intelligence that produced insights by the dozen, researched them prodigiously, and organized the findings so brilliantly that the results equated with cultural authority. From start to finish, she was a formal rather than a personal essayist. Even when the impetus for the work was openly derived from her own years-long battle with cancer (as in Illness as Metaphor [1978]), she herself was never there on the page. Concomitantly, living as she did in a fishbowl, she very early put in place a way of appearing in the world—haughty and dramatic—that, for many years, provided a living mask that served her well.

For Rent: Zombieland

Zombieland clocks in just a hair over 80 minutes long, which is just short enough for you not to be bothered by the fact that there isn't anything more to it than Woody Harrelson's performance as a badass zombie killer and Jesse Eisenberg's geeky narration of the "rules" ("Check the back seat") to surviving in a world where almost the whole population has become ravenous for human flesh after a pandemic. Harrelson and Eisenberg pick up two sisters (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) in their sprint across the country and that all there is; the appeal of watching the four smash things (and people) up and bounce off each other carries through to the final showdown at an amusement park. Zombieland was part of a great 2009 for Harrelson (culminating in an Oscar nomination for The Messenger), and for that alone we should be glad of its existence.

Cocteau Show

Seeing the Cocteau Twins, circa 1990. (Ned Raggett)

But I do remember one moment very clearly, the encore — it was the politest stage rush ever. I can’t recall whether it was after they’d left following the main set or when they came back, but I have this impression of a rustle of black fabric and veils all around me, like all the goths who I knew were there the whole time but who I hadn’t fully noticed somehow appeared from and boiled out of the rows and seats to swoop up to the stage front. Of course, I joined them. (No veils, though.) Seeing everything up close didn’t really change the experience all that much, but I’m pretty sure they saved “Heaven or Las Vegas” itself for the encore, and I sense a piercing, faraway look in Liz’s eyes and Robin’s hands nimbly calling up the arcing guitar parts during the break and end of the song.

Fred Hersch

Great NYT profile of Fred Hersch, the gay jazz pianist whose amazing survival of a two-month long AIDS-related coma and a host of other problems related to the disease is informing his new work and a career still going strong.

Hersch, among the most sensitive of jazz pianists, is acutely sensitive to the proposition that his sensitivity makes his music “gay.” I took up the subject on a walk with him along the gravel path behind his country house. We heard hummingbirds in the beech trees and got to talking about nature and the conception of beauty as a value in gay culture. “I wouldn’t quite say that’s bull, but it’s a very dangerous idea,” Hersch said, slowing his gait. “The compliment I get the most often is, ‘My, you sounded really beautiful.’ I used to think, I want them to say something else, because I felt like that was a kind of, Oh, yeah, you’re gay — so of course you play lyrically and you’re one of the great ballad players. Of course. But now I just don’t care at all what people think. I think music should be beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with beauty. I’m attracted to beauty and lyricism, but I don’t play the way I do because I’m gay. I play the way I do because I’m Fred.”

Sunday Music: Ben Gibbard/Jay Farrar - "These Roads Don't Move"

From the One Fast Move Or I'm Gone soundtrack CD; the film is a documentary about Jack Kerouac's Big Sur and the lyrics on the CD are taken from the book itself. My avoidance of all things Death Cab For Cutie related is temporarily suspended since it turns out hearing Gibbard sing about something other than himself is actually not so bad while Farrar does a less intense version of his Son Volt thing. Farrar has grown on me, but it's hard to imagine there was ever a time when Jeff Tweedy was perceived as the member of Uncle Tupelo less likely to have success outside that band. More on this song here. (Song In My Head Today)