What I’m Reading and Why
Thought some of yins out in the world wide web would like to know what I clutch on the subway. There’s actually a lot.
The Mammoth Book of Horror Comics, Edited by Peter Normanton
This beast of a book has been following me around lately. It all started when I had the bright idea to make a horror film, but couldn’t come u p with, ya know, plots or characters or those things you need to get some decent writing done. I don’t want to reveal my diabolical plans just yet, but I can tell you that I’ve been fascinated by zombies lately. I’d really love to get to know them better, get inside their heads (though I bet they’d want into my cranium more).
Anyway, killing time in the graphic novel section at B&N last week, I happened upon this tome of murderous tales. So far it’s tons of fun. Most of the comics I’ve read so far have been from 1950-1955, and while none have literally terrified me, they certainly have been quite entertaining. The one that will be toughest to top in this book is “Hitler’s Head” by Don Heck (and co.). It tells the tale of a decorated Nazi laying low in South America after the war who is haunted by the ghost of Hitler and his Army of demons. From the beginning right down to it’s head-scratcher of an ending it is truly fascinating. It is grizzly, but not gruesome. Plus, it’s easy enough to cheer on Nazi on Nazi action. Read on...
Review: 6 Sick Hipsters by Rayo Casablanca
I remember last summer’s article in Time Out New York that offered up the following thesis: Why the Hipster Must Die - a modest proposal to save New York Cool (May - June ‘07, Christian Lorentzen). It seems debut novelist and confused wordsmith Rayo Casablanca took this idea to heart, or missed the point entirely depending how you look at it. His new novel, “6 Sick Hipsters”, is an attempt at intellectualizing the nomads of Williamsburg who voluntarily go by that moniker, a futile effort to say the least. Perhaps, for a fleeting moment, Mr. Casablanca forgot how passé it is to call oneself a hipster, but alas, let’s try and get to the meat of his novel.
Primarily it is the story of a boy and a girl who find themselves in extraordinarily gory circumstances. Our hero, scientist/porn aficionado and author Harrison, spends his time cavorting around Billyburg with his equally fame-obsessed gang of pals, the self-titled Whole Sick Crew. It’s hard to tell what has brought this motley bunch together, but to spend too much time wondering would keep you from ever making it more than 10 pages into the book. In any event, some of his cohorts start drawing connecting the dots between prominent hipster murders. For some reason, Harrison falls in love with Beth-Ann, a knitter on the verge of blindness who indulges his friends’ detective work. Read on...
Review: Woody Allen’s “Mere Anarchy”
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From the back cover
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I have ben spending much of my time studying the works of Woody Allen. It’s not n easy task as his directing tally creeps closer to 50 and his writing credits have become innumerable. Once upon a time comedians wrote for a living. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that people devoured what it was that comedians scrawled across magazines, newspapers, short compilations, and of course, the great American novel. Woody Allen fit into this mix back in the days of yore, and he hasn’t really ever taken a break. He remains an hilarious thinker and quick tongued funny-man, with an endless grab bag of one liners that keep the chuckles coming.
I made the foolish mistake of reading this latest compendium in (practically) one sitting. I found it at B&N yesterday afternoon and decided to tear through it in time to read “Deathly Hallows”. Each short story was enjoyable, but I found myself trudging through some of them, leafing to the next break to see how much longer until a new face appears. That being said, I thoroughly enjoy most of the stories. The first five or so had me rolling on the floor. As I said, moving through became a little less fun, but there are certainly worse things out there to peruse.
In Sidney Lumet’s “Making Movies”, the filmmaker posits the question to Arthur Miller why he would prefer the theater if his first novel, “Focus”, which predates his subsequent successes, had every bit of strength as his stage stories. The writer replied something to the tune of loving the collaborative process. If for Miller it was camaraderie that kept him under the lime-lights, then it seems to be the pressures of films that keep Allen on the silver screen and off the bound page. When one is cutting checks in the millions for bagels and knishes on an overseas shoot, one damn well better hope to hell the script is in order.
Here, Allen lets loose and sets himself up to fail. And I promise, some of these shorts are failures. But it’s so wonderful to see the visionary branch out to territory he is not ready to do on the big screen. He is fairly detached from some things he writes about, but you can see he has done research enough to keep the facts straight. One of the book’s biggest mistake’s is a segment called Surprise Rocks Disney Trial. As we are all well aware, Mr. Allen is an east coast New Yorker no matter what locale he may find himself living in. This is an LA story he’s trying to tell, mocking the politics of the big bad Mouse House. Written as matter-of-factly as a stenographer would likely have taken the exchange down, a big mouthed Mickey Mouse takes the stand and quips about his animated friends. This is the stuff of adult swim wannabe kids who got a copy of Flash for Christmas. Where it does succeed is in seeing the master filmmaker try out something he is not known to do.
The novel really flies in segments that have hard boiled detectives or down on their luck actors. The names in the book are almost all hilarious in themselves. Names like Mealworm and Fleshpot. It is in the hard boiled tales like Tandoori Ransom and This Nib for Hire that he really flies. One must keep a thesaurus close to keep up with his witticisms, which at times feel like overblown intellectualisms, but in actuality, as one may find in his films, are a mile-a-minute pastiche of observations of this thing we have called pop culture all this time. While “Family Guy” rises in popularity for Dallas references or Margot Kidder appearances, Allen understands the interconnectedness of all things art. That is why he can write a rare cookbook in the style of Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Ate Zarathustra(”Man is the only creature who ever stiffs a waiter.”), or call upon Dostoevsky to quip of the doomed future of a three-year old denied a decent pre-school in The Rejection. He recognizes that we all share one community, and what is pop now is simply an old trick taught to a new dog.
I’ve long said that I love Allen’s films because even when I see a bad one, I leave the theater happy. The same rings true for this book. While he may not be changing the industry or making it on any bestseller lists, he’s writing better than many others out there. He writes like frog sit on lily pads, it’s just in his nature. I’ve heard people accuse him of still working simply for the sake of it, rather than actually making a great film or novel every time out. To them I say piss off. There is no denying that Woody will continue creating until he is taken from us. We must simply enjoy it while can, for there will never be another like him.
New Journalism vs. Woody Allen
Two things need to be made clear from the get-go: 1) I am an adolescent as a writer and prepubescent as a reader. I know very little of the topics I’m writing about, but am somewhat compelled to wrote nonetheless, perhaps to discover what it is that I must learn more about. 2) Neither of the topics that are apparently going head to head here are meant literally. New journalism refers to any offshoot or predecessor of that style, including gonzo journalism and literary nonfiction. Woody Allen refers not only to bespectacled auteur, but really to an era of writer/director self-reflection (read deprication) that I feel he ushered in with “take the money and run” and whose aftershocks are still being felt today. Them’s the rules kids, now
let’s get on the ride together.
Recently I picked up a copy of Norman Mailer’s “Cannibals and Christians” at the suggestion of a friend who wants to adapt the book for the small screen. No easy task as the book has lost a portion of it’s relevance over the past 4 decades, so much so that no publisher has seen fit to put it out there since 1983. It is a collection of the author’s political essays, poetry, and thoughts throughout most of the sixties. Not merely a compilation, Mailer has structured the book as a
blueprint for a new society of the future, quite literally on the cover photo in LEGOs.
I’m getting off topic here as I am not here to synopsize this particular work. I’ll say this much: the book reads like a juicy narrative, as was common of this journalistic style. One needs to be reminded that what is in essays is in fact non-fiction. Real events are unraveled in the same way fiction might. These are moments that Mailer witnessed, and has found a way to literize in an extended format, rather than the traditional headline and fact method of reporting. Perhaps if readers were more patient, they could be better informed, but as we are products of the history of jornalistic history, we know that we read headlines as fact and we don’t take the time to get informed. In fact, when we do take the time to read (or watch) an in-depth exposé, more often than not we are privy only to a greater deal of happenings, or a few anecdotal accounts of the parties involved in whatever event of problem could be found in the headline. The “climate” of the times is something we as readers are left to fend for ourselves over, rather than having it loving and broadly painted in the way Mailer offers in this particular compendium. The suthor admits in his introduction that literature, fiction he means, is the best way to understand and study our society, but these essays would also offer another viewpoint on the people and places at the center if this coming rapture.
Now onto cinema. Woody Allen makes wholly fictionalized films, with characters that never existed and plot lines spun from his own mind. Or does he. We all know he plays a similar persona in all of his films (thought I may argue against these perceived similarities in another blog), the bulk of which take place in a very real place, Manhattan. Though in his later work, Allen finds himself in a conundrum so shocking that he was forced to run off to Europe if ever to make a realistic story again: the New York he had spent so much of his time studying stopped existing for contemporary audiences (see “Melinda & Melinda”’s fantastical real-estate on an artist’s budget”). So what of it? Is there a line between Mailer and Allen over this issue?
If anything I’d put Allen closer to gonzo journalism as his first person accounting is more often prevalent than his omniscient statements. But let’s stick with New Journalism for a spell. Focus for a moment on Annie Hall, when Alvy Singer is waiting in the wings to perform for an Adlai Stevenson fundraiser. This appears, at least to my eyes, to be a political statement shrouded in the cover of a moment of romantic comedy. Much of his films appear to me such a formula, though the political machine he seems to be commenting on is cinema itself rather than nations and peoples. But of course, to the cinemaniac like Allen himself, the national cinema and international cinemas of humanity are reflections of all politics, social structures, and economic movements. (see today’s Variety for proof of this statement)
The artists’ films utilize his own life, or rather life of his on and off screen persona, as a means of commenting on the greater society and world in which he exists. In much the same way, Mailer uses his first hand accounts of events to create a picture of the overall society in which those events take place. The difference is this. The reality of Mailer is so sobering that we can buy into his coming rapture theory, and we are pushed to action because of it. Allen’s lovably easy-to-hate character makes it fun to laugh at his indiscretions while he pulls the wool over our eyes, blind to the overarching implications of his art.
In any case, both men seem to believe our demise is inevitable, and in the mean time we ought to just live it up with some decent art. I for one agree.
