Howling at the Moon
City Lights bookstore in San Francisco is a legend, but it’s also small and crowded, especially upstairs in the “poetry room,” where intellectuals and romantics stand, herringboned cheek to tweedy jowl, literate sardines in a tin of words and pages.
Through virtue or vice of these cramped quarters, I once got to be a part of an awkward first date. There was a clever young man trying to discuss “Howl” with a woman who had obviously never read it and possibly never heard of it. Equally obvious was that the man had fantasized about the prospect of discussing “Howl” with this woman.
What was making things awkward was that she clearly had no desire to remedy her “Howl” free lifestyle. There would be no standing under skyscrapers like endless Jehovas in the long streets beneath a thousand blind windows for them this evening.
My proximity, my face a just a few inches from theirs, may have contributed to the discomfort. I honestly couldn’t escape, because of the tight quarters, but I was also nosily absorbed by how things were unfolding with the interest crossed lovers.
“You see, he says, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness…’ so it’s really…” and the young man went on, getting nothing but unreceptive blinks from his date’s bored eyes. At this point, I considered pointing out to him that I would be a more suitable companion, someone to be an angel headed hipster with him, but I restrained myself, and spent the rest of the night wondering what if?
We might have spent an evening chatting about “Howl,” and Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac and how we didn’t like “On the Road,” but were aware of its significance and wished we could have read it when it was fresh and new and different.
Instead, I left them to each other, imagining what they would tell their friends about their date, and went downstairs to purchase a copy of “Howl.” I wanted one from the actual bookstore owned by the company that first published it.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of the first time Ginsberg read “Howl” aloud to an audience that included Lawrence Ferlingehetti, who owned City Lights, not just a bookstore but also the publishers that first printed the poem.
For the anniversary of the reading, I watched “Howl,” a Ginsberg biopic with James Franco playing the poet. I hope if anyone ever makes a biopic about me, I too will be subjected to such a flattering makeover. Even with darker hair and glasses, Franco doesn’t look much like Ginsberg, but the months he spent listening to and watching footage of Ginsberg to master the poet’s mannerisms and speech patterns show. The movie star completely disappears into the role, making you forget it’s not real.
After the poem was published, an obscenity trial ensued, due to the poem’s mature themes and occasional use of coarse language. Is “Howl” obscene? It’s not for children and the naughty words are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of why that’s the case. Ginsberg wrote it for his friend Carl Solomon, who was enduring shock-therapy, used in the 1950s to treat a number of mental ailments, and to work out a number of his own demons. The question asked by the the film of “Howl” is whether the poet had the right to write what he did and what exactly the words, as Ginsberg assembled them, mean.
The film, shot in a documentary style, intersperses re-enacted excerpts from that trial, footage of Franco saying things Ginsberg actually said in interviews and scenes of him reading the poem aloud on October 7, 1955.
One reason that young man was struggling to describe “Howl” to his date was encapsulated in the comment that came up during the trial. When the prosecutor asked Mark Schorer, a critic and writer brought in as an expert witness for the defense, if he understood what a certain passage meant, Schorer replied, “Sir, you can’t translate poetry into prose. That’s why it’s poetry.”
That may be why the film makers chose to excerpts of the poem. Hearing it read aloud captures the jazz rhythm in the lines, the driving flow, and the emotion behind each line, which makes the poems more asbstruse passages easier to unravel . The poem also conjures up images, lighting, and atmosphere something the film captures through haunting and evocative animation.
Most of the interviews features here explore Ginsberg’s approach to writing “Howl” and the craft in general.
“So then—what happens if you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse? The problem is to break down that distinction: When you approach the Muse to talk as frankly as you would talk with yourself or with your friends,” Ginsberg once said in an interview, discussing how to make poetry less affected.
I’ve always been a bit obsessed with novels and films exploring the lives of writers, so I know the genre well and can say “Howl” is unique amongst them. Although there’s some biographical information, it’s mostly about Ginsberg’s most famous poem and how he approached the reason we’re interested in him in the first place. It’s not that Ginsberg’s story isn’t interesting, it just that, more than any of the other beats, his work stands on its own.
James Dean
If you’ve lived in this world after 1955, you’ve seen the image. A young man in a red windbreaker, slouching, looking at us like he’s daring us to say anything and begging us to say something.
I remember the first time I saw it. I was maybe four or five and I was walking through the Diamond Center mall in Anchorage, Alaska to go ice skating with my Mom.
There was one of those nostalgia stores, selling pop-culture memorabilia, including life-sized cardboard cutouts of James Dean.
I was too young to have a refined sense of cool, but I knew it then and there. Whatever cool was, that guy was cool. Really cool. And beautiful.
“Mom, who is that?” I asked. She told me he was an actor called James Dean.
Years later, I would purchase my own cutout at a store across from Grauman’s Theater in Los Angeles. When I got home, I used him to hold hats and coats in my apartment.
One startling thing about Dean is that he didn’t actually do very much because he died in a tragic car crash at the age of 24, on September 30, 1955, 54 years ago Friday.
In his short life, he was in a handful of television programs (including one with a pre-political Ronald Reagan) and three films. Nevertheless, he is an enduring cultural symbol, destined to live for eternity alongside dashing quotes on dorm room walls and in paintings depicting him astride a motorcycle that are seemingly required to appear on the walls of every diner in the nation.
So, why is he such a big deal? Who can say for sure.
For one thing, he was influential. In the fifties, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean were redefining what it meant to be a man in the movies. As Dean said, “I’ve discovered that most young men do not stand like ramrods or talk like Demosthenes. Therefore, when I do play a youth, such as in Warner Brothers’ “Rebel Without a Cause,” I try to imitate life.” While Brando roiled with pent up animal magnetism, Clift and Dean vibrated with gentle sensitivity and previously unexplored masculine capacity for pain and doubt. Their fragility belied an aimless fury.
The fact that Dean died so young, at the beginning of his career, probably also made his image immortal. He never had a chance to perform badly, to fall apart, like Clift, or get old and fat, like Brando.
There are two sides to Dean’s legend. One is the “live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse” side (that quote is wrongly attributed to him), which has endured because of his interest in car racing and the way he died.
It’s his other side that is most important to the icon.
That side was the misfit, the restless young man, out of step with his life, dying for something to fight for and not finding it. As Jim Stark, in “Rebel Without a Cause,” and Cal in “East of Eden” he played that to perfection. “In Giant” he broke away from type to play the ambitious and insidiously vicious cowboy turned oil tycoon Jett Rink, but still had that chip on his shoulder that gave him his glowering intensity. That’s the Dean we can’t get out of our minds.
This is the Dean who said, “Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.”
In his own words, a few short pithy ones, Dean described himself, both alive and dead, more fully than all the admirers since.
Take a Drive
When I looked at previews and sneak peeks of “Drive,” what I saw could basically be boiled down to blah blah blah Ryan Gosling blah blah blah.
If Gosling was in this thing, I was going to see it. That guy can make anything good.
Although he was a Mousketeer alongside Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, Gosling proved his adult acting mettle with his riveting, nihilistic performance as an Orthodox Jew turned neo-Nazi in “The Believer.” His conflicted, self loathing character was more disturbing than appealing, but the performance was so finely controlled and daring, he instantly became a favorite. I’ve made a point to see all his movies since.
In “Drive,” Gosling’s a man with no name, bearing comparison to the Clint Eastwood’s original in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. Like Clint with the squint, Gosling is a master of the impervious, vaguely sad, intelligent stare. With carefully modulated, almost imperceptible alterations, the stare conveys romantic longing, dashed hopes, resignation, or ferocity, depending on the scene. He glides through a Los Angeles lit somewhere between a West Coast rap video and a film noir, not giving much away.
The film opens with the driver on the phone, describing to clients how things work. “For five minutes, I’m yours,” he explains, uttering words I’m sure many of us have dreamed of hearing from him.
We discover he’s a getaway driver for armed heists, and the film kicks off with one of the coolest car chases ever committed to celluloid in one of the most uncool vehicles. He drives a silver Impala and doesn’t race through the streets of Los Angeles, scattering law abiding motorists and leading the police on a merry chase. Instead, he slows down as much as he speeds up, pale eyes watching and maintaining that look of passive concentration while he balances a toothpick in a startlingly unclenched jaw.
After this graceful escape, we see him in a police officer’s uniform, leading us to think he’s cop gone bad who knows how to evade the police because he is one. Then he dons a rubber mask, gets behind the wheel of a police cruiser and intentionally crashes it. He’s not a cop at all. Just a stunt driver for the movies.
He’s also a sweet and tender hooligan with a soft spot for his neighbor Irene, a young mother raising her son Benicio alone while her husband is in jail. She is played by Carey Mulligan. With her sweet face and innocent air, thrown into sharp relief by the world that surrounds her but doesn’t seem to tarnish her, it’s not hard to see why the driver falls for her, thrusting him into another role as iconic as the man with no name.
He’s also a knight in shining armor, approaching Irene in such a way that when her husband returns from jail, the man actually thanks the driver for looking after his family while he paid for his crimes.
In the end, the driver gives up what he wants most, the reason he’s in this whole mess anyway, because he knows it is what he must do to protect his lady love. Not just from pursuing criminals, but from what she has seen him do to save her.
Although this is Gosling’s show, his glacially cool performance having the potential to make him, in his silk jacket with the embroidered scorpian, as indelible an icon as James Dean in his red windbreaker or Clint Eastwood in his poncho, I was wrong to read it as blah blah blah Ryan Gosling. Wrong because he supporting cast is sublime.
Christina Hendricks, of “Mad Men” fame, is way too good for her character, but it’s nice to see her anyway. Mulligan is predictably great. And who would have guessed that Brian Cranston, known to many simply as “Malcolm’s Dad,” was such a versatile actor, in this playing a good hearted but terminally unlucky mechanic who gets tangled up with some nasty characters? One of those is Albert Brooks. When he grabs a fork, forget everything you thought you knew about this actor.
The film has moments of shocking and appalling violence, shown in the kind of detail that makes Quentin Tarantino look like a pussy cat. And that’s the main weak spot here.
The director, obviously talented and stylish, is more interested in showing up cascades of blood than their emotional consequences, something even the actors’ performances can’t totally fight. There’s nothing new here, other than that cautious chase sequence and more graphic images of blood shed. It’s moody in a way that suggests reservoirs of emotion, but it’s not articulate about that part of pain. Ultimately, it’s a tale told by a virtuoso director, full of cool and fury, signifying nothing.
One Day
It could have been a lot sappier than it is. The fact that this particular story began its life as an English novel by David Nicholls, who also wrote the screenplay for the film version, saves it from oozing the stuff all over the place as indiscriminately as some romantic comedies I don’t care to remember. But that’s not to say that there isn’t at least one moment, near the end, where the film abandons its light touch and adopts an air of overwrought sentimentality, before returning, mercifully quickly, to it’s roots for a decent conclusion.
Which is to say that, for its genre–light, character driven dramadies with undercurrents of seriousness that break through in one shameless moment of needless tragedy–”One Day” is a pretty good film that people won’t need to feel too embarrassed about enjoying.
How much of my personal enjoyment had to do with the fact that I am powerless to find certain types of British fellows anything other than adorable and tend to appreciate films that feature bookish brunettes with glasses and literary aspirations and how much of it had to do with the film’s merits as a cinematic work is somewhat difficult to determine, but I’m pretty sure it’s actually not too bad.
Stranded somewhere between the mundane misery and common place comedy of Mike Leigh films like “Another Year” and the strange-bedfellows-so-awkward-you-have-to-laugh chuckles of so many good romantic comedies,” “One Day” occupies a unique niche in the summer film market.
The two main characters are equally stranded between friendship and romance, dreams and the strengthening chains of reality.
The film begins with a flock of newly minted University of Edinburgh graduates wandering the streets of the city at sun up in 1988, clad in their graduation cloaks and gowns.
Emma, a serious student and aspiring writer from a family of modest means, and Dexter, a charming golden boy from a world of wealth and beauty, tumble back to her shabby apartment and into her bed for a drunken almost tryst that never quite gets off the ground, evolving instead into conversation on the morning of Saint Swithin’s day, known to many Americans as a Billy Bragg song, or, in terms of the calendar, as July 15.
From that awkward beginning blossoms a life long friendship that tows a thin line between what it is and what it almost was. We check in with Emma and Dex on the same midsummer day as the years float or steamroll by and Emma subsides into life as a waitress at a dismal Mexican restaurant and Dex laughs his way into work as a television presenter. Few of the defining moments in their lives occur on that day, but we see the shifting currents of their lives, careers, and relationships, the one between the two of them and the one’s each has with other people, and catch up on the details through their conversations.
Emma’s life starts out slowly, as she struggles to find confidence and a path she wants to walk, while Dex’s life peaks early, falls apart, reconstitutes itself in desperation, then becomes very happy until that aggressive tragedy I alluded to barges into the frame.
Nevertheless, “One Day” is quite funny, without featuring a single crude, gross-out scene, which makes it refreshingly grown up. The humor here relies on sharp, deftly delivered quips and witticisms. Although there is that one scene where our skinny-dipping hero emerges from beneath the waves to see Frenchmen escaping with his expensive clothes, forcing him to chase them nude through the streets of a seaside town, his dignity shielded only by a plastic bag.
Anne Hathaway is likable as Emma, keeping her character from turning into an unappealing sad sack or well of self doubt. Her faux British accent leaves something to be desired, but we’ve all heard worse.
Jim Sturgess traces Dexter’s trajectory, from privileged, irresponsible golden boy to quivering, needy mess, with wit and foppish charm, like a modern day Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead Revisited.
My friends who have read it have told me, as is so often the case, that the book is better, but if you’re the impatient type, the film is just fine.
Can’t Stand Me Now
Two guitars come in with a frantic bang then quiet down and jostle gently for space.
“An ending fitting for the start, you twist and tore our love apart,” Carl Barat claims.
“Oh no, you’ve got it the wrong way ’round,” Pete Doherty counters.
They team up for the repeated refrain “you can’t stand me now,” the accusation traded back and forth between the two of them, angrily, plaintively. It could be the very sound of love falling apart.
It was the first single off The Libertines self titled second album. Monday marked the seventh anniversary of the single’s release, in 2004. They broke up shortly thereafter, but their brilliance is such that any excuse to listen to all their songs repeatedly while singing along at maximum volume is welcome. An anniversary is just such an excuse.
I got into The Libertines while doing laundry in college. Perched atop a dryer with a British music magazine, I read an article about this band that sounded fascinating.
It was helmed by two friends whose partnership seemed more like a blood bond out of mythology than just two mates having fun. They spoke eloquently of an imaginary ideal of their country, which they referred to as “Albion.” They talked about Oscar Wilde, “The Anatomy of Melancholy.” and the concept of Arcadia.
When I flipped the page, I saw Carl and Pete, a modern day Byron and Shelley, clad in crimson Crimean War era British Army jackets, half Dickensian urchins, half Edwardian dandies. I liked what I read and saw, but were they actually any good?
I raced out to buy an import of their first album, “Up the Bracket.”
Their music was a shambles, but what a glorious shambles it was. Their devilishly clever lyrics told picaresque tales of urban squalor and artistic redemption while slipping gracefully between rambling meditations and pithy bon mots.
Their songs were both drily funny and matter of factly sad. In “Time for Heros,” they transition swiftly from the line “There are fewer more distressing sights than that of an English man in a baseball cap,” to “the stale chips are up and the hope stakes are down.” “The Boy Looked at Johnny” featured the twisting of a well worn phrase into “don’t you know who I think I am?” It’s funny, but also sad in it’s slurred bravado.
The guitar lines were by turns woozy and spiky, running the gamut from music hall to punk. They artfully mixed the strands of the double helix of British pop—melodic tunefulness and thrashy chaos.
But a Greek Tragedy was brewing. Pete, a prize winning poet and Oxford drop out developed a serious drug problem and ended up doing several stints in jail and rehab. Somehow, they managed to put out “Can’t Stand Me Now,” and the album that features it, but the strain became too great and they broke up. For a while, the band’s fame, or rather Pete’s infamy, rose due to his headline nabbing self destruction and perplexing relationship with supermodel Kate Moss. Pete and Carl both went on to form other bands and release solo albums, but it’s shockingly apparent that they were perfect complements, each compensating for the other’s weaknesses.
Although they temporarily reunited for last year’s Reading and Leeds Music Festivals, it seems unlikely the band will be getting back together permanently. Earlier this year, Carl told British magazine the N.M.E. “Right now is not the time for The Libertines. I thought the water under the bridge was under the bridge, but maybe it’s not…I don’t believe we’re healed from the hurt. If our hearts heal up then we can break them all over again. But right now… it’s hard.” Pete, meanwhile, says Carl still doesn’t trust him.
Carl is preparing to star in as the Roman emperor Nero in a pop re-imagining of Monteverdi’s 17th Century opera “The Coronation of Poppea” on the Paris stage. I’m giving this venture the benefit of the doubt. Pete has recently been palling around with French first lady Carla Bruni, prompting talk of a possible musical collaboration. Their bassist John Hassle has moved to Denmark and has his own band, and their drummer, Gary Powell, is doing his own thing too.
The stars that burn brightest also burn fastest. While they were around, they gave a voice to thousands of closet romantics, ragamuffins, rakes, and clever lads and lasses. Have a listen now and you’ll feel excited all over again. On “Don’t Look Back Into the Sun,” another swan song, when Pete yelps, “let me go” you really, really don’t want to.
Battle of Britpop
England’s in a bad way right now. For months, they’ve been living under pummeling austerity measures and their prime minister and police force have been sucked into a massive phone hacking scandal.
Now, the country has been seized by a wave of riots. Buildings that survived the Blitz are falling and at least one man has died. Many more have been hurt, a lot of property has been destroyed, and the jails are overflowing. It’s a heartbreaking situation.
Even the music industry has suffered. “The Independent” reported that numerous record labels behind popular acts including Adele and the Arctic Monkeys saw their stocks wiped out as a result of a fire at a distribution center that broke out during the unrest.
When tragedy strikes, many of us take refuge in the past. Right now, I’m nostalgic for a summer when the most serious conflict gripping England was what the papers dubbed “The Battle of Britpop,” a scuffle between the two country’s two biggest band, Blur and Oasis. After months of posturing and verbal sniping, they both released singles on the same day, August 14, 1995. The anniversary is coming up on Sunday.
The two bands were very different and the conflict was transformed into a representational struggle: the middle class southerners against the working class northerners. Blur were fine featured beauties with an art school air and “mockney” accents while Oasis were ruffians with burly good looks and Mancunian vocals.
Although they mined the same influences, their music was different too.
Blur specialized in lyrical vignettes, painting pictures of routine dystopias in a tea cup. They starred characters who embraced the boom time culture of disposable thrills and sleaze, only to find themselves corroded from within. Amidst the razor sharp observations of the social ecosystem of the modern world and it’s inhabitants, there’s also a distinct sense of growing alienation at the hands of technology. Their London is dotted with naughty and charmless top men and telly addicts thinking of cars that they saw on a commercial break.
Oasis’s area of expertise was big, brash, vaguely non-sensical anthems. With Oasis, you sort of have to feel it, not really think about it, which makes it hard to talk about what they were like. But when you hear them, it’s almost impossible not to sing along to at top volume, convinced, for the duration of the song anyway, that you’re ten feet tall and invincible.
When the songs were released, Blur’s “Country House” went to number one before Oasis’ “Roll With It.”
While Blur won that skirmish, Oasis won the war, with more ongoing sales and airplay, especially outside of Britain. In America, Oasis was the unquestionable winner.
Blur only had one stateside hit that came out a few years after the showdown. Most people know it as “that woohoo song.” It is in no way representative of their general sound or indicative of their customary lyrical brilliance, so a lot of people here don’t know much about Blur except that they were fronted by that guy from Gorrillaz.
All these years later, now that tempers have cooled, can we pick a winner? Lets have a look at the singles at the anniversary of their release.
Oasis sang, “You gotta roll with it, you gotta take your time, you gotta say what you say, don’t let anybody get in your way, ’cause it’s all too much for me to take.” Okay.
Blur were slinging comments about a professional cynic with his heart not in it, retreating to the country to read Balzac and knock back Prozac. “Watching afternoon repeats and the food he eats in the country, he takes all manner of pills and piles up analysts bills in the country, It’s like an animal farm lot’s of rural charm in the country.” Then the music lulls and Damon Albarn sings, “blow, blow me out I am so sad I don’t know why.”
“Roll With It” is hardly Oasis’ best song, but on paper, Blur certainly looks vastly superior. Considering the lyrics from other Oasis songs doesn’t help their case.
“Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball, where were you when we were getting high? Someday you will find me, caught beneath a landslide, in a champaign Supernova in the sky!” Or then there’s, “Maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me, ’cause after all, you’re my wonderwall.” Several years on, subsequent Brit poppers Travis would sing a song that gave voice to the question that hit left many of us asking: “What’s a wonderwall anyway?”
But that is Oasis’ genius. Noel Gallagher could write utterly absurd things, but put ‘em in his brother Liam’s mouth and back ‘em up with gale force instrumentation and, somehow, we all know exactly what they mean.
As a 17 year-old Pete Doherty is captured on film telling an MTV reporter, “I subscribe to the Umberto Eco theory that Noel’s a poet and Liam’s a town crier, and that, for me, has always been a perfect combination.” You can Youtube it.
So, there isn’t really a winner. Many music snobs will dismiss both bands, but they’d be wrong to do so. They were both brilliant. Put on a Blur song that isn’t “Song Number Two” (that’s the official title of the Woohoo song) or listen to Oasis without thinking about it, and you’ll have a hard time denying it.
Beginners is Brilliant
When Hal’s wife dies, bringing to an end a 44 year marriage, her 74 year old widower decides to come out of the closet to his son, Oliver, who has quiet problems of his own.
The lonely younger man struggles to form happy, long-term romantic relationships, not because he’s afraid of commitment, or because he wants to keep his options open, but because he’s afraid of imperfect love.
At one point, Hal, played to perfection by the wonderful Christopher Plummer, provides an analogy. You spend your whole life wanting a lion, then a giraffe comes along and says it wants to spend the rest of its life with you. You’re going to take the giraffe. Oliver says he’d wait for the lion. His father says that he knows that about his son, and worries for him because of it.
But for Hal, it doesn’t seem like he’s settling for the giraffe. He’s just making himself happy with it. Oliver can’t understand why his father refuses to regret his life as a gay man married to a woman, especially when he sees how happy and vibrant his father has become, even in the face of terminal cancer, after revealing what he’s kept hidden for so many years. Hal, on the other hand, says he liked his life.
The action begins in the wake of Hal’s death. Oliver, played to perplexed, hang dog perfection by Ewan McGregor, can’t get his father out of his thoughts and becomes obsessed with the idea of creating a history of sadness in the world, even though that wasn’t an emotion his father seemed to struggle with very often. His mother, who we later learn proposed the marriage despite sensing that there might be a problem, is another story. Oliver is also another story. The biggest obstacle to his happiness is himself.
When he meets a beautiful actress called Anna at a Halloween party shortly after his father’s death, he, and the adorable terrier Arthur he has inherited whose thoughts are occasionally visible through subtitles, think that might be changing.
This romantic relationship between Oliver and Anna is somewhat disappointing. She veers too quickly between manic pixie dream girl behavior and damaged sadness to be particularly believable and sparks never convincingly fly between the two, although we’re supposed to think they do.
That may sound like a major problem, but it isn’t really. The films really about the deep and complex relationship between father and son, and that’s pretty fantastic here. McGregor and Plummer have great chemistry. The relationship between Hal and Andy, the man he falls in love with at the end of his life, is also well done.
In addition to the well crafted story, the film is also beautifully shot. Los Angeles emerges not as a glittering hive of superficiality or emptiness nor as a place where stars are born and dreams are made, but as a place where people work and live lives of quiet desperation or happiness.
Much of “Beginners” is memory. Interesting, however, the scenes that take place in the present, after Hal’s death, are much quieter and more static. Sunlight drifts in through windows, dust motes hang lazily in the air, Oliver stands alone, sorting through old boxes, or sits at his desk, sketching.
The bridge between these quiet scenes of the present to the past are often still but colorful snapshots, accompanied by voiceover narration. It sounds silly, but somehow in the hands of a talented director like Mike Mills, who based the story on his own autobiographical history, it works.
Oliver’s memories are a whirl of activity. Setting off fireworks with his father, looking through art history books with him and comparing the pattern in the ceiling title to a sand garden, shopping at office supply stores for rainbow colored paper, impromptu letter writing and hospital room parties with wine and new friends. Here, indeed, was a man who packed an entire life into his last five years.
Even better, the film ends with the suggestion that there may still be hope for Oliver, Anna, and the rest of us.
Why you Should be Watching Zen
Zen cuts a dashing figure
You know them, you love them. Hercule Poirot, Inspector Lewis, Jane Tennison, Inspector Morse, the list goes on. They are the fictional detectives that the BBC has been bringing to the small screen for years, shown in America on PBS as “Mystery,” now “Masterpiece Mystery.”
But as much as you may love those detectives, and the many others who have become familiar fixtures, the series needed an infusion of new blood as desperately as Bertie Wooster’s family line.
And on “Masterpiece Mystery,” there will be blood.
Last fall, there was the wonderful new “Sherlock” series, set in modern times. Although there’s no detective older or more thoroughly done than Holmes, this was an imaginary fresh take, punchy and sharp and witty. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were delightful as the awkward sleuth and his trusted partner Dr. Watson.
Beautiful women should never light their own cigarettes.
Now, we have the elegant and intensely moral Aurelio Zen, pulled from the pages of the crime series written by Michael Dibdin. The debut Zen mystery “Ratking” won the Crime Writers’ Association’s coveted Gold Dagger award in 1988.
The television series, like the books, is set in Rome. It is that special Rome one only sees in film and on television that is inhabited almost entirely by British actors. Both character actors, always recognizable as that guy from that thing, and beauties like Rufus Sewell, who slips gracefully into Zen’s well cut Armani suit.
The Italian police have a reputation for being flagrantly corrupt, but Zen isn’t like that. He’s honest. Almost too honest, according to his co-workers and high level types who try to persuade him to compromise his morals. He won’t even take a free cup of coffee.
He runs up against a problem when a laxly conducted (not by him), but seemingly successfully closed case rears its ugly head again and his immediate superior and a government minister both want him to revisit it and produce specific, diametrically opposed results. Notice that word produce. They don’t want him to find out what actually happened. They just want things to look good.
Our hero has no truck with that, but he’s also not an outspoken boat rocker. No storming out of the office for him. He keeps doing the right thing in his own quiet way.
The mystery aspect of Zen is somewhat lacking, but I think it reasonable to hope that will improve in later episodes. The two plots Zen is tracking are somewhat thinly sketched and anticlimactic. Since I have not read the books, and don’t know anyone who has, I’m not sure if those problems are there in written form or if it’s a side effect of the hour and half format. In the first episode, the creators are too busy establishing the character of Zen to focus intently on what he does.
I don’t blame them for this as all truly great mystery series are about the inner workings of the detectives and the atmosphere, not really the crimes. Mystery series provide a unique opportunity to stay with a character over many books, spanning many years, in situations of great stress, which means we get to know them pretty well. It’s also a fixture of mystery fiction to imbue the tales with a strong sense of place, bringing the city the detective works to breathing, pulsing life for the reader at home. This televised series of Zen captures Rome well and creates a character we can care about and want to follow on subsequent adventures.
Rufus Sewell as Zen and Middlemarch's Will Ladislaw, the character many of us first fell for him as.
He has the tired, wisecracking air of many great fictional detectives from Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe onward, but he’s soft spoken and brings a sort of grave sensitivity to the role.
When his coworker love interest Tania tells him what she’s heard about him, she concludes her list with “you’re separated from your wife and you live with your mother.”
“You make it all sound so glamorous,” he says with a sigh and with a smile.
He’s joking, but he IS glamorous. He pairs his olive skin and shiny black curls with green eyes and excellent clothes.
Zen’s finely tuned moral compass also leads to an interesting, cautious, and in many ways much more true to life approach to his relationship with Tania, played by Caterina Murino, than is seen in most television shows.
It’s definitely worth tuning in for subsequent episodes Sunday at 9 p.m., even if you just like to see beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes in beautiful city.
Howl if you Love Patrick Wolf: “Lupercalia” delights and disappoints by turns
This first appeared in today’s edition of The Hopewell News.
There are probably a lot of people who have wanted to marry Patrick Wolf ever since he released his first album in 2003 at the age of 20. Unfortunately for us, so does his fiance, who, unlike anyone else, has been asked.
That engagement has clearly informed his most recent musical offering, “Lupercalia.” When first listening to it, I remarked to no one in particular, “Wow, is he ever in LOVE.”
His small but ardent Wolf Pack fell for him because he’s brilliant and unlike anyone else.
His songs are sweeping, epic, and mythological without being boring. He’s also a daring multi-instrumentalist, incorporating violins, pianos, ukuleles, fifes, violas, and god knows what else without being annoying.
Wolf has styled himself as a sort of mythological creature, a werewolf pixie (if someone who’s six foot four can really be called a pixie) with a tender black heart of gold. Wolf is not his real last name, but part of his persona. David Bowie and The Libertines are the only other artists I can think of who have so successfully created legends around themselves. And he’s clever enough to pull all this off without being ridiculous.
His first album, Lycanthropy (the transformation of a human into a wolf) addressed “Dear Fenrir, my savior.” Fenrir is, apparently, a mythological Norse wolf monster. The album is the seminal howl of a restless young werewolf, pacing in his cage, finding his footing.
On his second album, “Wind in the Wires,” he sang in the form of legendary Cornish hero Tristan, the sorrowful knight errant. The album sounds like it was recorded in an ocean cave or in the small house built on the sea with no company aside from a horse and ukulele that he dreamed of finding.
“The Magic Position,” marked a departure for him. It seemed he’d found a cure for at least some of his woes and also The Cure. The title track is downright skippy and “Get Lost” is ripe for a razzle dazzle Kurt and Blaine duet on “Glee.” If you don’t own this album, or “Wind in the Wires,” run, do not walk, to your nearest record store and remedy the situation.
With “The Bachelor,” Wolf was back to gloom, but with a tougher more industrial sound and vocal cameos from Alec Empire, and, somewhat alarmingly, Tilda Swinton.
And now here he is with “Lupercalia,” named for an ancient purification festival linked to wolves, with a ring on it, a horn section, and enough good humor, optimism, and faith in love to choke a motivational speaker.
I’ve never encountered a record more subjective than this one in that it is either mildly disappointing or heart swellingly perfect, depending on what sort of mood I happen to be in while listening to it.
Wolf’s always been a graceful and talented lyricist in that British sort of way, a skill which is not particularly on display here. Nothing says love quite like the tendency to speak in cliches, but with the utmost confidence that one is being utterly original. This, along with the cheesy horn section, is the main thing about “Lupercalia” that strikes me as disappointing, when I’m in that sort of mood.
Patrick Wolf holding hands with William Charles Pollock, the fiance who has him in such a chipper mood.
When I’m not, I realize that Wolf actually does make things sound fresh. He captures the sense most lovers have of their feelings being completely new and revolutionary, even though people have been falling in love for thousands of years. Just ask Cole Porter.
And I’ll be darned if Wolf, and those horns, haven’t got an least one cynical old grumpy pants in a good mood despite herself, and once again believing in the healing power of love.
Opening track, and first single “The City,” is a perfect slice of thinking person’s indie pop, its insistent kick so infectious and undeniably joyous that resistance is futile. “William” has the broken music box haunt of Xiu Xiu in top form. “Time of my Life” is another stand out track, and one that points at his lyrical abilities and the debt he owes to less jubilant times. “Armistace,” which incorporates a Manx folk song, is a slice of epic gorgeousness, and “The Falcons” sounds like nothing so much as birds soaring amongst the buildings of London Town and is almost too perfect to be believed.
Meanwhile, “House,” even with references to Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, and “Return of the Native,” and “Slow Motion” are just too syrupy for anyone who still likes Wolf’s earlier work.
It’s not his best album, but that would be asking for a lot. It’s a enough to keep us waiting, with baited breath, for his next transformation.
Four out of Five Howls
When the Stars Were Just Nebulae
This ain't breakfast at Tiffany's sweetheart.
This was one of my weekly columns from the Hopewell News.
There’s nothing quite like seeing stars before they were famous after they’re famous.
“The Lavender Hill Mob” begins with Alec Guinness on the lam in some exotic locale. When a pretty bar maid enters the picture, it’s impossible to focus on anything else because it will be instantly apparent she’s Audrey Hepburn. “Hey, it’s Holly Golightly! Sunglasses and black dresses and, wait, was that it?” The fact that she’s in such an insignificant role, and vanishes from view so quickly, just makes her more noticeable because, knowing what comes later, we’re struck by the anonymity she’s supposed to have. Fortunately, it’s a wonderful film that soon recaptures the attention, but it’s still weird to see someone who is now an icon struggling her way out of extra-land.
Woody Allen, an icon in heavy glasses, and Sly Stallone, an icon as Rocky and Rambo.
In “Bananas,” in one quick scene, Woody Allen is assailed by a subway tough who is supposed to look like just any menacing fellow on the subway. Take your pick from hundreds of them. For modern viewers, this effect isn’t really achieved though, because he’s obviously none other than Sylvester Stallone. Menacing maybe, but hardly an interchangeable face in the crowd.
In “Hannah and her Sisters,” another Allen film, a pre Seinfeld Julia Louis Dreyfus accompanies Woody on a walk through the hallway as a nameless handler.
Orlando Bloom, from Victorian rent boy to heroic elf in a few short years.
In “Wilde,” there’s a one line interaction between Stephen Fry and some random guy in the street. I say random guy, but when I first saw “Wilde”in 2002, years after it’s initial release, any hope of the guy being glimpsed and forgotten about had been dashed by the success of “Lord of the Rings.” Even the Victorian hat and the absence of long, blonde locks couldn’t hide it. That random fellow was really much more noticeable than he should have been because he was totally Orlando Bloom.
In my day, elementary and middle school teachers were obsessed with “Voyage of Mimi.” I have no idea if the show remains all the rage with educators, but I recently glanced at it again out of curiosity and was startled to realize the gawky tween boy at the story’s center was Ben Affleck.
A wee Ben Affleck, voyaging towards stardom.
A personal favorite of mine is a “General Electric Theater” production from 1954. The wafer thin plot involves two young ruffians, one of whom has been shot, forcing a noble doctor to see to the wound without involving the police. Now, here’s where it gets interesting.
It's blurry, but it's definitely James Dean and Ronald Reagan.
If I were to ask you if you thought James Dean and Ronald Reagan had ever met, you would probably say no. But lets take a moment to remember that Ronald Reagan began his adult life as an actor, as did Dean. And in the 50s, that meant taking silly roles in extremely overwrought television programs. Dean went on to become an icon, perpetually wandering the Sunset strip of our collective consciousness, destined to live for eternity alongside daring quotes on dorm room walls and in paintings depicting him astride a motorcycle that are, for some reason, required to appear on the walls of almost every diner in the nation. A mere two years after that show was filmed, he would die in a car crash at the age of 24, with just three films to his name.
And of course Reagan, clad in a bathrobe for the role, went on to be President of the United States of America.
I know these things because it’s now, but I’d be willing to wager that no one who watched the show back then imagined such a future for either actor.
It’s funny and occasionally poignant to see these stars whose faces have become familiar to a the world at large at a time when they were probably happy just to have jobs in bit parts that the audience isn’t really even supposed to remember.
I’m not talking about when you see a star or icon in his or her first film role. “Red River” was Montgomery Clift’s first big screen appearance, but he was one of the stars of the film. Colin Firth’s first film was “Another Country,” but once again, he’s a main character. Same goes for Hugh Grant in “Maurice.”
While it’s funny to see these people looking so young and fresh faced, you still don’t have that startling sensation of “wait, that guy saying ‘ya lookin’ for somethin’ guvnah?’ is that dude who played Legolas, right?”
So next time you head for the cinema, pay attention to that guy parking the hero’s car or that girl behind the cash register giving the big name change. They may just be the next faces to launch a thousand ships and burn the topless towers of Ilium.
