The Quotable Ebert

"Reviewing The Naked Gun... is like reporting on a monologue by Rodney Dangerfield - you can get the words but not the music."

"Angela's Ashes, which reminded me of Mark Twain's description of a woman trying to swear: `She knows the words, but not the music...'"

"There is also a lot of crude four-letter dialogue [in Dirty Love], pronounced as if they know the words but not the music."

"[The Sweetest Thing] is deep-sixed by a compulsion to catalog every bodily fluids gag in There's Something About Mary and devise a parallel clone-gag. It knows the words but not the music ..."

"The Road is a film that, to quote Mark Twain, knows the words but not the music."

Office Space

Katie gave me an Edward Hopper calendar last Christmas, which I hung in my office. The October painting shown here, Office at Night, from 1940, has attracted more attention than any other, maybe because it is set in an office, and because of its sexual allure. No one fails to notice the woman's butt.

As in all Hopper paintings, you ask yourself what, exactly, is going on, what story is being told: what's up between this leggy secretary at the file cabinet and her boss studying some correspondence at his desk? What's she thinking? What's he thinking?

Kathryn Shattuck had some interesting questions in a 2006 New York Times piece:

Does it depict a power struggle, a political comedy or the build-up to an office romp? Hopper preferred to leave the narratives to the viewer's imagination, said Carter Foster, the Whitney's curator of drawings.

Or, as Hopper put it, "If you could say it, there'd be no reason to paint."

In "Office at Night" a man in his 30's or 40's sits at a heavy desk in a sparsely furnished room, a voluptuous secretary standing with her hand in a file drawer nearby. Twisted in a provocative if physically strained position — both breasts and buttocks are visible — she could be looking at him. Or maybe she's wondering how her skin-tight dress will allow her to stoop down to pick up the paper dropped on the floor, and if she does, what the outcome will be. A breeze enters an open window and rustles a blind as the man reads a document, apparently oblivious to the situation. Or is he?

Hopper himself said this of the painting: "My aim was to try to give the sense of an isolated and lonely office interior rather high in the air, with the office furniture which has a very definite meaning to me."

Hopper's paintings have the odd effect, I find, of making you think about what role certain inanimate objects will play in whatever happens next. How long will it be before someone draws the blind? Will he use that big black dorky phone to call home and say he's going to be later than he thought? Or will the phone ring at the wrong time, and will it be his wife? He may not have a wife, though. There are no pictures on his desk, or on his wall. He may have no imaginative life whatsoever; not even a wall calendar. The sylph in the blue skirt may be the most visually alive thing in his world, and he doesn't even notice her.

But maybe he will. There is, of course, that piece of paper on the floor.

More from Shattuck:

At the time, the position of executive secretary was a relatively prestigious role for a woman, though inherently subservient. Still, this woman, with her fashionable attire, her makeup and her come-hither pose, could be the one with the power. Especially, as Mr. Foster and not a few other art historians have noted, if she does go for that paper.

The experts do tend to focus on that paper. The people at something called artsconnected give a little back story:

Hopper and his wife, Josephine, who also served as his model, went through a series of possible titles for the painting, including Room 1005 and Confidentially Yours, before Hopper chose the more ambiguous Office at Night. In spite of Hopper's reluctance to assign it specific narrative content, the painting is full of clues pointing to the complexity of male/female dynamics in the workplace. The piece of paper that has fallen to the floor, a detail added only in late sketches for this work, focuses the drama. How did it get there? Will she stoop to pick it up?

On his website, an art teacher at the State University of New York asks students to focus on it:

I think Hopper by including this detail is begging us to ask the question as to who will pick up the piece of paper? Who do you think will do it and why? Would your answer change if Hopper had placed the man and woman in a different context, for example a garden? Another way of analyzing the relationship between the man and the woman is on the basis of power. All societies depend on the control and structuring of power relationships. Identify the different types of power presented in the painting. Who or what authorizes these types of power?

Nicky Charlish finds the face full of tension: the secretary looks at her boss "with the annoyed expectation of someone who expects an overdue declaration of affection - or who is dying to leave work and get home."

No such mystery for Gordon Thiessen, in his book Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche: "She is turned toward him with tilted head and lidded eyes, intent to seduce."

We have no idea whether she actually gets the guy -- whom, it occurs to me, may be staring at his correspondence so intently because he's trying not to think of the secretary, and of all the possibilities this particular night has in store. He's trying not to think of her because he can't think of anything else.

But she, and the painting, definitely seduce the viewer, even the casual ones who see a reproduction, nearly 70 years later, on a wall calendar.

Listening Post

Here are nine songs I've downloaded over the past week:

* "People Who Died", The Jim Carroll Band. Carroll's death last month makes this a bittersweet listening experience.

* " Jesus", Glen Campbell. The song from the Velvet Underground's third album sounds like a prayer, although, in the context of this particular band, it's maybe more of a character study. The Velvets always sang about dead-end characters: whores, junkies, pushers, etc., and this sounds like a prayer offered up by one of them. Glen Campbell takes it out of that world and makes it his own. He plays it straight and sincere. A moving performance that shows how two people can play a song the same way and have two different perspectives.

* "Over At Tom's House", Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers. I came across this number while doing a little Internet research following a recent family reunion in Roan Mountain, Tennessee. We were all sitting around one evening talking about our old home place in Elizabethton, Tennessee, located in an area of town allegedly known as Cat Island. It got it's name following the 1901 flood, when the local constable, Tiger Merritt -- father of my late great uncle Earl -- came back to report that the area was full of nothing but dead cats. The name stuck. Thirty years later, there was this song in which Cat Island is prominently mentioned. This song is a thrown-together mountain jam session where a guy named Tom keeps welcoming new musicians into his home; somewhere along the way a fellow named Clarence Greene walks in and says he's been over to Cat Island in Elizabethton, where he and another shady character named Hog Moore drank and fiddled. Tom has a wife named Katie and a dog that won't shut up and his house is apparently the place to go when you're in the mood for some picking and fiddling and a good swig of liquor. The song was written just before Prohibition died out, so liquor was still a forbidden pleasure. Anyway, better heard than described.

* "It's My Life" and "Spill the Wine", The Animals. Nostalgia.

* "Children of the Revolution," T. Rex. I fell in love with this song after hearing it in the movie Breakfast on Pluto, a terrific gem from a few years ago.

"Too Drunk to Fuck", The Dead Kennedys. Some titles just beg to be heard.

"You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", sung by Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Roseanne Cash. This was one of the highlights of Bob Dylan's 30th Anniversary Show in Madison Square Garden, about which few people remember anything except that Sinead O'Connor was booed off the stage for having insulted the Pope a week before on Saturday Night Live. This is a great song sung by three great voices. Watch it. It's fantastic.

* "Baby I Need Your Loving", The Four Tops. A soul classic, on sale for 69 cents.

A small note regarding The Decemberists

I started listening to this band for no other reason than that I was reading the books written by the lead singer's sister. The lead singer is Colin Meloy, the sister is the suberb short story writer and not-all-that-good novelist Maile Meloy.

Very literary family. Based on the two albums I've heard, Picaresque and The Hazards of Love, Colin's songs are all short stories themselves, full of all kinds of incident and detail. Unfortunately, a little of him goes a long way: his yearning earnest voice wears on a listener after awhile.

Luckily, his latest album, The Hazards of Love, is both a varied and weird offering that brings in a lot of other, better singers. It's a kind of bizarre pastoral fairy tale on a grand scale, full of shape-shifting beasts and infanticide and rape. I'd tell you the whole story but I don't think I've totally processed it yet.

Jim DeRogatis is a little obsessed with it.

But Would You Read It Again?

I loved Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which has now been named "best book of the millenium" by the folks at The Millions. This novel about a paterfamilias who believes there is only one way of doing things, children who seem to go all directions at once, and a society that is forever bent on improving, correcting, remastering, and smoothing out every flaw was both a superb family novel and a wonderful literary performance that delivered five thoroughly memorable characters, whose names I've somehow managed to remember: the parents Alfred and Enid Lambertand their children Gary, Denise and Chip.

That's saying a lot for a book I read eight years ago. I thought it was in some ways a brave book, too: brave in that Jonathan Franzen pushed his talent as far as it would go, sometimes coming up with pure gold and sometimes not. I admired even the bad sentences or the sometimes florid or tasteless details, because you got the feeling Franzen was trying to go as far as he could. I admired his ambition and range, his inspired sense of domestic life and his grand taste for Gogolian mischief on an international scale. (There's a crazy subplot involving Lithuania that involves a con man who seemed to be based on Chichikov in Dead Souls.)

On the other hand -- I'm less sure that it's a book I'd want to read again, which I tend to regard as the high-water mark when people are passing out superlatives. With great books, there's always a sense that you missed something, either because this particular landscape offered too much to take in, or because the book left you with several huge and perhaps contradictory thoughts. Maybe it's a book that invites multiple interpretations.

I didn't get any of this with The Corrections, and I wonder if anyone has, if anyone has felt pulled to sit through it more than once, and if it has anything new to offer that wasn't apparent before.

Maile Meloy

I review her latest.

Grey Villet on the NYT Lens Blog

Stephen Crowley's NYT Lens Blog has a superb essay today on the life and work of Grey Villet, citing in particular the photo essay I have long raved about, "The Lash of Success."

You can see more of Villet's work in this slideshow from AOL Pixcetera.

Over the weekend, I checked out the classic book Great Photographic Essays from Life, which is where I first encountered the story in college in 1978. In fact I read or re-read several of the essays, including one on heroin addiction (also cited by Crowley) that was photographed by Bill Eppridge and written by James Mills, that is just as powerful today as when it was published.

What I didn't quite see then, perhaps, is that these essays were very much a matter of planning, team work, research, careful selection among hundreds of photos shot, and a fine sense of storytelling drama in the way photographs are cropped and arranged.

The team in the case of "The Lash of Success," which focused on a true Type A businessman named Vic Sabatino, was a writer, Barbara Cummiskey, and Grey Villet, who met during this assignment and later married.

Barbara got Victor to talk about himself, his dreams, and what drives him, and he let her and her photographer into his own stressed-out world.

Using 90mm and 180mm telephoto lenses, Villet clicked away, bent on bringing back images that were "as real as real could get." Here's how the book describes Villet:

He never said a word, just watched and shot everything. He is a big man, six foot four, but with a surprising ability to melt into the woodwork, particularly with Barbara upfront doing the talking.

Consequently, when Vic went after a hapless Chicago employee, Villet was able to shoot right over Vic's shoulder, his camera becoming Vic.

Sabatino understandably thought that appearing in Life Magazine as a model of success was the culmination of his dreams. What he didn't know was the kind of model he would represent: the winner at work and the loser at home.

He surely didn't know how Villet's images would poke through his mask, or that his words would come back to haunt him. (He refers to himself as a hawk and customers as chickens. Speaking of his wife and daughter, he says "I tell myself sometimes that I was doing this for Lillian and Donna, but I knew it wasn't so." He would eventually lose both of them.)

Barbara Villet, the stalwart champion of her husband's legacy, explained to me (as well as Crowley) in a letter that the story "was the outcome of a trilogy I wanted to do called Fame, Success and Wealth."

By the way, if the partnership between Barbara and Grey clicked as well in life as it does on the page, then I can see why they stayed together until Villet's untimely death in 2000. Barbara writes with just the kind of merciless honesty the subject demanded.

For the last few years, she has been putting together a retrospective book of her husband's work.

"His work must not disappear," she said in a recent e-mail. "I miss him."

Oh, the Married Men...

You probably have to be my age (half a century last November) to remember a song by the Roches titled "The Married Men."

Jenny Sanford's story in Vogue brought it to mind.

"I also feel sorry for the other woman. I am sure she is a fine person. It can’t be fun for her, though I do sometimes question her judgment."

-- Jenny Sanford, regarding Maria Belen Chapur, Gov. Mark Sanford's mistress.

I know these girls
They don't like me
But I am just like them
Picking a crazy apple off a stem

-- "The Married Men," The Roches

Pynchon Lite

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. The Penguin Press. 369 pages. $27.95.

From the author of such time-bending, globe-hopping, head-scratching multi-narrative intellectual extravaganzas as Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, this rollicking, wisecracking, neo-noir dope thriller comes as a surprise. It’s the most linear and focused novel Thomas Pynchon has ever written and, if not the most rewarding, certainly one of the most fun.

Set in Los Angeles around 1970 -- when the dream of the 1960s has crashed and burned, and family values are being defined by the Brady Bunch on one end of the spectrum and the Mansons on the other -- it's a psychedelic free-for-all, a nostalgic dirge for the end of an era, and less of a spoof than a faithful, loving homage to a genre that perfectly suits Pynchon's world-view.

Here as in every Pynchon novel, there’s a fine line between paranoia and grim reality; conspiracy isn't so much theory as fact, and everyone sooner or later runs up against some omniscient force of corporate or government control that is all the more insidious because it's so deeply concealed.

This is actually not all that far from the shady moral environment occupied by the gumshoes in Hammett and Chandler, the lone cool cats who are all that stand between the dregs who break the laws and the dregs who make them. In their job, as Pynchon's laidback private eye Larry “Doc” Sportello puts it, paranoia is "a tool of the trade," the one that points you "in the direction you might not have seen to go."

Actually, laid-back is understating it, as Doc, the brains (so to speak) behind LSD Investigations (for “Location, Surveillance and Detection”) is a cross between Philip Marlowe and Gilligan, living on a mental isle perpetually engulfed in pot smoke and, as he's told at least once, way overdue for a checkup from Dr. Reality.

As in every hard-boiled tale from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown, the story starts with a visit from a woman. Doc's ex-girlfriend Shasta is seeing a married guy named Mickey Wolfmann, a wealthy and eccentric Jewish real estate developer whose wife is trying to set him up for a stay in the loony bin so that she and her boyfriend can abscond with his dough. Given the fact that Wolfmann has hired the Aryan Brotherhood for protection, she may have a case.

Still, this being L.A. and this being Pynchon, such ties are hardly unusual, particularly where the drug trade is concerned, which is where the story leads once Wolfmann disappears and an Aryan brother turns up dead. Doc finds himself in the middle of a series of events where not only is everyone in bed with everyone else, but everyone is a player in a bigger struggle between the haves who run the system and the have-nots who get in their way. At the center of the mystery of Wolfmann’s disappearance is a mysterious cargo freighter, The Golden Fang, whose name more or less sums up Pynchon’s attitude toward capitalism.

Pynchon has put himself in something of a vice of his own with this book, by hard-boiling his style down to plot, seasoned as usual with silly songs, casual porn, jokes and popular culture references. It's a lark, yet at the same time you feel him holding back, keeping both his formidable imagination and his swing-for-the-bleachers prose style in check. His best novels are truly memorable; they leave behind a lot of evidence in your head that they were there. This one is fast food with an aftertaste of creaky, nostalgic, sentimental hippie politics.

It’s either the work of a writer who figured after all this time he needed a vacation from his usual cosmic concerns or one who is slumming, who wanted perhaps to prove to himself or his publisher that he can fill the cheap seats.

If that's the case, then it may well be that at the ripe old age of 72, America's master fabulist has written a kind of imperfect introduction to his world, a gateway drug to his previous novels and hopefully the (more impressive) ones yet to come.

Wonderful news on the Grey Villet front (with some corrections...)

(Barbara Villet has pointed out some errors in the following post which I have set about correcting.)

Many months ago, I wrote a little piece here about a great American photographer, largely unknown, named Grey Villet.

He worked for Life magazine among others, and he always took the most beautifully composed images, and some of the most dramatic, especially his close-ups of both the famous and the unknown, capturing them at just the right moment of doubt, or triumph, or tragedy.

That little blog piece brought word from Villet's family, who were just then putting together a website on his work and life.

The website is the joint effort of Grey Villet's daughter Ann (who designed it) and wife and frequent collaborator Barbara (who wrote the text).

Revel in it here.

Take a look in particular at the haunting photo essay "The Lash of Success," which I revere as much as I do certain great films.

Rocking in Oblivion

Not being a metalhead, I've barely heard of and never actually even heard the subject of Sacha Gervasi's fantastic documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil until this afternoon.

I may never hear them again, but I'll tell you one thing: I wish them all the best, because they are living, noble proof that in rock and roll (and in every field of art and entertainment) there are some people who never stop paying their dues, especially ones who once looked like they had it made.

According to such confirmed fans as Slash from Guns N' Roses, Lemmy from Motorhead, Lars Ulrickson from Metallica and numerous others, Anvil set the bar back in the heavy metal boom of the early 1980s. Unfortunately, while the competition rose into the stratosphere, Anvil only mustered one song, "Metal on Metal," and then basically sank into obscurity.

The main reason, according to the film, is bad production and bad management, but the overriding one simply seems to be bad luck, which only gets worse as the years roll on and younger bands roll in.

Nonetheless, 30 years down the road, the band's two dominant members -- lead singer and guitarist Steve "Lips" Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner -- refuse to let their dream die. They've long since taken on day jobs, with Kudlow working for a catering service and Reiner doing some kind of construction work, but they still make records and still tour, hoping against hope that this will, finally, be their year.

Seemingly cursed to always wind up back where they started, Kudlow and Reiner (apparently the only remaining members of the original band) gear up for yet another Sisyphean struggle against ever increasing odds. With a new manager named Tiziana Arrigoni, a well-intentioned but incompetent Italian fan who can barely speak English, Anvil takes a depressing (but often hilarious) trek through Europe, in which they see old friends playing stadiums, find themselves playing small, dimly-lit clubs, encounter at least one deadbeat club owner -- who nearly gets his ass handed to him by Kudlow -- and miss first train and then plane connections.

Time to pack it in after all this time? That's a constant matter of discussion, but the dream is still out there, just waiting to happen; after all, they have enough material for a new album and a chance to work once again with Chris Tsangarides, the metal wunderkind who produced "Metal On Metal."

At least one reviewer, I noticed, has called Anvil the greatest rock movie since "This is Spinal Tap," and Gervasi (a former Anvil roadie) slyly alludes to its predecessor in a shot that made everyone in the audience laugh; there are some control knobs, as it turns out, that actually do go up to 11. But I also found myself thinking of another Canadian pair, Bob and Doug McKenzie from SCTV's "Great White North," who founght constantly but who gave their all to a little cable access show no one watched.

The two band members could almost be brothers, twins in fact -- Kudlow's goofy grin and Reiner's stolid demeanor are all that sets them apart -- and they pursue their crazy dream with the same fearless moxie. Or maybe not so crazy. You know how documentaries are. They have to have an arc, like any story, and this one delivers an ending that you can't help but hope is only, at long last, a beginning.

Maybe I'm just getting older

but articles on overrated films such as this latest from Tim Lott in The Guardian, have become such a fucking cliche. And they're so ignorant -- LOTS of people have trashed those films he takes such delight in debunking. It's nothing new, and it's totally boring to read. Old stuff. Tired. Useless. Who cares?

Graphic Lives: Ones With a Beat, And One You Can Dance To

The Beats: A Graphic History, by Harvey Pekar and others. Hill and Wang, 224 pages, $22.

You couldn't ask for a livelier short course on the Beat Generation than this multi-author, multi-artist guidebook.

Clearly something of a personal mission on the part of Harvey Pekar (who did most of the writing, usually working with artist Ed Pisker) the book starts by focusing on the giants, with chronological, straightforward narratives that illustrate the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Pekar is dry, smart, and witty about the well-known pretenses, peccadilloes, many highs and multiple lows of these fabulous, sputtering Roman candles, and dead serious about their legacy. Too serious, perhaps; he proclaims the Beat gospel with the kind of zeal that can easily go from persuasive to pushy. Pekar and Pisker also serve up shorter, rather dutiful portraits of Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and others.

In the latter half of the book, Pekar and other gifted writers and artists serve up one idiosyncratic portrait after the next from the Beat pantheon, many of them somewhat obscure, but who nonetheless led eventful and interesting lives The poet Kenneth Patchen, bedridden for life following a botched surgery, spends his days creating picture-poems.Nancy J. Peters and Penelope Rosemont, ably supported by Summer McClinton’s photographic graphic style, tell the unusual story of their friend, poet Philip LaMantia, a committed surrealist who would influence Kerouac. We also meet the obsessive painter Jay DeFeo, who spent years painting and repainting a work that would take over her life, and D.A. Levy, whose radical poetry led to both his harassment and his suicide.

The text and art of Jerome Newkirch brings to rousing life a nutty beatnik Chicago dive known as the College of Complexes, led by a one-of-a-kind intellectual hobo named Slim Brundage.

In true Beat spirit, the book also allows for considerable dissent. Joyce Braber considers the lives of the women in the Beat scene, who sacrificed their own ambitions to their mates, and suffered far more than they did from the sexual mores of the time. Kerouac’s girlfriend gets raped as payment for an abortion, Ginsberg's wife commits suicide after his homosexuality ends their marriage, Burroughs' wife takes a bullet through the forehead when her drug-addled husband tries to shoot a glass off the top of her head, and Hettie Cohen, white Jewish wife of the black poet Amiri Baraka, gets ditched when her husband becomes an anti-Semitic Black Nationalist.

This is a comprehensive and imaginative cultural history that is an exuberant work of art on its own.

Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography by Sabrina Jones. Hill and Wang, 144 pages, $18.95

One of the great assets of the graphic form for non-fiction biographies is that it cuts historic figures down to size. The form by its nature makes it hard to take anyone too seriously, especially a figure like Isadora Duncan, who took herself seriously enough for all of us. The Jazz Age dancer -- whose many affairs, near-nude dancing, and general disregard for conventional morality of any kind scandalized the hoi polloi from coast to coast -- saw herself as the reincarnation of the Dionysian spirit, the one who would reinstall the Greek spirit of art and culture in the new 20th Century America.

Sabrina Jones' deeply researched book seems to miss no significant event in Duncan's endlessly dramatic life, spanning her humble, impoverished California childhood to her early success and her extended stays in Greece, France and Russia, and all the many guises she took on as revolutionary, radical, mother, lover. She lived heedlessly and famously died the same way, strangled when her own long, flowing scarf got caught in the rear axle of an open-air vehicle.

While few if any people alive today have seen Duncan dance -- although there are famous pictures by Edward Steichen, the dancer herself refused to allow herself to be filmed by a movie camera -- her name has become synonymous with her art, and Jones draws with a similar rapturous energy. She captures this whirlwind and worldwide life in all of its brilliant fury.