REVIEW: The Age of Movies, Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Library of America
750 pp / $40

The sad implication in the title of this selection of writings by the late movie critic Pauline Kael is that the Age of Movies has passed, that movies matter less than they used to. The big screen, after all, has been supplanted by a variety of little screens (the television, the computer, the smartphone), screens that we use to watch grisly traffic accidents, celebrity bloopers, cute kitten videos, and occasionally even movies.

If one thing is certain, it’s that no movie critic will ever again matter as much as Pauline Kael, who reviewed movies (Kael dismissed the words ‘film’ and ‘cinema’ as stuffy and elitist) for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. She was read avidly or fearfully not just by moviegoers but by filmmakers and fellow film critics.  She was caricatured in movies and comedy shows; her spats with other critics were cultural front-page news.

Read the rest of this entry »

REVIEW: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Every age seems to get the monsters that reflect its deepest anxieties.

In the Late Victorian era, an age of sexual repression and widespread, often fatal sexual diseases, it was the vampire and the werewolf. In the Fifties , when our  two biggest fears were nuclear annihilation and Communist takeover there were body snatchers and a series of monsters created by atomic radiation. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, at a time when it seemed like our society was abandoning traditional religion and losing its moral compass, it was the devil (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen).

In the new millennium, teenagers may be vampire-crazy, but the monster of choice seems to be the zombie. In the last ten years, we have had remakes of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, even erotic zombie movies. The biggest hit on cable is The Walking Dead. And now Colson Whitehead, the author of rarefied novels like The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, tries his hand at the genre with the novel Zone One.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wilfrid Sheed’s Office Politics Reconsidered

When I picked up Office Politics recently (the last time I read it was a hasty skim twenty five years ago), I had the vague notion that I might write about it because it had some relevance to the contemporary workplace. Work for many people has gotten a lot shittier in the last forty years, and the Work is Hell genre has correspondingly expanded, e.g., novels like Something Happened and Now We Come to the End and TV shows like The Office and movies like Office Space, Company Men and Horrible Bosses.

At first glance, Office Politics resembles many of the novels, shows and movies that reflect the worsening of the contemporary workplace: there is the same atmosphere of exhausted cynicism, dread and bad faith; the faux-genial manipulation; the heavy drinking; overeating; ulcers and other neurotic manifestations of people who toil in bureaucracies. There is also the disruption that comes to the office without warning. But the big difference is that the change comes from within and below, not as it does in our increasingly corporate workplace in which decision-making is often centralized to a remote location, from above and far away: it is the lower-echelon staff of the magazine, not a CEO based in another office or another country, that tries to shake things up.

The office in Office Politics (1966) is a drab, almost windowless collection of partitioned rooms somewhere on the east side of Manhattan.  The walls are peeling, the furniture is falling apart, and the fire exit is blocked by a filing cabinet. The office belongs to a bimonthly liberal magazine called The Outsider, a ‘broken-down opinion machine’, circulation 21,000 and falling.

The Outsider is edited by the British expatriate Gilbert Twining, who, one of his underlings sourly notes, attended a finishing school where he “took the tripos in self-satisfaction, poise and the thrill of being me.” His ascendancy derives from his ability to intimidate his rebellious but easily cowed staff with his Englishness and his unerring instinct for their weak points. His raised eyebrow, we are told is ‘a beautiful piece of miniature engineering.’

Read the rest of this entry »

Common Time: Notes on Music and Fiction

How do we write about music in fiction? Or, to put it another way, what can the writer express about music and what remains inexpressible?

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, the comedian Martin Mull once said. .
Do we describe it technically? Perhaps, but most readers aren’t trained musicians and will get bogged down in a passage full of music theory terms:

After having played the first four bars two beats G minor two beats C seventh, every bar since they’d sat down, they suddenly found themselves ascending by half tones every bar, creating an entirely new harmonic base upon which they improvised in brand-new scales. G minor C seventh, A-flat minor D-flat seventh, A-flat minor D seventh, B-flat minor, E-flat seventh, and then a quick little half-tone figure to come out exactly right on F “undefined” dominant seventh. It was so exciting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thoughts on Geoff Dyer, Part 2

Editor’s Note: Part 1 of this essay appears here.

Titled, with typical offhandedness, Working the Room, Geoff Dyer’s latest collection of non-fiction includes the same kind of miscellany as his first collection, Anglo-English Attitudes: essays on contemporary art and photography, literary journalism, meandering thoughts on jazz, sports and fashion, and a handful of singularly offbeat autobiographical musings.

Of these, the least engaging are the essays on art and photography, which betray the heavy influence of Dyer’s friend and mentor, John Berger. As skillful as they are, there is nothing as dampening to a reader’s interest as overhearing one writer speak in another writer’s voice. Anglo-English Attitudes contained an essay “Ecce Homo”, which juxtaposed a photograph of an exhausted prizefighter with a Bellini crucifixion, imitating  Berger, who famously compared a foreshortened snapshot of the dead Che Guevara to Mantegna’s foreshortened Christ. Although there are no echoes in this volume as blatant as that, there are still a distressing number of borrowings from Berger’s bag of tricks here; Like Berger, Dyer  is of fond of the baldly asked rhetorical question, the combination of the stridently  political and the vaguely mystical, the habit of deflating the pronouncements of the Western imperium by quoting Third World poets,  and the  discovery in art of the remote past the outlines of our current predicament.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thoughts on Geoff Dyer, Part 1

The French use the word flaneur to describe a certain kind of strolling writerly consciousness. A flaneur is an ambler and an idler—an observant loafer. “A Columbus of those near-at-hand,” is how Saul Bellow’s Augie March portrays himself, and this phrase perhaps explains the paradoxical focus of the typical flaneur project. Take Xavier de Maistre’s book -length essay Voyage Around My Room, which is just what sounds like: a sedentary stroll, a series of imaginative reflections inspired by the objects in his room (Two centuries later, Nicholson Baker would repeat de Maistre’s voyage on a microscopic level). Making the familiar strange, conjecture, free association, “this reminds me of the time when …,” and what Harold Rosenberg called “loitering in the neighborhood of a problem”– these are the techniques of the flaneur.

Read the rest of this entry »

Notes from the Decade of the Empty Gesture

1980. Reagan elected. A feeling in our household of stunned nausea. The sense that his victory is above all an assault on meaning.

The breach in the wall between entertainments and politics. Reagan will prove to be the first of in a long line of entertainer/politicians—Sonny Bono, Fred Grandy, Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura.

On the other side of the wall: playing farmers in the movies now confers enough authority on actors like Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek to have them testify before congress as expert witnesses on behalf of the 1985 Farm Bill.

Reagan’s biographers all describe his inability to distinguish, on one hand, between incidents that occurred in his life and historical events he lived through and, on the other hand, roles he played as an actor and movies he watched. Perhaps for an actor, the emotional experience is the same.

Jimmy Carter, Reagan’s predecessor. Sanctimonious, humorless, a legendary micromanager. As progressive as he appears, his message is a thoroughly old fashioned American one–you will be held accountable for every single thing you do. Reaganism, though, promises the trappings of old-fashioned America without the struggle and the hellfire.

People don’t remember now that when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 he never mentioned personal morality at all…He saw that greed and hedonism did not need to be adversaries. By uniting the right wing that wanted wealth with no obligations with the left wing that wanted pleasure with no consequences, he built a new American majority.
–Bill Flanagan, Evening’s Empire

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 2: Dispatches from Dream City: Zadie Smith and Barack Obama

PART 1 of this essay is located here.

IV

But let’s return to Obama. In the essay “Speaking in Tongues,” originally a talk delivered shortly after Obama’s election, Smith discusses her acquired flexibility of voice, the consequence of imposing the Cambridge English voice “with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place” on the voice of her childhood  home, working-class North London. She ruefully admits that the two voices have narrowed into one, the educated voice, and that people are in general suspicious of voice-shifters:

We feel that our voices are who we are, and to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best. A Janus –faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls.

This leads to Shaw’s Pygmalion, nominally “the unambiguous tale of a girl who changes her voice and loses her  self…undercut by the fact of the play itself, which is an orchestra of many voices, simultaneously  and perfectly rendered.”  Another orchestra of many voices is the skillful memoir of the new President, Dreams of my Father:

For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden—it is also a gift.

Read the rest of this entry »

PART 1: Dispatches from Dream City: Zadie Smith and Barack Obama

I

Reading and re-reading Zadie Smith’s spookily empathetic essay about Dreams of My Father and the natural linguistic flexibility of the biracial, upwardly mobile figure, the inevitable thought occurred to me: Is Zadie Smith the Barack Obama of literature?

Consider the parallels between the two: both are biracial (Zadie Smith had a white English father and a black Jamaican mother). Both are precocious strivers who came from somewhat déclassé origins and rose to become shining examples of their respective countries’ meritocratic aspirations (Zadie Smith grew up in a council flat, the English equivalent of a housing project, and received a scholarship to Oxford). Both give evidence of having been closer to their white parent. Both seem to promise liberation from the bad faith that has existed on both sides of the color line since the start of the post-civil rights era. Both are figures who because they smoothly speak the language of progressivism (in Smith’s case, the language of progressivism is the language of avant-garde literature and abstruse academic theory) appear–or in the case of Obama, appeared–less cautious and conservative than they really are. Changing My Mind is the title of Zadie Smith’s collection of what she calls ‘occasional essays;’ it might as well be titled ‘Only Connect,’ to use the credo of her beloved E.M.Forster’s Howards End–like Forster and like Obama, Zadie Smith is a builder of bridges and a reconciler of the seemingly irreconcilable.

There is a remarkable essay, “Two Directions for the Novel,” which is a kind of Beer Summit for contemporary fiction: on one side of the table is Joseph O’Neill, author of the Gatsbyesque 9/11 novel Netherland, on the other side is Tom McCarthy, writer of manifestos (still, after a century, a prerequisite for avant-garde credentials) and author of the astringently difficult novel Remainder.
It can be said that—

Read the rest of this entry »

Music Ho!

Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (1934), by the forgotten British composer, conductor and critic Constant Lambert, superficially resembles a kind of polemic familiar to twentieth-century readers: the Modern Art Jeremiad.  The Modern Art Jeremiad, whose prototype is probably Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895), means to expose the sterility, rootlessness, pseudo-egalitarianism, elitism, and lack of craftsmanship in modern painting or sculpture or architecture or dance or literature –and to tie these flaws to deeper flaws in modern life.

The writer of the Jeremiad is almost always an outsider and often an amateur or non-practitioner; his tone is caustic and usually reactionary; the writer maintains a bitterly satirical approach, world-weary yet not morally compromised–the knowing adult in the guise of the not-yet illusioned child, fearlessly exposing the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Often another artist, usually unfashionable or little-known and by general standards faintly risible, is held up as a healthy alternative to the decadence of other modern artists.

Examples of the Modern Art Jeremiad  might include Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, Philip Larkin’ s All What Jazz, Bryan Griffin’s Panic Among the Philistines, B.R. Myers’s A Reader’s Manifesto.

Read the rest of this entry »