Our dried voices when we whisper together

So I finally got to see The Ides of March and Moneyball. Clooney is not as smart as he thinks he is and Brad Pitt is not as charismatic as he thinks he is. Which is no crime. Clooney is a good director: he knows when to hang back and he really lets the actors speak for themselves. His style reminds me very much of Robert Redford's in Quiz Show: he shuts up and lets the story get on with it, and the drama is character-driven. The weakness is in the script (three credited writers, based on a play) which turns on Ryan Gosling's moral character making an immoral choice. Why he does so isn't set up or explained. Basically the character acts out of character.

The Moneyball screenplay is credited to Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin: a sort of screenwriting supergroup. Liked it a lot, again because the director lets things hang a little, but Sorkin's dialogue tennis is best served fast and Pitt plays it slow. I don't think I've truly enjoyed Pitt in anything: like Alfred Molina, he is likeable, talented and nearly always miscast. He's tremendously physical -- in one scene, tossing a bat aside with the fluidity of a dancer -- but every role he takes involves doing annoying things with his mouth (sucking a spoon, chewing on a sandwich or, in this case, spitting gum into a coffee cup). But when he looks rundown or downcast or subdued, he ages ten years and becomes terrific. Edward James Olmos' line to the DOP was "don't make me look pretty." Pitt could use that.

Both films are about money and the lack of it. I enjoy this as a subject. It's becoming more current.

Neither are as good as The Ghost, which I finally got to see as well. Polanski knows how to build tension. He deploys clichés like a sail, adjusting them gradually. In The Ghost an exiled politician lives by the sea: one shot has his groundsman sweeping the sand off the steps only to have the approaching wind blow it back. At which point I decided: I fucking love this movie. The Ghost is as melodramatic as Ides of March; as esoteric as Moneyball, yet recognisable, spooky, obsessive, human. Square inside a genre, buckling down on character and above all witty. I guess this is what it was like watching Rosemary's Baby when it first came out.

I'm obsessed with 'drama', now. People walking in and out of rooms, talking. It's amazing how much you can do with that.

Pat

Patricia Highsmith interviewed by Gerald Peary in 1988:

She owns no copies of films made from her books, not even Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 version of her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950). "It seems to be entertaining after all these years," she acknowledges. "They keep playing it on American TV, ancient as it is. A few years ago, there were requests to me, 'Can we make this?' I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake."

Strangers on a Train was sold outright for $7,500, with ten per cent of that to Highsmith's agent. A meager recompense, some would say, but Highsmith disagrees. "That wasn't a bad price for a first book, and my agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment. I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes."

Hitchcock purchased Strangers On A Train through an intermediary so Highsmith's agent wouldn't know who was bidding for it and ask for a larger advance. It's interesting that the author puts so much distance between herself and the director: critics and fans put them hand in glove.

NB: Nice sweater.

You hit me with a flower

One-star reviews such as:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
"So many other good books... don't waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed."

...always remind me of the 'Review of Winslow Homer Show at LA County Museum' from Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes, pictured above. (I have a first edition -- Putnam, 1977 -- sitting in storage with the rest of my books.) In addition to his many other talents, Steve Martin may have predicted the internet.

Now, more seriously, Time's Lev Grossman has examined the phenomenon of "it sucks / it rocks" reader reviews in depth:

It's a basic but still weird fact about books that two people's experiences of the same book can be radically different but equally valid. On the face of it it doesn't seem possible. When we read a book and find that it sucks, that doesn't feel like a personal judgment on our part, it feels like an observed fact that everybody else who reads that book should acknowledge — and if they don't acknowledge it, that means that they suck. It goes against our instincts as a reader that two people can have opposite reactions to a book, and that both reactions can be true...

Grossman concludes:

I feel like there should be more talk about the criteria by which we make literary judgments. More and more books are being published every year, but we have less of an idea than ever (what with aesthetics being dead, or at least resting) how to filter and sort and organize and canonize them, or even whether we should.

The full article is here.

Driving down your freeways

James Ellroy in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

You were away from Los Angeles for twenty-five years. Why'd you come back?

JAMES ELLROY

One reason: Cherchez la femme. I chased women to suburban New York, suburban Connecticut, Kansas City, Carmel, and San Francisco. But I ran out of places, and I ran out of women, so I ended up back here.

INTERVIEWER

Did you miss the city?

ELLROY

While I was away, the Los Angeles of my past accreted in my mind, developing its own power. Early on in my career I believed that in order to write about LA, I had to stay out of it entirely. But when I moved back, I realized that LA then lives in my blood. LA now does not.

Full article is here.

The description of evil through art

East Coast intellectual Simon Grigg has written a great piece on the subject of MegaUpload:

Given that, really, [MegaUpload's] offences seem to be little different in scope to the rogue YouTube, as documented in that Viacom indictment, one wonders why the 'man' is so keen to stomp so visibly and brutally on the founder and face of the site.

Because people are killing music. But remember the days when music was killing America? In 1995 Bob Dole wanted to be the Republican nominee for President and his campaign was searching for ways to distinguish him. Writes Bob Woodward in The Choice (1996):

The plan, as [advisor William] Lacy had proposed in April, was to attack Hollywood directly on the grounds of sex and violence in movies and popular music. [Speechwriter] Mari Will... had spent some time drafting the anti-Hollywood speech... Dole needed to step up in a forceful and direct way if he was going to get and retain attention, particularly with conservative voters.

Dole was to give the speech in Los Angeles. Will had "injected some high voltage rhetoric into the speech" which Dole approved. Later he began to express reservations. Revisions were made and the language softened, but the Senator's doubts persisted. "Maybe it was generational, Dole figured, but he was very uncomfortable with the Hollywood value speech... He considered not giving it."

On the night of the speech Lacy went over it with the candidate word by word, "a diversionary tactic so that Dole wouldn't toss out the entire speech." Dole even wavered once he got up on the podium, improvising an introduction. But eventually he reverted to the words on the teleprompter:

A line has been crossed — not just of taste, but of human dignity and decency. It is crossed every time sexual violence is given a catchy tune. When teen suicide is set to an appealing beat. When Hollywood's dream factories turn out nightmares of depravity.

You know what I mean. I mean "Natural Born Killers." "True Romance." Films that revel in mindless violence and loveless sex. I'm talking about groups like Cannibal Corpse, Geto Boys and 2 Live Crew. About a culture business that makes money from "music" extolling the pleasures of raping, torturing and mutilating women; from "songs" about killing policemen and rejecting law...

Today Time Warner owns a company called Interscope Records which columnist John Leo called the "cultural equivalent of owning half the world's mustard gas factories." Ice-T of "Cop Killer" fame is one of Time Warner's "stars." I cannot bring myself to repeat the lyrics of some of the "music" Time Warner promotes. But our children do. There is a difference between the description of evil through art, and the marketing of evil through commerce.

The speech was a big hit -- "giant news. The impact was way beyond anything in Dole's entire political history."

Dole hadn't seen the movies he was talking about. Not sure if he'd heard the rap tracks either but "teen suicide set to an appealing beat" has the air of authenticity.

Love is the cure for every evil

It's been a good week for lawyers. The Pirate Bay founders were denied appeal. Kim Dotcom was denied bail. US authorities seized file-streaming domains ahead of the Superbowl.

Neil Young says piracy is the new radio. Twitter user @rupertmurdoch says it's stealing and wrong. EMI's Craig Davis calls it a service issue.

If all three share a common point it's that old guard has been scooped. Users want what they want, and now. Traditional distribution can't keep up. Much like a determined journalist who disguises herself as a maid to steal a story from a rival,  the audience has taken an alternative route.

Piracy is not just about theft: it's about who controls the sea lanes. Legislators and enforcers are trying to regain control and steer everyone back into safe water.

In the meantime a record label has used the internet to crowd-source publicity for a new artist and rack up #1 sales in 14 countries and counting. See what happens when we all work together?

(Pic: Judex)

The cigarettes, the magazines all stacked up in the rain

People have been enjoying City Lights very much. Ta muchly -- it's nice to get nice back from the web. I've written the second part of the story. I just haven't typed it up yet.

Stephen Stratford is writing. You know he will be in the home stretch when he Twitpics bourbon or reaches for an awkward metaphor like "zebra hunting."

In the last month I re-read Woodward and Bernstein's All The President's Men and watched the movie (yet) again. Screenwriter William Goldman is always good on the writing process:

"One of the things I love to do when I work with young writers is to disabuse them of the notion that I know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm writing a script now, and as we are speaking, I am looking at my computer, tearing out my hair, thinking, well, is this horrible, or is this going to work? I don't know. Storytelling is always tricky."

I been reading many comments from authors about their mid-career anxieties -- what's the point, maybe it's all over, etc. Writers feel that every day, even the Nobel Prize winners. Writes Kevin Rabalais of Ernest Hemingway:

Once the 1930s rolled around, many critics believed he had seen his day, and by 1954, the year of the aeroplane crashes and Nobel announcement, he had become, for many, a parody. Following his suicide, Time magazine reported on the life "which led Hemingway himself not only to some mechanical, self-consciously 'Hemingway' writing, but to a self-conscious 'Hemingway' style of life". That life grew increasingly desperate after the crashes from which, writes [biographer Paul] Hendrickson, "he never really recovered in either his body or mind".

Writing is a lonely full-time job that doesn't pay very much. But the solitude of the task is balanced by the way fiction taps into and feeds the continuum. In the New York Times last year Pixar's John Lasseter summed this up in a story about Steve Jobs summing it up:

Steve Jobs and I were very close, and early on when I was making "Toy Story" we started talking and he said, "John, you know at Apple when I make computers, what is the lifespan of this product, two years, three years at the most, and then about five years, they're like a doorstop. But if you do your job right, these films can last forever."

On hiPod-rotate: Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine. In 2005 she explained the four-year break between her second and third albums to Rolling Stone:

"The first couple of years, I didn't have anything left in me to write about. That was a good thing, because it meant I'd done my job on the last batch of songs. I was riding a wave of independence. I wasn't trying to write; I just figured if the songs came to me, they came to me, and if not, 'Oh, well, it's been fun.'"

That's a pretty lovely way of thinking about it.