Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and John Ford's Upstream

The Goldfinch is a book I found quite compelling and enjoyable but one I would only recommend to some people, particularly those who like Salinger and Robert Goddard (John Major's favorite writer):  the style and first-person narration remind me of Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass while the stolen-art plot reminds me of many Goddard novels.  Theo Decker, who narrates most of the book as a thirteen-year-old, is very much like a member of the Glass family, though he is on the East Side and, as he tells his mother early on, "Franny and Zooey was the West Side." And he is rather like Holden Caulfield (on drugs, which Decker starts taking after his mother dies) in his puncturing of adult pomposity and his observant similes:

He looked partly like a rodeo guy and partly like a fucked-up lounge singer.

Like a pair of weakling ants under a magnifying glass.

With svelte lines like a 1950s spaceship.

Everything seemed slow like I was moving through deep water.

Streets gray like old newspaper.

The book has a wealth of intelligent references to everyone from Tacitus to Walt Whitman and shows an understanding and appreciation of New York, including Film Forum, my favorite place to see movies (they have movies worth seeing).  As the book moves from New York (where Theo's mother dies) to Las Vegas (where his father dies) to Amsterdam (when he is in his twenties) Theo keeps his thoughts on Carel Fabritius's 1654 painting The Goldfinch, which he rescued from an explosion and is the one permanent thing in his life, and Tartt keeps the narrative going with the appearances of Theo's friend Boris, a strange and helpful personality.



John Ford's Upstream (1927) was recently shown on TCM, part of the series of films found recently in New Zealand, one of the 11 films now known to exist of the 60 or so films that Ford made before 1928.  As Tag Gallagher says, in his thorough and excellent John Ford The Man and His Films (1986, University of California Press): "Many mysteries would be clarified, were fewer early films lost."  Upstream looks backward to D.W. Griffith, with its emphasis on subtle and low-key acting, and forward to the sound films, with its emphasis on group camaraderie (in this case, in a theatrical boarding house).  Ford's ability to convey a great deal within a single shot is very much in evidence here, especially the shot where the elderly drama coach, who tried to teach the importance of the play itself, wearily climbs the stairs behind the celebration for the actor who values his own acting more.

Chaplin

The November issue of The New Criterion has an excellent article on the humanities by Mark Bauerlein:
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/What Dido-did--Satan-saw--O-Keefe-painted-7728
in which he says:

To attract the undergraduate who focuses narrowly on career and the CEO with $10 million to give, advocates should realize, don't wax righteous or pragmatic about the humanities as a bloc or as an instrument.  Rather, show them vivid images of architecture in Washington, D.C.; recount Captain Ahab on the quarterdeck enlisting the crew in his obsession, or Dido's reaction once she learns her beloved Aeneas has slipped away in the night, or Satan in the Garden eyeing Adam and Eve, tormented by their innocence and plotting their ruin; stage the avid sadism of Regan and Goneril or the banter of Algernon and Ernest; or run the final scene when the Tramp, just out of prison, turns to face the blind flower girl, now cured, who clasps his hand, grimaces at the sight of him, and mutters, "Yes, I now can see."  These are the materials of inspiration, and they are the highest card the humanists can play.

I think this is sound advice, though I will leave for another time the discussion of how effective it will be with the many undergraduates who have never read a book, seen a painting or been to the theatre or a concert. What most impressed me about this passage was the intelligent inclusion of Chaplin's City Lights.  Chaplin is one of the few filmmakers who my fifteen-year-old son loves and I think this is not only because he is funny, but also because of his intense humanity and compassion.  When I first starting going to the movies seriously the Chaplin films were unavailable, except for poor prints of The Gold Rush, which for complicated reasons had fallen into the public domain.  Gradually the films began to be released, the lovely A Woman of Paris last (I knew people who had gone to East Berlin to see the only available copy) and I urge anyone who has not seen them to do so, ideally in a theatre (Film Forum shows them fairly often);  one may not find them funny but Chaplin moves like a ballet dancer and constructs his gags elegantly without ever sacrificing the context for a cheap laugh (unlike Woody Allen, who some young New Yorkers said they preferred when the Chaplin movies began to surface). Chaplin's films are amazingly resonant today, when we need laughter and compassion more than ever.

Revolution

I watched Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba recently on Turner Classic Movies and I am currently reading Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine and the Lost Muse.  What the Kalatozov and Kendall have in common is their demonstration of the hopes and disillusionment of revolution.  The Kalatozov film was made in 1964 and shows, with constant camera movement and high-contrast black-and white, what Cuba was like before the revolution.  Its four segments show desperate women becoming prostitutes, farmers losing their land to United Fruit, students supporting revolution, and peasants whose homes have been destroyed joining Castro's forces.  The film was considered by Cuba and Russia guilty of excess "formalism" and suppressed for years until its rediscovery at the Telluride Film Festival in 1993.

Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine and the Lost Muse was reviewed intelligently
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/unknown-young-balanchine/
by Jennifer Homans in The New York Review of Books.  What Balanchine really thought when he left Russia in 1924 we don't know, but there was still a great deal of hope that traditional ballet could accommodate Balanchine's modern approach.  I'm not one who believes that it necessarily enhances one's appreciation of an artist to know about his life but this detailed and extensively researched book about his parents and his training add another level of appreciation to one's view of Balanchine.  I have often said that Balanchine's ballets simultaneously show life in a group, in a pair and as an individual so I found it particularly interesting to read about Balanchine as a student, a married man (to Tamara Geva when he was 18) and as a child left to fend for himself as a boarding student in ballet class at the age of 9.

Turner Classic Movies

TCM is the one reason to have cable TV, since many of the movies they show are not available on DVD and are not shown elsewhere.  Before there was cable TV in New York I would use a stopwatch to time movies on TV between commercials and was not surprised that many movies ran short to allow more commercials and to shoehorn the films into particular time slots.  TCM shows movies uncut, uninterrupted and in the proper aspect ratio. The best movie I have seen on TCM recently was Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, intense and gritty.  I will say more about it later but for the moment I just wanted to mention what I think are the best films coming up on TCM in November:

Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth.  I often say that the best comedies are the most serious and this wonderfully funny film is a serious study of love and fidelity.

John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge, The Rising of the Moon, and The Searchers.  Ford, my favorite director, still has not gotten the recognition he deserves, though The Searchers has been widely praised in recent years and has even been the subject of Glenn Frankel's book The Searchers:  The Making of an American Legend, though that book is more about the historical background of the story than it is about John Ford.  Ford was supposedly one of the Klan riders in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of the Nation and his movies often deal with racism as a theme, very much the case in the two Westerns here. The Rising of the Moon is one of Ford's Irish films that, as Andrew Sarris says, "celebrates Ireland's very strangeness."

Blake Edwards's The Party.  When I saw this film at MoMA in the 80's there was a small riot in the auditorium when they showed a pan-and-scanned print of this wonderful wide-screen comedy.  Edwards uses all the space of the widescreen image for this deadpan low-key film about Hollywood.

John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle.  Jean-Pierre Melville said, in his interview with Rui Nogueira, that he came up with nineteen variations on his favorite cops-and-robbers situation and that The Asphalt Jungle uses them all.

I also recommend Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be, McCarey's Love Affair, Lang's The Big Heat, and Preston Sturges's Christmas in July, all of which I will be writing about at some point.
 

The World Series on Fox, continued

In Richard Sandomir's NY Times column yesterday he quotes Peter Macheska, the coordinating producer of baseball for Fox, on why they were late showing Koltan Wong being picked off first by pitcher Koji Uehara for the final out, based on the Fox "philosophy"  of showing anxious faces to heighten the tension!  Macheska said "Baseball isn't the quickest sport; if we stay on the field and don't give all the reactions, it's not as exciting as when we do."  So instead of seeing the beauty of the game itself, poorly televised as it is, we get endless shots of the fans and the teams in their dugouts!  This is as condescending as the canned laughter of sitcoms that make them so unbearable for some of us; network executives having said that without canned laughter many viewers would not know when to laugh, though perhaps the lack of genuine humor in most sitcoms might be part of the problem. In any case, some of us know that baseball can be at its most beautiful when nothing is happening and Fox and other networks should work at capturing that beauty instead of showing endless reaction shots of the spectators.

The Tomb of Ligeia and the World Series

In Poe's story "Ligeia" he refers to Ligeia's face as having "the radiance of an opium-dream" and The Tomb of Ligeia, like many of Roger Corman's films, has a dream-like quality.  In 1970, when I just had begun to take films seriously, I would go to see the films of Allan Dwan at MoMA in the afternoon and in the evening I would go to the Corman series at the Kips Bay Theatre, where the audience was sparse.  I prefer Corman's more obscure films, such as Teenage Caveman (evocative of the frailty of human existence) but the Poe films are very much true to the spirit of Poe's stories.  Not too long ago it was hard to see movies in their proper aspect ration, especially on VCR's or TV, but that has changed considerably now with DVD's and Turner Classic Movies and TCM showed The Tomb of Ligeia in all its wide-screen beauty, with blue candle drippings and space between actors that emphasized their emotional distance from one another.  There are certain similarities to Vertigo but the Hitchcock film soars with its Bernard Herrmann score while the score for the Corman (by Kenneth Jones) is both inadequate and inappropriate.  There has been little serious attention paid to Corman's films but Roger Corman:  The Millennic Vision (The University of Edinburgh Press, 1973) has an excellent essay on the Poe films by David Pirie.

Yes, the World Series is going on and the Fox coverage is so poor that last night they missed the final pick-off play because they were too busy showing fans in the stands! And, of course, the home run continues to play too big a part.  Mark Leibovich, in his article on Miguel Cabrera in the NY Times magazine, wrote "But while fans have been outraged over performance-enhancing drugs, they are also conditioned to expect the results."  Can't they be re-conditioned?  Maybe not.  Perhaps it is just too easy for sportscasters, who often have little knowledge of the game, to show home runs in the highlights, the beauty of a successful hit-and-run or sacrifice bunt being just too boring. My radical proposal would to make any fair ball hit into the stands an out.  Okay, maybe just make it the same as a foul ball.  But the worship of the home run has many negative effects on the game, from removing any margin of error for pitchers to preventing younger fans from learning about the complexities of the game.

why these subjects?

These are things about which I care passionately

BALLET.  I knew nothing about ballet growing up and nothing when I first came to N.Y.  If I thought anything about it I thought it was frilly nonsense.  Then a friend persuaded me to go to the NYC Ballet, I saw Balanchine's  Symphony in C and I was immediately struck by not only its beauty but its elegant complexity.  It was 1970 and Balanchine was in some ways at the height of his creative powers and I started to go to the NYC Ballet regularly, sometimes several times a week.  The NYC Ballet performed at the NY State Theatre, where even the cheap seats had pretty good views.  Balanchine had insisted on that, feeling that the ballet had to be affordable or it would become like Broadway, only available to the well-off and conservative.  Around the same time I started reading Arlene Croce in The New Yorker and she was immensely helpful in helping me to understand ballet and, especially, Balanchine; I strongly recommend Croce's two collections:  After-Images and Going to the Dance (one is still waiting for her long-promised book on Balanchine).  Eventually I started taking ballet classes, which I enjoy not only for helping me to learn about steps and combinations but for pure pleasure.

BASEBALL.  I loved baseball as a kid, rooting for the Red Sox and Ted Williams (my older brother was already a Yankee fan), updating batting averages daily, and playing often in local empty lots.  Then I turned 12 and tried out for the local little league and was rejected, finding out later the selection was fixed, based on the support of fathers (my father had no interest in baseball whatsoever).  I then lost interest in baseball until 1976, when I read Roger Angell's essay in The New Yorker:  On the Ball.  Instantly it became clear to me that I had completely missed out on the beauty of the game, something Angell described in lovely detail.  Then I started to follow the game closely again, rooting neither for the Mets or the Yankees but for the elegant geometry of the game itself.  The beauty of the game is elusive on television, as I quickly found out when I started to go often to games.  At that time the Mets were in some of their worst years so tickets were readily available and at Yankee Stadium the bleachers were $1.50 and available only on the day of the game.

MOVIES.  I was not allowed to go to the movies as a kid unless my parents took me and they had little interest in movies so that was not very often.  My parents claimed that this was because movie theatres were full of perverts (I had no idea what they were talking about!) but basically it was because my parents, from New England, did not believe that anything that gave you pleasure was good, especially if it cost money.  So I had little interest in film until I was in college in New York.  In those days a student membership at the Museum of Modern Art cost $5.00 for a year and as an art history major I spent a great deal of time there.  I knew they showed movies there but never attended until one day I had time to kill and dropped in to see a movie that I knew nothing about but had vaguely heard of, Citizen Kane.  From the beginning, the death and fake newsreel, I was totally entranced by this amazing and complex work of art and struck suddenly by the realization that I was missing out on the whole history of the art form.  Around the same time Andrew Sarris was doing a show on WBAI and I heard him praise Howard Hawks's El Dorado, having to almost apologize for recommending a John Wayne Western; I went to see it immediately and enjoyed it immensely, paying attention to the eye-level camera angles Sarris mentioned.  Around the same time Sarris's book, The American Cinema, came out, as did Robin Wood's books on Hawks and Hitchcock and I started to go to the movies every day and read about them, trying to catch up.

BOOKS.  I grew up in a town that had neither a bookstore nor a library (it has continued to vote against funding a public library) in a home that had few books other than an occasional best-seller.  So when I started earning money with a paper route much of it went to buying books on the rack at the local grocery store.  They did not have much of a selection so I just bought whatever they had, mostly pulp.  But one day they had Orwell's 1984, a book I had never heard of but which totally captivated me with its dystopian vision and compelling style.  I continued to be frustrated in trying to find things to read and was excited to find that as a freshman in high school we would be reading real books, even if they were old chestnuts such as The Microbe Hunters and Death Be Not Proud. Somewhat to my surprise this was not acceptable to many of the freshman parents; they considered that requiring their children to read entire books was oppressive!  PTA meetings were held to discuss the topic and I was pleased that the teachers stood by their guns; some parents had their kids transfer to less demanding English classes. The next year I went off to prep school where there was a wonderful library and I read widely and indiscriminately until I started to develop my own taste and preferences.  My favorite writers now include Richardson, Smollett, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Trollope, Nabokov, and John D. MacDonald.  I will be writing about them, among many others.