What follows is the second installment in an ongoing serialized essay about two overlapping developments within modern American culture: the questionable popular demand that political leaders come “with a narrative” and, on the literary front, a general revival of approval for long serial narratives.
Culturewatch
“Money” Mayweather: A Postmodern Triumph
Modern professional athletes are entirely beholden to their corporate masters. Fuck up the brand, and you’re gone. Pete Rose, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson. On and on.
Seven Weddings and a Funeral
“I didn’t tell the whole truth, no one tells the whole truth…”
-Robert Durst
Serial Storytelling in the 21st Century or, If Knausgaard Is the New Proust, Can Elena Ferrante Be the New Tolstoy?
Part 1
I’m all about finding the political in art, but assertions about the role of art in the political make me nervous, maybe more nervous than they should. But…
A Grown Woman’s Tales of Detroit
Marsha Music née Battle is a writer of rootsy, elegant pieces on time past who grew up in Detroit, daughter of a pre-Motown record producer father. Her blog means to capture the vibrant, creative years of mid-century Black Detroit life before memories fade and the city “changes” once more. She regards the music of Detroit as an historical chronicle, reflecting the city’s importance during the American Century. Your editor came upon her posts through a link on YouTube following an upload of the 14 year-old Aretha Franklin singing “Never Grow Old.” That performance was produced by Marsha Music’s father, Joe Von Battle, who was the first to record Aretha.
The Chocolate Speaks
One recent afternoon, I found myself in front of the TV, its sound muted, watching an NCAA basketball championship semi-final between Michigan State and Duke. Ten young men ran back and forth, right-to-left, left-to-right, upon this court. It occurred to me that I had been watching this game for sixty years, and I did not feel that, oh, the last semi-infinity of this exposure had added to my stores of wisdom or emotional depth.
10th & Bainbridge Blues
I met E. Martin in 1958 at summer camp, where he was not only our bunk’s starting shortstop and point guard but the only one who read I. F. Stone’s Weekly. He went on to lead the anti-war movement at Penn medical school, participate in Physicians for Social Responsibility and practice psychotherapy from a self-characterized “radical social-economic justice perspective.” At age 70, he relocated from suburban Boston to a sustainable farming community in western Massachusetts. So when he recommended reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, I did.[1]
Mr. Turner & Mr. Leigh
Mike Leigh’s latest work, a highly episodic “scenes from the life of the artist” film about J. M.W. Turner, begs a question that has dogged me throughout life.
Mindless Pleasures
No one sings in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie Inherent Vice, the first film adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel. This is quite strange, considering that of all Pynchon’s quirks, his characters’ tendency to burst into song Hollywood musical-style would appear to be among the most welcoming to the general audience, the most “filmable.” And it’s especially strange coming from Anderson, who 16 years ago padded his film Magnolia, already overstuffed, with an unfortunate, outta-nowhere singalong sequence set to Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” (memorable for all the wrong reasons). So it’s not that P.T. Anderson, probably Hollywood’s most celebrated writer-director under 50, has anything against diegetic singing per se. He just doesn’t think it has any place in his Pynchon movie. Yet Inherent Vice is praised as an uncommonly “close” literary adaptation.
The Resistance to “American Sniper”
As more than twenty-five million Americans now know, American Sniper dramatizes the life of Navy Seal Chris Kyle, who with 160 confirmed kills and 255 probables became the most lethal sniper in our history. An imperfectly-successful rodeo rider, Kyle enlisted at the age of thirty after hearing about Al Qaeda’s embassy bombings in 1998. Almost immediately after marrying he served four tours in Iraq, retired, contended with PTSD, and began helping other veterans by taking them shooting, one of whom murdered him. There is not even a whisper of a rumor that Kyle committed any war crimes in Iraq. This might have made American Sniper an unlikely film to have excited the savage moralizing that the newspapers began reporting within days of the its release (“How Clint Eastwood’s ‘American Sniper’ stoked the American culture wars”, in the Washington Post shortly after the film’s release, another such in the New York Times, and since then a lot more). Eastwood’s Americans neither commit atrocities which Eastwood then excuses—the charge leveled against Zero Dark Thirty—nor do they suffer any, real or invented, which might plausibly stoke Islamophobia. The only atrocities committed by Eastwood’s Iraqis are committed upon one another, and the only Iraqi atrocity we see committed is the punishment of an informer, clearly intended to discourage others. While very ugly—the scene shows a Sunni insurgent threatening a child and then murdering an adult with an electric drill—atrocious reprisals against informers are proverbial in most insurgencies. Kyle calls the insurgents ‘savages’, and although the word has provoked a lot of indignation it surely ranks pretty low on the scale of offensive things soldiers have called one another, and may not be absolutely unforgiveable in a character contending with child suicide bombers and electric drill murders.
The Eternal Engine
The greatest virtue of Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho’s dystopian action film, may be its oddity.
Endangered Species
It’s Christmas Eve and it has been raining all day in a kind of incessant Blade Runner post-apocalyptic way: a muddy Christmas! Gasoline is suddenly well under three bucks a gallon so it’s hello greenhouse and goodbye ozone. Hunting season upstate and my dog has found a bag of guts a neighbor has left outside after butchering his doe. Yet the main thing about today, beyond the appalling weather, my rancid mutt, my worries for the environment, and the anniversary of the birth of the Infant Jesus is that I finished reading a great novel and I am surging with energy and feeling the aesthetic thrill of having experienced something original and important.
Uncool World
Questlove says it all well.
American hip-hop is usually based on imitation, and it is meant to produce artists who are users of the existing tradition, not creators. And because of that, black culture in general—which has defaulted into hip-hop—is no longer perceived as an interesting vanguard, as a source of potential disruption or a challenge to the dominant. Once you don’t have a cool factor any longer—when cool gets decoupled from African-American culture—what happens to the way that black people are seen?
IMMA LET YOU FINISH
“Shake It Off,” director Mark Romanek’s recent clip for Taylor Swift, depicts bad new trends in beautiful old ways. It works the same way as the best ‘80s-‘90s music videos—using semiotics to express up-to-the-minute changes in pop culture, producing the sort of imagery commentators and marketers now glibly call “iconic.”
Wonders Come to Pass
in 1856, Walt Whitman predicted
the coming of a race of fierce and athletic girls
Gentleman in Distress
For a guy who once conceded nothing to Holden Caulfield when it came to abhorring the “phoney,” it takes a well-seasoned blend of irony and humor to walk around sporting designer-distressed boots, jeans and safari jacket. But I am over-seventy, a serene sail toward a gradual retirement from the practice of law hastened by the two M.I’s, which fell upon me within two months of one another and led me to open heart surgery, an experience that illuminated as effectively as thunderbolts hurled by Zeus the likelihood that I would have neither the energy or time to rack up such character-defining “worn” spots and “scorch” marks on my own. True, the red wine and dark chocolate I imbibe for cardiovascular benefit place legitimate stains within easy reach. True, my blood thinner gives my slightest nick a shot at heightening any fabric’s coloration. But with my rowdy ways laid nearly as deeply to rest as Janis’s and Jimi’s, and with Lipitor and Metropolol as regular benchmarks of my conversation as Mick and Keith once were; I feel entitled to some short cuts.
Doing the Math
Up until 9th grade, math was one of my favorite subjects. Like most people, I loved the palpable rightness of its solutions. Then I went to a magnet science & tech high school, and suddenly I sucked at math because big brain robotoid kids with underdeveloped social skills were the majority of the student body.
Wait Till Last Year
Bob Liss finished this report on LeBron James’s role in last season’s NBA playoffs a few days before James announced he was “going home” to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers next season. Liss takes in the news in his postscript to this piece.
Existential Bugsquash
The costumes are wrong. They have to be discarded. We have to start out naked again and go from there.
Roger & Me
Ms. Levin completed a manuscript about her life as a tennis fan and player (Comeback) a few years ago. She picked up on the beauty of Roger Federer’s game early in his career and her text tells the story of her responsiveness to him. What follows are Federer-focused passages from her tennis memoir. Take it as her tribute to Federer in the wake of his inspired performance at Wimbledon this year.