Reading for pleasure has taken a hit, what with all the research I’ve been doing, for this or that, and so I haven’t done one of these “stuff I’ve been reading” things in a while. I have barely slept in my own bed for three nights straight in months. I was gone from late last week until Tuesday. I’m home until tomorrow afternoon. I will not be in my bed from tomorrow night into next week. The other bed I am in is a fine bed. But it is not home and … what with the pandemic and everything, plus locational upheaval, I treasure having my own quiet space, with the ocean wind battering against the side of the house. May sound alarming but I really love it. It’s hard to kind of settle down with this kind of bed-hopping absences. I am ready to get a new cat! But not with this kind of lifestyle. At least my library is finally out of storage, unpacked, and gloriously on display in my bookshelves, now re-erected and in place.
My friend Dan Callahan wrote about Fred Astaire for Bright Lights Film Journal. It’s wonderful, and made me want to queue up all of the numbers discussed. Dan is so gifted at pulling out the specifics, the granular:
Astaire showed himself willing to embrace slangy dance hall movements in the “Let Yourself Go” number with Rogers in Follow the Fleet, which Rogers herself takes to with unalloyed delight, and he often seems to enjoy deliberately un-elegant leg work, particularly when he bends his left knee in a cockeyed way during “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”, which ruins any “line” for expressive purposes. There is a curious and revealing moment in his tap solo “No Strings” from Top Hat in which Astaire suddenly catches sight of himself in a mirror and shyly looks away that exactly expresses his lack of ego and his lofty emphasis on form over content. He was more like an inventor than like a star who works for personal aggrandizement only, and he was most himself when worrying about details in his rehearsal sessions than in the amazing results he offered on-screen. It can be difficult to focus on these all-important details rather than resorting to all-out gushing over the results.
I know Nick Pinkerton, I’ve been a guest on podcasts with Nick Pinkerton, he speaks in full and sometimes complicated sentences – and it amazes me, I’ve been on panels with him, etc., so it’s weird to talk about him in a distant sort of way but oh well, handing out flowers to him because it’s always appreciated when fellow critics randomly hand out flowers to me: He’s top tier culture writer for me, a must-read no matter the subject. To quote the YouTube kids I follow – his shit just hits DIFFERENT. The subject matter of his latest was, as you can imagine, enough to make me drop everything to devour it in a single gulp. It did not disappoint. He wrote about Eminem and 8 Mile for Metrograph. This is just a taste:
Hanson had a weakness for preening showboats, but he was on solid ground with close-to-the-vest underplayers like Huppert or the James Spader of 1990’s Bad Influence. What a stroke of luck, then, his meeting with Mathers, whose performance as striving rapper Jimmy Smith Jr. aka B-Rabbit in 8 Mile is at times downright Bressonian in its opacity. The non-actor lead, white as a jug of Vitamin D, is surrounded by visiting Hollywoodians—Kim Basinger dowdied down as Jimmy’s booze ’n’ pills, Bingo-lovin’ mom; Brittany Murphy, a spontaneous performer with a charming knack for playing women tripping headlong through life, as his on-and-off love interest; a lowkey Mekhi Phifer as best friend and bemused well-wisher—but none brought along an appetite for nibbling on the scenery, which is admittedly unappetizing. With cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, Hanson exercises his genius for establishing and sustaining atmosphere, here that of a dead-end, blue-gray-green Detroit of factory lunch trucks and endless rides on city buses where the unwashed windows make an already grimy view grimier, long rides which give our protagonist plenty of time to contemplate which is worse, his job or his home life. The camera stays on the move in a restless, speed-of-life fashion, seeming to stumble across scenes rather than having them staged for its benefit, and this, along with the movie’s compact timeframe—one rocky week in the life of B-Rabbit and friends—lends the film a miraculously sustained immediacy. And though 8 Mile is very much an Eminem vehicle, it doesn’t contain a single “minor” character, the rare Great Man biopic where the subject is often less interesting than everyone around him.
“white as a jug of Vitamin D”?? See what I mean?
Another friend, Imogen Sara Smith, has a regular column over at Criterion, and I always love to hear what she’s thinking about and choosing to focus on. In her latest, she writes about the Los Angeles neighborhood of Bunker Hill, filled with steep hills and Victorian houses in the 40s and 50s, an evocative location used often and very well in film noir.
“Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town,” Raymond Chandler writes in his 1942 novel The High Window. Its tawdry charms lend flavor to Cry Danger (1951), Chicago Calling (1951), and The Turning Point (1952). In Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949), Burt Lancaster returns to his mother’s Hill Street home, convinced he has finally gotten over his ex-wife, only to immediately tumble back into the gravitational pull of their bruising relationship. Bunker Hill is home to a tormented child murderer in Joseph Losey’s surprisingly good remake of M (1951), and, in John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), to a tormented clairvoyant whose ability to see the future makes him feel like “a reverse zombie, living in a world already dead, and I alone knowing it.”
Bunker Hill is a place with a past, a place to hide, and a place to seek answers to mysteries. No wonder people in film noir keep washing up there.
And finally: Juggling these books, a couple pages at a time:
Sonata for Jukebox, by Geoffrey O’Brien – I just don’t know how I have not heard of this book before. A writer pal of mine, Andrew Chan, mentioned the “masterpiece” of the chapter in this book where O’Brien writes about the year the Beatles arrived in America – or what it was like at the time to discover the Beatles, being a teenage boy in America – and I was instantly intrigued. I just bought it and I am blown away by this book. It’s structured like a jukebox: Jukebox as metaphor for Memoir. Your life as a Jukebox, the songs woven into memories, dreams, every moment of your life, the songs and their discovery and re-discovery – it’s an extraordinary book and yes, the Beatles chapter is incredible. But so is the Burt Bacharach chapter. The “party playlist” chapters. And don’t even get me started on the Beach Boys chapter. It was so good and so deep and rich it almost made me nervous. I’ll finish this one in the next couple of days. There’s a coincidence involved in me randomly picking up this book at this particular moment in time – I kind of can’t even believe it – but I’ll talk about that when the moment comes.
The Big Green Tent, by Ludmila Ulitskaya
I’ve had this doorstop of a Russian novel sitting on my shelf for years. My friend Ted gave it to me. Ted knows my taste. He also knows my obsession with all things Russian. I had been asking him about current Russian novelists. Putin-era novelists. He gave me this one. So far so good. It opens with Stalin’s death in 1953. It’s the story of three boys, friends since grade school, and their different fates. I’m only about 150 pages in, but there are already ominous hints of troubles to come. Originally written in Russian, of course, so all I can say is I feel like the translation is very good. Cold War era Moscow. The weirdness of the ideology, dulling its edges, filled with contradictions, none of which anyone is allowed to speak of. I’m digging it.
This Time For Me, by Alexandra Billings
My dear friend Alex wrote a memoir. I read the entire thing in two days, and it brought me to tears on almost every page. It’s wondrous. If you’ve hung out here for any length of time, then you know about our friendship and the adventures we have had. We go way way back. To watch all that has happened for her in the last 5 or 10 years – especially considering where she came from – has been nothing less than a heart-bursting miracle. And she can WRITE.
Finally. I’ve been buried in research. I can’t speak about what the project is, not yet. The books clearly point towards a certain subject, as does my viewing diary of last month, but there’s so much in that particular subject I don’t feel like I’m giving too much away. These books are just a portion of the real stack of books I’ve been plowing through (in many cases for the second or third time, since these are essential books in my library already.)
It’s been fun. This is extremely well-trod ground for me. These guys were part of why I got interested in acting – not so much film, but acting – in the first place. The first wave of obsession, starting with Al Pacino – it’s a quick jump over into this realm. I know some of these performances literally by heart, down to gestures and pauses – but to delve into the deep end so totally, and re-watch them all back to back – has been so much fun and I already miss it.
