White wash Friday, Mar 5 2010

Morgan Thorson / Low ‘s Heaven

Picture yourself in a room full of people in silly white clothes, going through a series of ritualized and faintly absurd movements with expressions of blank sincerity on their faces, all to the accompaniment of the kind of synthetic organ music usually reserved for elevators and spa waiting rooms. Is it a new kind of yoga class? Some sort of new-age revival meeting? Rec hour at an asylum for recovering catatonics? No, it’s Heaven, as imagined by the Morgan Thorson dance company. God isn’t dead, he’s just been dulled into stupor.

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Metamomusphosis Friday, Mar 5 2010

Okay, so here’s the deal. I know this blog was supposed to be all about books and movies and I know it was kind of fun while it lasted, and I know that if you’re reading this then chances are that you, like me, have been waiting for the day it makes a comeback.

But let’s face it. It’s been two and a half years since I last posted on this site. This parrot is dead, dead, dead.

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No Role for the old man Wednesday, Nov 14 2007

Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men

[warning: spoilers]

Watched No Country for Old Men over the weekend – Joel and Ethan Coen’s impressive but ultimately unsuccessful adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name to the big screen.

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The gifts reserved for age Tuesday, Oct 9 2007

Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost

For surely now our household hearths are cold,
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.

- Tennyson, ‘The Lotos Eaters‘

Why is it that a ghost returns? Is it really in order to seek justice for the wrongs done to him, or in the hope of contact with a loved one, or to protect those he loves from harm? Or is it just that, by meddling among the living, the ghost hopes to reclaim for himself some vestige of past excitements, some inkling of what it meant to be alive? Does the torment of the grave lie not in anguish, but in the slow suffocation of the self, the knowledge that all we once were is lost forever?

This is the idea at the heart of Philip Roth’s intriguing new novel Exit Ghost. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s familiar alter-ego, has spent the last 11 years of his life living in almost complete isolation in the New England countryside – a period in which he has become both impotent and incontinent. Returning to New York after his long absence, ostensibly for a medical procedure that promises to restore his bladder control, he finds himself suddenly thrown into the world of the living, and proceeds to seize upon it through a series of spontaneous and unbalanced decisions that he recognizes as madness even as he makes them. Why then does he perpetuate such foolishness? Because he wants to be, in his own words, “back in the drama, back in the moment, back into the turmoil of events! When I heard my voice rising, I did not rein it in. There is the pain of being in the world, but there is also the robustness.” It is this doomed attempt to hold on to one’s slipping existence, this rage against the dying of the light, that Exit Ghost gloriously celebrates.

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Light and gravity Saturday, Oct 6 2007

Bela Tarr’s The Man from London

To describe Bela Tarr’s starkly ravishing new film The Man from London as film noir is, I think, to miss the point substantially. It’s like describing Hamlet as a murder investigation. Tarr’s film is so much more – a celebration of aesthetic possibility, a testament to the unflinching power of the camera’s gaze, an uncompromising vision of what film, as a medium, is capable of. Every shot, every frame in this film is put together with the skill and patience of a master craftsman – producing an effect that I can only compare to the best work of Bergman and Tarkovsky. Whether it’s a wizened old man crumbling bread into his soup; the same old man balancing a billiard ball on his nose while an accordion plays in the background and a man dances around him with a chair; the abstract image of a ship’s prow, the central line dividing the screen into two parts, light and shadow, life and death; the clockwork of figures descending a ship’s gangway and stepping into a waiting train, like the souls of the damned arriving in Hell; or just the image of a man standing alone in the gleaming glass cage of a railway switchbooth that becomes a metaphor for man’s fundamental isolation – every scene in this film is pure poetry, every scene combines the bleak realism of a Hopper painting with the immaculate lighting of a Cartier-Bresson photograph. And Tarr’s shots of the human face reveal a nakedness so severe, so absolute, that you almost feel like his film should be rated NC-17. Bergman, in an interview about Nykvist, says that the greatest achievement of cinematography is that is has conquered the human face. Watch The Man from London and you will see exactly what he means.

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Lust, Yawn Wednesday, Oct 3 2007

Perhaps the most challenging thing about watching Ang Lee’s new film Lust, Caution is managing to remember that it’s not In the Mood for Love. It’s not just the presence of Tony Leung that brings the parallel to mind – it’s the costumes, the lush interiors, the slow, nuanced unfolding of an impossible relationship.

Normally, this would be high praise. Except that the plot of Lust, Caution is so at odds with the quiet mellowness of Kar Wai’s masterpiece, that the end result is an awkward, patchy piece of work that tries to be both frenzied espionage thriller and unlikely love story and is convincing as neither.

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It didn’t happen one night Saturday, Sep 22 2007

Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach

Early in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, there is a scene where a pair of newly-weds sit glumly working their way through an unappetizing English supper, keen to get on with their evening but feeling that certain proprieties must be met. It’s a feeling of being trapped by an unacknowledged rule that readers of McEwan’s new novel will find familiar, as they ask themselves why they’re bothering to go on reading this thing when they could be out enjoying the last of the Fall sunlight.

To put it mildly, On Chesil Beach is not McEwan’s most successful novel. In fact, it’s barely a novel at all, more like an insecure short story blustering its way into novel status by adding a lot of padding and pretending to be a lot more grown up and serious than it really is.

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Pip Squeak Wednesday, Sep 12 2007

Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip

There is a scene in Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip where Matilda, the novel’s (then) 13-year old protagonist, is caught writing the name of Pip (from Dickens’ Great Expectations) next to the names of her ancestors, which she’s been asked to memorize. Scolded by her mother for sticking the name of a make-believe person next to those of her kin, Matilda replies that though Pip isn’t a relative, she still feels closer to him than to all the strangers whose names she’s been made to write in the sand.

I know exactly how she feels. Pip, or rather the specter of Pip that hangs over Jones’ novel, is about the only warm or believable character in the whole book – the only one I can bring myself to feel anything for, and that mostly for Dickens’ sake. Everyone else in this book is so two-dimensional, so much a stock character, that it’s a wonder that they manage to stay upright when a wind blows across the island.

Jones’ Mister Pip is a feather-weight of a book whose chief merit is that it’s really, really short. In fact, even calling it a novel feels like an exaggeration – it’s more like a collection of crumbs and odd tit-bits left behind from the great feast of the Dickensian novel.

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Animal’s Spirit Monday, Sep 10 2007

Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Serre, fourmillant, comme un million d’helminthes,
Dans nos cervaux ribote un pueple de Demons,
Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos poumons
Descend, fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaintes. [1]

- Baudelaire

[plot spoilers]

In the opening poem of Les Fleurs du Mal, from which the quote above is taken, Baudelaire gives us a litany of nightmarish images, then concludes by speaking of one “more damned than all” – l’Ennui. Yet boredom is the one monster you’re unlikely to encounter in Indra Sinha’s magnificent if somewhat overwrought novel Animal’s People, a book that more than makes up in ambition what it lacks in finesse.

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Ho Hum Friday, Aug 31 2007

Peter Ho Davies’ The Welsh Girl

[some spoilers]

Given the hype and prestige surrounding the Booker Prize, I suppose it’s only inevitable that we should see the advent of the Booker Prize Book. Not a book that wins the prize, you understand, but a book that seems to have been written for the prize, just as some movies seem made for the Oscars. You know the type – usually set in or around World War II and featuring a bleak countryside, a family (often missing at least one parent) scratching out a barren existence on a farm, a general air of sexual frustration, a main protagonist dreaming of escape from his / her small town existence, a colorful cast of villagers, some form of sexual assault or entanglement, guilt, shame, nationalism and / or faith, an unlikely friendship / love affair, partial redemption, epiphany, a sense of loss.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of the finest novels of the last fifty years have been written around precisely these themes. Peter Ho Davies’ The Welsh Girl, however, reads like nothing so much as a haphazard amalgam of these stock elements, welded together with considerable skill but very little inspiration, to create a novel that is not so much bad as plain dull. It feels unfair to use the word formulaic for a book so painstakingly written, so rich in prose, but it’s the word that, reading the novel, comes most often to mind.

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