AfterWord

Why I Walked On Boogie Nights

Television stands in, at best, as a substitute teacher mildly aware of the cinematic curriculum. It’s the big screen films are made for. The best movies suggest an enormity of plot, a largeness of their characters, demanding nothing less than a screen as long as a school bus to contain their stories. So praise God for any theater that makes “Classic Film Nights” part of their regular source of revenue. I first saw Magnolia on that kind of screen, transfixed by shot after shot, the interplay of sin, fate and grace playing out like a broken ballet. Characters stood out like Adam with the breath of God. It was bigger than life but right at home, a gargantuan window through which the world was new.

I approached the opportunity to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous ensemble piece, Boogie Nights, with gleeful anticipation. Theater 1, Regency on Sunflower, the same one as before, an fitting, elliptical end to a baptism begun months ago. Now let’s get one thing straight: I don’t go in for disco and pornography. But give me a rumination on how people are people, individuals, communities, darkness, light, and you’ve got me dead-on, bullseye. Lights go down, projector starts and up comes an almost mythical tracking shot. One character, two, three, four, all introduced with humor and poetic ecstasy. Anderson’s characters don’t stay up on the screen, they’re just more members of the audience. They watch each other like we watch all of them, they stand on the edge of teary-eyed conversation with the front row of the theater. It’s you and me up there but worse, I hope. Quirks and jokes abound but these characters, neurotic, erotic, and crazy, are signatories on an inclusive inheritance. They dream of vindication, a day when they can look their greatest critic in the eye and say ‘I made it.’  

The movie’s fine throughout the seventies. If tension builds, it does so in the face of what feels like a permanent lightheartedness. Once the decade ends though, a trigger and three characters meet their end right then and there.  The event is shocking in and of itself but I was more disturbed by the fuse it lights. From here on out, the charm and kitsch fades out while self-destruction sparks brighter and wild. Anderson doesn’t shirk from revealing depravity in places we would rather not see it or humanity in the debauched. His characters are adrift and self-mutilating. They descend to the depths because they’ve been pushed there and he lets them head for hell without a tinge of sadism. Once the train started running, he was powerless to stop it. Like a god without omnipotence, he weeps for his creations while still somehow behind it all.

So why did I walk on Boogie Nights? It wasn’t the pornography, though I seem to be more unsettled by that enterprise than the average male. The stark reality, the blunt facts of the matter, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is that this is one of the most non-pornographic films I have yet to see. Pornography reduces men and women to sex objects, defined solely by their genitalia. As the characters trek further down desolation row, the musical score turns to the ringing of bells. This dreary harmonium couldn’t help but put me in mind of a church chiming in its worshipers. But it’s at this moment, when the characters most need redemption, that step blind into the dark night of the soul. Rape, child pornography, prostitution and abuse all enter the mix at once. It turns your stomach, makes you enter by gateways you wish had never opened. Options run dry: there’s either a God who doesn’t stop child pornography or no God at all. These men and women tried to be porn stars but forgot their humanity along the way. They are  more than what they think they are, whole souls dedicated to self-reduction. 

I walked because I couldn’t stand to watch much worse things happen. The bells kept chiming and this confused, little Christian had to leave. I watched objectification and abuse happening right before my eyes, the meanness of people in real time. I became convinced that something truly awful was going to happen to a pregnant character and couldn’t even bare the thought. So I walked not because I was offended but because I was unready to be exposed to something I rather hadn’t seen. The humanity of the ‘depraved’ and the depravity of humanity makes for painful viewing. I’ll be able to finish it someday.

 

 

Can't Hardly Wait?

This would make a believer out of anyone. Stream this sucker, you don't have to break any laws or anything! James Mercer is back at the helm, so dock at the Port of Morrow.

Some Days

Real Estate makes nostalgia a genre in and of itself. Days lets you pine in it and through it; it's a new memory and a window through which you can call back any old time you please. Kodak moments all around.

Look Forward to This

 

The new album's golden.

Franny & Zooey

 

There are unpardonable vices and then there’s reading peripheral Salinger before you even touch Catcher in the Rye. I fully admit woeful ignorance of Holden Caulfield’s angst and wanderings. Up until now, I’ve spent a perfect day with bananafish and that’s it. I hit my roaring twenties in a matter of months so the window I have for appreciating J.D. with angsty, teenage abandon may not be blowing its draft in for much longer. In the meantime, here’s what I thought about my time staring through a Glass darkly. 

I started paging through On the Road a few days prior to starting this and couldn’t finish the slog. You could pick up Kerouac’s self-consciousness with a Geiger counter. He’s not tragically unaware of himself, he’s much too aware. The nation is traversed and details are left in and left out because he’s constructing an edifice to what’s hip in 50s America. Salinger is championed by angsty kids everywhere but I wonder if we are in on the joke. He peoples Franny & Zooey with characters like Kerouac, guys and girls with Nietzsche on their bedstead and A Love Supreme on their turntable, as a loving critique. Adolescent anger is understood but not justified. Franny and her brother are equally intelligent, equally aware of each other’s faults and logical inconsistencies and equally oblivious to their individual egotism. 

The story revolves around the concept that intelligence wrecks innocence and that religious devotion is but another self-inflating pursuit. At the center of every human heart is the desire for acquisition. Franny and Zooey Glass scoff at those who coif their hair in a certain way, who namedrop all the wrong people, and its a point of catharsis when Zooey points out the flaw in their precocious logic. The Beats, the Hipsters, the subcultural assault squadron: none of these can appropriately critique mainline culture because they are just its alternative manifestation. Whether trafficking in plebeian pursuits or high-culture oddities, this we all have in common. The two stories, if anything, are a thinly veiled critique of critique itself. Men and women all have different ways of being the same. 

Salinger uses too many italics, on every level. His dialogue, his characterization and his ‘subtlety’ are all a tad too emphasized. He wants you to know the cadence with which the Glass family speaks and interacts to a tee. This may be his greatest strength but for this humble fellow, it detracted from the story. Indeed, what he tries to do through under-the-table moralizing might have been better to explicitly say in an essay than thinly veil in a story. But there I go critiquing. Another adventure in missing the point.

 

Baby Missiles

 

For those days when you want your Springsteen served up with a side of Sonic Youth.

Raising Cain

The modern American writers and I have avoided each other's sideways gazes until quite recently. What I have found in their output has delighted and challenged me in all the ways literature can and should. One cannot help but see the saga of the Trasks and the Hamiltons as anything less than a six hundred page, Californian parable. Steinbeck's prose leaps and gallops through the Salinas Valley he so loves, mapping the the geography of human souls along the way. Original sin and parental folly meet to squall within us all: this is Steinbeck's landscape. For all its excellence, conversation is the tale's trump card; our interior unchartability becomes all the more knowable as we observe the characters' interactions with each another and converse with them ourselves. There's Sam Hamilton's frivolous wisdom and Adam's bipolar sentimentality, the moral confusion of Cal and the possession of Cathy by an evil unknowable. We live east of Eden and there's no returning. The Garden and the Fall reside within us all. It's stories such as these that harken us to press on to the Promised Land. Timshel. Thou mayest.

Backup Vocals

The voices of the dead resonate like the bass and drums of a jazz quartet. They suggest and murmur, they keep it all in time. Elie Wiesel said that "poets exist so that the dead may vote" and so they do. They cast their ballots and know they can't succeed. The Romantics are outmoded, the modernists out of style. Still, the whisper of the dead is what puts a halt on deafness. Deafness to the beauty, deafness to the glory, deafness to redemption all around. If only we would listen to the poets and lamenters, the psalmists and their woes. Give an ear to all the writers and directors, let our eyes take in their characters, their lessons and their worlds. They whisper, they shuffle and they never hit the snare. They won't make you listen and they won't make you heed. They're backup singers to far less worthy entertainers. The book says: we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us. Lend an eye to the votes they cast. The back of every ballot says "so who's dead after all?"

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part Eight)

Lyrically, Malkmus is just as scatterbrained as his music would suggest. Though there may be the occasional rhyme, reason is all but incinerated. His vocabulary is more attuned to the absurd than anyone else in his field. Indie rock takes its cues from T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound’s fight in the Captain’s Tower (‘Desolation Row’ anyone?) and R.E.M.’s create-your-own-meaning murmurs with its affinity for the cryptic. But while everyone else is trying on their best Albert Camus impersonation, Stephen Malkmus was and is hipsterdom’s very own Lewis Carroll. Take this excerpt from ‘Stereo’: ‘What about the voice of Getty Lee? How did it get so high? I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy. (I know him, and he does.) Then you’re my fact-checking cuz”. Or maybe this instance from ‘Harness Your Hopes’: ‘Show me, a word that rhymes with Pavement, and I won’t kill your parents, and roast them on a spit’. Eminently amusing and utterly meaningless, it’s a breath of fresh air to not have to seek out the esoteric in the songs one listens to. You don’t really seek out the meaning in the lyrics of Pavement because there really is none there. Jokes, puns and all that stuff but you’re not going to find the meaning of human existence anywhere on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. And that’s the best part.

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part Seven)

People throw overproduced on to Terror Twilight like they're executing criminal justice. The last person who said this was Pavement's finest hour in the town square of Pretentia was probably Piltdown Man. There are worse offenses certainly. Proclaiming your undying love for this swan song is a far cry from saying Liz Phair only got better with the end of the nineties. The occasional polite adjectives like 'enjoyable' or 'fun' are bestowed upon Terror as a means of distancing oneself from giving it too much artistic credibility. It's in vogue to slam their final moments and proclaim that you listen to Slanted and Enchanted more than you breathe from the rooftops (take puff on Parliament cigarette here). I'm not trying to set myself up as a voice crying out in the wilderness but all I have to say is: what the hell's the matter with you people?! If you don't feel more joy listening to 'Spit on a Stranger' or 'Major Leagues' than any other Pavement song, humanity's ship is sinking and its time to let the women and children off first. '...And Carrot Rope'? 'Billie'? This record is as good as any of their others, more spacy and streamlined, yes... but if you're about to abandon Stephen Malkmus for one or two laser sound effects, you probably have never seen Star Wars and are also possessed by Satan's second-in-command. Enjoy and forget the naysayers!