The left and right hand of comedy
Dennis Miller on The Daily Show.
Because I’m a creaky, gray-bearded old-timer, I can still remember when Dennis Miller was funny. Once his beloved Republicans took over in 2000, he cast off his comic chains and became an angry, mean, bitter, paranoid, delusional crank.
So I was a little relieved to see him at least try to be funny again whilst sitting next to Jon Stewart. The clip tells you everything you need to know about the left and right hands of American comedy. Stewart attacks the right (well, everyone really) on issues and Miller attacks the left on physical appearance. Al Gore is fat and won’t shut up, Nancy Pelosi is ugly and uses Botox, Robert Byrd is old and acts funny. Ha ha ha — gee, how can I possibly take any of those people seriously when one is overweight, one is a woman and one is old? You really nailed those losers, Dennis!
No mention whatsoever of the issues; they must not have been mentioned in the “talking points” fax he got that morning. Miller has an extensive vocabulary but apparently he hasn’t gotten to “shame” yet.
The Naked Kiss
Samuel Fuller pushes the boundaries of what one normally thinks of as possible in movies. He combines thudding, flat-footed awkwardness and even occasional outright “bad” moviemaking with surreal flights of screen poetry, sometimes within the same scene, even in the same shot. One fight scene is shot as as a heated, subjective tumble, another is shot dispassionately from across the room, still a third is shot with modernist elegance. Equal parts squalid and elegant, tawdry and moralistic, it can be startling with its crudeness one moment and then give way to visionary craziness the next. The clash of styles, tones and textures produces an unsettling, electric tension; one has no idea what is going to happen next. What emerges is a movie of unique, dynamic life, almost unbearable in its rawness as it plunges its spear into the cerebral cortex of American life. Actors will be stiff and lifeless in one scene and then, seconds later, they will surge with feverish passion as they deliver jaw-droppers like “You’ll be sleeping on the skin of a nightmare!” or “I’ve got no time to break in baby baggage!”
A Woman With A Past moves to a small town, anxious to start again, but wouldn’t you know it, No One Will Let Her Be and soon Her Past Catches Up With Her. All noir cliches, and yet this movie never feels cliched. Just when you think “Oh, I know what this is, it’s a ‘b’ movie, this’ll be fun” Fuller will pull some daring, shocking cinematic stunt, with seemingly no bottom to his bag of tricks.
There are any number of stunners in this piece, but my favorites are a late-night makeout session that moves from the couch of a suburban mansion to a gondola in Venice with no stops in between, a soul-searching colloquy between the protagonist and a dressing dummy and a musical number where the ex-prostitute sings like Mary Poppins to a room full of crippled children.
Constance Towers reminds me of Virginia Madsen as the crooked lady trying to go straight. Anthony Eisley, while not exactly “good,” has been given the task of pushing through an incredible arc as his attitudes toward the protagonist shift. He goes from cheerfully randy to puritanically prude to savagely protective to punishingly pigheaded until he finally arrives at something like understanding, forgiveness and tenderness.
The plot spirals downward into the bottommost pit of depravity, a potent stew of betrayal and hatred; it’s hard to remember that it is, forall intents and purposes, a “woman’s picture” plot in the Douglas Sirk mode. It also has one of the most effective gut-punching end-of-second-act curtains I’ve ever seen.
See how it all began
So much history in this clip. See Dan Rather when he was still a journalist, before he became a simile-spouting bug-eyed lunatic, see Jeb Magruder do the Scott McClellan liar’s stammer, see the Comittee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), already laundering Nixon’s dirty tricks money, months before the Watergate break-in, and most important, see the tall, skinny, bespectacled young idealist at the end, learning his trade of unquenchable greed and conscience-free ambition at the foot of the master, and already dreaming of the day he will run it all. Yes, he thinks, one day they’ll all pay, all of the dirty fucking hippies, they will all bow down to me and tremble before my power. I SHALL RULE THEM ALL.
Fundamental human truth discovered by Washington pundit!
The Republicans have, apparently, just now discovered that their president and his administration are monstrously incompetent. Strange how this discovery lay beyond their deductive capabilties during the past six years while they were enjoying the most unfettered amount of power in recent history.
And what did they do with that power? They did with it what all politicians do with unchecked power, used it to make a ton of money for themselves as they laid waste to the environment and began unnecessary foreign wars designed to line their pockets.
And some people are vicious, irresponsible hypocrites posing as journalists
The interviewer, it has come to my attention, is herself a cancer survivor and mother of two, who, when her husband was diagnosed, stayed at her job as her husband died. So then what is this interview? Partisan politics, blind hateful personal attack, or disguised self-flaggelation?
Proof of God’s appearance
I take Sam (5) to see The Last Mimzy. Before the movie, there is a trailer for the upcoming Evan Almighty, starring Steve Carell as Evan and Morgan Freeman as God.
During the trailer, Sam points to Morgan Freeman.
SAM. That’s God?
DAD. Yes.
SAM. I told you he looks like Mace Windu!
tonight’s dream
My wife and I work with an international espionage network of some sort. Agents of this network pass messages to each other coded within appraisals of Elvis Costello songs. Today it is incumbent upon me to write an analysis of “Veronica” whilst encoding whatever secret message I’m supposed to hide in said analysis.
(An aside: I have been thinking about writing an espionage thriller recently, but not about coding, although it certainly seems like my “message encoded in a song appraisal” sounds like a job for Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor.)
As the dream begins I am finishing up my task when a detail about the song’s lyrics catches my attention, and I find myself writing a good deal more than I need to for purely “code” purposes, just because of the beauty and import of the song.
(For those of you unfamiliar with “Veronica,” it is a propulsive, energetic pop song [and one of Costello’s only true hits] about a silent, still, senile elderly woman in England who has a rich, full inner life of memories. She is in a nursing home surrounded by people who do not have a clue as to the colorful life she’s led — to them, she is opaque and lifeless.)
I call my wife into the room and play the song for her, pointing out the lyrical passage that has caught my attention. Listening to it again I am moved to tears. (Don’t go dashing for your copies of Spike to find the lyrics — upon awakening, I realize that the passage that I found so moving is one completely invented by me in dreamtime.)
It is time to deliver the message to our contact. We go to meet him at a large, crowded fruit market. While we are waiting for him, my wife remembers that we need grapes. I select some from a pile: they look accepable on top, but when I turn them over I find that the ones below are rotten.
Readers will note a number of differences between this dream and the others. Here, I have, indeed, contracted to a performance, but this is a private performance for my espionage network, not for a public audience. Also, there is no bizarre, surreal travel nightmare in this dream and the location is, in all respects, a normal fruit market.
Sudden Impact
left to right: Ronald Reagan, Sudden Impact, George W. Bush, Bring it On.
Please tell me I’m not the first person to notice this:
When Ronald Reagan wanted to talk tough, he lifted a line from a Clint Eastwood movie. When George W. Bush wanted to talk tough, he lifted the title of a cheerleading movie.
Makes perfect sense: Reagan (although an evil, lizard-faced moron) saw a kinship in Eastwood, a fellow conservative, cowboy and Last Good Man. And Bush was, literally, a cheerleader. I can actually imagine him watching Peyton Reed’s cheerleading drama (a wonderful movie in its own right) for the fifth time in the screening room at the White House, nodding his head sagely and thinking “Yes, this is how it really was.” And then, the light bulb goes off: this is the message he will bring to the terrorists. He sets his jaw, grits his teeth and speaks the words aloud: “Because I’m a cheerleader, dammit.”
UPDATE: It has come to my attention that there are people unfamiliar with the Reagan quote. When standing up to somebody or other (Gadaffi, the Russians, who knows) he invoked Sudden Impact‘s catchphrase, “Go ahead, make my day.” It was as obscene then as saying “bring it on” regarding international terrorism is now. Imho.
The script puts two protagonists on parallel tracks; unfortunately, we’re only interested in one of them, and the one we’re interested in isn’t Dirty Harry. Sondra Locke pursues and punishes the men who raped her and her sister while Harry beats up some people, causes an old man to have a heart attack, shoots some would-be robbers, gets shot at by some mobsters, retaliates, gets yelled at by his superiors, runs into some more bad guys, has to kill them, so on. Harry’s action is fulsome but without dramatic impact (sudden or otherwise). Fully half the movie passes before the two protagonists literally bump into each other (via the hoariest of cliches, the pet dog, no less) and it’s even longer before Harry has any idea who’s killing all the rapists. It’s strange to watch a Clint Eastwood movie and to keep thinking “yeah, yeah, Harry’s interesting, but where’s Sondra Locke?” but that’s what happens here; her character is given all the dramatic thrust in the picture. That shows both Eastwood’s generosity and weakness as a dramatist — his own character is given pointless busywork to do while his nominal antagonist runs off with the movie.
tonight’s dream
I am a member of a large touring band of some sort. It’s the size of an orchestra but I don’t remember it having the instruments of an orchestra. Perhaps it’s a jazz or swing orchestra. In any case, I don’t play an instrument; I seem to be there in a purely administrative capacity.
We are in Canada. The band has been given a large, derelict shopping mall to rehearse in. The architecture seems to date to the 1980s, but the building was not well-designed and has been declared unsafe. The band is not even allowed inside the building; we rehearse in a semi-covered outdoor cafe on the exterior of the mall.
In the middle of a number, the store next to the outdoor cafe explodes from a gas leak. Glass showers outward into the parking lot. The authorities arrive and shoo the band away from the ruined exterior.
I note that the jagged hole in the store’s glass facade resembles the maple leaf of the Canadian flag. I pull a musician aside to point it out to him. Not only does he not find this funny, he has a hard time seeing the resemblance.
Men in grey suits and fedoras (these guys, actually, now that I think of it) show up to investigate the explosion. I suddenly remember that I’ve left something inside the mall and go in to get it, in spite of the fact that one of the stores just exploded. No one stops me — they have more important things to do.
Guido Nielsen
I have harbored an interest in ragtime music since, well, probably since seeing The Sting at age 11, and it has always frustrated me that any recording of ragtime I could find always sounded like it was recorded at the bottom of a well or else obscenely tarted-up, “cutified” to appeal to popular tastes (like, um, like the soundtrack to The Sting, for instance).
So when I stumbled across Guido Nielsen’s Scott Joplin: The Complete Rags, Marches, Waltzes and Songs at my local used record store, with a handsome package designed by no less an entity (and ragtime authority) than Chris Ware, I snapped it up.
The recordings are revelatory. Nielsen’s performances are clear-eyed, unadorned and unsentimental, letting the the compositions speak for themselves, and the recording is state-of-the-art in its clarity and precision. Impossible to listen to without experiencing overwhelming feelings of giddiness, optimism and joy, while still feeling the deep strains of melencholy and even tragedy that inform some of the melodies. This music is American life itself.
I enjoyed the set so much I sought out Nielsen’s recordings of two lesser-known Joplin disciples, Joseph F. Lamb and James Scott, again abetted by the lovingly lavish Chris Ware designs. They do not disappoint.
Mr. Nielsen hails from Amsterdam (figures, no American musician would treat his nation’s musical legacy with such respect and devotion), and emerges from the Beau Hunks Sextette, which has recorded definitive versions of Raymond Scott tunes and music from Little Rascals shorts. I recommend them all, especially Manhattan Minuet, which is one of my favorite recordings of all time and also features smashing design from Chris Ware.