The Friday Article Roundup
Taking an axe to the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will shred with:
Thanks to Hannah for submitting! Send your own submissions throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
Andy Cush describes playing Glenn Branca’s “Hallucination City” with 100 guitarists for Hearing Things:
Rehearsing Symphony 13 reminded me of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. With everything happening at once, at an extremity of volume that’s difficult to convey in writing, it’s all you can do to hold the sound of your own section in your mind, plus maybe one or two of the sections seated nearest you if you’re really paying attention. You are only touching the elephant’s toe. Anyone with even a modicum of concern for their future ability to hear is wearing earplugs. As a bassist, I was seated in back, near the drums, and had little idea what the people up front were doing most of the time. After rehearsals, Katie and I would try to compare parts and we might as well have been comparing our lives in different countries. Trying to hear the whole piece at once is like trying to hear the whole world.
At Comic Book Frontier, Liam McGuire interviews Stephanie Williams about the lack of coverage for her historic Eisner nomination:
As much as some may try to downplay the importance and impact, representation matters, and it should never be limited to fictional characters on the page. It’s crucial to know who’s in the room deciding what counts as “news” and what gets seen as historic in the first place. A milestone like the first Black woman nominated for Best Writer in the Eisners’ 38-year history reads as obviously significant to some people and as a footnote to others, and which of those you are often comes down to whether the history is yours. When newsrooms don’t reflect the breadth of the medium they cover, blind spots aren’t malicious. They’re structural, but they’re still blind spots.
Danny McBride writes about his favorite books, including Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, for GQ:
What I think is interesting about it is the man-code; the one character, Roland, is all about duty and everything is about completing the goal, to the detriment of him knowing how to be a human being and knowing how to love or care for people. That always resonates with me; it’s something I’ve explored with people like Kenny Powers. It’s that idea, in some men, when they feel that sense of purpose, it’s easy to relegate really important things about the human experience. And when you get to the end point, there’s a lot of questions about whether it was worth it or what was lost in the process.
Toy Story 5 is coasting on the series’ past, Jake Cole says at Slant:
The aesthetic whimsy that’s made the Toy Story movies so popular is all but absent in Stanton’s film. Most of the action occurs within two drab bedrooms, and Toy Story 5 contains few of the clever perspective tricks that dot its precursors. Ironically, for a work of art worried about the diminishing power of imagination, the film often feels like a procedurally generated series of images meant to remind you of the characters you loved in your youth.
And at his blog Old New, R. Emmet Sweeney facilitates a conversation with free jazz legends William Parker and Daniel Carter:
DC: The thing I don’t understand, I’m gonna have to ask William, once I got to be 80 years old, but it’s probably creeping up before I got to be 80, is how do I keep my memory straight with all this stuff in it [laughs].
WP: That’s when improvisation comes in. Just improvise!
DC: But I have to apply that to having conversations, to help me remember stuff. Because I was taking a shower earlier, and trying to get ready for this, and all these things were crowded into my mind, little bits and pieces from 1970 this to 1980 this. How do you keep all that straight, William?
WP: You don’t, don’t worry about it! Just remember that everything you say is gonna be beautiful, it’s gonna be a poem, and if it’s different every day, it’ll be a different poem every day. I mean, imagine a history that’s not a lie, but that’s poetic.
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Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode One, “No Compromises”
This is the start of the Bad Season, and honestly, there’s some pretty good ideas here. My understanding of the season’s badness comes down to two things: terrible episodic plots (apparently Garibaldi has a really bad, utterly hacky descent back into alcoholism) and squandered potential, with plots that doesn’t really go anywhere and simply set up the spinoff novels. But so far, there’s some cool shit; I like the new Captain taking over for Ivanova, especially the detail that she was working for the other side – very US Civil War. The basic idea of the telepaths trying to set up their own colony and Sheridan passing the torch isn’t bad either.
To be honest, I’m actually kind of excited for this in that bad scifi is extremely useful to me right now. Anything done badly can be fixed.
My favourite detail is Sheridan wanting to push forward with his, uh, coronation even after the violence. Makes sense to me that Sheridan would want to do this while they’re scraping some guy’s body off the floor, let alone the telepath kid. In a different show, the moral ambiguity would be more interesting.
The idea of the new Captain is not a bad one, unfortunately it is not really used. Replacing Ivanova, who turned into a great character, resets the writers to “woman? woman!” in terms of character development, very obnoxious.
Yeah, although Scoggins is pretty good. (She’s no Christian, but who is?)
The Enemy Below – Late in WWII (late enough that the ship has radar), a destroyer with a veteran but untested crew and a newly arrived but sure handed captain (Robert Mitchum) chases an U-Boat under the command of war weary and wily commander (Curd Jurgens). I didn’t actually set out to watch three movies in two weeks with WWII naval battles and German commanders, but here we are. And this one is of a piece with The Battle of the River Plate, in how the two sides face each other; in how there is a solid attempt to recreate war at sea using practical effects, models, and borrowed navy ships; and in making the German captains decent human beings. (Jurgens does not buy into Hitler’s vision to the degree that he makes a face at seeing an officer reading Mein Kampf.) But the battle scenes here are much better done than in River Plate, and having charismatic actors as the leads really helps. Others in the cast include David Hedison as Mitchum’s first officer before he played a similar role on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a very young Doug McClure, and Theodore Bikel as Jurgens’ closest friend. (Add Bikel to the list of Jewish actors who played German soldiers in WWII movies.) Trekkies take note: this was the inspiration for both the TOS episode “Balance of Terror” and some of the battle scenes in Wrath of Khan.
Elementary, “The Nutmeg Concoction” – Joan is hired to find a missing woman. The only clue: the scent of nutmeg at the scene. An FBI profiler is sure that she and several other missing people were kidnapped by someone leaving that smell, but Sherlock quickly dismisses this idea (and the profiler), and pieces things together to discover the smell is to cover a caustic solution used to dissolve corpses after murders. An interesting twist on the usual, and also a full team effort as Joan, Sherlock, and Kitty find key pieces. There is also some stuff involving Joan’s ongoing relationship. which started in the season premiere and is frankly not very interesting, but it will matter more soon.
Pluribus Ep. 9, the finale, and this is one of the rare prestige series where I am kind of okay with the pace being this leisurely.* Every scene has a purpose and gives you something new, and you’re steeped further into the sheer strangeness of the collective, the way you can get used to their creepy kindness as Carol almost does. The contrasts between Manousos and Carol are also great, including how Carol has become attached to Zosia and Manousos will not let himself do this with any of them. And he is probably right; a good chunk of this show is about trust and manipulation, and that goes both ways with humans – Helen monitoring Carol’s drinking – and the Pluribi. (My friend pointed out how isolating someone for 40 days is a torture tactic.) The Pluribi cannot lie, but they can avoid, and evade, and even conceal, until Carol recognizes. “You win. Let’s save the world.”
*I still demand it ramp up because by season’s end we’re literally at a bigger scale here – you can’t just show Carol stealing O’Keefe paintings and drinking to Golden Girls anymore.
I liked Pluribus, but I felt the real trick would have been making it a one and done, the “climax” of which was Carol’s shrugging capitulation to reality. I think that idea actually has more to say than a heroic rejection.
Wait, what would that have to say?
You can’t move mountains.
Riding Shotgun – Randolf Scott does the title on stages looking for an outlaw from his past. He finally finds him but when Scott gets in town ahead of the gang to warn the townsfolk they take him for a gang member and Scott has to hole up in a cantina for the rest of the film holding off the town dimwits and the gang. At seventy-five minutes this hits the ground running and doesn’t let up until the end. Low budget and shot on a backlot this benefits from being one storyline in a (mostly) single location. Andre de Toth gives stylish direction with some beautiful pans and a good sense of framing and geography of the town and cantina. It’s got a great cast of bit players playing a town full of old men and rubes who are easy marks for the bandits. Wayne Morris plays Deputy Tub Murphy and the name fits because he eats a lot but he’s smarter than everyone else as he tries to hold off the lynching of Scott. This is Charles Bronson’s first western and only second film but you can feel the electricity coming off him as one of the outlaws. Well shot, a great cast and tightly written with a noirish voiceover from Scott. Not as good as any of Randy’s films with Budd Boetticher but still pretty solid.
Oh, this sounds cool.
I need to find more of De Toth’s westerns. Overall I’ve found him to be among the most resourceful and inventive genre filmmakers of the 1950s. DAY OF THE OUTLAW feels about half a decade ahead of its time in terms of grit and masculine psychosis
RANDOLPH SCOTT! *stands up reverently*
ANDRE DE TOTH! *stands up even straighter*
This sounds great, like Son of Griff says De Toth is the man.
Don’t Drink the Water (1994) – A made for TV adaptation of a play Allen wrote in the ‘70’s (previously adapted as a feature starring Jackie Gleason), this one is often overlooked, but it is a riot. Allen and family (Julie Kavner and a cute as a button Mayim Bialik) are American tourists who get trapped in an Eastern Bloc embassy after Allen innocently takes a picture of the wrong building and the government believes they are spies. Michael J. Fox is the hapless deputy ambassador who has to deal with them.
Critics were not impressed at the time, possibly because the comic Cold War setting seems farcical in the immediate post-Soviet era of 1994. But it really is incredibly funny. Allen and Kavner play off each other so well, and they’re fast fast fast. The dialogue is this one is just one gag stepping over another in several frenetic scenes. And dialogue really is what’s on offer here, as the enclosed space established by the plot means the characters can’t have conversations in street corners and restaurants as they often do in Allen’s work.
That said, the staging and camera work, including at times an amped up version of Allen’s cinema verité style of this period, really sells the chaos and mania that two middle-aged New Jersey Jews can impose on an enclosed space simply by being unconcerned with anyone but themselves.
Weirdly I saw this as a theater production in my hometown though I’m pretty sure almost all the cast was Gentile.
I’ve only seen the old Gleason version long ago as a kid, but can’t say I remember much about it. I was confusing it for the longest time with Gone Are the Dayes which I similarly don’t retain much memory of, except the shockingly violent gang shooting opening.
I saw the first 10 minutes of the Gleason version years ago and couldn’t get any further. This version, smartly, skips all the set up (at least as far as the tourists go). There’s a couple minutes setting up some of the embassy personalities, and then suddenly Allen, Kavner, and Bialyk burst in and were off to the races. There’s no need to establish those characters when they’re not in crisis, so, smartly, the picture doesn’t try.
Just a bit more World Cup, caught the second half of Ecuador vs Germany while waiting for the world to cool down a bit. Good match, Germany had already won their group so they technically didn’t have much to play for but it still felt like a rewarding underdog victory when Ecuador managed to snatch a second goal late on and hold onto their lead. Ecuador manager looks like he should play keytar in an 80s cover band that REALLY enjoys cocaine.
Widow’s Bay, “The Inaugural Swim”
HELL YEAH. This ending is fantastic, finally forcing Tom past the point of even the most longed-for plausible deniability into recognition that the island is beset by supernatural horrors and giving him an instant upgrade in his tenuous, thorny relationship with Wyck, who blasted a sea hag into sand and surf for him and saved his life. (That’s a wonderful beat for Wyck, too: as much as he may want the satisfaction of Tom having to admit that he’s right, it actually falls a distant second to a genuine compassion: see him quietly giving Tom a hand up out of the bathtub and admitting his own uncertainty, choosing sincere connection over a boast.)
That recliner gag is brilliant.
Pride
Rewatch. This is a lovely, charming movie (about the Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners group in ’80s Britain, forging an alliance between LGBTQ+ people and striking coal miners; a sweet film that’s also unabashedly pro-union, fuck yeah) that I simply cannot be cynical about. When all those buses full of miners show up at the end, I start sobbing. If it were pure fiction, it wouldn’t work at all; the fact that it all actually happened in more or less this manner is one of the few things to give me hope in this world.
The whole cast is very good–it’s a shame Schnetzer hasn’t done too much, because he’s very good at being both charismatic and so youthful you could cry–but I find there’s particular pathos to the (sometimes only slightly) older characters: Bill Nighy as a long-closeted miner finally able to reveal himself to someone, Andrew Scott’s face when he speaks Welsh again, and Dominic West in the scene where he talks about being the second person in the UK to be diagnosed with HIV.
The Gay’s the Word bookstore is still kicking. The real Jonathan Blake is still alive.
Disclosure Day — Stephen Spielberg looks to his past, in particular Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and for a surprising stretch Hook. So yes, this movie has problems. It moves quickly but does not have a lot of depth, and the momentum is there to cover lack of logic (or maybe it’s the other way around) — the film offers an evil corporat threat but Spielberg films them like he’s already replaced their guns with walkie-talkies. There is a running theme of invasion that is mental more than physical, both heroes and villains invade others’ heads and this is ultimately an argument for empathy that is suspiciously tailored toward the projector of images, the movie is most effective in its mid-aughts Spielberg ending of unsettling implication hiding in triumphant resolution — it is not that everyone agrees on a truth, it is that everyone is forced to pay attention to one thing. There is some darkness here if you want it, particularly considering Emily Blunt’s Professor X-esque abilities and what they might be used for. And Blunt is superb, but the much-memed Courtney Grace is the real hero of the film. Possibly more to come.
Courtney Grace is incredible and that ending stretch of the film really worked for me despite being negative to “I can’t believe how bad this is” for large chunks of the film. Curious to read more if you write it!
New York New York – Summer of Scorsese!
For that very rare person who saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and said “I wish this had a dozen music numbers” or that even rarer person who saw Singin’ in the Rain and said “I wish this were a thousand times more aggressive.”
PTSD can fuel an interesting musical! Witness It’s Always Fair Weather. But holy moly. There’s something perversely hilarious in the calibration by the time we get to De Niro straight up shouting at a rando trying to park his car. I’m pretty sure his character was an asshole before a war broke out.
What did we read?
8 Bit Theater, Strips 1200-1225, Brian Clevinger
“Were it not for doomsday scenarios and the legendary warrior troupes who fight them I’d have to abandon my ridiculous way of life.”
“What I learned today is that really old wizards don’t get that way by being easy to kill.”
“The sword’s not hurting you, Fighter?”
“Of course not. How could it hurt me? Unless it was secretly wielded by my enemies! But I don’t have enemies. Unless I secretly do! But I’m not one of them.”
“This is gonna burn up a lot of daylight.”
“Unless secretly I am!”
“It’s kind of amazing how little that answered the question.”
“How are you supposed to eat these things anyway?”
“It’s simple. Start with the anti-most bottom and then work counter-upwise until done.”
“That sounded like the dumbest way possible to say ‘start at the top’.”
“You guys are almost as good to me as I deserve.”
“I can’t decide if this is unfair, or exactly what we deserve for being, well, y’know, us.”
“To be fair, it was a great plan until it involved Fighter.”
“Let’s check it out despite Black Mage being really weird about it.”
So yeah, this is when it turns out four white mages kill Chaos, as BM read in the guide all the way back in strip seven.
“You are powerless, Chaos.”
“No, I’m the opposite of that.”
“Thief, I healed your ass. Literally, your actual ass.”
So, I’ve finished 8 Bit Theater again. I had two main purposes here: one, to have something straightforward to talk about every reading thread in case I didn’t finish an actual book that week, and two, to consider my own taste in comedy. I have definitively succeeded at the former, and now I turn to the latter. There’s two aspects to this comedically that I love: one, that the setup to gags genuinely manages a very serious tone, which only puts the absurdity into sharp relief. Clevinger could have written a sincere fantasy story that would have been pretty good (if uninteresting to me personally), he just didn’t want to.
The second thing is the dialogue. I worry sometimes about my own writing being too tic-heavy – I certainly don’t mind recycling gags and ideas, but there’s a point where you’re just empty words, and in my fiction, I don’t want every character to sound the same. On the other hand, that repetition in the style is what attracts me to this comic; it’s as warm and familiar as coming home. There’s obviously a sense of the comic just ending – the epilogue serves as a conclusion simply by being a list of things we saw in the comic and a return to the status quo of the very beginning as opposed to being funny – but then, what else is there to do with this?
I also consider how the comic creates the illusion of not moving the plot forward; in actuality, this is as much a drama as The Shield where individual characters actions push the story forward, they just either push the story in a stupid direction, or stupidly push the story in the right direction. That is to say, there is an effortlessness and honesty that I respond to here; it’s a lot of intelligence put into making something self-consciously stupid (you see this especially with Fighter’s dialogue, where you have to be pretty clever to come up with something as stupid as that). The famous running gags are more of a language the comic pulls up to remind you they’re there; the long setups provide an overall direction to go (that the structure of parody doesn’t already).
The pleasure is mainly in filtering different settings and characters through the same worldview and language, and tossing the same five familiar characters into different settings. It’s something that makes the comic feel timeless even as the pop culture references become obscure, or at least dated (much like its biggest influence, The Simpsons). It’s interesting because there are Twitter feeds that try to do the same thing as this comic, but don’t work nearly as well; the cynicism and insult-humour should be a dime-a-dozen, but it’s much more peculiar and specific than those.
Part of it, I think, is that the stupidity is as sincere and as much self-expression as the cynicism – not that Clevinger would do these awful or stupid things, but that they’re intentional products of his imagination and an honest attempt to say stupid and awful things, as opposed to thoughtlessly lifting them from other people. There’s a lot of links to Rick & Morty here, though Clevinger took this project much less seriously than Dan Harmon took R&M.
Unfortunately, I’m forced to conclude that trying to recreate it is a fool’s errand; if I tried, I wouldn’t capture the sincerity all that effectively – my criticism and my dramatic writing capture that aspect of it very well simply for being equally as sincere. In fact, if I tried recreating the style, it would be no better than those obnoxious Twitter feeds. One thing about influence is that you have to figure out how to try and take it, and unfortunately I have to pick between taking the text – which I do, all the time – and losing the originality, following the principles and ending up in a different result, or recreating the actions that led to its creation and also getting a different result. Which is interesting; I’ve had an easier time ripping off Alan Alda’s persona as Hawkeye than I have the feel of the humour here.
Finished Those Angry Years by Lynne Olson. Mildly recommended if you want a decent snapshot of America between the start of WWII and Pearl Harbor, but even if you agree with the author’s takes on FDR and Lindbergh, her treatment of the rise of tensions with Japan as a footnote until December 7, 1941 is a glaring omission. `
Ongoing books that I am not getting through fast include that bio of King John and The Tailor of Panama.
I remember Tailor of Panama being sort of slow going as well.
Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson which really rips and more than a few Magpiers would dig, a nasty vengeance and vampire novel where a Vietnam vet and his traumatized adopted niece seek retribution against an especially evil vamp. Where the book gets really smart is introducing extra layers of said revenge and complication within the plot, a similar dynamic to Kill Bill emerges; not just “That woman deserves her revenge and we deserve to die, but then again, so does she” but also the villain wanting his own once he feels grievously sinned against. Strong prose here too – “He runs a switchblade across his palm. A mouth opens on his skin.” Poetic and grim, not a book for the faint of heart in it’s ownage and the horrors of love.
Putting It Together by James Lapine. His memoir about directing Sunday in the Park With George and it feels essential for anyone looking to put a play together, let alone pursue a career in the theater, as Lapine goes deep into the nuts and bolts of costumes, production design, writing, etc. Sondheim is of course a major component and I feel lucky that we get so much of his insight and memory before his passing. A prickly man but he also comes across as a genuine old-school gentleman in the code he follows. (He chews out a producer, albeit politely, for leaving a preview without telling anyone what he thought of the show, and when he casually dismisses one of Lapine’s ideas, the next day he profusely apologizes to Lapine’s surprise.) Patinkin, not surprisingly, seems like an exhausting, intense pain in the ass to work with, and I have been told he’s really chilled out since his younger days.
Very slowly working through a collection of Charles Olsen poems, these are very good and I like the sing-songy but also dissociative quality of his verse.
Breakout, by Richard Stark
Boy, he sure does break out a lot in this, doesn’t he? The most literal example, the opening prison breakout, is definitely my favorite, with the more psychological pre-breakout stretch–this is the first time we’ve ever seen Parker forced into this kind of neutered, tamed position for any length of time, since The Hunter mostly breezes over his work farm experience; he finds it frustrating enough to be boxed in by circumstances (see his speech in Butcher’s Moon), and being boxed in by literal walls and by restrictions handed down by men he can’t easily retaliate against, is so much worse. He quickly starts making escape plans, and that’s obviously practical but also feels like a way to keep himself sane. (And even then, he still feels a little shaken-up by the end here, especially with that final line to Claire. Ominous titling sequence to go from this to Nobody Runs Forever.)
Williams is our good new character this time around (“He looks like a door to me. I never did care what color a door was”), and I like that he both shows a sense of honor by turning around and coming back for Parker and Mackey when he hears about Brenda and envies the fact that it clearly wouldn’t have occurred to Parker to do the same. Honestly, the glimpse into Parker’s thought process as he breaks down why he should bother to help free Brenda is one of the colder things we’ve seen from him post-The Hunter; it doesn’t even feel like it stems from a vague “this will preserve a working relationship with Mackey, a partner I find competent and reliable” instinct as much as from “this will prevent me from making Mackey into an enemy I’m likely to run into in the future.”
Hey, I re-read this last summer! I found it enjoyable the second time around, a perfect book for those quiet moments when not doing things during Seattle Worldcon. And I am pretty sure this is the first time that a American Black man has a sizeable role in Parker’s world. But to some degree it feels like a video game. Parker breaks out, breaks in, breaks out, breaks someone else out, escapes, keeps leveling up. It’s a nice change from the usual but does get repetitive.
I think you’re right about Williams! It’s interesting to see how Stark’s confidence in writing Black characters grew over the years, since I’m assuming opting for African characters in The Black Ice Score was partly because he wanted an extra layer of unfamiliarity there so nothing would immediately ring false to his likely readers.
Ha, that structure probably does make it good Worldcon reading, funnily enough, because I can see how it would work better for fitting in during small gaps.
speaking of race and the Parker series, THE SCORE, the so-called blackspoitation Stark adaptation, is on the Watch TCM app for a few more days.
Dortmunder had more continuity than Parker so maybe it’s not surprising he beat his inspiration to the punch in working with an actual Black crook (Herman X) but it is an interesting late-in-the-game change that feels like it shouldn’t be so late. But on the other hand, the original run of 1961-73 is a time where likelihood of an integrated gang on personal level alone is low, but more importantly the societal cover Parker and his cronies have to operate in would be completely denied to a Black person in the white areas they generally roll through.
This is partly on the vagaries of the series’ publication, but you can break the books down into clusters of four — the opening salvo (where The Mourner ties off the final loose ends); the fall (Parker loses his cover and has to start over), the reorienting (the X Score books and Claire); and the original conclusion (things get tougher and tougher before the apocalypse of Butcher’s Moon); then there’s the return (culminating in Firebreak and its further tying off of old loose ends with a real “Parker is BACK” score); and now this last quartet, the narrowing down. Actually sticking Parker in the hole (and while he does not accept being in there his immediate understanding of his zero options as he’s caught is the man at his most pragmatic) is an indication of just how much harder it is out there for a crook. The involvement of Ed Mackey is a link to Plunder Squad, which has a similar structure of schemes constantly being complicated/falling apart but here it’s all escapes from confinement. I think the very last escape is Stark throwing his guy a bit of a bone, it is completely analog and if it’s within Parker’s skill set — his understanding of psychology and people, what buttons to push — it is out of a different time. Which Parker full well knows, as the final line makes clear.
Yeah, Parker’s surrender is a fantastic and oddly cinematic scene: a familiar image raised into iconic status by virtue of us knowing who this guy is.
I think the clearinghouse style of prison here, where everyone is on the way to somewhere else and relationships between inmates are difficult to impossible, is another indicator of the changing times. There’s a kind of classical model of a prison that would’ve been easier to work within on Parker’s time. But Stark also sees how this has created a different kind of opportunity, if only because the guards are likewise used to the system of a different time and not fully adept at controlling this kind of space. Nobody feels at home anymore. Parker’s not the kind of guy who could easily adapt to that in general, but here he’s just good enough.
The Looking Glass War, by John LeCarre — so the story is that LeCarre published The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and it was a huge hit and that British people in particular loved it because … they thought it was cool? I suppose if you squint you can argue that Lemas is a good spy and the vicious machinations of Control and Smiley are at least successful in their intent if brutal in their outcome, but that is very much missing the point. So LeCarre decided to make sure people got the point and wrote this, a bleak despairing tale of spies who absolutely suck and the bureaucracies that perpetuate them and themselves and how they work on lies that mean nothing. This is a cold, cold book — everyone is longing for the past glories of WWII twenty years later and especially the Department, a rival of Smiley’s Circus, and they latch onto a potential Cuban Missile Crisis situation in East Germany as a reason for action. Their action is incompetent and impotent (women don’t come off great here but the men they are stuck with are not giving them anything to hold on to) and tied to a sense of importance that is not just misguided but cannibalstic. “If you wish to stay in the Department and do the job, do it. If you wish to cultivate your emotions, go elsewhere and do so in peace. We are too old for your kind here,” one man tells another, it is an awesome line and it is in the service of nothing. Even Smiley, who is a side character here, is put off by how much waste there is, it of course does not stop him from letting a person be wasted. Grim, bracing shit, very good (if at times dense) but not for anyone looking for a fun read.
Truly, JLC is beach reading only for someone hanging out on a slate beach under a stormy gray sky.
RED SHEET– Ever since completing the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, James Ellroy has shifted the focus of his paranoid crypto-histories from state managed policing institutions, be it the LAPD or federal law enforcement, to cases of individual moral failure coalescing into interlocking criminal conspiracies. The rule of order in his L.A., has become challenged by a metaphorically maleficent city of nets This has allowed Ellroy greater leeway in bending known personages and events to fit a more personal world view, making his books more reminiscent of more prestigious meta-fictionalists like Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Robert Coover than the hard boiled crime specialists that he is most associated with. the latter’s A PUBLIC BURNING hangs heavy over this latest entry, as Richard Nixon’s commie-hunting days play a crucial part in RED SHEET’s backstory. Set ostensibly during the early days of the Rumford Act ballot campaign in late 1962, the latest in Ellroy’s Freddy Otash series finds him and the LAPD Hat Squad, under the command of future chief Daryl Gates, rooting out recidivist CPUSA influencers within the civil rights movement (and right wing co-conspirators). The narrative of said conspiracies extends way back into the 1930s, involving Alger Hiss, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
The biggest challenge that, in my opinion, hampered this book’s predecessor, THE ENCHANTERS, lay in expositing a vast interchange of criminal transactions through the detached first person, largely forensically centered narration. Processes related in revealing the last days of its subject, Marilyn Monroe, felt too much at the forefront, interrupting the flow of the action. In RED SHEET the balance between the investigation and the world it reveals is in equalibrium, and the author’s gift for police lingo and powerful street slang return to the fold in a wildly enjoyable, and at times nearly psychedelic manner. Some of the characters that Otash confronts along this journey, most notably double agent D.J. Siemler and her husband, a disgraced far right ex-T-Man, are the most interesting characters he’s created since THIS STORM, which serves as an unofficial point of entry to this newer book. Otash, still relying on a heavy drug and alcohol diet and still being prosaically whipped by powerful women, still hasn’t quite materialized as a great Ellroy protagonist. The sheer, surreal magnitude of the storytelling drive and historical sweep carry the story through, but at this stage the performance feels a bit too emotionally remote, particularly since Otash seems largely immune from shouldering the weight of his transgressions in rectifying politically induced wrongs. Ellroy is getting better at re-focusing his crypto-historical hallucinations into an intoxicating yet disciplined format, but the dramatic arc of the series, at least as it pertains to Freddy’s fate, remains too noticeably out of the frame.
Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon – The second Maigret I’ve read and first in the long running series. This felt like the gritty and violent pilot compared to Maigret And The Wine Merchant (#71) which felt like season eight in a long running television series. Not sure why I read them in that order. Maigret is notified that the notorious swindler Pietr the Latvian, who has so far escaped prosecution, has arrived in Paris. Maigret prepares to tail him as he disembarks from the train. But as the suspect heads to a hotel, a corpse is discovered on the train that is Pietr’s spitting image. There’s a murder and Maigret tails some more people. Not much is given to the reader to understand what is going on. I felt like I should have known something or missed something entirely. Maigret’s famed empathy in reading people doesn’t really come till the end. But this does have a grittiness and toughness to Maigret the later book was lacking, like he got more empathetic and less surly later on. It has violence the later book didn’t. The death of Maigret’s junior partner was pretty tough to read, Maigret gets shot and some guy gets his jaw shot off. The end seems off brand for the character from what I’ve read about his development. There is also a fair amount of antisemitism being written in 193o. There are three more of these in a Box Of Paperbacks I inherited – No Westlakes or Starks, alas. I think I’ll take a break and read one of the John D. MacDonalds.
Polostan – Odd to read only a portion of one of Neal Stephenson’s sprawling tomes (didn’t notice this was Book 1 until I got it home), and this has the would-be series-starter issue of the last five pages being the “Now the REAL story begins!” teaser. Still, a lot of interesting detail and action, and the protagonist is a corker of a character. Will read more if and when they arrive.
I will note that the state of comic book journalism is pretty awful now. As best as I can tell, no one is talking about the Eisners full stop. Which does not excuse ignoring a groundbreaking moment. But all the sites that used to attempt any serious news coverage are little more than movie news and clickbait (with the partial exception of Bleeding Cool), and Tom Spurgeon died a long time ago.
Instant FAR appreciation for getting to read Danny McBride’s thoughts on The Dark Tower. The ideas he mentions are especially resonant as an arc over the first three books, I think, but obviously they play into the series as a whole on a significant level (and I think any progress made on that front factors into certain horn-related matters, she said obliquely).
Yes, Roland’s metamorphosis into a rhinoceros shows his spiritual as well as physical growth.
McBride would probably not work as Roland for many reasons, but on the other hand, absolutely levitating at the idea of “I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart, motherfucker.”