[Note: none of the following is meant to take away from maybe the most salient fact of Kendrick Lamar's performance, which is its unapologetic Blackness. Nor am I suggesting that the performance was solely about Donald Trump, although he's an incarnation of the forces Kendrick Lamar works against. This is just me going over some stuff that I've been thinking about for the past couple of days] The fascism of the current moment continues apace. Trump has made himself the head of the Kennedy Center in order to bring about a so-called GOLDEN AGE of American art and culture. The NEA is laying out new rules for patriotic art. And, lest we forget, Trump started out this whole misadventure of 2025 with an executive order promoting a return to “beautiful” architecture for government buildings. All of these are disastrous examples of an artistically stupid man exerting his own bad taste; Donald J. Trump would not know a beautiful building if it landed on him, as we can only hope will eventually happen. If I keep banging on about this, it’s because I believe that art is vital. The mechanisms of capitalism and corporate greed have already desiccated the once-vital body of American cultural production. American culture, such as it was, has become increasingly flat and gray in spite of the infusion of exciting new voices from people of color and queer folk. This is because, frankly, capitalism is very very good at sucking up exciting new voices and grinding them into a consistent gray paste. In the face of such a mechanism, public funding and patronage of the arts is essential if we’re to have any sort of a culture at all. I’ve talked about this both here and on the podcast I co-host, so if you want a little more of my ideas on that angle, you can look here and listen here. Of course, what Trump et alia are objecting to isn’t the overwhelming mediocrity of the larger culture. They’re mad about architecture that doesn’t scream RETVRN. They’re mad about drag shows (a legitimately lively art-form even taking into account its mainstreaming in Drag Race). They’re mad about Black people (oh my god are they mad about Black people). They don’t want art; they want propaganda. Perhaps it’s this that makes Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance feel so very vital. Of course, the NFL won't let me embed it here, but here's the link to YouTube. I forgot that the Super Bowl was happening until it was happening. I didn’t even know that Kendrick Lamar, who just came off a spectacular year, was performing to an audience that included Donald Trump (in all of the flesh). When I saw the talk on BlueSky about the show, I was immediately eager to see it; I went to YouTube and found a crappy bootleg and watched it. Then I watched it several more times. I’ve lived with this halftime show in my head since that day. It’s a meticulously put-together work of art of a kind that simply doesn’t exist in the context of a Super Bowl halftime show. After I finally grew exhausted with rewatching Lamar’s performance, I turned to look at some older halftime shows. There were a lot of great ones: Bruno Mars, Beyonce, Madonna. There was Diana Ross, who was my first halftime performance and who entranced me so much that it should have been a clue of a certain lavender cast to my own personality. But the thing about all of these performances, even the very greatest, is that they were more or less just that—really good deliveries of popular songs. There was very little cohesive or intentional about them—they weren’t saying anything. Remember after Trump’s first election, when Lady Gaga performed? A lot of tongues were wagging beforehand with the usual suspects worrying that she would make it “political.” And she did, in a way; she positioned her show as a healing moment for America. It was a good show and totally flaccid, politically speaking, in spite of the fact that she performed her classic “Born this Way.” And, look, I love Lady Gaga. Nothing but respect for her. But it was a show wholly unsuited to the moment in which it occurred. Kendrick Lamar, here at the dawn of the second Trump regime (the last one, however it ends, and it will), delivered something much more to the point. I won’t here go into the various symbols overt and (possibly) covert; the YouTube Industrial Complex has churned out so many explainer videos over the past few days that you could probably watch them end-to-end until the next Super Bowl and not run out of material. I’ll link a few here that I found particularly interesting. See here, here, here, and here. A lot of talk about the messaging here specifically comments on the Black experience in America and it’s worth listening to these voices. Lamar’s performance immediately put me in mind of two things. First, naturally, was Alan Moore and his argument that poets and magicians are one and the same thing: anyone can put a hex on your cows, but only a poet can make your name mud for generations. It’s actually pretty rare to see this happen; even the songwriters and poets I regard in highest possible esteem, whom I think of as prophets in their own way (Bob Dylan, for instance, or Ezra Furman) rarely have a measurable real-world impact. It’s tempting to listen to Kurt Vonnegut’s words about writers versus the Vietnam War and say that art, however well-intentioned, is a pretty poor weapon for social change. But Lamar has done it; “Not Like Us” is an actual working. Lamar even (allegedly) begins the performance by flashing the cheat code for GTA: San Andreas that grants invulnerability, like a ceremonial magician performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. The song has already so totally demolished Drake that at the Super Bowl 70,000 voices rose as one to the words “a minor.” But I’m not (necessarily) arguing that Lamar performed an act of ritual magic in the Golden Dawn, Crowley, woo-woo sense. Not necessarily. But it is a kind of working all the same. The show itself has a narrative (something that most halftime shows that aren’t the Indiana Jones one don’t have). It’s a story about Drake, of course, but it’s also about America (an America divided and built on the backs of Black men, as countless YouTubers and BlueSky posters have observed). It’s a story about artistic integrity battling against cultural mediocrity (“too ghetto” is what Uncle Sam says; “DEI halftime” is what the ignorant proclaimed online). It’s a declaration that the artist has the power. And it’s a statement of intent to remake the world; indeed, it declares that the world is already being remade. It’s “Game Over.” And it’s performed in front of the sexual-assaulter-in-chief. Kendrick Lamar is throwing down a gauntlet, here. That’s magic in precisely the way Alan Moore talks about it. Kendrick Lamar is manipulating words and symbols to create a change in the world. He tells us what’s up at the very beginning when he promises that the revolution is about to be televised. So of course this turned me to Shelley and his "Defense of Poetry":
It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In our postmodern (or post-postmodern) age, we are perhaps rightly skeptical of this sort of language; it takes no great knowledge of history or literature to know that poets are often ineffectual and that the best dreams of the poets are often phantasms. But every once in a while there’s Kendrick Lamar. And he comes along and energizes symbols that the Right has tried to claim (the flag, Uncle Sam) and deploys a working initially intended to take down a rival, now reconfigured to combat the principalities and powers and the rulers of the age. What we witnessed at the Super Bowl halftime show was a sacred moment in which a powerful artist declared himself and uttered a resounding “no” against the cultural decay that is most concretely, though not exclusively, seen in the decaying undead corpse of the molester-in-chief. That’s pure poetry. That’s magic. And if there’s any hope to be had these days, this is where it is.
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In my book on American small-town fiction, I try to articulate an idea I called “redemptive nostalgia.” This is an idea designed to push back against the popular belief that nostalgia—looking back to a fantasy past—is inherently regressive. An obvious contemporary example of regressive nostalgia is, of course, MAGA. It derives its power from energizing nostalgia for a “better time”—that’s the again—but the “better time” is one that excludes people of color and queer people. To make America great again is to make it white, straight, cisgendered again. What I want to suggest in my book is that there’s a counter-nostalgia, or a competing nostalgia, possible. This is where people on the Left, in my observation, tend to fall down; they’ll explain in detail why and how Trump’s nostalgic vision is evil, but they don’t feel very comfortable suggesting an alternative nostalgia, a nostalgia that will push us forward. As I see it, the dilemma of nostalgia is similar to the dilemma of the superhero. Alan Moore sees an adult fixation on superheroes as infantalizing and implicitly fascist. Meanwhile, Grant Morrison sees superheroes as nothing less than our salvation, as they express in the introduction to Supergods: We live in the stories we tell ourselves. In a secular, scientific rational culture lacking in any convincing spiritual leadership, superhero stories speak loudly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and highest aspirations. They’re not afraid to be hopeful, not embarrassed to be optimistic, and utterly fearless in the dark. They’re about as far from social realism as you can get, but the best superhero stories deal directly with mythic elements of human experience that we can all relate to, in ways that are imaginative, profound, funny, and provocative. They exist to solve problems of all kinds and can always be counted on to find a way to save the day. At their best, they help us to confront and resolve even the deepest existential crises. We should listen to what they have to tell us. I feel no need to take a side—at least on the question of the value of superheroes—in what Elizabeth Sandifer has dubbed The Last War in Albion. I think they’re both right. Moore is absolutely correct that the contemporary fixation on superheroes, especially as they appear in the total domination of the cineplex by the MCU, is basically bad for culture and probably bad for humanity in general, because it represents a rejection of complex thought and a loss of appetite for difficulty. It becomes a kind of cycle: the world is hard, so we turn to light entertainment; and, turning to light entertainment, we find that we don’t have the tools to rectify a hard world. So it gets harder. On the other hand, I think Morrison is also right. There’s a value to a superhero like Superman because he represents something aspirational: a neverending battle for truth and justice for everyone. And in dark times like these I think it’s useful; certainly, I’m glad that the character is out of the hands of Zack Snyder who—whatever his other merits (or lack thereof) as a filmmaker—simply doesn’t vibe with Superman. The recent teasers for the new movie look like what we really need. I’ve been a Superman fan since I was a child; those Fleischer Superman shorts (still, to my mind, the definitive version of the Man of Steel on film) were a part of my mental furniture for as long as I can remember. It was later that I came to the Christopher Reeve movies; later still that I came to the comics—first through the President Lex storyline and later through the fantastic and (to my mind) unbeatable A Superman for All Seasons. I’ve had All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quietely for a while now, but never read it for whatever reason. And then, the other day I decided to finally crack it open. I did this for two reasons: first, because I’m going to be teaching it in my “Cultures of English-Speaking Countries” class; and, second, because...well, look around you. If anything looks like a job for Superman, it’s this. Morrison gets a fundamental optimism in Superman, not only about humanity in general but about particular characters—even about villains. Late in the book, Superman confronts Lex Luthor, who has engineered a serum to give himself the powers of Superman. It’s a fairly typical bust-up between these rivals; on film it would be interminable and dull. But during that fight, Lex has a sudden revelation; he sees the world as Superman sees it and, for a moment, he is almost a changed man. This is fairly optimistic, to be honest. I don’t imagine that our contemporary and real-world Lex Luthors (Elon Musk, Donald Trump, et alia) would actually be changed by the vision gifted to Lex. Lex, like Superman, is designed by Morrison to be mythic in scope; he is smarter than we are, grander than we are—in his own title he might even be a tragic figure. His hubris drives him to take on the powers of a god and, having taken them on, he is undone by the realization that they grant him. Neither Elon nor Donald have the intellectual, moral, or spiritual substance to rise to this level. But there’s something here all the same that I find terribly compelling. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe—I want to believe that it’s possible for anyone to glimpse the fundament of creation and be changed by it. I want to believe that we can create these godlike beings who are better than we are and that they can then drive us, all of us, even villains, to be better (one fascinating section of All-Star suggests that a world without Superman would have to create him). As I type this, Elon Musk and his twink brownshirts are deleting the US government. Donald Trump just this day (5-Feb-2025) announced his plan to evacuate Gaza and turn it into an American zone—once again proving that, however bad Biden was on Gaza, Trump will always be worse. At moments like this we need some kind of hope. We need something to believe in, something to aspire to. I’m not suggesting that Superman is some kind of god, that we should treat him with the same respect as Attis or Osiris or Christ. But these symbols are valuable, as all symbols are. The neverending battle for truth, justice, and (sure, why not) the American way is worth fighting. In the face of tech billionaires and self-appointed lords of the earth; in the face of the rough beast in the White House and his enabling cohort; in the face of the grundies and the fundies and the TERFs and the SWERFs; in the face of the utter inhumanity of these enemies of culture and human flourishing; it’s useful to have Superman there, in our mind, urging us forward.
I think that Superman can be a form of redemptive nostalgia. In his earliest forms he was a social justice warrior, fighting landlords and bankers on behalf of the common man. When he fights for truth, justice, and the American way, it’s on behalf of the common man. That’s part of the American heritage, too; and rather than concede the past to Trump and his fascist cohort, rather than saying “yes, America was always awful and that's the end of it,” we should be looking to the past to find this sort of energizing fantasy that can push us on into a more truthful, more just world. Superman doesn’t exist; he’s a fantasy. But he’s a fantasy that we create and that, therefore, creates our world. It’s a world worth creating. Gore Vidal once said that the sweetest words in the English language are "I told you so." Unfortunately, in spite of my consistent and vocal dislike of Donald Trump and his fascist policies, I can't really say that because the reality of the first...two, three weeks?...of his current term is so much dumber than I could have anticipated. And I don't just mean the flurry of executive orders attacking immigrants, people of color, and queer folk; I don't mean the blatantly unconstitutional attempt to destroy birthright citizenship and stop the flow of funds allocated by Congress. Those I could have called. What I didn't expect is that shadow president Elon Musk would stick around this long, long enough to start his own private little coup. Make no mistake, these are bad people and they are profoundly stupid people. Watching them run around enacting their dictatorial little fantasies is a bit like watching the classic Three Stooges short You Nazty Spy, if the Stooges were less competent and more malicious. (Apologies for the awful colorization; it's the only version I could find) Mocking Elon Musk and his puppet president is easy and brings little joy. Mocking their deluded christofascist and white nationalist followers is about as satisfying. Still, it's life's little pleasures that make the whole rambling trainwreck endurable. I don't have much to say in the way of conclusion, here; this disaster is very disheartening. I recently re-read The Odyssey for the first time in years, in Emily Wilson's translation. I grew up with the Fagles version; more specifically, I grew up listening to Ian McKellen's recording of The Odyssey. I've not quite done the kind of excavation needed to say exactly how this shaped my imagination and later intellectual life, but certainly McKellen's reading (of which I can find no clips on YouTube) shaped the way epics should sound to me. Wilson's translation is a good one, I think; at any rate, it scratched that particular Odyssian itch I had. Reading it, I couldn't help but draw certain strained parallels in the state of Ithaca in Odysseus's absence and the state of DC in the absence of anyone with the will or power to stand up to these buffoons. Here's Telemachus to the disguised Athena: As it turns out, of course, Odysseus does come back and the results are cruel and bloody; even the "good" suitors are judged to be complicit in the wrongdoings of the others. Justice is done; the good king returns and the goddess Athena steps in at the last moment to prevent a cycle of bloody reprisal. This is a fantasy, of course; the idea that bad and stupid people will eventually get what they deserve is one that only children and mystics have the convenience of indulging in, at least consistently. For the rest of us, especially those of us with little or no access to the levers of power, there is only the bemused horror of watching the genuinely least insightful people in the world given the power to force their obscene fantasies on the rest of us. Over at The Projectionist's Lending Library we have a new episode--our season finale--about Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and the 1980 PBS TV adaptation of it. Check it out. Toward the end of this episode, Erik and I go on a tear about public funding for the arts. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I grew up in the rural American South and there was at that time a kind of reflexive distrust for arts funding; I think the controversies over Piss Christ and things like that were still fresh in everyone's mind. I absorbed that at the time, but gradually I kind of just slipped into thinking that, no, public funding for the arts is probably a good thing. I didn't feel that passionate about it, though. That's changed. If the past ten or twenty years have shown anything, it's that culture in general has become dull and mechanical. In my previous post I shared a video of Alan Moore talking about Harry Potter. I'll post it here again because I think Moore's right. Moore's right. It's not that there isn't anything good coming out at the movies; Luca Guadagnino's Queer and Robert Eggers's Nosferatu are two movies that I enjoyed a lot and that I think are positive contributions to the culture. In the podcast, I talk about Piranesi by Susanna Clark and Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira. There's good stuff out there. But lately I've been overwhelmed by a sense of general depression covering most forms of media, where the truly strange or interesting is either pushed to the sidelines or mimicked (sometimes convincingly). We need more strange stuff out there. We need more weird art. And the corporate model is very difficult for this sort of thing. That's why I'm so passionate about public funding for the arts. Back in the day, one argument against public funding is that it was going to works that people didn't understand or that might offend some people and "why should my tax dollars" etc etc etc. But, of course, that's precisely why we need public funding. Because art, lots of it, simply isn't commercial. But it's good. It's a public necessity. Because art is what pushes us to imagine new realities and explore beyond what we normally experience. Public funding for the arts puts interesting art in the sight of the people, some of whom might be confused or enraged, but all of whom would not have the opportunity to encounter it otherwise. These are very un-organized thoughts. And with the ascent (reascent) of the philistine administration of Donald Trump, which is anti-human and so anti-art, it's unlikely that we'll see PBS or any other public services get substantial increases in funding. But it's a dream worth having. To close out, here's a video of David Lynch (RIP) talking about making art. Lynch was one of the true masters of the strange and the illuminating. He's meant a lot to me for a long time and I'm sorry to see him go. 2024 was a year that I felt like I had finally climbed back on the reading horse, as it were, after a few years in which reading anything seemed to be a struggle. Looking at the total number of books read, that seems to have been more of a matter of vibes than anything else, but I did read some absolutely fantastic books, including one that I'm pretty confident is going to be part of my personal canon for a long time. But I'll get to that. Below are five books I read this year that I loved in one way or another. Ascending order from the fifth to the first. 5. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs I read this in preparation for the Naked Lunch episode of the podcast I co-host, The Projectionist's Lending Library. My co-host Erik is a Burroughs fan and has done quite a bit of work on the Beats in general. I, on the other hand, have not; indeed, it took several years after my first reading of On the Road for me to warm to the Beats at all (outside of Ginsberg, who has always convinced me). (I tell this episode on the podcast, but my first exposure to Burrroughs was kind of a negative one in that I was as a child a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, at a time when finding copies of his books in the local Books-A-Million--outside of the first Tarzan book and maybe sometimes A Princess of Mars--was very difficult. William S, on the other hand, got an entire shelf. I hated him without reading him because I was a strong partisan as a child). Anyway, Naked Lunch. You can check out the podcast for my extended thoughts on it, but the short version is that this book is very weird in a way that I sympathize with. The plot, if there is a plot, is super thin; the characters, if they are characters, have virtually none of that roundness that we're told to expect from a novel. The content is obscene, bizarre, even sexy (in a way that makes people side-eye you if you claim to find the book sexy). It's a very bold book and one I simply can't imagine being released today; it breaks up your expectations of what a novel should be or do and forces new modes of reading on you. And that's just cool. 4. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin Here's another book I read for the podcast (actually, the next episode of the podcast, dropping later this month). Well, and for my English Language Novels class, which this year I themed around science fiction. It's also the very first Le Guin novel I've ever read, though hopefully it won't be the last. (I say "hopefully" although I theoretically can control what I read...). The plot here is simple: a man can dream dreams that alter reality. He asks a psychiatrist to help him only to find that the psychiatrist is wanting to harness his powers to change the world. Hijinks ensue. For the record, I re-read this book while I was also reading Alan Moore's Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, which appears below, and there's a kind of occult sympathy between the two books. I don't think Le Guin was an occultist, though she was a Taoist and an Anarchist, and I rather suspect she's more interested in themes of control and resistance than she is in dreams as such. Still and all, it's a wonderful, beautiful book and one that sticks with you. 3. The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore Let me not right out of the gate that this is not a book for children. Like, at all. What it is is Alan Moore (and his deceased friend Steve Moore, no relation) laying out his particular theory of magic, one which centers the act of creation at the heart of the magician's work. Put another way, Moore seems convinced (and I'm not unconvinced) that magic ultimately boils down to art: the creation of art, the dissemination of art, the promotion of art. Moore claims at one place that he began to develop his theory of magic while writing From Hell, when he has his villain say something like "the one place where gods can be said to truly exist is in the human mind." So for Moore magic, whatever else it is, is about accessing the potential of the human mind. Actually, I'll go further and suggest that, insofar as this book is itself a magical spell, its a spell by Moore to convince more people to create interesting art. Moore has been very open in his dismay at the trajectory of contemporary culture; this exchange is emblematic of his stance: He's not wrong. Anyway, this book moves well and it's compelling. If you're interested in Moore as an artist, there's a novella and several pages of comics (presumably his farewell to the medium); if you're interested in Moore as an occultist, he carefully lays out the system developed by himself and his friend Steve Moore; and if you care for neither of those things but really want to know how to do basic ceremonial magic? Well, you'll find that here too. It's a grimoire as only Alan Moore could do it. 2. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke I never read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, though I did watch the TV adaptation a while back. It's not exactly that I didn't want to, but it just kept slipping from my attention. But I had heard so much good buzz about Piranesi--and it is comparatively short--so I decided to finally read it in the last weeks of 2024. It wound up being the last book I read that year and, let me tell you, it was a high note to end on. As a treat, take a look at this interview with Susanna Clarke and Alan Moore: This book, like The Lathe of Heaven, isn't really one that relies much on plot per se. The book is really more about mood, as the initially-unnamed narrator wanders through a vast house and describes it and its inhabiting statues. It's dreamlike and Borgesian and I really can't recommend it enough. 1. Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira I first encountered Anthony Oliveira through his Twitter presence, and then through his Patreon-funded podcast about Milton. That project has long since moved on, but I've still kept up with Oliveira (I even bought an issue of a Marvel superhero comic because he wrote it). I bought this book when it first came out in...(? April 2024? I was sure it was longer ago). But I didn't get to it until toward the end of the year. And then, one day, I picked it up and started reading and was almost immediately in tears. I read this book, all 432 pages of it, in a single Saturday; I could not stop. So, what is this book? It's hard to describe. On the one hand, it's a kind of historical fiction about the Beloved Disciple--here imagined as Jesus's lover (and Lazarus, incidentally; Oliveira obviously knows all the potential identities of the Beloved Disciple and he manages to use all of them). But the "historical" bit here is very loose; Jesus and his beloved are depicted as watching TV at one point, for instance. And it's not really a novel at all; it's more of an extended poem, or poetic meditation. It's a work of queer Christian mysticism in which union with the Divine is conceived of in explicitly homoerotic terms. It's irreverent and sometimes obscene. And it's also a grappling with disappointment--being disappointed by God, by life, by the people around you. It's amazingly beautiful and it's not only one of my favorite books I read in 2024; it's probably one of my favorite books of all time. If you're curious, here's a sample of the audiobook (which Google, inexplicably, won't let me embed). So that's my top five reads of 2024. I'll probably get a movie list put together sometime soon; oddly, I don't seem to have gotten much done in terms of new television, so there probably won't be a list for that (Ripley was swell, though). Also, with the social media rapidly going fash, I'll probably be posting here a lot more. I know, I promise that every year, but I'm hoping that if I actually eliminate Facebook I'll need somewhere to post random thoughts, and that's exactly what this website is for.
Anyway, happy 2025 y'all. Be safe out there. Steve Steinbock has graciously reviewed God and the Great Detective at EQMM's "The Jury Box" and given it five stars. Check out his review here.
I'm late posting this here, but I was honored to be asked to contribute a piece to Ellery Queen: A Website on Deduction as a West 87th Street Irregular. You can read it here.
A Website on Deduction is the best resource for information about Ellery Queen on the web and it has been for decades. I'm proud to be featured on the site. I am currently on vacation and so unable to put together much of a post about the current kerfuffle about Jason Aldean and “Try That in a Small Town.” I’ve read the lyrics and they’re bad. I’ve heard that the video is worse. If I had time I would weigh in with the hottest of takes, since this is one of the places where I can say definitively that I’m kind of an expert. But alas. I’m going to confine myself to a reading list—one nonfiction and four fiction—that serve as effective counter-programming to Aldean’s whole thing.
This is an important point, so I’ll put it here at the beginning: the small town is symbolically America. It always has been; this is a point both Poll and I make in our respective studies. Historically, writers and artists have used the small town as a symbolic space to probe the complexities and contradictions of America. These authors don’t idolize small towns; they use them as tools of critique. And often they expose nasty things there: violence, racism, misogyny. Jason Aldean does the same thing. He sees the small town as a site of violence. But rather than suggesting that this violence is a symptom of something deeply wrong with America, he idolizes it. He pumps it up. For Jason Aldean and his ilk, it is fundamentally good and right that small towns murder people unlike them. By extension, his ideal America is murderous and violent. This is small-town America as imagined by Pennywise. That’s what I find troubling about this horribly-written song. Not only that he’s advocating violence but that he’s looking at a genre that has historically seen violence and deplored it and saying “This is what America should be.” I don’t want to say that’s new, but it’s a striking perversion of the formula. Anyway, I’ve a plane to catch so I won’t say more now. Read these books. Imagine a better world. Unranked: Main Street and Empire by Ryan Poll. This is a central book to all my thinking on small-town literature. I don’t actually agree with a lot of what Poll says here but it’s all said so well and so convincingly that I can’t not recommend it. Poll essentially suggests that the small town works as an imaginary space or covering that allows American imperialism to continue undetected even by the citizens of that empire. Kings Row by Henry Bellamann I consider this the first of what might be called the definitive midcentury small town trilogy (unofficial). Bellamann dives beneath the surface of an idyllic small town to expose rot, corruption, murder, and incest. It’s an absolutely bonkers novel that was too weird for Hollywood; the 1942 movie is a pale reflection of this book’s lurid glories. Peyton Place by Grace Metalious. The second volume in my unofficial trilogy, this book is Bellamann in a feminine vein. Indeed, the books are so close that you could make a case that Metalious is simply rewriting Bellamann. Be that as it may, this is a book worth visiting and revisiting, particularly for the bold way it foregrounds both women’s sexual desires and the dangers of a world in which a woman’s body and reproduction are not her own. ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. Tighter and better-paced than it’s bulkier younger sibling IT, this is the third book in the midcentury trilogy. On the surface it seems to conform to the dreariest academic truisms about small-town fiction: that the community is pure and any corruption comes from without. However, King is clear that the external evil (vampires) only arrives because of a preexisting internal evil. This is something he’ll explore more in IT, which is a massive and sloppy novel that absolutely deserves to be read. Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith A novel about a lynching and about the tangled lives of racially separated people in a small town. The ways in which love and violence interact are explored. Worth reading for that alone and for the way Smith exposes the ways even “nice” people can show nasty streaks of cowardice and racism. And, of course, there’s my book: American Small-Town Fiction, 1940-1960. Over at Arts and Faith I had the privilege of writing a blurb for F for Fake, which ranked tenth in the "Spiritually Significant Documentaries" list. It's a good list, and one I'm happy to have voted on. I'm also reasonably happy with the blurb, with one caveat: my actual write-up was significantly longer, and what I eventually submitted was a radical cut-down of the two thousand or so words I wrote. That's not a problem; a blurb is a blurb and a rambling ten-part essay is a rambling ten-part essay. But I figured it would be a shame not to put the whole thing up somewhere. So I'm putting it here, along with a very bad photoshop job that I threw together in about twenty minutes using Gimp. Enjoy. 1 The first card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot Deck--not counting the zeroth card, the Fool--is The Magician. In some mystical readings of the deck he signifies control over the Four Elements, represented by the images of the four suits arranged on the table in front of him. However, as Rachel Pollack observes in her book Tarot Wisdom, earlier versions of the card show quite a different figure: not the powerful magician (or Magus, as Crowley would have it) but a common street performer, before him a set of cups for the common game of cup-and-ball. For Pollack, this historical genealogy is significant, since it points to the two-sided nature of the magician: he is a worker of wonders and he is also a trickster. To put it another way, he is both an artist and a fraud. 2 It might seem odd to begin this rumination on Orson Welles' F for Fake with a digression on the tarot, but the connection is less strained than one would expect. After all, the first sequence in this movie is Welles--immense, clad in broad-brimmed hat and a cape--performing magic tricks for a small boy. He is here the magus as trickster. And yet who can deny the wonder--the magic, perhaps--seen on the boy's face as Welles transforms a key to a coin and then back into a key, back into a coin--into a handful of coins pouring from the boy's nose into a waiting hand. Is it fakery? Of course. Both onscreen and in the editing room Welles is ultimately a showman. But it is also magic. F for Fake is ostensibly a film about Elmyr de Hory, an art forger who produced paintings so seemingly authentic that they fooled the best art critics in the West. His paintings, we are told, are still featured in unnamed museums. The film also follows de Hory's biographer, Clifford Irving, who perpetrates a fraud of his own: a biography of the famously reclusive, famously daft Howard Hughes. And the film is also in its own way a fraud; in the last twenty minutes, Welles commits a slight of hand so audacious that even now, after several viewings, it still takes my breath away. So this is a movie about fraud, about deceit. And yet, it is also about authenticity. de Hory is an authentic fraud; so, too, is Clifford Irving. So, too, in his own way, is Orson Welles, as he admits when he narrates fragments of his own biography, including the infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast (an account that has been embellished to the point that it itself may be considered a kind of fraud). In contrast to and competition with these magnificent hucksters--each self-created in his own way, like all great artists are--Welles ranges the unseen ranks of critics, people who hold themselves up as experts on what is truly authentic and who discover, time and again, that they have been hoodwinked. In a telling observation, both Welles and Irving assert that the existence of the critic and the art market are what call into being the fraudster; the latter simply would not exist without the former. 3 The critic, in his self-appointed authority, offers the illusion of absolute certainty. J.K. Van Dover, a scholar of the detective story, titled one of his studies We Must Have Certainty. Since his study covers the history of the genre--and therefore much of the nineteenth century as well as all of the twentieth--we might take that title as the overarching theme of the past 120 years. The demand for certainty is, I fear, one that few of us escape. It is not enough to suspect a thing; we must know it, with unutterable conviction. The world of modernity (a wonderful, beautiful, horrible, and terrible world) demands solidity, not to say stolidity; if everything solid melts into air, we cling all the more to the evanescencing mist in the hope that something, anything, can hold. And into that gap steps the critic. Well-spoken, articulate, meticulous. Some of us who call ourselves critics speak from a place of knowledge, to be sure; others speak from ignorance, and therefore with more conviction. There is nothing a trickster loves more than an expert. Take a dozen sommeliers, range them in a line with blindfolds across their care-worn faces, and the trickster will substitute for their fine vintages a bottle he picked up on sale at the local grocery store. The sommelier sniffs, sips, swishes, spits, and declares that this bottle of Yellowtale Muscat is the finest French vintage he has ever encountered. His wisdom is faulty; his senses deceive him. In this film, Clifford Irving tells a similar story of fooling museum directors. When you set yourself up as an authority, you simply beg to be fooled. 4 Partway through F for Fake, Welles pauses to quote a verse from Kipling: When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold; And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?" The poem is "The Conundrum of the Workshops." Kipling, that old imperialist sinner, knew at least enough to suggest a striking idea about original sin: that the fall of humanity (a fall seen, perhaps, in the zeroth card, the Fool) arose, not from true knowledge--a knowledge, that is, of truth and beauty--but from false judgment: it's pretty, but is it art? We might ask the same of de Hory's paintings: are these forgeries, as accomplished as they are, really communicating anything? Does a Picasso that is not by Picasso still effect us the same way (and what, we might ask, of the false Picassos painted by the actual man Picasso, referred to in the film--what occult admixture transforms a painting by the man Picasso into what we call a Picasso?) What of the film itself? Does Welles say anything in F for Fake? Does the movie have a point? It is undeniably accomplished--Welles' editing, his screen presence, his deft slight-of-hand in the final twenty minutes, are unmatched and perhaps unmatchable. It's pretty. But is it (we might ask) art? And does it matter? 5 One of the darker observations of the novel Nightmare Alley and its film adaptations is this: that people, ultimately, want to be taken in. The genius of the mentalist, of the con-man, of the fraud--of Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving and, yes, Orson Welles--is recognizing this fact and playing on it. We desperately want new Picassos, new Matisses, new works of art. We want the fabulous, preposterous story of Oja Kodar and her grandfather and Picasso to be true and so we will it to be true, at least for those glorious minutes before Welles, with a twinkle in his eye, reveals his deceit. What Welles seems to ask is whether it isn't better that we believe, at least for a moment, that the glamorous lie is true. Or, at least, pretend to believe. One of Slavoj Zizek's favorite stories concerns Niels Bohr who, while he was living in Copenhagen, received a visitor. While they walked around the place he was living, the guest noticed a horseshoe above a door. "What is that?" they asked. "Oh that," said Bohr. "The locals tell me this will bring good luck." The visitor was taken aback. "Why, Bohr," they said, "You are a man of science! How can you believe such rubbish?" Bohr smiled. "I don't," he said. "But they tell me it will work anyway." Bohr enjoys a particular pleasure available only to the connoisseur of fakery: he both believes and disbelieves, and so he gains the benefits of both. Ultimately, Welles leaves the question unresolved, as all questions of faith must remain unresolved. The trickster de Hory suggests that the world is made better by his trickery: that the real frauds are those who set themselves up as authorities over matters of art. And this is something that Welles seems at least mildly to condone. Because, you see, the trickster is not the darker side of the magician: he is the magician, creating through his trickery a world of possibilities undreamed of by the stolid critic. 6 Late in F for Fake, Welles takes his camera to Chartres cathedral, which he calls "a celebration to God's glory and to the dignity of man." The cathedral, by Welles' account, is an unsigned masterpiece. We do not know the names of the countless craftsmen who worked on its intricate facade; we only know the work itself, destined, if Welles is correct, to stand long after the other endeavors of humanity have crumbled into dust. Welles imagines the craftsmen of Cartres murmuring "our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." If Paul Tillich is correct when he says that faith is the state of being grasped by Ultimate Questions--grasped, note, by the questions rather than by the comforting assurances of the critics' answers--then the whispered words of the craftsmen of Chartres are an affirmation of faith. "I must believe," says a dying man in Welles' film, "that art itself is real. If it is not...." 7 In ancient religion, trickery was indistinguishable from piety. The oracles at Delphi plied their trade with the aid of hemp; the Elusinian mysteries depended upon a meticulous set of practices designed to induce in their initiates a sense of wonder. Allegedly--this is according to Royston Lambert in his book Beloved and God--the priests of Antinous, Hadrian's deified lover, would speak from a hollow place in the back of an immense statue of the beautiful ephebe. Trickery, all. Fraud, all. Deception--all. The modern mind rightly turns from such crass flummery. And yet who can deny the attraction of being taken in? If one could stand, momentarily, before the Delphic oracle and breath in those fumes and hear the voice of Apollo thundering forth--even if all reason cried out against the manipulation--who would not quake and know that they stood on holy ground? For faith, ultimately, is the suspension--if only temporarily--of the harshest critic of all: the one within. 8 In truth, the mystical experience or the religious experience are not limited to the baser sorts of trickery. Here is William James in The Varieties of Religious Experiences speaking of mysticism: Single words, and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility. At its fundamental level, religion is a kind of art, and therefore a kind of artifice. It seeks to produce a sensation, a sense of oceanic wonder, a connection to divinity. The magician who opens the door to that divinity is also a trickster. Perhaps, we might suggest, the divinity is itself a trickster as well. By sheer coincidence, I was reminded as I sat to write these words of a quote from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter": "Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool." Poe--himself a poet, himself a trickster--touches upon a fundamental truth here: that foolishness is the gateway to wisdom. The zeroth card--the fool card, only one step before the magician (that is, the poet)--takes a step forward, his eyes lifted to the sky, not seeing the cliff before him. He is about to fall. And when he does, he will progress through the Major Arcana until he finally finds himself complete again with card 21, the World card. And back again, since in some decks the zeroth card is the end, rather than the beginning, of the Major Arcana. It is a terrifying thing, this willingness to be fooled. But it is the central demand of art, of poetry--of religion. And, as F for Fake shows us, even knowing the trick (knowing, for instance, that the moment Welles starts insisting that a story is true we can be certain that it is a lie) does not rob it of its power. 9 "And what," I hear my longsuffering reader ask, "Has any of this to do with faith?" Perhaps, depending on your faith, nothing. Or perhaps everything. Art is faith made manifest: Faulkner's one puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. We sing on in uncertainty; we sing on, perhaps, because of uncertainty. If you are feeling at this point a tormenting uncertainty, it's one that I feel as well (and one that I suspect Welles both expects and delights in): isn't this a demand to give up reason (and Reason), to surrender critical thinking, to plunge into the dark superstitious miasma that characterizes crystal readers, palmisters, cartologists, astrologists, Q-Anoners, and faith healers? "Ah ha," says Welles. "But don't you see that's the point? The mistake the card-readers and the Q-Anoners make is that they mistake their faith for reason. Faith, in the end, must be a kind of play." The very act of enjoying art is an act of faith. Indeed, artistic appreciation is indistinguishable from it. 10 A final quote. This is William Shakespeare's ineffable flim-flam man Prospero: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex’d; Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled: Be not disturb’d with my infirmity: If you be pleased, retire into my cell, And there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk, To still my beating mind. Long ago, critics took this to be Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage. Whether that is the case or not, it is a suggestive note on which to end. Since Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is out soon and will be the (allegedly) final entry in the Indiana Jones series, I took some time this week to rewatch the four previous movies. I started to say "authentic" movies, since Dial only features one of the three driving forces of the series, but I didn't want to be pre-emptively churlish. Certainly, the trailers for the new movie look fine and I'm sure it'll have its own charms. But, like Star Wars, Indiana Jones is such a creator-driven series that any new entries can only be a coda, an homage. These are the four authentic Jones movies, featuring Spielberg and Lucas working behind the camera and Harrison Ford in front of it. And they're great. Let me be clear before I begin: even the worst Indiana Jones movie is better than any of the series' imitators. So this ranking--wholly objective and correct as it may be--should be taken in that spirit. My own choice for "worst" features inventive action, memorable jokes, and a reasonably brisk pace. That is to say, it's top-tier action-adventure and would be the best entry in almost any other franchise. That said, there can be only one best Indiana Jones movie, and the answer to that is clear. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) All of the other Jones movies are great, but this one is a masterpiece. Indiana Jones emerges fully-formed as a character in the opening sequence: the mixture of seeming competence and profound incompetence, the iconic profile, the whip.... It's all there in the first fifteen minutes. Ford is splendid in the role, turning in a comedic performance that never becomes too broad. And as the movie progresses (relentlessly--this is one of the least-flabby action movies imaginable), layers build up. His relationship with Marion, his relationship with Belloq, with Sullah, all of these feel lived-in and authentic. Really, I can't say much about this movie without gushing. It's an absolute masterpiece and belongs in the Olympus where we keep the truly great movies. No other movie in the series comes close; at best, they're all about on a level--very, very good. But not eternal. So, in that spirit.... Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) Spare me the gripes about aliens and vine-swinging bikers. This movie's more fun than you can legally have in some states on a Saturday night. Ford ages up his character, giving him heft and gravitas while keeping the hapless core. Mutt Williams is a great addition to the series, reflecting the father-son dynamic from Last Crusade but doing it better. And Marion's back, which counts for a lot. The central trick here is that Indiana Jones exists in movie-land (incidentally, that's why sight-gags like the invisible bridge in Last Crusade and the magically-appearing baddies in both this film and Temple of Doom work; no one in the Indiana Jones films has binocular vision). The original three were homages to serials of the 1930s, but this one--because it takes place in the 1950s--has to engage with a later decade of pop culture. So we get Soviets, the Bomb, and aliens (interdimensional beings, in point of fact). The look is accordingly updated; it feels, often, like a technicolor adventure flick from the 1950s rather than a grittier affair. This is all very wise and pushes the series forward rather than wallowing in nostalgia. Where the movie falls flat isn't the setting or the aliens or the vine-swinging. It's the climax. Crystal Skull--like Last Crusade--learned all the wrong lessons from the first movie. Both films think that a central draw of Indiana Jones is the puzzle-solving, figuring out the ancient traps, and so on. And, yeah, that's part of it; Raiders works so well because it grabs viewers with that initial set of preposterous traps and then drags them along. But central to Raiders is the fact that, ultimately, everything that happens is out of Indiana's control. The more he tries to control things, the worse they get. It's only when he closes his eyes and lets things happen that the situation resolves itself. Last Crusade and Crystal Skull both drop the ball; they do equally focus on the idea of letting go (literally, in the case of Last Crusade), but they clutter up the climax with the kind of puzzle-solving and decoding that Raiders wisely kept to the beginning and middle of the story. The climax is also too cluttered with characters. As much as I enjoy every individual one of them, having Indiana, Marion, Mutt, Ox, and Mac all standing around for the big scene means that no one of them gets the chance to really shine. Still and all, this is a fantastic movie--a great ending to a great series. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) Hoo boy. I specialize in midcentury American literature, so having problematic faves goes with the territory. But this one's probably the most problematic favorite thing I have out of any media, ever. Because, to be frank, it's really, really racist. I don't think it's intentionally so, not that that matters so much; it's not Birth of a Nation or anything. But it regurgitates so many aspects of the serials it is aping, unthinkingly and without any attempt to subvert or interrogate them, that it winds up just playing straight such ideas as: colonized people can't govern themselves; colonized people are barbarians who need to be "civilized"; you can't trust a "civilized" person from a colonized nation; etc etc etc. If you've seen it you know what I mean; the British literally show up with a cavalry to save the day at the last moment. Kipling probably shed a single happy tear in whatever hell he's in. That is all--let me be very unambiguous about this--very bad. It's only marginally less bad if you take for granted that (again) the Indiana Jones movies take place in movie-world rather than our own world. And, no, deleted scenes where the Good British Man observes that real Indian people don't eat chilled monkey brains don't cut it. Neither does some kind of hand-waving about how this is really a bad cult and the good Indian people don't go along with it. Because, y'know, that's colonialist talk. So. Not fantastic. And the really unfortunate thing is that (unlike Birth of a Nation), this movie--in the midst of all that--is kind of great. The first two-thirds play like a screwball comedy, with Indiana sparring with Willie Scott. And then it veers, quite abruptly, into a horror-adventure, with heart-ripping and zombie juice and, frankly, all the things that make this kind of movie enjoyable. That's a bold swing; both of these aspects are either muted or wholly absent in Raiders. Temple of Doom does what every good second film in a series should do: it changes things up, explores new avenues, tries new things. And it mostly succeeds. Willie is no Marion, but Kate Capshaw is very funny in the role. Ke Huy Quan is great as Short Round, bringing us the best sidekick in the series. And Harrison Ford is in his prime as Indy; the sequence where he's drugged and shirtless have surely danced across countless dreaming eyelids over the past decades. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) Sigh. I know, I know. "But it has Sean Connery!" Listen, I like this movie. It's probably the movie I quote the most with my friends. It's got Sean Connery. It's got Sullah back. It has Marcus Brody. I know, I know. It's just.... The whole affair is so tired. The movie's a retread of Raiders of the Lost Ark but without the nasty streak that makes that movie so entertaining. This is a safe Indiana Jones, a domesticated Indiana Jones (no wonder so many of us who love it have fond memories of watching it as children). The performances are entertaining but toothless; the climax is overburdened and underbaked just like Crystal Skull would be years later. Basically, you can tell that everyone involved just wanted to get the third contracted movie out of the way so they could move on with their lives. See? I sound like I hate it. And I don't. It's fine. It's better than any of its imitators. But next to the other two sequels to Raiders it's tame, unambitious. But let me say something nice about. The dialogue is great. Apparently Tom Stoppard did a polish on it and it really works very well. Like I say, of all the Indiana Jones movies, this is the one I quote the most, even if it's the one I revisit the least. So that's that. The absolutely and inarguably definitive ranking of the Indiana Jones movies. I've not watched all of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, so I'll not even touch on where they sit relative to the main line of movies.
Now that's sorted, we can figure out soon where Dial of Destiny fits. Initial reviews aren't great, but who knows. What we do know is that, with the original four, Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford are responsible for one masterpiece and three great sequels to it. And that's nothing to sneeze at. |
AuthorNathanael T. Booth. All views are my own. Archives
April 2024
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