Interview with Yours Truly

The IndieView website was kind enough to conduct an interview with me about my book reviewing, and it was posted yesterday.

The Stove-Junker (S.K. Kalsi)

In an excellent, depressing, and undoubtedly realistic 2012 blog post entitled " 'It Can't Be Done': The Difficulty of Growing a Jazz Audience," Kurt Ellenberger notes:

...most of the music we are trying to build an audience for is cognitively demanding. So we're looking for some marketing, education, packaging or programming strategy that will influence and/or supersede both personal taste and the enormous pressures of the dominant popular culture; at the same time, we're asking people to commit to an art form that will tax (and probably frustrate) their capabilities before, hopefully, delivering a heightened aesthetic experience.

Most people, even most educated and intelligent people, don't want to grapple with cognitively demanding material in their leisure time. Attempts to make them want to - Oprah Winfrey's 2005 "Summer of Faulkner" is a great example - are almost always foreordained to failure. Dragging those who are not accomplished swimmers into the deep end of the pool is more likely to alarm them than stimulate or satisfy them.

I say this by way of preface to introducing a beautiful novel by a clearly gifted author - S.K. Kalsi's The Stove-Junker. As it happens, Faulkner is the first author that Kalsi acknowledges in a list of influences in the "Acknowledgements" at the back of the book, and the comparison is not an over-reach, because the commonalities are apparent:

• Stream-of-consciousness writing style
• Dense, poetic, highly specific prose
• Unreliable narration
• Thickly described place-setting (in Kalsi's case, Luzerne County in Northeast Pennsylvania)
• Only a couple of inches beneath the highly figured modernist surface, you find a melodramatic, potentially pulpy story of a deeply dysfunctional family across a couple of generations, with heavy "shadows of the past" 

This last point is what makes Kalsi more Faulknerian than Joycean (Joyce is the second writer he thanks). Joyce is NOT melodramatic; he does a deep dive into ordinary clear water. Faulkner and Kalsi leap, too, but into a muck of sin and unresolved goop. That is a big difference.

The specificity of the prose is worth pondering. Let me choose a Kalsi passage that is very detailed without being difficult:

Everything can kill you. The elements, wind, water, sun, cold, heat, everything is dangerous, coiled to strike your heart. I entered the medicine aisle, surrounded by shelves of fever-reducing pills and cough syrups, diabetic foot creams and salves for insect bites, joint braces for sprained wrists and ankles, and wraps for bruised knees. They had every remedy, for everything from chronic flatulence to dry eyes, sleeplessness to foot odor, gum disease to earwax, but what about loss? Maybe St. John's Wort, maybe Stinging Nettle, maybe a cocktail of B-complex vitamins and fish oils? They offered you power bars to build muscle, testosterone pills for a lazy libido, vitamin-infused water, lotions that promised to liquefy your skin, making it buttery soft and impervious to the harmful sun. They offered ointments for psoriasis, stress packs and fiber powders to regulate your bowels. Simple solutions to complex problems.

Notice how this forces you to deal with profusion in precision, at a level of attentiveness that we seldom attempt in "real life." The fact is that generalities (even cliches) are comforting and relaxing, whereas poetic precision is exhausting. It must be taken slowly (which is part of the point). It makes you think. Many people do not want to think, or to experience anything that intensely and densely. Even romantic love, which is intense by definition and should be specific (because you love this person and not that one, right?) often resolves in people's minds and emotions into vague and universal simplicities. Easier that way.  

The audience for a novel such as this, therefore, is self-selecting once they know of its existence; it's the ones who revel in the cognitive challenges. Others will scent trouble ahead, because the instinct for avoidance of certain materials operates in them powerfully and unerringly. Needless to say, I hope you are in the first group. But I do my job by putting the facts of the case in front of you.

Plot? Characters? I'll step out one inch on this: The Stove-Junker is about a man who goes home. Or thinks he does:

...I wonder if I'm inventing my life by remembering it? Perhaps I am. Perhaps imagination is a compensation for what I cannot remember. Perhaps tale-telling to fill up the time and ease this heart is a compensation for what I cannot remember. Maybe I am imagining being home, imagining the Dutch barn, the cold air and this boy. Maybe the dog is not barking and what I think is real is just imagination?

Or perhaps there is a kinship with the movie Carnival of Souls, and at a certain point in the narrative, the protagonist Somerset Garden changes states without being ready to admit it. Clues are provided but (it will not surprise you to learn) no definite answers, because it just isn't that sort of book.

I leave the exploration to you.

  

Tuesday's Overlooked Radio: The Black Museum

I went to my long list of old time radio shows and chose an unfamiliar one at random. What I got was a great show with an interesting history, and deliciously dark – The Black Museum. It was one of several Scotland Yard-themed shows that played in the U.K. and the U.S. in the late Forties and early Fifties. A syndicated program made in England, it was produced by Harry Alan Towers and narrated by none other than Orson Welles (who also starred in The Lives of Harry Lime for Towers around the same time). The modus operandi of the show was for Welles to select an object from Scotland Yard’s “Black Museum” and lead us into a dramatization of the particular murder case it was associated with. These “curious and repellent” mementoes gave each episode its title, such as “The Brass Button” from early in the run, which I listened to. The actual case it is based on occurred in 1942, although the dramatization is so loose as to be almost unrecognizable:

August Sangret

Welles naturally makes a splendidly melodramatic host. The Black Museum differed from a U.S.-produced counterpart called Whitehall 1212 in that it was not purely procedural, but “included scenes of the actual murders and….scenes from the criminal’s point of view.” All to the benefit of this episode, which starts with an eccentric and apparently man-averse young woman sketching on the outskirts of a village in Kent. She is approached by a soldier who seems friendly enough, but won’t take no for an answer….Rape is very strongly implied, although not mentioned as such during the rest of the story. The scene is creepy and quite effective. The procedural elements that dominate the rest of the episode hold the interest well, and of course center around the brass button from a battle jacket that the soldier inadvertently left behind him.

There are nice character touches, such as the bitterness of the victim’s mum – not over the murder, but over her daughter’s oddity of character! (Adding all the details up, it is quite possible that the writer meant to suggest a lesbian sub-text.) The postal delivery-boy who discovered the body is palpably disappointed that the Scotland Yard investigators don’t grill him longer. One of the soldiers from the local base who comes under suspicion tries to stonewall the inspectors about having been AWOL at the relevant time, until he realizes that it’s a murder he’s being questioned about. The actual killer is cleverly tripped up by the inspectors when he is confronted. A background hum of gossip and chit-chat round about the village and at the local pub in the wake of the murder adds considerable atmosphere. All in all, it’s a jolly good show.

Here is more information about The Black Museum:

The Black Museum

The Black Museum

“The Brass Button” is accessible along with other episodes at this page:

The Black Museum

Many of the old time radio pages have episodes of The Black Museum, which ran 52 episodes, all still extant.

Non-Fiction Bestsellers, Often Unimpressive

Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City is going to come in for renewed attention now that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have committed to the movie version. The book has been in "development hell" for a decade, but Scorsese / DiCaprio is a high-profile - albeit somewhat predictable - outcome. Although why Scorsese thinks that DiCaprio is the right actor for every role that has ever been written is simply beyond me.

Something else I don't get is the esteem in which this book is held. Sure, it's a reasonably compelling read. But the book cannot be categorized fairly as non-fiction, because Larson constantly cheats - which is to say, makes stuff up, including dialogue and descriptions of his characters' thought processes. He goes freely into their minds on no warrant. How could one respect the author's journalistic or historical integrity? He takes the easy way out time and again.

Besides that, the yoking together of the "Devil" and "White City" themes is forced and awkward, reading on every page as if Larson is straining for the bestseller he eventually got.

It is a low form of endeavor altogether, and has had a baleful effect on other narrative non-fiction writers. Michael Capuzzo's Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916, although worth reading, is a much worse book for Larson's palpable influence, as are many others. One can practically hear the literary agents and publishers at the authors' elbows, commanding them to sex it up.
 
There is a kind of social capital to be had from reading this sort of non-fiction bestseller because others will have read them or at least heard of them. But there is an enormous variability in their quality.

Another badly overrated item that is forthcoming as a movie (James Gray / Charlie Hunnam) is David Grann's The Lost City of Z. There are no new revelations in this book, and the significance of the story is not clear. Percy Fawcett's 1925 expedition into the Amazon was an old-fashioned, underfunded, under-equipped fiasco with an unscientific goal. The "lost city" theory was unworthy of a man of intelligence, but fits in perfectly, as Grann does admit, with Fawcett's spurious spiritualism. So to me this came across more as a tale of stupidity than a tale of bravery.

There is a frisson of uneasiness to be had from the notion of the jungle swallowing so many explorers, both Fawcett's party and many of the subsequent expeditions that tried to find him. But as a functional modern magazine writer, Grann brings no sense of poetry or awe to the narrative. The chapters that describe his own adventures are especially blah and reveal him as an inadequate researcher. He gets all worked up over seeing a supposedly inaccessible document that was already available in English translation and that you or I could have found. He offers a very sketchy summary in his last chapter of some interesting modern scholarship concerning the Amazon region which seems meant to vindicate poor Fawcett, and to justify Grann's own superfluous trek into the jungle, but it does not accomplish either task convincingly, and so brings the book to a flat conclusion.

"The Ballad of John and Yoko"

Bill Crider posted this as a "Song of the Day" at his blog, and I couldn't resist commenting, because I have thought about this song a lot:

For such a charming and funny song, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" actually posed a challenge to pop singer-songwriters that has not been much taken up: to dash off songs as quick commentaries on what is going on right this minute. Doing this well would require keen observational and verbal skills, as well as ready access to catchy and functional tunes that can frame the lyrics (so perhaps it simply takes too much talent!). The notion of newsy songs is related (as Lennon's title indicates) to the ballad tradition, which has had some continuing relevance in folk music, Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" perhaps being the best-known example; and also to Tom Lehrer and Mark Russell-style satiric political songs. But I'm not aware of anyone out there doing quite what Lennon did here.

Acting...It's Not for Sissies (Nicole Comer)

Although Entertainment Tonight and pre-awards red carpet shows would have you believe otherwise, acting really isn't that glamorous a profession. At any given time, the rewards of fame and money that many associate with acting are flowing to at most a couple of hundred individuals, among countless thousands who are plying the craft. (Of course, you can substitute the words music, writing, sports, and quite a few others for "acting" in that sentence; it truly has become a "winner take all" world.) Worse, nothing, not even an Academy Award, guarantees continued placement in that group. If you don't believe me, take a gander at the complete IMDB credits of Faye Dunaway.

And yet, for those that love their art and can't imagine doing anything else, "working actor" is a proud, realistic, and honorable badge. Nicole Comer's delightful book is aimed at that population, and those who would join it. You'll have to get your starshine fix somewhere else.

Comer has been in the trenches for a good while, as a performer, coach, staffing agent, and, inevitably, odd-jobber. Along the way, she has developed a keen sense of how acting works as a business, especially in Los Angeles (and it could fairly be said that this guide is L.A.-centric). She has gathered her insights, anecdotes, scar tissue, and sass into this short, non-nonsense book that bypasses discussion of acting technique (she assumes you have other sources for that) for a penetrating look at how to optimize your chances for survival in a difficult industry.

Is the book just for aspiring actors, then? Far from it, actually. I think that anyone is who is trying to freelance or build a solo service business in any field would benefit strongly from what Comer shares here. The book takes less than two hours to read and is a heck of a lot of fun besides, so it is an excellent investment.

As it happens, beyond being a film critic myself since my college days - I made part of my living at it in my 20s, imagine - I have other connections to the Los Angeles film and television scene. A college friend has worked as an entertainment reporter there, and my sister, who has a bachelor's degree in drama and a master's degree in television, has spent many years in casting and production. Through them and their connections I have heard a lot about the ups and downs of the business. And Nicole Comer is exactly right, it is not for the faint-hearted. 

Comer has solid brass-tacks advice on such issues as finding your acting niche (you can't expand beyond your niche until you have one), having headshots done (a very thorough chapter), joining the Screen Actor's Guild, working with agents and talent managers, attending workshops (an extremely valuable activity), keeping up with the TV world (viewing every series becomes part of your work), and navigating "pilot season." Just about everything she says chimes with discussions I have had with my sister, and both have wickedly funny stories about the jerks one encounters in the industry (along with surprisingly many solid, grounded individuals).

I think the only bone of contention between their points of view would involve Los Angeles theater, specifically non-Equity productions. Comer is kind of down on the idea of involving oneself too heavily in this world, suggesting that daytime theater rehearsals impair an actor's ability to take auditions for film, television, and commercials, and that industry types don't much attend non-Equity shows, so the chances of being seen and appreciated are few.

My sister, who has worked extensively as a stage manager on non-Equity shows, would demur. She tells me that she can almost always re-arrange rehearsal work around an actor's audition needs, and that industry types indeed show up at the performances with great frequency, in part because there are usually at least a couple of experienced television actors in the cast of any given show. She has been surprised by who she has seen in audiences. 

Well, great minds don't always agree. But Nicole Comer is never doctrinaire about any of the opinions she expresses; she is explicit about the fact that she is coaching from the perspective of what she has seen and experienced herself, and Your Mileage May Vary. You actors out there would do well to avail yourselves of what she has to offer. As a freelance writer, I learned from it too.  

The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range, 1943-1962 (David Meuel)

Even though the literature on film noir continues to grow at a dizzying pace, there is still some virgin territory to be claimed. David Meuel's The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range, 1943-1962 would appear to be the first book-length treatment of its subject (I say "appears to be" because such assertions have a way of being disproven later). The concept of noir westerns as a subset of "off-genre noirs" goes back a long way, and has been discussed in sections of books (such as Alain Silver et al.'s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, which first appeared in 1979) and in articles (such as Michael Shepler's 2008 "Sagebrush Noir: The Western as 'Social Problem" Film," which oddly goes unmentioned by Meuel). But it has long merited fuller treatment, and Meuel's well-written, engaging study is an excellent start on that. There will certainly be more books on the subject ahead.

Discussions of film noir can easily bog down in definitional disputes, which even though I am a participant at one of the best noir discussion boards, The Blackboard, I try to steer clear of. Although "film noir" was first used as a descriptor in France in the late 1940s, it was not a recognized term in the United States until the early 1970s. Therefore, as one of our finest noir scholars James Naremore has pointed out, it is "a concept that was generated ex post facto." No director or screenwriter of the "classic noir period" (fairly close to Meuel's defined dates of 1943 to 1962) would have known at the time that noir films were what they were making. It was inevitable that complete consensus on the use of the term would never be reached, and it has not been; as Naremore states, "no writer has been able to find the category's necessary and sufficient characteristics." The edges of the phenomenon are blurry even if the core is not.

In dealing with a branch of off-genre noir, David Meuel is necessarily operating at the edges, where disputes about what is in and what is out are potentially the most bruising. I'm not going to worry it. He has chosen 21 films by 11 directors to concentrate on, while identifying another 50 relevant movies in an appendix. His arguments on behalf of the inclusion of the 21 films are reasonably persuasive without amounting to a "Meuel test" for what constitutes a noir western. Thematic complexity, psychological depth, visual style, and bleakness of outlook all figure into his analysis, but in differing proportions with respect to each title and director.

When you look at it that way, the scope of the noir western could be construed very broadly. Any double fan of noir and westerns, and there are many, will readily think of some titles that Meuel has not listed - Joseph Kane's Ride the Man Down or Don Siegel's The Duel at Silver Creek, for instance (both 1952). In fact, it is harder to exclude many 1946-1960 Westerns from consideration than it is to include them. If one combs carefully through any of the numerous printed iterations of Phil Hardy's indispensable work on the Western, many of the descriptions of obscure A-/B+ Westerns spring off the page as meriting viewing and additional research in connection with this theme. And no one, as far as I am aware, has even started working on the noir strain in television Westerns.

So Meuel is a pioneer, and all that ultimately matters is whether he is a good pioneer, which he manifestly is. He found the spot-on publisher for this sort of material, McFarland, which has long specialized in offering the findings of independent scholars in popular culture, whose work is many cuts above mere fan writing, but generally more accessible and less jargon-ridden than the books that university presses put out. (Many such volumes are invaluable, but may present more of a challenge to the uninitiated.)

Well before the tag "noir" was applied to Westerns, the sort of movies that Meuel discusses were called adult, psychological, serious, and literary Westerns, and later, as we headed into the Sixties and Seventies, revisionist Westerns. An equally good description for some of them would be "arthouse Westerns"; in fact, a book parallel to Meuel's and covering many of the same films could be written that minimized references to noir and concentrated on how the arthouse attitude came to shape a genre one might think would be immune to it. I have a soft spot for many of the more extreme arthouse Westerns that Meuel resists a little bit - Anthony Mann's The Furies, William Wellman's Track of the Cat, Delmer Daves' Jubal - although he does very well by Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, one of the very first arthouse Westerns. Somehow John Ford always escapes being labeled "arthouse," despite the obvious fact that every single last thing in his films, every frame, is intensely considered.

The shift to more "adult" Westerns involved a number of directors, among whom Anthony Mann has received his just due, and Delmer Daves definitely has not. Meuel has a fine feel for the different personalities and strategies of these directors and honors all of them, who in addition to Mann, Ford, Wellman, and Daves include Budd Boetticher and Sam Fuller (long cult favorites), Raoul Walsh (not one bit inferior to the more celebrated Howard Hawks), Robert Wise (a supreme craftsman), Henry King, Allan Dwan, and Andre De Toth.

In short, this is a highly worthy addition to the film buff's bookshelf.