Picture Books 004: Raymond Briggs, GENTLEMAN JIM

Drawn & Quarterly · 1980

The Comics Journal saved my life.

Okay, that's too melodramatic. And even if, in retrospect, I'm sure I would have found my way out of the aesthetic and moral dead zone which comic books at the close of 1998 had become for me, the Journal's list of the hundred best comics of the twentieth century (officious, elitist, and pugnacious as the Journal always was) blew in air from a clearer, more human country. Superheros had become my life, the only narrative form I was willing to consider. Sure, like many comics fans I gave lip service to the idea that comics was a medium and superheros only a genre, but it wasn't old Pogo and Tintin books that littered the carpet of my one-room. I was beginning to feel desperate, my dreams slipping away from me; if Vertigo didn't respond to my proposal for a serious, gritty take on Ultra the Multi-Alien, I would never be a writer.*

I think I first became aware of the Journal's list when some cantankerous denizens of the superhero-centric message board I mostly called home posted a link to gripe and cavill at. Only a handful of superhero titles! Jack Kirby (himself) no higher than #30! Magazine cartoons on a list of comics! It was the worst, most fraudulent exercise in humbug elitism yet perpetuated by those assholes and degenerates at Fantagraphics, Inc.

I stared thunderstruck at the list. Names I had almost forgotten washed over me, names from the Smithsonian Book Of Newspaper Comics which I had pored over in youth, checked out from the library again and again in order to watch Hu Shee save Terry Lee's life with a car and a revolver, puzzle over the long-dead slang employed by the raffish Moon Mullins and Barney Google, learn what sex was from Al Capp, and stare at the J. R. Williams panel cartoons so hard as to practically will myself to step into their lazy, nostalgic neverland. It was in that instant, though I wouldn't realize it for another five years, that the spell which superheros had cast over me in my late teens (something surely to do with sexuality and power and a weak sense of self) was broken. The day the 210th issue of the Journal came out, I bought it and devoured it. The first thing I bought after that was Seth's It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken (#52 on the list).

(I cannot express how it altered my life. I was finally given permission to love all the old things I had always loved as a child — black-and-white movies, early comic strips, blues and jazz and ragtime, civilization built out of wood and stone with no plastic anywhere — but I was also, in Seth's sad chase after a fictive shadow, warned not to let nostalgia get the upper hand; love what you love, but think first. But all of this is nothing to the point.)

I began to steep myself in the history of cartooning, haunting used bookstores and snapping up old New Yorker cartoon collections, old newspaper strip collections, old comic books that did not feature superheros. I read allusive European art comics, flashy Japanese sci-fi comics, dry Canadian autobio comics and the weird, gross effusions of the underground. Most of the places I got my education from are no longer in existence; but one of the books that most thoroughly reoriented my outlook, and marked a subtle sea-change in all of comics even at the time, I bought at a national chain store which still does a roaring trade today. The store was Borders; the book was Ethel And Ernest by Raymond Briggs.

This isn't the place to go into a description of Ethel And Ernest; I'm six paragraphs in and haven't yet mentioned the nominal subject of this review. Suffice it to say that I consider it one of the four or five greatest works of art in the medium of comics, and reading it actually made me angry that the Journal hadn't waited until after the century was over to compile its list: how would the comics scavengers of the future be alerted to its presence? They needed this book. Well; I needed it, anyway. Its rich depiction of two ordinary, almost defiantly humble lives (the author's parents) set the standard for the vision of humanism which remains my most important criterion in evaluating art. The sickening self-satisfaction and meaningless eventness** of superhero — hell, nearly all — comics were intolerable after Ethel And Ernest.

So when Drawn & Quarterly republished one of Briggs' old books from the 1980s, there was no question but that I would snap it up. I'm pretty sure its purchase price set me in the red (that's true of about half the books I've really wanted for the past ten years), but just having it was enough. I didn't even read it. (Well, I tried once, on a long road trip. I've rarely been sicker.)

Gentleman Jim isn't Ethel And Ernest (very few books are), but as Seth's*** introduction notes perceptively, the dreamy, uneducated Jim Bloggs isn't a million miles away from Ernest, and simple, agreeable Hilda Bloggs is uncomfortably like Ethel. (If you've read or seen When The Wind Blows, it's the same couple again.) It's about as savage a caricature as Briggs seems capable of when dealing with people — the real target of his satirical scorn isn't Jim's rather stupid, Walter Mitty-esque attempts to live out a romantic fantasy, but the hyperlegalization of British life that has passed him by; officials and busybodies and superior persons of all sorts earn his ire. Though flipping back through the book it's not the dryly whimsical plot that stands out, but the fantasies, two-page spreads in gorgeous colors belying the drab hues of 1980 England.

But what's most fascinating that among the adventuresome fantasies Jim entertains — highwayman, cowboy, RAF pilot — is wedged the Executive, as seen in advertisements of the late 70s, all feathered hair and miles of brass. Briggs's sardonic point being that the illusion of wealthy competence is just another addled dream borrowed from the fantasy-merchants of television and magazines.

It's a beautiful book — Brigg's colored-pencil aesthetic was only bettered in Ethel And Ernest — but it is nevertheless slight, a brief fable of modernity that looks and reads so much like 1980 Britain that I half expect to hear the theme from Fawlty Towers as I close it. I'm glad to have read it, but I'm much more eager to see Briggs tackle another book for grown-ups.

*Sadly, nothing in this sentence was exaggerated for comic effect.

**By which I mean just one damn thing after another.

***Yes, him again.

Friday Film Festival 004: Réalisme Poétique

(I swear one of these days I'm actually going to post this on a Friday.)

As far as French film movements go, Poetic Realism lags far behind the New Wave of the late 50s and early 60s in terms of popular recognition and critical interest, but the loose collection of films that have been grouped together under its heading constitute probably the first great film movement of the sound era. Without the inventiveness, patience, and lyricism of its great directors (Renoir, Carné, Duvivier), French film might well have been just another regional entertainment system producing dull costume dramas and lame popular comedies instead of the world's greatest repository of cinematic brilliance — outside of American film. (That's right, I've got my biases straight.)

At least that's what I've gleaned from a haphazard, lazy self-education in cinema history; before this week I hadn't watched any poetic-realist movies. But as someone much more interested in the historical roots of film than in most of its later flowering, I figured I'd want to do more than just read up on the thing. On the hundred-gig hard drive where I keep most of my movie collection, there's a folder marked "Poetic Realism" with six or seven movies inside. I chose three of them because I thought they were the most highly-praised of the genre, so why shouldn't I start with the best? And now I'm going to watch them and see what I think.

1. L'Atalante

(France) Jean Vigo · 1934

I like smallness. Like G. K. Chesterton in the quote that kicked off this blog, I admire work which operates in narrowly-defined boundaries and covers that terrain completely. There are lots of stock descriptions for this sort of thing: jewel-like, "an N in miniature," and that old standby which I've used a lot and will do doubt use again, "a minor masterpiece." So it's not very surprising that I would find a lot to love in a movie which spends most of its time on a single set: the titular canal barge that goes up and down the Seine between Paris and Le Havre.

There's a lot to chew over in this movie, from the symbolism (the wedding cortège which opens it looks more like a funeral procession, and the last shot of the long, narrow barge from above makes it look like a phallic coffin) to the psychosexual relations between the characters (Père Jules and the Kid are both a vaudeville comedy team and a hobo/punk archetype), and I'm not confident enough of my reaction to it to say more without further study; my first impression is simply that it fills in the gaps between G. W. Pabst's social realist dramas of the late 20s and the neorealism of the postwar Italy, though with an allusive, close-framed quality to much of the camera work that keeps it from ever appearing documentary: everything is an aesthetic choice.

Michel Simon as Père Jules is one of the great screen creations, like Chaplin's Little Tramp or W. C. Fields' standard character, inserted into a somewhat conventional melodrama (He's the jealous type, She wants to experience Life in the Big City), transforming both the melodrama into something deeper and stranger, and the comic caricature he seems at the beginning into something else. There are many superb sequences in this film, but the one that lingers with me is the beginning of his search through Paris for Juliete; he's filmed from so far away at first that we can't tell who it is — even though his walk and carriage have hitherto been distinctive enough to know him by silhouette — and it's only when we get up close that we recognize the long, droopy face. He's become a human being; "just another" human being if you interpret the film as ending on a downbeat note, or "at last a" human being if you see it as being triumphant.

I'm not surprised it's Jim Jarmusch's favorite movie. He's one of the rare modern directors I'd be interested in following closely.

2. Pépé le Moko

(France) Julien Duvivier · 1937

If I had to find things to love about L'Atalante, there's no such hunt to be had with Pépé le Moko. This is one of the great crime movies of the thirties, and Jean Gabin's central performance as the title character is one of the finest distillations of criminal suavity I've ever seen on screen. Sure, there are moments when it goes awry -- his attempt at "distraught" only serves to remind us how long ago 1937 was -- but think of the other cinematic gangsters on offer at the time. Preening Cagney? Sneering Robinson? Leering Raft? Compared to them Gabin exudes cool, control, and professionalism; his very quietness is menacing.

The movie looks great, too: where L'Atalante was clearly filmed cheap, on location, in a nearly experimental style, Pépé le Moko has the assurance and style of the great studio pictures of the era, its location shots in the actual Algerian Casbah only adding to the mystique and atmosphere of one of the finest mises-en-scène in crime film. In fact it's not hard to see Casablanca — especially the fantastic first twenty minutes — in Duvivier's Algiers. (Though now I'm all curious to see the Hollywood remake of Pépé, Algiers, starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr in 1938. I like both of them, but somehow I don't think it'll feel nearly as immediate.) Special note should also be made of the great character actors making up Pépé's gang: the idiot with the vacant smile and the sharp dresser obsessed with cup-and-ball should show up in every gangster movie, and Lucas Gridoux as the cringing, insinuating Inspector Slimane out-Lorres Lorre with a performance that would have made a superb Iago.

In fact for so much of the movie it was such a plain, if stylish, thriller that I wondered how it ever got mixed in with the Poetic Realism crowd. But the final scenes, beginning with the long walk down out of the Casbah towards the docks, answered my questions: Duvivier commits deeply psychological, even experimental filmmaking as Pépé goes to his death. (Um, spoilers, I guess.) The only outright murder in the film is filmed in a fantastic psychological nearly-noir style, too; I'm especially a fan of the horrible player piano that won't shut up, a grim counterpoint to a double death. But mostly it was just a great, sleek crime-cum-melodrama film, the kind of movie that proved that Hollywood had no monopoly on stylish, witty, and deeply felt entertainment.

3. La règle du jeu (The Rules Of The Game)

(France) Jean Renoir · 1939

One of the pitfalls of being an Anglophile for much of my adult life is that it's made it much harder to be a Francophile. It feels odd for an American to claim to be a bigger fan of repression than of passion, but I couldn't help comparing the way the aristocrats in La règle du jeu comported themselves with to the way similar aristocrats in the British books and movies I know behave. The outbursts of emotion, the resignation to human imperfection, the willingness to drink and dance and laugh — basically, I'm disoriented by a country-house party in which "making a scene" isn't understood as the worst of all possible outcomes.

All of which is beside the point of whether this is a good movie: the question is not whether I understand the emotions and actions of the characters as being appropriate for the culture I grew up in (or perhaps aspire to), but whether I believe them in the context of the movie. And of course I do; Jean Renoir's magnificent, subtle camera, constantly in motion, inserts me more fully into the world of the La Colinière, both upstairs and down, the bedrooms, the hallways, and the shooting grounds. Far more than Vigo's barge, even more so than Duvivier's Casbah, this is a world both complete within itself and wholly believable as a real space in which real people move and talk and commit adultery and murder.

Like L'Atalante, I'm going to have to watch this again — preferably the Criterion edition, as the transfer (and its subtitles) which I downloaded left a lot to be desired — but it's a superb movie, one which achieves the rare novelistic effect of being about many different people, telling many different stories, and covering many different themes: class, sex, violence, art, money, lust, failure, history, truth. Even, despite my instinctive aversion to the French style of romance (and the balancing French style of cynicism), one of the most deeply humanist movies I've seen.

(There — I told myself I could write about it without bringing up Gosford Park or Robert Altman.)

But I'm not at all sure how this is a poetic-realist film, unless the unusual immediacy of the camera work is what qualifies it; out of these three, it is the least interior, least psychological. Everything is on the surface, and that's what's great about it. In fact, after watching all three of these movies I'm far less certain of what Poetic Realism is than I was before. I suppose I'll need to spend more time watching other French films of the 1930s for comparison's sake. Well; based on how much I enjoyed myself here, that's not an unattractive prospect.

Book Report 008: Walter Mosely, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS

Washington Square · 1990

Oh, man, is that more like it.

Look, I'm an English major lit nerd who loves soaking in the quiet backwaters of Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian (V) literature, where the surfaces are but rarely ruptured by a fleck of life however lazy . . . but I'm also a genre reader who will blow through a crime paperback in an afternoon and count it time well spent.

This is my first encounter with Walter Mosley (spoilers: definitely not my last), and where has Easy Rawlins been all my life? Though I'm not sure I would have understood as much about him when I was a teenager in love with Marlowe and Spade. (I'm very ahem white.) But if an adulthood of listening to jazz and blues and soul has done anything it's helped me cross the racial borders of the imagination (imagination being the key word; I'm not so foolish as to think I'll ever really know what it's like to be a black man in midcentury Los Angeles), and after closing Devil In A Blue Dress I was prepared to call Philip Marlowe a rough draft; his nobility is unearned, his outsider status unenforced. Easy Rawlins, on the other hand, is as much Existential Man as Black Man.

This kind of highfalutin theorizing is only possible because Mosley approaches his novel with unusual literary skill. Not that he shows off — the borders of the crime-novel genre are too rigorously enforced for that — but he manages the extremely difficult task of embedding metaphor in plot and character, without ever dropping the naturalist façade of hardboiled tradition, with such aplomb that I'm left wondering if it's just my imagination.

It's not. Easy is both himself, a deftly drawn character whose observational powers and ability to take a beating never strain credulity, and a sort of archetypal Twentieth-Century Black Male, born in Louisiana, raised in Texas, participant in World War II, fetched up in Los Angeles and making the gestures of citizenship and homeownership without being granted either the privacy of a citizen or the right to self-defense of a homeowner. (His story is that of jazz, and of the blues, over the same period. In 1948, the year Devil In A Blue Dress is set, the L.A. scene was perhaps the hoppingest in black music. Unless it was Chicago.) And the central moral struggle of Rawlins' life, his need/distaste for his murderous gangster friend Mouse, is as self-conscious a metaphor for black manhood as anything in Richard Wright or August Wilson. (In fact, the one possible misstep I can name is that having both Mouse and The Voice as foils to Rawlins' instincts feels like redundancy; I wouldn't be surprised if one or the other disappeared from the series.)

The plot, as far as it goes, is more or less familiar to those who know their Raymond Chandler: the standard noir themes of blackmail, adultery, incest, and large sums of cash are all in play. But setting it among black L.A. — in Watts, which Wikipedia assures me will become important in future novels — adds an extra dimension of psychological tension, an element of totalitarian danger.

If I didn't have this dumb blog project I would be on the library's website right now reserving every Mosley book they've got. As it is, I'll have to forbear continuing the adventures of Easy Rawlins (and others). But man oh man I can't wait.

Album Shuffle 006: Curve, DOPPELGÄNGER

Anxious · 1992

About halfway through the album I found myself asking myself grumpily why I had it in the first place; surely I couldn't have thought that anything this monochrome and repetitive would be a priority in my listening life someday. Glancing through the factoids a single search gleans, I realized why: because this is the band that people always say Garbage ripped off.

I don't like Garbage either.

That's not exactly true. I haven't listened enough to Garbage to know whether I like them; and if I was able to just choose one Curve song and soak in it for a while I bet I'd like them just swell, but over the course of an album (even if it is a mercifully brief 11-song one; 90s British indie got one thing right anyway) they shift and moan and jackhammer and flare in a very narrow groove and after I've said that they sound like My Bloody Valentine except instead of Kevin Shields it's Trent Reznor and instead if Bilinda Butcher it's late-period Madonna (without the memorable lyrics any such substitutions would imply), there's not a lot left to say.

It's quite true that I haven't listened to much shoegaze outside of one narrow groove (Loveless and, er, that's it), that I haven't listened at all to the electronic-industrial it was apparently Curve's stroke of genius to apply to shoegaze (one disgusted run through The Downward Spiral aside), and that there's really nothing aside from some of Toni Halliday's vocal tics and the distant memory of old Shep Pettibone beats to remind me of Madonna. So there's a lot of untested assumptions running through my approach to the album. But nevertheless I was getting ready to write it off as another bad bet, composing at least some of the above in my head as I pulled into the garage . . . .

And then I unjacked my iPod from the car stereo and put in headphones instead and !

Doppelgänger sounds a lot better on headphones. This is about all I'm willing to say in its favor so far, though you may if you wish color me intrigued. It still sounds overly bright and busy, those blocky jackhammer presets getting in the way of hearing anything else, but at least I can tell that Halliday's singing lyrics now. (Even if I keep wanting her to sing "Vogue" over top of it.) Another quick search, and it seems that "Faît Accompli" was the big single. Well, I'll see what I can get out of it. No promises, though.

And then I might check out this Garbage I've heard so much about too . . . .

Album Shuffle 005: Fela Ransome Kuti & The Afrika 70, GENTLEMAN

EMI · 1973

I'm afraid there's going to be a lot of "OH OF COURSE NOW I FINALLY GET IT" in the course of this blog; especially since I'm limiting my music talk to stuff I haven't heard/paid attention to previously, I'm mostly going to be featuring stuff I haven't previously gotten, and my self-image as a perceptive, sensitive, and thoughtful music-absorber requires me to at least go through the motions of understanding what I hear.

Which would frankly be a better introductory paragraph to saying thumbs down Fela Kuti you suck, but I'm neither that iconoclastic nor that stupid. Oh of course now I finally get it. Partially, at least.

I'd been avoiding Fela Kuti's music for a while, telling myself that it was on the principle of ignoring the elephant in the room while I rooted around for the lesser-known treasures. (Similarly, I've heard less Bob Marley than U-Roy, Lee Perry, or Burning Spear.) But really it was because when I first tried to get into him I couldn't focus; the music just slid past my brain, funky and sweet and hard-charging but going on for too long for me to take it in; after about four minutes my attention would wander and it could have been anything playing. What was the good of that? So I left Fela alone, resenting him slightly for not being more pop.

But today, it was precisely the length and structure that grabbed me. For reasons which I won't bother to go into here, I've spent a lot of time listening to very long songs; in fact for a while I was listening to nothing but songs which took up an entire side of a vinyl record. So I've become used to a certain ebb-and-flow in my long, "unstructured" jams. Start slow, build, crescendo, break, return, build, crescendo, fade. You know how it works as well as I.

But Fela jarred me out of my assumptions by kicking off "Gentleman" with a handful of bars of wicked funk, then cutting the band out entirely while he improvises, hard, for nearly four minutes all alone on the sax. Then, just after I'd given up hope and was settling in for a session of Anthony Braxton without the skronk, Tony Allen drops a beat; and the full-band funk that blows in behind him is all the sweeter and sweatier for having held off for so long. It's still eight minutes before a vocal line comes in (apart from the shouts Fela gave himself as encouragement during the solo), and the lyric — I no be gentleman at all, I be Africa man original — plays havoc with colonial assumptions and the aesthetics of civilization.

(Which you could say the same thing about James Brown and George Clinton but you'd sound like a dick, so why insist on interpreting Fela Kuti through the cultural-studies fog? Knee-jerk response to "non-Western" culture? (Non-Western in quotes obviously because of Fela's deep indebtedness to Westerners like James Brown, Pharoah Sanders, etc.) (But this week of stupid Vampire Weekend arguments has left me gun-shy about deploying the discourse of race and privilege.))

The two songs which make up the second side, "Fefe Na Efe" and "Igbe," are more classically structured as jams; the former, in its deconstruction of an Ashanti proverb about women holding their breasts when they run, is groovier and closer to the American funk I know; the latter rocks harder and left me feeling exhausted but in a good way, exhilarated.

I have, like any good music nerd, a lot more Fela Kuti, and I'm feeling much less intimidated about diving into it now. I'm looking forward to placing this in the context of a career. It sounds like a major highlight, but is it? Stay tuned.

Book Report 007: Ronald Firbank, CAPRICE

New Directions · 1917

One of the most vertiginous kinds of reading experiences is when a writer makes you work hard to understand what's going on (like say a modernist), but what's going on is so frivolous and silly that it doesn't matter (like say a humorist). Ronald Firbank has that quality; and apart from Max Beerbohm in certain moods and maybe Oscar Wilde at his most delirious I can't think of too many others.

But it's not like it's hard work; it's just that shaggy-dog stories told in elliptical snatches of highly allusive dialogue and jewel-like sentences of vivid imagery but almost no connective tissue are scarce on the ground, so the muscles that you exercise in reading the thing aren't used to being worked at the same time.

Is there a plot? I suppose there is; something about an aspiring actress and stolen silver and bohemian relationships — but it doesn't matter in any sense, because the entire thing is so extravagantly artificial it might as well be a Beardsley drawing set in motion, with no relation to the real world at all except in fragmented images and sudden half-glimpses of shadowy depths that the tinkling, brittle prose, skimming along the surface, never sounds.

Firbank was gay; and not in the Oscar Wilde hush-hush-dreadful-shame way or the Max Beerbohm who-cares-died-a-virgin way, but out and flamboyant and promiscuous and rich so nobody could touch him. Susan Sontag included his work in the canon of camp, and though to a Rocky Horror Picture Show-reared ear his silliness may be too understated to register, every sentence here is suffused with a such a finicky cattiness, so mannered and arch, that it practically screams QUEER if you're familiar with the prose styles of the period. Oh, and nearly everyone in the book is coded gay even if there is only one overtly homosexual relationship, a parody of tragic lesbianism.

There's also racism. Or at least he keeps dropping in "niggers" as set decoration; it's never clear whether his references here to jazz and ragtime are meant to be derogatory, since his world is so full of inverted and sideways values. Firbank was a cosmopolitan traveler, and blackness and "savagery" are major themes in some of his other work; this bears further study. (I bet there's a decent paper somewhere on the meanings of black musicians in Firbank, Wodehouse, Waugh, etc.; compare and contrast with selected texts of the Harlem Renaissance, and you've got a university-press book. You're welcome.)

There's little else to say; the book is tiny, a bare fillip of a novella (which doesn't explain why this is being posted so late), a sort of appetite-whetter for more and bigger Firbankery. Which I will get to (I've got a few more of his works lying about); but I'm glad I began with this apéritif.

Picture Books 003: John Stanley, THIRTEEN GOING ON EIGHTEEN

Drawn & Quarterly · 1963-64

I'm not ordinarily a big fan of repeating names like this — when shuffling a playlist I get annoyed if two songs by the same artist show up twice in ten songs — but this arrived in the mail two days after I turned in my thoughts on Melvin Monster, and I devoured it immediately, so I might as well talk about it.

I think I first read the title Thirteen Going On Eighteen in one of Trina Robbins' many books on girls' comics; for whatever reason, the fulsome praise Robbins poured on the comic stuck with me, and I added the title to the mental list I kept when scrounging happily in back issue bins and dusty longboxes, lo these ten years and more agone. In the back of a bottom shelf of random Dell, Gold Key, and Valiant (there are always Valiant) comics in a huge vaultlike shrine to its now-deceased owner's pop-culture obsessions, I found a handful of issues; my memory suggests that I only bought one the first go-round, either because they were expensive (that is, upwards of two dollars) or because I wasn't sure I'd like it and had a lot of other stuff I wanted to check out too. Anyway, I definitely remember sitting in my car racking up minutes on the parking meter afterwards, slipping that issue (I think it was #22, but I'm not digging through my own longboxes to check) out of its mylar bag (gosh, remember mylar bags? all my comics purchases nowadays have spines) and reading it through in one delicious gulp.

Which is exactly how I read this big slab of fake newsprint, in one sitting, my smile getting bigger as the comic I knew struggled out of its first halting drawn-by-some-other-guy issues and into the whip-smart, manic, bitchy, and surreal series it was for the most glorious run in teen comics history, twenty issues and out. My collector's impulse is sporadic and lazy; I'd only read about half the material in the book before, but it's been years since I revisited it and it's better than I remembered, and I remembered it as my favorite comic book series ever.

I talked about Stanley's strengths as a cartoonist and writer last time, but I want to emphasize again my conviction that there has rarely been a better cartoonist in terms of pacing, structure, and dialogue, especially in stories this ephemeral and fleeting. Thirteen Going On Eighteen is a "teen comic" in the vein of Archie or Marvel's Patsy Walker, but thanks to Stanley's loose, cartoony art and down-to-earth, sarcastic wit it's neither as visually glamorous nor as goofily brain-dead as teen comics nearly always are. Val and Judy are supposed to be thirteen, and though after a bit they simply occupy the generalized "eternal teenager" zone of Archie, they're never sexualized in the way that Betty and Veronica nearly always were from Dan DeCarlo on down: Stanley is too true to his own comic vision of frustration and ineptitude for that. His characters are fully-rounded comic creations: delusional, irritable, quick to fight and forgive, self-dramatizing, and manipulative in ways that leave the blank, unmotivated conflict-followed-by-bonhomie of the Archie universe in the dust.

As series editor and designer Seth puts it in his introduction: "Can you imagine Reggie sitting in his room alone? What would he be thinking?" Whatever the scriptwriter needed him to be thinking to advance whatever ridiculous plot he's involved in, of course; but when Stanley's Val or Judy sits alone and thinks, it's both psychologically true and funny all through.

It would be nearly impossible for me to oversell the quality of this work. The only complaint I can make is that since this volume collects the first nine issues it doesn't cover the series' peak yet, but it's good all the way through. And I suppose if you have something against teen comics, or comic books period, or unambitious situation comedy in general, you might dislike it. But as someone who has attempted to put brush to paper, wrestled with issues of pacing and rapid-fire dialogue, and accidentally knocked over inkstands, blotting out hours of work at a go -- that is, as someone who's tried to be a cartoonist — John Stanley is an inspiration, a standard to live up to, and a hero. I read him in the same way a studio musician might listen to jazz: for the sheer pleasure of seeing it all so competently done.

Friday Film Festival 003: Shakespeare Noir

Over the past ten years, I've become the kind of person who will say, with a weary, condescending sigh, that he doesn't really like movies. I say this for two reasons: first, as a sort of low-level guerilla warfare against the wholesale dominance of our cultural discourse by film. If I have to read one more person justifying their interest in a song/band/genre by talking about how Martin fucking Scorcese used it over the end credits of whatever, I'm going to . . . uh, roll my eyes and grumble to myself like I've been doing much of my adult life. If people are allowed to walk around saying that they don't really listen to music, or they don't really read books, or that they don't watch sports or follow politics, then surely I'm allowed to place a premium on my own interests at the expense of whatever "cultural conversation" others think I might be missing out on.

But the second reason I say it is because it's quicker than saying that I actually do like movies a lot, I just don't like movies in the way that most people like movies, or the kinds of movies that most people like, since people tend to think you're judging them when you say that. (It's why I've stopped saying I don't watch TV even though it's still factually accurate; I watch a handful of shows on my computer a while after they air, via means of varying legality. When I can find the time.) But bringing myself to acknowledge the fact that, yes, I actually do like movies after I've spent so much time saying otherwise, has been something of a journey for me.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this Friday (ha) Film Festival project owes most of its existence to the Battleship Pretension podcast, which I've been listening to for almost two years mostly because Tyler and David hang out in the L.A. comedy scene, and they had some of my favorite comedians on, and I liked what I heard and kept listening. Hearing two smart, unpretentious guys talk about movies in a smart, unpretentious way, week after week, has encouraged me to think that, hey, maybe I can like movies without surrendering to All That Shit I Don't Care For. And since my tastes are largely unrepresented in the film-geek discourse, maybe I might even have something to contribute.

Anyway, BP's most recent episode was Shakespeare In Film. (Or rather, films of Shakespeare plays; I was afraid they would get into stuff like Shakespeare In Love, but they didn't even mention it.) Not having had a Festival lined up for this week, I thought that sounded interesting; and I happened to have the materials for one lying around.

These are all black-and-white film adaptations of Shakespeare plays; they aren't necessarily the most revered versions of any of the plays, and they certainly aren't the most popular. But I, as both a fan of Shakespeare (just the standard English major's appreciation, I haven't gone full geek on his work, though I was unreasonably annoyed whenever Tyler or David, whose combined knowledge of movies vastly dwarfs mine, got something wrong about the plays) and someone who is gradually discovering within himself a keen interest in black-and-white cinematography, have really been looking forward to watching these movies for the past week.

1. Hamlet
(UK) Laurence Olivier · 1948

Hamlet is the Shakespeare play I've studied the most extensively and has a solid lock on being my favorite of the tragedies: its place as the usual junior-year-of-high-school Shakespeare play caught me at exactly the right age for the title character's self-important navel-gazing, Ophelia's wasted life and love, and the earthy humanism of the minor characters to seem like the most important things ever committed to paper. Even today it's difficult for me to think of it in any other terms but Monolithic Classic of Western Art; like Beethoven or the Sistine Chapel or Homer, it's just there, having shaped the rest of the world around it like a boulder in the path of a growing tree.

And aside from a teenage infatuation with Helena Bonham Carter as Mel Gibson's Ophelia, I've been snobbily unimpressed with any of the screen adaptations I've seen — perhaps especially Kenneth Branagh's four-hour slog through the written play, in which turns by Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams were only interesting in being utterly out of place. (I'd have preferred a Hamlet pitched at the level they were playing it; but then I've only ever enjoyed Branagh as Benedick.) And it occurs to me now that black-and-white was the missing element; somehow, even though I wasn't aware of the Olivier version in high school, its moody, stark contrasts were what I was picturing in my head the whole time.

And its art direction is simply ravishing; Olivier's Hamlet, dark-clothed with pale face and hair, stands out like a Harlequin in the chorus of grays that make up the set. This Elsinore, with its vast empty spaces and exposed, crumbling architecture, has its own proto-Gothic character: neither Hamlet's nor Ophelia's descent into madness seems particularly suprising here. (Jean Simmons as Ophelia is surprisingly effective even though she's beggared by the older cast members who between them had a couple centuries' worth of experience playing Shakespeare.) The kind of savage interiority with which Olivier approaches the title role is reflected in the deep-focus camera work, with plunging, twisting shots that keep us off-balance; the entire set, beautifully constructed though it is, might as well be a metaphor for the multi-chambered ruins of Hamlet's own collapsing psyche.

Olivier plays Hamlet with a raw physicality that not even Mel Gibson the action hero attempted; the seeming disconnect between his troubled, digressive interior dialogue (I'm not sure what I think about the choice to render much of the great soliloquies in voiceover) and the constant energy of his body is resolved in the final act, when camera trickery and interior monologues are dispensed with, and mind and body finally unite in the gorgeously-staged duel with Laertes. Apparently Olivier was largely inspired by Freud's reading of the play (the scenes with Gertrude make this obvious); but the existentialist reading, in which action however doomed is preferable to inaction, is the one that springs clearest to my eyes.

I wouldn't call it a perfect movie; the editing in particular leaves something to be desired, and any Hamlet that leaves out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is fatally incomplete. But it's a fantastic first step on this quick little trip.

2. Othello

(USA) Orson Welles · 1952

Othello happens to be one of the handful of Shakespeare plays I haven't previously read or seen any performance of, though like any moderately well-informed participant in Western culture I know the story. So watching this for the first time was as much nailing down the specifics of plot and character outside the Othello-Desdemona-Iago trinity as it was determining how the movie worked as an adaptation. I found the dialogue a little tough to follow at times, but I'm not sure how much that can be attributed to my unfamiliarity with much of the original text as opposed to the odd editing choices that were forced upon the filmmakers.

The story of the difficult and scattershot filming of Othello has been much rehashed elsewhere; all I can say is that it shows. The editing is sometimes amateurish to the point of delinquency, as in shots where people plainly speak but no dialogue is heard, monologues delivered with the back to the camera, and frequent disunity of tone between vocals and image — of course all this can be justified as contributing to an atmosphere of deliberate destabilization, Othello's world breaking down around him even as his trust in Desdemona breaks down, but I can't help believing a larger budget, reserved studio space, and no breaks in shooting would have left these apparent avant-gardisms on the floor.

All that said, there is some bravura filmmaking in there (and even when the filmmaking, in terms of sequential motion, isn't so hot, the individual images are always superbly composed), as of course one would expect from Welles. The dialogue-free pre-titles sequence is spectacular, setting a mood and casting a spell which the rest of the movie never quite lives up to, a severer and more intense mini-film than anything armed with mere words could be. Welles may not have been an auteur in the sense that there was a through-line or clear connecting themes to his movies, but in the sense of having a total mastery of his cinematic tools, he was undoubtedly one of the greatest.

Which leads us to his performance; a good one, if fatally compromised by the dual decisions to cast him as Othello and then to put him in blackface for it. I recognize that it's historically been an uncontroversial choice, that actors were blacking up for Othello long before American minstrelsy gave blackface the particular shame and disgust it carries today, but it's not like great black actors didn't exist in the late 40s and early 50s, or that Welles didn't know about them. (He produced an all-black Macbeth in 1936, and Paul Robeson had performed the role to great acclaim in England in 1931 and America in 1943.) But of course film financing was not theater financing, and the willingness of audiences in America or Europe to countenance the image of a powerful, sexually desirable black man killing a white woman — even in the name of High Culture — was limited. The result is a compromised movie, and I can't watch Welles in the role without thinking of him as "Othello," in quotes, and mentally substituting an actual black man.

It's a compromised movie regardless; immensely rewarding in spots, certainly, and I'd sooner watch it again than see Olivier's version — also in blackface, and (shudder) in color — though Laurence Fishburne looks tempting. (Oh, ninteen-nineties. Is there any adaptation you didn't attempt?) But first of all, I really need to read the play.

3. A Midsummer Night's Dream

(USA) Max Reinhardt & William Dieterle · 1935

After these intense, nearly experimental Shakespeares, let's cleanse the palate with a bubbly studio-system production. Olivia de Havilland as Hermia? Dick Powell as Lysander? Jimmy Cagney as Bottom? Mickey Rooney as Puck? Joe E. Brown having any business there at all? Sounds terrible, and it mostly is. But I have a weakness for studio adaptations of classic literature from the thirties and forties (like the truly godawful Greer Garson Pride & Prejudice), and find the professionalism of a certain type of character actor when entirely misapplied to a role incredibly entertaining.

It's a good thing that A Midsummer Night's Dream is impossible to take seriously, because it's sure as hell impossible to take this movie even as intentional comedy. It's camp through and through, and all the better for it. Half the cast doesn't even attempt an English accent, the other half plays it as broad as if the movie were silent, and the art design and costuming is so outlandish as to cross the border into silly. In one magnificently ludicrous moment early on, Dick Powell pretends to adjust a tie his fake-Elizabethan's-fake-Athenian costume doesn't have, then sings a snatch of the "Wedding March" from Mendelssohn score to A Midsummer Night's Dream.

That snatch of Mendelssohn is important: Reinhardt (adapting his stage production) and Dieterle (stretching his muscles for fantasy) use the score so much that the movie is practically a musical, the most familiar and easy-to-get form of cinematic fantasy in the thirties. And where it's not a musical, it's a pantomime, with as obnoxiously a twee, hyperactive crew of fairies as anyone who's suffered through "classic" children's entertainment of the period has heard. Rooney's Puck in particular is so manic as to be the stuff of legend, nearly as unwatchable as his infamous turn in Breakfast At Tiffany's though for wholly different reasons. If I were Oberon, I'd smack him good for every inane giggle and stupid shriek. But despite all that, there's a generous spirit to the fairy sequences, an lavish sense of spectacle, an giddy orgy of design and special effects that predicts The Wizard Of Oz or even in spots Lord Of The Rings.

But if Rooney is the worst thing about the movie, Cagney as Bottom is surely the best: even when his expressive features are obscured by one of the worst donkey masks I've ever seen (never try to make it animatronic; you just look stupid sixty years later), his dancer's posture and nimble hands do more than anyone else in the frame with all their faculties. Though Dick Powell does pull the most astonishing faces, as though he were making fun of the entire thing; in fact the four-way fight between Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and Helena is a minor masterpiece of over-the-top camp, even squashing as much of the play as possible into the smallest space by having all four deliver lines at the same time. Still, the rude mechanicals are the most straightforwardly funny thing in the film, the thirties' broad style of comedy being a far better match to the similarly broad antics of the Shakespearean clowns than the Victorian sentiment of Titania or the Powell's Broadway swagger.

The copy I have is a disgustingly low-quality VHS rip, so I'm not bothering to pull a clip from it, but I can make out just enough of the picture through the grainy distortion that I'd love to see a crisp DVD transfer -- while the performances may be amusingly out of sync with modern tastes, the glittery, wholly artificial sets and costuming are still something of a gold standard for black-and-white fantasy, a triumph of visual and cinematic ideas over theatrical and actorly execution. The play is one of my favorite Shakespeare comedies, and if this film owes more to early-twentieth-century conventions of pantomime and film comedy than to anything Shakespeare wrote, it's nevertheless hugely enjoyable on its own merits.

You do have to have the stomach for it, though.

Obviously, this brief list in no way exhausts the black-and-white canon of Shakespeare; there are at least ten others I could have chosen, not including Chimes At Midnight or Throne Of Blood. But these are the three I wanted to see the most just now; and so to bed.

Book Report 006: Guido Morselli, DIVERTIMENTO 1889

E. P. Dutton · 1975

I don't remember what I was looking for when I came across this slim paperback in one of the used-book chain stores that dot the state (and I know the location of every one by heart, more fool me). Something in the M's, obviously; Moore? Montgomery? Morley? Morris? But I might not have been looking for anything in particular, when the bright silver spine with Art Deco lettering caught my eye. I'd never heard of Guido Morselli; apart from the introduction to this volume, I still haven't. (As of this writing, he doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page.)

Briefly, then: Morselli, born in 1912, was the son of a rich manufacturer who received a good education, fought in Mussolini's army, and, not needing to write to live, mostly published erudite journalism while completing seven novels which remained unpublished until his suicide in 1973. Of the seven, this is the shortest (it's really a novella, or even a long short story), and apparently the least serious-minded, though it'd be a stretch to call it comic. A quick search of Amazon suggests that only three of his novels were ever translated into English; none of them, naturally, remain in print.

The back cover copy describes the book as a "jewel-like fable of the Belle Epoque," which, together with the phrase "with the delicacy of an operetta," was probably what convinced me to drop the four bucks the pencil scrawl on the first page says it cost. I wouldn't call it a fable, though I could imagine a remarkably sophisticated and slightly dull operetta being made of the plot (Sondheim, in his A Little Night Music mode, could probably handle it.) It relates a fictional interlude in the life of the second king of Italy, Umberto I, who in Morselli's hands is a not-very-intelligent man in his mid-forties who hates the responsibility and endless paperwork of being king, and when the opportunity to raise cash in a clandestine way presents itself, snatches at the opportunity to shed his identity and spend the summer holidaying in the Swiss mountains, incognito. What develops is not the farce you might expect (or, in my case, hope), but a low-key retailing of minor adventures, intrigues, and near discoveries which sometimes approaches being funny but is mostly too sober and even somewhat elegiac for laughter.

Sober and elegiac, of course, isn't a bad mood at all; and Morselli writes (so far as I can tell under the distorting lens of translation) very well, keeping the proceedings full of life and flavor even if they are never allowed to get too hilarious. He says in the author's note at the end that he was writing in conscious imitation of the literature of the era, and I recognize hints of James or Proust or Mann, though with a somewhat greater frankness about sex and bodily functions than the nineteenth century would have permitted; the king has one affair and nearly achieves two, but events overtake.

Umberto I was assassinated by an anarchist in 1900; there would only be one more king of Italy before World War II and the era of the Republic. With the benefit of hindsight, Morselli treats the monarchy as an anachronism, meaningless and unnecessary in a world of trains, telegraphs, and journalism, sentiments which his Umberto wholly endorses. (The real Umberto might have agreed with him: Wikipedia gives his only notable "quote" as "Remember to be a king all you need to know is how to sign your name, read a newspaper and mount a horse.") In fact, about the only benefit the crown seems to confer on Umberto (called "the Count" throughout most of the novella in deference to his incognito) is that it makes girls flirt with him.

The book was written in 1970-71, when Morselli was in his sixties; even though the king is supposed to be about forty-five in the book, he feels like a much older man, and one of the undercurrents of the story is the humiliation and boredom of aging. Not that it's an Updikean or Rothian complaint: Morselli means the title seriously, and his author's note speaks of escapism in terms which J. R. R. Tolkien would approve. Temperamentally, Morselli seems to have been a lot like Tolkien; he disliked the twentieth century, though he was aware of the pitfalls of romanticizing history:

"I am . . . perfectly ready to accept the notion, itself a cliché by now, that the Belle Epoque never existed. The most I would say is that we still have need of fables, and that that particular myth is as good as another."

In fact I'd love to read high fantasy set in Ruritania; but a gentle evocation of the nineteenth century's most civilized narrative form will do quite as well. I enjoyed the hell out of this novella, and could wish for much more where it came from.

Album Shuffle 004: Claude François, COMME D'HABITUDE

Philips · 1967

I might as well say before this goes any further that I have a lot of old French and Brazilian and Italian pop records and I know that in the 60s it was fashionable for every non-Anglophone pop album to merely bear the name of its singer on the spine, but I'm going to be following the long-established convention of calling these records by the title of their first track. Led Zeppelin can get away with that cutesy self-titled shit; Claude François cannot.

Which: Claude who? This is the first record I've come to in these shuffles that hasn't appeared on any List Of The Greatest Albums According To Whomever that I've seen, and while Claude François isn't nobody, he's not one of the four or five 60s French pop stars that young relatively hip twenty-first century Anglophones know. (That is, he's not Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, France Gall, Brigitte Bardot, or Anna Karina, and people only know the latter two for their movies.) The dawning light of comprehension may appear in your eyes (as it did in mine) when informed that "Comme d'habitude" is the original song off of which Paul Anka based "My Way." You know, the Sinatra thing.

I've always hated "My Way," and hearing François' original gives me a clue to why: it's a chanson, not a Tin Pan Alley song, which means it has a different structure from the kind of songs that Sinatra was the Best Ever Singer of. Tin Pan Alley songs — the good ones, the kind that get into history books and retrospectives and Sinatra albums — are structured like jazz compositions, with introductions and heads and bridges and space for instrumental breaks. French chanson, on the other hand, is structurally closer to folk song, with tight circular melodies and repetitive verses; emotional shifts in chanson are tied to emphasis and rhythm, not harmonics. Sinatra is a singer who relies on harmonic shifts to guide his subtle narrative power; given a repetitive blow-after-blow-after-blow song like "My Way," all he can do is up the arrangement and pour on the juice, and it's a smug, self-satisfied asshole of a lyric to begin with; by the last verse, he sounds exactly like the two-bit tin-pot hood-made-good he once was and now is only, the Voice that had once crooned so eloquently of heartbreak and wisdom lost forever in an alcoholic roar.

Compare this to "Comme d'habitude." François gives it a rock arrangement, which is exactly right: not only does rock share the affinity to folk song (this wouldn't sound out of place on Blonde On Blonde), but rock instrumentation, especially those galloping drums, can add intensity to the later verses without the brassy bombast of Don Costa's gloating orchestration. I don't have much French, so I can't speak to how much better or worse the original lyrics are than Anka's whole-cloth substitute, but knowing that "comme d'habitude" means "as usual" hints at a somewhat less egocentric epic.

But that's just the first track, and still my least favorite thing on the record. It's also one of only a handful of original songs (well, "original" as in written for him by lyricist Gilles Thibaut with various French pop composers) on the album; six of the rest are reimaginings of current American and British pop songs, and the closer "Ce soir je vais boire" is adapted from the Italian dance song "Stasera mi butto" by Rocky Roberts.

Those American and English songs, though, are interesting in their own right, if only in the way that putting them all next to each other tells us something interesting about what François wanted to signal. They are, in the order heard: the Foundations' "Baby, Now That I've Found You" ("Pourquoi"), the Move's "Flowers In The Rain" ("Le Martien"), the Bee Gees' "Massachussetts" ("La plus belle chose du monde"), the Hollies' "Carrie Ann" ("L'homme au traineu"), Stevie Wonder's "I Was Made To Love Her" ("Rien, rien, rien"), and Mary Wells' "My Guy" ("Ma fille"). It's all sharp, bright pop, with driving beats and massive hooks and joyous riffs; the lyrics François sings may or may not have anything to do with the original (his version of "Flowers In the Rain" is the third 60s French pop song I know called "The Martian," with appropriately daffy sound effects), but if he's casting himself as a peer to these folks, he's not aiming low.

But it's the other three originals that really interest me; they fit perfectly naturally in with Motown and the Swinging London, with sitar accents, punchy horn charts, and drums bashing a solid if never quite funky beat. The bright, poster-like Pop Art cover of the album is served well by the contents inside: François is a limited but effective pop/rock singer, belting out these tunes with a brio that calls to mind Neil Diamond or Tom Jones (and that's a compliment), and unlike many French pop singers of the era, he's not afraid of a little rhythm.

On the evidence of this album, he's not a flat-out rock & roller (which, the guy who co-wrote "My Way" couldn't be), but he's a sharp, effective 60s pop singer, and it's not just the James Bond cast to the album sleeve that makes me think of of Nancy Sinatra, Shirley Bassey, and Johnny Rivers — that sharp-dressed, good-looking, and solidly-showbiz tier of 60s pop that felt like it would go on forever if only those stupid punk kids with their long hair and free love hadn't gotten in the way.