A great film director who never, ever pigeonholed himself. The same guy made Bullitt, Breaking Away, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle. You should watch these films! Breaking Away is one of my favorite films ever, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle is arguably the best Boston film ever. I’m not exaggerating!!
I wrote a tribute to Eddie Coyle a couple of years ago, before it was reissued on a pretty Criterion DVD. It’s one of the better pieces I’ve written, although I’ve since revised my opinion on The Departed. “Eddie Coyle, on the other hand, has the nuance and, for lack of a better word, the dig-your-heels-in authenticity of a troubled city breathing a wheezy sigh. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that you believe these characters are poor and desperate and Yates is willing to let their status color the frame—the stillness of Eddie Coyle lingers long after the final shot.”
Here’s another really good piece on Eddie Coyle’s Boston authenticity. The Departed screenwriter William Monahan has some choice words about Eddie Coyle, but mostly due to George V. Higgins: “The Departed is the first time Boston was ever put accurately on screen, and I’m intentionally excluding the Friends of Eddie Coyle, which incidentally had an English director, because Higgins did a sort of Amos and Andy dialect comedy about his own people to entertain an audience of wannabe WASPS. Higgins had an investment in trashing his own people to entertain cunts who thought the Irish were fucking animals, with the possible exception of George V. Higgins.”
At the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Armond White Reminds Filmmakers Why They Hate Critics →
Breathtaking.
Armond White’s ridiculousness and condescension is rather epic. And yet! There is a part of me that thinks he’s really, truly, one of the most interesting film critics around, in print. Sure, you could guess that he’s going to pan Blue Valentine. That’s easy. But what’s he going to compare it to? David Bowie and Twyla Tharp’s 1981 The Catherine Wheel? And Ronnie and Sammi on Jersey Shore? Yeah, he does.
Let’s be honest: 99% of film criticism is boring as hell. Plot synopsis. Cute fact from the press notes (for example, Blue Valentine: it took 12 years! OMG.), summary on whether it’s worthy or not. Never venturing into the real dreamscape of films, why seeing things blown up twenty feet tall has a spiritual hold on us. And some critics out there (and it’s worse in the blog age) are mediocre sycophants with no idea of journalistic integrity, giving props to twitter-pal filmmakers who they’re buddy-buddy with.
White attempts to puncture critical groupthink. He constantly calls out the fact that for a populist medium, films are generally made by the privileged and moneyed. There’s something I appreciate about that.
(His pan of the utterly phony Fish Tank - a pretty film with pleasurable female gaze, particularly regarding Michael Fassbender, who never has a shirt in his movies and dingy British miserablism - was really quite good.)
Women’s bathroom, Mass MoCA, 2010.
Facts about Okkervil River: often, they save their best songs for their EPs. This version of “Love to a Monster” (which definitely cites some Joni songs, yes?) is so much better with the accordion as accompaniment. If you like writing, listen up, because the concise, devastating lyrics of this song are nearly their own lesson.
Two notes: it’s funny watching a band grow in popularity. Over the years, you notice that the people that come out to their shows are much, much better looking on average. And videos from La Blogotheque - it’s occasionally transcendent, but now nearly its own cliche, yes? The instant meaningfulness you get when French people reverently film you in real-time performing. So meaningful!
“It was, perhaps, the worst time in history to be starting out as a writer. In 1934, only 15 authors in the United States sold 50,000 or more books, and the magazine market was even more straitened; advertising was at an all-time low, and many of the mass-market, high-paying “slick” magazines had either shrunk or folded.”
Lessons from Drunk Irishmen
I just started watching The Wire recently, as a reward for finishing a big project. (I am currently on s04, e09, dreading the heartbreak that’s surely ahead. To quote Lorrie Moore: “On the other hand, so engrossing, heart-tugging, and uncertain are the various story arcs that watching in this manner one becomes filled with a kind of mesmerized dread.” Yup.) In an age of police-drama crap from Law & Order: Your Mom to CSI: David Caruso as Christian Bale in Batman, it’s easy to see why The Wire gets the hosannahs it does, did, and wholly deserved - save for its shallow female characters, although can you argue that’s part of the point? - as a show that reinvents the cop show formula, turning it inside out into a portrait of a dying American city. It’s easy, too, to see David Simon’s Baltimore in other dying American cities - even in miniature when you drive around upstate New York. Abandoned buildings, abandoned people. No commerce.
Detective James McNulty’s the one that gets me, sometimes. Watching him work the first season, annoying his superiors with his drive to be good police - and then, at the end, confessing that he went after the Barksdale case because he wanted to be acknowledged as “the smartest guy in the room”… it was hard not to relate. A small lesson that’s easy to take away from the show is Don’t Be Like McNulty. Because even though he’s good at his job, and has the smart-assitude and forthrightness to go after corruption even if it’s not careerist, it’s not the sort of thing that fortifies a healthy life. He drinks too much, he’s singlemindedly obsessed with his job, having it sum up who he is, and ultimately, he’s alienating everyone who can guarantee his future.
There’s a certain petulant streak of Irish smart-assedness that runs in my family, I believe. My dad has it, I’ve heard loads of stories about it, sometimes I have it to a degree. The sort of thing where you want to outsmart an adversary as opposed to figuring out the most straight way through the problem. Being acknowledged as the smartest guy in the room isn’t the most fulfilling compliment, ultimately. It mostly just means you’re not that good at getting along with people, keeping your head down. I have a tendency to probably come off as more of a smart-aleck than I mean to, sometimes, simply because I have a good memory. It’s not the most socially fluent skill and it probably looks a little bit worse on a woman, I must admit. It’s my inner McNulty, and if I want to get along in life, have money in the bank for retirement, and also have the time to do work that helps people, I have to quiet that little voice, that tendency. I have to be aware of it, too. The first step probably requires acquiring some form of poker face, where there is currently none.
So, as a resolution, I want to make my inner McNulty into my inner Detective Lester Freeman. He got burned as a young McNulty, but years later, he learned how to play the game. How to pursue good work without burning the house down in punk defiance. It’s a tricky thing to figure out - clearly, David Simon, with his burning anger over the death of newsprint, etc., is still rather McNultyish in some ways - but I think it would be helpful.
Other, actual sayings of wisdom and resolution that will surely resonate through 2011? Be more curious, for one. And, most importantly - you have to be purposefully naive if you decide to pursue anything. Someone great said that to me and it’s been banging around my head like a ping pong ball. I’ve been approaching hopes, wishes, and dreams with this attitude of “I’ll do it, it’ll be good and maybe it’ll work out but it’s likely that the world will go pear-shaped or something so I should prepare for the worst and not be disappointed.” Nope, that’s not the right attitude for life. That’s just being scared. I am going to be purposefully naive.
I miss you, snow. Come back!
A short summary of the year in review: I can say, without reservations, that I am a little bit happier this time this year than I was at this time last year. I’ve had to make a lot of choices, some of them really overwhelming, a lot I haven’t gone into in much detail here; and despite that difficulty, I have a lot of concrete work - 100,000 words plus - to show for it. Here’s to 2011!
“I can say without question that my mother would have traded those 51 years of innocence for the dark knowledge that could have potentially saved her life. My mother would have done anything to live.”
I Told Santa I Was Jewish →
The webzine is (a)live! Thank you to everyone who helped.
Please re-blog, re-tweet, or re-anything.
Awesome. As I celebrated my first Chrismukkah (a month of presents! so great) with my Jewish SO, this is relevant.
Related to the radness of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore - Kris Kristofferson: soulful 70s dream man. (Photo from last year’s Rolling Stone feature.)
Feminist awakening.
I Capture the Castle
The problem with this film version - a quibble regarding a delightful film! - is that it’s essentially the tragic tale of a blind girl, because she rejects THIS gorgeous, adoring specimen (Henry Cavill at his beauty’s peak):
For THIS (Henry Thomas as a black hole of… anything. Was Robert Sean Leonard unavailable? Paul Rudd?):
Choose your own adventure
You are at a pretty cool coffeeshop in Western Massachusetts, getting ready for an awesome day of working, reading, and writing. It’s very crowded and who’s sitting next to you? Kim and Thurston. Whoa, dude, cool. You can eavesdrop on them all day long! Kim is such a babe and totally dressed better than any other girl there! They have secrets that you should learn - like, how to be totally swoonily in love and partnered and only have eyes for the other awesome person on your art team. Life lessons. Today is going to rule!
You reach into your bag for your wallet - nothing. You have managed to drive two hours, emptying out the gas tank, and you have no cash or credit to get through your day. What do you do?
A) Call your family and try to get them to give you their credit card numbers over the phone.
B) Tell Kim and Thurston your predicament. They’re cool. They’ll understand. After all, you’re pretty close to having a panic attack in front of them and they can sense your worry. You could also justify your need for, like, a ten so you can get some gas and get home by saying “yo, I’ve bought a lot of Sonic Youth albums in my life!”
C) Go to your yoga studio and see if they will gladly spare you $15. Flap your arms around trying to convince people that you are not crazy, not a miscreant, and do take yoga there nearly semi-weekly; just not at that class.
I thought about A) but C) was the one that ended up working out. I thought really hard about B) but decided against it, even though it would probably make the weirdest/best story. The lesson of the story? Even though I’ve been doing yoga at that place for nearly a year, and really enjoy it quite a bit, there’s something about it that doesn’t, on the daily, feel like a community. But in an emergency like that, I was part of a community. And I ended up going to a yoga class there the next day.
Outside of the Heroes of Baseball Wax Museum, Cooperstown, NY. As a baseball agnostic from Massachusetts, this town was like a nightmare.
Stu put it very succinctly, when it comes to baseball fandom these days: “It’s like saying I’m a big fan of this corporation, headquartered here.” When I wrote a bunch of articles for a Boston paper, often the subjects would try to endear themselves by talking about the Red Sox, which I… frankly, couldn’t relate to much. And yet I still laughed at Marky Mark shooting Jeter in the leg in The Other Guys. Baseball + regional identity = so complex!
Better than Black Swan
Helium’s Pirate Prude EP
Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane. (Which I wrote a good essay about.)
“Man and Birds have been responsible for a great many advances in our civilization…”
Alfred Hitchcock’s trailer for The Birds. Comedy gold.
Ryan Gosling has a street team
When my friend and I went to see Half Nelson at Cambridge’s Kendall Square Cinemas, we were stuck in one of those terribly long post-Christmas lines for tickets. It gave us more than enough time to notice a stack of free posters on the concession stand, free posters advertising Zach Braff in The Last Kiss. Being unapologetic mockers, we made fun of it. After all, there was a lot to make fun of - the fact that this was Braff’s follow-up to Garden State, his sadsack expression and the condescending idea of marriage as a total ball and chain, the fact that ladies just want to lock it down while men’s penises need to be wild and free. We had a lot to joke about.
And eventually, we got our tickets and went into the theater, hunkering down in the darkness for Half Nelson. The theater was fairly empty, which is why it was a surprise that an owlish boy in glasses, wearing a backpack, with the slumpy posture of a likely computer nerd (we were in close proximity to MIT), came into our row and sat in the seat next to us.
He said, “I was wondering - what do you have against Zach Braff?”
We replied, “Wait. What? What are you talking about?”
He said, “I was in line behind you, waiting for tickets, and I heard you making fun of The Last Kiss. Why don’t you like Zach Braff?”
We mumbled something about Scrubs getting old and Garden State being an annoying attempt at “voice of a generation” status when it was shallow and not particularly well-done and the most salient example of good preview = bad film and how Natalie Portman’s character wasn’t even, like, a real girl, you know?
He replied, “Do you like Ryan Gosling?” We nodded. “What do you like about him?”
We were a little stymied. We replied that he was a good actor, he was intense, and he even made crappy stuff like The Notebook work due to his sheer intensity and commitment to the role. Plus, a teacher who’s on crack? That’s an interesting role. He’s also attractive, but it’s because he’s talented and charismatic. Unlike Braff.
He listened attentively, taking in our words. He nodded and thanked us for our time. As the lights went down, he got up - it turned out he needed to get to another theater for his movie.
I can only assume it was The Last Kiss.