Copyright Gjon Mill/Life Magazine

One final, much lighter thought about Where Men Win Glory: this being the kind of paperback where “NATIONAL BESTSELLER” features prominently in the graphic design, Krakauer’s book is festooned with a truly ridiculous number of media blurbs. They span the greater part of the back cover and two full, small-print pages inside the front cover, in addition to one relatively modest quote on the front cover itself. Surely publishing houses have done some kind of research to prove that these micro-testimonials increase sales, but I’m befuddled by the theoretical book-buyer who, for instance, is considering reading a book about Pat Tillman by one of the country’s most popular nonfiction writers, but first wants to know what the Louisville-Courier Journal, The Huffington Post, The Boulder Daily Camera, The San Jose Mercury News, and nearly two-dozen other national and local publications have to say about it. Seriously, there are 25 blurbs on this thing, and this isn’t even a very large number by contemporary trade paperback standards.

These are a slightly different animal than the name-drop status blurb, where a prominent author writes a recommendation specifically for a hardcover dust jacket, but they serve the same purpose. They’re also both routinely misused; while I’m aware that blurbs occasionally represent the most self-congratulating aspects of literary culture, they can also be very effective when given a little room to breathe. So I’m starting The Art of the Blurb, a series commemorating some particularly inspired blurbs I’ve read, and doubtless highlighting some egregiously bad ones for differentiation’s sake.

This initial positive example comes from Aldous Huxley, and embodies a few of the most essential qualities of good blurb writing: it’s written evocatively and personally, it’s long enough to make an actual point rather than simply list adjectives, and the blurber himself illuminates a crucial aspect of the text in question. It’s a quote in praise of The Night Country, a late-period essay collection by the archaeologist and nature writer Loren Eiseley. Eiseley’s primary legacy rests on his being a gifted scientist in addition to a visionary prose stylist. The selling point, as it were, of Eiseley’s work is his place in a lineage of “natural philosophers” stretching from Aristotle to Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, and Darwin. So a recommendation from an acknowledged stylist-scholar with much greater public standing than Eiseley makes perfect sense. And he supplies a doozy, taken from the Los Angeles Times and reprinted on the book’s initial paperback edition from Scribners:

The Night Country can be read in about three hours. The vibrations from those three hours, however, might well simmer the rest of your life…. The Night Country, long after the professor has stepped down to lace his bones and ancient fogs and prairie shadows, will join that happy pride of books which will linger for the next century….This book, and his The Invisible Pyramid, The Immense Journey, and The Firmament of Time will have more substance, warm breath and good blood in them in the year 2001 than 99 out of 100 writers who say they are alive today.

Huxley incorporates images that prepare the reader for Eiseley’s own (“ancient fogs and prairie shadows”), while praising both the book’s depth and its entertainment value. That last sentence, hinting that Eiseley is somehow more alive than his contemporaries, also captures the fundamental appeal of The Night Country: namely, its combination of artistic and intellectual value.

In other words: Yes, Mr. Huxley. I’ll read this immediately.

But then of course, Bush & Co. did also actively dismantle and mishandle things in such a way as to undermine any sense of faith or reliance on government among my generation. I was 16 when he was inaugurated, 18 when Iraq was invaded, 20 when Katrina hit–and those are only a few marquee disasters. They don’t account for the Justice Department debacle and the know-nothing Gonzalez hearings; the appointment of a total anti-UN fanatic like John Bolton to, naturally, the UN; Abu Ghraib; the anti-gay hysteria that weaseled its way into the 2004 election; the 2008 financial collapse; and let us not forget, 9/11 itself. These are the products of a government that believes government is inherently awful; if you’re selling people the line that politics are dirty and Washington is ineffectual, then it pays to pollute the pond and appoint bureaucratic stooges who despise the very offices they hold.

I thought a lot about this while reading Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory, about another jewel in the Bush crown of enforced incompetence: Pat Tillman’s death. What emerged from Krakauer’s thorough research and clear passion for his subject was Tillman himself, a larger than life literary character and genuinely inspiring man. Krakauer spends an inordinate amount of time scrutinizing Tillman’s friendly-fire death, but I admit I was more intrigued by his engaging quotations from the man’s journals and the testimonials from friends. Tillman loved his wife and his brothers. He thought deeply about the meaning of patriotism and the definition of a well-lived life. He loved Europe but was unrepentantly proud to be American. He liked the outdoors, coffee, and alcohol, in whatever order best suited the given day. Man after my own heart, he watched Gosford Park the night before flying to Fort Benning for basic training, and he wrote about it in his journal.

Krakauer clearly wants us to be enraged by the military’s cover-up of his death. He makes it very clear that this war, The War on Terror, was and is unworthy of Pat Tillman. And yet I found myself unsurprised. Of course this incredible man’s idealism was wasted and his death exploited. (I had a similar experience watching Erroll Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, which likewise might have been chilling had its conclusions been at all unexpected.) And this awful, cynical reaction made me realize that whatever people think “history will decide” about Bush and the movement he nominally led, they won (in a matter of speaking) much more than we care or dare to admit. To people who know little more of politics than that one administration, federal malpractice is all but assumed. This is a victory for anyone who stands to prosper from a population that considers government–all government, from health care legislation down to street lights, except defense spending–an inherent hindrance.

Tonight the war in Iraq is “over.” I remember back when this war was starting, when pundits around my parents’ age kept asking why no college students were protesting and picketing and starting a proper New Left freak-out. This generation, I’ve noticed, also tends to grossly overstate the talent, relevance, and effectiveness of Michael Moore. But I know very few genuinely apathetic people in my age group. I think we’ve generally recognized what an extraordinary level of governmental cynicism and crass political manipulation reigned during the last 10 years–you can scarcely enter a bookstore, watch previews on a DVD, or skim the nation’s op-ed pages without being assaulted by proof of it–and feel, if not exactly disenfranchised, than at least appalled to the point of numbness.

I don’t know what form this attitude will take, or what our generation’s politicians will be like. To be clear, I have essentially no hope that things will get “better,” institutionally. But it’s a really frightening thing to realize how low our expectations are, and how disengaged I’ve come to feel from the fundamental issues of my time. People like Pat Tillman die every week, and I barely bother to read the notices about them. Worse still, I don’t really have to. I haven’t been forced to make any sacrifice whatsoever on behalf of these wars and the other tragedies, like Katrina, that have been so horribly mismanaged by people in power. The evidence, like Where Men Win Glory, of political evil keeps piling up, faster than any normal person can keep pace with. Certainly it’s good that the record is growing, but it’s also increasingly clear that the scope and reach of the Bush administration’s bungling was so great that we may not have yet seen its true legacy: an entire generation of people are about to assume power in this country, having grown up thinking that this kind of governance is viable.

A friend recently emailed some newly released, century-old color photographs from Russia. It reminded me of the similar Depression-era photos released by the Library of Congress earlier this year, one of which–“Children in the tenement district. Brockton, Massachusetts, December 1940”–is above.

As has been roundly noted, these photographs tend to upend our widely held subconscious belief that the past happened as we typically see it: in stark or blurry black and white. This reaction is a testament to how fully our conception of the world is shaped by media. I finally read James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men a few months ago, and it was as beautiful and morally astute as I’ve come to expect from Agee’s incomparably underrated work. His commitment to “reality,” and his self-consciousness about a writer’s ability to reproduce it, are his justifications for including Evans’ photographs, which, along with Dorthea Lange’s work, constitute the foremost visual record of the Great Depression that we have.

They’re incredible pictures, and yet somehow… distancing. The b&w, perhaps more so than even the omnipresent dust and the stark furnishings, instill a certain “It can’t happen here” reaction. Maybe worse, it imparts a kind of alienness to the people in the frame–precisely the opposite reaction that Agee intended. I’d still recommend Famous Men to anyone interested in the era, but there are times when the two media pulled me in opposite directions: towards immediate, visceral identification with a struggling farm family on one hand, and towards reverence and museum-bound Americana on the other.

Cinematically, the difference between Evans’ photographs and the color ones from the Library of Congress is comparable to that between John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us. The former is considered, largely thanks to Gregg Toland’s photography, to be the greatest (in terms of accuracy and artistry) depiction of the Depression in Hollywood history.

Look at the Evans-level of detail and grain in this still. Like many of Ford’s movies, The Grapes of Wrath brings his incredible aesthetic command to a grim period of American history (though of course the Dust Bowl wasn’t yet history when the movie was released in 1940, the same year as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). His characters have as much moral complexity as any in American movies, and Ford granted them full human dignity by, like always, photographing them in a stately, naturalistic style. It’s a technique that values the interactions and reactions of individuals and groups through calm, long takes, rather than rapid cuts.

By all accounts, Altman was a less “naturalistic” director in Hollywood terms, though his usual lacerating irony and social criticism are largely absent from Thieves Like Us. This is a love story, and specifically the story of one young man choosing between his male friends and the love of his life. Both options, unbeknownst to him, are equally doomed. But in the course of his transition, Altman indulges every one of his iconic stylistic tics–overlapping soundtracks, seemingly improvised dialogue, languid pacing, slow zooms–and the result is probably my favorite of his films other than Short Cuts and California Split. The shot that begins around 1:20 in this clip (borrowed almost directly from Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night, which shares a source novel with Altman’s movie) embodies everything I love about his films; it has no narrative reason for existing, and yet it’s absolutely essential for an understanding of this young relationship.

Compared to the famous “I’ll be there” scene at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, this youthful cuddling seems almost frivolous. It doesn’t exactly match our idea of the Depression as a desolate, cracked-earth nightmare. But people did in fact fall in love, have sex, listen to the radio, converse aimlessly, and, above all, guzzle Coke while it happened. Evans’ and Ford’s are essential documents, but Altman’s Depression, like those unearthed by the Library of Congress, might be more unsettling and necessary for those of us who forget that the past happened in color, too.

The second edition of Take Two is up now. It brings me no joy to report that a 1978 collaboration between Richard Pryor and Michael Jackson left me cold:

I wish I could report that The Wiz deserves better than this cultural lacuna, but alas: This is a certifiable turkey, one of those doomed “star-studded” productions where a football team’s worth of talent can’t overcome the fact that nobody’s doing what feels natural. Everyone, particularly Ross, who, by all accounts, was the project’s true auteur, seems so amazed by the virtue and capital-I Importance of their undertaking that even the lighthearted numbers feel leaden. As Dorothy, a put-upon Harlem schoolteacher who’s “never been below 125th St.,” Ross plays her character as if she represented the dramatic and emotional summit of Western civilization. And a handful of other reliably joyful entertainers—most egregiously Jackson, Russell, and Pryor—follow her lead. This is The Wizard of Oz pitched midway between the first act of A Raisin in the Sun and the last scene of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and it lasts a mind-boggling 135 minutes.

This essay did give me a chance to write a little about one of my favorite movies, and one of the most underrated concert films, Mel Stuart’s Wattstax. I think I could watch it every day. Or at least replay Jesse Jackson’s speech, which beyond his own uplifting words, contains some beautiful photography and powerful editing:

And why not show the Staples Singers, as well?

To continue the topic of editing, I’ve only recently become acquainted with two of the most acclaimed records of the late 90s/early 00s, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997) by Spiritualized, and D’Angelo’s Voodoo (2000). Both have been extremely disappointing. This is probably inevitable when records receive the kind of hyperbolic attention that these both continue to receive, but to my mind they both suffer from the exact same flaw, and one that affected innumerable records of the CD era: bloat.

Ladies and Gentlemen and Voodoo both last about 70 minutes, which would have made them double albums in decades prior, but which was nearly par for the course during the 90s. Hip-hop artists were particularly egregious in their album-padding practices, but every genre fell prey to intros, skits, and secret tracks. I’ve yet to hear a record that benefited from any of these things. To their credit, Spiritualized and D’Angelo avoid them all, but their records are still meandering, overlong, and, most unforgivably, quite boring a lot of the time. You might ask how two clearly ambitious acts managed to make impeccably-produced music about drugs and fucking, respectively, and have it all turn out so boringly. I suspect it’s because there was no incentive, creative or otherwise, to make a short album rather than a long one.

Let’s compare both records to two of their most obvious forebears,  Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get it On (1973) and The Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake (1968). The influence of both is nearly incalculable, and no one could contend that they lack for ambition or artistic vision. And yet the latter clocks in at a trim 41 minutes, and the latter a nearly EP-worthy 31 minutes.

This isn’t to say that brevity always improves music, or that earlier generations lacked indulgent music–my shelf full of Miles Davis’ 1970s double-records would beg to differ–but rather that the necessity to be immediately compelling was more or less jettisoned in pop music when the 74- and then 80-minute CD became its presumed medium of presentation. Much as people bemoan our current era’s lack of long-form everything, I have no problem with the downloaded single becoming the dominant form of pop music. In 15 years, we’ll probably look at the Ladies and Gentlemen and Voodoo era as the outlier between relatively spartan periods of record-making.

"A Short History of America" by R. Crumb.

In my review of Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, published today over at Slant Magazine, I make my case for R. Crumb’s brother Charles as the true protagonist–or maybe the eminence grise–of the film:

Obviously it’s R. Crumb’s iconic artwork that justifies the existence of Terry Zwigoff’s beloved 1994 film, though the absent initial in the title speaks to what makes Crumb a masterpiece. We learn early on that Robert’s illustrative style, sexual fetishes, and scabrous worldview are inseparable from his relationships to the men in his family, particularly older brother Charles, who inspired Robert to draw and who shaped his sense of humor. But while the famous sibling grants the movie its subject and interest, it’s arguably Charles—and, to a slightly lesser extent, youngest brother Maxon—who makes the film so devastating and emotionally resonant. Crumb—in a similar manner to Grey Gardens, the closest thing it has to a forebear—is ultimately about a family rather than just its protagonist’s eccentricities.

Also recommended is Michael Sragow’s thoughtful consideration of this remarkable film. Crumb is one of the rare contemporary movies that seemingly all my favorite critics–Ebert, Sragow, Jonathan Rosenbaum, &c.–seem to adore equally. It does have a depth of feeling and artistry that seems timeless, something I attribute to the years Terry Zwigoff spent editing it. The only other film I’ve heard of with a similar shooting-to-editing ratio is Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, which likewise feels somehow out of time. I suppose it’s a good thing that most films aren’t produced this way, but they both point to the underrated (particularly in this era of ubiquitous “director’s cuts”) role of editing in the filmmaking process. It’s perhaps the best means of imbuing a film with its own internal logic and momentum–which I suppose is what I mean when I say “out of time” above.

All invasion stories are allegorical, which makes this pair of movies a perfect vehicle to debut what I hope will be a fun, immersive series of essays and considerations. Released 30 years apart, during totally disparate cinematic and political moments, The Thing from Another World and its 1982 remake are both brilliant films in their own ways, and both equally reflective of their contexts and creators. Watching the two within a few days of each other was—and I don’t mean to overstate—a nearly profound experience. John Carpenter’s later version is so different in tone, pacing, attitude, and theme from the earlier one, directed by Christian Nyby, yet also so reverent in certain sly ways, that it made me realize how a remake, when done well, can be one of the most personally expressive forms of filmmaking, even when the material is as seemingly rote as a sci-fi monster movie.

Theoretically this will be a biweekly thing. I’m mulling over a few different options for the next installment, including A Star is Born, The Wiz, or maybe one of Tim Burton’s recent remakes, all of which have looked too terrible for me to bother seeing previously.

So this stuff was happening simultaneously with, say, Zeppelin, and later bands like Boston and Foreigner, et al. Conventional wisdom says that the Rasberries, Big Star, Rundgren and their like differed from those bands because they were more melodic or more whimsical like the British Invasion. But Boston, whatever their flaws, had melodies for miles. Rather, I think the unsung heroes of 1970s power-pop are the genre’s bassists. Listen to all this music and you hear guys just absolutely killing on the bass. They all have a heavy tone and a sturdy, rhythmic style that rarely just mimics the guitar. In this way, power-pop was much more closely aligned with the era’s funk and disco movements than with the reigning stadium rock. They sound like The Who played by KC and the Sunshine Band.

Let the good times roll:

Tragically, YouTube doesn’t have a live performance of my favorite song by the immortal Rubinoos. But the studio version still slays:

It’s almost too perfect that he died within 24 hrs. of George Steinbrenner. I love New York precisely because both men were completely at home there.

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn’t have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn’t.

This just seemed apropos. Much more at Newshour. Thank ye, digby.